 Hello and welcome to this special CUBE Conversation here in the Palo Alto CUBE Studios. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of the CUBE Co-Founder of SiliconANGLE Media in the CUBE. We're here with Alan Cohen, CUBE alumni, joining us today for a special segment on the future of technology and the impact to society, always good to get Alan's commentary. He's the chief commercial officer for Lumio, industry veteran, has been through many ways of innovation and now more than ever this next wave of technology and the democratization of the global world is upon us. And we're seeing signals out there like cryptocurrency and blockchain Bitcoin to the disruption of industries from media and entertainment, biotech among others. Technology is not just a corner industry, it's now pervasive and it's having some significant impact and you're seeing that in the news, whether it's Facebook trying to figure out who they are from a data standpoint to across the board, every company. Alan, great to see you. Always great to be here. I always feel like, I can't tell whether I'm at the big desk at ESPN or I've got the guest chair at CNBC but that's what it's like being on theCUBE. Great to have you on, extracting the signal noise. There's a ton of noise out there but one of the things that the most important stories that we're tracking is, that's becoming very obvious and you're seeing it everywhere from me too to all aspects of technology is the impact of technology to people and society. Okay, you're seeing the election, we all know what that is. That's now front and center in the big global conversation, the Russian's role of hacking and weaponizing of data, Facebook's taking huge brand hits on that, to emerging startups in the startup game that we're used to in Silicon Valley is changing. Just the dynamics, cryptocurrency raises billions of dollars but yet something like 10, 20% of it's been hacked and stolen so it's a really wild west kind of environment. It's a very different environment so like, John, you and I have been in the technology and this is certainly for a whole bunch of lines under our eyes over the years that have gone there. My friend Tom Friedman has this phrase that says everybody's connected and nobody's in control. So the difference is that, as you just said, the tech industry is not a separate industry, the tech industry is in every product and service. Like, cryptocurrencies, like the concept that money is just code, our products and services are just code. It raises a couple of really core issues, like for us in the security point of view, if I don't trust people with the products they're selling me, right, I feel like they're going to be hacked and creating my personal data, right? So your product now includes my personal information. That's a real problem because that could actually melt down commerce in a real way. You know, obviously the election is if I don't trust the social systems around it. So I think we're all, and I'd like to say, we're all this kind of like iRobot moment and if you remember iRobot, it's like people build all these robots to serve humankind and then one day the robots wake up and they go, we have our own point of view on how things are going to work and they take over. And I think whether it's the debate about AI, whether the cryptocurrency is good or bad or more importantly, the products and services I use, which are now all digitally connected to me, whether I trust them or not is an issue that I think everyone in our industry has to take a step back because without that trust a lot of these systems are going to stop growing. Chaos is an opportunity, I think it's been quoted many times. It's not like Jeff Goldblum in my Jurassic Park. So chaos is upon us, but this is an opportunity. The winds are shifting and that's an opportunity for entrepreneurs, but the technology industry has to start working for us, but we got to be mindful of these blind spots and the blind spots are technology for good, not necessarily just for profits. So that also is a big story right now. And we see things like AI for good, Intel's been doing a lot of work on that area and you see startups dedicated to societal impact. And the young millennials, you see the demographic shift where they want to work on stuff that empowers people and changes society. So a whole kind of new generation revolution a kind of hippie moment, if you look at the 60s what the 60s were, right? There's people out in the street protesting, right? There were a couple of million women out in the street this weekend, right? So we are in that kind of moment again, people are not happy with things. And I believe this is a signal of a renaissance, a change, a sea change at enormous level. So I want to get your thoughts on this. The as technology goes out and mainstream you certainly from a security standpoint your business alumio is in that now where there's not a lot of control. There's like you were mentioning before we came on that all the spends happening but no one has more than 4% market share. These are dynamics and this is not just within one vertical. What's your take on this? How do you view this sea change that's upon us? This tech revolution? Well, think about it like so you and I grew up in the era where client server took over from mainframe, right? So remember there was this big company called IBM and they owned a lot of the industry and then it blew up for client server and then there were thousands of companies and it consolidated its way down. But when those thousands of new companies like you didn't know what was going to be Apollo and what was going to be Oracle, right? Like you didn't know how that was going to work out. There was a lot of change and a lot of uncertainty. And I think now we're seeing this on a scale like that's 10X of this that there's so much innovation and there's so much connectedness going on very rapidly but no one is in control. In the security market, you know, what's happening in our world is I got people said, okay, I have to reestablish control over my data. I've lost that control and I've lost it for good reasons meaning I've evolved to the cloud, I've evolved to the app economy, I've done all of these things and I've lost it for bad reason because I'm not really running my data center the way I should. So we're in the beginning of a movement of people kind of reasserting that control but it's very hard to put the genie back in the bottle because the world itself is so much more dynamic and more distributed. It's interesting, I've been studying communities and online communities for over a decade in terms of dynamics, you know, from an infrastructure level, how packets move to a human interaction. And it's interesting, you mentioned that we're all connected and no one's in control but you now see a groundswell of organic self-forming networks where communities are starting to work together. And you kind of think about the analog world when we grew up without computers and networks you kind of knew everyone, you knew your neighbor, you knew who the town of Looney was, you kind of knew things and people, you know, watch each other's kids and parents sat from the porch, let the kids play, there's a way that I grew up but it was still chaotic but yet somewhat controlled by the group. So I got to ask you, when you see things like cryptocurrency, things like KYC, know your customer, anti-money laundering which is, you know, these are policy-based things but we're in a world now where, you know, people don't know who their neighbors are. So you start to see a dynamic where people are asserting themselves to know their neighbor, to know their customer, to have a connected tissue with context and so you trust and reputation becomes super important. I think people are, so like every time there's a shift in technology, they're scary stuff and there's the funny duddy moment where people saying, oh, we can't use that art, I don't know that and, you know, clearly we're in this kind of new Cambrian explosion of this cloud, mobile, blah, blah, blah type of computing thing and blah, blah, blah is always a good intersection when you don't have a term and then things form around it just as you said, so if you think about 25 years ago, right, people created the well and there was a community, right, the first bulletin boards and like now we have Facebook, right, and you know, you go through a couple of generations and for a while things feel out of control and then it reforms. I personally am an optimist. Ultimately, I believe in the inherent goodness of people that inherent goodness leaves you open and then it can be manipulated and people figure these things out. So, you know, whether it's cryptocurrency or AI, they are really exciting technologies that don't have any ground rules, right, and what's going to happen, I believe, is that people are going to reestablish ground rules, they're going to figure out some of the core issues and some of these things may make it and some of these things may not make it like cryptocurrency, like I don't know whether it makes it or not, but certainly the blockchain as a technology we're going to be incorporating in what we do and maybe the blockchain replaces VPNs and last generation's way of protecting zeros and ones. You know, if AI is figuring out how to read an MRI in five minutes, you know, it's a good thing and if the MRI and if the AI is teaching you how to exclude old folks from me finding jobs, it's a bad thing, right, so I think as technology forms, right, there's always Spectre and 007, right, there's always good and bad sides and, you know, I think, you know, if you believe in it. I'm with you on that, I think value shifts. I think ultimately it's like, however you want to look at it, it will shift to something value activity will be somewhere else. Behind me in the bookshelf is a book called the world is flat and you're quoted in it a lot as a futurist because you have inherently that kind of view. Well, that's not what you do for a living, but you kind of an optimist. Marketing futurist, kind of the same thing, yeah. So Thomas Friedman, the book, that was a great book and at that time it was game-changing. If you take that premise into today where we are living in a flat world and look at cryptocurrency and then overlay the geopolitical landscape, I mean, I just can't see why the Federal Reserve wouldn't reign in this cryptocurrency because if Japan's going to control much in our China, it's going to be some interesting conversations. I mean, I would be like all over that if I was in the Federal Reserve. I think, you know, it's, look, cryptocurrency is really interesting and I think people a little over-rotated. So if you look at the amount of GDP that's invested in cryptocurrency, it's like, I don't know, there might have been, you know, 20 years ago, the same amount of investment in beanie babies, right? You know, I mean, things show up for a while and the question is, is it sustainable over time? Now I'm trained as an economist. You and I've had this conversation. So I don't know how you have a series of monetary without kind of governmental backing. I just don't understand, but I do understand that people find all kinds of interesting ways to trade and if it's an exchange, like, I mean, what's the difference between gold and cryptocurrency? Somebody have ascribed a value to something that really has no efficacy outside of its usage. I mean, you can make a filling or a bracelet out of gold, but it doesn't really mean anything except people agree to a unit of value. So if people do that with cryptocurrency, it does have the ability to become a real currency. Well, I want to pick your perspective at being an economist. This is the hottest area of cryptocurrency. It's also known as token economics is a concept. Token economics. And you know, that's an area that, you know, the cube with cube coin is experimenting with tokens. Tokens technically are used for things and mobile and whatnot, but having a token as a utility in a network is kind of the whole concept. So the big trend that we're seeing, and no one's really talking about this yet, is instead of having a CTO, chief technology officer, they're looking for a CEO, a chief economist officer. Because what you're seeing with the MVP economy we're living in and this gamification, which became growth hack, which didn't really help users. The notion of decentralized applications and token economics can open the door for some innovation around value. And it's an economic problem. How do you have a fiscal policy of your token? There's a monetary policy. What's it tied to? A product and a technology. So you now have a new twisted intertwined mechanism. Well, you have it as part of this explosion, right? So we're at a period of time. It feels like there's a great amount of uncertainty because there's a lot of different forces and not everybody's in control of them. And it's interesting, Google has this architecture they call Beyond Core, where the concept is like networks are not trusted. So I will just put my trust in the device. Duo Security is a great example of a company that's built a security technology around it, which is completely antithetical to everything we know about networks and security. They say everything's the internet, I'll just protect the device that it's on. It's a kind of perfect architecture for a world like where nobody's in charge. So just isolate, you know, by this, what is the device? It's a token, too. It's a person, your iPhone's your personal token. So, and then over time systems will form around it. So I think we just have to, we always have to learn how to function in a different type of economy, right? I mean, democracy was a new economy 250 years ago that kind of screwed around with most of the world. And a lot of people didn't think it would make it. In fact, we went through two World War Wars that it was a little on the edge, whether democracy was going to make it. And it seems to have done okay. Like it was pretty good IPO to buy into, right? You know, 1776. And, but it's always got risks and struggles with it. I think, you know, ultimately it comes together, it's whether a large group of people can find a way to function socially, economically, and with their personal safety in these systems. You bring up a great point. So I want to go to the next level in this conversation, which is right. You got the wrong guy if you're going to the next level because I just tapped out. No, no, no. We'll get you there. It's my job to get you there. The question is that everyone always wants to look at, whether it's someone looking at the industry or actors inside the industries across board, mainly the tech, we'll talk about tech, is the question of, are we innovating? And you brought up some interesting nuances that we talked about with token economics. I mean, Steve Jobs had the classic presentation where he had street signs, technology meets liberal arts. That's a mental image that people who know Steve Jobs know Apple was a key positioning point for Apple at that time, which was, let's make computers and technology connect with society, liberal arts. Okay, but what you were just talking about is the business impact of technology, economics. And that's just not like just some hand-waving, making technology, integrating with business. You're in the security business. There are some gamification technology, gamification that's business, built into the products. So the question is, if we have the integration of business, technology, economics, policy, society, rolling into the product definitions of innovation, does that change the lens and the aperture of what innovation is? Well, I think it does, right? You know, the IT industry's somewhere between three and $4 trillion depending on how it counts it. It grows pretty slowly. It grows by a low single digit. And that tells me as a composite, like is that that slow growth is a structural signal about how consumers of technology think in a macro sense. On a micro sense, things shift very rapidly, right? New platforms show up, new applications show up, all kinds of things show up. What I don't think we have done yet to your point is in this new integrated world, the role of technology is not just technology anymore. I don't think, you know, you said you need chief economical officer. What about a chief political officer? What about a chief social officer? How many heads of HR make decisions about the insertion of systems into their business? And that's what this kind of iRobot concept is in my mind, which is that, you know, we are ceding control of things that used to be done by human beings to systems. And when you see control, the social mores, the political mores, the cultural mores, and the human emotional mores have to move with it, we don't tend to think about things like that. We're like, I win and my competitors lose. Like technology used to be much more of a zero sum, my tech's better than yours. But the question is not just is my tech better than yours, is my customer better off in their industry for the consumption of my technology, of inserting it into their offering or their service. And I, you know what, that is probably gonna be the next area of study. The other thing that's very important, and you look, you know, whether, none of you have read Peter Teal's books zero to one, the nature of competition in technology used to feel like a flat playing field. And now the other thing that's rising is do you have super winners? And then what is the power of the super winners? So you mentioned, whether it's Facebook or Google or Amazon or, you know, or Microsoft, you know, the Fang companies, right? Their roles are so much more significant now than the four horsemen of the NASDAQ were in 2000 when you had Intel and Cisco and Oracle and Sun. So it's a different game. So you're seeing that now, so it's a good point. So you're reinforcing kind of this notion that the super players, if you will, are having an impact. You're mentioning the confluence of these new sectors, you know, government policy, social, our new areas. So the question is, this sounds like a strategic imperative for the industry. And we're early, so it's not like there's a silver bullet or is there, it doesn't sound like there. So to me, that's not really in place yet, I mean. Oh no, we are, we're not even in alpha. Like, well, we have demo code for the new economy. Like, and we're trying to get the new models funded. That's the demo version, not the real version. Yeah, this is not the alpha or the beta version, like you're going to go launch it. So if people think they're launching it, I think it's a little preliminary. And, you know, it's not just financial investment. It's like, do I buy in? I'll tell you, I'll tell you something that's really interesting. I've been visiting a bunch of our customers lately. And the biggest change, I'd say in the last two years is they now have to prove to their customers they're going to be good custodians of their data. Think about that. Like, you could go to any digital commerce you do, any website you use, and you give them basically the ticket to the Furrier family privacy. You do. But you don't spend a lot of time questioning whether they're really going to protect your data. That has changed. And it's really changing in B2B and in government organizations. So the role of data is regulation, GDPR in Europe. But this is a whole new dynamic. Well, and it's not just my data because I'm worried about my credit card getting hacked. I'm worried about my identity. Like, am I going to show up as a meme in some social media feed that's substituted for the news, right? And you know, I don't want to use the FN word, right? But you know what I mean? So it is a really brave new world. It's like a hyper-democracy and a hyper-risky state at the same time. So we're living in an area of massive pioneering new grounds. This is new territory. So there's a lot of strategic comparatives that are yet not defined. So now let's take it to how people compete. We were talking before we came on camera. You mentioned the word, we're in an MVP economy, minimum viable product concept. And you're seeing that being a standard operating procedure for essentially de-risking this challenge, right? The old way of, you know, build it, ship it, will it work? And we're seeing the impact from Hollywood to big tech companies to every industry. Well, you've got a coffee mug for a company that does both, right? Amazon does MVP in entertainment. Like we'll create one pilot and see if it goes, as opposed to ordering a season for $17 million to, hey, let's try this feature and put it out on AWS. And what's interesting is, I don't think we've completely tilted, but the question is, will buyers of technology, of entertainment products, of any product start to say, I'll try it, right? So, you know, like, you look, I've done four startups and I always know there's somebody I can go to get and try my early product. There are people that just have an appetite, right? Jeffery Moran's early adopter, all the way to the left of the case. They'll buy anything new. They'll try it, they're interested, they have the time, the resources, where they're just intellectually curious. And, but it was always a very small group of people in the IT industry. What I think that the MVP economy is starting to do is, look, I quick, I kickstarted my wallet. I don't know if I'm the only person who bought that skinny little wallet on Kickstarter. It doesn't matter to me. It had a peel. So what's the impact to the MVP economy? Is it going to change the competitive landscape? Like Peter Thiel was suggesting, does it change the economics? Does it change the makeup of the team? All of the above? What's your thoughts on how this is going to impact? Certainly the incumbents will seem to be impacted if or not. Well, I think two things happen. One, it attacks the structural way markets work, right? You know, if you think, if you go back to the classical economics, right? Land labor and capital. And people who own those assets now, you had information as a fourth. Those guys were around now. They would say that would be the fourth core asset. Production, I'm sorry, means of production is the term. The people who can dominate, that would dominate a market. Now that that's flattened out, you know, I think it pushes against the traditional structures and it allows new giants to kind of show up overnight. Right? The e-commerce market is rife with companies that like, look at Stitch Fix, right? I mean, a company driven by AI, fashions, tries to figure out what you like, sends it to you every month, just had a monster IPO, reinvented, by the way, the Spiegel catalog, except like with a personal assistant. And, you know, it's changed that in just a short number of years. So I think two things happen. One is you'll get new potential giants, but certainly new players in the market quickly. Two, it will force a change in the business model of every company, right? If you're in a cab in any city in the world, I'm not saying whether the app works or not. Uber and Lyft is forced, every cab company to show you, here's the app to call the cab. They haven't quite caught up to the rest of the experience. So what I think happens is ultimately the larger players in an industry have to accommodate that model. For people like me, people who build companies or large technology companies, we may have to start thinking about MVPing of features early on working with a small group, which is a little bit the beta process, but now think about it as a commercial process. Nobody does it, but I bet you a lot of people will be doing it in five years. I want to get your take on that approach, because you're talking about a really disrupted, reimagining industry, the Spiegel catalog now becomes district with technology. So the role of technology in business, we kind of talked about the intertwine of that and its nuance is going to get better, in my opinion. But specifically the IT, the information technology industry, is being disrupted. It used to be like a department. In the IT department, we'll give you your phone and your desk on your PC and your desk or whatever. Now that's being shattered and everyone that's participating in that IT industry is involved. What's your take on the IT industry's disruption? Well look, it started 20 years ago when Mark Benioff and the sales force decided to sell the sales forces instead of IT people, right? They went around to the end buyer. And so I don't think it's a new trend. I think a lot of technology leaders now figure out how to go to the business buyer directly and make their pitch. And interestingly enough, the business buyer, if the IT team doesn't get on board, we'll do that. I think- Because of cloud computing. Because of everything. And the modern analog I think in our world is that the developers are increasingly in control. Like my friend Martin Casado up in Andreessen talks about this a lot. The traditional model on our industry is you build a product, you launch it, you launch your company, you work with the traditional analyst firms, you try to get a little bit of halo, you get customer references, those are the things you do. And there's a very well structured, for example, enterprise buying cycle. And playbook. Playbook and there's the Challenger sale and there's Jeffrey Moore and there's like, so you've got your textbooks on how it's been done. As everything turns into code, the people who work with code for a living increasingly become the front end of your cycle. And if you can get to them, that changes. Like, I mean, think about like, open source, you know, Tom wrote about this action, the world is flat. Like Linux started as Apache, right? It didn't start with the IT department. It started with the developers and there was the Linux foundation and now Linux is everything. And there's a big enemy called the big mini computer operating systems and the workstations. Wiped down whole parts of Boston and other parts of the world, right? Yeah. Exactly, that's where I move out here. You follow the client server out here. I follow the smell of the innovation. No, but this is interesting because the dislocation of industries is happening. So with that, so they also, on the analog of Martin's at Andre's end, so we'll do a little VC poke here at the VCs because we love them, of course. They're being dislocated. I don't poke at any of my investments. Well, no, their playbook is being challenged. So here's an example. The go big or go home investment thesis seems not to be working. Where if you get too much cash on the front end with an MVP economy we were just riffing on and with the big superpowers, the Amazon, the Googles, you can't just go big or go home. You're going to be going home more than going big. I think they know that, right? I mean, Dina Sussman, who's I think Chief Information Investment Officer at NASDAQ has a very well known talking line that there are half as many public companies as there were 10 years ago. So the exit scenario for our industry is a little bit different, right? We now have things like aqua hires, right? We have other models for monetization, but I think what the flip side of it is, you know, we're in the- Adapt or die. Adapt, yeah. This is devaluable shift. Liquidity's changing. It's a few hires. I think the investment community gets it completely and they spend a lot more time with the developer mindset, right? In fact, I think there's been a doubling down on focus on technical founders versus business founders for companies for just that reason, because as everything turns the code, it's going to hang out with the code community. So I think they're- You think there'd be more doubling down on technical founders. Yeah, I think because, because that is ultimately the shift. There are business model shifts, right? But it's, you know, I mean, like Uber was a business model shift. I mean, the technology was the iPhone, GPS, and they wrote an app for it, but it was a business model shift. So it can be a business model shift. And then scale. And then scale, and then all of those other things. But I think if you don't think about developers, if when you're in or it's like, we build a Lumia because developer could take the product and get started. I mean, you can add developers actually can write security policy with our product. And cause there's a class of customers, not everyone where that matters is other people where the security team is in charge or the infrastructure team is in charge. But you know, I think everything is based on zeros and ones, right? And everything is based on code. And if you're not sensitive to how code gets bought, consume, I mean like, I mean, there's a GitHub economy, which is I don't even have to write the code. I'll go look at your code and maybe use pieces of it, which has always been around. So it is, it's software disruption is clear. Cloud computing is clear. Agile is fast and with de-risking capabilities, but the craft is coming back. And some will argue, we've talked about in the queue before is that, you know, the craftsmanship of software is moving to up the stack in every industry. I think it's more like a sports league. So like, I love the NBA, right? So in the old days, you were a professional team, you'd scout people in college. Now they used to scout them in high school. Now they're scouting kids in middle school. What it says is that you have to, you know, but they can, right? So I think, you know, your point about it craft, you're going to start tracking developers as they go through their career and invest in bed on them. Don't reveal our secrets of the queue. We have scouts everywhere. Be careful out there. So, but think about that. Imagine, you know, it's like, there's such a core focus on hiring from college, right? But we had an intern from high school two years ago. We hire freshmen. Okay, so let's go, let's, I want to do a whole segment, but I want to just get this point because we're both sports fans and we can riff on sports all day long. I'm just not going to talk about the Patriots, yes. And Tom Brady's getting his sixth finger attached to his hands for his sixth ring coming up. No, but this is interesting. Sports is highly data driven. Yep. What you're getting at here with an MVP economy, token economics is more of a signal not yet mainstream, but you can almost go there and think, okay, data driven gives you more accuracy. So if you can bring data driven to the tech world, that's kind of an interesting point. What's your thoughts on that? I, yeah, look, I mean, look, I think you have to track everything, right? You have to follow things. And by the way, we have great tools now by the way, you can track people through LinkedIn. Like, you know, there's all kinds of vehicles to tracking individuals. You track products, you track everything. And you know, look, you know, we were talking about this before we went on the show, right? People make decisions based on analytics, and you know, increasingly. Now the craft part is what's interesting, right? And I'm not the complete expert. I'm, you know, I'm on the business side. I'm not an engineer by training. But look, a lot of people understand a great developer is better than five bad developers. Yeah. So. Well, Mark's mark on Theresa's 10X is a classic example. So it's, there's clearly a star system involved. So if I think in middle school or in high school, you're going to be a good developer. And I'm going to track your career through college. I'm going to try to figure out how to attach. That's why we started hiring. Oh my good for Dave Jarrows. Jarrows started a company that does that. Will fund college education for people that they want to bet on. Sure, they're just taking an option in there, right? Yeah, option on their earnings. Yeah, exactly. They are, it's like. It sounds like token economics to me. It is. You know, you can sell anything. You can see, we are in that economy. You can sell those pieces. The good news is I think it can be a great flattener, meaning that it can move things back more to a meritocracy. Because if I'm tracking people in high school, I'm not worrying whether they're going to go to Stanford or Harvard or Northwestern, right? I'm going to track their abilities in an era. And it's interesting, speaking about craft, like, you know, what are internships? They're apprenticeships. I mean, it is a little bit like a craft, right? I mean, like, why would I, because you're basically apprenticing somebody for a future payout for them coming to work for you and being skilled? Like, because they don't know anything when they come in or I shouldn't say that they actually know a lot of things. Alan, great to have you on theCUBE. I was always great to come in and get the update. I'm going to do more of it. I'd like to do a segment on you on, you know, the startup scene and some of the venture capital dynamics. We were tracking that as well. We've been putting a lot of content out there. We believe Silicon Valley's a great place. There's some issues out there. We've been addressing them, but we really want to point the camera this year at some of the great stuff. So we're looking forward to having you come back in. My final question for you is on a personal one. I love having these conversations because we can look back and also look forward. And you do a lot of mentoring and you're also helping a lot of folks in the industry within just your realm, but also startups and peers. What's your advice these days? Because there's a lot of things we just kind of taught a lot of it. When people come to you for advice and say, Alan, you know, I got a career change or I'm looking at this new opportunity or hey, I wanted to start a company or I started a company. How is your mentoring and your advisory roles going on these days? Can you share things that you're advising key points that people should be aware of? Well, look, ultimately, I've never really thought about it. You just asked the question. So ultimately, I think to me it comes down to own your own fate. And what it means is like, do something that you're really passionate about. Do something that's going to be unique, right? Don't be the 15th in any category. Jack Welch taught us a long time ago that the number one player in a market gets 70% of the economic value. So you really don't want to play for sixth place. It's like Ricky Bobby said, if you're not first or last. I mean, you can't always be first, but you should play for that. So I think for a lot of companies now, I think they have to make sure that and people participating, make sure that you're not playing the old playbook. You're not fighting yesterday's battle. You know, Rhett Butler, gone with the wind, said there's a lot of money in building up an empire and there's even more money in tearing it down. So there are people who enter markets to basically punish incumbents, take share because of innovation. But I think the really inspirational is, look forward five years and find a practical but aggressive path to being part of that side of history. So are we building up or are we taking down? I mean, it seems to me. You're always doing both. The ocean is always fighting the mountain, right? I mean, that is the course of, right? And then new mountains come up and the water goes someplace else. I mean, we are taking down parts of the client server industry. The stack that you and I built a lot of our personal career of it, but we're building this new cloud and mobile stack at the same time. And your point is we're building a new currency stack and we're going to have to build a new privacy stack. And so it's never, you know, the great thing about our industry is there's always something to do. How has the environment of social media, you know, things that are worth a cue, we do our thing with events. And just in general change the growth plans for individuals. If you were to speak to your 23 year old self right now, knowing what you know. Oh, I have one piece of advice I give everybody, take as much risk as humanly possible in your career earlier on. There's a lot of people that have worked with me over the years, you know, people when they get into their 40s and they go, I'm thinking about doing a startup. I go, you know, when you got two kids in college and you're trying to fund your 401k, working for less cash and more equity may not be the most comfortable conversation in your household. It didn't work well in my household, right? I mean, I'm like Benjamin Button. I started in big companies. I'm going to smaller companies. But something's just going to be me and a dog. You went the wrong way. Yeah, I went the wrong way. And I took all the risk later. And now I was lucky in part, right? That the transition worked. So when I see younger folks, it's always like, do the riskiest thing humanly possible because the penalty is really small. You have to find a job in here, right? But you don't have the mortgage and you don't have the kids that support. And so I think people have to build an arc around their careers that's suitable with their risk profile. Like, maybe you don't buy into Bitcoin at 19,000. Could be wrong, could be 50,000 sometime. But it's kind of 11 now. Don't go all in on 19. Maybe take a little bit in there to play and run. Dollar cost averaging, that's what the fidelity advises. So I think that's what's really important for people. What about the 45-year-old executive out there, male or female? Obviously the challenges of ageism. We're in an economy, a gig economy, whatever you want to call it, MVP, economics, token economics, this is a new thing. Your advice to someone who's 45 who just says, hey, you're too old for our little hot startup. What should they do? Well, being on the other side of that history, I understand at first hand, I think that you have an incumbent role in your career to constantly reeducate yourself. So if you show up, whether you're 25, 35, 45, 55, or 65, I hope I'm not working when I'm 75, but you never know, right? You'll never stop working, my prediction. But have you mastered the new skills? Have you reinvented yourself along the way? I feel like I have a responsibility to feed the Cohen household. My favorite part of my LinkedIn profile is this obedient worker would be at the Cohen household. He's like, when I go home, I'm not in charge, right? So I've always felt that it's up to me to make sure I'm not going to be irrelevant. And that to me is, I don't worry about ageism. I worry about, did I self-obsolescent? Yeah, did I make myself self-obsolescent? And I think if you're gonna look at your career and you haven't looked at your career in 15 years and you're trying to do something, you may be starting from a deficit. So the question is, what can I do? Can I, you know, before I make that jump, can I get involved? Can I advise some small companies? Could I work part-time on the weekends and do some things so that when you finally make that transition, you have something to offer and you're relevant in the dialogue. And I think that's, you know, nobody trains you, right? I mean, like, we're not good as an answer. Having a good community, self-learning, growth mindset, always be relevant. Is it not a bad strategy? Yeah, I mean, because, you know, I find increasingly, I see people of all ages and companies, there is ageism, right? There is no doubt and there's financial ageism and then there is kind of psychological bias ageism. But if you keep yourself relevant and you are the up to speed in your thing, people will beat a path to want to work in because there's still a skill gap in our industry. And that's the key. Yeah, make sure that you're on the right side of that skill gap and you'll always have something to offer to people. Alan, great to have you come into the studio. Great to see you. Thanks for the commentary. This special Cube comes to talk about the future of technology, impact of society and a range of topics that are emerging. We're on a pioneering new generational shift. And the Cube is obviously covering the most important story in Silicon Valley from figuring out what fake news is to impact the humans around the world. And again, we're doing our part to cover it. Alan Cohen, Cube Conversation. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.