 from the Sands Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2015. Now your host, John Furrier. Okay, welcome back. We are live here at AWS re-invent 2015. This is theCUBE live three days of coverage worth day three. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. It's our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal noise. We talk to the leaders like Andy Jassy. We talk to the customers. We talk to the leaders of companies in the ecosystem. And of course, we have to talk about startups and their investors, VCs. And we have here a special guest, CUBE alumni, Mike Dowber. Three years in a row, Jerry Chen has got to run for his money at Greylock. Jerry and I have a bet going. I think I'm winning right now. Mike Dowber with Amplify Partis. So when you were first on your battery ventures, now you started your own venture capital firm with a partner. Talk about Amplify. Pretty young, but two years in. Three years in now. What's going on? And obviously three years of historical Amazon here on the ground. What are the dots that you're collecting and connecting? So first off, great to be back again. Love coming on the CUBE. So first off, I joined Amplify about a year ago. My partner, Sunil, started Amplify three years ago with really the realization that early stage enterprise tech had changed a lot. With the advent of AWS, you don't need $10, $15 million to start an enterprise infrastructure company anymore. You can do it with two or three. But the problem was a lot of these first-time founders they need a lot of help. And so we're very, very focused on cloud infrastructure, data, security, all the things you can see. Technical founders. Technical founders building technical products for technical buyers. That's what we focus on. It's the same infrastructure enterprise stuff that we've thought about for a long time. But you just don't need the money or the capital to start the companies. That comes later on when you scale up sales and marketing. You and I have talked about this a lot of times. And so that's where we spend our time. Sunil and I divvy up the world. We're a team of four people. We brought on a new guy on Monday at Alien Vault. We're really excited. Andy Minoski. And we've been having a blast. So we've been at re-invent all week. And I will tell you what, I think last year we talked about this, that last year was kind of the coming-out party for Enterprise for AWS. If you weren't paying attention last year, they've bludgeoned you this year to make sure you know it. But everybody up on the keynotes, you see enterprise, enterprise, enterprise. It's no longer- So let's rewind. The first year that we came on them, we were here, you were here also on theCUBE. Oh yeah, they won the public club, but they're not enterprise-ready next year. Oh, they got some enterprise stuff. But is it enterprise-grade? Yeah, this year. This year, it's like, whoa, geez, man. I mean, just as you walk around the show floor here, especially for people who can come here, this year you've got Dell, HP, Accenture. I think that's a teradata back there. Basically every single company that does anything in enterprise realizes that this is the place to be. Yeah, to me, Accenture deal with Amazon. I didn't ask Jazz, I should have asked them. I didn't have enough time, that's a huge validation. Accenture is an old line system integrator. I mean, I don't mean that in a negative way, but they're old school, I mean, they've been around for a while, old line system integrator, all in on Amazon on a joint venture. That's pretty significant validation. I was in New York last week for strata. I'm sorry, I missed you there. But I met with one of the top three banks when I was there, and they were talking about their new AWS experiment that they're running. And the guy was talking, said, look, it's only a matter of time before this takes over infrastructure. And if the CIA and Fortune 5 banks are using AWS, where's the excuse that I can't be on Amazon anymore? It's like an island of money out there. And whoever can race out to the island first wins. I mean, this is a money making operation AWS, not just for Amazon. I mean, Amazon has beautiful integration, they fund everything, they got benefits on the other side with the shipping, all this other stuff. But outside of Amazon, there's going to be a lot of money to be made in the ecosystem. How do you look at that? Because now we're getting kind of the first look in my mind at the real ecosystem. Last year, you could see some formation. People were kind of scared, do I going to get bought out, do I going to get rolled over? Now it's kind of pretty clear. There's money making to be had. What's your view? I think you have to look at Amazon as the new OS, right? I mean, if you're starting a company, you need to look at how are you building on top of Amazon or how are you partnering with this ecosystem? Because you don't want to be running headlong into it. Right, I mean, I think you can, every year you can tick off companies where you kind of scratch your head and say, what are they going to do now? Right, because Amazon's kind of gunning for them. And I'll put GCE and Azure out on the side because I think there's still a place for those guys. But Amazon is so far in the lead. So I'm a big fan of Pure Storage, as you know. Love the company, love the founders, love the investors there. But they went public and kind of like soft, okay? The revenues are good, not totally breaking out. But Dave Vellante and I always ask the same question. Have they achieved escape velocity? And is it still viable to build a storage company in this market, standalone storage? Now, they're looking good. I'm not saying they're not performing well, but Amazon is the last company to build the billion dollars in sales and storage. Besides NetApp, if you go back to NetApp, what storage company did a billion dollars in revenue? Well, so. Amazon. Yeah, Amazon for sure. But they're not a startup, but still, the storage business has changed. As one example, HP, IBM, EMC, these standalone guys, even Oracle's, but a little shaking in their boots with Amazon. We just look at traditional infrastructure, look at storage, look at networking. I don't think, I think it'd be very hard press to find people who are still investing a lot in hardware. There's a couple of hardware startups and the Pure Storage's and Nimble's and Tintries of the World to me are no longer and Pure went public yesterday. These companies are no longer startups, right? They've raised hundreds of millions of dollars. Just, they just have chosen to stay. Well, I saw Ravi at Lightspeed, he's on board of Nutanus, D Raj's been on theCUBE many times. Nutanus was kind of laughed at the beginning. No one really wanted to invest in this weird little startup. They're more of a server vendor, but these new models are emerging. It's a, my point is there's a new approach. There's a new approach. What is your, what do you see for that? What is the new normal now for building a products company? Infrastructure, you have to assume that infrastructure is running here, right? That infrastructure is not running in someone's data center. And we don't have a data center anymore. Our data center, our data center is the cloud, right? When we raised our new fund in Q1, one of our investors asked us for business continuity. What do you do if there's a disaster in California? We said, as long as our stuff is up and running in someone's data center, it doesn't really matter, right? And we run across, you know, Box and Google and just like everybody else. So cloud native, that's a cloud native approach. You have to, but so if you're focused on infrastructure today, if you're a new storage company today, I think it's fine to be a new storage company, but you have to assume that you're building something that's stitched within a cloud fabric, right? Maybe you're running across private and public clouds, but I don't think if you're starting a company in 2015, 2016, it can be, it could look anything like snowball, I think you're going to talk about next. It can't be these boxes. I think snowball is a smart bomb that decimates the storage business because now they just take that off. I mean, to me, I wrote a tweet, hell froze over. I had no idea that Amazon would ever ship a box, ever. Is the box going on the cube? It looks like one of those water things out there. You know, it's got the casing, it doesn't really look like a box. If there's a drive by, I'll stand behind you. But no, I think to the point you're getting at, one of the things that we spend a lot of time thinking about is how do you make the cloud more accessible and solve new types of problems? What are some of the profile persona of the entrepreneurs that you're meeting? Because, you know, I'm 50, I have provisioned boxes, I have loaded Linux. That's right. These younger guys, they, what? I load patch on Linux when I provision a server. So the younger guns have a new mindset, and Dries and I think talks about this 10X developer. So you have a new breed of entrepreneur, even if they're not technical, they got needs in business. What's the philosophy? What's the pattern that you're seeing? So for us, we're almost exclusively technical founders. And what we really like is we like the practitioner turned founder, so behind you is Datadog, right? And Olivier was solving that problem in his old company, which ultimately was bought by News Corp. He recognized the problem for cloud monitoring years ago, built Datadog into probably the preeminent monitoring tool that's used on top of AWS today. Archer Bergman at Fastly, you know, he recognized the issue that created Fastly when he was the CTO at Wikia. And this archetype of the technical founder solving a problem for him or herself, realizing that this problem generalizes not just to them and their friends, but to thousands of other people, tens of thousands of other people, that's what we're seeing consistent. So you look for that, and then the broader market match to that. That's right. Does it address a broader market opportunity? That's right. I mean, if it only addresses problems that you and your friends have, then we have an issue. But if you and your friends happen to be very good predictors for other people, that's a great sign. Okay, so your take, I've got a final question for you. So you're in the trenches, great to see you, you're investing, you're getting dirty, rolling in the mud with the entrepreneurs, which is great. We're trying to get dirty. Well, you're adding value, you're working hard. To me, that's, I know all the VCs that are doing the work, it's obvious, they're out in the streets, we see them at theCUBE. But I got to ask you, this show here, what's your take of it? You got AWS, IoT, how big will that be? How big is the BI disruption? What's your take on all this? Well, I mean, I was thinking about that before I came on. It's amazing how many industries these guys disrupt in a week, right? It'll be interesting to see what happens with the BI tool. I think QuickSight's an interesting product, but that's a different customer base for them. They have Twitch TV that can turn on IPTV tomorrow and be a leader. But you look at what they're doing in IoT. I mean, there was dozens of companies we've seen in that space for a long time. They're all in the world of hurt this morning. You know, you look at what they're doing, basically building out of mobile paths. This is a great place to do it. You really have to be careful. They're going to dominate all the Gartner magic quadrant categories. Yeah, it's going to get really boring. Mike Dauber, final thing, just final plug for the firm. What are you looking for deals? What are your current deals? Quick, end the segment with a quick soundbite on Amplify. A quick soundbite, we just recently announced our new fund, $125 million seed series, a enterprise infrastructure. So that's cloud infrastructure, security, data analytics, we're all over it. All right, Mike Dauber, Amplify partners, technical founders, solving real problems, addressing the broader market opportunity, pounding the pavement. We'll find out what deals you're working on when we come back. We'll be right back with more after this short break.