 From New York City, it's the Cube, covering Welcome to the New Edge, brought to you by Pensando Systems. Hey, welcome back, you're ready. Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We are in downtown Manhattan at the top of Goldman Sachs. It was a beautiful day. Now the cloud is coming in, but that's appropriate because we're talking about cloud, we're talking about Edge, and the launch of a brand new company is Pensando, and their event is called Welcome to the New Edge, and we're happy to have, since we're in Goldman, the guys who have the money. We're Barry Eggers, the founding partner of Lightspeed Ventures and Randy Pond, the CFO of Pensando. Gentlemen, welcome. Thank you, pleasure. So Barry, let's start with you. You think you were involved with this early on? Why'd you get involved? What kind of sparked your interest? Well, we got involved in this round, and the reason we got involved were mainly because we've worked with this team before at Cisco. We know they're fantastic. They're probably the most prolific team in the enterprise, and they're going after a big opportunity. So we were pleased when the company said, hey, do you guys want to work with us on this as a financial investor? And we did some diligence and dug in and found everything to our liking and jumped right in. Didn't anybody tell them this startup as a young man's game? They mixed up the 20-something, I think. Yeah, they sort of turned the startup on its head, if you will. No pun intended. That's quite all right, yeah. Yeah, and Randy, you've joined them as CFO, you've known them for a while. I mean, what is it about this group of people that executes kind of forward-looking transformational technologies time and time again? That's not a very common trait. It's a great question. So you know, the key for these guys have been, well, they've been together since the 80s. So Mario, Luca, and Prem have been together since the 80s. I worked with them at their previous startup before Christian into the 80s. And the combination of their skills are phenomenal together. So one of them has some of the vision of where they want to go. The second guy is a substantive sort of engineer. It takes it from concept to first drawing. And then Prem takes over from an execution perspective and then drives this thing. And they've really been incredible together. And then we added Sony at Crescendo as a product marketing person. And she's really stepped up and become an integral part of the team. So they work together so well. It just makes a huge difference. Yeah, it's amazing that A, that they keep doing it, and B, that they want to keep doing it, right? Because they've got a few bucks in the bank, and they don't really need to do it, but still to take on a big challenge. And then to keep it under wraps for two and a half years, that's pretty amazing. So I'm curious, Barry, from your point of view, venture vesting, you guys kind of see the future. You get pitched by smart people all day. When you looked at John Chambers' kind of conversation of these 10-year kind of big cycles, what did you think of that? How do you guys kind of slice and dice your opportunities and looking at these big necks? Yeah, and going back to the team a little bit, they've been pretty good at identifying a lot of these cycles. They brought us land switching a long time ago with Crescendo. They sort of redefined the data center several times. And so there's another opportunity. What's driving this opportunity really is the fact that the explosion of applications in the network and, of course, east-west traffic in the network. So networks were more designed north-south, and they're slowly becoming more east-west. But because the applications are closer to the edge, and networks today mostly provide services in the core, the idea for Pensando is, well, why don't we bring the service delivery, the services, closer to the applications, improve performance, better security, and better monitoring? Yeah, and then just the hyper-acceleration of the amount of data, the amount of applications, and then this age-old, do you move the data to the computer? Do you move the compute to the data? Now the answer is yes. All the above. So you got some money to work with. We do. You got A round, I think a B round. You guys are closing a C round. So I think, what, 180 people approximately? I think somebody told me close enough. So as you put some of this capital to work, what are some of your priorities going forward? So we will continue to hire, both in the engineering side, but more importantly, now we're hiring in sales and service. We've been waiting for the product quite frankly. So we've just got our first few sales guys hired. We've got a pretty aggressive ramp, especially with the HPE relationship, to put people out into the field. We've hired a couple guys in New York. We'll continue to hire the sales team. We're ramping the supply chain. We've got a relatively complicated supply chain model, but that has to ramp now that we're going to market. All that money would be pretty used to do that. We're changing facilities, we need to grow. We're sort of cramped in a one-story building, or not one floor of a building right now. So the money is going to be used sort of critically to really scale the business now that we can go to market. Okay. But a pretty impressive list of both partners and customers on launch day. You don't see Goldman, HP, Equinix, I think Oracle Cloud was quite a slide. Some of that is the uniqueness of the way we went to market and did the original due diligence on the product and bringing customers in early and then converting them to investors. You end up with a customer investor model. So they stayed with us. Goldman's been through all three rounds. We brought HP in the last model. We had NetApp has been in two rounds now. So we've continued to develop as a business with this small core group of customers and investors that we could try to expand every time we moved to the next round. And as Barry said earlier, this is the first time we've had a traditional financial investor in our rounds. The rest of them have all been customers. They've been friends and family for the most part. You joined the board too, right? I did. Yeah. So what are you excited about? What do you see as, I mean, just clearly you're excited you invested, but is there something just extra special here, you know, really chambers put in a 10 year cycle? Yeah, I mean, we've talked about it. I'm excited to work with the team, right? They're best in class. Working closely with John again is a lot of fun. The chance to... Not exhausting. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you know, the chance to redefine the data center and be part of the next wave. And as a VC, you love waves and build an iconic company, right? And I think we have a real opportunity in front of us. It takes a lot of money to do this and do it right. And I think we have the team that proven that can execute on this kind of opportunity. So I'm excited to see what the next five years hold for this company. Good. Well, it was funny, John has teased him a little bit about all the M&A stuff that he was famous for at Cisco. He's like, I don't want to do that anymore. Now I'm an investor. I want IPOs all the way. So he wants all 18, thinks it is 18 companies in his portfolio thereabouts. They're going to IPO all the way. Yeah, that's a good point actually. This team has been prolific and they've delivered products that have generated $50 billion. And you walk into any data center in the world, you're going to see a product this team has built. However, this team has not taken a company public. So that's really the opportunity. I think that's what excites them. It's why Randy's here. It's why John's here. It's why I'm here. We want to build a company that can be an independent company and be a lasting leader in a new category. Yeah. So last word, Randy, for you, for people that aren't familiar with the team, that aren't familiar with what they've done, what would you tell them about why you came to this opportunity and why you're excited about it? Well, there is no higher quality engineering team in the world than these people. So it's to get re-engaged with them again with an entirely new concept that's catching a transition in the market was just too good an opportunity to pass. I mean, I had retired for 15 months and I came out of retirement to join this team much to the shit grand of my life. But I just couldn't pass up the opportunity. They're fun to work with. They surround themselves with really high-collar talent. Every day is interesting, I have to say. Well, thanks for sharing the story with us and congratulations on a great day and a terrific event. Thank you. Thank you very much. All right, he's Barry, he's Randy. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE from the top of Goldman Sachs in Manhattan. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.