 Hi, I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, and this is exclusive coverage of the Excel partner, Stanford University Symposium, 17th annual event where they gather the top minds, entrepreneurs. Essentially it's still all the portfolio companies with Excel partners and all there. We get the scholar program, and here's the Cube, our flagship program, we go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise, and my guest here is entrepreneur, Dax De Silva and John Locke from Excel Partners. Welcome to the Cube. Thank you. Thanks for having us. So you got to watch the microphone a little bit, lean closer, so we can present the background noise coming out. So, Dax, tell me about Lightspeed, you're the founder, CEO. You guys are taking on kind of a whole other generational thing. It's classic opportunity recognition. New consumer experience, talk about your company, what your value proposition is. Yeah, I mean, we started in 2005, and our original product was bringing retail POS to the Mac. And we sort of rode that crazy wave that Apple had growing in the 2000s and grew 1900% in five years. We went without investment for seven years, and then we met up with Excel and took an investment last year. And since our original days, we've kind of expanded the platform to really respond to the way retail's transforming these days. Retail is, they need to stay relevant in this age of e-commerce. They need to give customers a reason to get off the couch and into the store. And so Lightspeed's engaging customers, or allowing sales reps to engage with customers on iPads and mobile units. But still, great back office and inventory management tools on a Mac, and bridge to e-commerce as well with our web store. Retail was supposed to be dead with the web. The web was supposed to kill retail, but it's now transforming a destination base. What's with the trends in retail? Well, you know what's really funny is that some of the biggest e-commerce brands are opening retail stores, and Apple's, Apple never had to open a retail store, but they've grown their empire by opening about 500. So, what is the magic with a retail store? Why do they persist? I think that the interesting thing I've learned talking to retail CEOs over the last year is that you can't tell the brand narrative over the web. The brand narrative for a store is really told, sorry, the brand narrative is really told inside the store. So that is very important, and that customer experience is important for people to have that impression of the brand. I want to bring John in from Excel in a minute, but I want to ask Das, one more question, Das, one more question about like, just some legacy, let's just take Macy's or some big brand, big storefront, a lot of legacy, generations of retail, they get a web, they have very successful web presence, all of a sudden it's just so easy to move to mobile, they think, right? So we've seen some bumps in the road for these classic e-commerce vendors. Talk about those kinds of big players, how do you see them, and how do you solve that need? So I mean, we're in about 11,000 stores, but the stores that are really leveraging the light speed experience are the small innovative retail chains, let's say in Soho and Williamsburg, where we have 1,000 of our 11,000. The big retailers would love to have this customer experience, but what the innovative nimble guys are doing, but they've got all this legacy, ERPs, all these backend systems that they have to tie in to. And so we're having some success with helping them move into the modern age of retailing and engaging with their customers in new ways, but it's definitely a bigger challenge for some of the national brands. So John, John's a young gun at Excel, Forbes under 30 recently. So you're the new generation, right? So you've got to look at, you must see things that the older guys like Bud Colligan might not see, been around the block, but it'll be on later, but that's a shout out to you. Angry birds, obvious success, you see things like that. These are cultural but generational defining where new brands are emerging from entrepreneurs out there, and they're new things that young guys are getting, the young generation, they don't read the papers like these, they're online all the time, so how they're connecting, all this is part of a new generation. So what do you say to the folks out there that want to kind of have an insight into this preferred user expectation? And the web was easy, I want to self serve, search some things, find what I'm looking for, navigate, that was Google great. That's kind of a check, I've been there and Google will still be around, but the new model is different. You share your insight and vision and what you're seeing for trends. I don't know if it's much of a vision, but I think- Just trends, yeah. So much happening from obviously a mobile engagement perspective, right? I mean it just, I do more shopping on my mobile device than I do on traditional online commerce on my PC these days. So that has obviously a lot of impacts on industries ranging from gaming, as we see with Angry Birds, to payments with Braintree and powering a number of mobile commerce sites too, what DAX is doing at Lightspeed, which is enabling retailers to use these mobile devices and tablets and these sorts of things to change the way that their stores look. So they get people out from behind the cash register and talking and engaging with customers that are at the store. So again, I don't think mobile, I'm the first one to say mobile, but it has so many different applications, not just on the consumer side, which we hear a lot about. I mean, everyone's like, hey, check, you know, that's obvious. But also on the enterprise side. But I mean, the user experience, I mean, think about that for a second, I'm just going to drill down on that. So you shop a lot on your mobile device, but we were just talking about the retail experience, the Apple stores are packed more than ever. So that line is blurring between my virtual space buying and the physical presence of retail. I mean, do you agree and how would you kind of get that out? Well, I think, and again, bringing it back to what DAX is doing, I think what we're seeing on the retail side and Apple's not a phenomenal job of this is that retailers are starting to take some of the tricks that e-commerce guys have been using for a long time. So every e-commerce site that we're involved with has the traditional conversion funnel. How many people came to the site? What did they do when they got to the site? How many of those people actually bought something? And we're starting to see retailers use some of these same techniques in the store. So store counting and seeing how many people actually check out and to really care about analytics because they have to be relevant in this day and age when it's very easy to shop on Amazon or anything else. And so we're really seeing retailers striving for sort of next-gen analytics type things which we offer at Lightspeed and we really think they're gonna offline retail. So guys, give us the update on Lightspeed. How many employees, much funding did you get from these guys? Yeah, we did a $30 million series A last summer. And you were probable beforehand. Yes, we were. We were self-funded for the first seven years of our existence. I've seen here at Excel. I've seen a lot of entrepreneurs self-funded big A round. But I mean we went from, since that investment we've gone from about 41 to 85 people in a year. So it comes with that you can scale up. I'm surprised they don't have more gray hair. You should yield a good amount of money. A couple more meetings, you know. A couple more, probably two more. But yeah, it's been a great ride and I think that for a Montreal company, we did some great things in our first seven years but we definitely had our nose to the grindstone and building very focused on ourselves and our reseller channel and so on. I think the great thing about the Excel investment's been opening up sort of our network to Silicon Valley and to- How did you pump into the Excel investment? Did they call you? How did it all go down? Because you're in Montreal. Right, yeah. Silicon Valley is a place here but yeah, Silicon Valley's opening up. I've seen a lot of investments out of the Australia, all over the world now. Well, I just bumped into John in a bar in Montreal. No, that was after. Yeah, yeah. It was the bar called after. The beer has more alcohol content in Montreal. Well, I mean, I think that there was a discovery call early, late in 2011, then they came to visit our booth at the NRF, which is the big retail trade show that happens. And I think that they saw the difference between what Lightspeed was trying to pitch in comparison to the legacy players. And we just kind of completed one level of our platform. We just rolled out iPad. So we had sort of all the elements. It was kind of a great time for us to- So you were showcasing your mobile app as for the PO's point of view? Yeah, like we were showcasing basically kind of almost a completed platform at that point with Mac, iPad, mobile and e-commerce and API. So we sort of had the whole thing at the time. So it was a great time to sort of entertain these discussions and went on a little vacation to Argentina when I was back. John was at the office and we sort of did a term sheet a few weeks later. It was just a really good chemistry and great alignment on the way we view the transformation on that and retailing and also the appellation. The success that Apple was having. When was that closed? That was last year. Last year? June, last June. We get really excited about these businesses that have been built outside of Silicon Valley, Dax and Montreal, Bill Reddy and Braintree in Chicago, Angry Birds is in Helsinki. So a lot of times, if you haven't done a huge series A like is typical in the Valley, you got to be lean and you got to make money right away, right? And that instills a pretty good culture. So we try to, as much as we can, get outside of our mobile gear. It was a lot easier now when you have entrepreneurs who could cobble together their own funding through customer acquisition and their own team. That kind of validates and kind of de-risks it a little bit from the DCs, but you guys also see the growth and want to put more cash in to grow it. Did you feel the same way about that? Yeah, I mean, to date, we haven't, I think we've leveraged more Excel's network and expertise than we have really touched the cash. You know, the cash is for, I think, for things we're looking into. What are some of that cash? Yeah, the things we're looking into now with how- A lot of Silicon ads have got plenty openings for our, we don't have banner ads on the site. So, but the cash gives you comfort, I mean, people and employees who scale, you have now an option to put more gas on the fire and grow that. Invest in it and bring in new teams and so on. So, that's the kind of thing we're looking at now, but I think, you know, in the first year, it's just been opening our eyes to different networks that we didn't have previous. So, John, what do you get excited about looking at, you know, this new generation of kids my old, this is 18, going to college next year, and it's so funny to watch even anyone between the ages of 15 and 20, and everything is all about what their window to the network is. I'm old compared to that. So, yeah, if you look it up to you. But, you know, this is a whole new generation. What gets you excited? You look at, as this whole new plethora of technology, cloud mobile, social, big data, what gets you excited? Well, I think we, obviously, enterprise is sort of back in vogue, right? And we have a lot of people talking about it and there's sort of these ebbs and flows of things, but we get really excited about these, sort of picks and shovels, businesses that are powering what that generation is doing from just a sort of purchasing perspective. Your brand tree is a tool for payment processing. These guys are a tool for retail management. I see on the growth market. Tooling with growth. That's right, in these sorts of categories. So, it's always a little bit difficult to pick what the fad of the moment is on the consumer side and what people of that age are going to do and want to use over the long term. We really like these tool type businesses. Okay, Dexter, so congratulations from Montreal. Always a great city to go to. Not in the winter, but spring's beautiful there. It's a fantastic city. Of course, I'm a Bruins fan. Boston Bruins, that is. Not the Canadians, but again, congratulations, John, great to be on theCUBE, guys. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having us. This is SiliconANGLE's exclusive coverage of Stanford, Excel, Symposium. We'll write back for our next guest after this short break.