 Hey, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. Welcome everybody. We're at the Stanford Graduate School of Business for the future of innovation event, a half day event, three or four panels, talking about some really big issues that are way beyond the technology and the social implications of a lot of things that are happening in terms of diversity, robots taking over the world, silicon angles all over the world and what's going to happen next. And I'm really happy to have Rob Siegelon who is the moderator of the panel and consistently took a positive tone every time things kind of went to the dark side in the sky net. He's a partner at Exceed Capital, a lecturer here at Stanford, but most importantly, the moderator of the event. So thanks for joining us, Rob. Great to be here, thank you for having me. So what did you think? It seemed like kind of every topic would kind of take this dichotomous, there's kind of the dark side and a positive side. What's your kind of takeaway? Well, I think our job at Stanford is to be pushing envelopes on business and thinking not just about how one makes money but the broader social implications of what's happening. And the three panels we had today touched on all of those issues. Silicon Valley is a leadership for innovation versus other spots in the world. Diversity in the workplace and of course the role of the gig economy and a variable workplace. Now you're in a great spot because as a VC you get to see a lot of new and innovative thinkers. Being here at the school, I think it's so great to have kind of one foot in academia with the young folks. I'm not that young, but the young folks coming up. What's your take in kind of the difference between the youngsters coming up through the school now and what you see kind of with more the, you shouldn't deal with too many old people. You're a venture capitalist. You don't like old guys coming in. Well, that's not exactly true. Your experience can inform what happens. Andy Grove used to tell us at Intel that every generation thinks they've discovered sex and by definition that can't be true because it wouldn't be here as a species if that were the case. And so what you find is you get new technologies and new ways of doing business. However, they can be informed by things that we've learned in the past. I think with the students, what we see is a very broad global perspective. They understand that their businesses might start here in the valley, but very quickly will become national and global operations, and they want to make sure that they can be getting to scale with a speed and an energy that's required to have a real impact. Yeah, it's interesting on the diversity front because so many successful startups are founded by immigrants or first generation Americans, a completely disproportionate number to the population. Why do you think that is and what's kind of the takeaway from that? I think our country has been built by immigrants over the last several hundred years and people come here for a higher quality of life. They come here, they want to give their children the opportunity to live in freedom, to have economic comfort, and so I think that entrepreneurs when they often come from immigrant families because they're hungry, they may not have necessarily had the creature comforts that older generations have had, and so they see an opportunity where no one's getting in the way and no one's slowing them down. I think that's part of the magic of the valley. When we're teaching in front of the class, it's like teaching at the UN, accents, names that from all over the world, you see it from North America, South America, Europe, Asia. It is pretty magical when you see the blending of people and they bring that global perspective into everything they do when they're here for two years. Yeah, it's really funny kind of in the political scene right now, which is so much civil discord and I think we've, it's really unfortunate as a society, it's really hard to have a discussion and a disagreement and keep it civil and keep it logical before people start going bananas and the American dream is dead, blah, blah, blah. But you can see in these people that have come here that maybe it's not the best system, maybe sure we have bugs and warts and this and that, but they're the ones that see that that dream is still alive and come to places like Stanford and Silicon Valley to actually execute on it and many times do. But if you want to have a good day, hang out with me. Whether I'm here at Stanford and you see the students who have so much energy for the impact they're going to have on the world, be it in business or in nonprofits, an entrepreneur who comes in with an idea that he or she thinks is really going to have a big impact on the universe, everybody brings that positive attitude. If you look at the history of our country over the last 250 years, the post World War II period was actually kind of an anomaly where you were able to get things done politically and there's the apocryphal story of Reagan and Tip O'Neill having a cocktail on a Friday afternoon, but yet in the history of our country, if you go back to the times at Alexander Hamilton, politics has never been back. Politics used to be and always has been very aggressive. And so I think what we're seeing now is just perhaps a reversion to the mean of what politics has been in our country, but we've now got social media to amplify it in ways that it wasn't amplified before. Every single thing, right? So in the panels today, you kind of cheated because you know, you prepared for the panels and you talked to everybody. But were there any surprises that came out in the panels that either you didn't expect or kind of reinforced something that's, you know, kind of in the back of your head that you weren't necessarily looking for or maybe in the Q and A? That was a surprise today. I don't know if I was surprised by anything, but I felt comforted knowing that we saw a great blend of academic foundations and practical use of the ideas, be it, you know, how the labor force is changing. We had one panel that was very much driven by economists and a very academic perspective on things, but then able to then talk about what are issues of displacement of a labor force and how does that impact the everyday individual? And that kind of conversation could be generated within this context. I was also very pleased to see the engagement from the people in the audience that they were very interested in the topics as well, so it made me feel good that the classes we're teaching, the research that we're doing is relevant outside of this academic environment. Yeah, I mean, this place, Stanford, it's just a physical place, an institution, a place to bring people. It's such a powerful and underrated driver of what makes Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley. You know, I spent some time in Philly, at Penn, great school, but people don't stay in the way that when they come here, they stay. You know, they plant roots, and it's so powerful that Stanford does pull in the surrounding areas, they pull in the neighborhoods, and they've got things like the football game, which is a real community event that is such a driver of the magic of this place. Stanford is a university is, again, one of those moments in time where we've had successful alumni, we've got great researchers and spectacular students, and it becomes a positive reinforcing circle where people come and want to stay. And it doesn't hurt that the weather's like this. There's not a cloud in the sky anywhere. But the people that you get to talk to, there is a diversity of opinions and background socioeconomic that makes it a very vibrant opportunity to be here. And if you like that, if you like being challenged, you like the fact that it's difficult because it's hard to kind of get things going, there's no place like it. And broader in the Bay Area, you've got the University of California at Berkeley, on the other side of the Bay, UCSF in San Francisco, San Jose State, Santa Clara, you really get a real magnet for a lot of young energetic people who come here and then want to stay here because they enjoy their experiences that they have. Right. All right, I'm going to put you on the spot before I let you go. You get to sit and let's do a lot of entrepreneurs. What are you seeing from the venture side? What things are kind of coming through the door or anything new? Is there something that we don't necessarily think about beyond AI and ML and AR and VR? What are some of the things you guys are seeing some themes? So I think if we're talking about it in the press, it's already too late. And the role of a venture capitalist is to be on the tip of the curve, but more importantly, following the entrepreneurs who are on the tip of a curve. So we're at a platform change. What's happened with mobile, what's happened with enterprise software, big, big changes and we're going to continue to see big changes, but we're actually getting that transition out. We're at the end of a boom and bust cycle here in the valley and that means the new boom is going to be starting soon. And the good news is no one knows what's coming. And that's like hitting the reset button for all of us. So I'm excited because now I know that everything that I might have dismissed before I should be paying attention to because we're about to have a new world order. Now I don't know if that's going to happen in one year or three years or five years, but I know it's coming. And there's a Schumpterian creative destruction of Silicon Valley, and we're going through it again right now. I can't wait for the next one. It's amazing. You know, people talk about it. Will there be other Silicon Valley's, but having been here for over 30 years and just to see wave after wave after wave of new thing is just fascinating. And then the one that's in the press is right around the corner. I don't even know when you're talking about. We'll have to check in in five years and see how it all worked out. It's a pretty amazing thing whether it was started with semiconductors and then personal computers and then Web 1.0 and then social media. Then now new sorts of platforms, the sharing economy. It just keeps happening over and over again. I can't wait for the next one. What those pesky guys in Seattle got the cloud thing. So we'll have to, we'll let them out of the cloud because it's cloudy in Seattle. So that really makes sense. All right, Ravel. Thanks for taking a few minutes of your time and really great job on the panel today. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. To have to manage all those big egos on both sides and on the panels and in the audience. So, he's Rob C. Lump Jefferyk. Thank you for watching The Keyword, the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Thanks for watching. We'll catch you next time.