Hi, everyone. Welcome to Gray Matter, the podcast from Gray Lockery, shared stories about company builders and business leaders. I'm Jerry Chen, General Printing Gray Lock.
Today, my guest is David McJennet, CEO of Hashee Corp. Hashee Corp is one of the defining companies in the cloud. We're super excited to have David today. Hashee was started in 2012 and went public last year, and it's been one of the category defining cloud infrastructure cloud open source companies.
I've had the privilege of work with David for many years. Dave and I worked together first at VMware over 10 years ago, and then he was briefly at EIR at Gray Lock. David, thank you for coming on the podcast today.
Thanks for having me. It has been 10 years shockingly, but it's probably slightly more.
谢谢你让我来。惊讶的是已经过去了10年,但实际上可能会更长一点。
It's been 10 years and obviously the news, a few weeks ago, of VMware Broadcom acquisition. I want to talk about all things cloud, but maybe just riff about our times there. And Cloud Foundry V fabric is how Unifers came working together where we try to build this first effort around cross cloud, multi cloud, software. What do you think we got right back then? And what do you think we got wrong?
已经过去了十年,前几周出现了VMware Broadcom并购的消息。我想谈谈所有与云有关的事情,但也许只是简单谈谈我们曾经历的时光。而Cloud Foundry V fabric是Unifers合作的方式,我们试图构建跨云、多云软件的第一个尝试。你认为我们当时做得对吗?又认为我们做错了什么呢?
To me, there's such a consistent pattern to this stuff of existing spending categories, transitioning from old world to new world. And essentially what Cloud Foundry was a bet that the app server mark, but basically how people were going to run and deploy applications was going from a world of like web logic, web sphere, maybe Tomcat, to a world of this sort of highly curated runtime platform, which at that time we were just sort of messing around the wording with as a platform as a service. And so that turns out the platform as a service notion is just a modern version of an app server. And I think we got that right.
I think we also got right the idea that developers just want to be able to do a CF push rather than declare all the infrastructure that other pins that are applicated. They just want to push that application element. I think that part got right.
I think Cloud Foundry then became a thing. In fact, we were joking about how that got started. It's actually amazingly simple. I have these things you sort of did ideated become these things. I remember the picture on the whiteboard of what ultimately became Cloud Foundry sort of got propagated around the internet. I think you got the design from 99 designs or something similar. It was not very complicated at all. It got started, but it turned out to be pretty right. Best 99 dollars you spent on my academics back then.
So maybe we'll segue that to this journey to Hashtagcorp. I mean, you did a brief stand a couple of the companies before landing at Greylock as EIR. We're going to get the weeds around Cloud and open search and Hashtagcorp. But for those listening to podcasts that may be less familiar about deep, deep infrastructure technology, tell me a little bit about Hashtagcorp. Were the products you sell and how did they work together?
And sure, so our course thesis was that the infrastructure transition underway is from people running private data centers to people running Cloud, which is just a different operating model. It's kind of very different paradigms for the core aspects of infrastructure. And so we provide a suite of products that address the challenges of running and securing apps in distributed systems, i.e. outside of the data center.
We took a very unique view of the world, which is let's create one product that does one thing, and then another product that does another thing. And you can use them together. Originally, the team said, I think there are actually four problems that we need to solve to run Cloud infrastructure. So let's try and solve all four of them. There are ones around infrastructure provisioning without became terraform. One's around the identity-based security of things in Cloud.
I can this thing talk to this thing? I don't know what it's like. What's its identity? That's the core paradigm of security in the Cloud is identity-based. And that is vault. Then the question becomes, how do I network it all together? This thing, once to talk to this thing, is it allowed to? Well, vault tells me that. But the actual connecting of it is what console does. So it's a modern take on networking. And then the fourth problem to solve is how do I then run compute jobs across that distributed fleet?
So those four problems, basically, infrastructure, security, networking, and then the runtime are the four problems that have to get solved in Cloud. And so, AeroGo, the hashie stack was born. So these are actually independent products that were created. But you generally use them together. So today, we see companies that run a 20,000 server of state. They run these products to underpin them all. And it basically acts as one throbbing humming distributed compute fabric with nomads, scheduling jobs across the top. So pretty complex distributed system stuff. But it decomposes into really four core products that underpin it.
Yeah, I mean, those four core things, identity, security, networking, infrastructure, I have rift on, have been the core paradigm from the first mainframe to the mini computer, to the PC, to the Cloud, that you always need compute, you always need network, that you always need identity, you always need infrastructure. And what happens is every time there's this platform shift, these elements get rehydrated into different technologies.
But to your point, I think the genius of hashie corp was one, you identify these are the, you know, called atomic elements, or the stem cells of the cloud that can either work independently and some of your customers do, but also work together as a stack, because the evolution to this cloud comes at different paces, different rates for different customers. And so your ability to have customers either start with vault, or start with console, or start with a telepharm, and then evolve or time embracing, you know, all four parts is super interesting.
I think that's one of the things you guys got right, that we didn't get right at CloudFoundry, for example. Exactly. Like all platform tech, again, in hindsight, gets adopted the same way. It's about balancing insertion point versus big picture vision. So what I just described, you know, imagine, and this is literally what we see in our customers. Like if you're playing a game, or if you're, you know, sending a message to your friend, or if you're streaming a processing payment, it is going through our stuff.
And what it's doing is a basically federated feed of thousands of servers that that customer is running. And they put this stuff on top, and it's basically like having a single computer look like, you know, across a thousand different machines, and then finding that open slots to drop in things, where there's processing space, in a secure way, and network, etc. So that's what it looks like at scale. That's pretty sophisticated stuff. But that's not where most people start. It's too big of a vision for them to get there, to have 20,000 servers wired together like this. So you have to determine insertion point, which is why this sort of Unix philosophy worked really, really well.
You know, how about you just start with the infrastructure provisioning problem. Let's just start with that one. And I can walk you over the course of years into that broader picture vision once you're ready for it. It's just too big of a vision to sell it because it's such a comparative. Cloud Foundry conversely says, here's your black box. And people go, that's an awfully big black box. Like, what's it doing? And you go, don't worry about it. It just works. So what if it's what it doesn't?
And so there's just a lot of reluctance. And it's very hard to get a bottoms up adoption motion when I'm just selling you one big thing. Now, people want to be able to adopt the elements and walk your way to it. The insertion, or I keep preaching like the sharpness of the wedge with matters, right? It's the pointy tip of the spear or the sharper wedge. And oftentimes, with startups, you want to have a very narrow wedge. You'll land and shirt with low friction. You always want low friction in high friction out, right? As a platform company, an infrastructure company. And many startups fail because they see the second or third act where they want to be. But they forget that you don't get to third act or you don't have a very good wedge to land on.
I think the nice thing what you guys built at Hashie Corp was this portfolio of three or four different wedges. One is historically an open source, especially in the cloud, especially in developers. And the history of Hashie Corp's obviously tied with open source. And I'd love to hear about how Hashie Corp thinks about open source, both investment ecosystem, then balancing that with a product you guys build and the business models around open source be it enterprise version, you sell, versus a cloud-hosted version.
I'm kind of a disciple of the view that you can't build an infrastructure company today that is an open source. That's just my particular view. I think VMware was the last one. He was built at a time where the source really was and a thing.
I just think it's hard to build an infrastructure company that is an open source because so many people rely on it. And they actually, they needed to be open source in many respects. So our view is always the products we're going to be open source. And we authentically commit to that.
And I think that the approach you take is you say, all right, what's the role of open source? There's a development role. And there's a distribution role. On the development side, how can we construct a project where we can invite people to collaborate with us to aggregate more people to build things that we would otherwise build while retaining control of the direction of the project? That's there's a science and an art to that.
Short version is it kind of comes to the architecture of those projects. For example, you'll notice Terraform, there's Terraform Core. And then there's the provider ecosystem for what plugs into it. There are thousands of contributors to the providers. There are very few people that contribute to Core. And that's where the way the model works, well for everybody. So number one, it's about getting development levers. And that's one path.
The second part is how do you drive standardization? That's really what you're trying to achieve because you get distribution and practitioners through open source. There's no friction to the consumption of it. But you also get ecosystem standardization. So the real magic is something like Terraform today is that there are thousands of Terraform providers. So if you want to use Terraform to provision something, you know there's a Terraform provider for it. Whether it's for provisioning stuff on Amazon or whether it's for configuring your GitHub account. Why? Because someone is built to provider for it. And actually, it's the standardization that you're trying to accomplish with open source that is just like why would someone build a plugin for V-Sphere? Or like a driver for V-Sphere?
You wouldn't until all of your customers required it. But in this way, you can actually activate the ecosystem around it. So actually, you have to authentically commit to that, saying like, I'm not trying to make money out of that. I'm genuinely just trying to drive standardization. Because I think it's good for everybody. I think that's sort of point number two.
Point number one is using a four development point. Number two is actually authentically committing to that idea that we're not trying to monetize that group. And we're genuinely just, we think it's good for everybody to standardization. Then number three is about what's your commercial model?
And I actually loved the comment that Mitchell made years ago. He goes, we realized early on that if you build a really big open source ecosystem to our community and then try to monetize that community, you have to reconcile that you've not aggregated the community of people with a predilection not to pay you anything. And I think there's a truth to that.
So you don't try and monetize them. What you try and do is try to come up with a model that monetizes the usage of those products inside an enterprise inside some other methods. But you're not trying to monetize the same people. What we did is we had the philosophy of, hey, let's say everything the practitioner needs is open source. We don't hold that back.
But everything the organization needs, well, that will go sell that to the organizations that are using this tech. And you think about that paradigm. It's actually just a different set of problems. You go from an individual to a team to an organization as you could get further organizational complexity. The team problem is one of collaboration. How do we collaborate around this thing? OK, that's an opportunity. Number two is policy and governance for the organization who did do what? Audit trails and all the rest. So that's how we think about it.
So the commercial value is around that latter part. For most successful open source companies, it's sort of monetizing the organizational complexity. And I think that's pretty straightforward to the users. It's pretty honest and straightforward. Now, do you do that in the form of a managed product? Or do you do that in the form of open core products? I think everybody's preference is to the in form of a managed product. Let me have my cloud service for Kafka, for Confluent, or for technology, ABRC.
But I think you have to reconcile what your buyers want first. So it turns out people's appetite for consuming a managed database is actually pretty high because there's only one app using that database. At the infrastructure layer, it's just sort of a different beast. If vault goes down, the lights go off for all of your company, not just one application. So as a result, the bar is just much, much higher to consume that as a service. Turns out the market will tell you whether it wants to consume your products as a service.
In our case, it didn't want to early on. They wanted us to have a self-managed version that they could manage themselves in enterprise form. I'll maybe stop there because I can talk about this forever. No, I mean, I think you said two or three threads are super fascinating. And it's probably Armada Mitchell, the two co-founders, had that great insight of open source seeing all the service area that practitioner wanted cared about and really committing to that. And then I think you came in in 2016, was it? 2016, yes. 2016 as CEO. And you had insight where like Armada Mitchell had this great insight and understood the developer aesthetic.
You had the great insight into the organizational requirements of the monetization, I think the three of you made to the great team because that separation of the personas practitioner, like the developer versus the organization, and had different needs identifying the organization paid for it. And what those features are and making sure you don't open source those features versus what the practitioner cared about open source those things. It's kind of church and state. We actually refer to it as church and state. And those things can't cross.
I'm afraid ask what's religion and what's government? Which is church and state. And then we would both know. Right? I think clearly the practitioner is the religion. And the organization is the government, regulating it. In this cloud world, we're increasingly cashier quirk as a fast growing cloud business. Confluent has a fast growing cloud business. Mongo Atlas is a fast growing cloud business. Snowflake is not open source at all. 100% cloud business. I'm involved in companies like Docker, Rockset, Doc's open source, Rockset's 100% cloud, Cronus fears, open source, but then all cloud. Do you need to be open source anymore to win in the cloud game at all? Or yes or no? I think it's harder to drive market standardization, depending on what your aspirations are.
我怕问一下什么是宗教和政府?哪一个是教会和国家。这样我们就都会知道了,对吧?我认为实践者就是宗教,而组织就是政府,对它进行调节。在这个云计算的世界中,我们越来越像是一个快速增长的云计算业务。Confluent有一个快速增长的云计算业务。Mongo Atlas 也有一个快速增长的云计算业务。Snowflake根本就不是开源的,它是一个100%的云业务。我参与过像Docker、Rockset和Doc's Open Source这样的公司,Rockset是100%云业务,Cronus fears是开源的,但是也都是云计算业务。您是否仍然需要开源才能在云计算游戏中获胜?是还是否?我认为,这取决于您的愿望是什么,更难驱动市场标准化。
So again, these companies, they get married together. And they are in fact very different. And I would pause that there's a big difference between the application layers. So databases, you know, message queuing and middleware are basically the runtime layer. As opposed to core infrastructure, which is security networking and the infrastructure itself. So let's talk about the top layer, which I'm referring to as sort of the app infrastructure. You don't have to standardize an entire market to build a business. I mean, look at Snowflake. They're one of multiple data warehouses. Look at Confluent. They're one of multiple message queuing options I have. Look at Kubernetes. That's one of many runtime platforms that are out there. And so I think in that instance, you actually don't need to be open source. I don't believe.
At the core infrastructure layer, it turns out, like there's only one way to do TCP. There's only one way to do firewalls. There's only one way to do networking. It all works the same way. So I think there tends to be stand to win at the infrastructure layer. You sort of need standardization, because I'm going to have a variety of applications, but I can't have different ways of doing networking. So I think those kind of need to be open source. And so the adoption patterns are being subtly different, too.
And I think there's a nuance that really matters here, which is at the app infrastructure layer, so databases, et cetera, middleware. It's very app driven. So I have an app that I want to be built in Kubernetes. I have an app that I want to do message queuing in this modern way. I have a set of apps that I want to do data warehousing with. Versus the infrastructure sells for all your apps. So there's a very different motion. And I say the app that I type for consuming in a cloud service, the services a single app, is kind of OK, because if that service goes down like that, sucks, but my lights still stay on. Versus at the infrastructure layer, there's just a different risk tolerance.
Enter the framework then becomes to your point, how many of the things do you touch, right, or integrate or depend upon it? Like a single CRM app, notably, there's been tries of like open source CRM, like sugar CRM, et cetera. That has never worked out the same as other layers.
The lower level of the stack, clearly like a Kubernetes or a Docker, the more open source you have to be. The lower down you get, the more important it is. You know, the early days are hash-y.
Tell us about the foundational early customers. They really help hash-y get his footing, get started, and help sharpen this sort, if you will, to polish what the products became. Be kind of curious, what was the inception customers and how has that changed over time?
Yeah, I go back to kind of the thesis for business building. In my view, it's very consistent. It's about old world, new world transitions, architecturally, that create the opportunity.
So what was happening 10 years ago was the emergence of cloud as a target, and it was the realization, you know what? The paradons are just different. I'll take securities, an example. Old world, the idea of like four walls and a pipe in a pipe out and a firewall around. It was how we think about security. Cloud world, it's like a mission of walls. It's like, it's a setting on my S3 bucket. Is it in-child or is it outside? This changes my world a little bit.
And so the definitive conviction around, hey, the right way to do security in cloud is based on brokering identity was the insight that the Armani Mitchell had early on. And they were just convicted around that. And they said, hey, this IP base, which security makes no sense, lets build a product that does identity based. And then the people that were starting to use cloud were like, yeah, these guys are right. That's right. And they started using it.
The people that were adopting that cloud paradigm first came to the realization that this was the right way to do it. And those were the cloud native companies.
最先采用云计算模式的人意识到这是正确的方法,它们是云原生公司。
It's the twitches of the world. It's the get hubs of the world. It's sort of the early cloud native folks that you would expect to are building companies at that time. And that is where the initial traction came from unquestionably, because we'd been very opinionated about the idea.
Infrastructure as code is how you do provisioning identities, how you do security. Service name is the way you do networking. Those three principles are the most profound. They're just totally different principles.
Once that's sort of got some adoption, you should have worked the edges off inside these big web cloud native companies. And some of them are just absolutely enormous as you can imagine. Like the scale of usage sort of started to shock us. And all of a sudden you're connecting 100,000 machines. And you're like, I wait, I never expect that to happen.
So by the time some of the forward leaning enterprises who we wanted to monetize ultimately started consuming this stuff as well, because they were like, hey, we're building the massive web app that needs to be built on cloud and infrastructure the very earliest of Amazon's customers. They adopted it. And I think that's actually quite repeatable. But it was related to this paradigm shift. You've got to kind of got to look for those. Who are the people that are looking at that new paradigm first? And it's select financial institutions. We would say some of those companies as you mentioned that early doctors have seen the future.
So you look at some of the things we back at Greylock, like Rockset team came out Facebook. Coronavirus for our team came out of Uber. A lot of those teams out of Facebook, Uber, we've said seen the future, right? Or saw them at Docker, seen the future in terms of how you build apps. And they've solved this problem. The other folks haven't yet, but will soon. They're just one step around the corner.
And pretty soon, the banks, maybe some of the telecosy mentioned, or other companies soon adopt this pretty quickly from containers and microservices to whatever. There's the same customers that started early in cloud, Amazon that early days were a bunch of startups, right? And then now they're standardizing on, no, gov clouds or financial services clouds with likes of Goldman Sachs.
This castle is a cloud project that you've helped me on and you don't have rift on these ideas in the past. We've been tracking the big three, Amazon, Azure, Google, and how they evolved over time. And how oftentimes they copy each other.
But increasingly now, in 2022, especially the past two years of the COVID scene, multi-cloud really be a best practice paradigm. And multi-cloud also include maybe private cloud as well. And, you know, Hashee Corp has been, like I said, early of this defining company in this multi-cloud conversation.
So it'd be kind of curious. You talked a lot of customers right now. What are you seeing about multi-cloud or cloud trends writ large and is it going to be a multi-cloud world? Is it all going to be Amazon? I think we all, 2012, 2013, everyone thought, oh, yeah, Amazon, I got it. I've seen this pattern before, old world, new world, old world, private data center, VMware, new world, Amazon. Okay, got it.
And obviously, our bet was that the steady state was multi at the time. And, you know, actually, I've been really bullish on Azure all along. So I think that's a very, very like, doggy culture that's going to pursue the tail that's Amazon and probably pass them at some point, just be a data shared determination. And so I think we made the view that multi was going to be the thing and that was probably, what wouldn't be 10 that would be a few?
And that's kind of how it's worked out when you travel around. It's like every single big company is trying to standardize on a couple, but not succeeding. I had a conversation with the CIO couple of weeks ago, it made me laugh. He goes, yeah, I just finished a project of data center consolidation. We went from 18 data centers down to six, like it took us two years to do. And I just sort of smiled. I said, can I guess which ones those are? And he goes, sure, I go, Amazon, Azure, Google, Alibaba, private data center times two. He goes, how do you know that? Because you look like everybody else.
You have operations in China. So that's going to be on Alibaba, whether you like it or not. And whether I accidentally do it by design, you're going to use the other ones. He goes, yeah, we just come together with that. So that's what the world looks like. It just does. People are doing strategic deals with maybe two to try and get vendor power bit. Like they're not really succeeding because you have a dev team that wants to do something over here for a very good reason that you end up there.
I actually think if anything, that trend is sort of accelerating, and I've been traveling around for the last quarter. Armand was in Europe, Asia and North America a couple of times this quarter. And what you see is actually, yeah, I know, you know what, some of this stuff needs to run more in private data center because this one's really sensitive. Now that stuff is okay to run an Amazon. And actually this one maybe needs to manage it, run it on an edge pop because it's serving an edge network. And you're like, hold on a second, I thought they were going to be three. Now I'm seeing the big three plus Alibaba, plus even Oracle and some instances, plus some pop. And it just speaks to like, that's the messy reality that we all live in. And I think multi-cloud just becomes the thing.
Now, as it relates to investment opportunities, startup opportunities, that's an awesome, right? Think about the problem that your customer has of like, trying to, I don't think about zero trust across those five states, good grief. Okay, well, it turns out that's what we all help them with. So I think it actually creates massive opportunity what initially look like a winner-take-all of game for Amazon and then okay, maybe just for a few of them. Actually, now it looks like there will be a software stack that runs across all of them to solve sort of some of these problems with consistency. And we're certainly seeing that through massively.
This multi-cloud architecture, David, is fear versus greed. What I mean by fear is the fear of lock-in, right? And like the early days are Oracle. And how much is greed saying, hey, I want to take advantage of XYZ service on Google, ABC serves in Azure. Is it just like, hey, you know, for me once, you know, say I'm on you, for me twice, shame on me, I don't want to be locked into the next gen Oracle. I think it's a bit of both.
And I was talking about customer in Australia, this big bank that's got the majority of their apps on cloud already. They basically said, hey, we're gonna pick Amazon and Azure and you know, some will run on either place. We're just trying to get them to cloud because long-term we think it's cheaper there than we can run it ourselves. And they're okay with the lock-in. But then there's a certain class of applications within their estate. They're like, this one actually needs to be built more like Zoom.
Like the way Zoom is built, if you followed it, it's sort of cloud agnostic. It doesn't use any cloud native services from what I recall. And as a result, it can be moved around to wherever their compute fabric is. And I think people are coming to the grips.
Like number one, I'm okay getting locked in because I get a lot of benefit from that. And over, by the way, I can drive down costs. I'll get cheaper over time that I could ever run it, so I'm okay with it. But there are certain things which they're more less saying what about. I think that is a newer trend where people are like, you know what, this payment app that actually is the basis of my whole thing. Maybe that one, no. That's new. That's new.
I think also just that underscores my p-spoint around increasing heterogeneity, not less. Yeah, I used to say in the early days, when I talked to developers and startups like, this is not how people use cloud and not how customers use cloud. In terms of an elastic workload that sprints between clouds, it was to your point, different workloads and different clouds that had different privacy security use cases. And you're okay going all in and one in cloud in one region for scale and cost. You're never bursy between clouds.
But there are some categories of applications that for security or privacy purposes need to be in a private cloud or for some companies like ISVs like Zoom needs to be truly multi-cloud with the same app. But more or less, most customers aren't with that Zoom architecture. They don't have one giant app that is moving around the globe. It's really different apps on different clouds from different purposes.
One insight that did surprise me on my last current trip was for these companies that are pretty far down the path of cloud, they're actually starting to see cost savings year over year. As they move more of their estate into cloud, their bill is actually going down. You're like, that's weird. Well, it's actually not because it actually, there's actually truth to the thesis that the cost of storage of your networking on cloud is gonna be cheaper than you could do on your private data center.
So they may be charging a margin on it, but if you can get good at optimizing age and over-prevision stuff, don't leave stuff running. This shouldn't be running just operationally. You can massively ratchet down your cloud spend. And I think that's the phase to come of cloud who's mature people. And if you make the bet that is cheaper for them to run that is for you, like it's sort of one direction on. Yeah, we're seeing a category of companies invested a couple around, not necessarily Finals for reducing cloud cost and cloud spending, right?
And I think in this economic environment right now, you will see more people focus on reducing cloud costs. It would be basically a question for me out around cloud. How does hash-y compete or work with the big cloud providers, right? On the outside people say, oh, Amazon or Google or Azure would hate hash-y corp, but you guys do a decent job also working with them.
So be kind of curious how do you guys thread that needle if you will. So we actually won partner of the year from Azure like through the last four years and partner of the year from Google last year and group Amazon's a bigger partner than any of them. They just don't have that same partner award structure. So the net is our mission in life is actually to drive more workloads to cloud.
我很好奇你们是如何做到这一点的。我们过去四年中获得了 Azure 的年度合作伙伴奖,去年获得了 Google 的年度合作伙伴奖,而与 Amazon 的合作伙伴关系比任何其它合作伙伴都更深入。只是 Amazon 没有同样的合作伙伴奖励结构罢了。因此,我们的使命在于推广更多的工作负载转移到云上。
And I think that comes down to, that's a very, actually very unique position in the market. It's very unlikely snowflake or even a confluent where, hey, Amazon trying to sell you a service for data warehouse and where it pops up service. So like there's a one-to-one thing to kind of sell, they don't try and sell you your provisioning products. They don't try and sell your identity broken, broken products. Those are just the fundamental primitives of their platforms. That's the difference.
So there is absolutely zero conflict between us. We are like the railroad tracks to cloud for them, but allowing people to have a consistent way to provision allows them to reduce the time to get apps running on Amazon. So we're like the railroad tracks to them. So yeah, we really like it's a very unusual position but it's a very deliberate position. And I think it took us a while to figure out that that was the right model and now we are where we are.
We definitely don't compete with them. We're like their biggest enablers. And I think it comes down to like the very practical view that your system of engagement might be running on a Kubernetes platform running on Amazon, but the database that's connected to is probably running in your private data center. So you have a bridging problem for that real app to be built. And we solve that bridging problem. Amazon cares about Amazon, VMware cares about VMware. We pay the bridge between them.
I think the bridging thing is interesting, right? Because you don't have to pass one of my favorite quotes is that old Jim Barcell quote, the only two ways to make money in technology is bundling and unbundling. And they go through this phase of bundling everything together as a PC to unbundling between the OS and the apps, bundling everything together in clients server, unbundling again.
And you can argue that from 2008 to 2018, it was a bundling of compute networking storage databases, et cetera, into the cloud and Amazon. In the past four years, we're seeing an unbundlingly services and companies like Snowflake, Confluent, Mongo, DataDog, Chronosphere, Rockset, Docker, HasheeCorp, all either attacking one service like a database or data warehouse or observability or a networking identity, for example.
And so now we're seeing, I think, in my opinion, an unbundling phase where you see Amazon, Azure, Google, getting unbundled into independent services and obviously something like Hashee that bridges between services, between data centers makes sense when you have an unbundled world. I mean, curious, are you seeing the same thing? And if you do believe in the unbundling, where are you seeing this happening?
I think at 100%, that's what's happening. I think it comes back to the heterogeneity reality for like if you're a big company and you're having to do things on, that are in multiple different places, like you can't use the Pub sub mechanism on Amazon to build one app and the Pub sub mechanism on Azure to build another one, like it's just way to operationally complex.
So I think as reality is set in that actually, I'm not gonna put on my workload on Amazon, I'm gonna have to do with multiple things and my private data center. Then people start sort of stepping back and saying, like what are actually the software layers that I need in this upper stack? And I've always contended that there are seven, there are seven core ones, there's infrastructure, security, networking, that's the bottom three. Then there's the runtime layer, the best-rescuing layer, and then the database, those are the core six. And then on the right-hand side of that is how you monitor all and that's your APM.
And I think there are others as well, but I think those are the ones that have been very clearly reestablished. Hey, how do we do provisioning? Well, that's terraformed whether it's on Amazon or Azure. How do I broker identity for that security concept? Well, that's fault. But how do I do monitoring? Well, that's a data dog, right? And so I think that heterogeneity has driven the unbundling reality because the end users just can't deal with that much heterogeneity.
Not technically, I just mean operationally. If your job is to establish a zero trust approach to your new fleet of applications, and some running on Amazon, and some running on Azure, like good grief, good luck trying to build them in different ways, you can't, you have to step back, say, what's my common foundation? And then all apps are gonna use that common foundation. And that is essentially a software stack that I run either on Amazon or on Azure. And it's the same stack.
Yeah, I love that seven elements. And clearly that informs a lot of how we organize Castle of the Clouds and how we've been investing from observability like chronosphere, databases like Rockset, elements like Docker and a compute stage. And the one networking in security is one that has to be cross-cloud. So we're involved in a chemical Keto networks that's basically both wide-air networking across clouds and data centers, as well as secure like firewall and Castle of the Cross Workloads, because as you unbundle between the cloud, you need somethings had to be a common and a substrate like security.
And so that's obviously one where super bullish on, as we see this unbundling of the world happened before our eyes. I think what we're also seeing is it was seen that on the front end stack as well. So I think like as the cloud world has gone, as well as gone cloud, the infrastructure stuff has gone to recast.
But I also think that same thing is happening at the front end stack, which used to be a very consistent stack. Now you've got a lot more decomposition of those elements. It's kind of going to that same experience. So that's one area that's super interesting.
I think the other one that gets super neat that we see way more than I would expect is edge. And I think edge to some degree, I actually think, I do think about it, and my customers think about it is, there's like your private data center world, and then there's the outside of your private data center world.
And that outside of the private data center world, one A is cloud, one B is edge. It turns out the software stack you need to like, imagine a car that needs to connect to a data center. Well, it's the same software stack as you're running on cloud. But I gotta believe there's a lot of other specific things that edge environment, I'm not close enough to know that are also unbundled because there's heterogeneity of edge targets as well. So there's probably lots of interesting things there.
Yeah, edge is one we see all of us, you with Kato networks, they built their own network of pops around the globe, kind of like a cloud flare, or just to be close to the customer. But this edge of pushing things out leads to another theme that you know, I have talked about, this kind of either federation of cloud, federation workloads across multiple clouds, multiple the Geos, and you know, how much of that you think is driven by a compliance of data across Geos, and how much do you think is just more multi cloud unbundling?
I just think of the practicality of like deploying things where they make sense to be deployed is what's driving it. It's like, yeah. And I think the Alibaba is the best example of it, where like if you're gonna run something in China, you kind of got one choice, and people are generally okay with that. So a lot of multi nationals run stuff on Alibaba, you know, it's probably not the first choice, but it's kind of their only one. And they're okay with that because their consumers are in China, and that's the way to have it work. So I just think it's more practicality. That begs lots of questions around controls on how you have consistency across this totally different environments, disparate environments, but it kind of goes back to the point of this common software stack.
It's funny, I actually find myself, obviously I totally geek out on this stuff. I just think it's super intellectual and interesting to watch these markets evolve. So you gotta stop me, but whenever I see an app like Zoom or Slack or Stripe, I can kind of imagine how they're built. It's not that complicated. Where when I see my Uber driver, you know, filling with their app to like, if it gets an extra, you know exactly how those are built. It's something like fault authentic, any identity of that endpoint, something like console, tick-create, then encrypt connection across the internet. And it's something like Terraform that's automating the provisioning of the compute farm to allow it. And then it's some custom app running on top. You're like, okay, cool, like that's just how these things are all built.
And that level of consistency, I think is what we're all looking at, is like, what is that pattern? Because I think regardless of what the underpinning compute is for that, like that software stack sort of is finding its way to standardization. And that's what's cool for startups is like, what is that market like? What are those pieces that are required? And just know that the cloud vendors are not going to fight you for it. They're like, they want the compute.
Well, okay, so that begs me into the next question. I wouldn't be doing my job. I wasn't picking your brain around that startup ecosystem out there. Either startups out there that you think interesting or just spaces or themes in general that you're tracking, that you think are either white spaces for yourself, white space for startups, that as we think about Castles and the Clouds, we're the holes in the Castles walls or the paths or the mode, if you will, that you would suggest to your listeners out there that you think about as their founder.
I would think about how profoundly different the paradigm of cloud is relative to the old worlds. And then start looking at the existing markets in the old world and see how they're going to get reconstituted in cloud. I think that's actually the right word. These markets go from old world to new world and they don't look the same. They're just reconstituted in slightly different form. For example, use firewalls for security in the old world, use identity-based control software in the new world. You're going to spend the same amount of money on each in just a different way.
The one that we've been talking about sort of goes down that thought process is privilege access management. And obviously this, we have a product in the open source community around this. But I'll use it as an example because it just underscores how we think about it, which is the idea of privilege access management is actually pretty well-established market.
It's the idea of how does an administrator log into a privileged machine? And they do like, you know, such recording what they've done. And there's compliance reasons why you do that. There are vendors in the market that do that very well today in the private data center.
And that is a billion dollar spend category or probably. Well, as the world goes cloud, like it's just a totally different paradigm, now you've got to give temporary access to a machine that may only be alive for a minute. Right? So, but the problem still exists.
So, the old world, new world transition is right there for the taking. It's like, okay, well, architecturally, the old way, which assumes a static IP address target just doesn't translate to the new world, but the spend category has to translate to the new world. So, I'd look for those, you know, for us, boundary is that product because it's very specifically just like an old world, new world transition.
And everybody in our platform teams that we service that you describe it to goes, please tomorrow. Like, yeah, that's exactly my problem because you understand how different the paradigm is. So, I think that's an example.
Now, boundary for the listeners is this kind of a simple, secure, remote access for your end users, yeah. Yeah, so how do I SSH into that machine over there for one second when that machine only exists for, you know, 30 seconds? So, this idea of old world, new world is how to look at it.
I think there are lots of those markets, things like the tokenization markets and the private data, things like even the HSM market, some of these like really nerdy, hardcore markets that are, you know, relatively sleepy vendors in those markets because they haven't changed a lot. Well, their world's totally changed in the cloud world. So, I would do that academic exercise.
And I think you've done that exercise as well. And you can see that Amazon services were basically a copy of that path. We've done that multiple times trying to find founders startups. Oftentimes, I probably get them more wrong than right Dave, but I'm just stopping from trying.
But no, no, it's, you know, obviously like, when you have a new platform shift like the cloud, first thing happens is people try to use the old tools and the new paradigm, right? And the first question is in the new paradigm, what breaks, right? And so the first thing is you fix the things that break from old tools to new tools. And then, okay, now you're in the new paradigm, what new things can you do, right? So it's a two-step thing.
So there's still a category of things that are broken. And then once you're in the cloud, you can, there's a new category of things you can do definitely that you can in G before, which is I think super fascinating.
We're just being able to see that, I think, because the first generation cloud was, let's move what we had before into the cloud, we broke about the stuff, let's fix it. Now we're seeing, oh, now we're in the cloud, we can build things differently. And so I think stuff you guys build like, boundary or waypoint, etc.
And you're changing, now I can build apps differently than I did eight years ago. Yeah, but I think, but I think this is the progression, you're exactly right. And I think consult for me is a perfect example of this.
So you look old world, new world. Like if I were to look at all the IDC categories of spend in the current data center, okay, well, which of those need to move to the cloud model, because that's where all the future apps are going to be. You can see a one-for-one mapping, and that's how you get started.
And then once you've built that, then you go, actually, you know what? From where I'm sitting here, you can do something totally different. A perfect example is what happened with consult. So consult was built around this idea of, hey, the way you do networking in the old world is I've configured Cisco Networking Gear.
In the new world, I just created a rule that says, this thing talks to this thing, so I've whenever it appears connected to. And that becomes your DNS. So basically, it just speaks DNS whenever something wants to find another thing, you know, consult is your DNS.
That's a literally a one-for-one replacement. The evolution became, hmm, what if I wanted to run that across the wider network, and I wanted to have mutual TLS between all those services? Well, that became the service-match market, which people go, well, that service-match thing's pretty obvious.
Well, it wasn't obvious. It was an evolution of consult. In fact, even Istio is essentially a replica of that exact consult idea that came out a long time after a consult. But that's an example of how you navigate, you cross over one to one, and then you go, hold on a second, I can see something different, and boom, and entirely in your market strategy's created.
You take a full historical right? I Twitter recently, you know, Mosimo, one of our former VMware colleagues, reminded me of conversation with him saying, hey, you know, the market's trying to figure out is VMware the last of the last generation companies, the first of the next generation companies, right?
You know, and I think that was kind of the little bit of state between old world and cloud data centers, VMware and virtualization was the naveler of cloud. And I think, you know, 13, 14 years later, we're now the next generation where this kind of state between how cloud 1.0, or the first active cloud is, to the second active cloud, which could be edge, could be decentralized, could be multiple clouds, that we have generation developers, and customers, and users, and students, don't know anything but cloud, right?
And so, you and I racked servers for the first part of our careers, right? And plugged in networking cards, et cetera. And now, because we have a generation born in the cloud natively, what they imagine and what they expect is very different.
So I'm an investor who's pretty excited, this next turn of the wheel, if you will, would be very different than previous turn. And I think comes like hashier of things that we're investing in are going to be there for the next generation of multi-billion dollar companies.
Yeah, I totally agree. The generation of folks, it's just like, they just think of, in fact, I remember going to my first hashier club, I had no idea what we're talking about. I was like, I was genuinely confused, because it's just like a different language. And I was like, I understand this stuff pretty well, but not this stuff.
The other, so I at your point, the other part I just make, I think it's getting easier for startups, because I think there's a logical buying center for this stuff. And I'll draw the analog to the VMware world, because it's been all I mind a lot. The thing that happens in these infrastructure sensations is it actually requires a slight org check structure change every time it happens.
And I think about what happened, pre-VM where you want a more compute, you called up your person at HP and you waited three weeks for another machine, whatever it came. It then claimed the creation of the VI admin as a role. It's, no, no, no, no. You just open a ticket, the VI admin will provision you a virtual machine and close the ticket, because I have a pool here waiting for you. And that became the buyer for so much of the VMware stuff in the end, that singular role, right?
Like that is, that is sort of that entry point. And I think there's a parallel here in cloud is the creation of these platform teams or these cloud program offices. That is a central team that goes, hold on a second, y'all are really nearly adopting cloud. Stop. I'm gonna step back, create a common set of, you know, apertures for provisioning, monitoring, whatever it is. And you're all gonna have to use those regardless of whether you're running an Amazon or an Azure or a private data center, because that's the only way we can achieve consistency.
And that is what has happened in every cloud company. That's what happened at Hoshy Court. We have a cloud team, or basically a platform team, and then four product teams. Every company we engage with has a platform team and the app teams that they support. And that is your buyer. They're the people that are deeply steeped in this domain of understanding the paradigm that's different. And that's who you seek out if you were a startup. You go and find that group of people who are in the cloud program office, whatever it might be.
And they are the ones defining the next 30 years of their infrastructure. I think that's a great place to leave it and the conversation. This new persona, this cloud buyer, this architect, is kind of the, has evolved and become a reality that passed four or five years. And that's persona, you and I, I'd be working with them in the next, you know, five, 10 years or a career.
So David, any last advice to founders executives out there that's starting things in the cloud and either advice on starting companies, running companies, or how to work with you in Hoshy Court? Business building is by definition super fun. These are intellectually fascinating pursuits that are super interesting to pursue, particularly if you really, you're geek out at the role that you play for these biggest companies in the world, as they're doing their things.
So I would embrace the journey. There's lots of opportunity. You know, last I checked, $180 billion will be spent on the big four cloud providers this year. And that number is growing 30 plus percent per year. So there's so much committed budgets out there for you to go and engage with that it is a great time to be engaging with it.
And despite the macro realities and what you hear broadly, you know, the secular tailwind is strong. Well, thank you for your time. And we'll do another podcast on that topic, running and building companies and the leadership aspects that the journey you had in your career.