>> From New York City, it's the Cube! Covering "Welcome to the New Edge", brought to you by Pensando Systems. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. 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 cause
we're talking about cloud, we're talking about edge, and the launch of a brand new company. It's Pensando and their event is called "Welcome to the New Edge". We're happy to have, since we're Goldman, the guys who have the money, Barry Eggers, a founding
partner of Lightspeed Ventures and Randy Pawn, the CFO of Pensando. Gentlemen, welcome. >> Thank you.
>> Thank you. >> It's a pleasure. >> So, Barry let's start with you. I think you were involved
with this early on. Why'd you get involved? What kind of sparked your interest? >> We got involved in this round and the reason we got involved, or 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?" We did some diligence and dug in, and found everything to our
liking and jumped right in. >> Did anybody tell him this
startup is a young man's game? They mixed up the 20-something, I think. (laughs) >> Yeah, they sort of turned
the startup on its head. No pun intended. >> That's quite all right. >> And Randy, you join him as CFO, you've known him for a while. What is it about this group people that executes forward-looking transformational technologies
time and time again? That's not a very common trait. >> It's a great question. So, the key for these guys have been, well, they've been together since the 80s. So, Mario, Luke, and Prim have
been together since the 80s. I worked with them at
their previous startup before Crescendo in 80s, and the combination of their
skills are phenomenal together. So, one of them has the vision
of where they want to go, the second guy is
someone who engineers it, takes from concept to first drawing, and then Prim takes over from
the 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. >> It's amazing that A,
that they keep doing it, and B, that they want
to keep doing it, right? Cause 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 they 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
Chamber's conversation of these ten year big cycles, what did you think of that? How do you guys slice and
dice your opportunities in looking at these big next jumps? >> Going back to the team a little bit, they've been pretty good at identifying a lot of these cycles. They've brought us land switching, a long time ago with Crescendo. They've sort of redefined the
data center several times. And so there's another opportunity. What's driving this opportunity
really is the effect of 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 just the hyper acceleration of the amount of data, the
amount of applications, and this age old, "The
data to the computer? Do you move the compute to the data?" Now, the answer is yes. Right? All the above. So, you've got some money to work with. >> We do. >> A round, I think a B round, you guys are closing a C round. So, I think, what, 180
people approximately? >> Approximately, yes. >> I think somebody told me. Close enough. So, as you put some this capital to work, what are some of your
priorities going forward? >> So, we will continue to
hire, both in the engineering, but more importantly now we're
hiring in sales and service. We've been waiting for the
product, quite frankly. So, we just got our first
few sales guys hired. We got a pretty aggressive
ramp, especially with the HP relationship. To put people out into the field, we've hired a couple guys in New York. We'll continue to hire out 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 will put to use to do that. We're changing facilities.
We need to grow. We're sort of cramped
in a one-story building, I mean one floor of a building right now. So, the money's 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 that 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. >> Did you join the board too, right? >> I did. >> So, what are you excited about? What do you see as, I mean there's clearly
your excited you invested, but is there something
just extra special here, Chambers put in a ten year
cycle, that's a big statement. >> Yeah, I mean we've talked about. I'm excited to work with the team. They're best in class. Working closely with John
again is a lot of fun. The chance to- >> Not yet exhausting. >> Yeah. 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 they 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, I was teasing him a little bit about all the M&A stuff that he
was famous for at Cisco, and he was 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, I think
he said he has 18 companies in his portfolio, thereabouts,
they're going IPO. All the way. >> Yeah, and that's a
good point, actually. This team has been prolific and they've delivered products that have generated 50 billion dollars, and you walk into any
data center in the world, and 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. That's why Randy's here.
That's why John's here. That's why I'm here. We want to build a company
that can be an independent company, and be a lasting
leading in a new category. >> 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, to get reengaged with them again with an entirely new concept that's catching a
transition in the market, was just too good an
opportunity for me to pass. I had retired for 15 months and I came out of retirement
to join this team, much to the chagrin of my wife, but I just couldn't
pass up the opportunity. They're fun to work with. They surround themselves with a really high caliber of talent. Everyday 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 the Cube from the top of Goldman
Sachs in Manhattan. Thanks for watching.
We'll see you next time. (electronic music)
