Aw, what's up, Brandman Network? It's Brandman Sean, and I'm back with another exclusive, and today I'm talking about an exclusive, exclusive, because what I realized is a lot of people don't really understand what a meme strategy looks like. They think you can just create memes and blow up, but I'm gonna take you to the step-by-step of how we really get this thing done, like when these artists blow up, what these things happening in the background are.  So I created a fancy PowerPoint, check this thing out. Aw, check that out, that fancy PowerPoint, man, the way the black pops off of the white. It's like I'm in a world racism with one PowerPoint. Now, if you see these first words, going viral versus becoming a meme, right, they're completely different. Understand that going viral means you get a lot of visibility, a lot of people are sharing and things are moving, things are popping, you see this happen with a lot of people all the time, but most of those people who don't last, right, it's almost like having a one hit wonder of some sorts, is the difference between going viral and becoming a meme. Becoming a meme is really this last thing thought, is really pushing a specific thought, it's branded, almost. It really is branded into your mind, and understand that meme is a real word, meme existed before social media. And so, and then the word social meme actually alludes to the original idea of a meme, creating memes versus a meme strategy. That's another thing, creating a meme, you know, even having it shared a little bit, that's not necessarily a meme strategy, even if it goes viral, obviously. So let's get into that. What does this really look like? Number one, you need to create memes for a meme strategy, and I'm talking about a hundred memes, that's the way I like to start, right? Just because if you think about creating a song, you have to create a lot of them a lot of times, just to really get into that creative groove, you have to, you know, keep creating things just so you can find that hit song. In some points, this meme that you create, all the memes that you create, there's gonna be some of them that, they aren't as strong as others, but some of them are going to be hits, and that's what you're really looking for. So that's one part about it, but then, three main ideas. Understanding, once again, what a meme is, it's an idea, it's a specific thought that gets branded into the mind.  Here's an example, Blueface. Blueface is an artist with, when he blew up meme-wise, he had multiple ideas. When I say multiple ideas, look at the fact that people said that he was offbeat, and you saw that become a meme in itself, right? Then people talked about specific lines that he had, and they thought they were funny, meme within itself. And then of course, you had like Datiana, that became a meme within itself. Those are three ideas attached to the same person. If you can get multiple of those, you will have so much more powerful of a brand outside of just going viral, and now people are sticking to you and really knowing who you are, and you're probably building a legitimate fan base from it. Most people just have that one idea, and we can get into some of that other stuff later, but just keep this in mind. You want a hundred memes probably just to create so you can get some things going, and then three main ideas, and with those three main ideas, you need to create 10, maybe 20 around that one idea so you can push that. You're hoping for those to catch on. However, you're gonna have an extra 40 memes probably that are just around some random ideas, and it might be one of those that stick on. So we'll get into that later. The next step, oh, this one right here, creating meme pages. People don't understand this part about it.  I did it in my original video, but there's meme pages that get created, right? Meme pages, fan pages. So these people aren't necessarily just random people who decided to create a meme about an artist. This could be me saying Chris Brown is my client or something like that, but nobody knows Chris Brown. So the way this meme page gets created, right? I create my 100 memes, I got my ideas, and then I say I'm gonna create Chris Brown meme page. That's the obvious one. When I say obvious versus low key, what you see on the screen, some people have Chris Brown meme page, and then some people do, it might be some random names, some random avatars or something like that, and they might even have other memes that aren't necessarily related to that artist on the meme page. So you kind of do something skewery so people can't tell that it's just you. People will also create both of those. You might create multiple Chris Brown meme page underscore Chris Brown underscore meme page. And Chris Brown memes, like those might all be pages that you create, and you might still create some of these obscure pages or have these accounts that really only have like five posts, but two of them are your meme. Your meme from for you as an artist or whatever idea that you're trying to push. Now, what's so relevant about this part right here is you need to set a catalog. We talk about creating catalogs with music when something blows up and people start to go see and look what's going on. You wanna have more music for them to check out and stick to. Same thing happens with the memes. So you're setting out your 100 memes or 50 of your memes or a decent amount of your memes on your meme pages. So when people start to check the hashtag later on, you actually have something for them to see. There's ideas. I can keep laughing at this person. I just discovered blue face. And now I'm checking out the blue face hashtag.  Or now I'm sharing this and I'm just spreading the word of blue face. You have to set that catalog. You cannot rely on somebody else to create your virality and hope other people start to spark ideas. You wanna actually keep things controlled. You don't wanna leave virality to chance. But hopefully of course things keep going. Now, this is create meme pages. You're setting the stage. You put all these memes. You got them with a unified hashtag. All that stuff is cool. Next step is the waterfall method. Now we get into the promo phase a little bit. So got a hundred memes on Instagram somewhere or whatever, whatever the social media platform is. And now I have some of these memes that I really think are hitting, right? Cause these other memes probably haven't even been seen yet. Keep that in mind when you have your fan page, you're really not trying to get followers. None of that stuff really matters.  Now you implement the waterfall method. I have a video on the waterfall method in Brain Man Network. So you can check that out on the influencer marketing playlist. But just to give you a quick reminder, it's when you start big and then you go small, right? Start big, go small. You get your meme shared for the content that you want to go viral, shared on a bigger platform. And then you reach down to smaller platforms there and start to get that energy going. And of course you want it to be targeted so you're getting continuously being seen within one community or close or knit community versus I'm going to put something on Taylor Swift page and then I'm going to post something on, I don't know, Gucci Mains page. Let me tell it, there's no Taylor Swift Instagram page, but I know she has one of the top followers on Instagram but you're too wide, right? Obviously people aren't going to see these things repetitively. The whole goal is to get these people to see these things repetitively. So refer to the waterfall method video to get a little bit deeper into that. And also remember that going big is relative. Think about where you are. You don't have to just use a meme strategy once, you can use it in levels. So I can say I have 10,000 followers and now I'm going to reach out to pages with 100,000 followers as a big page to start myself off and then I'm going to waterfall down from there. And then I started to move the ball down to field a little bit. Now I'm going to reach out to 500,000 level pages and then waterfall down from there. This can continuously go up. So don't be discouraged if you don't have the money to reach out to million follower pages, 3.5 million follower pages, all that good stuff. So keep that in mind. Now this is when the key starts. See there's a lot of steps to this thing. I promise you, this is not like a short sprint. It's a long game, promote successes. So what does this mean? See which means stick, then push them. You have all these memes that you put out there, right? And once you put something out there, people are like, ha ha ha, this is funny or whoa, that's weird or whatever the idea of your meme is. It doesn't have to be funny. It could be scary. It could be politically controversial, whatever it is, right? And once you do that and start getting those promoted with the waterfall method, some of them are gonna be obviously a lot more funny or will have a lot more attraction than the others. You'll see them spread by more people and you'll see more interest in those. So then forget about whatever them other ones were, right, you had good ideas, but now it's like, okay, this one's going, I'm gonna keep pushing this one. I'm gonna find more pages for this one to be pushed on. And some of those memes, once people saw the initial ones, they're gonna go back into the hashtag and then they're gonna find other ones and you might find out there's another meme that's a hit that you didn't know about or you didn't decide to pay for it because you didn't think it was gonna be as big as these other ones and you might stop promoting some of the bigger ones to bring the next idea out. That's a part of it, but these are in phases as well. You wanna keep making newer ones popular. So that's another benefit of having a hundred memes already done because this is gonna be in phases. One is popping is good. People are getting their laugh. Let that one run its course just a little bit. Now you come back with another one and then you let that one run its course a little bit. Now you come back with another one and then you can do this across two or three different ideas because a strong meme strategy, honestly, last probably at least two months, at least two months but it could be two to four months really just for one pop and then you might take a break and then you can do on the meme strategy get another time. So see which memes stick then push them. Next, see which memes ideas stick. When I say ideas stick and then create more of those memes and then push them as well. So you already had some memes that are just popping push those and then if there's some ideas that stuck that especially that you didn't already create 10 for 24 you only had like one of those memes but the idea stuck and people kept sharing it and maybe even started create their own. Now you gotta say, yo, I gotta create some more of these or I need to take these other ones that are being pushed by other people and I need to run with that narrative as well. So pay attention, a lot of this and this is a lot of marketing for real for real especially while you're growing a fan base by the way like you're doing stuff but you have to continuously pay attention to the marketplace and then keep doing stuff. You have to amplify the things that are working is not usually just one big mastermind. I'm sitting down, I figured it out and I go do it. It's like I sit down, I figure out a framework I start to implement the framework and from there, that's when you start to see people make adjustments based on what they're seeing in the marketplace and all you do is you save money that way, honestly. So I'm not even gonna get into that but waterfall method part two, right? If you go back to the promote successes you're essentially going to do the waterfall method with those successes as well or those new ideas particularly, right? Cause you want people to continue to see these new memes, these fresh memes you're constantly refreshing the content so people can think it's funny every single time. You don't want them to see the same meme again and again and again and it's like those people who have a weak promo and they keep showing you the same flyer again and again and again and this is boring, right? It gets old very quickly. So use the waterfall method again and oh, another thing about the waterfall method part two especially if you already blew up let's say on a bigger scale, right? You pay some more expensive sites or pages the next time around more likely you can go a tier or two down and get the same amount of traction because the idea is already out there they just need the new material. So you don't have to get out to the bigger people you just go a few tiers down and now people already see it they're already on it, it's already trending itself they'll take it and social media will work for you and that's when you get to the point where you're controlling the machine. That's the, I love when I get to that part of social media campaigns. Now the long sprint. This is the part that you have to realize I've alluded to this already. These campaigns for a meme strategy this isn't I just pay a couple of people, right? And they post me one time this is a true three months I would give it at least three months and playing out to just keep watching, keep watching oh this one's blowing up and all that's cool I'm running, I'm running, I'm running and it's been killing the game all week maybe two weeks. All right, cool. It's time to put something else back in there. You gotta keep going, gotta keep going. All right, yeah, I'm watching, I'm watching. All right, what's the idea that's blowing up? And did somebody create another idea about this thing and now that they came into my world and start to say, yo, that song is funny or it sounds weird and I never thought the song sounded funny but let me cap off of it. We saw this with 21 Savage and it's a right. That blew up, he was just being him in an interview. Next thing you know, they were like, hey, we're gonna own this concept. A big part of branding is owning concepts. A lot of people are doing things but people only are branded around the things they decide to own and let you know they own. Otherwise somebody else will run off with it.  Remember, this is a strategy, a strategy. So, you have to understand what you want out of the process where you're going and understand your brand enough where there might be some memes that are blowing up and you have to be like, ah, yeah, they created this cool meme is blowing up but that's not really gonna mesh with the brand correctly or I need to figure out how do I bring this back to a level where I can benefit from because just because something's going viral around you doesn't mean it's going to benefit you. So, keep that part in mind. That's why this is a strategy. There will be things that you didn't plan for in this process, they will be. There's a lot of variables you can't plan for but understanding your strategy and what you want out of it and the direction you're going is going to help you decide whether you react to something or whether you don't react to something. How do you include something into your brand now that you say, oh yeah, I see that, that's dope, I can pull this in house and I can start flipping that or say, yeah, I see that, that's cool but I'm okay on that one. We're not gonna try to give that one too much energy. And that is all for the meme strategy breakdown. When you create a meme, you have a meme strategy is so much more to it. There's even things that I might have been able to add onto that but it's really a process, right? And as you can see, I talked about the waterfall method. The waterfall method is a part of the meme strategy, right? This is what I mean by these things aren't necessarily the end all be all. Even the meme strategy is a stage of some bigger strategies. It's powerful by itself, right? Even a waterfall method, it's powerful by itself but when we're talking about a sustainable career, creating real fans, these things are just segments of bigger strategies. So keep all that stuff in mind. You're gonna see a lot of other influencer strategy videos and things like that in Brandman Network. Other than that, let's get to it. Oh!


When it comes to protecting and defending America, being there matters, and USS George Washington and Carrier Air Wing 5 are already there. George Washington strike group is the most significant naval force that we employ on a day-to-day basis in the western Pacific. I think in many ways the strike group represents the United States Navy's contribution to security cooperation and stability. It's the most visible sign of American strength and commitment to our allies and partners in the region. It was an all-hands effort to welcome more than 60 aircraft from nine squadrons to George Washington for its 2014 patrol. So it's real important that we have the right hand signals and we're communicating properly. We're just all paying attention so we don't lose any aircraft or personnel for that matter. That's one team, one fight around here. We all work together. It's just like, it's a brotherhood around here. The George Washington Carrier Air Wing 5 team look forward to working with regional partners to promote peace and stability in the U.S. 7th Fleet area of operations. For USS George Washington, I'm Petty Officer, Carrier Naval.


Okay, welcome back everyone to SuperCloud 22 here in our live studio performance that you're on stage in Palo Alto I'm Sean Furrier, host with the queue with Dave Vellante. My co-host got a great industry ecosystem panel to discuss whether it's real or hype David Mcjennan, CEO of AshiCorp, hugely successful company as Will LaForest, field CTO at Confluent and Victoria over here and go from VMWare Guys, thanks for coming on the queue. Appreciate it. Thanks for having us. So real or hype, SuperCloud, David. Well, I think it depends on the definition. Okay, how do you define SuperCloud? Start there. I think we have like an inherently pragmatic view of SuperCloud or the idea of SuperCloud as you talk about it, which is, you know, for those of us that have been in the infrastructure world for a long time, we know there are really only six or seven categories of infrastructure. There's sort of the infrastructure, security, networking, databases, middleware and really the message queuing aspects. And I think our view is that if the steady state of the world is multi-cloud, what you've seen is sort of some modicum of standardization across those different elements, you know, take, you know, take Confluent. You know, I worked in the middleware world years ago, MQ series and typical multicast was how you did message queuing. Well, you don't do that anymore. All the different cloud providers have their own message queuing tech. There's Google Pub sub and the equivalence across the different different clouds. Kafka has provided a consistent way to do that. And they're not trying to project that you can run everything connected. They're saying, hey, you should standardize on Kafka for message queuing because that way you can have operational consistency. So I think to me, that's more how we think about it is sort of there is sort of layer by layer sort of de facto standardization for the lingua franca. So a streaming super cloud is how you would think of it or a component of that could be a super cloud. I just I just think that there are like if I'm going to build an application message queuing is going to be an unnecessary element of it. I'm going to use Kafka, not, you know, a native Pub sub engine on one of the clouds because operationally that's just the only way I can do it. So I think that's more our view is much more pragmatic rather than trying to create like a single platform that you can run everywhere and deal with the networking realities of like network, you know, hops missing across those different worlds and have that be our responsibility. It's much more around, hey, let's standardize each layer operational. Standardized layer that you can use to build a super cloud if that's your intent. Yeah, yeah. And it reminds me of the web services days you kind of throw back there. And we're kind of living the next gen of web services. The dream of that next level because dev ops dev sec ops now is now gone mainstream. That's the big challenge we're hearing devs are doing great. But the ops teams and they got to go faster. This seems to be a core, I won't say blocker, but more of a drag to the innovation. Well, I'll just get off it. I'll hand it off to you guys. But I think the idea that like, you know, if I'm going to have an app that's running on Amazon that needs to connect to a database that's running on private data center. That's essentially the SOA notion, you know, writ large. They were all trying to solve 20 years ago, but it's much more complicated because you're brokering different identity models, different networking models. It's just much more complex. So that's where the ops bit is the constraint. You know, for me to build that app is not that complicated for the ops person to let it see traffic is another thing altogether. I think that's that's the break point for so much of what looks easier to a developer is the operational reality of how you do that. And the good news is those are actually really well solved problems. They're just not broadly understood. Well, what's your take? You talk to customers all the time. Field CTO, Confluent really doing well streaming data. I mean, everyone's doing it now. They have to know these are new things that pop up that need solutions. You guys step up and doing more. What's your take on super cloud? Well, I mean, the way we address it, honestly, is we don't going to be honest. We don't think about super cloud much less is the fact that SAS is really being pushed down. Like we rely on seven years ago and you took a look at SAS like it was obvious if you were going to build a product for an end consumer or business user. You'd do SAS. You'd be crazy not to. Right. But seven years ago, if you look at your average software company producing something for a developer, the people building those apps, chances are you had an open source model or, you know, self managed. I think with the success of a lot of the companies are here today, you know, Snowflake, Databricks, Confluent, it's obvious that SAS is the way to deliver software to the developers as well. And as such, because our product is provided that way to the developers across the clouds, that's that's how they have a unifying data layer. Right. They don't necessarily, you know, developers like many people don't necessarily want to deal with the infrastructure. They just want to consume cloud data services. Right. So that's how we help our customers span cloud. So we had that SAS was going to be either built on a single cloud or in the case of service. Now they built their own cloud. Right. So increasingly we're seeing opportunities to build a sales force as well across clouds, tap different different different services. So so how does that evolve?  How does that all get sort of adjudicated? Do you do you devolve to the lowest common denominator? Or can you take the best of all of each? The whole point of that, I think, is that when you move from the business user and the personal consumer to the developer, you can no longer be on a cloud. Right. There has to be locality to where applications are being developed. So we can't just deploy on a single cloud and have people send their data to that cloud. We have to be where the developer is. And our job is to make the most of each individual cloud to provide the same experience to them. Right. So yes, we're using the capabilities of each cloud, but we're hiding that to the developer. They don't shouldn't need to know or care. Right. Again, you're hiding that with the subtraction layer. We talked about this before. And that layer has, what, some intelligence that has metadata knowledge that can adjudicate where the best service is or a function of latency or data sovereignty? How do you see that? Well, I think you need to instrument these applications so that you can get that data and then make the intelligent decision of where this deployed application. I think what Dave said is right. The level of super cloud that they're talking about is the standardization across messaging and what's happening within the application. Right. So you are not too dependent on the underlying. But then the applications say they take the form of a microservice. Right. And you deploy. There has to be a way for operators to say, okay, I see all these microservices running across clouds and I can factor out how they're performing. How I cycle manage and all that. And so I think there is, to me, there's the next level of the super cloud is how you factor this out so an operator can actually keep up with the developers and make sense of all that and manage it. Yeah. We say that all the time. It's also like, that's what Datadog does. So Datadog basically allows you to instrument all those services on-prem private data center, you know, all the different clouds to have a consistent view. I think that's another good example of a vendor that's created a sort of level of standardization across a layer. And I think that's more how we think about it. I think the notion of like a developer building an application they can deploy and not have to worry where it exists is more of a PAS kind of construct. You know, things like Cloud Foundry have done a great job of doing that. But underneath that, there's still infrastructure. There's still security. There's still networking underneath it. And I think that's where, you know, things like Confluent and perhaps at the infrastructure layer have standardized. Off-the-shelf PAS, if I can call it that. Yeah. And then you have PAS. And I think about, you mentioned Snowflake. Snowflake is what Snowpark seems to be developing a PAS layer that's purpose-built for their specific purpose of sharing data and governing data across multiple clouds called SuperPAS. Is that a prerequisite of a SuperCloud? You're building blocks, I'm hearing, for SuperCloud. Yeah. Is that a prerequisite for SuperCloud that's different than PAS of 10 years ago? No. I think they're just different layers. So it's like, I don't know how the Snowflake offering is built, but I would guess it's probably built on Terraform and Vault and Console underneath it. Because those are the ingredients with respect to how you would build a composite application that runs across multiple clouds. And that's how Oracle, the Microsoft announcement they just made, if you saw that, that was built on Terraform. But they would claim that they did some special things within their past that were purpose-built for low latency, for example. They're not going to build that an open shift as an example. They're going to do their own little mechanics. For sure. So I think what you're pointing out and what Victoria was talking about is, hey, can a vendor provide a consistent experience across the application layer across these multiple clouds? And I would say, sure, just like you might build a mobile banking application that has a front end on Amazon and the back end running on vSphere on your private data center, sure. But the ingredients used to do that have to be, they can't be the cloud-native aspects for how you do that. How do you think about the connectivity of networking between that thing to this thing? Is it different on Amazon? Is it different on Azure? Is it different on Google? And so the companies that we all serve, that's what they're building, they're building composite applications. Snowflake is just an example of a company that we serve that's building composite applications. But don't you have to hide the complexity of those cloud-native primitives? That's your job, right? Is to actually create simplicity across clouds, is it not? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that, in fact, is what we're doing for developers that need to do event streaming, right? That need to process this data in real time. Now, we're doing the sort of things that Victoria was just talking about. Like, underneath the covers, of course, you know, we're using Kubernetes and we're managing the differences between the clouds. But we're hiding that, and we've become sort of a de facto standard across the cloud. So if I'm developing an app in any of this cloud... I think we all know, and you was mentioning earlier, every significant company is multi-cloud now, all the large enterprises. I just got back from Brazil and, like, every single one of them have multiple clouds and on-prem, right? So they need something that can span those. What's the challenge there if you talk to those customers? Because we're seeing the same thing. They have multiple clouds, but it was kind of by default, or they had some use case, either .NET developers there with Azure, they'll do whatever cloud. And it's kind of seemed specialty relative to the cloud native that they're on. What problems do they have? Because the complexity to run infrastructure as code across clouds is hard, right? So the trade-up between native cloud and have better integration to complexity of multiple clouds seems to be a topic around super cloud. What are you seeing for issues that they might have or concerns? Yeah, I mean, honestly, it is hard to actually... So here's the thing that I think is kind of interesting, though, by the way, is that... I think we tend to, you know, if you're from a technical background, you tend to think of multi-cloud as a problem for the IT organization. Like, how do we solve this? How do we save money? But actually, it's a business problem now, too. Because every single one of these companies that have multiple clouds, they want to integrate their data, their products across these, and it's inhibiting their innovation. It's hard to do, but that's where something like HashiCorp comes in, right? Is to help solve that so you can instrument it. It has to happen at each of these layers. And I suppose, if it does happen at every single layer, then voila, we organically have something that amounts to super cloud, right? I love how you guys are representing each other's firms. But they also, correct me if I'm wrong, but your customers want to monetize, right? They want to bring their tools, their software, their particular IP and their data and create, you know, every company is a software company. As you know, Andreessen says, every company is becoming a cloud company to monetize in the future. Is that a reasonable premise of super cloud? Yeah, I think everyone is trying to build composite applications to generate revenue. Like, that's why they're building applications. So, yeah, 100%. I was just going to make a point, because we see it as well. Like, it's actually quite different by geography, weirdly. So, if you go to, like, different geographies, you see actually different cloud providers more represented than others. So, like, in North America, Amazon's pretty dominant. Japan, Amazon's pretty dominant. You go to Southeast Asia, actually, it's not necessarily that way. Like, it might be Google for whatever reason, more early, Bob. So, this notion of multi is just the reality of what everybody's dealing with. But, yeah, I think everyone goes through the same process, what we've observed. They kind of go, there's Cloud V1 and there's Cloud V2. Cloud V1 is sort of the very tactical, let's go build something on cloud. Cloud V2 is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I now have some stuff on Amazon, some stuff on Azure, some stuff on vSphere. And I need some operational consistency. How do I think about zero trust across that way in a consistent way? And that's where this conversation comes into being. It's not like the first version of cloud. It's actually when people step back and say, hey, I want to build composite applications to monetize. How am I going to do that in an industrialized way? And that's the problem that you were sure about. It's not a no-brainer like it was with cloud.  Here, it's architectural systems thinking. You've got to think about regions. What's the latency? It's the step back and go, like, how are we going to do this exactly? Like, it's fine to do one app, but how do this scale? Zero trust is a great example. I mean, Amazon kind of had it. It was forced to get into the zero trust discussion. That wasn't even a term that they used. And now they're starting to talk about it, but within their domain. And so how do you do zero trust across cloud to your point? I wonder if we're limiting our conversation too much to the very technical set of developers. Because I'm thinking back at, again, my example of C++ libraries, C++ libraries that makes it easier and then visual basic, right? And right now, we don't have enough developers to build the software that we want to build. And so we are now debating, oh, can we hide that AI API from Google versus that SQL server API from Microsoft? I wonder at some point, who cares, right? I think if we want to get really economy of scale, we need to get to a level of abstraction for developers that really allows them to say, I don't really, for most of the procedural application that I need to build as a developer, as a procedural developer, I don't care about this. Some propeller head has done that for me. I just like plug it in my IDE and I use it. And so I don't know how far we are from that, but if we don't get to that level, it feels to me that we're never going to get really the economy or the cost of building application to the level. I was going to ask you in the previous segment about low code, no code, expanding the number of developers out there. And you talked about propeller heads, that's what you guys all do. You're the technical geniuses to solve that problem. So you can have low code development. I don't think we have the right people here because we're still trying to solve that problem at that level. But that problem has to be solved first right before we can address what you're talking about. Yeah, I worked very closely with one of my biggest mentors was Adam Bosworth who built all the APIs for Visual Basics and the SQL API to Visual Basic and all that stuff. And he always was on that front. In fact, his last job was at AWS, building that no code environment. So I'm a little detached from that. It just hit me as we were discussing this. It's like, maybe we're just like creating... I would argue that you kind of got to separate the two layers. So you think about the application platform layer that a developer interfaces to. Victoria and I worked together years ago and one of the products we created was Cloud Foundry. So this is the idea of like just CF push, just push this app artifact. I don't care. That's how you get the developer community writ large to adopt something complicated by hiding all the complexity. And I think that is one model. Turns out Kubernetes has actually become a peer to that and perhaps become more popular. And that's what folks like Tanzia are trying to do. But there's another layer underneath that, which is the infrastructure that supports it. Because that still needs to run on something. And I think that's the separation we have to do. Yes, we're talking a little bit about the plumbing, but we just need to be talking about the app layer. You need both of them. Our point of view is you need to standardize at this layer, just like you need to standardize at this layer. Well, this is infrastructure. This is DevOps v2. DevOps. Yeah. And this is where I think the ops piece with open source, I would argue that open source is booming more than ever. So I think there's plenty of developers coming. The automation question becomes interesting because I think what we're seeing is shift left is proving that there's app developers out there that want to stay in their pipelining. They don't want to get under the hood. They just want infrastructure as code. But then you got supply chain software issues there. We talked about that DockerCon big time. So developers at the top, I think are going to be fine. The question is what's the blocker? What's holding them back? And I don't see the devs piece, Vittorio, as much. What do you guys think? Is it the blocker ops or is it the developer experience that's the blocker? It's both. There aren't enough people, truthfully. That's true. Yeah. I mean, I think I sort of view the developer as sort of the engine of the digital innovation. So, you know, if you talk about creative destruction, that was the economic equivalent of softwares eating the world. The developers are the ones that are doing that innovation. It's absolutely essential that you make it super easy for them to consume, right?  They want to deal with infrastructure to some degree. But I think they understand the value of getting a bag of Legos that they can construct something new around. And I think that's the key because honestly, I mean, no code may help for some things. Maybe I'm just old school, but I went through this before with like Delphi and there were some other ones and I hated it. Like I just wanted a code, right? So I think making them more efficient is absolutely key. But I think what you're going with that question is that the developers, they tend to stay ahead. They just get wired that way, right? So I think right now, there is a big bottleneck in developers. I think the operation team needs to catch up because I talk to these people, like our customers all the time and I see them still stuck in the old world.  You know, although as Legos is going to be there forever, they'll manage your main train. The world is all about microservices and containers and if the operation team doesn't get on top of it and the security team, then they're going to be a bottleneck. Okay, I want to ask you guys, if the companies can get through that knot hole of having their ops teams and the dev teams work well together, what's the benefits of a super cloud? How do you see the outcome? If you kind of architect it right, you think the big picture, you zoom out and say, what's the end game look like for super cloud? What's the nirvana? To me, nirvana is that you don't care. You just don't care. When you're running a building application, let's go back to the on-prem days. You don't care if it runs on HPE or Dell or I'm going to make some an animes here with my old family. But you don't really care, right? What you want is the application is up and running and people can use it, right? And so I think that nirvana is that there is some computing power out there, some past layer that allows me to deploy and build application. And I just build code and I deploy it and I get value at the reasonable cost. I think one of the things that the super cloud, as far as we're concerned, is cost. How do you manage and monitor the cost across all this cloud and make sure that the economics don't get out of whack, right?  And as a vendor, when I was in my previous company, we had a whole team figuring out how to lower our cost on the one hyperscaler that we were using. So these are the ones you have in the super cloud, you don't care. You go with the path of least the best economics is. So what about the open versus closed debate? Will, you were mentioning that we had snowflake here and Databricks is both ends of the spectrum. You guys are building open standards across clouds. Clearly even the walled gardens are using open standards. But historically de facto standards have emerged and solved these problems. So the super cloud as a de facto standard versus Databricks is trying to do a super cloud kind of as an open platform. What are your thoughts on that? Can you actually have an open set of standards that can be a super cloud for a specific purpose? Or will it just be built on open source technologies? Well, I mean, I mean, I think open source continues to be an important part of innovation. But I will say from a business model perspective, like the days like when we started off, we were an open source company. I think that's really done in my opinion. Because if you want to be successful nowadays, you need to provide a cloud native SAS oriented product. It doesn't matter what's running underneath the covers could be commercial, closed source, open source. They just want a service and they want to use it quite frankly. Now it's nice to have open source because developers can download it and run on their laptop. But I can imagine in 10 years time actually, and you see most companies that are in the cloud providing SAS free $500 credit. They may not even be doing that. They'll just go whatever cloud provider that their company is telling them to use. They'll spin up their SAS product. They'll start playing with it. And that's how adoption will grow. My personal view is that its infrastructure is pervasive enough. It exists at the bottom of everything that the standards emerge out of open source in my view. And you think about how something like Terraform is built. Just pick one of the layers. There's Terraform core and then there's a plug-in for everything you integrate with. All of those are open source. There are over 2,000 of these. We don't build them. It's the same way that drove Linux standardization years ago. Someone had to build the drivers for every piece of hardware in the world. The market does not do that twice. The market does that once. So I'm deeply convicted that open source is the only way that this works at the infrastructure layer because everybody relies on it. At the application layer, you may have different kinds of databases. You may have different kind of runtime environments, and that's just the nature of it. You can't have two different ways of doing network. Because the stakes are so high, basically. Yeah, because there's an infinite number of... The surface area is just so large. So I actually worked in product development years ago for middleware. And the biggest challenge was how do you keep the adapter ecosystem up to date to integrate with everything in the world? And the only way to do it in our view is through open source. And I think that's a fundamental philosophical view that we're just grounded in. I think when people are making infrastructure decisions that span 20 years at the customer base, this is what they think about. They go, which standard it will emerge based on the model of the vendor? And I don't think my personal view is it's not possible to do it in a product way. Do you think that's a de facto standard kind of psychological perspective? Or is there actual material work being done or both in there? It's a network effect thing, right? So before Google releases a new service on Google Cloud, as part of the release checklist, does it support Terraform? They do that work, not us. Why? Because every one of their customers uses Terraform to interface with them. And that's how it works. So the philosophical view of the customers, okay, what am I going to standardize on for this layer for the next 30 years? It's kind of a no-brainer philosophically. I think the standards are organically created. Based upon adoption. I mean, for instance, Terraform. We have a provider where, again, we're at the data layer that we created for you. So I don't think there's a board out there.  They're creating standards. I think those days are kind of done, to be honest. The Terraform provider for vSphere has been downloaded five and a half million times this year. Right? I mean, these are unifying moments. The de facto standards are a really important process in these structural changes. I think that's something that we're looking at here with SuperCloud is, what's next? What has to unify? Look what Kubernetes has done. I mean, that's essentially the easy thing to work with, but people get behind it. So I see this as a big part of this next v2. What do you guys see that's needed? What's the rallying unification point? Is it the past layer? Is it more infrastructure? I guess that's the question we're trying to... I think every layer will need that open source or a major traction from one of the proprietary vendor. But I agree with David. It's going to be open source for the most part. But going back to the original question of the whole panel, if I may, if this is reality of hype, look at the roster of companies that are presenting or participating today. These are all companies that have some sort of multi-cloud, cross-cloud, SuperCloud play. They're either public, have real revenue, are about to go public. So the answer to the question, yeah, it's real. Yeah, and there's more too. We had good fit of men, but... We chose SuperCloud on purpose because it was kind of fun. John and I kind of came up with it. But do you think it hurts the industry to have this, try to put forth this new term? Or is it helpful to actually try to push the industry to define this new term? Or should it just be multi-cloud 2.0? I mean, conceptually, it's different than multi-cloud, right? I mean, in my opinion, right? So in that respect, it has value, right? Because it's talking about something greater than just multi-cloud. Everyone's got multi-cloud. Well, to me, multi-cloud is the problem, I should say, the opportunity. SuperCloud, or we call it cross-cloud, is the solution to that challenge. And we're debating that in our Clouderati panel we were talking about. Is multi-cloud a problem yet that needs to get solved? Or is it not yet ready for a market, to your point? Are we in the front end of coming into the true problem set? I can give you a definite answer to that. The answer is yes. If you look at the customers that are there, that have gone through the euphoria phase, they're all like, holy, something, what are we going to do about this, right? But they don't know what to do. And the more advanced ones, as the vendor. Look, at the end of the day, markets are created by vendors that build software that customers want to buy. Because they get value. And it's nuanced. David, we were sort of talking about before, but Goldman Sachs is now a software vendor, right? Capital One is a software vendor. I'd be really interested to see what Cerner does, what Oracle does with Cerner, in terms of them becoming super cloud vendors and monetizing. That to me is, that is their digital transformation. Do you guys see that in the customer base? Am I way too far out of my skis there? I think it's two different things. I think basically it's the idea of building applications that they monetize. Yeah, and Cerner's going to build those. And if you think about IOT companies that sell, or you think people that sell thermostats, they sell an application that monetizes those thermostats. Some of that runs on Amazon, some runs on the private data center. So they're basically going to composite applications and monetize them for the particular vertical. I think that's what we see each and every day. Yeah, you can argue that's not anything new, but what's new is they're doing that on the cloud. Exactly, that's what makes it super cloud. And I think what we all participate in is, hey, in order to do that, you need to drive standardization of how you do provisioning, how you do networking, how you do security, to underpin those applications. I think that's what we're all talking about. Guys, this is great stuff. I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to help us continue the conversation, to put out in the open. We want to keep it out in the open. So in the last minute we have left, let's go down the line from a HashiCorp perspective, Confluent and VMware. What's your position on super cloud? What's the outcome that you would like to see from your standpoint going out five years? What's it look like? We'll start with you. I just think people are understanding that there is a layer by layer view of how to interact across clouds to provide operational consistency and decomposing it that way, thinking about that way is the best way to enable people to build and run apps. We want to help our customers work with their data in real time, regardless of where they are on-prem or in the cloud. And super cloud can enable them to build applications that do that more effectively. That's great for us. Antonio? My advantage for us is customers don't care. Just that's computing out there. And it's a tool that allows me to grow my business. And we make it all the differences and all the challenges disappear. Dial up compute, utility, infrastructure as code. I open up the thoughts of water coming out. Yeah, I don't care how he got here. I don't want to care. Well, thank you guys so much. And congratulations on all your success in the marketplace, both you guys and VMware, and your new journey. And it's going to be great to watch. Thanks for participating. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Okay, this is super cloud 20. Our inaugural event is a pilot. We're going to get it out there in the open. We're going to get the data. We're going to share with everyone out in the open on siliconangle.com and thecube.net. We'll be back with more live coverage here in Palo Alto after this short break.


What's up everybody welcome to the Fandula hurry up I am Frank Stanfield joined by Jim Sonis of Number of Fire to bring you some bold predictions for the 2019 fantasy football season. What's going on Jim? I am excited for week one just around the corner preseason was fun I really did enjoy preseason, but to have actual football in week one and have actual data to work with after week one It doesn't get a whole lot better than that. So I am beyond excited. How are you doing Frank? Same man super excited for week one just around the corner here a lot of fantasy football drafts still going on over the weekend So we're gonna give people some bold predictions for the upcoming season And the first one that you have Jim is revolving around Lamar Jackson a very polarizing quarterback this year What do you have on Lamar Jackson? Yeah, I think at the end of the year We'll be talking about Lamar Jackson being a top five quarterback for fantasy and for fantasy is key there Because I don't know what Lamar Jackson will do as a pastor.  That's beneficial to him He doesn't have to be as accurate. That's good for him They also added to their past catchers this year in the draft pretty heavily So I like the weapons around Lamar Jackson. I think that's very good Even with him being thrown into this offense mid-season last year where the offense was not really tailored around him yet He still went out there and showed that he has just a massive floor for fantasy He scored at least 16 fantasy points in every game that he started He had more than 20 points twice and now you give him a full-off season for them to build this Ravens offense around him And I expect really good things for him in fantasy in 2019 I think there's kind of just this blob at quarterback once you get past those top-end guides And I think that Jackson is firmly within that second tier and anybody in that second tier could be a top-five quarterback And I think that Jackson given the floor he has for rushing and the upside He could had if he could do anything as a passer is really good. So Lamar Jackson someone I'm getting pretty much everywhere I know that his cost has gone up as a summer has gone along, but I am still buying him where he's going I think that the upside in the floor are way too good for me to pass up Lamar Jackson is a cheat code for fantasy football this upcoming season because of his rushing ability Also working with offensive coordinator Greg Roman who has worked with similar quarterbacks in the past Jim Son, it says Lamar Jackson a top-five quarterback this upcoming season Let's move over to the running back position and honestly Jim This one has me pumped up because I have a ton of shares of Aaron Jones already in fantasy football What do you have regarding Aaron Jones this season? Yeah, I feel like whenever I have a late third round pick and Aaron Jones falls to me It's always like this little celebration like he shouldn't be there I would consider taking him in the second round if I had to but I don't have to right now because he's just so cheap And I think that with Aaron Jones. I think he's going to return first round value Which is why I'm so excited to get him in the late third round which I can at times get him for this year And I think there are a couple of things you want to look for in trying to identify running backs Who can return first round value you want guys? We're going to get a lot of rushes a lot of targets and a lot of touchdowns and Aaron Jones is A candidate to have all three of those things see average 5.3 targets per game last year when he was in his bellcow type role Which is a role I expected to be him at the start of 2019 Nat LaFleur their new head coach has also mentioned how much he wants to get his running backs work in the passing game I think that that makes a lot of sense And it's also good to hear for a guy like Aaron Jones who has shown he is capable as a receiver as well And an offense led by Aaron Rodgers is always going to be a threat to score a lot of touchdowns Add in that their offensive line has extra depth this year and they're also really good among the starters And Aaron Jones has everything that you want for a guy to be a first-round running back You don't have to take him there You don't have to buy any means but I think that that's really the upside for Aaron Jones And I would not be shocked if we're coming back here in 2020 and talking about here And how Aaron Jones is a good first-round pick in the mid to late part of that So Aaron Jones if you can get him in the third round, I would take him every single time But even if the draft car cost it seems a little bit higher than that I'd be willing to take him at the end of the second because this guy's upside is just so good Aaron Jones has averaged 5.5 yards per carry in his career Matt LaFleur wants to run the football more this year as well with the Green Bay Packers a Lot of the times in fantasy sports. We're trying to find that third round pick that can return first-round value Jim Sonnis Thinks Aaron Jones is that player? Let's stick with the running back position here and a little bit more doom and gloom this time when it comes to Joe Mixon and the Cincinnati Bengals Jim. What do you have regarding Joe Mixon this season? Yeah, it's not a bold take to say that Joe Mixon will fall short of expectations But it's kind of worded vaguely intentionally because I like the volume for Joe Mixon I think that's super encouraging But the ceiling is is very scary and this team is very scary right now because you look at injuries in the NFL They're gonna happen every time and an injury that occurs in September or October is going to be a red flag But injuries that happen in July those are even bigger red flags and the Bengals had several of those They had their left tackle have shoulder surgery He's likely done for the year Then they moved their left guard out to left tackle back out to left tackle as he was there last year and the guy Who could have potentially or play plays that guy left guard decided to retire They have since had a second retirement on the offensive line AJ Green went down which hurts this team's offensive efficiency and the Bengals are in a pretty scary spot where they could wind up being a Pretty dysfunctional team even with Andy Dalton and Joe Mixon and Tyler Boyd being fully healthy That is a pretty major concern for me that this offense could just fail the function and that's a concern for Joe Mixon We have not seen him be This bell cow running back who gets a lot of carries and a lot of targets outside of basically the second half of last year So I'm concerned we talked about Aaron Jones checking all three boxes Potentially for this year and Joe Mixon checks the volume box and he checks maybe the target box But I'm scared about this offense. So I think that his cost has come down He's now going off the board in the middle of the second round That's not egregious But I'm not gonna take him there when there are guys like Daven Cook, Aaron Jones, Leonard Fournette, Devonte Freeman still available I'm scared of this offense and it makes me pretty wary of Joe Mixon And I would not be shocked if he fell if he falls well short of expectations Yeah, this one hurts Jim and it's hard to blame you really because of everything that's happened with the Cincinnati Bengals Injuries to their offensive line, retirements to their offensive line, AJ Green going down with injury I think Joe Mixon is a really really talented player But could be in for a really really tough season with the Cincinnati Bengals in 2019 Let's move over to wide receiver and RJ ETS Jets, jets, jets, we saw Robbie Anderson take off in the final month of the season You think that that's going to carry over into this season, Jim? Yeah, I think Robbie Anderson has a good chance to be a high-end wide receiver too And based on where he's going in ADP as wide receiver 29 That would be outperforming his ADP by quite a bit And you could be concerned about Robbie Anderson because they did bring in Jameson Crowder, Leavion Bellas there, Quincy Inouye was healthy, and Chris Herney will be back after his four-game suspension But I think that the way you want to think about this jets team, based on the way they've been operating in the pre-season is Kind of like the Rams, I'm not saying they'll be the Rams I'm saying that they're similar to them in a lot of ways Specifically in that they're going to run a lot of three wide receiver sets Adam Gates has wanted to do this in the past He has done so in the pre-season with the Jets And what that means is it's probably going to lead to a relatively narrow target tree Where Leavion Bell will get his, Aswell, Crowder and Inouye But there's still the possibility that Robbie Anderson is getting upwards of 20% of the targets And that's valuable when it's a guy who is as good as he is But also who gets the variety of targets that Anderson gets Because Robbie Anderson, among the guys in this team He's pretty obviously the best deep breath that they've got And Sam Darnold, despite the reputation that he had at the beginning of last year He does like to throw deep 20% of Sam Darnold's attempts last year When at least 15 or 16 yards beyond the line of scrimmage That ranked 10th in the NFL out of 41 qualified passers So you may think of Sam Darnold as a guy who likes to throw short But last year that was not the case He did go deep pretty often And it's almost always going to be Robbie Anderson who's getting those targets And those are high value targets And I want to get as many of those as I could possibly get The Jets have been running up tempo during the pre-season two So concerns around pace may be still there but not as big as they were And if they decide to operate as a mid-level team in pace Like if they rank 16th in situation neutral pace Robbie Anderson's upside is pretty good So I understand the concerns around Adam Gase's reputation As a play caller and the conservative nature of their pace I understand the concerns about added targets But Robbie Anderson is going to get the targets that we want And this team I think could outperform expectations So Robbie Anderson's a guy I am targeting pretty heavily in the sixth round I think he makes a lot of sense and I would not be shocked If he winds up being around the wide receiver of 15 at the end of the season Robbie Anderson a super talented wide receiver I think he proved that last year But Jim I have to ask you any concern over this mild cash training he's dealing with Yeah we were talking about with the Bengals Where concerns in injuries in September make sense But injuries in August and July are pretty concerning So it's something to keep an eye on for sure But at least based on what we've seen so far from Anderson I am not flashing up the you know the warning signs Yeah the problem is we're not going to get any clarity on him And so probably Wednesday when that first practice report comes out So I think it's one of those weekends where we just keep row to row the world up And keep on refreshing it and see if we get any information But at least based on what we've seen right now I feel pretty okay with it But yeah Frank it's something we're going to have to monitor for sure throughout the weekend He proved that over the final month of the season last year And already has a really good rapport with Sam Darnold Let's stick with the wide receiver position And this time it's MVS Shout out to my ECW Rob Van Dam fans out there But Marquez Valdez scantling Jim a lot of people have been trying to figure out Whether to take Marquez Valdez scantling or Geronimo Allison It seems like you are very clearly taking Marquez Valdez scantling Yeah to be fully in front I'm okay with both I will take either You know if I don't get MVS I will happily take Geronimo Allison But I like the upside that MVS has a little bit more So if I can choose between the two I will go MVS But if I don't get him then I'll take Geronimo Allison too Because I just want exposure to offenses led by Aaron Rodgers As we discussed with Aaron Jones And one thing I think that can be helpful When trying to identify players you want to draft for this year Is ask yourself all right who is going lower right now Than where they'll go in 2020 You're trying to buy them before the cost goes up And I think with Marquez Valdez scantling We could see him be a top five round pick next year If things go the way they could That's my bold prediction is that next year we'll see MVS go Within the first five rounds because He's tied Aaron Rodgers we love that And he's also looking like he'll be on the field In two wide receiver sets Whereas Geronimo Allison may not So they decide to go with heavy personnel We'll still see MVS out there Whereas Geronimo Allison may not It also helps that Marquez Valdez scantling Is a big player who ran a really fast time at the combine And when you can get that size and speed combination It's pretty attractive from an upside perspective We saw MVS flash some of that last year When he got chances Now it seems like he will get a chance For the full season with the healthy Aaron Rodgers With a new offense in place I think those things are all pretty enticing From an upside perspective So MVS going in the ninth round right now I don't think that will last into 2020 So I think that if you want to get MVS shares while it's still cheap Do it in 2019 Get him in your best ball drafts Get him in re-draft as well And maybe buy him in dynasty Because I don't think the cost For Marquez Valdez scantling is going down anytime soon Marquez Valdez scantling aka MVS Just a physical freak 6 foot 4 4.3 7 40 Lot to be excited about this upcoming season With the Green Bay Packers Last but not least We have a tight end It's Austin Hooper And Jim you have a pretty bold prediction When it comes to Austin Hooper this season With the Atlanta Falcons Yeah my bold prediction here Is that Austin Hooper winds up As a top five tight end By the end of the season I'm not going to say he's going to Enter that top tier with George Kittle Zach Hurts and Travis Kelsey Because I don't think Really anyone outside of maybe Hunter Henry or O.J. Howard has that chance But Austin Hooper has a chance To be a top five tight end And I think that this kind of stems From my process at tight end Where I want to target tight ends Who are in good offenses And will score touchdowns And Austin Hooper fits within both those The Atlanta Falcons defense Or offense was good last year But we didn't notice Because their defense was so bad That their offense just did not matter Now they enter the off season They pick up a couple of good offensive Liman in free agency Add two more in the first round of the draft And I would expect an offense That was already good last year To get even better And the positive for Austin Hooper Is they did not add to their pass catchers Sure you get another year of Calvin Ridley Maybe he progresses and takes up more targets But it's not as if they bought Another wide receiver in free agency So it's back at the same group Last year Hooper's target market share Was 15% with 18% of the red zone targets And if he keeps those numbers up In an offense that should be better And should generate more scoring drives this year He does have a path Towards being a top five tight end Now again I'm not going to You know go out of my way To reach for Austin Hooper Because I think that there are a lot of other tight ends In this exact same tier Who are very attractive But if Austin Hooper's on the board from me You know where he's going And I still have a tight end I'm going to take him every time Because I think that the upside in this offense Is really fun I want exposure to Atlanta I think they're a really good team I think that they could make some damage this year Given their new pieces on the offensive line So Austin Hooper is a guy I think could take a step forward this year And I want to buy in before that happens The Atlanta Falcons play something like 13 of their 16 games inside of a dome this year So there's a lot to like with their offense Jim Sonnis is buying Austin Hooper If you wait on tight end In your fantasy football drafts For Jim Sonnis I am Frank Stamphill Thank you so much for watching Good luck in your drafts this weekend And we'll see you next week