this is Sonali. Thank you all for coming out some time for attending today's webinar on the episode three of BX Academy, Business Excellence Mentoring and Coaching. I would now like to welcome our speaker, Mr. Gaurav Maharaj, Chairman and Founder of the Franchise India Group. A very warm welcome to you, sir. Thank you, Sonali and welcome friends and welcome to another edition with the Business X Academy. This is a series we have started. We just finished 30 episodes on the scale, invest and exit your business, which was very, very successful. And we got some good feedback. And then we started a Business Excellence series. It's all about talking about how do you really bring improvement in your business thinking and also implementation of some best practices within your organization. And every time we pick up a one topic and discuss on that particular topic, and this is a full series which we'll continue to do. And we'll seek your feedback doing that. Before this webinar started, I was actually asking Sonali that we need to really understand who comes to our webinar. We get a very overwhelming response on a lot of people joining in. But it's very important to understand where you're coming from, what is your expectation, what are the challenges you're facing in your organizations, and how this would fit in.  And if it doesn't come to closer to your expectation, it would not work. So it's very, very important for setting the expectation right. Our general thinking is because the business X is a fairly large community part of franchise India group. So we have one of the largest communities is actually startups in what I call the mid-sized businesses within us. So all our content we try to design around that. But there can be different expectations. You might be in a different level of journey of your organization, different challenges of impacting. You're more than happy to give you as much information we have. The whole platform is set to really enable businesses to really grow and scale themselves. And also, business X is known for helping you to raise capital at a certain stage when you want to do that. This is also an initiative now, particularly in these current times because we feel that at this stage, businesses are a little bit of a stuck because what is happening around us, it's a difficult time, difficult time for our economy, difficult time for our businesses, difficult time for our people who are working for us. Everything is a little bit distorted at this moment. Even the businesses which are didn't demand, so to say, and which are what we call the COVID resistant businesses also facing a lot of challenges, especially in the second wave. I've seen businesses which were doing pretty well also are being disturbed because of a lot of people being infected and not a smooth functioning. Every day you really start your day, even remotely you find somebody is not available, something is really stuck and so on so forth. So it's a very complex time. But it is a great time for business owners if they can really carve out some hours every single day to really think about their own organization, how they want this time to go differently and approach differently and how we can make these organizations. And we have to learn from West that how they have been actually designed as an organization which were able to work remotely and they were very efficient in terms of doing it. And they had a much bigger predictability than a lot of businesses I have seen in India. And that's something which we have to all learn on this basis. So all these webinars we do, we really are having a mix of what I call some journal best practices which I discuss. And also I'll bring in some of my own experience into this. I've been also in business for now about 28 years and in doing myself my enterprises and then had an opportunity last 23 years as chairman of French India to work with a lot of businesses and seeing them grow, work with a lot of brand owners to really see their businesses grow. So a lot of experiences have come from there. So I try to mix those both parameters. I try to bring in some kind of best practices which we have a lot of content available and also marry with some of my own experiences which would be good. So today's topic is how do you really design what I call the customer-centric organization. Now this is something which is absolute need today for organizations to change and become customer-centric. Now this is the most commonly used word in organizations. This is something which is part of almost every statement, every mission, every company you go from the outside when you enter into that, almost everybody tries to claim that they are a customer-centric organization because that's something which we are all grown up to believe that. But I can tell you about 99.9% of organizations are not designed to be a customer-centric organization and there are reasons for it and neither they are designed, neither they are practicing. They all believe that they are available to really give the best customer experience and it's all about client satisfaction and so on. But really if you go out and see that the organization design, they're not designed to do that. Very, very few organizations are designed to be a customer-centric organization. And especially in these times where the consumer has become very fluid, it's available at different levels and we all been talking about this own omni-channel approach which means that customer is buying from different channels and how do you really bring in some kind of a consistency? How do you bring the same kind of experience almost every touchpoint? Even the largest of the company, I'm the biggest fan of this company, Apple, which everybody is. Now they are really a customer-centric organization but even if you look at a market like India, if you see how you consume Apple products in India are differently being sold, you're going from multi-brand retailer to Apple store to online experience to a platform like an Amazon experience. So there is a difference of multiple experiences and so on and so forth. How do even a company like Apple would be able to cope up and deliver the value system which they're doing? It is much easier in certain environments but it becomes even more difficult when you come to markets like India where the experiences can be very, very different. So another thing which is very important, a lot of companies really feel that they have a differentiated product. Maybe that brings customer loyalty to them. Answer is no. That's not the real case and 90% of companies don't have a differentiated product. They're pretty much me too. Somebody is doing it and they would differentiate by smaller things which is not really what customer is able to see. So the only differentiation you can really create almost about 90% of the organization is how do you really deal with your customer? What is your last mile customer experience would create that experience? And a lot of other things which would also be very important to understand that sometimes the quality, the value, all these are default functions. The basic expectation from a customer is that he want to get the best quality at the best price. Now that's not really the difference. The differentiation what I am seeing largely what customer is looking for today is how easy you are available to be purchased. How can I reach out to my product or my service? How fast I can do that? How easy I can do that? And how personalized it is? So three things are becoming very, very big differentiator today. How easy, how fast, and how personalized the experience is. Apart from that, some things are default. The whole quality and the value and other things are default. Another area which is the lot of perception issue. So a lot of companies would perceive that they are having a great customer satisfaction levels but they don't really see from the customer viewpoint. While they can see the trend of the same customer buying from you consistently, now like these days we have a lot of food clients and especially these dark kitchen clients which don't have a front interface. Most of the time they are picked by Zemato or Swiggy and they don't even know the customer who's consuming them. So it's a very difficult situation to be in where you're producing, you're seeing a lot of orders increasing every day. You're having the same Zemato guys queuing up and taking your product. You feel very happy and you see that there are a lot of demand which is coming in but you really don't know what customer is telling you because you don't know the customer at all. You don't know the customer who is really making a purchase decision. This is becoming even more difficult for organizations where they are only getting indicative figures of sales been growing or the sales function going more customers coming to them but they have no understanding of who is purchasing, why it is purchasing, why it is growing is the same person purchasing over and over again. That the fact really is that 80% of people feel that they are delivering great super experience and but only 10% of them would be the it would match with the same customer feeling which means the customer has the same perception as you feeling with your product. Which means that there's so much of differentiation so about 90% of that what you're believing is not true, only 10% of people it needs to be done and that's what shocks people when suddenly their sales start dipping and they start doing a lot of experimentation because they feel that something has gone wrong but actually they never had the same customer buying so it was either driven from promotions you were running or something else which was happening that you had this kind of a structure but truth is you never own the customer. Now that's a very very worrying part and that even becomes even more worrying when you are in environments like the what I said the dark kitchens and delivery platforms which are taking up your businesses and even the online channels you know you look at the amazons and the flip cards when you are a direct to digital kind of digital first companies these days which are going only on digital and suddenly they continue to see the demand but they don't really know who's really making this purchase decision why they have done that. So it is important first to really understand why we have to be a customer centric organization and what it means to be a customer centric organization. So first you need to understand who's your target group and very sharply define that that's very very important part of it because unless and until you really know your target group and who is consuming you that's extremely extremely important first important to define that. Second you also as the customer centric organizations everything you do should come from the insights you're getting from a customer and this is now your function to really understand how you're going to get those insights coming to you and that is unless and until you are you know designed without reading customer insight and your business intelligence which is telling you you will never be able to forecast doing it and also you need to also understand how you're going to be leveraging that data and to build and nurture your customer relationship that's also very important part of a business model. How do you really nurture that relationship when you need to own the understand who's your customer you need to also understand what it makes to for them to come to you regularly and what is the insights they're giving you and you can evolve your product according to their insight and then how do you nurture those relationships. Now the problem is that a lot of people don't even know the customer they don't know why they had made the decision to consume your product or your service and what are they telling you are they completely satisfied or they missed something which was available in that thing and the last would be even more difficult part that how do you nurture that relationship with that and and all these other programs and platforms available the CRM platforms and things of that nature they continue to pick up a lot of data I personally feel that data has no meaning unless and until you find a meaningful answer on the data and really create your structure on that so you need to really understand what is the data telling you you know what is the data telling you what is kind of the customer behavior it has how many times they consume what are they consuming what are their interests how big is the engagement they have with you that's very very important you know like Briani I will give you an example of this and I think there are many many companies and we have franchising there as like today 25 different clients some are using and making sales as a commodity product which is a meal option for people who are hungry and they want a full portion and doing it and there are companies like Briani by Kilo which are more driven from celebration at home and you want to really entertain your guests and things so you really have see that they are two different buying behaviors you know one is somebody sitting in office wants a lunch and holds a meal at a lower price fast enough to be completed in 30 minutes right so whole transaction has to be done and the second consumer is somebody who's looking for a much larger delivery experience so he will appreciate the packaging the indulgence in all that pieces so unless and until you really clearly understand the both are the Briani operators but both have a different target group and hence they would need a very different kind of an experience to come there if I try to give the experience to this person a little more then I will feel a little bit cheated because I am I don't want it to pay that kind of price it's not doesn't work for me and if I give this piece to this just commoditize I'd say and then I'll take the experience away the indulgence away that also would not be able to do that so you really have to understand who you really are trying to address and then only you will be able to what I call create new product services and promotions depending on your customer group unless you have this life cycle being very very clearly defined you will not be able to create a newer products services and promotions also very important because otherwise if you really see in the whole especially in the digital world people is just copying somebody else right because they don't know their customer they're just trying to do what other person is doing and they would try to just run through you know a lot of same promotions like I was talking to one of my clients and they said look we're doing these promotions and I think we have known that should we do it should we not do it is it working for us are people buying just because we're doing promotion or we're just doing over and above these kind of promotion because other players are doing it so you need to really see why you want to do that and I can tell you there are some real studies big studies been done even a Deloitte has a statement which means the 60 percent of companies which are customer centric organizations are much more profitable than their counterpart 60 percent of these companies so now we really get into what we have to really see understand how you measure your customer experience now this is very important aspect of it and most of the times we go into the last purchase this season and try to measure that but to me it's a end-to-end you know structure end-to-end journey of a customer to actually locate you to consume you unless and until all that piece is synchronized and deliver in a certain harmony it will not create the last mile customer experience which means if I have to look at from the current space how a customer is searching you how he's getting choices on that say if I was searching say a shoe then I would need to go where all I'm going to make a search how search was convenience how I got choices how do I make my selection how I was engaged how the how the last file sale was done and how I build the perception of the entire course now that's something which is very important so smart organization smart brands would not just focus on the end product you know which is very usability we all talk about say if I was buying shoe how it would be functional how it would be you know durable how it is that aesthetic wise how it is done so all their discussions would happen in our boardrooms we will become too product-centric and talk about anything to do that product how a customer would do that but really if you see the entire buying experience what from how he searched how he made choices how he made selection how he was engaged and finally what the sale and the whole sale experience happened and then phenomenally after using the product how this entire experience in totality look to be and that's something which is which is extremely important and this is also a big problem because if you really see in our organizations our organizations are designed to really encourage people just sell more and that's why they incentivized on selling more and so on so nobody is really having any kind of structure to incentivize people to see the whole value chain you know how this whole value chain is going to be addressed now it is very difficult to really address because on the day for every organization the only thing which matters is getting revenue in the system and and defining that and that's how organizations are designed so we always would measure how much we were able to sell but we don't really measure the whole end-to-end experience cycle for for a customer now let's talk about some of the best practices which is very important what are the best practices one of the best practices is the how do you anticipate the consumer need now this is another very very complex situation to be in today because it's not at all easy to understand and define what is the consumer looking at you know there's a good quote of apple CEO Tim Cook he says the our whole role in the life is to give you something which you didn't know you wanted and once you get it you would you cannot imagine your life without it so which means that cost they are trying to locate products which customer never wanted and once they get it experience was so good that they cannot think their life without it so if you really see it's it's a very very far-sighted thinking of an organization like apple right so they are even thinking whether the consumer is not able to perceive that product but they they are human problems which they need to connect and all these human problems if you can bring in your product and understand and give that experience to somebody and they have the life around the that would be probably them that thing so how do you really anticipate what is the consumer looking at and that would be the one very important so to say a best practice to do that and the second is how do you build accessibility uh to your customer base now this is one funny example I'll give you there is a company I actually had an opportunity to visit in Bangladesh uh called Rams group you know it's a very large group multi diverse multiple places and so on and uh and I met somebody at a general manager level and you know already has a number like this you know and it's chairman's number on the card and uh and then I looked at his website if you go on website is also the number everywhere it is that number available and it's a large organization it's like a you know company which is very very diversified multiple businesses multiple structures large industrial group now the philosophy very clearly for our organization is that they want to create an accessibility to every single person who wants to reach out now people are intelligent if I get this general manager's card I'm not going to call the chairman I'm not going to call that but what he's telling as organization uh that I am accessible I'm available right so this is very hard a lot of companies try to make it uh you know a lot of call centers and other things and so on so you actually complex it if you really see around you uh you have actually see a lot of complexity of reaching out organizations even if you are every day using you're using telecom banking other things which you're using every day you if you really see it's not very simple it's it's looks like they try to make it very simple for you but it is not that simple it's not that kind of accessibility which you like as a consumer another thing which is missing very big is the human touch I think with optimization and all that pieces which is happening it might look like we are giving the user experience to the user himself that he can really go out and and do this piece but we are taking away the human touch and that's also very important that people need to really understand that uh end of the day the best consumer experience can be delivered by a human touch you know so which means that somebody calls you somebody talks to you somebody gives you a personal message and things of that nature and how you really would like to do that another best practice is how do you design the organization and democratize your consumer data so people at every level understand what is going on in the business and what is going on with the customer it's not just reflected to one single small group which is called the client servicing and most ignored and most of the times a cost side group in the organization so people really put that as a cost side that this is a customer service department which is actually a function which is not or most of the companies these days it's a department which looks after escalations that's how these departments are designed by mindset and and how do you really not really involve the entire organization and which also calls for the connectivity between what I call your culture your consumer and your communication how these three things connect the three C's your culture connect to your consumer through effective communication that's how this whole structure should really reflect so democratize your data and also try to connect these uh three C uh points which are very important so these are some of the best practices done that there are many many more which one can really touch upon do this now I'll touch upon last three points which are before we close we are coming in next three months if you have any questions go out and write on a q&a box which Sonali would take it and I will try to answer so three things which you need to really understand in your the entire customer experience cycle one is what is your turn rate how many customers you lose every single cycle and what first you need to understand what is your cost of acquisition of every customer what is the cost of retention of your customer and how many customers you lose every single year so or if your cycle of purchase is different than how many customers you lose every single quarter or a month or things of that nature depending on the the consumption cycles and you need to now then put a science behind it and it is much cheaper to really put an effort to get and retain that same customer base and not continue to do that so when you do the cost of acquisition and cost of retention you'll find the cost of retention is much smaller but it doesn't have cost of acquisition normally is a sales function right we define that how much marketing money you will put how much this but this we don't put as a structure uh you I you will have a chief sales officer but you will not have a chief retention officer you know so this would have been more productive for organizations to really think through because the I personally feel the loyalty word is relatively dead you know you need to keep the customer excited and glued then only would they would stay with you otherwise experience largely would become very very same you know like for example I'll give you my own example I was only staying in ITC and suddenly we started spending a lot of you know monies with the Marriott hotel and Marriott also has a same actually cost piece you know you know same loyalty program ITC has its own also but they also work on the Marriott's Benoy program which has now become one of the best programs there and and I didn't tell you it was phenomenally different ITC is a great hotel chain very very good hotel chain but Marriott is in a different scale altogether they absolutely go in a different level on that so now when I go to ITC I they would ask me would you put like to put your points in Marriott or in ITC I will say Marriott because I then I can make a lot of choices in the Marriott hotels including ITC and the kind of level of service which they will need to do that now but truly speaking it's not about the hotel it's not about that property it's not about the people it's about the engagement which they would create with you which is very very different to a lot of other things so so loyalty is not there I can move I can move I mean overall it would be a different level of service somebody else would be different level of service but because of my glueness they're keeping me excited they're giving me a lot of things which I cannot miss and and that's what people get attached to I remember one of the top companies I work with is President of Remax actually Global which is one of my companies I work with actually was called me I said I'm flying to Singapore for a day and if you are free then we can catch up for a for a meal and we can discuss few things in Asia we want to do so I thought he must be coming from some serious meeting to attend and this is a real story you know and this is about two years back and I felt that this guy only flying from us one single day coming in and and something much more serious about this trip because it's a it's a big hassle to really fly down and and he came and I had a meal with him and I said you had some small meeting this is no no no I am my my if I didn't do this flight then I would lose my tear which I have on on the airlines which he was traveling and because he was not well so he didn't travel for some time and he can have the loose because the stickiness was so high for the experience he get he just flew to cover this piece right so just for a day he came in he had a you know a one day in Singapore and flew back and and retain his his pieces so this is not about the loyalty about that airline or things of that nature because the the perks you get at that level keeps you stick at that particular situation so you don't want to lose that tear it's not really about any pride nobody knows that you are in this tier or that tier it's just your personal experiences which you would get using those and I think so one has to learn on on how you need to do that another thing which you need to do is divide your consumer based very clearly how is your consumer how many enthusiasts you have everybody has about 10 percent of customers which are enthusiasts like for me I used to love this brand called Muji I started buying that about 15 20 years back that time it was not available is a Japanese brand you know based on you know different philosophy of product development and things that so I started using that product and I used to come and tell a lot of people about that and especially I used to buy a lot of stationery and used to give and gift people on those stationeries so I was a kind of enthusiast on the brand but these are only 10 percent of the people and then there are passive subscribers you know they can go both sides they can come this side they can come this side they are the most important to really focus on enthusiasts also because they sometimes are too much in love with that and they can you can really disappoint them if you don't nurture them and and pamper them so to say you continue to pamper them in that and then you have the critics you know the who are not somebody who really appreciate and they have this and they would actually can damage your brand so you need to really divide who is that so unless you have a clarity of who who's buying from you and how is this this data is divided and what are you doing for different strategies for different people and the last is how do you really calculate your customer lifetime value you know first you need to understand the lifetime value lifetime value would be the average value of the sale multiplied by number of transactions and the retention time period which is average retention time so average customer how much time it's staying with you so if you if you multiply that that would give you a lifetime value and if you multiply a lifetime value with your overall profit margin that would create a customer lifetime value right so it is this is where the largest valuations are happening these days especially in a businesses which have a large subscriber group this kind of a valuations would work so this is what I wanted to share this is obviously you cannot cover the subject in in full sense you always would pick up some points which would come through and it doesn't really give you a full sense of things but idea is to really you know spark a little bit of thought in you on thinking process on few things which you can do in your organization once once you start thinking on that you obviously put some bricks around it and I think a lot of data is not a problem in life no data is too much available if you it's only alignment of you to really think towards what improvement you want to bring in your organization and I also benefit from this I mean I have a liking of these doing these webinars not for some other reasons because it also gives me one or two thoughts when I'm really thinking about it what I can do differently in the organization because it's easy to tell others but it's very difficult sometimes to implement in your organization so thank you very much over to you Sonali if you have any question I can answer thank you so much for another wonderful session and for sharing your valuable insights as you said this topic is really vast and we have already exceeded our time limit but if your time permits can we take a few questions that we are sure sure so I quickly jump on to the first question the first question is is it a good idea to be transparent to your customer even if it means to show your drawbacks or shortcomings to show the real status of of your business no it's a very tricky question to really answer if you if you use the word transparent it is fine but if you think that the customer is having that kind of you know patience or would accommodate you because you're not perfect then then that's not true it's it's difficult to believe but the customer need is immediate if I go and say why I'm good I'm improving and I will give you a better thing tomorrow normally a customer doesn't appreciate that's something which one has to really understand that you have very little window but you have to be transparent acknowledging that you are not good enough that's not a bad idea so another thing which I didn't touch upon which is very important you know sometimes you have to be very balanced on the customer feedback customer feedback can also destroy businesses and I've seen businesses which get too overwhelmed by the feedback and they don't really think from so you don't change the principle and the base of your organization right like for example let's take McDonald's great organizations so many years so many markets I don't know how many people would give them every single day a device and if you follow McDonald's I follow them on Twitter and other places you see the kind of comments people write to them if they start really following that they would have been a confused product by now you know people give them so many devices on changing almost everything they have you know but they have never changed it because they understand that there is a lot of people who are liking it but they listen to a few things and be honest on on continue to improve a small pieces of what they stand for so they stand for a great fast service right so they would continue to do work towards making an understanding and listening even if the bait was a person standing ahead of you and he took a little time in taking that that also irritated me because I didn't want to stand behind somebody and waited for him to take three minutes more to place his order because he was not efficient and he was looking around and and you can so what they did was that he created these panels now where you can go and sell for that because you see how how he did and and this might have happened with you when I have it happened with me multiple time when my kids want McDonald and I'm standing behind somebody who's not even making a decision to what to buy you know and he's looking at board and he's he's not even considerate that he can move out and just decide and then come in the queue but even for that smallest thing McDonald understood and they created these self order panels doing it and sometimes it's just surprised me like Dubai airport I saw them a big panel has been created and I saw none of them people really on the queues and people were still going and making their own order on doing it rather than going and giving down the counter they were giving it that so it just tells me how how they anticipated giving people personalized experience of doing whatever they want to do they didn't want to even talk to somebody and give order they wanted to do it themselves so these are smaller feedbacks which really excite me about how companies can be so so very clear about customer centricity absolutely sir very well explained the next question I would like to take up is are limited time offers or promotions a good way to earn a customer will these customers stay when they won't get the same offer again yeah so it depends on why they have come at the first place you know price value which I said and the quality of product is default it's everything else which would really be important so if you would continue to give a better price than the your other products available in the market in the entire thing so maybe that's a that's a point to really attract them but it is only eventually things which are beyond that the whole experience cycle is to me very very important and and now it's changing you know so companies are realizing that just because selling it on discount or selling it cheap or thing this in peace because there is no end to the bottom right so you will continue to ask even if you get 70 percent discount people who say oh only 70 percent can you not give me more on that can you not give me 70 so I have a company used to be a company called Coutons which factor and become bankrupt and they used to do this they started with buy to get one free then they came down to something else and the last was actually getting into getting some five free or six free and it was impossible for how discounting really lowered them and and they felt that only for discount they can survive and actually they got bankrupt right sir the next question I would like to take up is what is the best medium to engage our customers social media adds one on one review surveys etc according to you all all all are very important social media is sometimes too much of noise best is and leadership team should do it you know I think I last time I gave this example that when Flipkart started if you see the older days of Flipkart the Bansal's used to go and do delivery themselves and and that to me a lot of people felt that it was a good social media engagement even this matter owner founder used to do this piece but to me it was very important it was very very important for leadership to really participate in taking feedback and it's tough and it's very sometimes very annoying because you get to hear things which you which you always not want to hear it but but it happens you know so this is something which we we should all be prepared for it right and the last question that I would like to take up is from your view names of good names of good company in customer centricity to adopt good practices from them you've already given an example in the session but anything you would like to add you know so at this stage a lot of global examples all these multi global multinationals which are customer service companies especially service companies I mean I give Starbucks McDonald's all these companies if you really see and learn from their smallest things what they do because they have really the best I don't see that too much in the product companies because they they still don't have that sensitivity but service companies have a very strong sensitivity of delivering to the I think we have also great examples even we have a great examples in our cooperatives you know companies like Amul, Mother Dairy even I mean the people don't really appreciate but if you really go and see these organizations how how good the organizations these are and how they're based on the great value system I mean I love Amul and Mother Dairy as organizations for what I've said that how to deliver culture to consumer to their effective communication very very good effective communication they don't really do that so all these companies are great organizations and one has to learn from these companies and these are in conventional businesses which are even more difficult to really bring in and build that kind of a value and we have all seen in difficult times how these companies have really retained their customers deliver the correct customer experience never on but not able to deliver the promise they never disappointed so whenever we wanted them they were there as organizations so so thank you very much I think we we overshadowed our time we normally do 30 minutes but we've done 12 minutes extra idea is to give you a little bit of a what I would not say just a little bit thinking process it's not you know but we we want to really have a feedback from everybody so reach out to Sonali or me if you have anything to share which we can help us in future series we can really touch upon topics or any other topic that you would like to hear that also is we will be more than happy to do that I'm putting my email id is gm at goromaria.com so you can reach us and we will be happy to hear your feedback thank you so much for itself another wonderful session as always and for very patiently answering all the questions and thank you to our attendees for joining us for this session we really hope you were able to add some value to your lives through the session and please join us next saturday at 11 am with another episode of the bx academy business excellence mentoring and coaching as Gaurav sir said if you have any questions if you would like to know more about our services or if you want a recording of this session please feel free to reach out to me and I would be very happy to help you thank you so much thank you thank you very much thank you


How do you survive 50 hours of hell?  How you doing Steve? Yeah, good James cool. Are you really doing good? Oh, I feel a bit run down at the moment after the weekend after some light exercise over the weekend Yeah, good job. Let's have a look at some of your injuries here. Let's before we get in where the injuries Sean It's kind of on my arms bruises Yeah, just cuts we had to do a lot of crawling through form bushes. Yeah. Yeah, and let's have a look at your leg as well Can you that was a yep? That was a pre-existing injury. We can't quite see it. Can you move? Can you get in there a little bit? Yeah, we're gonna move it up. There we go. So what what's underneath that? So a skin infection called cellulitis. So that sounds good. That sounds healthy All right, so you had cellulitis leg injury going into this thing. Tell us what is PCORA? What is it? What is the seal fit? Yeah, it's incredible. It's Just Google Navy seal hell week and it will show you the thing that those guys go through So the seals that have this thing called hell week you stay away for five days And it really is just to weed out the week see who is really committed to this kind of warrior process And my divine a few years ago my divine heads up seal fit He created an equivalent camp which is three days to prepare Seal candidates before they did the real thing and then civilians were saying mark I want to do it myself. So he opened it up to civilians I did marathons when I was younger used to box when I was in college and I was looking for a new challenge My son was four years old I've kind of been in one or two jobs where I didn't feel like I was meeting But my potential and when I heard about kakora, he really got the fire burning again So I wanted to do something when I could where I could really prove myself to myself Yeah, I actually interviewed mark divine on the James Swannick show podcast and my podcast about six months ago And he's a badass now to be clear. I haven't done it yet. I haven't done the kakora I want to do it now. He's asking me questions. I know I keep doing it So mark divine if you're watching this I'm coming to do it that just be go easy on me Can you just be a little easy on me?   I think in society at the moment There's no real tests particularly for guys to prove You know your manliness. There's no real, you know, if you look at the ancient Warrior traditions like Spartans, they all had this initiation process that they had to go through You know in in in the modern world probably the hardest thing you have to do is maybe a couple of exams at university So for me, I was looking for a real crucible experience where At times it felt like I was on the verge of death, but I knew I could get through it through, you know Using a strong mind positivity micro goals and also just preparing physically for Around two years beforehand so you prepared for two years to do this thing two years But where I went wrong for the first year. There was a lack of focus. I was doing everything I was in CrossFit. I was in Seelford workouts I was running I was doing yoga and I had a job at the time where it was taking up a lot of my time And I just got completely burnt out But I think it was more my mind playing tricks just saying Steve you can't do it How can you do 50 hours? So it kind of made an excuse and I postponed it And then what I did at the start of the year was I quit my job And just made preparing for Seelford more of a one thing. So I just focused on doing this as a one thing At the start of the process I paid for some coaching from Ben Greenfield who is a friend of James Ben Greenfield fitness Yeah, and he got out to Ben Greenfield. Hey, man. He done Kokoro two years prior and he gave me a very focused training plan And because I had to pay a bit of money for the training plan It was only 20 minutes that gave me accountability to follow through It almost felt like I didn't want to let Ben down, you know Why bother wasting his time if you're not going to apply what he said to you So he gave me a focused training plan and then it was just Bolstered the wall. I focused doing one thing And luckily I'd weaved into my life becoming a freelancer. So I had a gym in my back garden So I just trained and did freelance work at the same time. Okay, so you practice you mentally prepared for two years You did some physical exercise What happens to explain or describe the process? Maybe not reveal everything because you want people to like go there and kind of be surprised But what were some of the really horrendous things that they made you do and some of like physical Activities and mental activities as well. I think right at the start is um, you have to line up on this Asphalt area called the grinder and you wear in a white t-shirt says your name There's something about putting your name on it makes you feel stronger and prouder You know when you see your own name You stood there you hold in a weapon, which is a PVC pipe filled with sand You got a backpack on And mark divine comes around and comes up to every one of you and he says introduce your name. Tell me what you do And then he asked you questions But the questions he asked you kind of like oh, is he does he not think I'm ready? So he said to me, you know, what's your name? I explained. What do you do? I explained And then he said are you ready? I said, well, I'm ready as I'll ever be and he kind of looked to me and just said Okay, good luck and he also said how old are you and I'm thinking god does he think I look like crap? Does he think I'm not ready? That's already I'm thinking oh, maybe and then he just screams kakora 42 Let's begin and then all of these navy seals and coaches just come running onto this grinder with water There's guys on megaphone screaming at you like back feet belly It's just the idea is just to create absolute chaos. Um, you have to keep hold of your weapon The seals coming around trying to kick it out of your hand if you lose your weapon You've got a bear bear crawl after it you also given a swim buddy So if me and James were swim buddies if James has to go to the toilet I have to go to the toilet with him. If James leaves his weapon. I have to go get his weapon with him so my Swim buddy lost his weapon pretty quickly. I had to go get his weapon Then my swim buddy got tricked in an ice bath He had to keep his head under water in a like a pool of ice for 20 seconds And then I did it as well and that really takes the breath out of you So they gave us a bit of a beat down for about three hours and then we went into what we called the So three hours is still a long. I mean I do work. I've done crossfit workouts that are like seven minutes and at the end of it I'm like But this was like continuous for three hours. I and you were telling me that you'd involve burpees and push-ups Yeah, it was it was calisthenics. So burpees air squats push-ups lots of push-ups But because it's bodywear and if you're quite durable if you've done quite a lot of yoga or restoration You can do that stuff all day. I mean, I can't anywhere. I'm building more for insurance If it was lifting heavyweights, I'd be pretty tired. Okay. So then let's let's get into some some more stuff So we're doing that for three hours, which in itself is a huge herculean athletic task, right? Then what happens? You do a thing called physical standards, so they have physical standards, which is 50 push-ups in two minutes 10 dead hang pull-ups So it's going right to the bottom and then pulling yourself right up and then right to the bottom So it's not like a kicking pull-up. You have to do 50 air squats in two minutes 50 sit-ups in two minutes Wow, and then you have to do a one mile run Okay within nine and a half minutes, which I mean most people could do that now to be clear We're not going to reveal everything that has to happen here We're just going to like skim the surface to give you an idea give you a flavor because again We don't want to give too much away Uh, we kind of want to go in there not knowing some aspects of it, right? And I'll just see I'll just youtube seal for kakora. You you will see for yourself what happens. Yeah So then you were telling me that they there's a lot of hanging out in the lake in the surf where you've got really cold water Splashing over you and that's quite challenging physically and mentally, right? It can be I mean as part of my training I live by the I live close to the ocean So I would do a lot of open water swims But it what made it challenging is that it's at night time and you're just in there for hours So you have to link arms and to keep warm And then you have to walk backwards into the water and it's the pacific So you're going to smash by these waves and then you have to lie down And you don't know when the next wave is coming and then all of a sudden you'll get hit by a wave It just goes over your head. It's going on your nose and your ears And you feel like you're drowning because you're getting dragged back into the water by this by a powerful surf And then you get out you have to do some more calisthenics You have to do this thing called a sugar cookie where you get wet and sandy you roll around in the sand You basically so you can't see any skin is covered in sand And then the instructors will go hit the surf again and you have to run back in And hit the surf now at this point a couple of guys will get in hypothermia And they they have to get pulled out But generally you have to put on a bit of weight beforehand You know if you've got a bit of fat on you You can handle the cold a little bit better And when you say a couple people got hypothermia a couple people have quit by this stage as well Yeah, yeah, I mean when we got to the beach it was dark I'm one of the coaches said something like tonight is going to be the worst night of your life And we're not going to go home until at least four people quit. I'm happy to stay all night I'm wrapped up. I've got coffee. I'm good to go But we're not moving until someone quit. I think in the end three people quit But he did say you know if someone wants to quit now, you know go home And so there are a couple people who do quit right and what do they do to say I'm out? Yeah, just say I'm out You know I quit you know they do everything where it's a choice which I think is great You know you are consciously making that decision set.  I would say this was the hardest bit. We've been awake for around maybe 36 hours Um, it was dark and we're walking up this mountain and I was just hallucinating Tigers were jumping out of the walls Um, I was I guess we're jumping out of the world. You were hallucinating. Yeah. Yeah I'll see I'll see an extravagant buildings in front of me, but there was there was nothing there It was I've never done drugs but I imagine that's what drugs would be like It was the weirdest experience ever And then when I got to the mountain got to the top of the mountain to let us have a rest And I I felt literally plus the death, you know, my breathing was all funny I could bet I was on the floor. I could barely stand up and then They gave us this thing called an MRE. It's uh, it's basically a food in a package Which never goes out of there. It's full of preservatives, but it's about about 3000 calories in it And I scoffed that down within 10 minutes later. I was I was back to life It was all I needed was just something to eat. Yeah, okay. And then uh, what was the lowest point? What was the lowest mental point and Well, and physical like physically and mentally when did you just go?  I think two things were hard. One was the mountain I think the other one which I found really hard was um I think it was humility and and ego was um helping other teammates who were Who were struggling? I don't know It was something was starting to grade on me because there'd be maybe one or two teammates Well, I was always having to help them and it's like I've prepared why I didn't you prepare and they say at the start The idea of kakora is not about being the guy who's smashing out 20 pull-ups. It's not about being the guy at the quickest The quickest on the runs It's about being a really good leader and a really humble leader and a really good teammate where You're looking out for other people before yourself and I found that really hard You know, we're not really conditioned that way and decided to look out for other people There's more what can I do for myself? And that was the hardest thing hardest head a lot.  Everyone's got blisters. Everyone's tired. Everyone's hallucinating So the main thing was helping teammates who who kind of weren't pulling their way and I've been carrying them all day, but They still added massive value in other Evolutions of evolutions work else So people have strengths and weaknesses. So how many hours were you awake for? 50. So so you don't sleep at all. They don't even let you take a little nap or whatever And change up was a very quick slide, right? Put on some new gear be back in five minutes Everything they give you is an impossible deadline. So you're always failing. So it's always never good enough But you learn to just deal with it. If you go into it knowing that it's not personal They're gonna scream at you. They're gonna Say you're nothing and just see it as a bit of fun That you'll be fine see it as a bit of fun as they Making you swim in the freezing cold pacific ocean and making you do 100 burpees and run up mountains with blisters and yelling abuse at you, right? So 50 hours without sleep now You also have to carry a lot of things and swim across the lake and carry stones We won't go into that now because we again, we don't want to give away too much, but What happened explain that the feeling On that final sort of like couple minutes where mark divine walks out and says You're in kakora 42. What does he say kakora 42 kakora 42 you are secured Kakora 42 or you are secured. What happens in that moment? Well, just before he does a yoga session with you. Um, he's just released a new book called kakora yoga Look before I came across the vines teachings. I wasn't into yoga I thought it was kind of for girls thought it was the spiritual thing But what he's done is he's put He's taken yoga and made it very westernized for athletes So it's more doing movement to make you a better athlete rather than Saying mantras.  You've always got to be prepared. You know, there's always going to be curveballs coming in The key thing which I kept saying to myself all weekend was stay stay stay stay in the moment Stay in the moment. Don't focus on the thousand burpees. I've got to do just stay on doing this one burpee Perfectly. Okay, I've done one next one because if you think about I've got to do 50 hours I've got to do a thousand burpees 800 press ups. It's just too much. Yeah, yeah If you're wanting to speak to steve One on one and actually hire him to give you a training workout regime give you some advice Just like ben greenfield gave you gave you some advice You can reach steve. How what email address should they get you at steve w costella steve w costella at gmail.com or you can reach me on twitter My twitter handle is steve w costella So if you're thinking about doing kakora and you really want to get some in-depth knowledge and talk about your situation Reach out to steve at his email address and schedule a time to speak with him on the phone And he can give you a little bit more guide a little bit more official guidance um any final words then on Who it's for and who it is not for like who watching right now should definitely Definitely not do it and who here definitely should consider doing it You will know in your heart as soon as you hear it if it's for you or if it's not If you want to do it, it's a massive commitment. You got to have a strong burning why So my why was I've got a son. He's nearly five I want to be that father who doesn't say tally and you need to do this and that I want to set the example And then hopefully he'll maybe do it himself But I want to be a leader leading the way And then maybe he'll follow in my path if he doesn't as long as he's his own person and takes ownership over his choices I'm happy with that, but it starts with me The second reason was I had a lot of success in my early 20s. I'm now in my early 30s I fell in my late 20s and early 30s. I lost my way So I just really needed to prove myself to myself again. I wanted to prove to myself. Yeah, you've still got that fire in you So you need number one. You need a really strong why Number two, you need to be deeply committed to the process And I think the strong why helps you in the process The seal fit workouts check out the book eight weeks to seal fit by mark define I literally followed the eight weeks to seal fit operator watts To the letter over a 10 week period now these workouts Two to three hours long and then on the weekend you have to go for a long Rock where you put on a backpack you fill it with 20 pounds of sand And you go hiking up a mountain and it can literally take up all your weekend I what luckily, you know, my my son's mom was really understanding would look after him But I hardly saw my family through the training because I was so focused on this on this one thing So it's a big time commitment Uh, you need a strong why? You will get pretty burnt out at times I'm going to be writing an article soon for my body green on how I Incorporated good recovery. Mm-hmm But um, yeah, they're the two main things be prepared to put in the time be prepared Have a strong why and number three, you know, be prepared to fail. You might not make it people prepared really well Um, I think 20 people started on the 13 finished most people quit within three hours What does that tell you that's amazing that you did so you were part of the So a third quit or a quarter quit something like that. I think yeah Let's just we're gonna go out and do a little snapchat now if you're watching this We're gonna go to my snapchat, which is that james swan. I could do a little 10 second daily motivation videos I'm here with steve costello who did the kakora navy seal training the number one tip to get through hell The hell 50 hours here it comes in a snap All right, so we're just gonna send that or it's decided to there we go And your number one tip pretty steve is Go have a strong why you need to remind yourself why you're doing something really hard. There you go There you go. Check me out on facebook as well on facebook live at james swanic All right, there we go. We're gonna send that off Does anyone does anyone have any questions? Does anyone have their own challenges that they're working on at the moment? Yeah, so if you're watching this uh on facebook live as Live if you're watching this live because we are live as we're recording this then go ahead and ask a question of steve costello Uh, if you're watching this on youtube right now Make sure you share this With someone right now who you think might want to do this and also uh tag a friend in here as well If you're watching this on facebook if you're listening on the podcast the james swanic show Please do uh Share this episode with someone who you think might want to do the kakora training And maybe even just reach out share or this with mark divine himself You can actually send this video to seal fit on facebook and mark divine on seal fit as well Do any one of those uh any one of those things? So we had a question here Ron rambish says what sneakers do you wear when you're doing kakora? Um, yeah, I Um enough the call in offs in offs. I think it's In offs two four six. There are really light running shoe the hold up very well You also have to wear special forces boots. I wore nike Special operations boots, but if you're going to do kakora, you need to break in your boots And that means you need to go on long runs with them when you first wear them You need to when you first get them you need to put them in warm water And then put them on and then go for a walk So your feet mold into them a lot of people are being cut out of kakora because they didn't break in the boots And then they've got so many blisters. They just chopped them down. They couldn't start working. So number one get your boots I would recommend the night special ops boots and then The second thing is you need to double sock a weak one a good socks Wool socks and a sock liner And the third thing is I used a goo called hike goo Where you you cover your feet in in hike goo and that stops blisters. Hey, we've got a we've got seal fit Yeah seal fits asking. What was your lowest and highest point in the weekend? So let's deal with the the lowest point. What was the lowest of the low? Probably the mountain because I was hallucinating. I was tired um You know your body saying stop stop stop Um, but there's a great seal fit coach called derrick price Um, he said something when he did kakora of Never make a decision in the dark don't make a decision in the dark things are always worse at night time You mind place tricks but seeing the night time's over and when the sun is rising. It's the best feeling ever So maybe that's the highest point the highest point is wow. I got through that really hard evolution I got I got I conquered the mountain the sun's rising. I know there's only a few hours left easy You know and obviously the highest point is completing a challenge, which was two years in the making Yeah, and that moment was pretty but you're he's very beat up at the moment I saw him yesterday and he looked like death. It was like 36 hours after you completed it And his eyes well, I mean we're wearing swanis blue light blocking glasses right now to to protect ourselves from the The lights here and if you wear these it helps you sleep later on at night And and steve obviously trying to get as much sleep as he can but how like In the in the it's been what 72 hours now since you completed it How did you feel in the first 24 hours? How did you feel in the first 48 hours? And how do you feel now first 24 hours pretty delirious? There was a lot of adrenaline running through me. So Felt pretty good But since that felt to be honest, I felt pretty shocked in last night james was going to take me to la dodgers game I was like james. I need to just go bed I know I had field tickets had field tickets for the la dodgers to take steve's never been on a baseball Never been to a baseball game, but 12 hours sleep was more appealing And then now today feel maybe 10% better But seal fit did say you will feel pretty terrible for a couple of weeks. That's normal when I'm back in australia I have a thing called intravenous vitamin therapy where the stick of needle in your arm and Put a lot of vitamins in you that seems to have with the training Um, but I mean America at the moment. So I'll have to wait until we go home Yeah, so I hope that answered your question seal fit. So Yeah, you still don't look too good to be honest. You look you have looked better How much how much sleep are you planning on getting tonight?  Yeah, yeah, I feel like I've got a fever and burning up. I'll keep having to wake up and go to the toilet Really? Yeah, I don't feel great. Why do you need to keep going to the toilet? I think it's because I'm having a drink so much water, you know, you're very dehydrated At the end of the at the end of the course. Yeah, but I wouldn't change it for the world is I've never felt worse, but I've never felt better. It's a great. That's a great feeling, isn't it? Never felt worse never felt better. I did a marathon I ran the new york marathon some years ago and at the end of it.  It's like I get cranky if I don't get eight hours sleeping You've got to remember you're doing this with world-class coaches who they know just What exactly to say you at the right moment? So at one point I was doing burpees I was getting really hard on one of the coaches says Costello. I've done Um Don't quit on me now and that was enough to just keep me going There was another moment where a coach grabbed me by the shoulder and he looked me right in the eye and said, are you good? And that just kind of gave me strength and also you get strength from saying look, I can't quit on my teammates I need to help them. I'm I'm here for a reason. I'm not here for me. I'm here to help my teammates through it So although you might be in the gym and working out and it's really hard when you've got world-class coaches around you Who have just dominated their field for years and you've got like a bunch of warriors who are just getting after it There's no better feeling you get energy from that and that's what drives you forward. Yeah Steve Costello who completed Kokoro 42 created by Mark Devine and the CO5 team Uh, go ahead and congratulate Steve right now. Leave a little comment down below and say well done Good job. Whatever words of encouragement you have for Steve a Herculean effort He's almost inspired me to start to sign up for it and do it myself. I think I'm Pretty tough. Let's start with a 20x. So if you if you don't want to do kakora, you can do 20x It's kakora, but only over 12 hours or they have other courses where is Introduction to seal fit freedom cost or mark divine's got an outstanding online program called unbeatable mind where it focuses more on the mental aspect Troy, what was your why a really good question? So um, I'm 34. I've got a um, a son called Tyler. He's nearly five Um, I wanted to be a father who Rather than saying Tyler, you need to do this. You need to do that I wanted to set the example and then maybe he'll follow my path But as long as he takes ownership of other of who he is and is not afraid to get after his dreams That's perfect for me. So seal fit which seemed seal fit kakora, which seemed impossible I thought that's a really good example to Tyler in seal for you have to do a lot of log lifting You know pushing logs above your head and Tyler seems to be into it already So if we're out on a nature walk and he sees a log He seems to want to pick it up and push it above his head That was my first why my second why was I wanted to prove myself to myself I had a lot of kind of career success in my early 20s um And then in my late 20s, um, I made a few bad career choices Um, and then I had a son and I just it felt like everything went a bit sideways like life got put on hold And then now that my son was a little bold I just thought right it's time to get back in the game I need to do something where I can prove myself to myself and light that fire in my belly again So it was number one was being an example to others number two was You know, do you want to go through your life always making excuses? So do you want to just set a goal and get after it? And I've always been really into adventure in the outdoors So this seemed like a perfect perfect way to test Do you think do you think I'd be able to handle it Steve knowing knowing me? Yeah, I think you've got a strong mind.  It was like, yeah Yeah, maybe I think You have to be really committed You know a lot of people said yeah, I'd love to do Kokoro I was one of those people too, but it doing it and actually doing the work doing the eight weeks to see if it operate awards consistently every day You know, you have to just show up and do it. Um, when I was actually preparing for Kokoro seriously very few people knew about it I just wanted to concentrate on Doing the work rather than just saying I'm doing this It's a big commitment. All right. There you go. There you go. Steve Costello who successfully completed Kokoro 42 Thank you to Mark Devine. Thank you to Seal Fit. Thank you for all the Seal Fit coaches and the amazing team mates Show the injuries again. Show the injuries. Can't really see it Call him through fawn bushes Yeah, a few bruises But yeah, nothing too bad. Yeah amazing team mates amazing coaches It will change your life if you want to do it. Um Absolutely hands down the best program out there at the moment. Okay. All right, so A couple of call to actions just before we go if you want to reach Steve directly Steve W. Costello at Gmail at gmail.com Twitter Steve W. Costello Okay, uh tag three friends who you think should watch this and try and encourage them to do Kokoro Share this to Mark Devine if you can just share it to him. So he sees it. Thank you very much to Seal Fit These are swanis blue blocking glasses that we're wearing swanis glasses.com that help you sleep Steve's going to go and sleep now. I'm going to send him home and have a little bit of a snooze because he needs it, right? Um, and uh, oh, yeah, if you want to listen to my interview with uh, Mark Devine Go to the James swanik show podcast in itunes. I think I published it maybe four or five months ago and listen It's called toughen up go and check it out. See ya


Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partner. Hey, welcome back everyone. We live in Las Vegas, the CUBE special coverage of VMworld 2017, our eighth year. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE with my co-host, Dave Vellante, also co-host. Our next two guests is Jespreet Singh, CEO, founder of Druva and Matt Morgan and CMO of Druva. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much. Be here.  Take a minute to talk about why you guys are excited by this wave, because I think data protection, decentralized, fully cloud world, cloud, IoT and Edge, is creating a huge data environment. Jespreet, take a minute to explain what you guys are doing. Absolutely. So if you look at the big wave, right? The data, as I said, is getting completely decentralized. We have IoT, Edge, the new cloud and the data center is getting disrupted big time. And the more data gets decentralized or defragmented, right? The more centralized the data management has to be, right? Whether on the edge, in the cloud. And the whole notion of cloud, if you think about it, is actually an interesting phenomenon where Amazon is sort of applying retail economies to traditional IT. If you combine them together, you sort of want to manage the data as a service wherever it goes. Be it the Edge, be it the core, you want a simplest ability to sort of protect it, to govern it and to add intelligence to it over time as you gather more and more information. So Druard provides a platform end to end to sort of make it data all managed properly from a single console. Pat Kelsinger was up on stage in his keynote and he just came out, big news, Amazon Relationships got some fruit daring already. And they had to do that because vCloud Air was kind of an interesting point. But he brings up the point about the cloud as a disruption and that the conventional wisdom of the old is no longer the most relevant thing right now. And a lot of customers are paying attention to that. So I got to ask you as a founder and CEO of On the Right Wave, in our opinion and Wikibon's opinion, what should customers look for for success? And because we're early on this new vector, what's different? What should they be thinking about as they look at the cloud, look at this distributed and decentralized edge? What are some of the things that's different? I think if you think about customers and Matt please add to it, for customers this is not just a technology stack, right? It's not a software defined data center all over again. This is more of trying to see how they can consume something at a predictable SLA and price wherever they go, right? That's the whole genesis of cloud. It's a complete business model shift. And so when they look at data and how they holistically manage data, they understand data is likely to outlive more systems by three X. And now when they have this notion of cloud, how can they be on the journey to sort of consume and deliver the value of data as a service in this whole notion of public cloud? And that's sort of the driver promise, right? So Matt, I wonder if you could talk about sort of the brand continuing that brand promise. The ascendancy of the sort of modern backup software in the first part of this millennium was coincident with virtualization and consolidating servers. And we've sort of played that out. And now customers are saying we have to rethink the way we protect data because of cloud. So I wonder if you could address that and talk about the brand promise of Druva in that context. Excellent, yes. We did a survey, 450 VMware customers. And it basically underscores the VMware strategy. There are going to be three tenants to the modern data architecture moving forward. There's going to be physical servers. There's going to be virtualized infrastructure. And there's going to be VMware cloud on AWS or its derivatives. When you move further from left to right, moving from physical to virtual, virtual to cloud, what ends up happening is the approach to data protection of the past fails to scale and frankly is no longer compatible. You can't float an appliance in a cloud. You can't possibly put your own co-located infrastructure within a cloud store to attempt to protect that data. So a lot of people just go without protection at all. What we found in our survey is that three out of four people surveyed really want an as a service solution because they're able to basically protect cloud to cloud. They're able to come in and say, okay, if my data is going to be sitting there, my infrastructure is going to be sitting there, I want to be able to wrap that infrastructure with an as a service solution that will protect it. The real value though, isn't just protecting in the cloud. It's the as a service solution is not limited by the constraints of the past. It can actually be extended backwards. So you can take your virtual infrastructure and protect it with an as a service solution. You can take your physical infrastructure and protect it as a solution. So as a result, we see this as a sea change to this new way of protecting data. So just for you were saying that you've got to have sort of this centralized data management philosophy in order to succeed in this world that Matthew just described. Why is that? Is that because you need a single point of control in case something goes wrong and it's a recovery thing or is it more of a business model sort of an as a service business model requirement? I wonder if you could address that. So the traditional IT boundary is sort of shattering in the cloud world, right? If you're going to have, you know, there's a last incident of sorts, right? If one incident happened in a company, there are many parties looking at what happened there. Is it a breach? Is it a loss? Is it a governance issue? So data has multiple faces now.  So you got to have a holistic view of looking at the data versus traditional approach of, I'm going to put a backup architecture or DR architecture or e-discovery architecture all in silos. And cloud sort of also gives an opportunity for, you know, people not to hug their heart wouldn't say, this is mine, go get yours. They can sort of break boundaries and say, let's work together on this data set, but I can manage the prediction part of it and someone else can pay their dues to manage the governance part of it. So decentralization, the more utilization of data is promoting a sort of a holistic view of management of data purely built from the cloud. Jasper, I want to ask you, you had a pretty busy week. We covered this on SiliconANGLE and so I want to kind of ask it again, since we're here at VMworld, $80 million in funding, congratulations, big news and the Druva Cloud Platform on AWS. Congratulations. Can you share more color to that? It's a lot of cash, 80 million. It's a good amount of money. It's just no replacement for creativity, but it's a good, good fuel to have in the company. Yes, we fortunate to have a great lead, root, capital with all of our existing investors, Sequoia, Nexus, and Aya, including EMC Ventures of the industry in Druva to be in this round. Secondary storage overall is getting disrupted. The legacy isn't material anymore, given the big cloud wave, as I said. So the new wave of providers have to be in the cloud and hence Druva. We've been building historically a very strong foundation of cloud native solution without a hardware approach, with no hardware approach all in the cloud. But in the past, we have taken a legacy architecture of a backup, DR, e-discovery into multiple products, NSYNC and Phoenix to make a ticket of edge data or data center data. And now we're doing a big step forward to say we're going to combine our products into a single platform. Think of it as Amazon services for data prediction. The customer logs in can search for their workload. They want to backup VMs today. They want to search today. And then deliver what they want to the IT right from a single point of console. That's the power of Druva Cloud Platform. Eight years ago, we interviewed D-Raj Pandey for the first time. It was our first time doing the Q2010. And at that time, no one's ever heard of Nutanix. Then Nutanix, Nutanix, a little accent from New Jersey, Massachusetts. I always get it wrong, isn't it? I say Nutanix. Nutanix. D-Raj was kind of crazy. He was viewed in Silicon Valley as kind of a wildcard. No one got his model at that time. Dave and David Floyd were like, this is amazing. They saw it right away. And I'm like, this is really awesome. You guys are kind of out of that same track and the investor along the same line for secondary storage. So I got to ask you, when you're doing your fundraising, you must have had some pretty interesting experiences. Can you share some of the without naming names, the good and kind of weird conversations you had around? Because you got to understand the trends to get your business. Absolutely. I think storage is the new effort, right? So there's a lot of people who don't dislike storage for what happened in the public market recently. So you got to explain them that there's a thesis around making money on public cloud, using public cloud as storage here. So we had various interesting conversations there. And we were lucky to have Riverwood who got the idea, who had the same conviction as the founder to sort of put money behind where the market is going. But still a lot of venture capitalists don't like the venture part of it. They want a predictable story. They want easy money.  But the venture and the venture VC capitalists. The idea of venturing is to go take a chance on a bet that's called venture capital, not hedge fund or money market. Absolutely. So you've actually got some pretty weird kind of like, huh, questions? Where's the craziest question you got? That was so off base. You had crazy questions like where's the box? You know, you're selling all the power. Wait a minute, where's the shorted box? Where do I put it? Where do I put the leader? We had one question with someone asked us, so what's your, you know, adoption, what's the word? What's your, you know, the engagement on your software?  It's got to perform, got to be durable, but you don't engage with the software as you would with Salesforce.com. But, you know, you got to look for one party or two parties of a strong conviction and sort of go with them. Great story. Thanks for sharing. So you mentioned three things, protect, govern, and add intelligence. And that add intelligence piece is, you know, you don't usually associate that with certainly not backup, but data protection. So in this world of digital business, we think of digital business is all about how you leverage data assets. And when you think of adding intelligence, that's not something that we typically think of in a data protection company. How has Druva different in that regard? And how can you help organizations leverage their data assets? Yeah, we see this as a customer journey, okay? Data protection is the gateway drug to leveraging an as a service model, right? Because it's really obvious. I can protect my data, I can restore it, I can do disaster recovery. Once you get that data into a centralized store, there's incredible things you can do from the fact that it's centralized. Unlike previous approaches that were dozens or hundreds of silos that you never could report across, Druva gives you that centralization effect. So the first logical step to move up the customer journey is to embrace governance, where you can start having a perspective, making sure that you're legally complying with regulations, making sure that you're governing for legal requirements within the company. But when you move past that, you start to actually start to manage for patterns, and that's where intelligence comes in. When you start thinking of data, the associated metadata that surrounds that data is data within itself. And if you wrap intelligence around that, you can start to get predictive around areas that could affect risk for your organization or even open up opportunity. So a good risk example is ransomware. Through intelligence, you can actually see when data that is distributed starts to be encrypted early, so you're able to identify and do what we call the anomaly detection. So that's kind of the journey, if you will. You go from protection to governance, governance to intelligence. So it is kind of the holy grail, right? I mean, companies historically in your business haven't been able to achieve, I mean, EMC tried, it bought documentum to try to achieve that vision, and I mean, I guess it failed, but they sold it for a boatload of money, so they're all good, nobody's crying for EMC, but what's your perspective on this, Jaspreet? I think these are mostly elastic workload, highly elastic workload. You want a search on data, you want it right now, and you want it to be a short-lived search. You want AI, deep AI, which requires a lot of data, but the deep AI, machine learning sort of has to have a holistic amount of data for a very short amount of time. It can burst compute, get the problem solved, and move on. So historically, for lack of architecture, lack of abundant amount of hardware, and also the IT boundaries of not supporting each other decision was a big, you know, limiting factor. Now with Cloud, we have delivered a full-text search, but to a price point, the companies can afford for an investigative search, right? The search was not affordable in the past. They can do searching of pet-a-pet-a data in an instant and go out, right, and likewise, machine learning. Machine learning is a lot easier proposition in Cloud, and the user is pretty easier, right? So you apply deep learning, you understand patterns to what Matt said, you understand ransomware before most customers can see it, and then alert them and then sort of move on, right?  One last marketing question, if I may, your marketing challenge, you got a choice. You can go after the legacy stovepipe guys, which is relatively straightforward, but there's an emerging set of modern data protection folks. How do you sort of pick those two? Do you do both, and how do you differentiate from the latter in particular? Well, I'm really grateful that some large companies have gone forward to advocate public Cloud, okay? Amazon and Microsoft, with Azure, and with even Google, with Google Cloud Platform, they have done a phenomenal job of selling a disruption and a more effective way to do business when leveraging the public Cloud. When you move to that, the data protection conversation must change. There is no option to do things the way you used to do. It will be called the chain of pain, right? So from a marketing point of view, I can attach to all the dynamics of what data protection means in this hybrid reality where some of your stuff will be in the public Cloud, some of your stuff will be below the horizon on premises. I also have the opportunity to talk about the centralization of data. So unlike any appliance vendor that's on the market today or any traditional approach, the idea of stove piping your data limits you. It limits you both in the immediate term and it limits you over the long term by centralizing that information together and delivering it as a service to wrap more of your infrastructure with our protection technology, you're going to be able to gain a lot of value. So I need to focus specifically on that centralization, the move to public Cloud, and then there's a cost efficiencies conversation that I can have on top of all of that, which is about, you know, taking half your cost out. Guys, you had the launch of the Druva Cloud Platform, that's your big news here on AWS with the VMware. Since it's VMworld, which is VMware's ecosystem show, what should they know about your Cloud Platform? The VMware customers, people who have running ops and data centers, obviously the data protection, we've talked about what you just said, which is there's no walls in the Cloud. So it's a completely different dynamic, completely disrupting data protection with Cloud, a completely different ballgame, get that. But VMware customers, what do they do? How do they engage with you guys? Why should they use you? And what should they know? So absolutely, as Matt said, there are about 90% of customers who surveyed, said they're looking at AWS for hosting their VMs in that new model and this new shift towards public Cloud, Druva is only as a service solution, they can consume from Amazon Marketplace, from VMware cross-Cloud services platform, is what they're calling it. Or directly through Druva or our partner channel. So it's a no hardware, simple as service solution, delivered near AWS to consume on-prem and Cloud, directly on to a center of the audience. So you're an ecosystem partner of VMware's. Absolutely. On that chart that Gelsinger put up under data protection, you will have your logo there. Currently we don't, in the near future, yes. They were certain, yes, absolutely, yes. In the near future, we definitely hope to see our logo. Well VMware is still owned by Dell Technologies, AKA Dell EMC, hence the top billing. That's true. Veeam was in there and they've had a little bit of a... That's true. Early on requirements of... That's great. Like I'll say it, you should be in there. But you're certified, it's not like it's in development, it's shipping. The early on requirements by Veeam is pretty simple, that you have to use native Cloud technology, not the classic disk array, but of the storage and you have to have a clean path to talk across AWS and we qualify it very well. So we are in development right now and to be announced pretty soon. All right, so bottom line. Can I buy it and use it today? Yes, you can buy it and use it today. I'm a Veeam work customer. Oh my God, yes. Absolutely, yes. Okay, great. Guys, thanks so much. Drew, with a hot startup, $80 million of funding.  About 200 million. $200 million. Plenty of cash on the war chest. Check it out, data protection in the cloud, one of the areas. Being disrupted by this new wave that Pat Gelsinger laid out here at VMworld 2017, we'll be back with more live CUBE coverage after this short break.