Welcome everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of MYs here in Washington, DC. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, alongside my host and analyst, John Furrier. Great to be back here with you. Great to see you. And today we are joined by Brian Dye. He is the CEO of CoreLight. He's in from San Francisco. Welcome, Brian. Thank you, Rebecca. Great to be here. So the news hit the wires this morning, this expanded partnership between CoreLight and Mandiant. Tell our viewers a little bit more about this amplified partnership. Yeah, it's really got two big parts to do it. Number one, what is Mandiant using CoreLight technology for and how is CoreLight integrated into Mandiant and Google proper technology? So for the Mandiant professional services team, their instant responders, they have the ability to use CoreLight technology in their instant response engagement and in their managed defense services. And we'll talk about that why in more in the future. And then for CoreLight, we've more deeply integrated our technology into a bunch of parts of the Google platform, not just the Chronicle security operations suite and the Mandiant threat intelligence services, but also the GCP pack and mirroring services as well. There's a lot of talk about shared responsibility. You see all the attacks, the MGM thing was in the news all this week, and we were actually there at an event when it was happening, the elevators, half the banks were gone.  I mean, this is the ransomware problem. There's so many seams now. Detection, response, what's the answer? I mean, you guys are in the middle of this right now. There's so much activity going on. This marketplace is brutal and we need answers. What's the, how do you guys see that and where do you guys connect and how does the partnership help companies be more secure? Because this is code red. It is code red. And I think what you're seeing is a dramatic bifurcation of the threat landscape. You've got situations like ransomware that are incredibly fast, incredibly destructive, but then you've got the advanced threat actors that are still actually incredibly quiet, incredibly slow and long. So what we really see organizations doing is kind of doubling down on four big areas, right? They need endpoint, they need identity, they need a cloud and they need threat network. And what those really represent is a balance of depth versus breadth and how you get the right intelligence to go and find these advanced attackers, especially when what you're essentially doing is looking back in time, right? Take MGM, right? And I wish everyone there the best. They're wrestling with a really hard problem right now. They are trying to look back and figure out, are they diagnosing a problem from a week, a month, a quarter or a year? Like that's your step one problem. And so you need this balance of depth versus breadth and your insight. And again, that's that same mentality is actually behind the Coralite Mandium Partnership. So can you give our viewers an example of how this partnership works and what it entails? Yeah, so the, and it really comes down to thinking about the world not as a technologist, but really as an instant responder. And so let me walk you through an example that's not MGM, certainly the details on that are not publicly known. But actually one of my first interviews, research interviews, when I joined Coralite was with a consultant here at Mandium.  Why does this network data matter so much for you? Like what's useful here? And he walked me through this story. Said look, one of his earlier engagements was a multi-thousand entity franchise organization, right? And so they're incredibly large. They got notified by Visa that they were compromised. Step one, which couple hundred endpoints do you go worry about? These point of sale terminals when you've got 10,000 plus franchise locations. So the network tends to have this great role of helping prioritize your overall investigation. So they went, they prioritize, now you flip back to endpoint, right? Let's go instrument those points. Sale terminals, let's find out where the malware is. Great, once you find the malware, now you're back to the network. Cause how did that malware get there? You've got to reverse track the entire kill chain, right? What was the lateral movement? What was the command and control? What was the point of encouragement? So the network tends to be fantastic to accelerate that instant response process. Third, now that you think you've got the attack, how do you actually get rid of it?  Once you think you've got it out, how do you prove that none of that activity's recurring? Right? The network tends to be the source of ground truth for that. And the last piece that frankly I thought was most interesting is he said, never forget that there might've been 15, 16 consultants from Mandi working this thing super aggressively for six or eight weeks. And folks worry about how expensive that is. That's nothing. Cause when those 15 or 16 people leave, one or two of them stay and they get joined by three or four lawyers. And the lawyers stay for the next three months while you're trying to figure out what defensible disclosure is for that organization. So it turns up the network not just provides you connectivity to connect the dots across all this, but it gives you ground truth of what's really happening. And that defensible ground truth that can stand up to the audit committee for example, tends to be really important. I like the ground truth, networking the ground truth angle because it's like the footprints are in the network. You can follow the packets, you can't hide them. When you're moving around, you can't hide. So that's always, we've heard that before, but it's getting complicated now. You get all these endpoints, cloud is involved and connectivity is increasing. So you got edge emerging with AI here and the data is everywhere. Is it a data problem? Is it a network problem? How do you guys look at the new sprawl of data networks when you look at the problems to attack that defending side of, of course, speeds a factor. So you got increased roll of data, budgets aren't increasing 10x. So how does a practitioner think this through when they look at this? Yeah, it's a really, it's a really good one because all of those things are not created equal and how do you prioritize them, right? We often find defenders are kind of thinking about just like there's the attacker advantage, right? Where they only have to win once and the defender has to get it right every time. There's actually a defender advantage where you want to position yourselves and focus your efforts where you have multiple chances to get the attacker, right? Those tend to be reconnaissance, command control, lateral movement, right? To use the kill chain stages. So that's really where we see things playing out. And if you think about the role of data, the thing that we see folks focusing on is A, all data is not created equal and B, you have to actually start thinking not just about data but about time, right? How much time coverage do you have looking backwards to go find what the issue was? Like think about log foreshel, really big issue. How long could you look back and figure out where that was in your environment three months ago, six months ago, nine months ago, right? When that vulnerability might have been exploited. So those are the two big issues. And then also storage, how long do you store it for? How is it available? What's AI of access to it? Is there automation? These are all the questions come up and I got to ask you, because this comes up a lot. We're going to talk a lot about here at this event and certainly the rest of the year and ongoing. Threat detections like a, you know, first responder. Go figure out what happened. But now you've got the more holistic operating system view of networks, you're in networks. So you got to look at a bigger picture. You mentioned a little bit of how big that is. Love to get your feelings on how big that truly is. But how do you look at that and balance the holistic view versus jump in and just send a SWAT team or a response team at something? When you, because you got to look at the detection, got to throw a blanket on that right away. But zooming out, time, how far back do you go? Where's the data stored? That's going to require architecture. It is. And I think what folks are starting to realize pretty aggressively here is it's not an or, it's an and, right? You absolutely need detections. You need kind of live threat detections. You need anomalies. You need all the things they're going to enable, not just your initial instant response, but follow on threat hunting programs. That's really critical. But then the broad base view of the data becomes really important because you've got living off the land, right? You've got a bunch of stealthy techniques that folks are being used that will not and cannot actually drive detection, right? You're not going to alert on PowerShell just because there's PowerShell within an organization, right? There's PowerShell everywhere. That's not the problem. Who's using PowerShell incorrectly is actually the problem. So we kind of think of it in a couple of layers. One is what Kevin Mandi actually recently called second stage detections, right? Where you have an incursion from an actor that looks like they're doing nothing unusual. But then you have a whole bunch of very unusual leading to malicious activity afterwards. So it changes the shape of what you're looking for, right? That becomes one big one. The second big one becomes really thinking about this time coverage piece that we've talked about already, right? How much can you actually look back, right? And the third, in a really, really big way, is how do you actually think about, sorry, enabling threat hunting programs because you talked about this balance between the attacker and the time. What a threat hunting team is going to do, and even if it's not team, by the way, even if it's just giving your higher-end instant responders a few hours on Friday to go and do threat hunting, they will potentially find bad things in your network live. If they don't find bad things, they're probably going to find policy violations. And if they find nothing, now they know your environment better, right? There's a great Rob Joyce quote from years ago, right? Back when he was running tailored access operations where he got up and said, your number one obligation is to know your network because we will, right? And that's the attacker's viewpoint. So we're really living in a time where ransomware attacks and security breaches are an inevitable part of doing business right now. But what is going on in the moment? What is about this particular moment in time that makes your partnership so important? So I think there's a couple of things that are behind it.  If you look across the different geographies, there's actually very, very different drivers for the initial incursion, right? You know, phishing and social engineering continues to be very big, but there's actually been, especially because the number of, unfortunately, network-based vulnerabilities that have been disclosed over the past year has never been higher, right? If you look at the last five years, the last 12 months, we've seen more broad-based network vulnerabilities than ever. So you've got more ways to get into an organization undetected. Once you're in undetected, we're back to this depth of breath problem, right? If you're in undetected, that means the perimeter defense, the detection engine has by definition been bypassed, right? It's not solar winds. I mean, that was a super aggressive way to do this, but a classic network vulnerability for either router switch or, you know, heaven forbid firewalls or VPN devices, which we've seen a lot of in the past year, that becomes a really big problem. So now it puts a lot more focus and weight on the raw network, both for the network evidence and the network-based detections to find those follow-on indicators that compromise those follow-on attack signals. And I think that's been the biggest thing in the landscape over the past year especially. Can you talk about dwell time? This comes up a lot. You kind of mentioned a little bit on the defender side. What's the definition of dwell time in security context? And why is it important to understand that? Yeah, dwell time for us. And again, Mandion has great research on metrics, right? There's a, for folks that don't know across your viewership, there's a set of metrics they use called Drain Cover. Drain CVR, technically, D-R-A-I-N-C-V-R. There's some research you can Google it that kind of does a really nice walkthrough of each of these metrics and why they matter. But at a simple level, dwell time is a measure of how long that attacker's been in your environment before you found them. And so, A, that's essentially your exposure. How long did they get to recon? How long did they get to find their payloads? How much exfiltration time did they actually have before you found it, right? Are you actually left a bang to use the exfilt analogy or not? And then second, can you even see the beginning of that? Right, if they've been in there so long that you can't find the beginning of it, now you've put everything else in your instant response process at risk because you're not truly sure whether you found the full scope of that attack, contain them and eliminated the threat, right? If they've been in there longer, then you have the visibility for it. But that's, you know, dwell time in a field. And that gives you the range of how bad it is, basically. If they've been there for a while, you're like, oh man, what's going on? And that's kind of what happened at MGM. They were already in there and they did some damage and then kind of, when they were detected, that's when they encrypted, went to the ransomware move. This is kind of early reports coming out. Not yet clear, but clear the disruption there. I mean, just generally zooming out, a lot of people see the AI trend, they see the security trends. There's almost like, and I hate to say this word on camera because I don't believe it, there's a doom and gloom mentality. People are scared, they don't know what to do. I think it's a little bit overblown by a mile, personally. But the unknown scares people. What's the truth when it comes to security and AI? What's real, what's not real? What should people pay attention to? How should companies defend themselves? I mean, it's a free-for-all. Like, where's the government helping? So, I mean, it's a lot in there, but feel free to share. Plenty for us to riff on on this one. There's a lot here. So just to get us going, I think there's kind of three layers here. There's what are the attackers doing? What are the organizations doing what are the defenders doing? And happy to come back to this because we've seen some fascinating things both within our customers and within the open source community. But what are the attackers doing? They're doing the same thing the defenders are doing. They're actually using AI to automate their attacking and their code development, by the way. So they're getting faster, right? One of our partners made the comment that with AI the incremental cost of labor has gone down. Everyone gets more productive. And unfortunately that includes the attackers, right? So they're doing that. What are the organizations doing? They're trying to figure out what exposure do I have, what policy should I put in place and how are people even using this stuff? And that is all over the map right now because you've got some early adopters that are being very aggressive. You've got some folks that are just outright banning it and their organizations, right? So you've got a huge spread there. And the defenders, I think are actually being really, really smart about this. The folks that we talked to, and again, we have the privilege to serve some really, really elite missions, right? We're a bizarrely kind of high-end focused organization from that perspective. We see defenders already going in and saying, help me translate alerts into English. That simple, practical, valuable doesn't incur hallucinations in these other AI problems. What is the wisdom of the crowds of how I would start investigating the following things? If I've got distributed DNS exfiltration, where do I begin? But they also know that after that, you have to kind of stop because the Gen AI, remember, it's predicting the next letter of an answer for you. It's generating stuff. It's generating stuff, right? It's actually not good at generating like interesting detective hypothesis. This is way, way too hard of a problem to ask a Gen AI machine. So if you go down the wisdom of the crowds and it doesn't work, it's back on you as an answer responder, as a defender. The Gen AI, you get a massive spike in hallucinations.  Well, the human in the loop is critical here because then that's the expertise that's being augmented and the heavy lifting from AI facilitates the human to be better. So when they get better, what's next? What's so, some reasoning happens on the human level. Are there other AI techniques coming or there to go to the next level? I mean, we've seen this in chess. Well documented. Humans plus computers against computers. Humans plus AI is better than AI by itself. We've seen that. Where's this profession go next? Because I'm just thinking there's going to be a creative class emerging out of in the cyber around how to defend and attack, counter-attack or counter-measures. There are 100% is and I think it's important to realize that the defender and the defender's needs is not a one size fits all, right? So let's kind of break this down a little bit. You've got incredibly high end defenders from very large organizations, right? Hundreds, maybe even thousands of people that are actually just in the InfoSec team or maybe even just in the sock. They've got one set of needs. Let's contrast that if you've got maybe five or 10 people in your security team and you're trying to cover the same scope as what those incredibly elite defenders are doing. So I think the answer of what's next on Gen AI is a little bit different for those two groups. In the really high end, we see folks already doing alert translation, doing investigation guidance, even doing like taking SIM queries and doing draft SIM queries using the Gen AI, right? And I think, frankly, there's going to be incredibly broad adoption across the technology landscape of AI accelerated workflows and security to serve kind of those high end needs. I think there's going to be a tremendous amount of that. And that stage two thing you mentioned earlier also can be automated detection. There's another good point. I got to ask you about the use cases. Obviously we're kind of seeing AI as that third inflection point. Web, mobile, AI that changes the app environment to underlying infrastructure and the user experience expectation on good, bad, and ugly. As AI comes out, you're seeing things like vishing, voice phishing, as popular. Now you can see voice activation. Now you have all these new ways to social engineer. I mean, a lot of the companies coming out of the MGM and others is that the LinkedIn is a great environment to get that kind of identity based bait and switch. And then the social engineer, and then you get vishing, voice phishing. What's next? What's the next? This is like a whole nother level. It's a whole nother level. I mean, it's next level. It is, and I think it's going to continue the speed problem, right? And again, the paradox, right? We talked about this dwell time challenge earlier of ransomware that's super fast and destructive and the APT stuff that's super slow and kind of sinister, right? And so take that into the gen AI and like the image generation, the voice generation, exactly what you're saying, that's all going to accelerate the pace and the speed of attack development. It's not necessarily going to create new attack types. It's going to accelerate the development of the existing ones, right? So now we're going to get kind of these two things, right? We're going to get things like ransomware that phishing effectiveness and vishing and we're even, we're having to invent new acronyms. That's never a good thing, right? It's going to accelerate there. So then you need defenders. They're going to focus on how can I actually radically improve the speed of response of my tier one and the automation of my tier one against these common but very fast attack types. So I think it puts a tremendous premium on speed. You're going to get the other thing too though, because if you can accelerate the attack development, you can accelerate all your attack developments. So I spoke to a CISO last year that had a really interesting strategy that kind of followed this twofold punch. He said he has two, one strategy that is I need to be able to respond to routine threats in six seconds, six seconds, right? That is fully automated, zero touch, right? You can use AI productively in this case, right? AI plus the automation platforms, plus the Sims, everything else. You can drive that. But on the other end, he said look at the kill chain. I want to go focus on lateral movement. I want to take that stage to the kill chain and I want to identify and drive to zero every vulnerability in lateral movement. Because that's actually where I get defender advantage. It's where I get most ability to see what the attacker's doing. I get the most bites at the apple. And if I can truncate that, if I can cut the kill chain right there, I buy myself the most time to find that attacker kind of in the rest of the kill chain. So I think it comes down as the Genai continues to kind of amplify in power. You're going to get attack velocity by the attackers. And that means the defenders have to almost get bipolar, right? And I mean that in a good sense of the word. And the thing about IT, Dave Vellante and I talked about, Rebecca and I were just talking about before we came on camera about the personnel, the workforce. The pace of play and security is so fast.  That's why they're getting hit with the ransomware, low hanging fruit for the hackers. But the pace of play is so high. The budgets are on increasing 10X. The talent pool is not increasing 10X. The data is increasing 10X plus, some say more. The hackers are increasing in groups and organized crime units at multiple levels. What's the answer on the personnel front? Well, I think it's a couple of things. Number one, I think constructively using Genai to offload the lower value, kind of more routine stuff from your team, that both gives them time to focus on the more advanced topics and frankly gives them time to train and learn the environment. This is such the core issue. To your point, pace. Let's ignore that super high end organization for a second. Let's come back to a team that might have five or 10 or 15 people in their security function. They're trying to cover an entire enterprise, all the different cloud services, all the different end points, network combination, zero trust, you name, pick your buzzword throw it all in the soup and mix it up, right? Those folks have a shockingly hard problem because they have the same attacker profile, the same kind of savvy, but they've got to be jack of all trades and master of them all. So if we can use the Genai pieces to kind of offload and automate a huge chunk of that team's routine work, so they can actually just breathe, catch up a little bit and then that'll enable them to do some of the threat hunting. And you and I were talking before we got live, like what's the kind of thing that I worry about in the background? It comes back to the government regulation question because there is a bunch of appropriate concern around how do you take, what is essentially dynamite and make sure that we're kind of making tunnels and not blowing people's hands off, right? That horrible analogy, but let's make sure the tool is used appropriately. But we've got this massive mismatch between the speed of the legislative engine and the speed of not just cyber, which has always been a problem, but the speed of tech development in AI. So how do we hit that balance where we're providing some guardrails around the same? But let's solve the problem, right? It's not a new problem. It's a new problem, yeah. The regulations BS in my opinion, because one, they can never get the speed. Number one, two, it's emerging too fast. They got to let it run, let chaos reign, reign in the chaos as Andy Groves famously said at one point. There's enough guardrails in place. And again, it's not like the government's helping companies. They have to hire their own militia, AKA the security department, not the IT department. So I mean, it's a wild west right now. It's really regulation, I think would kind of hurt things in my opinion. I think it would be incredibly hard. It's incredibly hard to regulate something that you don't really understand. And I think very few people truly understand what's going on. And the state of that changes every three to six months. Which is fantastic. And again, I think in terms of bets, I think if you've got a material player in cyber that doesn't have an AI-based kind of offering or integration by the end of this calendar year, it says what, three and a half months left, then they're either drunk or asleep at the wheel. I mean, and when things are moving that fast when you've got fairly nimble, fairly technically agile team is focused on exploiting. And I mean that in a good way, the capabilities of technology, and you compare that to the regulatory apparatus. Like, they're trying to figure out what the practitioners knew a year ago. That's kind of the state of research, which I think is just, it's normal, right? So it's just, it's an impedes mismatch that we got to figure out our way through. It's all exceedingly complex. Yes, yes. Well, Brian, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It's been a really interesting conversation. Thanks for having me, I really enjoyed it. Thank you much. Thank you. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of MYs. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. Stay tuned.


The United States welcomes competition and does not seek conflict with Beijing, but the country will speak up on issues like the South China Sea, Vice President Kamala Harris said on Thursday. She was speaking to a news conference marking the end of a trip to Southeast Asia. Harris attacked Beijing multiple times during the regional visit, and this was as Washington tries to rally regional partners to take on China's growing economic and military influence. The Chinese Foreign Ministry shot back on Wednesday. It accused the U.S. of meddling in regional affairs and disrupting peace. Harris also said evacuations in Afghanistan rather were dangerous and difficult, but the mission must be seen through. We welcome stiff competition. We do not seek conflict, but on issues like you raised the South China Sea, we're going to speak up. We're going to speak up when there are actions that Beijing takes that threaten the rules-based international order, again such as activity in the South China Sea. The issue in particular of freedom of navigation in that regard is a vital issue for this region. Our highest priority right now is evacuating American citizens, evacuating Afghans who worked with us, and Afghans who are at risk with a priority around women and children. We have made significant progress in that regard. I believe it's since August 14th, I believe we have evacuated over 80,000 people. And as you know, each day and night we continue to evacuate thousands of people, understanding that it is risky for them to be there. It is a dangerous and difficult mission, but it must be seen through and we intend to see it through. Hello. If you enjoyed the news, please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


So, yes, I went and saw Lita Battle Angel today and I treated myself to a Valentine's Day movie man. It was very special. Really? How was your date? I had the popcorn. I had the pop. Good? Good. It was very good. My date was great. She didn't complain. She didn't say anything. She didn't cost any money either. It was great. Perfect date. I know it's a version of the story. She's a humanoid cyborg who is found and brought back to life by a cyberneticist doctor on what can be said, just Earth and she's got memories or slowly she learns that she's got memories from a past life or her original programming and she becomes this warrior cyborg. I think I'm not spoiling anything by telling you that though because I think you can find that out best by watching a trailer. But yes, she comes back to life. She's discovering her abilities and what her past was and she eventually tries to rise up and defeat the people that destroyed or she was fighting originally in the first place. That's her goal, right? So at the end of the movie, I'm not going to spoil it for you. So that's what she's striving for is to get back to her original goal, her purpose. Her original goal was to defeat a company that was ruling the Earth and she was destroyed in battle and now that she's discovered herself again, that's what her primary initiative is to do that again. So her primary directive is to do this again. So that's what she's striving to do. That's a Cliff Notes version. I'm not going to go into the long version. Detail, not what details, what year does it take place? I think it's a good question. That's a good question. I want to say like 2700s, 2500s. And so this is a battle ravaged Earth. Yeah, it's like a utopian future where for some reason there's cities that are hovering above the Earth itself and there's humans that had obviously colonized Mars and they gained more advanced weaponry and technology and they build these cyborgs to come back and invade and destroy these other humans on Earth. And that's what Alita is. She's a cyborg that comes back to Earth. It was good. I did not like the ending and it's got a sequel written all over it. Oh boy. Oh yeah. Okay.  So I think a few weeks ago I said that it just seemed like it was like a Jupiter ascending kind of, you know, John Carter, like a really, really big blackbuster is just going to, you know, rip or pull back and fart, you know, do you think that it's going to have a negative reception or do you think it's going to have a more positive reception? No, I think it is. I think the hardest part for me to grasp at first was the fact that she looks, she's not a human and she's a cyborg obviously, but she looks so lifelike and the main difference is her eyes. Her eyes are really big and it's hard to look at for, you know, the first couple of minutes of the film. But then once you get used to it, it's fine.  Like you'd never even knew. Oh man, it was amazing. That's good. Oh. And the story was good, you know? And Kristoff Walts is in it. He pays a doctor. Jennifer Conley pays a doctor's wife. What's that guy's name from true detective, Marshali or? Ali. Yeah, Ali. I can't think of. I can't say his name. He plays. He plays. Yeah. He, he plays like the, the world at the ground level. He's like their boss. All right. You know, so he's in charge of everything on the ground. Oh, God. And what's the Ajax Ajax. Yes. You get, you know who I'm talking about. Yeah. He plays. Circuit. Yeah. He's kind of what they call warrior hunters and they track down people that like bounty hunters and they track down people that are killers on the main on the planter. Yeah. Okay. So that's what Ajax plays. All right. So, and that's what he's a villain. Yes.  All right.  How are we shocked? Right. And he plays the same character.  Like, and every time I heard his voice, all I could think is I just want to hear Deadpool like just saying, you've really got a piece of lettuce in your teeth. It's been bugging. It's been bugging. It's been bugging. So yeah. I liked it. And I, you know, it was long. I want to say it was, it was over two hours, I thought. And like I said, I was, I don't want to say I wasn't satisfied with the ending. I just, I wanted more, right? And I assume that's where the second movie is going to come in. I mean, they're going to have to make a sequel. But, but are they going to, but are they going to have to make a sequel because it's good or because they've just set it up for it? Hopefully both. Okay. Yes. Set up for a sequel. The guy that plays the main bad, the bad dude is, his name is Nova. And he lives in the city in the air and he's played by Edward Norton. Really?  He wasn't even advertised for the film. Yeah. And you know what?   That's exactly who I knew.  So, no, I liked it a lot. It was good. I, I, I recommend it. Go see it. You know, it was worth the 850 I paid for the matinee show. So perfect. How many bros would you give it? It's two bros, man. Two bros.  Zero one or two? If you want me to expand the range of bros, I'd probably give it, you know what? Zero to ten. I give it. Yeah. Six and a half. Six and a half. Seven bros. Yeah. I would definitely see it in the theater. It's just, it was made for. I saw in 3D too, which I'm not really crazy about the 3D movies. I can't. I can't. I think it really worked in this film. And there were several times where they're really high up in the air. Oh gosh. I was getting like shaky. My palms were sweating and I'm like, oh my God. I can't, I can't look at this. So, I mean, that just goes to show you how well that everything was shot and you know, it was really, it was really well made. So, but yeah, I would definitely go see it. I would see it on the biggest screen possible and I would see it in 3D because I think I think it'd be worth it in 3D. I don't think you'd get the same effect if you saw it in normal theaters. Right now, well, there's a lead a battle angel and nutshell there for it. Yeah. In R.D.'s rambling explanation, you're welcome. R.D.'s ramblings. We'll call that your movie review portion. R.D.'s ramblings. Nobody wants to hear that. R.D. ramblin. That's your pen name. R.D. ramblin. Ramblin R.D. That's a new podcast. R.D.'s rambles. Ramblin' on. I like it. Ramblin' on. There you go. Oh, God.


Live from Midtown Manhattan, it's theCUBE. Covering Big Data, New York City, 2017. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem sponsors. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live, the CUBE in New York City for Big Data NYC. This is our fifth year doing our own event, not with O'Reilly or Cloudera at Strata Data, which was Hadoop World, Strata Conference, Strata Hadoop, now called Strata. Probably called Strata AI next year. We're theCUBE every year, bringing all the great data and what's going on, entrepreneurs, VCs, thought leaders. We interviewed them and bring that to you. I'm John Furrier with our next guest, Greg Sands, who's the managing director and founder of Costano Adventures in Palo Alto. Started out as an entrepreneur himself, the single shingle out there. Now he's a big VC firm on the third fund. On the third fund? Third fund, how much in that fund? 175 million dollar fund.  I'm really great to see your success. Thanks very much. I mean, we're still very much an early stage boutique, focus on companies that change the way the world does business, but it is the case that we have a bigger team and a bigger fund to go do the same thing. Well, you've been great to work with. I've been following you, knowing each other for a while.  It's a few partners, but a lot of people helping companies, that's your ethos. That's what you're all about with your firm. Take a minute to just share the folks, the kinds of things you do and how you get involved in companies.  Yeah, absolutely. So the way we think of it is combining the craft of old school venture capital with a modern operating team. And so since most founders these days are product oriented, our job is to think like product people, not think like investors. So we think like product people, we do product level analysis, we do customer discovery, we do, we go right along on sales calls when we're making investment decisions. And then we do the things that great venture capitalists have done for years. And so for example, at Elation, who I know has been on the show today, we were able to incubate them in our office for a year. I had many conversations with Satyan after he'd sold the first two or three customers. Okay, who's the next person we hire? Who isn't a founder? Who's going to go out and sell? What does that person look like?  Do you hire someone for domain or do you hire someone for talent? And that's the thing that we love doing. Now we've actually built out an operating team. So a marketing partner, Martina Lauchenko and Jim Wilson as a sales partner to really help turn that into a program so that we can take these founders who find product market fit and say, how do we help you build the right sales process and marketing process, sales team and marketing team for your company, your customer, your product? Well, it's interesting you mentioned old school venture capital, I'll get into some of the dynamics that are going on in Silicon Valley, but it's important to bring that forward because now with cloud, you can get the critical mass on the flywheel on economics. You can see the visibility faster now. So the game of the old school venture capital is all the same, how do you get to cruising altitude? Whatever metaphor you want to use, the key was getting there. And sometimes it took a couple of rounds, but now you can get these companies with five million, maybe 10 million dollar funding. They could have unit economics visibility, scales in sight, then the scale game comes in. So that seems to be the secret trick right now in venture is don't overspend, keep evaluation in a range that allows you to look for multiple exits potentially or growth. Talk about that dynamic because this is like, I call it the hourglass, you get through the hourglass, you know, everyone's down here, but when you can sneak through and get the visibility on the economics, then you grow quickly. Absolutely, and I mean, it's exactly right. And I haven't heard the hourglass metaphor before, but I like it. You want to basically get through the narrows of product market fit in the beginnings of scalable sales and marketing. You don't need to know all the answers, but you can do that in a capital efficient way, building really solid foundations for future explosive growth. Look, everybody loves fast growth and big markets and being grow into it, but the number of people who basically don't build those foundations and say, go bigger, go home, and they take a ton of money and they go spend all the money doing things that just fundamentally don't work and they blow themselves up. Well, this is the hourglass problem. You have, once you get through that unit economics, then you have true scale and value will increase. That's right. Everybody wins there. So it's about getting through that and you can get through it faster with good mentoring, but here's the challenge that entrepreneurs fall into the trap. I call it the, I think I made it trap. And what happens is they think they're on the other side of the hourglass, but they still haven't even gone through the straight and narrow yet and they don't know it. And what they do is they overfund and implode. That seems to be a major trap I see a lot of entrepreneurs fall into. Well, I got a 50 million pre on my B round or some monster valuation and they get way too much cash and they're behaving as if they're scaling and they haven't even nailed it yet. Well, I think that's right. So there are certainly, there are stages of product market fit. And so I think sometimes people hit that first stage and they say, oh, I've got it. And they try to explode out of the gates. And we, in fact, I know one good example of somebody said, hey, by the way, we're doing great in field sales and our investors want us to go really fast.  And so we always preach crawl, walk, run, hire a couple, see how it works, right? In a new channel or a new category or an adjacent space. And I think that it's helpful to have an investor who has seen the whole picture to say, yeah, I know it looks like light at the end of the tunnel, but see how it's a relatively small dot. You still gotta go a little farther. And then the other thing I say is, look, don't build your company to feed your venture capitalist Sego, right? I mean, people do these big rounds at big valuations and the big dog investors say, go, go, go. But you're the CEO. Your job is to analyze the data and say, given what we know, how fast should we go? What's investments should we make? And you've got to own that. And I think sometimes our job is just to be the pulling guard and clear space for the CEO to make good decisions. So yeah, no, I'm a big fan. So my bias is pretty much out there. I love what you guys are doing. Tim Connors at the Pivot North is doing the same thing. Really adding value, getting down and dirty. But the question that entrepreneurs always ask me and talk privately, not about you, but in general, I don't want the VC to get in the way. I don't want them to preach to me.  I want added value. But again, I don't want the preaching. I don't want them to get in the way because that's the fear. I'm not saying that's the same about the VC in general, but that's kind of the mentality of an entrepreneur. I want someone who's going to help me be in the boat with me, but not be in my way. How do you address that concern to the founders who think, not think like that, but might have a fear? Well, by the way, I think it's a legitimate fear. And I think it actually is uncorrelated with added value. I think the idea that the board has certain responsibilities and management has certain responsibilities is incredibly important. And I think, you know, I can speak for myself in saying I'm quite conscious of not crossing that line. I think you talk. You got to do it, you got to build a return. I mean, that's the other thing. No, but ultimately I'd say to an entrepreneur, I'd just say, hey, look, call references and by the way, hear 30 names and phone numbers and call any one of them. Because I think the people who are, so venture capital, know it all in the boardroom, telling CEOs what to do destroys value. It's sand in the gears, it's bad for the company. And so some of my, when I talk about being a pull and guard for the CEO, that's what I'm talking about, which is blocking people who are destructive. And rolling a block for a touchdown, kind of use the metaphor, adding value. That's the key then. That's why I wanted to get that out there because most guys don't get that nuance in the entrepreneur, especially the younger ones. So it's good and important. Okay, let's talk about culture. Obviously in Silicon Valley, I get reading this more in the Waymo guy and that writing it. That's the Silicon Valley. It's not crazy. There's a lot of great people in Silicon Valley. You're one of them. The culture, certainly in an innovative culture, there's been some things in the press. Inclusion and diversity obviously is super important. This whole programmer thing that's been kind of kicked around. How are you dealing with all that? Because this is a cultural shift, but I think it's being made out more than it really is. But there's still our core issues. Your thoughts on the whole inclusion and diversity and this whole programmer blowback thing. Yeah, well, so I think the, so first of all, really important issues. Glad we're talking about them and we all need to get better. And to me, the question for us has been, what world do we play? And because I would say it is a relatively small subset of the tech industry and the venture capital industry. At the same time, the behavior that has become public is appalling, right? It's appalling and totally unacceptable. And so then the question is, okay, how can we be a part of the standup part of the ecosystem? And some of which is calling things out when we see them though frankly we work with and hang out with people where we don't see them that often. And then part of it is, how do we find a couple of ways to contribute meaningfully? So for example, this summer we ran what we call the Coast to No Access Fellowship intentionally trying to provide first opportunity and venture capital for people who traditionally haven't had as much access. We created an event in the spring called Seat at the Table, really particularly around women in the tech industry and it went so well that we're running it in New York on October 19th. So if you're a woman in tech in New York, we'd love to see you then. And we're just trying to find a couple of places. You're doing it in an authentic way though. You're not really doing it from a promotional standpoint. No, we're just. It's legit. Yeah, we're just trying to do, pick off a couple of things that we can do so we can be on the side of the good guys. So I guess what you're saying is just high-five integrity and be part of the solution not the problem. That's right. And by the way, both of these initiatives were ones that were kicked off in late 2016. So it's not a reaction to things like binary capital and the problems at Uber, both of which are appalling, but. Stuff awareness is critical. Okay, let's get that to the nuts and both of the real reason why I wanted you to come on. To find out how much money you have to spend for the entrepreneurs that are watching. Give us the update on the last fund. So you got a new fund, you just closed. The new fund. Fund three, you got your other funds that are still out there that have some funds reserved. Which is only. So what's the number of them out? How much are you writing checks for? Give the whole thesis. Absolutely, so we're an early-stage investor so we lead Series A and seed financings in companies that change the way the world does business. So up and down the stack, a business-facing software, data-driven applications, machine learning and AI-driven applications. But the filter is changing the way the world works. Yes, but in particular the way the world does business. You can think of it as a business-facing software stack, right? We're not social media investors. It's not what we know, it's not what we're good at. And it includes security and management and the data stack. And it applies an emerging tech. That's right. And every crazy idea in between. That's right, absolutely. And so we'll participate in or lead seed financings, as most typically are half a million to maybe one and a quarter. And we'll lead Series A financing, small ones might be two or two and a half million dollars at the outer edge, just probably a six million dollar check. We're just opening up in the next couple of days, a thousand square feet of incubation space at World Headquarters in Palo Alto. Nice. So Elation, Acme Ticketing, and ZenIQ are companies that we invested in. What location is that gonna be at? That's near the Fills in downtown Palo Alto 164 staff. And those three companies are ones where we effectively invested at Formation and incubated them for a year. We love doing that. I have to hang out at Fills more and get the data. Absolutely. And so you got some funds. What else do you have going on? 175 million? Yeah, so fund one was a $100 million fund and then fund two was a $135 million fund. And the last investment of fund two, which we announced about three weeks ago, was called Roadster. So it's e-commerce enablement for the modern dealership. So Ani Channel and Mobile First infrastructure for auto dealers. We have already closed and had the first board meeting for the first new investment of fund three, which isn't yet announced, but in the land of computer vision and deep learning. So a couple of the subjects that we care deeply about and spent a lot of time thinking about it. And average check size for the A round against C to A. What do you normally do? The average for the C is half a million to one and a quarter and probably average for a series A is four, four or five. And you'll lead A's. And we will lead A's. Okay, great. What's the coolest thing you're working on right now that gets you excited? It doesn't have to be a portfolio company, but the research you're doing, think tires you're kicking in subjects or domains. You know, so honestly, one of the great benefits of the venture capital businesses that I get up and my neurons are firing right away every day. And I do think that, for example, one of the things that we love is all of the agile infrastructure. And so we've got our friends at VictorOps that are in the middle of that space and the thinking about how the modern programmer works, how everybody, people that talk about DevOps, security is very much on our radar.  So she's just joined Bug Crowd as the CEO and Casey moves over to CTO. And the word bug bounty was just entered into the Oxford Dictionary for the first time last week. So that to me is the ultimate in category creation. So security and DevOps tools are among the things that we really love. And bounties will become the norm as more and more decentralized apps hit the scene. Are you doing anything on decentralized applications? I'm not saying blockchain in particular, but blockchain like obviously distributed computing, you're well versed on. Blockchain will have an impact in your area. Blockchain will have an impact. And we just spent an hour talking about it in the context of our offsite at the Costa Nova Lodge in Pescadero. I felt like it was important that we go there and digging into it. I think actually the edge computing is actually more actionable for us right now. Given the things that we're interested in and we're doing and it is just fascinating how compute centralizes, then decentralizes, centralizes, then decentralizes again. And I do think that there are a set of things that are fascinating about what you process at the edge and what you send back to the core. As Pat Gelsinger said on the queue, if you're not out in front of that next wave, you drift with a lot of big waves coming in. You've seen a lot of waves, you're a part of one that changed the world, Netscape browser, wrote a business plan for that first product manager on that, congratulations. Now you're at a whole other generation. You ready? Absolutely, I'm totally ready. I'm ready to go. Greg Sands here in theCUBE in New York City, part of Big Data NYC, more live coverage with theCUBE after this short break. Thanks for watching.


IWX is the information warfighting exercise currently located at Camp Upsher within Quantico, Virginia. IWX is a great venue for the international community. It's the only exercise of its kind. We have seven different countries here, split between the war game and the tackling, and really what we're looking for is cross-pollination of tactics, techniques, and procedures related to information operations and psychological operations. So the purpose for me at the planning level of IWX would just be to have a better understanding of how to properly build the proper conop, how to brief a proper conop in case brief, and also how to look through all the information to see what's relevant to psychological operations. That differs from the execution phase by going from doing everything, planning and all the research and all the back work goes into it, to then actually executing it and doing face-to-face engagements and actually being able to execute what you were planning in the last minute. A huge benefit we gain, we get to see how our partner nations plan operations. We get to learn from their planning process, which is very important, to see how they organize a methodic approach to solving tactical and operational problems. So the fact that we can observe the way that they both plan and the way they brief, that gives us experience when we have to conduct coalition operations with our allies and partners. We have a sense of where they're coming at in terms of solving different problems. It also gives us a familiarity with different planning processes that we can improve our own. That amount of interoperability will pay huge dividends should we find ourselves in conflict.


Hey guys, this is Nate, AKA The Foot Accountant. Welcome back to the channel. We had a really nice market rise yesterday with not a lot of content on a Monday at FIFA Ultimate Team, fresh out of the Weekend League, where there was a lot of sell-off, squad-battery awards, pre-order pack supply, definitely impacted the market. So I want to talk about some of the cards that rose today and especially talk about what could be happening today on Tuesday with UEFA market matchups possibly coming. We have UCL games again on tap. We talked about it in the market outlook a little bit yesterday about what some of these cards could do, especially considering the road to the finals. But I want to talk about just the stuff that happened on the market as well with some of these record breakers because they go out of packs today. Best of team of the week cards go out of packs today and how you could be making some coins in this market right now as well. And do we expect anything related to team of the group stage today or tomorrow? I'm not sure. But we'll talk about that in this video as well. So first things first, a lot of cards got low last night with squad-battery rewards and this is, this is like suspect numero uno right here with this Fabregas record breaker card. Last night at rewards down to 79,000 coins basically on both consoles around 80,000 coins and he bounced back over 100 on the Xbox and he's up to 93,94 on the PlayStation. That was a nice bounce back on Fabregas. I got a bunch of those myself at 81, 82, 83K and I sold them too early, man. I sold them before 6PM. I sold them around like the 89,90,000 coin range on most of those. So it was just a small bit of profit for me. I could have held out for more as he went almost up to 100K right after today when there was no content at the 6PM timeframe. That happened also to Jamie Vardy and this guy actually had the craziest rise out of everybody. So down to 415K after rewards, went all the way to 530 on both consoles and is now kind of back down a little bit on both consoles as well. It kind of reached that peak. I think there were some people today that saw no content and they went out and they actually bought more cards because a lot of stuff peaked like an hour or two after the 6PM content drop today. But we saw this across the entire market not just with these record breaker cards. We have got Inforums, Road to the Finals and everything that is just flying at the moment. Not everything is flying but a lot of stuff is rebounded very well. Quadrado's 230, he was 215, right? But Onhold was close to 200, he's back at 220. A lot of Inforums have bounced back nicely as well. Not all of them, not all of them at all but a lot of cards have and some of these really meta and more rare items have bounced back very, very well today. Especially the cards that were in best of team of the week. Some of these guys bounced to Rashford, 720. Renato Sanchez is up like 20,000 coins at 217. Walker's up 20,000 coins. Benyeter is up, Conte is up a little bit too. So rule breakers have gone up themselves. Icons have bounced back a decent amount today as well. Excuse me. Honestly, some of the gold cards have been a little bit of a let down in terms of watching cards that have risen up over the market in the past time period over this no content day. I had some marshmallows on my transfer list that I bought at 55K with a hunter during squad battle rewards. I got one at a lucky lazy sale at 62K earlier but this guy is literally around the same price. Same thing with most of the gold cards. Rashford's kind of the only one that has bounced but again he was out of packs or he is out of packs until today at 6PM just because of the fact that the best of team of the week at Rashford is the only, that's the card that has impacted on the inform. So this guy's at 220, he was 210 last night so there was a really nice bounce back today on the market especially on some of the icons. Now I flipped one icon today, I got this, where'd it go? I sold an Estian today. I'm not sure why this icon is sitting here back behind the fiber gas but I sold this Estian today and I was watching a decent amount of icons on the 59th minute because there were deals popping up and these cards fluctuated a lot. This Petit was down at 1.02 mil and is now back at 1.1 where he usually is. A lot of fluctuation today. Macalene was in low 800s. After seeing him on last night's video and thinking that 8.20 was a good price when it actually wasn't. This guy was almost under 800,000 coins today. This Ian Wright baby card fluctuated from like 2.90 to 3.20 where it looks like he's almost 3.20 right now at the moment. A lot of other icons I watched today. Butragueño, Socrates best, Mateus Del Pierro. Just kind of watching those icons around the one mil coin range. I probably should have bought this card. Yeah man, a one mil mid bid. This Roberto Carlos bro. Roberto Carlos every year in FIFA is like an absolute flex of a left back. An absolute flex of a left back. This is what this card is in FIFA bro. And this one came up today for 999,000 coins. I did not buy it because I'd seen on his recent sales that he had not been selling too much over like 1.05 and I was like that's not really flippable so I did not buy the card. But unfortunately I should have because it was a great buy in hindsight. This Alberto at 900K, 950 so I would have needed to see like maybe an 880 or an 890 to get interested with that card possibly just to be safe on some good profit. But a lot of icons were fluctuating today. A lot of these cards were flippable and they were buyable. I would expect that to continue over the next couple of days. Now if you had some record breaker cards like again Vardy, Fabergas. If you have not taken the coins on those yet one thing we might see today is these guys do go out of packs. Yes, but they've kind of dropped a little bit. They've dropped a little bit from where their peaks were, right? Vardy right now is just under 500,000 coins. He was at 530. You know, you had Fabergas at almost 100K. He's at about 91,000 coins at the moment. And now I don't know about some of the other ones. You know, like we have Donnaruma at 78. Some people are shouting this Donnaruma as a good investment out of packs because he obviously links to the level 30 storyline, Rull Magnoli. This guy was extinct at 70K. I think yesterday during rewards are not extinct, but at discard at 70K. He's already up to 79,000 coins. Because of that perfect link people are already starting to prepare for. So that's one thing to keep an eye on today. If any of these rule breakers, for some reason, drop at all today into the 6PM content range. That could be a buy because they could bounce up out of packs a little bit more, especially since these guys are really rare. And the real only supply came from the weak and weak lighting rounds. And they didn't have any rewards open with these guys in packs, which does limit their supply. And not many people are playing squad battles. So there's not a lot of supply for those cards there as well. Now let's talk about today on Tuesday, what could be happening. I already started to mention it with a couple things. We talked about these road to the final cards that have boomed in price as expected into the games today, which we do have some nice matchups today. We've got Atletico and Bayern. Even Muchen Glabak and Milan, I'm interested in that game because Muchen Glabak has been on fire. Milan has not. And my boy Eric's in place for Milan. But that's a fun game today. I think the Atletico and Bayern game is like the most interesting. Liverpool, Ajax could be a good one too because Ajax need points desperately, desperately to try to get into, to stay in to the, to go on to the knockout rounds. But a lot of these cards are up, right? Davies at 560, Klossmann's up 20K. Oblox even up 20,000 coins. Team one cards don't seem to be up as much except for some of these Europa Leagues, right? And Diddy 274, Salah is 1-5. That's up a lot in price. But the road to the final, set two. Hazard yesterday. Eden Hazard yesterday was like 750K. He's 850 up 100,000 coins. Cisoco is up over 120K from where he was before the weekend. Draxler, Akaji, Kulobali, Kessie and Portu all again continue to rise higher. Portu is rising slower of course because of the right wing, Alessandro, that is out. But of course a lot of these cards have risen up and that was what we expected. So if you bought any of these on the weekend like sell off yesterday or even on Saturday, you're chilling. Now again, what we saw last week was a lot of these cards actually dropped off after their games, Real Madrid playing Shakhtar today. I forget, okay, Group B. Real Madrid playing Shakhtar, right? Of course, Real Madrid winning would put them more, most likely in a position to possibly get that upgrade. I don't know if it would technically be guaranteed. 10 points, if Muchengladbach won, they would be on 11 points and then basically it would be over from there going into game week six. So after this week, there's gonna be a lot more cards like possibly Hazard where you would say, okay, since they won this week or after this week's games, they might have that guaranteed upgrade coming for them, right? People will know for a fact that they're going to be upgraded, but I still think that even though you might see a slight rebound, if the card's already up a lot like Hazard, I would take the cash.  I would still take the money on that, I think, today. And then probably a little bit of a drop off and then maybe a slight rise into match week six when the cards actually do get upgraded. We'll see what happens with that later on this week. But if you have roads to the finals that are up a lot, especially that Hazard, now a card that I might hold would be a card like Draxler because he was 60K, PSG won. He's went back down to 50, he's back up to 56. If PSG went again, I think this card could be undervalued a bit at the moment. If you do think any of these are undervalued, that would be the only scenario where you would want to hold the card. You know, Zacaria, I don't know, 232. It looks like they're gonna be going through. He's gonna go to an 86 rated card. It's gonna be saucy. Just be careful with some of these cards. If you wanna take the cash, if you're up a lot like Salah, 15, just take the cash please, in my opinion.  I guess not today, but tomorrow and Wednesday. Teams and cards could lose as well, right? PSG beat Man United and then, uh-oh, it's not looking as good for Man U and that would make a card like Rashford possibly drop off and lose some value. So just be careful with that sort of stuff. Today, again, you weigh from our key matchups. I'm not really good with predicting what teams are gonna be in, but if I had to choose some of the hype games from this week, I don't know if Atlético and Bayern could be in, but I would probably choose that or maybe Liverpool, Ajax for the Tuesday game, for the Wednesday game.  There's a couple options on the Wednesday game. I'm not sure what's in Marquis matchups right now or what they've done in the past couple of weeks for UEFA Marquis matchups. One thing I do remember is last week when they released UEFA Marquis matchups, they held it on us, man. They released the content. The market started to drop. People started investing in golds to flip, right?  We started buying, I think I was buying Martial's last week and he started to rise a little bit and then 30 or 40 minutes after, 30 or 40 minutes later, I'm actually gonna go find the tweet right now from last week. 30 or 40 minutes after that, what we saw was EA put out those UEFA Marquis matchups and they kind of like hit us with the supply. Yeah, the delayed supply, this was the tweet right here. Oh, last week was the icon SPC, man. That's what it was. Last week on Tuesday was the base icon. This is the tweet, EA with a delayed supply. They released this, what time did I tweet this? At 1.51 p.m., so that would have been 51 minutes after the actual content dropped. So we got the icon SPC that was unrepeatable. I said, no UEFA Marquis matchups and then boom, they released UEFA Marquis matchups a little bit later after that. So just be careful if it does not come out right away today at 6 p.m. UK time on the content drop. Be careful because there might be a delayed release by a few minutes. I don't know if EA plans to do anything big today. I don't think they do. It's basically the end of the promo. So I don't expect any big time content, just kind of the end of this Black Friday promotion and all the stuff that has gone on in this last week with FIFA or this last week end with that. Now, one thing I will say today is if you see panic selling on any areas of the market headed into 6 p.m. And what areas might you see panic selling on? Possibly some golds and possibly this current team of the week. You might see some panic selling on these cars because people will be expecting them to get supplied from Marquis matchups. You know, Holland, Carrasco, Dignay, Neuer and I guess probably Lukaku as well would be my favorites as a rise out of packs. I know these guys got supplied a lot from team of the week packs on tradable, all the lightning rounds, all the flash SBCs. A lot of these cards have a lot of supply compared to a normal team of the week. But I think this Neuer card's gonna be very rare at some point and I like this guy as an investment. At some point in this year, this card's gonna go back up from maybe not his lowest point right now but maybe during team of the year or something. I still feel like this is a very valuable card in this game. Carrasco is already up, I think like six or 7,000 coins. Yeah, he was like 30K on the weekend. He was 30K this morning actually during rewards. He's already up to 37,000 coins. Very popular card from this week's team of the week. A lot of games played, 2,000 thumbs up. That passes the hype check. So just kinda watch if there's panic selling on this team of the week. It might be a potential timeframe to pick up on some of those at a little bit of an undercut in price. Same thing with record breakers. I don't know why people would panic sell record breakers but that could be some that you see today as well. And of course, SBC Fodder. Let's talk about this. SBC Fodder is very inflated. There's a lot of SBCs that are out right now. Icons of course, the base icon upgrade, V2. And of course some player SBCs. I don't think that you waive a marquee matchups would really affect SBC Fodder price today. I really don't think that it would that much. Maybe a little bit of a drop unless EA juices the pack weight. But right now it's just kinda coin suck central in the SBC section with these high-rated being up three, four, 5,000 coins a card from where they were two weeks ago. At least the 86s. And some of these cards are up even more. Oblak 59,000 coins. He was in the 40s a couple weeks ago. Even 83s are at 2.2K. After today, there's really not that much demand for 83 rated cards because the team of the week SBC I think goes away. And if it doesn't go away, the best of team of the week cards are out of packs. I guess technically you could do a team week SBC still and try to hit Ronaldo. But I think that there will be a lot less hype for the current team of the week upgrade. It still is out for two days. So I guess we can wait and see what happens with this next team of the week. But I feel like 83s will lose a bit of their hype because there's just not gonna be as many cards to pack from that SBC. So again, a lot of the market did rise today if you made coins, GGs, icon trading, flipping on these out-of-pack special cards. I was talking about the Eurente, right? We were talking about this Eurente card like multiple times this past week, the rule breakers. This guy was 230,000 coins on Saturday, Sunday. Right now he's 245, which is kind of low because Fulpin was saying that he was just 261. So I might have to get interested with a little flip situation here on Eurente if he was actually just 261 a little bit ago because that's kind of how he was during the weekend league at one point. He went from 240 today to 260. He hit 260 twice today. So if I would see this any lower than 245, I'm gonna get interested. Any lower than this, probably like a 240, I would get very interested in a possible flip to 260 because these cards are very rare and that is the perfect example of the type of trading that you could be doing right now is the fluctuation trading with the out-of-packs cards. I don't think we have anything that causes a lot of panic today. It honestly seems like a quiet day on the market from Monday to Tuesday and I'm fine with it. I really am fine with the quiet day as it was yesterday with some of the 82 plus packs. We had, yes, we did have some of the grindable SBC content with the 81 to 87 that was released as a part of the upgrade packs that are out right now. I guess if you're somebody who had a lot of time today or maybe even on Tuesday morning, you have a chance at doing this 81 to 87 upgrade wherever it is and it's very craftable and you could probably, if you did it long enough, craft some team of the week packs or you could craft an icon SBC if you're really stuck at it. So you can put bronze and silvers into this. That's why it's very craftable with BPM and then the bronze to silver to gold upgrade or bronze to silver upgrade with five gold players and 45 chems. So if you're somebody who loves to grind the menus and do a lot of those packs, you can even pack some good team of the week cards from those packs right there while best of team of the week is still in packs. So that's kind of the market outlook for this week, boys. Not this week, but for today, that's just kind of a market talk for today. A little bit of a longer video. Apologize for that, since there's not a lot going on, but I just want to kind of explain it all, talk through it. Champions League today, good luck if your team's playing. Should be some good games. Road to the finals will be very popular in footpin and we might see some rise out of packs a little bit right away if there's no big time content and if nothing happens today with some of those record breakers. So if you do see a low point in any panic selling on record breakers this morning, I'd give you a thumbs up to maybe buy a few of those. So if you enjoyed this video, smash the thumbs up on it, comment down below if you have any questions and subscribe to the channel if you're new. It's been Nathan Ford Accountant, catch you guys later. Peace out.


Getting a contract maintenance program involves two phases, development and implementation. Development was covered in the previous program. In this program we will look at implementation. It includes solicitation and award procedures and effective supervision of the contract. There are five components to the solicitation and award stage. Contractor interest, contractor pre-qualification, pre-bid conferences, bid analysis, and contract award. Agency personnel have many contacts with outside contractors at informal meetings, contractor association meetings, or even job sites. Use this time to determine if there is contractor interest in a contract maintenance program. Another method is by written survey. Most contractors respond indicating an interest in contract maintenance. In some parts of the world, contractors may not have highway maintenance experience. In this case, the agency should hold maintenance workshops to tell contractors the kind of expertise they will have to provide. When the agency decides the contractor community is interested and capable, it's time for the next stage. Contractor pre-qualification. The process begins with a formal advertisement in newspapers and trade journals to notify the contractor community of the contract maintenance program. Before the agency begins the bidding process, it should pre-qualify a group of potential bidders. That means reviewing four issues. Financial capability, bonding capability, management capacity, and past performance. The key financial issue is whether the contractor can finance the cash flow requirements. The agency can ease this burden with a timely payment process. Maintenance contracts, like construction contracts, should have a performance guarantee. It depends on local laws and regulations, but usually the agency must make sure the contractor has the backing of a financial institution, such as a bank, insurance, or bonding company. If the contractor defaults on performance or is unable to pay its subcontractors, the financial institution guarantees the performance and payments. The agency should also review contractor's management plans. It can provide some guidelines for the plan, but contractors must be able to develop a detailed management plan. It indicates they have prepared themselves to perform the contract. Finally, the agency should review contractor past performance, paying special attention to related maintenance work. And it should check on the relationship between the contractor and available subcontractors. When the pre-qualification process is complete, there should be a formal short list of interested and capable contractors. Normally, an agency will hold two mandatory pre-bid conferences before receiving bids. The newspaper and trade journal advertisements should contain the dates of the conferences and the bid deadline. The agency should hold the first conference two to three weeks before the bid deadline. At this conference, agency representatives distribute and review bid packages. Numbering the bid packages is a good way for them to keep track of contractor interest. They should make sure contractors understand the agency's objectives, their long-term goals. The conference will probably last for two to four hours, depending on how much the contractors understand and how many questions they have. The second pre-bid conference normally occurs one week after the first. This meeting usually narrows the number of interested contractors and helps the agency determine if there is enough interest to continue. If most or all contractors have lost interest, it is time to reevaluate how to proceed. At this conference, representatives review the bid package again, answer any questions, and give a thorough description of the award's process. Before bid analysis begins, the agency should establish a formal process for reviewing, analyzing, and awarding the contracts. During bid analysis, reviewers determine if bidders have adhered to the bidding requirements, have the capability to perform the contract, and recommend a contractor for the award. This process should include checking for signs of bidding collusion and bidder responsiveness. After selecting a bidder, there are some final checks, a pre-award survey of the contractor. The survey includes contacting the contractor's guaranteeing institution for confirmation, the contractor's bank, and any other references that help establish the credibility of the contractor's bid. Next is one more discussion with the contractor. The agency should confirm that the bid is still a serious one, and that the contractor is still interested in receiving the award. Now the agency should formally award the contract and notify all bidders about the award. There is still a formal contract signing, legal postings, and so forth, depending on local requirements, and scheduling of a pre-work conference. At the same time as some agency people are going through the solicitation and award process, others should be finalizing the contract supervision procedures. These procedures must be ready when the award is made to a contractor. They include administration procedures, quality control program, payment procedures, contract modifications, and training. Administration procedures involve contract administration work, such as processing and control of emergency work requests, especially with regard to safe traffic operation during the emergency, and internal documentation requirements. These procedures should be ready for the pre-work conference with the contractor. The agency staff must receive training and administration procedures prior to the work beginning. Training usually includes workshops with case studies involving actual administrative procedures. The agency should prepare a detailed quality control program before starting work. This program should clearly state the agency's and the contractor's responsibilities. It should include procedures for daily, weekly, and monthly monitoring. It should establish the number of inspectors, their geographic responsibility, and documentation requirements. It should also include documentation forms, along with instructions for filling them out. There should be procedures and schedules for workshops on inspection and contracting. And the program should include ways the contractor can maintain quality, such as making sure the grass is cut to the proper height. Let's look at a typical program. In British Columbia, the program asks, is the highway system being maintained to the standard specified? To answer the question, it uses a system of sampling inspections and tests to determine compliance with specific quality control requirements. Sampling is a cost-effective way to establish compliance. The program also asks, what do we do if maintenance is not to standards? To answer this question, the agency developed procedures to deal with such problems. The procedures are in the contract provisions. The greatest motivator from the contractor's point of view is practical payment procedures. These are perhaps the most critical and necessary procedures. The Australian program includes detailed practical payment procedures. Their program calls for a 14-day payment period for routine maintenance work. It requires retention of funds for minor omissions or defects. There are progress payments for work expected to take longer than one month. And there are special procedures for payment of large material purchases. Most of the successful contract maintenance programs have used elements of the Australian model. The contract should include a section on measurement for payment or it should be included in the performance standards. Measurement for routine maintenance is based on a percentage of the work agreed upon for a lump sum. Measurement for the periodic maintenance is based on measured quantities such as tons of asphalt. Contract modification procedures must be simple, understandable and clearly established early on to avoid adversarial legal situations. As a minimum, there should be change order procedures and renewal or non-renewal of options procedures. These procedures should state how the contractor is notified, the timing and the effect on contractor payments. Finally, the contract should have legal procedures for processing contract misinterpretations, disputes and terminations. And they should be reviewed at the pre-work conference. Agency and contractor personnel training is critical to the success of a contract maintenance program. Regularly scheduled workshops, self-study and informal training sessions for both agency and contractor personnel are necessary. They must be comfortable with all aspects of the program to solve problems quickly and to ensure smooth operation of the entire process. In this program, we have covered the implementation phase of creating a contract maintenance program. We covered stage one, solicitation and award procedures and stage two, effective supervision of the contract. There are five components to the solicitation and award stage. Contractor interest, contractor pre-qualification, pre-bid conferences, bid analysis and contract award. Agency personnel should use time at informal meetings, contractor association meetings or even job sites to determine if there is contractor interest in a contract maintenance program. Another method is by written survey. Most contractors respond indicating an interest in contract maintenance. In some parts of the world, contractors may not have highway maintenance experience. In this case, the agency should hold maintenance workshops to tell contractors the kind of expertise they will have to provide. Before the agency begins the bidding process, it should pre-qualify a group of potential bidders. That means reviewing four issues, financial capability, bonding capability, management capacity and past performance. Normally an agency will hold two mandatory pre-bid conferences before receiving bids. It should hold the first conference two to three weeks before the bid deadline. At this conference representatives distribute and review bid packages. The second pre-bid conference normally occurs one week after the first. At this conference representatives review the bid package again, answer any questions and give a thorough description of the awards process. Before bid analysis begins, the agency should establish a formal process for reviewing, analyzing and awarding the contracts. During bid analysis, reviewers determine if bidders have adhered to the bidding requirements, have the capability to perform the contract and recommend a contractor for the award. After selecting a bidder, there are some final checks, a pre-award survey of the contractor. The survey includes contacting the contractor's bonding company for confirmation, the contractor's bank and any other references that help establish the credibility of the contractor's bid. Next is one more discussion with the contractor. The agency should confirm that the bid is still a serious one and that the contractor is still interested in receiving the award. At the same time as some agency people are going through the solicitation and award process, others should be finalizing the contract supervision procedures. These procedures must be ready when the award is made to a contractor. They include administration procedures, quality control program, payment procedures, contract modifications and training. The greatest motivator from the contractor's point of view is practical payment procedures. The Australian program includes a 14-day payment period, retention of funds for minor omissions, progress payments for work taking longer than a month and special payment procedures for large material purchases. The contract modification process must be simple, understandable and clearly established early on to avoid adversarial legal situations. As a minimum, there should be change order procedures and renewal or non-renewal of options procedures. These procedures should state how the contractor is notified, the timing and the effect on contractor payments. Training is critical to the success of a contract maintenance program. Frequent workshops, self-study and informal training sessions will help personnel to review all procedures in detail. For more information on this or other IRF videotapes, write to the International Road Federation or call the numbers on your screen.


What is going on with Bitcoin? So honestly not much has happened since our last update on Friday as today in the United States It is a holiday. So pretty much the action today the volume today is very similar to a weekend So today's video will be short and sweet as we take a look at a few different Indicators and some on-chain data to give us an idea of what is really going on in the market right now So let's go ahead and jump right into today's video Hey, what's up Jay here and welcome back to Bitcoin daily bringing you guys the best tips tutorials and ideas to help you guys become profitable and successful investors the goal of this channel is to empower you guys the community with the knowledge and Resources to help you take your wealth up to that next level So if you guys are new to the channel consider hitting that subscribe button and turning on those notifications Also, don't forget to smash the like button on the video And if you have any questions regarding anything that we cover here, of course drop it in the comments as you guys can see ever since We had this drop on back in January 5th We've basically been trading within this range You can pretty much draw a straight line through it and you'll kind of see this range We've been trading with and we had the the possible Breakout attempt here and then we got sent right back into the range, right? So what's interesting is that it has been respecting this? Ascending support level here, which is a good thing and then we have the flat top resistance So basically what this looks like is where it will kind of continue doing something like that It will continue to compress volume will continue to go down as you guys can see it's been doing here lately Bollinger bands are going to tighten at that point and eventually we're going to get a Either a breakout right or a break down So a decision has to be made here probably within the next two weeks Bitcoin must Decide on a direction. So we are getting close people. So how do we know which way it's going to break? Well, there's really no way to know what we try to do is look through different indicators and different data to try to get an idea of What's going on and what's happened previously with that data, right? So if we look at the RV I which is the relative Volatility indicator, right? You will see that it is basically at the same lows where it bounced from last time Which was back in June before we began our climb back to the upside Before that we're at these levels back during this time right here, which again It was just low volatility for a long time before moving up and we've really only been below these levels at the end of the bear market back in 2018 going into 2019 and that was of course again before a move up So next we're looking at the Bollinger bands on the 12 hour You can see that we're starting to get really tight here and that usually represents that a move is coming especially if you pair it with the Volume also falling lower and lower and lower volatilities falling lower So all of these things are telling us that a move is basically Getting ready for a move to happen now whether that's a move to the upside or move to the downside That's what we have to kind of figure out So we've basically shown you guys everything that there is on the charts, right? We've shown you guys all the fractals from here and back here We've shown you guys their current Support that we're at same support as here, etc. Etc. We've shown you guys the Possible accumulation schematic that we could possibly be in right now, right? So let's look at some on-chain data. We've even shown you guys some of the advanced indicators that have consistently and accurately called the tops and bottoms of different periods of the Bitcoin Cycle right including the NVT signal which is signaling a buy which every time it's been in the same level You can see the price has gone up It was over here price went up when a signal when a signal day over here at that time from where it was Price went up before continuing down. So another thing that's usually bullish for Bitcoin is the total hash rate So you can see that we're actually at a all-time high as far as hash rate You can see that back in May We had the huge drop-off in hash rate when the whole thing with China was going on and then ever since It's not only picked it back up and caught back up to where it was But we say a new all-time high in hash rate So this is usually a bullish sign for Bitcoin another thing we've been watching here is the well Holders so a well holder is anyone that has over a thousand Bitcoin You can see that it's currently at a all-time high here This is actually the most that whales have Accumulated so wells have slowly continued to accumulate Bitcoin here during this time and that kind of also hints to us that they're not going to let the Prices continue to fall because that's going to affect them right so at these low prices. They've been accumulating I think I saw that one of the largest wells It was like the third largest wallet or something like that has been buying this whole way down Basically any any time it's gone under like 46,000. It's been accumulating there as well. So again guys I know that we're down today about 2% and A lot of the sentiment out there is very bearish There's still a lot of fear as you can see we're at 22 and we're at the lowest levels that we've seen since back in May June July But as long as we stay above these levels guys, we're still on a very strong support There's a lot of confluence there and it's holding for now So as long as we hold above forty thousand dollars as long as the candles continue to close above forty and forty two Thousand we are bullish guys until we lose this level. We are not flipping So if we do lose this level then we can start looking at lower targets, you know, probably way down here That would probably be the first target that we're looking for if we were to close below this But for now, we're still not bearish. This is still a higher low, right? So the macro trend is still intact. So let's see what happens this week But again, we're not really looking to take any leverage trades at this time only looking to just kind of being patient here adding to some of our longer term portfolios and You just got to sit in your hands guys You got to learn to sit in your hands to learn to preserve capital learn to just sit back and let Messes like this play out and then you bounce in once there's a clear direction People are always too focused in trying to catch, you know, the bottom or trying to time the top I'm not interested in any of that guys. I want the middle. I want this part right here I want this part right here, right like we want the middle That's what we're interested in. That's what we're going to make the majority of our money. We are not going to time the market We're not gonna time the bottom. We're not going to time the top So get that out of your head wait for a direction and just make money in the middle I'll leave you guys with that. Thank you guys for tuning in and watching this video If you guys enjoyed it make sure to smash that like button if you guys are new to the channel Don't forget to subscribe turn on notifications and if you have any questions drop it in the comments I'll see you guys on the next one as always peace and love


I'm Farrie Blassengane and this is my draft story. Blassengane, the rookie free agent out of Vanderbilt. How about that for the first catch of your NFL career, right? It's kind of set the scene for us. What was, you know, you played at Vanderbilt, you're getting ready, when did you kind of realize, maybe you always realized that you could play in the NFL, but what was that kind of senior year like going into the draft process? It was different, man, but it was a really focused time. I had a lot of support and help from my family, from my teammates, a lot of us returned that boost. But it was fun, man, I kind of was just taking it all in. Like, you know, I watched, I watched like the draft and like pad to the draft on NFL Network all the time growing up. So it was kind of cool to just be going through that process, you know, of my own.  So did you have it here in Nashville at Vanderbilt? And do you remember how many teams came through and were you nervous, were you excited? Do you know this is your chance to showcase it? Yes, so pro day was at Vanderbilt. But yeah, man, it was a little bit of nerves. It was a little bit of nerves, but it was also fun because, you know, I've always watched the draft. I've always watched the combine. So getting to, you know, run the 40 and jump and do all of that and finally put all that work that we did for eight weeks out there. It was, it was fun. And then a lot of my guys were out there, like a lot of my teammates, they came to watch it. So it was cool to just kind of be back in front of them too. What do you remember about the draft weekend? Did you have an expectation of being selected or you just kind of enjoying it like you always did or take us through that, what do you remember of your draft weekend? You know, I thought I might have a chance to sneak into a late round, but I know, I mean, I know how the draft works and different things play out different ways. And if a certain number of backs get picked here, they might not get picked there. It was a bunch of different emotions as I was watching it. But when it all came down to it, getting that call from Coach KP at Minnesota and working something out here, it was a relief. And I felt good about it at that time. Since that time, what's your NFL journey been like? You got on the team and you got cut and you went to practice squad and you worked with them and you came to Tennessee and it's kind of full circle with you going, Huntsville, Nashville, Minnesota, then back to Nashville again, but kind of take us through what you kind of remember through some of those tumultuous times. Coming back to Nashville was great. It was like when I first got back, I could tell that it was the right decision and I was in the right place. What's some advice you have for some of these guys that go through the draft process, not hear their names selected and then hit the undrafted wire, I suppose? What kind of advice do you have for those guys? The landscape of what they're facing right now, a lot of guys who are potentially undrafted in the late rounds, they didn't have a pro day because of the coronavirus and they have a really unique situation. So I would say just find a way to stay positive, keep working because when it's time to play football and camp and mini camp, that's all that matters really. So just whenever the opportunity comes, just be positive about it. Be grateful for it, be thankful for it and just make the best of it and play ball because at the end of the day when you get back to the ball, it's gonna be fun if you love ball. So just stay positive, have fun with it and take it in the moments because not everybody gets to put on it in a fair room.