Well, guys, I think we've finally done it. After years of searching, wondering if he even existed, we have found him. The world's most dialed in man. And in case you're not even dialed in enough to know what that means, let me show you this Instagram video that should explain everything. I'm about to be absolutely dialed in going to this monthly meeting. I've been up since 4.30 a.m., energy's through the roof. Someone's gotta drive the innovation and creativity to keep everyone's money safe. Hey, let's get after it today. A couple of things I appreciate about this video. One, this guy speaks in like LinkedIn motivational quotes, but honestly, I believe every single word of it. Two, I kind of feel like I'm on a FaceTime with him. I'm in the middle of some kind of private personal call with him where he's both motivating me and himself to crush this midday meeting. And three, this man has somehow been up since 4.30 in the morning and his energy is through the roof. I've been up since 4.30 a.m., energy's through the roof. What have you been doing since 4.30 in the morning, dude? There's nothing to even do that early. I feel like these dudes who are obsessed with productivity and stuff are just making their morning routine start earlier and earlier, but like there's nothing to do at 4.30 in the morning. Like it feels wrong to even eat breakfast that early. Did you invent a new meal that's like pre-breakfast? I feel like eventually guys like this are gonna start waking up for their day, the previous day. This next video is gonna be like, I actually woke up yesterday at 9 p.m. to start my day. Regardless, I'm very impressed that even given how early you woke up, your energy is still through the roof and you are going to be dialed in for today's meeting. So I don't know what this guy's job is. His name is Davis Clark. He appears to have some kind of financial job. And I feel like we've seen other financial guys, motivational bros, business-brained bros on social media before, but none have quite struck a nerve with me like this guy. I feel like he's built different. I've seen a few of his videos before, but I had Robert go and source some more so I could blind-react to a bunch of them. And by the end of it, let's see if we can get ourselves dialed in as well. I am curious like what his actual job is though, because in this video it's very vague and he just says he has to like stay creative and drive innovation to keep everyone's money safe. So it's something in finance, but it also involves creative ways of keeping money safe.  And of course, who loves gold? Dragons. They love to sit on big piles of gold. So they keep having to come up with new and creative ways to keep the dragon away from their gold. And if that is his job, honestly, you need to be dialed in for that. Dragons are cunning, dragons are tricksters, so you better be waking up early to get the grind started before the dragon does. Well, let's see if he can keep that energy level up for this next video. Locked in for greatness today because it's time to absolutely hammer some Excel spreadsheets. Whoa, okay. Dude is ready to hammer some Excel spreadsheets. Did he say locked in for greatness? Locked in for greatness today. Nothing says greatness to me like hammering some Excel spreadsheets. When we look back in history at the greatest men of yore, my mind immediately jumps to the brave men and women of this country who have been hammering Excel spreadsheets since this country was founded. Also, did you have to use the word hammer? Hammer some Excel spreadsheets. I feel like that has like an overly sexual connotation to it. I'm about to input some data into these Excel spreadsheets, if you know what I mean. No wonder his energy levels are at an all-time high in this video. Dude is horny. Again, still not sure what this guy does. This video does have a lot of likes though, 300,000 likes. So clearly this is resonating with a lot of people and a lot of people are getting pumped up by this. Maybe he's keeping his videos vague enough to appeal to a wide number of people. Lots of jobs use Excel, so there's probably a lot of people out there who are dreading having to go into their spreadsheets today, but this dude is encouraging us to just hammer them.  Imagine we find out this dude actually has like a really dark, sinister job, like keeping the death toll for the CIA or something and he uses Excel spreadsheets to do that. It would be a little bit weird to find out he's that pumped up for something like that. Just found out about a new foreign coup gone right thanks to the CIA. Excited to get into these spreadsheets. Absolutely drill into them, pound them, make them squeal with the lights. Bad day to be an Excel spreadsheet or a good day, depending on how you look at it.  The hell? I mean, look, sure, it's kind of like basic content and we've all seen this type of motivational stuff before, but he's not hurting anybody. He's honestly pumping me up. He's locked in for greatness. He's ready for glory to go into battle with some Excel spreadsheets. What's so bad about that? What, you don't want your money kept safe? This dude is such an L. Okay, Milo chap. What do you do for work? What is your job? What time did you wake up this morning? And most importantly, what is your energy level currently? Because I'm pretty sure it's nowhere near this dudes. Sorry if you can hear my dogs barking in the background. The mailman just came and they hate that guy. I'm absolutely locked in when I'm working from home because I always give my best effort and stay focused throughout the day. It's all about being accountable and doing the right things. Okay, I'm digging the attitude, very nice. It's all about being accountable and doing the right thing.  I don't know about you guys, but when I work from home, I make sure to do actually twice as much work as I did in the office. I stay locked in and I do everything my boss says and I would never think about getting a different job. This dude like an industry plant. It's hard to say, because again, I don't even know what industry he would be a plant for. It's just like work. His job is just like work. This dude is like, if there was a work Ken in the Barbie movie, his job is just work. Also, not to be a narc or anything, but doesn't really seem like you're that locked in right now because you're making an Instagram reel. So I hope you're not on the clock right now, buddy. But the sun is shining into the windows, which means it's not 430 in the morning. It's time to get to work. Jordan. Hell yeah, man. What are you doing here? It's my friend Jordan. This man was born to create shareholder value. You know, it's crazy. We hear the expression a lot.  And I feel like a lot of people always assume it's some kind of glamorous or creative job where you're your own boss or you're pursuing some sort of passion. But we never think of it as just like a guy in a cubicle crunching numbers in Excel. But I guess that type of guy does exist and he's right here. And his name is Davis Clark. Maybe we should alter the expression to be something like pick a job where you hammer Excel spreadsheets and you'll never not be locked in a day in your life. Now that's the kind of slogan that would make Gary Vee do a high school musical jump. You know what I'm talking about? Where they're like up in the air like this. It's a very specific kind of jump they did in that movie. I don't know how they all knew to do it, but it just, I guess that movie just sort of had that vibe. They didn't even have to tell him to jump like that. They all knew the vibe right away. I might be the best dressed person working from home in America today because I care about what I'm doing. I'm feeling such a mix of emotions watching this video because on one hand I'm impressed and I'm happy for him that he likes his job so much and he takes pride in what he does. On the other hand, I am a little bit pissed that he insulted my work from home outfit by saying that his is the best. In my next video, I'm wearing like a tuxedo just to prove this guy wrong. Your move, Davis Clark. Dude, I wonder if I could start some kind of back and forth battle with this guy just by trying to be more dialed in than him. I do feel pretty dialed in making this video and honestly, my energy levels are feeling pretty good as well. But I do appreciate his attitude that him asking people to prove him wrong is just to drive everyone to new heights. He's not trying to put people down. He's trying to make everybody else dress as good as him. The concept of like dressing up to work from home does make me kind of sad. It does feel a little dystopian for some reason. Getting all dressed up to sit on your couch. I don't know, I guess it's nice to get yourself dialed up just to do nothing. Nerves through the roof this week because like anyone, I deal with a lot of emotions and I'm just a regular person going through a crazy time right now. Oh man, that wasn't very motivational. I do appreciate that even at his low moments he's still smiling. He's got a positive demeanor about himself but also damn, that was sad. I wonder why his nerves are through the roof this week. Did the dragon almost get the money? Is my money not safe? Did you get rejected by an Excel spreadsheet? Honestly though, I will say this. I feel like a lot of business-pilled dudes don't really talk about getting nervous or feeling down about yourself. So this is kind of an interesting side to this sort of motivational account that we don't usually see. So I appreciate that about him. Whoever left this top comment, you are a sicko though so get help immediately. We got some positive comments though just trying to get him back into zone.  You got this, bro. Lock in. Just kick the can down the road a bit and go out and ask a three to seven day vendor. Man, I don't know about that. You need some milk, that's not bad advice. Listen, Davis, I appreciate your transparency. Even if you have your dream job and you're crushing it and you feel motivated most of the time, it's okay to have days where you're just not feeling in it or where the stress of things can get you down. I appreciate that and honestly, it just makes me that much more pumped up when you get back on your bullshit. Let's get dialed in, baby. Whoever lives the truth comes to the light so that their work may be seen. It's on tomorrow, people. Let's go, dude. That's what I'm talking about. See, now I'm dialed back in. I'm not 100% sure if that was motivational or a threat that it did kind of have a threatening aura to it but for the time being innocent until proven guilty, I am dialed in, baby. Okay, it's a Bible quote. Okay, so probably not a threat. Probably. So we're back on our grind. I'm happy to see Davis smiling. He's dressed quite well. If this did have horror music over it, it wouldn't feel super out of place. Whoever lives the truth comes to the light so that their work may be seen. But as it is currently, I'm liking it. We're feeling good. ["Horror Music"] Yo! Whoa, this dude just took being the best dressed working from home guy to a new level. The sunglasses and the fedora? My dude is dressed like a financial pilgrim right now. Okay, so his caption is locked in for the exam so I guess he's taking some kind of exam today. Maybe that's what all of the nerves and things in previous videos have been about. He was nervous about this exam. Maybe he's studying to become some sort of accountant, financial professional. This looks like someone who is about to ace an exam. He's about to hammer this exam.  People are playing iSpy in the comments. They're so dialed in, dude. This is crazy. Okay, it looks like we got a post-test video. Let's see how it went, guys. Got after the test this morning and it hit hard, but I like to hit hard right back. Cut to him punching the test.  We all think it's a metaphor, but he's dead serious.  All I can say is the results won't come out for like another two months. So it's gonna be a wait, but in the meantime, I'm just gonna try and make good things happen in life. Well, this was five weeks ago and he said that he won't get the results for another two months. So I guess we probably still don't know how we actually did on the test, but I'm glad he's got a positive attitude about it. He was dialed in for the test. He did lose his sunglasses. I don't know, maybe they confiscated those because they were like, we don't know if this could be some kind of recording device or maybe the test was just so crazy that he just lost track of them.  Do you think that like the people who invented the internet and social media pictured this? Because I feel like they might have only pictured this.  It shares success stories. The whole internet is just gonna be like this guy, just everybody talking about how dialed in we are, how much of a good time we're having and how much we're making the world a better place. I feel like this is the internet we were all sold back in 99. And so I'm happy that there's at least one corner of the internet where this is happening. In office Friday, the heavy hitters of America are about to be shaken in their boots seeing that young people are actually motivated to work. In office Friday, dude, let's go. This is probably Davis's favorite day of the week. He gets to be in the office grinding. One thing that's interesting is I feel like he's actually dressed down compared to usual. Like he's wearing less layers. Do you dress up more to work from home, Davis? The heavy hitters of America are about to be shaking in their boots.  Cause they've never seen somebody so dialed in. He's got a smile. He's got a positive attitude and they've never seen anything like it before. They've never seen the young people actually motivated to work. They're shaking in their boots, dude. They saw what he did to those Excel spreadsheets and they don't want them to do it again. Just a normal dude getting after it on Friday. I'm not the fastest. I'm not the strongest, but I'm gonna give it everything that I have. All right. Some exercise content. This is very cool. It's been a long week. Lots of hours of work as y'all have been seeing, but I'm gonna finish it strong and bring everything together today. Have a great weekend, everyone. Keep those vibes going. This video does have the vibe of like POV. You just woke up in the middle of the woods to this man standing over you. You're like, where am I? Who are you? I'm not the fastest. I'm not the strongest, but I'm gonna give it everything that I have. Okay, cool. Why are my arms and legs bound? I will say this. I don't think that you are a normal dude, Davis. Just a normal dude getting after it on Friday. For better or worse, you are not just a normal dude.  You're dialed in. You've got a crazy attitude.  No, I want you to say, I'm a hard worker. I'm a grinder, baby. I'm a freak. And then you can say the rest of whatever you were gonna say. Say, you know, I'm gonna give it everything I have.  There are people who really don't like this guy and have it out for him. And so they comment mean things on his videos. So this video appears to be in response to some of that hate. Let's go ahead and see what he has to say. The hate fuels me, but right now the haters are gassed. They're looking for a Dunkin' Donuts so they can get some caffeine, get some energy like we have. Okay, let's go.  The hate fuels him. So I guess in a way, we better hope that the hate keeps coming. No, we shouldn't say that. He says that the haters are looking for Dunkin' Donuts so they can get energy to keep hating on him. But should we want them to get Dunkin' Donuts so that they do get the energy because the hate does fuel him and he's making the world a better place? Davis, can you clarify what exactly you want people to do? I can tell you one thing though. Davis is reaching his final form. You can tell he's dialed in. He officially, I think, has the most layers on he's had yet and with each layer he does become more powerful. It really does make you wonder, like why is this guy getting so many hateful comments? You know? This is just sort of like normal guy core. It's like regular job core TikToks and he's just making the most of the situation he's got. He's got this job. He's trying to see the positive in the situation. And you know, we've seen, there's moments where he's not as happiest but he's trying to make the best of it. All he does is smile, go to work, wake up obscenely early. So I don't know why there would be people like leaving him legitimate hate. That does seem odd. Seems like those people have their own demons to work on and honestly, the haters are dialed out. They're undialed. They're not locked in, they're locked out. We're over here getting it done, making money, keeping our shareholders' money safe and the haters are quite frankly locked out. There's a sign on the window that says, sorry, we're closed. No haters allowed. Please continue to share your opinions in the comments section because that's what our founding fathers wanted. Freedom of speech, press, and expression is what makes this country special. So whether it's love or hate, I formally invite you to keep sending those messages up to Boston. The birthplace of freedom were a bunch of farmers and rabble rousers like Sam Adams started the greatest country on earth. Let's go have a Monday people. Did he memorize that whole speech? Did he write that beforehand? Or was that just off the dome? That was crazy eloquent, my guy. I love how we describe the founding fathers as rabble rousers.  They weren't great men, per se, because they didn't do any Excel spreadsheets, but they were rabble rousers. I wonder if Davis would consider himself a rabble rouser. Does he rouse rabble? Comment that on his video. Do you rouse rabble, Davis? That's what the founding fathers were doing, man. They were just causing a little mischief. The Boston Tea Party? If there wasn't some rabble rouse that night, I don't know when was some rabble roused. And that's a sentence that made sense. That's what I've been saying. I'm not about to be selling out for money. If someone wants a sponsorship, it better be in millions. I'm not on a rookie contract anymore. Send the Pat Mahomes money this way if you want it. Bad day to be a rookie contract, that's right.   What is this about, even? Are people trying to offer him sponsorships and he's like, no, I won't take anything less than millions of dollars for an Instagram sponsorship? My man thinks he's a Kardashian. He must make good money at his job, which we still don't know what it is. I wonder if it says in his bio. Actually, I should just go to his page. Davis Clark, inspire, help others, do the right thing, enjoy life every day, riser, locked in for greatness. Okay, so no, we still don't really know what he does. I wonder what companies are reaching out to him, trying to get him to sell out the dragon. And what sponsorships would be good for him? Patagonia, of course, Excel maybe. A cellular network, AT&T, T-Mobile. He could use a signature slogan and say he's dialed in. The most dialed in network with the most coverage, that would be kind of bomb. At the end of the day, it's not the typical content I usually consume, but I do appreciate Davis for trying to make the world a better place and trying to motivate people. And I'll admit, I feel a little bit pumped up after watching his videos. I'm not sure how to apply a lot of what he said to my own career, but there's something to be said for making the most of your situation, being proud of your work, giving the shareholders the value they deserve. His life's all about those shareholders, baby. All right, well, I hope you guys enjoyed this video. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.


This guy stole my building supplies. And this guy was going to pick my lock until he saw one of my many cameras. I just knew it was a matter of time before someone broke into my workshop. I got a bunch of electronics and started building my own security system. I wanted what Edna had in the Incredibles. The full Edna mode. We designed a case for it, we installed it on the wall, and then it was ready for us to test. Step one was to enter the correct password. Next up was to scan the correct fingerprint. After that you need to scan your face. And once it sees that you're a match, or as close as we want it to be, you'll be asked to say the voice line. In my case, of course, I had to take the Edna mode voice line from the movie. If the voice matches, the big button will light up green, and bang, the garage door will open.


Okay, we're here at HP Discover 2012. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE.tv's coverage of HP Discover. Walter Walby here for three days, getting all the stories, find out who's got what going on, talking to the smartest people we can find, extracting the signal from the noise and sharing that with you. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com, and I'm joined with my co-host with the segment, Stu Miniman. Stu, great to see you, covering for me yesterday inside theCUBE. Appreciate it. Another good day we got going on today. Thanks, John. Great to have you back here, and lots of excitement here for the next two days at HP Discover, and I'm happy to introduce Nick Goliadas, who's with Broadcom, excellent partner of HPs, and he's the CTO of the Infrastructure Networking Group. For people that aren't too familiar with Broadcom, they're really a lot of the components inside lots of the different pieces. Very broad portfolio. Nick touches the switches, the adapters, lots of different pieces here, and so, Nick, welcome on theCUBE. Thank you, Stu. Thank you, John. It's a pleasure to be here. You know, a lot of the infrastructure players like Broadcom and others, they're powering all that, and that's really why we love theCUBE, because we get to talk to the people who are making all the great stuff happen, and people know the brand names like Intel, and I'll see that huge marketing budget over the years, and they've done great work, but you guys are in the news today. Broadcom, big time announcement about the 5G Wi-Fi. So, congratulations. This is real testament to you guys' leadership, and it's great to see Broadcom kind of being highlighted in the gaming laptop. You guys just announced that product for us. So, can you tell us a little bit about that? I know it's a different group, but Broadcom has a company that's great leadership. So, we're calling this 5G, so this is the 802.11 AC, it's not a standard yet, it's a draft standard. We announced the access point solution back in March at Mobile World Congress, and now we've announced the client side. So, to actually take advantage of the 5G, you need to have both sides of the connection. So, there was company shipping our access point solution today, and now we're going to enable laptops with the client side as well. So now you have a true gigabit plus connection between a laptop and an access point. That's really going to enable high speed networking. Just in the keynotes here, we're hearing from Meg Whitman all the way down to even Intel is on stage today talking about big data, and big data's now hugely popular, right? For everyone's agenda. All the innovations happening around storage, obviously at the center of that, but at the network and all the device sides, there really needs to be this kind of innovation. This is just one example of the leadership. Can you just share what Broadcom's doing right now under the covers that's really kind of empowering this mobility and social networking, and the cloud, the cloud mobile and social, which is the hottest trends right now. At the nexus of all this is the data center, right? And the data center has to be scalable and have performance. And today's Broadcom is supplying adapters, NICs, controllers for the server infrastructure, as well as a high capacity switching infrastructure. These would be the top rack switches, the end of row switches. The silicon that goes into all those products is today Broadcom is the leader in providing those solutions to our customers. The OEM is like HP. In particular with HP with the Gen 8 server release, we are, we had five adapters go out in March and then we have three more that were announced here at the show. This is both 10 gigabit and one gigabit. Very high performance in terms of a CNA were 265% faster than our nearest competition that was been benchmarked by the MarTech and that's on multiple threads running simultaneously and then just some pure throughput were 37% faster than our nearest competitor. So that's the kind of performance you need to be able to run these social apps to be able to get the big data in and out of the servers in these next generation data centers. Okay, so Nick, first Dennis Martin, he's actually one of the original Wikibon contributors. Great to see his research being used. If you go to wikibon.org, you can find that. So I remember Broadcom really as the leader in the law market space, the Landon motherboard. And we've seen really a C-shift as you go to 10 gig. It used to be this solder down on the motherboard. You get the design win and you win everything after that. But if you look at with 10 gig, there's more flexibility. Avengers like HP is I can choose from multiple vendors. So, how are HP, who is your customer and how are the end users making their choices on this next generation of adapter? So the flexible arm is what HP is calling it is basically you get to choose the networking adapter when you configure the system. And Broadcom wants to be recognized for having the most complete software solution, time tested, we've been shipping Nick's now for over 10 years. So there's a lot of history there in quality and stability. We have the highest performance, so our customers can recognize that when they use a Broadcom controller in their system, they're getting the highest performance Nick that is available. And then the feature capabilities. Because of our architecture, we can provide features on existing hardware through software upgrades. So we have this ability because of our programmable controller to add functionality as new standards come out or new capabilities, let's say like new virtualization protocols. These are the VXLAN, NVGRE and L2GRE. As those come to the forefront, our controller has the ability to be upgraded in the field through a software upgrade to take advantage of those new protocols and HP embraces them in their products. So in the case of the users, I believe they should look at a Broadcom, Nick, as investment protection because it allows them to future-proof their servers going forward. And then all the features of functionality can invest in class performance. Nick, we've been hearing themes on theCUBE all year now and just recently here and early on in our summer tour that really there's two key themes around cloud, mobile and big data, and all those, we call the four horsemen of IT disruption. That's performance and integration and that translates to solutions. What are you guys doing with HP? Can you talk about some of those specific points with regard to your HP relationship and around performance and some of the integration that has to go on because these solution sets are becoming more complex. Just past two days, we were at the IBM Edge event in New York City. They've completely transformed their business model around storage, not as a silo, but as a full integrated portfolio. That seems to be the trend. Can you shed some light on what you guys are doing with HP specifically? Certainly. So we're part of the proactive insight architecture platform, the PIA. So this is an umbrella that HP has with their vendors to allow that devices will interoperate as part of a system and allow visibility into performance and faults through their architecture. So working within the PIA, Broadcom ensures that our products play within the system as a component that's well integrated. So that's the first aspect of it. We've had a very long relationship with HP going back many, many years. So it's not like we're just coming in and putting a product on the table and having them ship it. We've had a working relationship with them. We've been working on solutions with them. The most prominent one is Flex10. So Flex10 was co-developed with Broadcom and HP and we continue to support it today. That gives them flexibility to be able to reconfigure their blade server in different ways using this Flex10 technology. So by being a partner to HP versus just a vendor, we are able to work on solutions together that are cohesive, well-tested and future-proof. So Nick, the other big area that you're partnered with HP is on the switching. Broadcom's one of the leaders in merchant silicon. Every year we go to interop these days. You can see all the OEMs that Broadcom has there and HP is a strong one of those. Dave Donatelli and his keynote this morning was talking about HP trying to transform networking. Things like SDN, we're going to have Sargillai on later today to talk about that. So can you speak a little bit about your relationship on the switch side and where you see that market going? Correct. So SDN and people also refer to this as open flow. I think open flow is one instance. I think open flow is one component of SDN. And Broadcom was the early developer of platforms that ran open flow but SDN in general. My view on SDN is that SDN allows you to treat the network like a programmable platform. So no longer are you going out and trying to configure a box or switch for a particular set of attributes or push policy to it. Now you treat the network as a platform that you then are able to configure and able to run applications on top of. So let's say one example I like to use is let's say you have an energy monitoring application whose job is to go out and run across all the switches in this SDN framework and monitor their energy usage, their traffic. And then based upon the say traffic profile say I'm going to shut down this part of the network because there's low traffic. I'm going to move the workloads from one virtual machine instance to another and let's say move the VMs to let's say this cluster of servers shut down the switches here and turn down the servers over here and now be able to have an energy savings by just monitoring how the network and the servers are running and treating that as a platform versus trying to look at individual boxes and making decisions at that level. So a big portion of transforming the network is really we need to get off the CLI and really automate this environment. Being the underlying chip in a lot of these switches, do you have hooks into that or what's Broadcom's angle on that? We do have actually, we have hooks into that. We're also a leader in what's called energy efficient networking and one aspect of that is called energy efficient ethernet and we actually worked on a white paper with you guys on developing this technology. So it's very important. The ability to power down interfaces when they're not active is a key component of this. So now that the network becomes load power couple, meaning that as the traffic comes down, the power usage of the network goes down as well. So the energy efficient networking really turns down the power usage based upon load. So now as if you have busy periods, you're obviously using more power, but if there's like idle periods, the equipment actually goes into a lower power state and saves energy inside the network. Right, and a big piece of that is this is all automated. This isn't no longer the admin going in and having to tweak all these knobs and everything like that. Correct, it's done through a set of APIs that then can be exploited through SDM. Okay, great, so what else are you guys looking at? So Trident Plus is kind of the next generation to hear things like Trill or the other things people are talking about. So what can people expect to see coming forward from some of the Broadcom chips and the switches that they enable? So we tend to call this area the data center fabric and Trident Plus is the name of our, coding of our latest 64 port 10 gig switch and that device is the problem used in top of rack or under row configurations. That supports Trill and other multi-path protocols. So now you can build these large data center fabrics that are multi-path, so you have high cross-sectional bandwidth that allows a lot of the web and social media applications to have what's called cross-server communication. So there's cross-sectional bandwidth available so that the applications can communicate with each other horizontally is very important. And then this also gives you redundancy and a failover protection because you have multiple paths that are active and if one of them fails, you don't lose the network. And along those lines, where are we with 40 and 100 gig ethernet? So where we are today with 40 is becoming mainstream. Today, because of the economics of 10 gig, 40 is really four times 10 gig and then you get some packaging and density improvements with it. So actually 40 gig on a per gig of a basis is becoming more competitive than 10 gig if you want that capability. And 40 gig for today, you can actually deploy them as either four by 10 or one by 40. 100 gig is now starting to become more accepted in the forefront and we're working with the IEEE to standardize some next generation 100 gig technologies that's based on four by 25 gig and drive the cost of the optics down to be much more competitive with 10 gigabit ethernet. So now you can actually see the backbone of these next generation data centers moving to 100 gigabit because it's going to be class competitive. Nick, I want to ask you a couple of questions. Just kind of level up a little bit because of your unique position at the company and with the data center, all the action in the data center is really transforming. We've been covering HP for over a couple of years now. We've seen Gen 8, we've seen the Project Moonshot. A lot of the stuff that they're doing at the server level, the chip level has been pretty fantastic and there's always the power issues and cooling. What would you say to the folks out there? Share with them your perspective on the bottom line of what's happening because every vendor's got, it seems to have a different approach. You're seeing HP do some things, you're seeing IBM do some things, EMC doing some things with storage. Everyone's got kind of this different approach around performance and integration. Tell the folks out there what really matters. What are the three things that really matter right now when you talk about having that next generation server, the next generation networking and storage infrastructure as it all kind of converges in? I mean it's a half a trillion dollar market opportunity in this converging infrastructure. What are the top three things that really matter? So as a semiconductor vendor that sells into all these different OEMs and we are a foundation for their products. So you have to have a strong foundation. So the idea here is you want to have the highest performance underlying silicon that's very flexible because this is a dynamic marketplace today. There's new protocols being developed, new applications being developed and you want to make sure you have a foundation that is scalable and can be built upon with software. So our customers take our base silicon and they build their systems around it, they overlay their software on top of that and they rely on our devices to provide high performance and flexibility. The other aspect of this is energy efficiency. If we need today these massive data centers that are becoming the utility computing engines of the future need to be very energy efficient. So by moving to the latest process technologies and putting in things like this energy efficient ethernet allowing the components to actually scale power with usage is a very important aspect. And finally is cost competitiveness. Providing a cost effective solution because when you're building out data centers that are large in nature it's a big multiplier. So providing a very cost effective solution as that foundation is very important to our customers. So now out in the world of big data, storage, flash memory, a lot of new things really increase and we can put cores everywhere now. And Intel's out totally pumped about that. The finger pointing continues to go to the network. So what would you share about the network innovations that are happening because data being moving around the network, people saying the network's now the bottleneck. One, do you believe that to be true? And your news today with the 5G computer really kind of shows us really advancements there. So how do you address that? How do we just talk about that? Is the network truly the bottleneck? Is the open flow and like initiative you got Nasera out there doing some things. You got the software, you mentioned software is kind of playing a big role in it. Talk about that. The network, I don't believe is a bottleneck. I think there's plenty of network performance at throughput level. What I believe has to happen is the network has to become more application aware so that the appropriate prioritization and flows are sent through the network with the utmost urgency. And we're working on technologies today. We have what we call app IQ technology the ability to actually recognize what application is running on a particular flow versus just looking at the IP address or the MAC address. So now the network can become application aware and be able to prioritize traffic based upon what's running there and give the network administrative visibility into what's running in their network and understand what things may actually be hogging the network, right? So that's what happens. So what's the hottest area right now around this area? I mean, it's a good debate and it's kind of not really that critical but people are doing some new things. What's the hottest area within that network? Virtualization is very key here. So the ability to segment the data center network into sub networks that are tenant specific or workload specific is very important and having an infrastructure from the controller to the neck through the switch that is aware of what the virtualized entity is, the VM and be able to transport that traffic both inside the data center and intro data center. So you're now able to tie data centers together and have virtualized connections between them or in the hybrid model where you have an enterprise that wants to do a hybrid model that puts some of its compute resources in a cloud, some of it in-house and then tie those together using this virtualization so that inside the hosted data center it's their own domain. Okay, Nick is the CTO of infrastructure and networking at Broadcom. Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us and giving us your perspective. Great to see Broadcom in the news innovating with the gaming laptop and the 5G networking, congratulations. We'll be right back with our next guest from HP Discover right after this short break. Thank you guys.


So we meet again Matthew is great to be with you as always we've I was just thinking backstage all the different cities We've been in and I think this is the furthest north in the world We've ever been together, but but it's been an amazing journey with with you Scott and and any a well Thank you Matthew and welcome to Helsinki. I've been here before at slush great to be back You know since I was here Cloudflare has become one of the most famous companies in the world But for the founders out there, I'd just love for you to tell them the origin story How how the company got started? Why you started the company what you set out to do and and how it's different today than what you thought it might be back then yeah, so Cloudflare launched in September of 2010 and actually launched an event. It's a lot like slush. It was the tech crunch disrupt event in San Francisco And so when I see things like the slush 100 and the startup competition here, you know It's it's amazing to think that not that long ago just 12 years ago. We were one of those startups standing on stage scared to death Pitching to a bunch of investors and so it's it's incredible to see what's here And and I think that there's a real chance that people here might might create, you know The next cloudflare which is exciting we started because we saw that the world was shifting from You know software and hardware that you bought to services in the cloud that you consumed And we saw what was happening with traditional box software, which really in the past was made by three major companies Oracle SAP and Microsoft that was turning into all the SaaS companies that are out there We saw what was happening to the storage and compute space with You know once upon a time you would buy a box from a Dell or an HP or a Sun or an IBM And that obviously has turned into the major cloud hosting providers and we said that same trend is Going to shift What how people consume network gear things that someone like a Cisco would sell Into a service as well And could we take advantage of that opportunity? And so the three of us that started the company me my co-founder Michelle and Lee Holloway We sort of started out Thinking we're going to take on that challenge and you know cloudflare's mission today is to help build a better internet when we started Cloudflare's mission was to build a big business and hopefully make a bunch of money But I think what changed along the way is that in order for us to get customers We knew that we needed to have the data to build the security sets and things that the big customers that rely on Cloudflare today have but in order to get that data We had to have customers and that created this chicken and egg problem where We're trying to figure out how to solve it and the way we ended up solving it is we created a free version of our service And we thought you know small businesses and startups would sign up for that But what really ended up being the things that signed up were a lot of the civil society organizations non-profits human rights groups around the world and They would get attacked all the time for the important work that they were doing and that was first of all a great source of data That we could then turn around and and use to help protect big companies, but even more important than that I think it put us on the front lines of What were some of the most important work that was being done? online and on the internet and I think that our mission emerged from that because we saw You know journalists in Africa reporting on government corruption. We saw Human rights workers in Asia Reporting on you know the lack of hospital care. We saw you know on the front lines today You know we're helping protect a lot of Ukraine against the attacks that are coming and I think because we did that It really changed the business where yes, obviously we want to build a successful business But our mission is much bigger than that and it's about how do we actually help? The internet and some of the most vulnerable people on the internet make sure that they're fast Reliable and secure and so I think our mission actually grew out of our business model And I think that's part of why it's been so sustainable Hmm and and tell us a little bit more about this idea of giving it away for free and back in the day that that wasn't such a universally adopted idea and of course today a lot of founders are doing that So I think it'd be helpful to just reflect on Not just why you did it But how that has transformed the business and what advice you would have for entrepreneurs that are thinking about that today you know for us for a lot of businesses and and I don't mean to Denigrate them in any way, but you know if you're a drop box The reason you give the service away for free is because you hope that people will use it a bunch and then eventually pay you if You're slack you hope that people use it a bunch and eventually pay you that's just never been the way We've thought about the business as much What we really that the problem that we were trying to solve was that again in order for Cloudflare to be able to sell to the Huge companies that rely on us today and 18 of the 20 largest companies in the world rely on us 32% of the Fortune 500 relies on us or something like between 20 and 25% of the entire web Sits behind Cloudflare's network today but in order to be able to get there we knew that we needed to have the Understanding of what cyber threats were out there and we'll be able to stop them and so How we Catalyze that was we we actually gave the service away for free in order to learn About those those cyber attacks so that we could eventually sell to the you know Visas and apples and Goldman Sachs and you know big companies that that provide most of our revenue today But it had these additional benefits as well Well, it is very rare that if Bob's blog Signs up for Cloudflare that someday Bob will you know decide to spend you know a million dollars to protect his blog That blog is probably still free But what we realized was that often times while Bob's blog might not be a big company Bob is is actually working as the CTO at somewhere like Salesforce and that literally is how Salesforce became what is a customer now that spends, you know north of ten million dollars a year with us Their CTO used us on his personal blog He got to know us there when he went to work He saw a problem with what was going on at work at Salesforce He knew how we worked and so he advocated he became our internal champion and then pulled us into Salesforce Salesforce started out as a $60,000 a year customer and they've just grown and grown and grown and grown and grown But that original seed of trust came from the fact that But you know Bob the metaphorical Bob was using us for his personal site And that then gave him the trust to bring us to work So I think there are a lot of different paths that people can take with sort of the freemium Business I think ours is a little bit different than everyone else's and what I think is key is you've got to understand that your business you've got to understand The the go-to-market dynamics of your business and you've got to understand the cost of your business to make sure that if you're Going to go down that path it makes sense over the long term But it's been something which is key to who we are and something that we we will always have and was that something that was easy to Sell to investors in 2009 and 2010, you know, it's I mean I think right now We are living through very difficult economic times And probably the hardest economic times since the sort of 2008 2009 Time frame and I remember, you know, we launched in 2010, but we were first pitching investors back in 2009 and You know, we got a lot of sort of scratching our head looks when we were when we were first pitching it what I think we did really well though is We didn't pitch blindly we didn't just go run to a bunch of investors and say anyone who who would listen to us Like what we're gonna try and try and get money from you We were very very very strategic and this this is Michelle my co-founders Sort of the genius is she made a list of our target top 20 investors not by firm But by individual partner at those firms and we would meet with anyone But it was it would always be never be in their office. It would never be in our office So I'll be out always be out over coffee. We tell them what we were working on We'd learn a ton from those meetings and at some point we were at one of those coffees with a woman named Daphina and Daphina was an associate at a Venture capital firm called Venroc and one of the partners there was a guy named Ray Rothrock who is one of the top Security investors and he was actually number two on our list and Daphina said, you know After we'd had coffee and we talked about the business and she's like I need you to meet Ray And what was interesting was that was the first time that we went what somebody was like I can give you a clear path to one of the people on your list. We went in we met Ray and 15 minutes in the conversation Ray said I have the authority to write you a half million dollar check right now Will you take it and I said no and and Michelle kicked me under the table like what are you doing? I said well, we're targeting raising two million dollars And so we need we need more than that He said well, I then I guess we have to have you meet with the rest of the partnership But that obviously and that was really the only firm that we pitched at the time and we were the only technology investment that NEA did in Excuse me, excuse me. The Venroc did in 2009 and we and we were then have been the most successful investment in Venroc's entire history, which is pretty amazing given they were the original funding behind Intel they were the original funding behind Apple and And so, you know, it's it's I think even in really tough times You can actually build great companies and it becomes a little bit harder to raise money But sometimes that actually makes the company better Well Ray of course is the one that introduced me to you Yes, that's how we got involved But I guess the part of what I remember also is that free wasn't so obvious back then and while Ray and I Believed in free when we went out to raise future rounds Even it was still not that easy to find people who did believe in free it ultimately found usv and off we went but I yeah I just think that's important to think about in times like today where investors are increasingly focused on revenue generation Yep, I certainly see that in our founders if we encourage them to do something, you know pursue this free strategy They're first, you know responses Well, but we're gonna have to generate revenue in order to get the next round of investment Which is I think what you guys told us when we encourage you to go free for longer and longer and yeah, I know and I think that What you what if you're going to go down that path again what I think you have to be incredibly disciplined about is cost And so we have you know, we believe that even today as a public company every dollar that an investor entrusts with us is We have a sacred duty to make sure that we are being Very very very responsible with every single one of those dollars And so we have from the earliest days Obsessed about how can we drive every cost down as far as we possibly can and I think that that Discipline that was actually born out of what were the tough times when cloudflare started has made us a much better Company today and I think the companies that launch if you look at when do the Googles and and Facebooks and I mean and all of these companies that turn into massive massive massive successes Oftentimes they actually come out of very difficult times And so while right now it definitely has become a lot harder than it was a year ago to raise money I would I would bet on the companies that are that are successfully raising money today that are thinking about costs in a very Disciplined way and and that are building businesses that yeah, we'll scale to you know today Cloudflare, you know generates a billion dollars in revenue But that they also are doing it in a way that they can have you know Very high margins that they can be that they can succeed at scale And I think when money is really easy to come by sometimes There's less discipline around that and I think that the tough times that we started in actually gave us that discipline Which continues to pay off today? Well, I actually think this is one of the most important things for founders to understand about the environment We're in you know We know that great companies are founded and funded in really difficult times and in you know In any ace history more than half of our best investments where companies founded in tough times, but it's precisely what you said It's not it's not just that the money is hard to come by but there's sort of this crucible of learning and Discipline that comes out of that which which builds fundamentally better businesses and I would have to say of all the companies I've been involved in you're you're right up there with Christian Chabot in terms of discipline on spending money. He's the founder of Tableau Built his business on 1.8 million dollars. That's pretty much impossible to do But anyway, you guys are right there with him and one of the things I remember about that is that whenever You would encounter a problem you would always challenge the team to solve that problem by you know Basically writing software that would solve that problem rather than going out and buying somebody's box at one point We had some other NEA portfolio company I remember Recommending to you which had some next-generation switch or something and you guys were nice enough to look at it But you said no no no we got a we got to create the solution ourselves. Yeah, you know, I think we You know Clutha was either gonna be a one or a zero it was either gonna work or it was gonna be a complete failure and In order for it to work it need to have scale and or if it was going to get scale we we really did need to drive the fundamental costs as far down as possible and And so I think that we're we we invent a lot of our own solutions And and I think you can make a mistake as a company if you know if we were inventing our own I don't know CRM system or we were venting our own, you know tax and accounting system Those aren't things that are core to our business and we go out and buy those and we negotiate really hard on all of those things But anything which is core to our business We always needed to figure out how to do it as efficiently as possible And so what what I always would say to our team was, you know, let's Drive anything which is a commodity that we're buying It has to we have to be able to buy it as cheaply as anyone else like Cheaper than Google cheaper than Amazon cheaper than Microsoft cheaper than than Facebook How do we drive those costs down? But those things that are truly differentiated which ultimately are the people How do you make sure that you're you're not being cheap in those areas and that you're really rewarding people and Making sure that it is that they are successful and and I'll say that You know, we've we've done very very well I've you know from a financial perspective done really well But when I think about what are the things that have been the most rewarding at Cloudflare It's when you know an employee who was early with us calls me up and says, you know I was just able to buy my first house because I you know, I joined Cloudflare I was just you know able to you know, send my kids to school without having to think about You know what the cost would be I was just able to do those things and and so I think we've always been And I think you've really helped us Think through how to reward the employees in your team as much as possible. They're not commodities That's not the place to be cheap But yeah driving down the cost of a switch It's a switch like we should we should make sure that we're never dependent on any one company so that we can continue to Drive those costs down as far as possible That's the commodity that you need to be cheap around but people you really want to reward And you want to make sure that those people who bet on you early are are you know In in our cases many of them created generational wealth for them, which is which I'm really proud of It's wonderful to see you know coming back to the cost discipline. I think One of the things that impressed me was the creativity that went into the standardization of the hardware You know off-the-shelf hardware standardized offering standardized software which could be deployed without a human ever leaving You know San Francisco to deploy it in Bombay or whatever it was Could you just talk about that a little bit because I'm not sure people have realized that's even possible So one of the earliest fights that we had in our engineering team at Cloudflare Was did we need to have specialized hardware to do all the different things we did? So did you need a storage server to store files? And then did you need a you know specific DDoS mitigation server to stop DDoS attacks and a DNS server and That was one approach I think Lee who was really the technical genius behind Cloudflare and then to a lesser extent I Really saw what Google had done In terms of saying we're gonna buy just commodity Equipment and then we'll spend our time running clever software that makes it act as if it is one giant mainframe Our question was could we do the same thing? But instead of being one giant mainframe could we make it one giant you know? Router or switch or load balance or one giant network effectively That was out there and so it was not popular at the time and it was harder But we from the beginning said we are only buying one type of server and it has to do everything and today We will set up and we're on our 12th generation of servers. We buy them. We actually have multiple What are called odm's that build them for us mostly in Asia? We bid them all off each other. They have a certain spec. We're specking it down to the individual chips that are on the motherboard There are times where someone can't get a chip for us and we'll go source the chips individually To be able to to again drive those costs down as far as we can But when we buy equipment instead of us buying you know a little bit of one thing a little bit of another thing a little bit of that we're buying a ton of One type of equipment and that has two meaningful impacts the first is because we can then buy at scale We can get that equipment very inexpensively. The second is that it really simplifies our Deployment so that whenever we need equipment somewhere we can actually depot it around the world and then deliver it Right to those places. What's been powerful though is what that means is We're always at somewhere on our network. We have a little bit too little capacity for something Maybe we have we're running hot on CPU But maybe we have then an excess of something else maybe we have more storage than we might need and every single quarter our Infrastructure team meets with our product team and they look at okay not where things running hot We know what to do when things are running hot We deploy more equipment and we sell that but where do we have excess capacity and so for example? Recently about a year and a half ago our team looked out at our network and said we've deployed all these servers everywhere They have a certain amount of storage in all of them. We have excess storage today so what can we do with that and and our Infrastructure team challenged our product team to go out and build something around it and they said well Let's go compete with a AWS right they have s3 as a storage system. We've got a whole bunch of extra storage We can go sell that extra storage which is already deployed as a as an object store So we launched something called R2 which is a s3 compatible object store but with no egress fees no no data transfer fees and That's gonna use up all of that extra storage and then we'll have to buy more boxes and then though You know to supply that and then we'll wake up I would predict in 18 months and now we'll have a whole bunch of extras at CPU and we'll be like Well, what can we do with that and so I think we're always trying to think about Where is their slack in the system and how can we take that up with new products or features? Which can then surprise and delight our customers or you know I have always really admired Amazon's ability to take things that are costs and turn them into revenue centers And I think that we've been very inspired by that And I think that's a big piece of how we think about products as we build them awesome Matthew in the time We have left. Let's switch to people. Yeah, you know I've been amazed over the last, you know decade I've been involved in the company that Cloudflare always seems to get the people that you want to get and they're often quite extraordinary and I contrast that with You know, not that my other portfolio companies are necessarily doing a bad job of this But it's it's been a very difficult hiring environment for for the last decade in Silicon Valley What's the secret sauce at Cloudflare for you know attracting and retaining these extraordinary people? Everyone who comes and works at Cloudflare can work somewhere else Everyone has multiple job offers that they could work somewhere else and we I think we're generous around pay and and those things But but we don't chase that when especially Late last year beginning this year it seemed like, you know salaries were going through the roof I think we're very disciplined around that But as a result, I think we've tried to be very fair Across that and and people want to work for organizations that are fair That's I think really important and and so being disciplined around how you think about compensation Actually, maybe you don't get someone In the short term, but it actually means that you're gonna be more fair and that's more stable over the long term Which which is important. I think the second thing is mission really matters And people who can have multiple different opportunities are thinking about what is the thing they want to do in their life Because they realized especially I think during COVID people realized Like time is finite and I and I should be working on the things that really matter and so I think that Because we have a big mission Because we live that mission every day of helping build a better internet Because we are out there, you know right now We're helping make sure the internet stays on in Iran. We're helping You know, Russian citizens 10% of Russian households are using Cloudflare technology to bypass Russian censorship. I was personally sanctioned by Iran I had to check on the flight path to make sure on the way in we weren't getting too cool not by Iran by Russia to make sure we weren't getting too close to Russia because we're pretty close right now and and I think that people want to work for places that are doing work that matters and So I mean my advice to founders that are out there often times Founders want to do something that's within sort of the four corners that they understand and feel like they can control We had no idea how Cloudflare was gonna work when we started we saw a big problem We're like, yeah, that seems like it's an opportunity But we weren't the obvious people to figure that out But we knew that if we got different people with different backgrounds together and that they were smart And curious and empathetic that we'd be able to figure out a big problem And so my advice to founders is always set your sight on something that's so much bigger Then you think it is be serious about getting there and that's gonna help you actually attract better better founders That's gonna make it more likely that you succeed Love that Matthew. Thank you. Let's leave it there and thanks to everybody in the audience for being with us today