The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Leon Kuperman, Co-Founder and CTO of CAST.AI

Episode Date: December 20, 2021

Leon Kuperman, Co-Founder and CTO of CAST.AI cast.ai CAST AI combines instant AI-driven cloud optimization with Kubernetes. It’s one platform that cuts your cloud bill in half, boosts the power of DevOps 10X, and guarantees business continuity by preventing downtime.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks chris voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here another great podcast who knew that we'd do it again? As always, I mean, really, if you haven't gone to youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss, it's my name.

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Today, we have an amazing gentleman on the show. He's going to be talking to us about his company and history. His company is called Cast.ai. Leon Cooperman is going to be talking to us today. He is the co-founder and CTO of Cast.ai or Cast.ai, we could just call it. I'm giving you the.com or the.ai, I should say. He is the formerly vice president of security products, OCI at Oracle. His professional experience spans across tech companies such as IBM, Trishan, hosted PCI. He founded and served as the CTO of Zenedge, a enterprise security company protecting large enterprises with cloud WAF. He has 20 plus years experience in product

management software design and development all the way through to production and deployment or production deployment however you want to put it but i'm i put an and in there that's just the way i roll he is an authority in cloud computing web application security and payment card industry data security, standard e-commerce, and web application architecture. How are you doing? Welcome to the show, Leon. Hey, Chris. Good to be with you.

Thank you very much for having me. There you go. Did I name Trition? Did I pronounce that correctly on the name of that company? Yeah, it's Truition. It's not a real word. It's like truth and intuition slammed together. I like that. That works.

That works. So welcome to the show. Give us your plug so people can find you on the interwebs. Yeah, so the only social network that I really use for business is LinkedIn. So you can find me on LinkedIn. I think it's slash executive CTO. And hit me up. There you go.

There you go. So before we get into cast.ai, you've got an amazing origin story. Let's talk about you and kind of your upbringing history and kind of what got you through some of these different companies and to the place you're at now. Yeah, absolutely. So kind of to start, like if you want to look at my professional career, I'm an engineer by trade, I guess by passion. So I started coding at a very early age, like when I could, like beg my parents to scrounge enough money together for my first computer was like an Apple clone, like an Apple TV clone. And, you know, I always told my wife, I would be doing software, whether it paid a lot or it didn't. So

we just got lucky that it happens to be a pretty good profession for us. We, I come from an immigrant family. We migrated to North America, specifically to Canada in the late seventies, 1978. I was five. So you don't hear the Russian accent, although I do speak Russian fluently. Well, some would say fluently. The, and, you know, I kind of got my love of engineering and science from my brother and my parents. Everyone's an engineer in the family. I kind of broke tradition and went into computer engineering or computer science. And everyone else is kind of mechanical or electrical. So so that's kind of the technology background is like those, you know, that 10,000 hour rule of, you know, where people are get fairly

good at something that they do all the time and for me that was software engineering or software development i'm good at nothing and i've spent 10 000 hours developing and getting really good at just nothing i'm sure there's something because i'm sure there's something we can put a bow tie on there's probably gaming or something i don don't know. Call of Duty, probably. Something like that. We've done a few podcasts. That might be it, too. One or two.

One or two. One or 2,000. So this is an interesting journey. We were talking about before the show, you basically grew up in the Soviet Union pre-war, which is pretty extraordinary. I don't meet a lot of people that, you know, have gone through that experience. Uh, how did that shape you or get you really in, maybe did that influence your interest

in computers or did, was computers maybe a way to get out of sort of the environment you were growing up in and get into, uh, I don't know, the, the better future or something. Maybe, I don't know. Yeah. It's interesting. Cause my only recollection, I was pretty young when we moved, so my only recollection of the former Soviet Union or Russia,

I lived in a city called Odessa, are black and white photos. I remember things in black and white because I grew up looking at those photos, so it's kind of a reinforcement. I wouldn't say so much that technology was the kind of out, but I did understand the struggle of immigration and the struggle of immigrants. Imagine the family that moves here and your mom, dad, and your grandparents don't speak a word of language, come to the country with like $5 in your pocket, and you're basically starting from scratch. And some of these folks, when they come here, they've had some success in their lives previously. And the reason that they made that jump over the pond

is for their kids, right? For their kids to have a better future. So I grew up watching my parents as serial entrepreneurs. And why are most immigrants entrepreneurs? Well, because they can't really get that stand. They can't become doctors, lawyers, accountants. They don't either have the education or the background or the language, frankly, to have those professions. So they are forced into entrepreneurship. They're forced into owning that restaurant or that convenience store. And in the case of my dad and my mom, I watched them go through all of these cycles. And I knew that very early on in life, even, you know, far before even high school that I wanted to, uh, be in business for myself. I didn't want to, uh, have my fate in the hands

of any large corporation or I want, I didn't want to be a cog in the wheel, so to speak. Yeah, it's, it's definitely, I identified that early on where I was like, I don't, I don't really want to be, work for other people. I don't like other people. So there's that. But no, I can feel you there. But yeah, see, I grew up in the Soviet era. And I'm not sure if you guys went through this as children in the soviet era but we i grew up hiding under my uh steel desk it was

probably filled with lead um because it was just you know the 60s 70s but i grew up hiding under my desk from you people you know from the nuclear bomb we do these nuclear bomb raids and you would hide under this desk that clearly was never going to save you from a nuclear bomb, which was kind of ironic to think about it in the time. But somehow there was some semblance of security and knowing what to do when the nuclear bomb hit. And so I grew up fearing the Soviets. And, you know, I still think sometimes of Russia as the USSR. I mean, that's how old I am. But, you know, it's interesting you grew up to that time. You mentioned, too, that you grew up Jewish in that area, and that wasn't the most friendly sort of place for Jews. No. In fact, if you look back historically, there were a few places in the Soviet Union that were kind of havens for Jewish populations. Odessa, which is

in the Ukraine now, it's changed hands a few times, but it actually started with the Ottoman Empire and then moved to Imperial Russia, and it is now part of the Ukraine. And it's still a very Russian-speaking city. It was considered a free port. So it was like a place where you could do trade freely and that attracted a very large Jewish population. And there were a few other places in Eastern Europe that kind of had those centralized populations. So while society, while living there, you still felt the antisemitism,

but you were in a place that was kind of accepting of your existence. But, like, if you move into the outskirts, life was obviously difficult for minorities, and especially minorities that were blamed for a lot of the problems in society. So it was a difficult time. But, like, Chris, back to your point on the hiding under the, i think at the end of it there was propaganda on all sides and what you the lowest common denominator was people were people and everyone was scared right and to different degrees um and yeah we everyone was everyone everyone was villainizing the other side yeah but you know the truth is somewhere in the middle it's great

definitely i remember watching i mean there's a there's a movie years ago uh uh back when i the other side. Yeah. But you know, the truth is somewhere in the middle. It's great. Definitely. I remember watching, I mean, there's a, there's a movie years ago, uh, uh, back when I was a kid of, of,

you know, you, you would hear about people trying to scale the wall and get over the wall and blew it over the wall on people that were dying, uh, wrapped in barbed wire, trying to escape Russia. Uh,

and you really got an empathy for the situation. I remember one thing that kind of brought me clarity was Sting's song, The Russians Love Their Children Too. They're just like us. They're just trying to deal with it. And that's when you kind of realize that it's more of a government thing, a government against government as opposed to people against people. And I remember when the wall fell.

It was a beautiful thing. It was an amazing, shocking thing to see it fall. But it was interesting to, I remember Neil Peart of Rush. You're up in Canada, so we'll do a Rush reference. Neil Peart wrote the lyrics. He said, you know, who's going to pay for all the wasted lives, all the wasted lives for a dead ideology? And, you know, who pays for this?

All the people who suffered, all the people who died, all the people who died trying to climb that wall. So you've gone through an interesting journey. And some of our best people that have come to America have been immigrants. Steve Jobs, the CEO of Google right now, grew up on a dirt floor in India. You know, the best and the brightest people aren't, you know, the Americans don't have the corner on the best and brightest people. So let's talk about how that shaped your journey and some of the companies you

got to and what got you really interested maybe in AI. Yeah, absolutely. And I will tell you, like, before the current CEO of Google, you know, Sergey Brin is also a Russian-Jewish immigrant. I always joke with my parents that the difference between the two was he had a math professor as a dad, so I already started back on a flirt too. It's just a little Josh with my dad.

Your dad needed a garage in Silicon Valley. That's basically yeah but i can but i can work much better with my hands than sergey i think because because of my dad's mechanic right but there you go um but yeah so i i got because of that kind of uh growing up with the prevalence of math science engineering basically what we call STEM now in education terms, was a huge focus in our household. Obviously, computer science came to me very early. Because I started coding so young, my university years were pretty easy.

I really did not have to study very hard when I went to college. It all came very naturally. Again, that 10,000-hour reference. And then I got this internship at IBM. And when I got into the first kind of six months at IBM, I thought, this is terrible. I was in some arcane backend compiler group where the ivory tower beards were so long.

And I'm like, this is not for me. I cannot be a software engineer. This is just too arcane. But luckily I got switched to, like I maneuvered around and I got injected into this little startup group that was doing e-commerce back in the late 90s when it wasn't even a thing.

And we built an e-commerce platform with an IBM. And the team got a lot of notoriety because we launched like ll bean and sears and so a bunch of uh companies that started going online in the very very early days and actually performing credit card transactions and um from there i said this is the this is technology this is the thing that sparked my excitement and interest and really kind of elevated my thought process. And I said, oh, this is fantastic. I will never be happy at IBM, though. It's just such a big company, so much bureaucracy, even though some of that was changing under Lou Gerstner.

And I started out my entrepreneurial journey. And really, that's the last time I ever worked for a large company up until I was at Oracle. So the gap between kind of large organizations was kind of 20 plus years. And through that startup journey, I'll fast forward just to kind of the tail end just before Oracle. I found myself in a position at a company where we were attacked. It was a cybersecurity attack. And one of the things I realized is like we were completely unprepared. So and then I realized not only were we completely unprepared for this cyber attack, it was one of those ransom things like we're going to keep. Oh, geez.

We're going to keep your business down until you pay us money. And before then, Bitcoin wasn't a thing. So I literally had to Western Union $5,000 to a place in Siberia. I shouldn't laugh. And what was scary about that is this hostage situation was literally millions of dollars a day in business that was being held up. And so once that kind of as bad as that experience was, and I'll tell folks like the worst things that you're living through, there's always something to be learned from those really bad things. As terrible as you think they are in the moment, you can probably exit with something of a gem. And my gem out of that experience was the idea for Zanage.

And we built Zanage to protect companies from cybersecurity threats like the ones that I lived through. They were called denial of service attacks. And eventually, we grew the business and we ended up selling the business to Oracle. And that's how I ended up at Oracle, kind of as the last big company that I ever worked from. And then was the next step Cast AI or where did you go from there? Yeah, we had actually built a couple of companies in parallel. So there was a company called Cujo as well, which also did cybersecurity, but protecting the end home user, which is still very much doing extremely well. But one of the, Chris, one of the things that one of the heartburn moments that I had at ZenEdge, and it happened almost every single month, was my CEO would come to me with the cloud bill, like basically what we were paying AWS.

And we started at a couple thousand bucks a month. And by the time we were done, it was like a couple hundred thousand dollars a month. And Yuri would ask me, dude, what's up with this bill? There's nothing I can do. There's no financial wizardry I can do to kind of, we basically failed at cost management. As successful as the business was, we could not get our heads around the primary cost driver, which was cloud expense.

And that kind of left a deep scar for me. I was like, I just felt like AWS, no matter what I did, whether it was my fault or AWS's fault, as the head of technology, I couldn't get my financial house in order. And I felt that everyone else, I can't be the anomaly here. I can't be the only tech leader that is healing this pain. And when we dug into the market, we said, this is huge. Everyone is overspending on cloud. It's not just us. There's a severe industry problem here.

And that's how Cast was born that's awesome i i had a i've had a lot of friends and i've had friends that work for aws um the uh i've had friends that have worked for them and like all of a sudden yeah overnight they get a bill in fact one of my friends uh their daughter or something did a little startup she was working on a little project and suddenly it, I don't know what she did wrong, but suddenly she got like a $20,000 bill, $30,000 bill. And it was like some little project. And, you know, they were asking for help to fund it or, you know,

reach out to AWS to help them. And I don't know, the friends that I've had at AWS are usually fairly nice a little bit, but yeah, they can balloon out of control. So did that help you launch Cast AI? Yeah, so we looked at it from our first principles perspective. We said, okay, where's the money going? Is there significant waste in the system that we can help eliminate?

And the answer was yes, for the most part. There's systematic waste built into the process. And I think it happened with kind of this, this what's called DevOps movement in the industry. And for those who don't understand, I'll just explain it briefly. Basically, if you go back 10, 15 years ago, if you as a software engineer needed computing resources, you'd go to the finance team and you'd say, hey, guys, buy me some computers. We're going to do this project. And then we'd go through this kind of top-down waterfall budgeting and funding exercise for that project. And then what CEOs realized, well, hey, we're hamstringing our engineering team.

These guys have lots of great innovations, lots of great ideas. We need to unleash them. And the unleashing potential came with the advent of cloud, because now no longer did you have to buy these computers, you could rent them per the minute or per the hour. And so that became an enabler for moving the keys from the finance department to the engineering department. Now, I as an engineer could come to the cloud with my own cloud account that's under the company umbrella and say, I need these 30 computers and this much hard drive and this much network, and I'm going to go build my innovation. And businesses love that. And that's the boom that we've seen in tech over the last,

since 2007 till now, that has been the big advent and boom. As a startup, I no longer need millions of dollars for a data center. That doesn't exist anymore. You start a company, you don't go and raise money for physical infrastructure. You just need enough to cover your cloud bill. And so that movement to the engineering department opened up this huge wave of innovation, but it also created the financial control problem. Engineers aren't accountants. They don't care what the bill is. So they're going to spend what they're going to spend. And there's no financial discipline on an engineering team to say, wait a minute,

maybe we're wasting money. Maybe we don't need all of these resources. And that's that kind of dichotomy and the flip. Yeah, we created a lot of good for the world endless innovation but we now need to come back and kind of balance the books how do we make sure folks are spending what they need to spend and not more than what they need to spend yeah yeah so was that what cassie i was born out of then is that uh the proponent for starting the company and get it going it was exactly the the innovation and the origin story it Most good ideas are, you know, invention is the, what's the phrase? I'm forgetting it. Necessity is the engine of invention or something.

Yeah, the mother of invention. That's right. Mother of invention. So we built a solution that we, for a future, that we could adopt for ourselves. And it turns out to be a great fit for many different organizations. And it's based on a few principles, which I can kind of highlight. The first one is that we don't want our customers

to commit to cloud companies like Google, Amazon, Azure. Those are the three big ones for multi-year contracts. That's not the promise of cloud. So cloud promises that just-in-time resource, which means when I need something, I can go get it and pay for it. I don't need to commit to a 10-year deal or a five-year deal or a three-year deal. That's kind of a negotiation tactic from decades ago. So that's kind of a first basic, first principle. The second one is we are short on human beings for almost everything in engineering i heard a stat yesterday last weekend some we have something like 25 million coders in the world we probably need 250 million to meet the demand you know like we're 10x short

the number of people that can actually write software. Wow. So because we're short on so many people, anything that can be done automatically should be done automatically. So automation was the second kind of core founding principle of the business. We need to be able to automate things that humans have previously done so that we can get machines to do the work and get humans out of the way and let them focus on the more creative and higher order thinking engineering tasks that they need to do. One of the ways we've really failed as a nation,

especially here in America is, is not building enough engineers and stuff. That was what made us a great nation for as an empire for a long time. And we're really feeling it. And now with the job market being all crazy, and, you know, I think we've developed less engineers here in America than we have ever. I mean, it's like people are just good at playing video games,

basically, at this point. If you look at the typical kind of engineering roster and where companies are recruiting from, a lot of folks coming from China, India, former Soviet Union, Europe. Brazil has even now become a hotspot. We get less and less engineering talent locally in the US. If you remember last year, there was this ban on these H-1B visas. It was a Trump-era ban, which I never understood. The thing we're short of is we're

not going to allow them to the country. It made absolutely... America as a principle was based on it's a population of immigrants. There was native indigenous folks here

were here first. Everyone else was an immigrant. There's no other Native American. Sadly, it was also built on racism. So that tends to rear ugly, ugly head. So, you know, it's a, it's a sad state. Thankfully we're hopefully back on track. Hopefully we stay on track, but yeah, I mean you know, I was just, I was just citing earlier this morning the book by the guy who created Vox, Matthew Iglesias, One Billion Americans, The Case for Thinking Bigger.

You know, we have to compete with China and the way China is going. But let's get back to your company and give us like an overview of what Cast AI does, and then we'll get into the weeds. Yeah, absolutely. So very simply, we provide our customers with a very simple automation platform that plugs into their existing environment. We don't work for all customers. They have to be kind of on a certain technology track. We just took a bet that that technology track would be the future. But if they're on that track, which is called Kubernetes, by the way, I'll explain it in a moment,

we plug into their environment seamlessly, and then we take the control of the wheel, right? So all of the scaling operations that need to be done are managed by Cast. And the Freakonomics aspect here is that a typical cloud company like AWS, for example, may have like 150 to 200 different SKUs or computers that are available for

rent. They all have different characteristics and performance profiles and costs associated to them. And so our, our technology is basically cost-driven. So we look in the open market and we say, what is the best computer configuration that currently exists in the market that will fulfill your need at the lowest possible cost? So thinking about the technology as a finance-first operation

that will optimize every single choice that we make against the cloud, like AWS, for example, or Google or Azure, to make sure that that bill is lower. And by doing that continuous optimization and not having any human beings involved, hence the AI part of the company, we are able to drastically lower customer bills and they don't have to take any recommendations.

There's no report that they have to run and then try to implement afterwards. It just starts happening from day one. And that's, I think, where the eureka moment happens for customers. That's pretty freaking awesome. I mean, that's really awesome. And saving money, of course. Like I said, I've just been like, I've seen some crazy stories about bills and everything else where things just get way the heck out of hand. So Breakdown, who are usually your clients? Like who do you usually work with? Well, so we're still, like our company has been around for a couple years,

but what we've noticed is that companies that are born on the cloud, meaning like they've been created in the last five to seven to ten years, find it easiest to adopt our technology. And so we started with our initial customer base being those early innovators, if you will, Chris. One of the things that we realized, when you teach a computer to play a game, the computer needs to know the rules of that game. So like, if you've ever seen the AlphaGo, like AI that plays Go against some of the best human players in the world, there was a great Netflix series on the topic, or they've even taught computers to play StarCraft now at the most elite level. And since you're a gamer, I think that would be super interesting to you. I think it's called AlphaStar. It's a company that Google bought

in the last five or six years that produces this amazing AI. But one of the things that they're, why those AIs are so successful is because they have rules of engagement. They know how to play the board and they know what's off limits and what's on limits. So think about a game like Starcraft as an example. Well, if you're going to do a computer automation for something, it's much

easier if you have those rules of engagement. So with CAS, we said, look, we can't just optimize any environment across any application, across any technology set. It's just too varied. So what if we focused our scope of thinking just on a subset of the problem and maybe put the legacy companies aside and focused on the folks that are moving to the latest generation of technology? And that happens to be this thing called CloudNata, which is a technology that was born, again, in Google data centers. It used to be called Borg. If you're familiar with the Star Trek reference, they had a system in their environment called Borg that would basically allow every developer, every engineer to deploy and manage their applications the same way. And

they turned that into a completely free and open source project called Kubernetes. Kubernetes is Greek for navigator, I believe. So it's navigation of the cloud. And hence the logo is a little, is a sailing, like a sailing wheel. And so we took a bet that most organizations and companies would move to Kubernetes in some form or fashion over the next five years. And why did we do that? Well, that allowed us to apply some intelligent rules to an environment where the rules of engagement are well understood. So now if the rules of engagement are well understood. So now if the rules of engagement are well understood, we can start applying machine learning and AI to the problem because we're

not dealing with a general AI problem. We're dealing with a very specific set of predictions we have to make. That's pretty awesome. It says on your website, you can save, cut your cloud bill in half. That's pretty freaking awesome. That's actually some chunk of change right there. Yeah. I think in one of our first promos was, asterisk, asterisk, or we'll pay the difference. That got a lot of heads turning towards us. I don't know if the lawyers asked us to take it down,

but it was a pretty cool claim. And it's true. Unless you are, as a company, spending all your time on your own optimizations, which some people do because they're at scale and they're big enough to have a whole team of people to do that, most people are just shocked by the amount of waste that's in their system. Wow. I noticed one of your clients was Samsung, I guess. They're actually an investor and a client as well. Oh, wow. That's always good. That's always good. You know, they're not going anywhere because you've got them locked in with

your stock. And you guys work with AWS. What are the cloud services do you work with? So today we work with AWS, Google Cloud, which is GCP, and Microsoft Azure. Those are the three primary ones. And then next year, we're going to expand into Oracle Cloud and IBM Cloud. There's probably five or six really big clouds that the vast majority of the folks use. You know, AWS market share is so dominant right now. That's why we have that whole Jedi. Chris, did you know about this whole federal $10 billion contract, this Jedi contract from two years ago?

No, I don't think I specifically know. Yeah, it's an interesting story. So basically the U.S. government has decided, all right, we're going to move to cloud. And I guess two and a half years ago, they awarded the whole contract to AWS. Oh, wow. It was $10 billion or something like that.

And then we had this one interesting moment in August of 2019 when Capital One was breached on AWS Cloud. And it was really a pivotal moment for the Jetta contract because all of a sudden everything ground to a halt. And halt and the U.S. government said wait a minute we're putting all of our eggs in this basket right maybe let's take a step back and see if other vendors let's get some uh uh let's let's get some diversity in our vendor base so that if something bad happens to one, we've actually got a disaster recovery plan. The whole government is going to shut down. So since then, they've done a smart thing

where they've divided that contract between AWS, Azure, and I think others are getting an opportunity to win some of that deal as well. That's probably good. Because when one goes down, man, you're just like everything goes down, it seems, or like a lot of your popular stuff goes down, man, like you're just like everything goes down. It seems like a lot of your popular stuff goes down. You're just like, well, the Internet's broken again.

Yeah. It's like, yeah, like Facebook had a big outage was a month ago. Right. Yeah. Like a couple of days, man. They were down. Yeah. And people I think people were totally, their lives

were totally upside down. I can't use WhatsApp. I can't use Facebook. Instagram, yeah. Everything was down. Gnashing of teeth, wrenching of hair. It was getting biblical, man. It was getting totally biblical. People were jonesing like coming off

of a heroin addiction. People were running naked through the streets. It was like Paradise Lost or something. I don't know. It did feel kind of weird, but it screwed up Verizon. And so my Verizon phone wasn't working. It was all scrambled. I think the data was working, but the phone wasn't.

Yeah, it was really weird. Totally screwed up everything. But yeah, I mean, I don't know. The U.S. government going down? Could that be a bad thing? No, actually, it would be. and wasn't or yeah it was like really weird um totally screwed up everything but uh yeah i mean i don't know the u.s government going down we could that could that be a bad thing no actually it would be um i mean considering the military is probably a big part of of that you you definitely got to run be able to keep the military going especially you know if anything were to happen that would certainly it was vulnerable um what are some some other services or touch-ons that you want to tell us about with the company that, you know, people should know about?

Yeah, I want to actually step back to, so now that we're talking about this kind of disaster piece, this is kind of interesting, Chris, because we actually have a much broader vision for the company. If you think about this of Cast as a platform, we're getting to this place called product market fit, which basically means you have an addressable market. Customers find a usable product

where they get a tremendous amount of value. They might be complaining about lack of features. Actually, the theory goes, the more customers complain that, hey, they want more features, the better your fit into the market is because they're not going anywhere. They need the platform in order to succeed. So we're going through this product market fit journey right now on one leg of the stool, which is this cost optimization piece.

But if you look at the overall kind of computer environment, there are a lot of processes that need to be automated. And we call these kind of autonomous systems, just like, you know, if you own a Tesla, it can drive itself automatically or other EVs in the future. We believe that kind of these cloud environments should drive themselves automatically or autonomously. So and one of those kind of second pillars that we want to tackle is exactly this area of disaster recovery. Like, why do you as a customer have to choose a cloud? Like, why do you have to say, okay, I'm all in on AWS or I'm all in on Google? Why can't you do what the US government did and say, I want to pick two and I'm going

to run my stuff in such a way that's fluid so that if one goes down, my business isn't in jeopardy, right? So I'm not scrambling for two weeks to kind of break the vault and get the tapes, you know, like this whole old school disaster recovery mechanism of trying to restore everything once you have a huge outage. Like Facebook had, like Google had a few weeks ago where many customers are down. So our ultimate, like now that you, once we've got cost under control, the next thing we want to get under control is this disaster piece, and allowing customers to flow seamlessly between two or three clouds

without any outage, even if one of them goes down. And that's something we're going to be looking, like, we've already got the underpinnings for that technology in the platform. And we're going to be looking at that as a commercial offering in, in the next year. Do you, I don't know if this is applicable, but do you, this whole new metaverse thing that Facebook is trying to re-engineer and,

and stuff. Do you see any of that coming into play for AI and what's going on? Or is, is it still a little bit, um, I don't know, hype or blue sky? I don't know. I mean, there, you know, there, there's a lot of hype and then there's some reality. I, I'm societally very concerned that we're going to have a bunch of kids that are living in some alternate reality, playing video games for a living that never actually have a chance to procreate and we lose all generation. But if our technology

would be applicable, so we're a tools provider, right? We're the picks and shovels of the infrastructure business, which means that if there's going to be new innovation in augmented reality, virtual reality that ends up being kind of the formation of the metaverse or Web 3.0. They need computers to run on. They need to pay for those computers with money. And so we're going to be the ones saving those innovators the money that lets them grow their

business effectively. Wow. That should be pretty cool. Any other aspects we want to touch on before we go out? No, I think the key thing is, well, first of all, we're hiring. So if you're an engineer and you want to work on cool stuff, I'm going to just do that shameless plug, Chris, sorry. There you go. All over Europe, North America, give me a shout.

Because like I said, we're short on really great engineers in the world. And we are going to be building some really cool next generation automation and AI associated with automation. So I'm pretty excited. I'm looking forward to the next stages of the journey. That's important.

All my friends that are Silicon Valley coders and stuff, I have a whole bunch of them. You know, AI is the thing. Can they work remotely or do they have to, you know, be in Silicon Valley or one of your offices? Yeah, you can see I'm in my office right now, which is just my home. But no, we don't. We have offices, but it uh never been a requirement right so

uh folks work wherever they want to work i got a guy working on the beach as long as he delivers i don't care right i've had the zoom thing with the beach behind him and the waves and bikini girls walking by and he's like i'm sitting here working hey people think it's a virtual background it's totally fine where's that guy who's going around he's like riding I'm sitting here working, eh? People think it's a virtual background. It's totally fine. Where's that guy who's going around? He's riding the motorcycle, and he's got the green screen attached to his body, and he's at the football games and stuff. Yeah, there you go.

Well, you know, I've been able to work anywhere in the world since 2004, so as long as I've got a Wi-Fi connection. And then even if I don't, I can just check in on email. So it's a beautiful thing. Give us your plugs so we can find you guys on the interwebs and get to know more about you. On the interwebs we're www.cast.ai and you can hit me up on LinkedIn

at executivectl or find me by name and we've got and then a really cool thing once you hit our website, it's a completely just, if you're an engineer, you want to give this heck a run, just sign up, run it for no cost. There's like a trial period. Like you don't have to put a credit card down. It's pretty cool.

We also have a really great open source Slack community where you can just join our Slack channel and talk to all of our engineers, all of other customers. It's a really nice open community to share information and learnings. Also, AWS has a big show every year. It's reInvent.

It's this year in November in Las Vegas, your hometown, Chris. So we're going to be exhibiting our stuff at reInvent, and we're pretty excited about some of the innovations we're going to be showing there. That should be pretty awesome. You guys also have a cost calculator. So if people want to figure out what their cost savings would be, they can just go on your website and punch in some numbers and figure out what they can save.

Oh, that's a really good point, Chris. So we have this mode where the software runs in this kind of benign read-only mode. You don't have to turn on any automation. You install this thing and it tells you upfront based on your actual application running, here's how much you're wasting and here's how much you could save and here's how. And you don't have to pay anything for that report. And you can just continuously run it forever and just pick up the recommendations from there. So even if you've got a really tiny environment, you don't think you want to be a commercial customer, just install this thing and you'll get all the goods.

There you go. There you go. Well, it's been wonderful to have you on. Very insightful. Wonderful journey that you've taken and gone on. And, of course, you know, it's an interesting world now where it's uh you know we're all big one big world as long as we got computers and everything but yeah i mean ai is the future of everything i mean i just constantly hear people talking about that and the metaverse seems to be the big new thing

that and nfts but stick with ai for now um we just have to decide if we're going to take what is it the blue pill or the red pill like that's yeah have some friends that they just grab on to whatever the latest noise is or fat is. But fun is fun. So thanks for being on the show, Leon. We certainly appreciate it and your story and everything else. Thank you so much, Chris. It was great to talk to you. I look forward to chatting real soon.

There you go. And thanks, Moniz, for tuning in. Go to YouTube.com, 4ChessChrisVoss. Hit the bell notification for tuning in. Go to YouTube.com, 4ChessChrisVoss. Hit the bell notification button. Go to Goodreads.com, 4ChessChrisVoss. See everything we're reading and reviewing over there to get smarter. And go to all of our groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram. Just search for my name or The Chris Voss Show.

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