Agile Stacks | John Mathon

Agile Stacks | John Mathon

Transcript

Alan 0:02
I’m here today with John Mason. John is the founder of agile stacks and also CEO. John, welcome to today’s show.

John 0:09
Thank you. Good to see you here.

Alan 0:10
So agile stacks. You know, for the listeners, before we get into the company, let’s let’s take your the history, your background from school education, what you’ve done the past, and they’re bringing you up to date.

John 0:23
Okay, well, my my big background, I went to MIT and I met a friend there. And one of the most peculiar things is, we, we both knew, we wanted to start a company together. And it was only a few years when we finally met, I could get him out here in California, and we started this company that called Tibco software. And it was very successful, we conquered the financial industry and, and Wall Street, in a matter of five years, we had 50% market share throughout all of Wall Street and the world, really, in financial industry. And the company was, you know, amazing, we, we invented this thing called publish, subscribe, and patented the idea and made the technology so that people could distribute information very easily around enterprises, but you know, eventually everywhere. So this idea of publish subscribe now it’s become really prominent in things like IOT. And also even in the cloud, we’re starting to see more and more that’s around this publish subscribe idea. So the idea lives on. And I’ve been very vocal in supporting, you know, the progress of IoT and publish cross publish, subscribe and moving the industry you know, in that direction and following it with some cool ideas and companies and stuff so my my latest edge agile stacks will tell you about when if you’re interested

Alan 1:41
Sure Yeah. And you know, when when you’re moving into first the tip Karina, really what they on the subscription model, also news wires. So they also take hold of this it like the Reuters and

John 1:54
Right, well, one of the things that, you know, we found was that information of all sorts can be distributed through publish subscribe there easily. It’s a great model. And so the news organizations picked up on it. Reuters bought Tibco at one point, and then we actually split apart and had sort of a partial ownership by orders. So it was a it was a spin out. And that was kind of interesting. But yeah, all of the news companies eventually model, you know, a lot of their stuff on the publish subscribe model. So it’s, it’s been very powerful effect on lots of industries.

Alan 2:30
So John, you’re always constantly thinking outside the box, looking at the next big idea and in really bring change to our individual lives. But when we look at agile stacks, you touched on the vision there, what what inspired you to do this? And what do you really see for the vision of the future?

John 2:50
Yeah, so one of the things I’ve always worked in enterprise IT and helping companies, and that’s, you know, what I know, I’d love to do consumer stuff more. But, you know, that’s just what I got, you know, does seem to be get pinned into, people seem to think I’m good at that. So and I have a lot of ideas. So I have been talking a lot to a lot of businesses over the last five years or so. And one of the problems that I see a lot of businesses having is you really going into the cloud and building their infrastructure to offer services, it’s a very tough thing. And only the biggest companies like Google and Apple and Facebook and stuff have done it. Well. A lot of other companies are struggling. And we know though from Gartner and just my experience, millions of companies want to go into the cloud and start offering services, it’s an exploding, as the cost of the cloud goes down, more and more businesses want to just take all their operations and move it to the cloud. And the problem is, it’s very difficult to move, especially a lot of older industries and stuff and businesses into the cloud. So I saw the problem at my last open source company that I was working at, where people were trying to deploy these these services, multiple services at the same time. And they, they couldn’t make them work. They didn’t know how to make it reliable, how to make it secure. A lot of knowledge is missing for many companies, and they don’t have a good resource to get quality information. And so I saw this serious problem that a lot of organizations were going to fail at getting to the cloud. And so I have developed a technology not unlike publish subscribe in some ways. There’s a a publish subscribe component kind of concept in here. So it’s a leverage of some old ideas, but some new ideas. And it enables us to take large numbers of components in technology and integrate them and make them work in the cloud without having to have all the expertise and giving you what we call like a Google like infrastructure out of the box for day one, and you can grow like Google, I mean, it’s amazing. So, we, it’s a brilliant way I think, and it’s gonna help a lot of companies get to the cloud faster and better.

Alan 5:08
I’m visiting here today with John Maytime. He is the founder of agile stacks. John, I need to take a quick break, and we’ll be right back down. Okay.

Speaker 1 5:19
I love fishing with my family.

Unknown Speaker 5:23
I think it’d be easier to use a net, it was so much fun.

Unknown Speaker 5:29
The times when we are together, it makes it all all the more worth it. Having dad teach them how to like cast a fly rod. And

Alan 5:36
as long as we’re doing stuff together, we’re having fun. Some people see a father and his son fishing together, while others see a succession plan

Welcome back I am here with John Mathon he is the co founder, he is the founder of agile stacks. And, and John, we’re talking about the history of what you’ve done in the past at MIT graduate and, and starting right out of school essentially Timko, very successful public company and and it and then this new idea coming for agile stacks is more of an enterprise business software model that that’s helping companies move to the cloud. But what are some of the barriers of entry that you face? As you’re, as you’re getting ready to roll this software out?

John 6:29
Well, there’s several things that I could talk about. One is just starting the company has been kind of a challenge. Allen, it’s, it’s, this has been a tough market right now, I don’t know if you know, but a lot of VCs aren’t investing it’s been it’s been a tough thing to go out and raise money right now a lot of people will mention that. I think that’s a good thing, though, actually. Because when times are tough like this, and it’s hard to raise money means there’s less competitors. And it means some of the best companies in the world have been built during times when it’s been harder to raise money. And so I look at that actually as a positive. So a lot of a lot of competition, not a lot of people, you know, thinking about the same things. And that’s, that’s a benefit. So the other thing is that as we’ve talked to the VCs, and to different people and companies, we’ve refined our idea, and you find this is very common in a lot of small companies, even at Tibco. I remember, you know, we had originally three vectors that we were going out on, and we ended up having to decide on one finally, and it took a while to figure it out. And with Agile stacks, we have, you know, had to think about our message, our value proposition very clearly and carefully over the last several months, as we’ve talked to different people, and it’s really helped us gel, the ideas, it’s a very positive process, actually, in a lot of ways, even though you get rejected a lot, even though you know, you’re facing, you know, a lot of issues. The product itself, though, is, you know, it’s remarkably simple idea to help companies get going forward. And this is one of the most exciting things I’ve seen. I have started other technology companies before and when I go in and talk, there’s always 50% 60 70% of companies don’t want to don’t need it don’t not interested, when I go in and talk about agile stacks. And we’ve talked about the problems getting into everybody’s doing it. I mean, there’s, there’s hardly a company I talked to that isn’t interested, and you know, needs that kind of thing we’re talking about. So it’s been very exciting for me to go and just talk to people and find you know how they all have the same problem over and over and over again, just so many companies. So the cloud is pervasive right now everybody is moving in to the cloud, it’s becoming a crowded space. But there’s a lot of room to grow.

Alan 8:53
It’s interesting, I saw an article come across my desk that talked about how much Google and Apple are really, they’re buying up companies, big data companies in AI companies as quick as they can. And what do you think is behind all this, you know, in terms of exhibit, is that a good move in terms of what you’re, you know, how you see it? Are they trying to kill the competition? Or?

John 9:18
Yeah, there’s a lot, there’s so many good ideas out there. And I guess, Google and Apple and other companies are recognizing that, you know, it’s a lot easier to acquire something that’s a good idea than it is to build it yourself. And so, you know, it’s very typical for companies to go out and like that and buy all kinds of companies and, and I think you’re right, that there is an accelerated curve of acquisitions, because there’s so much out there. It’s just a very exciting time. Actually, there’s, I call it the virtuous circle. But there is an enormous innovation curve going on right now where we have an exponential growth in technology ideas, and every idea feeds other ideas, which then drives technology even faster. faster. And so I don’t think the companies can keep up with it. They need to buy people with good ideas, because that’s that’s where, you know, everything is. And it’s gonna continue to be that way. You know,

Alan 10:10
I heard that. So, a friend of mine recently we were talking talked about the information overload that we’re in. Yes, right now, there’s so much stuff, so much change so much information that we really need to transition to AI in order to get stuff processed.

John 10:28
That’s an interesting perspective. It is, like we used to say, at MIT that was like drinking from a firehose, because you had so much stuff you had to absorb so quickly, but I have found my whole life is like that. I mean, it’s just a constant stream of massive amounts of information growing exponentially. Keeping Up With today’s technology is hard enough, I actually call this the age of magic. And the reason I use the term age of magic is, when you don’t know what is possible. When you don’t know the technology behind it, it can seem as if it was magic, that people can do these things. When I look at my cell phone, it’s just astonishing the data rates that we can get through these things, the amount of applications and data that can fit on the phones and stuff, it boggles your mind, if you have any knowledge of the technology involved, it’s just amazing. And the more you know, the more boggling it is, okay, so, and there’s new innovations coming down like digital antennas that are revolutionizing cell phones and other technologies in IoT, that are going to really improve performance, the battery life, the bandwidth and everything. So there’s more change coming, it’s not like we’ve reached the end of this at all, it’s actually accelerating. And there’s, there’s a lot of things happening that are extremely exciting. So I can, I can definitely see all these companies accelerating their purchases, I can’t see how they can stop

Alan 11:48
visiting here today with John data. He’s the founder of agile sex, and I need to take a quick break short, and we’ll be right back after these messages.

Since you can’t take your wealth with you spend time with your family

welcome back and busy here today with Sean Maytime. He is the founder of agile stacks. And, John, a lot of our listeners are business owners or entrepreneurs. And they may not have this strong background though in tech. Could you explain for the listeners a case scenario of full stack automation? And how that would affect their business? And maybe some real life examples?

John 12:52
Oh, yeah. It’s really great one. So I am, I’m very lucky that I, through the years, I’ve had a lot of good people that I’ve met and experiences and, and one of them is in the Netherlands is company called the Enloe. And the President Ruben there, he’s become a great partner of mine in the building of this agile stacks, and has introduced me to a number of companies in Europe and stuff as we build the company and, and they do consulting all over the world and are a great company for consulting. So Ruben took me into a company called Qb, which is an IoT company that that makes thermostats and energy monitors for the home in Europe. It’s like the nest of Europe, they have shipped 10 million of these devices or have tried trying to ship 10 million of these devices around. But they have a huge problem in building the IT support all those devices. They have struggled with getting the qualified people that they need, and building that infrastructure and really making it happen. And one, it’s very interesting. When I first started talking at Qb, I, I was very early. This is just a few months, but it was very early in the Agile stacks. And I didn’t really you know, want to talk to them since they were a yellow customer. So I was just listening. And I asked him well, how are you doing as far as the cloud deployments and stuff you’re, and they went into a tirade and basically told me the whole story of how painful this was and how they would like to buy premade stacks if they could of technology because they just didn’t want to deal with this. It wasn’t their core business to do. If an enterprise infrastructure, their core business revolves around their IoT device and the applications and the consumers and, and things like that. They didn’t really want to spend half of their time developing the infrastructure for it. They wanted that off the shelf, which was astonishing to me because I that was what I was planning to do. And they just basically told me before I even mentioned anything that they wanted that that’s really exciting from a business man’s point. View is to have a customer just tell you, you know that what you’re doing before you even mentioned it to them that that’s what they want. You know, I’ve had that experience several times. Now,

Alan 15:09
it was interesting that not not to digress here. But last night, I went down and I was having some light bulbs replaced and I went down and I saw this Philips Hue lamp, I thought, yeah, had multiple colors and never had a light bulb colors before. So I go home, I put in the light bulbs and has all this Wi Fi connection. And then I thought now how do I get it to change colors? Well, I found Oh, you have to buy the templates for five bucks on an Apple B. And I can see the same thing. A lot of businesses don’t want to be inside of developing these performers and templates really to scale out. So

John 15:50
Right. Yeah, so yeah, so we expect to enable a lot of companies to move faster and have much higher security. I mean, one of the big issues with any enterprise they go into the cloud is security, reliability, things like that, how do you make it really reliable, but security especially there’s so much threat from people, you know, attacking and just concerns that having high quality security in your infrastructure is something that a lot of people don’t know how to do. And you know,

Alan 16:17
if I could, you know, it used to be that when we would buy the PC, then we’d upgrade to the next Pentium chip for AMD. And we would see the the immediate performance, but in the cloud, because the desktop has been removed essentially from us. We no longer see the speed, things are processed. But can you give us a little bit of update where we’re going with with this and the speed of the cloud? And what are the barriers right now that in the technology that people are trying to work through? So we can get to the next level?

John 16:53
That is actually a really pertinent question. There’s a, there’s two angles on that I think, really, that are important. One is we have reached the end of Moore’s law is, you know, we did it actually, several years ago, computers have not gotten faster. We’ve been stuck at about two to three gigahertz for a long time now. And what we’ve done instead is we’ve increased the number of processing units, but that depends on being able to divide the work effectively between those units, if the work can’t be divided, then it can’t go any faster. And so we’re stuck with a lot of times our processing not being able to grow as fast as we want. This is particularly important when it comes to AI applications or things that have a lot of, you know, computational that is involved. So there’s two angles, that one is the IO limitation, that just the sheer amount of IO of data in and out needs to be massively increased. And we have the capacity to do that, and I’m working with a company that’s actually going to buy some of our agile stacks, that’s going to dramatically increase the performance of, of the IO operations in the CPU. It’s, it’s a major improvement in overall performance of computers that could be arriving in the next two or three years to finally break. Get back into Moore’s law, maybe or, or, you know, start to get faster and faster. The other angle, of course, is quantum computers. And we’re seeing a lot of advances on the quantum computer front row are far from for making that for general computational purposes. But there’s a lot of applications of those that are starting to evolve that, you know, could be interesting. Google is you know, and other companies are using it for some, some work in the back office and you know, doing stuff behind the scenes, but, you know, it’s it’s happening and I think in the next 10 years, we’re gonna definitely see a huge impact from that as well.

Alan 18:42
Yeah, Elon Musk recently gave a a speech before it was published in The Guardian, in June of this year. And it it it completely turned my head where he said, I think it dwells upon the quantum computing and the laws of physics and how, how different the same amount of space, you could have six dimensions of time. And Elan came out said the following. He says it’s a billion to one likelihood that that we’re inside of a virtual world and, and, you know, this guy’s a founder, Tesla, the SpaceX, he said, Oh, Elan that’s out there. But but he says he made the following point. He goes, either we’re at the end of the world, or we’re going to really transit into something new. When we start to move this sixth dimension, virtual reality and AI.

John 19:40
Well, yeah, I’ve heard the same comments from Elon and you know, he says that he is he has had long discussions with people about the VR the idea of are we in the matrix and and he’s apparently concluded that we are in a matrix. And I haven’t really thought about had it long enough to say whether we’re in a matrix or not yet, but I can’t discount it either. Yeah, um,

Alan 20:07
all I can say is Gene Roddenberry when he did Star Trek, he gave us a good perspective of moving through, you know, our minds are, you know, I once heard is good as AI? Is there not going to ever overcome, you know, what the human mind can do?

John 20:25
Yeah. Well, that’s a fascinating topic. I’ve studied this a lot and thought about it quite a bit. The because I studied up AI back at MIT. And so it’s been a topic of great interest to me. And we divide AI into we’ll call an AI Narrow Intelligence, then general intelligence, and then superior intelligence. And we haven’t, we’re really doing a ni what we call now Narrow Intelligence, which means we can play Go, we can play computer games, pretty good, you know, decent things like that. We’re not good at building computers that can think beyond a narrow region. And they’re not even really thinking they’re not planning. They’re actually just recognizing things and stuff. So it’s, we’re still early, early, early. And I don’t know if but one of my heroes in this is a guy named Roger Penrose is a famous mathematician and physicist from London. And he has proposed that the human mind is a quantum computer, and actually, maybe many quantum computers. And he’s laid a lot of theoretical foundation for that and work with some people. And what this means is that the, and I think this makes a lot of sense, the brain operates at a different level, what happens in quantum mechanics is operate, things proceed from one state to another. And when they do, they jump from one state to another. And this is kind of if you think about the way the mind seems to work, like when you think about something, you don’t think in a logical step by step fashion a lot, a lot of times it just jumps at you what the answer is, and that is very similar the way quantum mechanics works, actually, when it tunnels through a plant chlorophyll and produces the energy for the plant, it does it in almost like a magical way, the way quantum mechanics works. And in the same way, a Roger Penrose basically postulates and shows that the brain could work this way, there could be quantum operations happening in the brain. Some physicists don’t believe this, they say it’s too wet this net, but there has been work done to show it’s not. What that means is that if the brain is operating as a quantum computer, it’s able to process information so much faster than a computer could that it may be unreachable for a regular computer to ever get to intelligence. But there’s several other implications of this. One is that the way quantum mechanics works is it occurs in space. In space, the underlying vacuum of space is where quantum operations happen. And what that means is that our brains if they are actually operating in quantum space, that every our consciousness is really in quantum space, not in our physical brains, what’s our brains are transducers or proxies for our intelligence in our consciousness, which would then be in space, quantum space. As a result, when you die, according to theory like this, you may not your physical body, the transducer from quantum space may go away, but your consciousness may still exist. Now without the senses of eyes and ears, maybe that consciousness doesn’t have anywhere to go. I don’t know. But we don’t know about this. But this is the kind of thing I think that people don’t realize, like, the world is full of like knots of new mysteries, new possibilities, that even even scientists can’t deny. Could be could be happening. And if that’s if that’s true, and I Roger is one of the most brilliant people ever to exist me may be smarter than, you know, Einstein are. And if he believes this, I think, you know, people should look at it. It’s a stupid idea.

Alan 24:08
Nice and I think is I think the further we go, the more we begin to understand about, you know, how how the quantum mechanics is transcending multiple dimensions. And you know, that the science of creation, you know, and I think that’s one thing that Elan was trying to bring out in his recent comment is he says, okay, as we move forward, guys, put your seatbelt on now because yes, either recovered to the end the world or we’re gonna have some major breakthroughs on you know, where, where this technology is all going? Yeah,

John 24:44
I strongly believe with all along that we are on the cusp of a lot of new breakthroughs. It’s why I called it the age of magic. I think we’re, we’re going to see a lot more magic coming on over the next, you know, 510 years and a lot of big changes happening in the world over the next five years.

Alan 25:00
To sit down, let’s jump back to person one more information on that just x. How would they go about that?

John 25:05
They can go to our website, we’re in stealth mode, but we’re going to launch the website very shortly. And, you know, that’s one way. Just stay tuned.

Alan 25:14
John, thanks for being on the show.

John 25:15
Okay, thank you, Alan.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

 

We hope you found this interview about “Agile Stacks | John Mathon” enjoyable.

To receive our free newsletter, contact us here.

Subscribe our YouTube Channel for more updates.

This transcript was generated by software and may not accurately reflect exactly what was said.

Alan Olsen, is the Host of the American Dreams Show and the Managing Partner of GROCO.com.  GROCO is a premier family office and tax advisory firm located in the San Francisco Bay area serving clients all over the world.

 

Alan L. Olsen, CPA, Wikipedia Bio

 

 

GROCO.com is a proud sponsor of The American Dreams Show.

 

The American Dreams show was the brainchild of Alan Olsen, CPA, MBA. It was originally created to fill a specific need; often inexperienced entrepreneurs lacked basic information about raising capital and how to successfully start a business. Alan sincerely wanted to respond to the many requests from aspiring entrepreneurs asking for the information and introductions they needed. But he had to find a way to help in which his venture capital clients and friends would not mind.

The American Dreams show became the solution, first as a radio show and now with YouTube videos as well. Always respectful of interview guest’s time, he’s able to give access to individuals information and inspiration previously inaccessible to the first-time entrepreneurs who need it most.

They can listen to venture capitalists and successful business people explain first-hand, how they got to where they are, how to start a company, how to overcome challenges, how they see the future evolving, opportunities, work-life balance and so much more..

MyPaths.com (Also sponsored by GROCO) provides free access to content and world-class entrepreneurs, influencers and thought leaders’ personal success stories. To help you find your path in life to true, sustainable success & happiness.  I’s mission statement:

In an increasingly complex and difficult world, we hope to help you find your personal path in life and build a strong foundation by learning how others found success and happiness. True and sustainable success and happiness are different for each one of us but possible, often despite significant challenges. Our mission at MyPaths.com is to provide resources and firsthand accounts of how others found their paths in life, so you can do the same.

About John Mathon

John Mathon has provided C-level executive leadership to numerous companies including two that went public. He invented the publish/subscribe technology at his first company, TIBCO. John’s most recent company is Agile Stacks provides full stack automation to companies wanting to migrate into the cloud.