All in Emerging Tech

#20: Sports and Pandemic Pivots with HotMic CEO Sean Longworth

Sports has been an unfortunate victim of this global pandemic. Sports junkies all over the country are really hurting. We always say that in chaos there is opportunity, and one company standing ready to step in and help bring the fun back to sports is HotMic. HotMic gives you the opportunity to choose your watch party with your favorite sports personality, celebrity or just host your own watching parties with your friends. It is like a tailgate party in your own home. Today we have HotMic Founder, CEO and startup veteran Sean Longworth with us to talk about what it is like to build a startup in the midst of a pandemic, and how to remain agile to adjust and pivot in a market turned upside down.

#12: Talking Security and Confluera with John Thompson and Mukesh Singh

Welcome back to another FUTRtech video podcast. Today we have with us some very special guests.

John Thompson started off his career at IBM back in the 70s as a salesman. He rose through the ranks to become General Manager of IBM Americas, but after 28 years at IBM in 1999 he was lured away to become CEO of Symantec building it into a true enterprise focused company. In 2014, John Stepped into the role of Chairman of the Board of Microsoft Corporation following Bill Gates’ departure. John has been an active investor and in 2018 he became a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners and has put together a portfolio of truly impressive companies. One of those companies is the cyber security company Confluera, which we are really excited to talk to him about today.

eMERGE 2020 Chicago Preview

Welcome back, I’m sure you have talk about eMERGE 2020 Chicago conference here. So what the heck is it you may be asking. This is a technology culture conference. Chicago has so many great components to make it a great technology hub, but it has failed to really take off as a technology center. I think part of that is because of the cultural aspect.

Back during the dotcom boom, Chicago had a great technology culture, but after the crash, that kind of disappeared. In the valley, the roots of technology had taken hold, but here, they weren’t as deep and they got washed away in the crash.

FUTR New Year's Resolution

As we approach the new year, I reflect on the past year. It has been incredibly busy, but satisfying. This FUTRtech website and YouTube channel have really matured, and I hope to make more videos in the new year, with more diverse content, more interviews, more cool companies and more great tech. There are also some very exciting things in the works for next year, all I will say at this point is keep April 30th open. More announcements to come in 2020.

VMWorld 2019: A Quick Interview With Liqid

So I have talked in the past about the rise of disaggregation and compassable infrastructure, and a lot of that was on display at VMWorld. I first ran into Liqid at the Open Compute Platform summit a few years back. They drew a lot of attention for showing how you could provision hardware assets as easily as you could provision VMs. Because it is all REST based, you could add physical hardware provisioning into your DevOps process. Basically, all of the components are joined together over a PCIe fabric to allow the dynamic provisioning of components.

VMWorld Part 1

My last stop in SanFrancisco was for VMWorld 2019, and let me tell you it was quite a show. Last year my perspective was that it was a show in decline, and that VMWare was trying to stay relevant in a world that is increasingly being dominated by Cloud.

Clearly VMWare’s CEO Pat Gelsinger was on top of it, because they made some impressive and bold moves over the last year or so.

Emerging Tech and the Asian Markets

To quote statistician, Hans Rosling from his 2018 New York Times Best Seller:

“If the UN forecasts for Population growth are correct, and if incomes in Asia and Africa keep growing as now, then the center of gravity of the world market will shift over the next 20 years from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. Today, the people living in rich countries around the North Atlantic, who represent 11 percent of the world population, make up 60 percent of the Level 4 consumer market. Already by 2027, if incomes keep growing worldwide as they are doing now, then that figure will have shrunk to 50 percent. By 2040, 60 percent of Level 4 consumers will live outside the West.”

Valley Visionaries Trip Part 2

Many of the VC offices are built around a fabulous old tree. This one is from the courtyard of Lightspeed Venture Partners. We visited with Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greylock, Sutter Hill, Sequoia, and IVP.

In this episode, I focus on some of the portfolio companies I met with.

Companies discussed in this video are:
Blameless - blameless.com
Epsagon - epsagon.com
Fiddler - fiddler.ai