Brad Gerstner: belief

Transcript context

…For all of cloud? For all of cloud. Our view was it was safer and then it was only a matter of time before the cost and efficacy of computing the things you could do in the cloud would be better. We were on the lookout. One of the things that we were focused on at the time—this has been a (I think) theme for us over the last decade—we have this view that not all software is created equal. Not all ARR is created equal. If you rewind the clock to 2000, the largest sector of software was databases. In 2000, if you aggregate the total enterprise value of companies that were principally driving their revenue from databases, it's about a trillion dollars in market cap in 2000. Then if you fast forward and you say, well, every year we're producing more data than in all years of human history combined. It's got to find a home. We're only going to censor more of it, and build centers to gather more data in the future. Where is that home going to be? I remember Bill Gates saying, somebody asked him a question. I think Meg Whitman asked him the question, isn't all the interesting stuff done? And he said, Meg, do you realize how barbaric it is the way we make decisions? He said, in the future, we will have all this data stored. Machines will analyze the data and help us make better decisions about how to diagnose an illness, about how to educate a dyslexic child, about how to maintain an aircraft's engine. It will all be decisions made by machines looking at data. We did have a strong view that the entire database market was going to be remade. It was going to be remade in the cloud, purpose-built for the cloud. For us, that infrastructure layer in the cloud, all the enablement that would be required in order to get enterprise in the cloud was something we focused on (I would say) more than probably anybody else, and that proved to be a rich vein. This is an interesting thing to talk about here because it's kind of a second pillar of Altimeter. If I think about where you were first successful, it was really realizing that the internet is an amazing place to transact. People want to transact there and they want to buy stuff. Overwhelmingly, they're originating that journey on Google. You sort of went down the list and said, okay, what interesting businesses could people buy stuff from when they click through from Google? You've got Expedia, you've got Priceline, and a lot of Travel, Amazon. But then there's this second, I don't know if it's still an emerging thesis since you did Snowflake in mid 2000-teens. When was this?…

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