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Industry Deep Dive: Cloud 101

HOSTS Alec Renehan & Bryce Leske|9 November, 2020

When Natalie Piucco reached out to us and pitched a deep dive on the Cloud industry, we couldn’t resist.

Natalie is a Cloud Technologist, and Equity Mates community member, and works at Google.

The Cloud industry is growing at a phenomenal rate, and is one that we were keen to understand more about, given the opportunities it presents to investors.

In this episode we cover:

  • Natalie’s Cloud superpower
  • An intro to Cloud and the main players
  • The three main categories of Cloud
  • Benefits of Cloud
  • Investing in Cloud
  • Future trends

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Bryce Leske: [00:01:28] Welcome to another episode of Equity Mates, a podcast that follows our journey of investing. We break down the world of finance and investing from beginning to dividend so that you can hopefully make some returns. My name is Bryce and as always, I am joined by my equity buddy Ren. How are you going? [00:01:43][14.8]

Alec Renehan: [00:01:43] I'm very good, Bryce. I cannot wait for this episode. I feel by the end of it we're going to know a lot more about probably the hottest industry, if not the hottest one of the hottest industries of the moment. So very excited. [00:01:56][12.8]

Bryce Leske: [00:01:57] Likewise, Ren one of the things that we've been striving to do over the last few months and want to continue to do is bring as many members of the Equity Mates community onto the show to share their experiences, their investing journey, and particularly help us dove into some industries that you and I Ren don't necessarily have a whole lot of experience with, but have identified that are important and topics of interest to the Equity Mates community. So it is another industry deep dove today. And it is our pleasure to welcome a member from the community, Natalie Piucco. Natalie, welcome. [00:02:27][30.3]

Natalie Piucco: [00:02:28] Hello. Thanks so much for having me, guys. Really, really looking forward to today. I've been listening to your voices for so long since the pretty much the very inception of Equity Mates. So, I mean, it certainly doesn't feel like the first time we've met, that's for sure. [00:02:42][13.9]

Alec Renehan: [00:02:42] I'm surprised that you've stuck with us, given the poor audio quality of the early days. But it's good to hear you have. [00:02:48][5.7]

Natalie Piucco: [00:02:49] Well, I mean, I do know a secret that you're sitting there with a blanket over your head right now. It's good to say that you stay to your authentic roots. [00:02:58][8.6]

Alec Renehan: [00:02:59] Yeah, well, the blanket didn't feature in the early days. It's been a Covid edition, I say. But, yeah, you know, now now we're doing everything we can to keep the quality, you know, maybe not a good standard, but an acceptable standard [00:03:11][12.4]

Bryce Leske: [00:03:13] quality at all costs. [00:03:13][0.7]

Natalie Piucco: [00:03:14] Yeah, exactly. Well, pleasure to be here. Really looking forward to the conversation. [00:03:18][4.0]

Bryce Leske: [00:03:19] So, Natalie, you are joining us all the way from London. You reached out and sort of let us know that after I think it was the video games industry, we did some deep dove. I kind of remember what it is, to be honest. But you have experience working in the cloud industry. And Ren mentioned that it's probably one of the hottest industries at the moment for investors and for our community. So before we get into details, do you mind just, I guess, sharing a bit of a background into yourself, what you're doing in the industry, and perhaps also a little bit about your investing journey? [00:03:50][30.9]

Natalie Piucco: [00:03:51] Yeah, absolutely. So I work at Google in the Google Cloud business, and I guess I've been on this rocket ship for seven years, which is quite clearly taking off, like you said, clouds of hot topic, lots of investable opportunity. And, you know, my super power that could be really interesting to this Equity Mates community is that I guess I'm both a technologist so I can get deep in the engineering, architecting and actually building cloud technical solutions. And then when I do in my role as I sit with executive teams and I've done this across Europe and Asia Pacific, big enterprise is kind of small startup banks, health, media, government as an advisor and educate on the business opportunity that the cloud presents. So I guess a fusion between business and technologists. And obviously I'm a kind of a novel retail investor and clearly loving what you guys are doing. So hoping that fusion can help our community. [00:04:46][55.5]

Bryce Leske: [00:04:47] I'm glad we've got you on the show because you certainly sound like you have way more experience at that time. [00:04:54][6.5]

Natalie Piucco: [00:04:54] So I think we just started maybe you can ask that question to get it. They are certainly looking forward to it. And then I guess in terms of our investment journey, I was really thinking about this when this started. And clearly Equity Mates has been a big part of that journey. But when I was looking back, I'm fairly sure my investment journey started when I was about six or seven and is actually this is a true story. So I would check the All Ords, which is about the top five hundred companies listed on the ASX twice a day. And now this is probably not what you're thinking, but my father, who is kind of a cross between a small business owner and also electrical engineer, kind of similar profile to mine where I get a lot of my inspiration from our family, televisions on default channel to sky business. So every single morning, I guess, before school between kind of like odd attack and, you know, somewhere between autistic and round the twist. We'll be checking that kind of all odds and I guess learning by osmosis. So I'm not sure if it was kind of smart or sneaky, but that's kind of about as far back as my investment journey kind of goes. [00:06:05][70.9]

Alec Renehan: [00:06:06] So any parents out there set the default TV station to Sky Business or some financial channel? Yeah. [00:06:14][7.4]

Natalie Piucco: [00:06:14] So that's kind of how I started. And since they're obviously my investment, I guess interest has grown quite a lot and particularly being like. In one of the fastest growing industries, of course, and being directly involved in seeing a lot of businesses harness cloud technology and being around those kind of business leaders, leading the next generation of cloud is obviously certainly part of inspiring that next level of that journey. [00:06:43][28.7]

Bryce Leske: [00:06:44] It's certainly pretty evident that it's absolutely transforming the way things are done so very much looking forward to getting stuck into it. [00:06:50][6.5]

Alec Renehan: [00:06:51] Not only do I think it's probably worth us starting at the very beginning with cloud computing, because I kind of think of cloud computing a little bit like big data in the sense that it's often spoken about, but probably not often understood. It's become a real buzzword from different companies across, you know, across the economy these days. And so I guess to frame this deep dive, if we start at the very beginning, can you tell us what cloud computing is and how we need to understand it? [00:07:17][26.4]

Natalie Piucco: [00:07:17] Yeah, absolutely. I guess like you said, you hear a lot of those buzz words, but when you kind of start to pull apart the layers, there is quite a lot to get through. So maybe I'll preface that in the start, especially in this conversation. I'll certainly touch on a lot of kind of big topics here. I guess we might even have to look at doing a part to at some point. But you probably already an expert in cloud, so you probably share your photos with the store, them with Apple Cloud, Google Photos. You might share and collaborate files on Google Docs, Dropbox, Office 365 know probably very useful, used to using things like Zoom working from home. I guess we're all probably a little bit more of an expert than we can have been at this time. So it's not an unknown industry. But as I mentioned, when you start to pull apart the layers, there's a lot of opportunity and I'm going to share some of my personal views on those today. So I guess if we start with the basics, it's clearly one of the fastest growing industries. And since the early 2000s, the cloud industry has seen some pretty exponential growth in stuff in the past 20 years. And if you look at Gartner reports, the worldwide cloud public service market is forecasted to grow this year to a total of two hundred and fifty seven point nine billion and could be as much as eight hundred and thirty billion in the next five years. And that's compounding annual growth of 17 percent. I mean, you know, the numbers don't lie. There's clearly, clearly a lot of growth in this industry. And then on top of that, you then look at the breadth of solution Covid you just mentioned big data. You know, that's just a start. Obviously, cyber security, infrastructure development, machine learning, you know, it's just moving so quickly. I was a solution engineer and Google Cloud and even Google Cloud has up to 90 products, which makes it extremely difficult as a cloud solutions engineer. You know, we explain these technologies, as I knew so quickly. And then, of course, you have the application of those technologies in every single industry. You know, I in health care for personalized medicines, analytics and data, in hyper personalization services, in banking, retail, scalable platforms that make streaming entertainment platforms possible. Let Netflix and Spotify. And these are just the things that we know about today. [00:09:45][147.2]

Alec Renehan: [00:09:45] Just to go back to the very basics for a point of, I guess, definitions, correct me if I'm wrong and I'm sure I will get this wrong, but I just want to try and articulate how I understand the shift that cloud computing has enabled. But back in the day in like the first generation of personal computing, everything was contained. Like you had the hardware in your computer, you relied on your computer's memory for data storage and you relied on your computer for computing power. What cloud has changed and really what's driven? All this amazing advancement across sectors and industries is that you can now draw on data storage and computing power and the like, basically from online and from data centers and servers that aren't physically located with you. [00:10:30][45.2]

Natalie Piucco: [00:10:31] Exactly, exactly. And I'm going to talk about some of those benefits that kind of cost and scalability a little bit later on. But you're exactly right. I mean, essentially, it's going from what you just explained today or I guess in the past to a whole bunch of data centers filled with lots and lots of servers, football fields of servers, all working together to solve problems which businesses can use. So, yes, spot on. And this particular industry certainly hasn't been slowed by covid either. I mean, this particular industry certainly is unique in that way. And we're waiting to see the full effects of the market that this week in particular, tech companies are reporting their Q3 results and we're seeing companies up to forty eight per cent on the big tech companies announced for Q3. Which is pretty unbelievable growth, and that's only going to continue to grow. [00:11:29][58.1]

Bryce Leske: [00:11:30] So, Natalie, who is some of the biggest players in the cloud industry at the moment? I mean, IWC comes to mind, but I'm sure there are many others, obviously. Google. [00:11:39][9.1]

Natalie Piucco: [00:11:40] Yeah, absolutely. So I guess, you know, if you want to do some further research, Afterpay against Gartner releases that magic quadrant every year. So keep that on your radar. But essentially, if you look at cloud infrastructure, if you look at kind of the right hand corner, there's Amazon Web Services, Microsoft is your and Google cloud. So there's some of the top players in the infrastructure space, but some other prominent players present in the market, which you've probably heard about before, is things like Alibaba, Cloud, Oracle, Cloud, IBM and Salesforce, Adobe Cloud. So, yeah, you're absolutely right. They have some of the top names that we see popping up in this industry, of course. And we'll go into some more depth as we make our way through. [00:12:24][44.4]

Bryce Leske: [00:12:25] Just on that, if you think about it from like an investing point of view, the infrastructure is obviously one part of, I guess, the cloud industry. Are there other ways that you can think about getting access to the cloud industry without having to just invest in those that provide infrastructure? [00:12:41][16.6]

Natalie Piucco: [00:12:42] Yeah, absolutely. Firstly, I would say there's kind of three different categories, although there are others emerging in public cloud community. And I guess I've kind of held product solution engineering kind of roles in a couple of them now. And, you know, these big players have products and services across all three of those cloud categories. If you look at a triangle in the bottom, we have infrastructure as a service. We in the middle, we have platform as a service. And at the top we have Sess, which is software as a service. So they're the kind of three ways that you can, I guess, break down the cloud industry. And I can kind of take you through a couple of those examples. Yes. Before I actually do that, I think it's really important if I kind of take it one step back and say, like, why is there so much opportunity in cloud? Why now? And I think, you know, there's obviously lots of reasons. But simply put, you know, customers and data at the center of every business, and both can be optimized and powered by cloud. You know, these are just the obvious ones. I mean, the business conversations that are happening at board level, six level or that agility, speed, cost risk management, new product development, they can essentially all be optimized with cloud, which means there's limitless opportunity. I mean. Ninety four percent is the number of enterprise organizations that are already using cloud technology as a part of their strategy. So in these three categories, which I just mentioned, infrastructure service platform as a service, as a service, there's just so much that exists today and hopefully it continues to ride that and obviously more to come. So how about we start with Seth? OK, so says the most common cloud service type largest market segment forecasted to grow one hundred four billion in twenty twenty and most of us use this every day. So it's basically software access through an app or web browser. So it's an as a service model or an annual subscription, like we would pay for things like Netflix, for example. It's a big hit in the business world and some kind of notable SAS company. Is there things like Salesforce CRM, which you've probably heard of it kind of platform that gives big businesses kind of single view of the customers, so still generating some really impressive growth. After twenty one years, they reported that kind of 20, 20 revenue was up, something like twenty nine percent year on year, and pretty much every organization has some kind of CRM. So that's one example of course during covid collaboration and productivity suites like Google Docs Office 365 Zoome of course the big one I know up around six hundred percent. I think it was unbelievable. And you know, for some kind of less obvious ways that people and the businesses are using SAS, I mean like of course Najran Covid to enable schools and remote workers, but like enabling telehealth to give frontline caregivers access to patients and better access to their data. Of course, that collaboration extends to big companies like Atlassian. I mean, that they really are the jewel in the crown for Australia as an Australian company. They, of course, are things like JIRA and Confluence, which helps engineers collaborate. And then, you know, you have some other big bone in the cloud kind of SAS companies that have hitcher systems like Workday, for example. So it's the largest market segment and it's still only 20 percent of it spent. So let's just kind of pause there, kind of pull over, stop running and start doing what you do if you land or not. It's the biggest logit segment and still represents only 20 percent of its spending. [00:16:40][237.5]

Bryce Leske: [00:16:41] You mentioned earlier that the industry in itself is 280 odd billion over the next five years. Expected to be, what was it, eight hundred and forty or thereabouts. So growing sort of three times. What it is today is, is the software as a service, the sector that will be driving most of that growth. [00:16:59][18.5]

Natalie Piucco: [00:17:00] Yeah, I mean, the numbers certainly don't lie. I mean, that's what the numbers are saying. This out of the three that I mentioned is certainly one of the fastest growing areas. And there's kind of no debate around the utility of public cloud and especially in SAS and especially during covid. And, you know, we're already seeing some of these kind of spawn of SAS industries like DocuSign, for example. I know you guys said that, you know, you're using DocuSign and kind of hitting heads saying to him, I wish I had a thought about that right at the start of Covid that people need to sign contracts. People can't go and physically do the things. Then you see kind of spawn of industries again, like particularly with the work from home. I mean, companies like OCTA, all of a sudden you need to connect back remotely to VPN. You need to authenticate. We need to get people working from home. I mean, we're seeing more and more companies, of course, during this time we need to do that. So, yeah, absolutely. I would say this is certainly one of the fastest growing areas. Next, we have infrastructure as a service. So this is a second largest market segment. And what is basically its basic computer infrastructure, like data storage software, defined networking service, all in the cloud and before the cloud. A lot of large organizations would obviously have to kind of host these services and things like that on premise. So now they're looking at a large cloud organizations to host those servers. And in this particular market grew around kind of 40 percent ish in 2009 and forecasted to grow again, of course, this year to around 50 billion. Wow. So they're big numbers. I mean, this is for small enterprises and kind of large businesses, as I mentioned, instead of owning, managing, patching, maintaining big server rooms, you're looking to cloud providers to support with some of that. So some of the examples that you've probably heard of, things like Amazon's EC2, Google's compute engine, we heard some buzzwords around things like containers and open source software like communities. So seeing a lot of organization and particularly the play, it is like big enterprise customers. I mean. Ninety five percent of large organizations are using cloud computing. And then this less obvious areas, which I thought were really fascinating. It's organizations that do things like rendering. So movie rendering. So I was reading that one snapshot of Spider-Man, something as little as 90 minutes compared with the seven to eight hours it will take to render one image of Spider-Man on kind of a local c.p.u. Of course, the bandwidth and kind of displaced you need to do that. These big movie studios like going from seven to eight hours to 90 minutes to do some of this stuff, like pretty impressive. Wow. [00:19:55][175.2]

Bryce Leske: [00:19:56] What is driving that day? Like it's too hard to comprehend. [00:19:59][3.1]

Natalie Piucco: [00:20:00] I'll talk about it in a little bit when I talk about the benefits of cloud. But very high level here. We're talking about things like scalability. So being able to actually have access to these infinite amount of compute resources at. And so a lot of large organizations, you physically without cloud, you have to go and buy big surveys that have a lot of CPA that have a lot of memory that they kind of see in a server room. And you certainly don't want to be the person that's buying all this hardware and not using it, nor do you want to be the guy or girl that I guess in another world didn't buy enough and then you're having to go back and buy more. So I think, you know, obviously scalability is a big part of this cost is a big part of this. I mean, you're seeing big tech companies on the hardware side of things at least starting to optimize some really high powered hardware, things like tensor processing units, things that are really optimized to do high processing in the cloud or kind of on demand. So lots of reasons. And I'll I'll get into that a bit further, but that's just one of them. And then, of course, you know, you see health companies, for example, using infrastructure as a service, doing things like genome sequencing. So, again, instead of owning their own big servers, again, they're looking at things like specialized machines to run, big genome algorithms to kind of start to determine the different types of medicines that we can give to people depending on, you know, different genomes and different ways that people are made up. So that's infrastructure of a service [00:21:39][99.5]

Alec Renehan: [00:21:40] before we move to platforms as a service, just with things like infrastructure, as a service, will that incorporate things like quantum computing and artificial intelligence and machine learning? [00:21:50][10.4]

Natalie Piucco: [00:21:51] Yeah, absolutely. You are stealing my thunder a little bit here about quantum computing in my section on what's next. But no, you're absolutely right. You make a good point because, I mean, technically, let's just jump to that now. I guess it's not because it is exciting. It sounds like it's far away things like quantum computing. But actually, it's really not. I mean, this time last year, Google announced a pretty major milestone in quantum computing research, which shows like a traditional computer that solves a particular problem in two hundred seconds that would take the world's fastest supercomputer. Ten thousand years. Wow. Wow. That's the start right now. Now, you take that kind of unfathomable. I don't even know if that is the word. Let's say it is concept. And then you put that like as a service so that any startup, any big organization could potentially have access to as a service on-demand pay as you go in a data center. And this could solve problems that are impossible, as you mentioned, for classic computers today, things like designing better batteries, changing the way we do security and encryption. So, yeah, you're absolutely right. It sounds like it's far away. But there are some other players, you know, of course, Amazon and IBM who are already starting to offer these as a service. So you're absolutely right. [00:23:30][99.0]

Alec Renehan: [00:23:30] Is that quantum computing like that massive leap forward in computing power, is that just going to be the norm in like 20 years? Are we going to have normal computing? Is it just going to all be quantum computing? [00:23:41][10.7]

Natalie Piucco: [00:23:42] If I had the answer to that, I feel like I'd be a very, very rich person. I mean, I'd like to think that was the case. But I mean, you know, as I mentioned, people are already starting to do this. And I guess without getting too deep, because there's only so far I can go down this quantum computing kind of rabbit hole. But I mean, to your question, will it end or. I think it will always kind of be both, because if you look at how computers are made today, you know, the binary, which means computers are made of electrical currents that are made up as kind of zeros and ones. And quantum computing basically completely changes the binary structure of how computers are made. So instead of, again, not going down too much, a rabbit hole, but instead of. Being is if zero one, it can live on a spectrum, which means that zero and one can live in a superposition, which means it can be a zero and one at the same time. Now, what on earth is she talking about here? But let me tell you, if we start to look at completely changing the way we do computing and we apply that to things like cybersecurity and we start to look at encryption and private keys and things like that, instead of hackers, you know, hacking private keys and things like that, they're studying, they're going to have to break the rules of physics. [00:25:02][80.5]

Bryce Leske: [00:25:03] What if they have a supercomputer on there and. [00:25:06][2.3]

Natalie Piucco: [00:25:06] Yeah, this is good. I'm sure we can go back and forth. And to be honest, I don't know the answer to you. But, you know, you're starting to see what I wanted to buy going down that rabbit hole. What I wanted to show you to your question, is it end or I think there's the basic way computers are made today is binary structure and the computers are made. Of course, you've got these kind of new way of making computers as well. So I don't think in our lifetime it'll ever be and all. But I think they'll probably both exist just to a you'll have greater access to those types of technologies. [00:25:37][30.6]

Alec Renehan: [00:25:38] All I'm thinking now is that people are getting excited about 5G. I can't wait until my phone is quantum computer. [00:25:44][6.4]

Bryce Leske: [00:25:47] Will that actually mean that the physical computers that we buy, if you can then plug in, I guess to us, a infrastructure as a service being supercomputers, you're actually not going to have to have powerful internal computers. Does that make sense? [00:26:01][14.3]

Natalie Piucco: [00:26:02] Like, just it's a good question. I mean, that's exactly the point of cloud, right? So big enterprises. Right. So now, instead of having your kind of physical servers sitting next to you, if you want to change that up, it's like a physical phone over. I might be. You're using those resources that obviously aren't sitting next to you, that aren't sitting a server next to you, that kind of sitting in the cloud and you're accessing them remotely. You're kind of tuning into big machines and you're doing all this kind of you're accessing this infinite computing power through your laptop. So I guess if that's the trend in the cloud world, then who knows where that's going in the consumer space. [00:26:36][33.8]

Bryce Leske: [00:26:37] Before we jump to platform as a service, we'll just take a quick break to hear from our sponsors. Ren, you are all about getting fit. You've bought the Garmin, you bought the Gulf membership, you bought the gym membership, and you're on the mind muscle shift. And even in lock down last year, you bought those resistance bands of Instagram that from memory didn't even come. [00:26:55][18.5]

Alec Renehan: [00:26:56] No, look, they didn't come. But all of that effort really was canceled out by the numerous menu log orders that were a real staple of my lockdown experience. [00:27:06][9.5]

Bryce Leske: [00:27:07] Well, we've just headed into a new financial year, so I think it's time you get money fit with Virgin Money, our latest sponsor. [00:27:14][7.0]

Alec Renehan: [00:27:15] That's right, Bryce with a high-interest savings account bundled with a seriously rewarding everyday transaction account. You can manage your money easily on the go smash your savings goals and be rewarded for it. [00:27:27][11.9]

Bryce Leske: [00:27:27] And with the Virgin Money Go transaction account, you can earn rewards on your everyday spending with zero monthly fees. Sounds like just what you need. Ren. [00:27:36][9.3]

Alec Renehan: [00:27:37] Yeah, the FBI twenty one get Ren didn't quite work but if y twenty to get Ren money fit might be to go [00:27:45][8.4]

Bryce Leske: [00:27:46] back to your own beat virgin money terms and conditions and monthly criteria apply. Now let's get back to the show. Not only were we touched on infrastructure as a service and software as a service in the third category is platform as a service, so do I. Take us through that and then we can perhaps start jumping into the benefits of cloud. [00:28:06][19.8]

Natalie Piucco: [00:28:06] Absolutely. So let's go through this. It's the smallest. But when we say small scale, so forecasted to be worth around seventy two billion platform as a service. And when we look at exactly what is platform as a service, essentially it's a cloud environment that supports the development and kind of life cycle of helping users build, test and deploy new apps. So if if I was about to build an application as a small business, I wanted to get started tomorrow. This is the platform that you would use to bring your ideas. And essentially you bring your ideas, you bring your code, and then you rely on big cloud or small cloud players to bring the kind of underlying compute infrastructure and scale databases and things like that. So some notable examples of things like IDEO resources are still being stored in Google Cloud App Engine. You're seeing again, a lot of small startups use this type of platform for obvious reasons that they don't want to go out and buy infrastructure to build a lot of kind of scalable mobile back in. So again, so whether you're kind of building your first mobile app or looking to reach existing users via mobile experience, it's these kind of platforms that we're starting to see businesses test new ideas and scale new ideas and not worry about all the stuff that sits underneath all the hardware. It's like we bring the code, we bring our ideas, and then we give the responsibility for someone else to make the scaling happen. [00:29:41][94.6]

Alec Renehan: [00:29:42] So not only you've just explained the three main categories of cloud computing infrastructure as a service, platforms as a service, and then software as a service. And I've got to say, my mind is a little bit blown by the scale and then I guess, the opportunity in this space. Let's try and blow my mind a little bit more and really drill down on some of the benefits of cloud computing. I guess in the most simple terms, you know, Microsoft used to deliver software from a site that you installed in your computer and now they deliver it through software as a service via the cloud. Why do companies choose to do that? And why is it better for consumers as well, I guess? [00:30:20][38.0]

Natalie Piucco: [00:30:20] Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, there are a lot of business benefits. And so often we focus on kind of like the technical benefits, which, of course is a really key part of that, that why there are so many cloud companies and why there's so much opportunity. But there's obviously some really key business benefits here, so I'll just lightly touch on a few of them. So the first one is scalability. And this is basically the ability as a business to be able to rapidly scale your computing infrastructure, your data and storage in your app as it either grows or shrinks, depending on how many users you get or the business demand. So in the cloud industry, we say elastic compute. So you imagine holding a rubber band and that rubber band kind of like bouncing in and out depending on how far you're pulling it apart or the pressure that you're putting on that band. So you imagined 10 years ago, you know, you're at it at a startup. You kind of go by the service, like I mentioned earlier, that you've either bought too much or and you've got some left over or you haven't bought enough and then you're not meeting the needs of the amount of customers that you might be able to get. So I guess through this kind of pay-as-you-go model, you can kind of better control your costs. You can scale up and down meeting the demand. And I think the key part here that I've seen with the customers that I've worked with at least, is the cost of failing is so much lower. And to be able to kind of literally like swipe a credit card and within a few seconds you've got access to infinite amount of computing resources. I mean, it's fairly obvious why that's very attractive, not only to people who are building new startups, but obviously building big organizations as well. And one really notable example, of course, is Pokemon go [00:32:11][110.3]

Alec Renehan: [00:32:11] Bryce [00:32:11][0.0]

Natalie Piucco: [00:32:12] probably don't need to be given and we probably don't need to give an introduction to that. But I mean, within 15 minutes of launching Pokemon go in Australia and New Zealand, the player traffic surged well past what 90 had expected, and their worst-case predicted would be kind of five times the amount of data stored. And guess how many times they actually exceeded that original kind of worst case of five times the amount of data that they would collect? [00:32:45][32.3]

Alec Renehan: [00:32:45] Yeah, that's what I was going to say about now. I'll go. I'll go. Five hundred [00:32:48][3.0]

Natalie Piucco: [00:32:50] fifty. [00:32:50][0.0]

Alec Renehan: [00:32:54] I mean, every aspect of we're still standing here. [00:32:59][5.1]

Natalie Piucco: [00:33:00] I mean, yeah, I mean, you told me you would have made to blow your mind. I mean, you just find my mind. I mean, you got it straight on 50 times now. Like, you imagine the poor person in an all I want to say. Oh, well, but it's not really that old that I didn't buy enough infrastructure, you know, physical kind of hardware services to be able to, like, store that much debt. I mean, you'd be kicking yourself for it. So the ability to be able to have a database like DataStore, for example, is a Google product, Google cloud product to be able to scale up and down depending on how much data that you use. I mean, that's very, very attractive, obviously. [00:33:41][41.1]

Alec Renehan: [00:33:42] Makes me think of the TV show Silicon Valley, where they were managing their own servers in the garage. And like, that's just not an experience that founders of today's startups have to worry about. [00:33:56][14.0]

Natalie Piucco: [00:33:57] No, not at all. As I said, it's kind of as simple as going onto a website and saying, I want this database click. I want this and one standard machine click. You know, it's that easy. And I think, again, kind of probably tangential to this, but you starting obviously why we're also seeing so many startups in this space being so successful so quickly, because it is a matter of kind of going on and kind of it's a click away to be able to use these services. And, of course, that kind of that elastic demand pretty well into the second benefit, which is cost. So, you know, you've seen that with Pokemon go the ability to scale. And the idea with cloud in general is it's pay as you go. So instead of physically buying and housing all this kind of infrastructure, it's kind of like paying for a water or your gas bill. You pay for it as you use it. And there's kind of a big cloud. Companies are doing things like down to things like paying by the minute for the stuff that you use, which of course is very, very attractive. And of course, you know, you think about the cost of actually using just using the infrastructure. But what about the costs that it it costs to actually manage this hardware and manage the software and the people power that it takes to manage all these four big businesses? And, you know, if your core business this is what I often say to the cloud companies, I work. If if your core business is not patching service or building a custom service mesh, then why wouldn't you focus on whatever your core businesses in the thing, the competitive thing that's driving your business forward? Why wouldn't you put your resources into doing that? So, yeah, cost and scalability obviously come kind of hand in hand, [00:35:48][111.1]

Alec Renehan: [00:35:48] not only before we move on from cost and tell me if I'm stealing your thunder again. I imagine the other side of the cost equation is the next to zero incremental cost of distribution for a lot of these companies. You Microsoft used to have to create physical seed roms, send them around the world, and they had shopfronts all they had to sell into retail shopfronts that would actually then sell the seeds. But now it's just downloaded with the click of a button. So for Microsoft, all that cost is now stripped out of that business. [00:36:18][29.8]

Natalie Piucco: [00:36:19] Yeah, absolutely. I think you're spot on in the way that the cloud is bringing on whole new services models like software as a service. These terms like cloud is eating software, you know, so you kind of see the hard the physical disk and then you see that disk being hosted on a computer. And now, of course, the software is then eating that and cloud is then eating that. So it's just like a self-fulfilling prophecy. I guess there's just something new all the time. That's why it's so exciting to be part of this industry is because it's just growing so fast. And I'm very similar to age, I think, if not exactly the same age as you guys, kind of late twenties. And, you know, I'm sitting here talking about cloud, but I was also the same. I also had, you know, in Canada and I was we were also that kind of those kids, I guess, at the time that were using kids. And that's why I think out antipasti space for the Equity Mates community. That's what our I guess millennials are very, very uniquely placed in, that we've seen both worlds. Would you agree? [00:37:27][68.0]

Alec Renehan: [00:37:27] Yeah, 100 percent. I still remember for sure floppy disks back in the day, like in the very early days. They are a serious relic of the past now. [00:37:38][10.7]

Natalie Piucco: [00:37:38] Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, I think this community is a really interesting place to be able to see where we've come from, but also where we're going. [00:37:48][9.3]

Alec Renehan: [00:37:48] So I'm going to say not only you're you've made me feel bad about where I am and. I create given that you are the same age as us and killing it in Google over in London, [00:37:57][8.9]

Bryce Leske: [00:38:01] we're actually on the other end. We're using all this cloud stuff to think about how you're saying it's so easy just to go in and, you know, choose your database simply just through a click. And we're going through that process at the moment with building out our new website and all that sort of stuff and just getting your head around all the options that are out there. But the ease in which we can just do it literally from our own homes is pretty phenomenal. [00:38:24][23.2]

Natalie Piucco: [00:38:24] So I'm going to give you guys kudos here. I know. I know. You certainly do deserve it. We'll continue to do it throughout the show. But I mean, even this platform that we're using today to be able to record this, it's clear it's a software as a service and the ability for you guys to it, you know, starting it was essentially a platform and a business to be able to share voices across the industry. I mean, you guys are perfect examples of the scalability and the opportunity for cloud side. Yeah, well, I [00:38:57][32.9]

Alec Renehan: [00:38:57] mean, podcasting as a whole genre as a whole vehicle wouldn't exist without cloud computing, I imagine. [00:39:03][5.7]

Natalie Piucco: [00:39:04] Yeah. I mean, like I mentioned, I guess, you know, software as a service. We've talked about that as one of the three at the top of the three that I've explained today, although there are others that the top three is fastest growing. So and of course, you also mentioned that as part of your inquiries, you're looking at data and data is and insights is kind of the next benefit of cloud. And I think one of the most exciting and there's so many kind of businesses yet to be discovered in this space, and especially now with the sheer amount of data that we collect. I mean, Iot Internet of Things, Sensis, Web Clicks, everything is smart, smart TV, smart bruggen, smart washing machines. I mean, we're capturing every single data point around customers in their transactions with our business services. And before cloud, this was really cumbersome and an expensive process to collect. And when we think about data, the opportunity for data and data businesses, I like to break it down into kind of this simple way, because you can look at data as a whole, but there are many parts of data and insight that cloud can help with. So Cloud can help with kind of the collection part, how we collect data, how we store data, how we analyze data, and finally how we visualize data. So things like the tools, which I'll talk about in a second. But you're seeing some big products like redshifts, Amazon Redshift. We see things like big query in Google. You say Snowflake, of course, is a big one, really topical right now. Just upload Riced around three point four billion, more than kind of doubling on its first day of trading. So you're starting to see these really interesting data organizations, I guess, that help business bring all the data together in one place. So I've heard it kind of data graffitti, I guess. So how do we get all our data together so that we can start to make some really meaningful decisions for that data? Like I talked about platform as a service, these big data companies coming out with instead of having an old world, you'd have to set up the infrastructure. You'd have to define the size of the database. You'd have to say, how are we going to replicate the data? All you know, now there are these cloud companies like Snowflake, for example, be clearly like redshift that are saying forget about all that stuff that sits underneath. We're going to provide you with a platform for you to be able to simply be able to do focus on the analytics, on the data. And that's really, really attractive for large organizations to not have to worry about the stuff underneath. I mean, again, if you look at Gartner's magic quadrant for analytics, you see in business intelligence, you see platforms like powered by Tableau Cleek, Splunk Data Dog. So, you know, you can certainly start to see why data is is so important. And I think I mentioned right at the very start that customers and data at the center of every single business I can guarantee you won't be able to find a business where customer data isn't a part of what they drive. So you can see why there's so much opportunity in the data industry. And I mean, we haven't even talked about machine learning yet. [00:42:35][210.6]

Bryce Leske: [00:42:37] Let's move. Let's move to that unless there are any other major benefits or if you include machine learning in the benefits, because it'd be good to also touch on, I guess, the investing side and some of the trends that we're seeing. [00:42:48][11.1]

Natalie Piucco: [00:42:49] Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So I guess machine learning. It feels like a bit of an enigma. It's like people know what it is, people don't know what it is, it's like it's kind of reserved for the data scientists and things like that. But really, what we're starting to see in the cloud business, at least, and I'll talk about this a little bit further, the kind of future trends in the cloud is that we're democratizing access to machine learning. So it's not reserved for the data scientists, people who can write or see Cool or Python. It's like, how can we make machine learning API platforms accessible for people who don't necessarily have those deep, deep expertize? And again, you're seeing a lot of the big major tech company players, Amazon, Microsoft, as your come out with machine learning platforms, as a service so people can kind of build their models, run their models, deploy their models all on platforms that typically you would have had to have very large, heavy, expensive machines to be able to do that. So that's that. And then I guess the final one before I go into the investing, I guess, and I won't go too deep on this because I know that it's cybersecurity surprise. You guys always see this an episode on that. And I think you did a really, really great job. If I do say so myself. It's clearly, clearly, as ICOS and cybersecurity is clearly part of a growing Klatt industry. And I just came across on ABC, just released their digital insights survey, and they interviewed a number of Australian businesses on their kind of projections for twenty, twenty one. And we can see that those top Australian businesses are set to boost the cybersecurity budgets by half. So by 50 percent, which means, of course, investing in more and more the opportunity to invest in more and more cloud security tools. And again, I really suggestively saying go and listen to the guys security forecasts who did such a great job. But, you know, you're talking about things like when we mean cybersecurity, what do we actually mean? You know, things like network security. So Palo Alto Networks is by far the largest security software vendor measured by revenue. You talk about data loss prevention. You're talking about identity and access management. How do we actually access our cloud infrastructure, etc.. So, you know, lots of fun things happening in that space and looking to go to date there. But I will give you this one fun fact. So Google has a vulnerability reward program and they do it every single year. And basically, if you can find some kind of vulnerability in any kind of Google product, they'll give you pretty much up to a couple of hundred thousand dollars, a T-shirt, and probably a job. But some [00:45:49][180.1]

Natalie Piucco: [00:45:57] Obviously, I'm not certain, but I imagine if you're finding something like that. So by giving you that fun fact, what I'm saying is like cybersecurity is really intrinsically tied to the cloud. And there's a lot of reasons why businesses choose to use cybersecurity. Cloud software is because most of these big businesses, it's what they do, the experts in this. So a lot of large enterprises, more small startups are diverting the kind of software, I guess, problems you could call them, or opportunities to big businesses who spent a large portion of their days kind of working this out so that they sent some of the obviously not all of them, but some of the benefits scalability, data security and cost. [00:46:41][44.5]

Alec Renehan: [00:46:42] That Google program is so smart for two reasons. One, it allows them to identify all this talent that's able to find vulnerabilities that their engineers can't find. But it's not these hackers selling those vulnerabilities like on the black market, and instead creates a financial incentive to give them back to Google another way that Google can. [00:47:01][18.9]

Natalie Piucco: [00:47:03] Yeah, there's a lot of interesting stuff happening this space. And look, I know I haven't gone super deep on security. I'm not a security expert, but it certainly is a very exciting space. And I did name a few types of organizations there like Palo Alto Opto, which I named kind of earlier. It's a big place in that space. [00:47:21][18.6]

Alec Renehan: [00:47:22] So not only you've covered all four major benefits there. Are there any other benefits that people should be aware of around cloud computing? [00:47:30][7.3]

Natalie Piucco: [00:47:31] Yeah, I guess the final benefit is around sustainability. And I think this is kind of a less obvious one when you talk about the benefits of the cloud. But this is a priority for a lot of large organizations that are investing in cloud. And you're thinking how sustainability and cloud work together will. It essentially helps businesses to lower their carbon foot. And of course, this is something that, you know, is really important as corporate responsibility for big businesses, and how do they do that by reducing their reliance on kind of physical service, owning their own hardware, electricity and running costs. That, of course, lowers things like carbon footprints and using big technology companies, like big pledges that they're going to be on a Google mentioned that they were going to operate carbon on carbon free energy by 20, 30, and also becoming the world's largest corporate buyer of renewable energy, things like kind of wind and solar. And of course, if you're saying that the industry, cloud industry is moving that way in terms of sustainability, this, of course, spawns off demand for other industries as well, that we won't, of course, have timing today. But if these big tech companies, it becoming the world's largest buyers of renewable energy, of course, is downstream effects for other industries on that. So one that's kind of less obvious, but I think obviously very, very topical. [00:49:00][88.9]

Alec Renehan: [00:49:00] Yeah, there's a whole rabbit hole we could go down there around the sustainability of data centers and all that stuff. But let's not go down that rabbit hole in this chart. At this point, we've Covid of what cloud computing is. Some of the major categories of cloud computing talked about some of the major benefits. The next question naturally is how do we actually invest in this industry? [00:49:21][20.4]

Natalie Piucco: [00:49:22] That's a good question. I guess so. For me, my personal investing principle is choosing a company that I can come to an intelligent decision on. And I don't mean doing a kind of comprehensive valuation, although if you are into that, I do suggest you read The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. I know you guys are also a fan of that particular book, but I mean, taking the advice that I know this community really thrives on from Mr. Warren Buffett and the idea of investing in your circle of competency. And I say this specifically in the context of cloud, because this industry is so big and you don't have to be right about one hundred companies. You just have to be right about a couple. So for me, if I'm generally interested in the cloud technology and I guess on my side, I can dove kind of deeper in the technical solution. But if, you know, if I'm actually going to read the cloud report, if I know who's calling the shots, if I know where it fits into the competitive landscape, what makes it different in the cloud industry then? To me, that's a pretty good start. And if you're not interested now in Mokra Services or Carbonetti or service, Misch, what did you and just say? Well, then I would suggest you probably start with something that you use every day. And like I mentioned, there are lots of cloud technologies that we use every day and you don't have to have an opinion and everything, and you just can't in cloud. I would say just go with something that you're really passionate about. But if you want to get more specific, obviously you can't overlook some of the mega caps or kind of big cloud tech companies in the market. We talked about some of the big tech companies and you can invest in them directly if you've got between a thousand and kind of three thousand us to spend, I guess, on one particular stock. I mean, you can go invest in the big tech companies, but, you know, ETFs, ETFs are a really great way. And again, I know these communities really and I know you guys, too, are really that's typically kind of where we take the conversations around investing in a bunch of different tech companies that follow an ETF or kind of bundled in an ETF. So the COMSEC pocket up under tech savvy, they have that that particular ETF tracks the performance of the Nasdaq 100, which includes many of the cloud companies, which I've just mentioned. Again, I know you guys, a big fan of Haak and Baitfish is kind of global cyber security ETF. And I think although we didn't go deep into security today, it is a simple kind of cost effective way to get exposure to some of the leading cybersecurity companies in a single kind of assets. And some of the holding companies with things like OCTA, which I mentioned, which is quite an interesting company, particularly in this work from home world where we need access back to a lot of our kind of corporate infrastructure. And then the other one I kind of came across was that BGP Nasdaq emerging cloud index, and this is developed by Bessemer Venture Partners, kind of a leading capital group, and they have an ETF that kind of track. Fifty four cloud companies. So they're just some of the ways, of course. And you can look at ETFs and big, big companies. But then finally, I think it's important, particularly in the category of cloud that we look at some less obvious, not publicly listed companies, those that are yet to IPO. And I know you guys are doing a great series, which I have loved on that, taking companies on the IPO journey because there's a lot of good, fundamentally strong companies with good guys, reasonable valuations kind of still yet to IPO. And, you know, 10 years ago, there was no private cloud companies valued at about Dollars billion. And my research showed that as of February this year, there's at least at least 86 private cloud unicorn companies valued. Yeah, valued at over a billion dollars. And their companies like Hashi Corp, they are big infrastructure as code for helping businesses to manage provision run infrastructure in the cloud strop payments platform. We just obviously we talked about Snowflake like they just opposed Australia's Kanwal. That's still a private company. And I was researching that this year. Their valuation doubled to six billion. I also wanted to talk about those companies that have an IPO yet, because I think it's important for this community to kind of keep an eye on what's obviously out there. But clearly what's coming, [00:54:01][279.7]

Alec Renehan: [00:54:02] it's crazy, just the amount of companies out there that are killing it in this space. One question I have around investing in this category or a cloud computing theme, it feels like there's a lot of companies that are benefiting from it who are pivoting to distribute their software or the services or whatever through the cloud. But it feels like the conversation always comes back to Amazon Web Services. Microsoft is Google's cloud business. It feels like they're really the backbone of what all these other companies are trying to do. Is that right? Or how do we think about the interactions between those sort of tech giants with their Web services, businesses and all the other businesses that are benefiting from this cloud thing? [00:54:44][41.2]

Natalie Piucco: [00:54:44] Yeah, I think it's a good question. And I guess my answer to that might be slightly biased because I think many tech companies. But I mean, particularly when you're talking about when we think back to the benefits of cloud, things like being able to offer infinite scale, infinite elasticity, kind of low cost, really high security. I mean, these big tech companies, like the ones that we've mentioned, typically, they have the infrastructure in place already in some cases to be able to run their own businesses like Amazon, like YouTube, like Gmail. So I guess you are seeing these be the large tech companies that I've mentioned be able to provide these services because they also do the piggyback of some of the other big businesses. But then, of course, are you seeing those big companies acquire other cloud businesses like IBM acquired another big player in the cloud, the red hat. I mean, you see Microsoft acquired Git Hub. So, yeah, you're right. I think you you are seeing a lot of these big tech companies, a lot of the innovation spawned from the big cloud tech companies. But at the same time, I've mentioned a whole raft of other smaller but not so small businesses. [00:56:05][80.5]

Alec Renehan: [00:56:05] Now, this is a relative term when we're talking about tech companies. [00:56:09][3.9]

Natalie Piucco: [00:56:11] Yeah. Does that it is that kind of start to answer? Yeah, it [00:56:13][2.5]

Alec Renehan: [00:56:13] does. It does. The story that always gets me is that Amazon obviously has an Amazon Prime video streaming service, but they also host on us on Amazon Web Services, Netflix's infrastructure. And it's just it's crazy how they like they might be competing with some of these businesses in one category, but then they're also benefiting from the growth of those businesses in other parts of their business. They've just got, you know, fingers in every pie at the moment. [00:56:40][26.7]

Natalie Piucco: [00:56:41] That certainly is software and cloud industry. I guess it's just there are so many benefits that make sense to so many other businesses. Yeah, absolutely. I agree. [00:56:50][9.3]

Bryce Leske: [00:56:51] So not only to close the convo out, I guess, what are some of the key trends that we should be keeping an eye on in cloud over the next few years? [00:57:00][9.4]

Natalie Piucco: [00:57:01] Yeah, absolutely. So I would firstly kind of start off by saying, I think, you know, when you talk about what next, I think it's less about what's beyond cloud. And I think in my perspective, it's really around what's building on cloud, because I think Cloud laid the foundation for it, like we talked about a lot of new computing models and that unlocks some pretty unbelievable set of innovations. And the areas that I'm personally interested in are things like I touched on this one earlier, the democratization of a platform so low code, no code I platforms and we see this term data see the sentence which was new to me. I was like, what's a data citizen or a data citizen? Is that is actually one of the fastest growing categories of data users and their everyday data users like you and me. And it's how do we actually. Allow the everyday user to have access to kind of prepackaged APIs, so kind of like cookbook recipes that are already made with things like speech to text, with things like vision, things like sentiment analysis, to be able to build, run model, deploy machine learning capabilities in the cloud. And I think there's so much more to be done in the machine learning space and the opportunities huge. I mean, when I teach my machine learning kind of workshops, I always say that the opportunity for machine learning is so big because the best use case machine learning is a repeated decision at scale. So something a decision in an enterprise that's made over and over and over and over again. And I think obviously it's clear that there are so many businesses that make repeated decisions of scale. So clearly machine learning is part of that. But then you look at some really interesting applications of that. I mean, you look at what a publicly listed company, but I don't know, have you guys seen so machines, what they're doing in New Zealand, kind of human face chatbot? [00:59:02][121.4]

Alec Renehan: [00:59:03] So far, I haven't heard it. [00:59:04][1.2]

Natalie Piucco: [00:59:04] And it's unbelievable. I mean, it's like an actual human face. And it truly looks like you're chatting to somebody. I know some of the big banks like ANZ, I believe, are looking at using this type of chapbook functionality, which is kind of spawned from machine learning capability. So seeing more and more repeated decisions at scales like that through customer interactions and now sort of industry firm that is responsible, I guess it's not that we don't often talk. I think we're starting to talk about this more and more and more as more businesses start to use machine learning is how do we do that responsibly? And I think there's a lot of because it is a big industry, I think there's a lot more to happen in this space. And it's not just obviously cloud companies' jobs to do this, but things like I had I had an executive the other day asked me, I'm really interested in doing machine learning, but like, how do I know if my data is bias? And I thought that was a really good question, because unless you have the right tools and things like that and you have the right people solving those problems, it is something that a lot of businesses are really going to have to start to think about. If we are building a lot of machine learning models, how are we doing that responsibly? And how are we making sure the human element, the part where we decide what are the inputs into the model, how do we make sure that not bias? So I think that's a really interesting part about that. And I guess the next is multi cloud. That's roughly roughly. Eighty four percent of large enterprises who use cloud have a multi cloud strategy. What is Malti mean? It means using more than one cloud and this is happening now. But I think there's certainly more to do in this space. We'll continue to see more organizations support with helping businesses kind of move data around, manage assets in two clouds. There's still a lot more kind of protocols to be designed and standards to be managed and adopted in managing multiple clouds. And if I want to mention one business, he may report a few people in your organization. Is it a show, your podcast show on your show mentioned Megaupload and they manage network connectivity to multiple cloud providers, all in one kind of space. So you can see if I'm talking about multi cloud is kind of like what's next? It's very likely we're seeing mega port companies like that. I mean, they announced the FBI twenty twenty results where they delivered something like sixty six percent increase on their revenue, which is huge, and it was around twenty four percent increase in their customer base, doubling the services. So clearly you can see what multitracked is part of this kind of what's the industry. And the mix is spatial technology. And you know, I find this fascinating. Some analysts actually project space related cloud technology services could total about 15 billion by the end of the decade, and that's at least several times higher than the current levels. And last week, I heard that Microsoft announced teaming with Elon Musk's SpaceX, and that's to push some kind of like high speed Internet satellites to provide connectivity around the globe, warning systems, defense systems. So lots to happen in that space. [01:02:36][211.1]

Alec Renehan: [01:02:36] Yeah, the moon might have better Internet connections than some parts of Australia in the coming years. [01:02:42][5.2]

Natalie Piucco: [01:02:44] But he knows who knows? And, of course, we talked about you kindly stole my thunder a little bit earlier. But it's quite clear, as I mentioned, that we're going through a new wave of just start completely rethinking how we do the fundamentals of how a computer is made. And I heard someone say the other day that you can't build a lightbulb by building a better candle. And I thought that was a really interesting way of explaining the opportunities for cloud computing, because it's not just doing something like 10 percent better. It's completely rethinking the way we do. The fundamentals of computing went down before the kind of zeros and ones and blah, blah, blah, you know, and obviously we will. And we're already starting to see, as I mentioned, some of the big tech companies already starting to offer some of these kind of like quantum computing as a service. So they some of the ones that I'm interested in, obviously, there's others like gaming, cybersecurity, block chain. You know, there's so many kind of people predicting what's next in cloud. But I think I would go back to what I said earlier. These are my views of what I'm interested in. And I think it's not about what's next above cloud, but it's kind of like what's building on cloud. [01:04:05][80.2]

Bryce Leske: [01:04:06] Well, Natalie, you've certainly gone deeper than I guess I think any industry deep dove then can I ever have. But it's been absolutely fascinating and very much appreciate you spending your time to share your experience that you've got with the cloud industry, because as Alec sort of said at the start of the show, something that is a hot topic in the community. But as you've clearly, I guess, illustrated over the last hour or so is that it's an industry that we should very much be keeping our finger on the pulse, as it certainly feels like it's going to provide a lot of investing opportunity going forward. [01:04:38][33.0]

Natalie Piucco: [01:04:39] So absolutely. Thanks for having me. [01:04:41][2.4]

Bryce Leske: [01:04:42] Thank you for your time. And yeah, looking forward to keeping in touch and seeing how the industry grows from here. So thank you very much. [01:04:49][7.2]

Natalie Piucco: [01:04:50] Yeah, not a problem. I certainly hope it's given some people some things to continue to over. It's certainly moving so fast. This industry, I guess it's probably already changed. Start this. And the last thing I wanted to point out is that I just want to point out that we went the whole entire episode without saying the word Afterpay. [01:05:10][20.8]

Alec Renehan: [01:05:11] Yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:05:12][0.8]

Bryce Leske: [01:05:16] You just said [01:05:16][0.5]

Natalie Piucco: [01:05:18] now I really believe that we've said it and I hope it certainly inspired some other cloud enthusiasts and hope and hopefully some more women in cloud and investing, for that matter, because it's a really exciting space to be. [01:05:29][11.1]

Alec Renehan: [01:05:30] Yeah, very exciting. And you've definitely given us a lot to think about and added a lot of companies to our watch list and a lot of topics to our rating list. I think so, yeah. Just to echo what Bryce said, massive, thank you for coming on. And I think as this industry continues to develop, we'll have to get you back on to get updated and hear more about it. [01:05:48][18.5]

Natalie Piucco: [01:05:48] Sounds good. Thanks very much for having me. Really enjoyed it. [01:05:48][0.0]

[3767.6]

More About

Meet your hosts

  • Alec Renehan

    Alec Renehan

    Alec developed an interest in investing after realising he was spending all that he was earning. Investing became his form of 'forced saving'. While his first investment, Slater and Gordon (SGH), was a resounding failure, he learnt a lot from that experience. He hopes to share those lessons amongst others through the podcast and help people realise that if he can make money investing, anyone can.
  • Bryce Leske

    Bryce Leske

    Bryce has had an interest in the stock market since his parents encouraged him to save 50c a fortnight from the age of 5. Once he had saved $500 he bought his first stock - BKI - a Listed Investment Company (LIC), and since then hasn't stopped. He hopes that Equity Mates can help make investing understandable and accessible. He loves the Essendon Football Club, and lives in Sydney.

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