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Today we are going to be talking with a company that is re-thinking the way computers work. As workloads become increasingly more resource intensive, this company is leading the Big Memory and Memory Centric Computing charge.

Sandesh and I first met MemVerge’s founder and CEO, Charles, Fan, a few years back, and much of what he was talking about sounded like science fiction at the time. But, MemVerge has raised over $43 million dollars from prominent VCs and some major industry players like Intel, Cisco and NetApp. By utilizing persistent memory technologies and memory virtualization, they are redefining how computers process data, and we are excited to hear all the details,

Welcome Charles

https://memverge.com/

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FUTR.tv focuses on startups, innovation, culture and the business of emerging tech with weekly podcasts talking with Industry leaders and deep thinkers.

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Security is top of mind for everyone. With the recent Colonial Pipeline breach, ransomware is at the top of the list for most companies. We are Going to talk security, so get ready.

Today we are talking security with Vectra (AI)’s CEO Hitesh Sheth. Vectra is a leader in the threat detection and response market. They have raised over $350 million and are definitely a Unicorn, and possibly a decacorn. Hitesh has worked with a who’s who of tech companies from Oracle to Cisco and Aruba, so he has a lot of history with this space. Really excited to hear about Vectra

Welcome Hitesh

Vectra can be found at:
https://www.vectra.ai/

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FUTR.tv focuses on startups, innovation, culture and the business of emerging tech with weekly podcasts talking with Industry leaders and deep thinkers.

Occasionally we share links to products we use. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases on Amazon.

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Here are some ways to help with the COVID relief effort in India:

Direct Relief: https://secure.directrelief.org/site/Donation2?df_id=2924&mfc_pref=T&2924.donation=form1

Oxygen for India: https://cddep.org/

Project HOPE: https://secure.projecthope.org/site/SPageNavigator/2021_04_India_COVID_Response_unr.html?s_subsrc=hh1

Association for India’s Development: https://aidindia.org/donate/covid-relief-fund/https://aidindia.org/donate/covid-relief-fund/

The American India Foundation: https://aif.org/donate/covid-19-response/

The Indian Red Cross Society: https://www.indianredcross.org/ircs/COVID19Donate

You can find more ways to help here: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/how-to-help-india-during-its-covid-surge-12-places-you-can-donate


We have often spoken about the critical need for different viewpoints in technology. Most companies you look at these days have Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives. But, it is often easy said than done. Today we are going to be talking about how to bring it all together and learn from our mistakes. We are also going to take a look at the recent issues at Basecamp, and where they went wrong.

We are talking with Sejal Thakkar, who is the Chief Civility Officer at her company TrainXtra.  She bills herself as a Legal Training Ninja, TEDx Speaker, and Master Juggler. We are going to hear about her journey, what makes her passionate about social justice and how she helps companies pursue a more diverse, equitable and inclusive workplace.

If you want to find Sejal on LinkedIn, she is at:
linkedin.com/in/sejalthakkar

Her company’s website is at:
trainxtra.com

Here is a Link To Sejal’s TEDx talk:
https://www.ted.com/talks/sejal_thakkar_the_pain_power_and_paradox_of_bias/up-next?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare

The Verge article on Basecamp:
https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/3/22418208/basecamp-all-hands-meeting-employee-resignations-buyouts-implosion

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FUTR.tv focuses on startups, innovation, culture and the business of emerging tech with weekly podcasts talking with Industry leaders and deep thinkers.

Occasionally we share links to products we use. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases on Amazon.

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Welcome back, today we are going to continue our conversations about women in tech and what it takes to become a data engineer in this industry. We are also going to talk about what data engineers really want in tools to make their life easier.

We are talking to Lee Blackwell, an architect and data engineer at Databricks, about why diversity and company culture matter, and she is going to fill us in on what data engineers really want.

Now, Lee’s bio says she is a confident, authentic woman who enjoys talking about modern data architectures and helping others achieve their goals, but she describes herself as a low class comedienne, jaded Data Engineer, Data Queen, and Databricks fan girl all in one. So, this should be a fun one.

Welcome Lee

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FUTR.tv focuses on startups, innovation, culture and the business of emerging tech with weekly podcasts talking with Industry leaders and deep thinkers.

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NetApp's very own storage guru, Rajesh "Sheik" Kapoor talks with us about the importance of mentors and about his journey through the world of tech.

Today we are talking to another legend in the tech community. His presence has been huge and and he has been a mentor to many.

Rajesh Kapoor, or as many know him by his nickname, Sheik, has been at NetAp for more than 21 years, and is now a Senior Director at NetApp. He carries the unofficial title of CRO - Chief Reality Officer. For fun, he likes to jump out of airplanes, run marathons, climb mountains, mentor High School Seniors, and recently completed a half ironman.

We are very excited to have him on today.

Welcome Rajesh

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I remember watching the Jetsons when I was a kid. The promise of pushing a button and letting machines do the work was the future cartoons promised me. 

It was a young child’s vision of the future, but that vision isn’t that far from reality. 

Today we are going to dig into Robotic Process Automation. So, buckle in, here come the robots.

We are talking about RPA or Robotic Process Automation. Sadly, there are no physical robots involved, and for more on that you can see my quick video on RPA here (https://youtu.be/firHxRw4-W8). 

That said, these software robots are no less useful at eliminating the tedious and dangerous tasks that humans often get stuck doing. 

Today, we have with us Prince Kohli, who is CTO of Automation Anywhere, a company that has raised over $840 million dollars and is a decacorn. They are one of the longstanding dominant players in this space.  

Prince is going to tell us about RPA and share some stories of how automation has made businesses move faster and save money, while letting their people focus on doing the things they do best.

Welcome Prince

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FUTR.tv focuses on startups, innovation, culture and the business of emerging tech with weekly podcasts talking with Industry leaders and deep thinkers.

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In the world of emerging tech, Venture Capital plays a huge role. We have seen the rise of some of the biggest and most successful technology companies from the portfolios of VC firms. Still, much of it is shrouded in mystery. We are going to dig into Venture Capital.

Today, we are going to be talking with Saqib Awan, a partner at the prestigious venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners. Lightspeed is know for its investments in companies like Snapchat, GrubHub, App Dynamics, Epic Games, Rubrik, Nutanix, ZScaler and Mulesoft, to mention a few.

Saqib is going to tell us how it all works and fill us in on where he sees the tech markets going.

To find out more about Lightspeed’s CIO program, contact Saqib at [email protected].

Connect by Carol Robin and David Bradford: https://amzn.to/3mCM2nJ

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FUTR.tv focuses on startups, innovation, culture and the business of emerging tech with weekly podcasts talking with Industry leaders and deep thinkers.

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I think one thing we can all agree on is that robots are cool

Really cool

Robots come in many shapes and sizes.

There are dancing robots, scary robots , villanous, murderous robots, surgery robots, romantic robots, domesticated robots, and robots that entertain cats.

Ultimately, the dream of robots is that they will perform many of the tedious or dangerous tasks that human’s don’t want to or can’t do.

Someday soon, I’m sure we will see a murder of robots congregating in public. I know that a murder is the herding or venery term for crows, but since robots don’t appear in the 1486 Book of Saint Albans under the section Companynys of Beestys and Fowlys, I am going take the liberty of borrowing murder. It was that or steal wisdom from wisdom of Wombats, since Wombats don’t actually form groups in the wild, making the term generally under-utilized.

We even already have laws for these robots we will one day encounter. 

The three laws of robotics as established by national treasure, Isaac Asimov, are:

First Law
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Second Law
A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Third Law
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

So you can imagine my excitement when I heard the term Robotic Process Automation or RPA. I could picture myself looking into the soulless red eyes of these process obsessed automatons.

It was my disappointment to learn, however, that these robots are in fact non-corporeal software entities.

But, to their credit, they are actually incredibly useful systems that fulfill the promise of robots by relieving humans of tedious and repetitive tasks that they are not well suited to do. These software robots can perform tasks at a high rate of speed without the kinds of errors humans tend to introduce.

They can interact with data and systems to interpret information, trigger actions, and communicate with other systems, performing an endless array of repetitive tasks without sleep and without mistakes. Best of all, the can greatly reduce the amount of time it takes to perform these actions.

So while they are not inscrutable mechanical beings with questionable intentions, they are extremely useful tools that deliver on the promise of lifting humanity from the tedium of our soul sucking corporate existence

And that, is progress

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FUTR.tv focuses on startups, innovation, culture and the business of emerging tech with weekly podcasts talking with Industry leaders and deep thinkers.

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I was recently called out for not having enough women on the podcast, and it is a very fair criticism. Out of the last 34 interviews I have done over the last year, only 2 have been with women. Today we are going to talk diversity and data.

Women are underrepresented in technology. It can be a difficult career path for women and the underrepresented people. Today we are going to be talking about diversity, equity and inclusion in technology and how that impacts the things we build, and at the center of that is data. 

While this stuff isn’t rocket science, today we have gone ahead and found us an actual rocket scientist to help us understand all of this. Dr. Colleen Tartow has a Ph.D. In astrophysics and is the Director of Engineering at Starburst Data, which provides a storage free data access solution that allows people to access data where it lives.

Welcome Colleen

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In IT, there is a tremendous amount of jargon.

We are constantly using acronyms and abbreviations and obfuscating meaning.

And, I have to admit, I have used terms without fully understanding their meaning, even though I thought I did

Sometimes, the same terms can have different meanings like the term SASE, which means Secure Access Services edge, and not the Self Addressed Stamped Envelope I would send off to people advertising in the backs of comic books when I was a kid.

One term that is talked about a lot today is AI/ML, as if AI and ML are interchangeable concepts.

But they aren’t.

AI has been around for a long time at least since 1956 when the program “Logic Theorist” was conceived by Allen Newell, Cliff Shaw, and Herbert Simon to mimic human problem solving skills.

By the 1980s experts systems started to show up and in 1997 Deep Blue defeated chess champion Gary Kasparov. Around that time, we started to see speech recognition systems hitting the market.

All of these things were called AI at the time, but by today’s standards they are less than.

So today when we look at the panoply of AI, we see it as an onion.

AI is the outer ring, the general category.

ML, or Machine learning is a ring inside the onion, which uses algorithms to parse data and make predictions.

Deeper into the onion is DL or Deep Learning which utilizes neural networks to perform machine learning on large data sets.

We have reached the age of reasoning machines, and we look down the road to Artificial General Intelligence and Self-Aware Systems.

Perhaps someday, we will become one with the machine intelligence and reach Singularity and Transcendence, but for now we have machines, that one day will seem primitive when we look back, but are doing and discovering amazing things today. 

And for now we should take pause and try to understand what we have built, and what it means to society and to future generations, because whatever AI really is, it is inevitable.

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FUTR.tv focuses on startups, innovation, culture and the business of emerging tech with weekly podcasts talking with Industry leaders and deep thinkers.

Occasionally we share links to products we use. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases on Amazon.