theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Actai Maui | Jeff Kafka, Storyboard Capital

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Jeff Kafka

CEO

Storyboard Capital

play_circle_outline Jeff Kafka's introduction and early experience with kitesurfing and surfing in California and Maui

play_circle_outline Tech community's love for kitesurfing and the technical aspects of the sport

play_circle_outline Storyboard Capital's work in helping companies connect money to deals and partners

play_circle_outline Larry Page and Sergey Brin's kitesurfing skills and contrasting styles

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Jeff Kafka, Storyboard Capital

Jeff Kafka

CEO Storyboard Capital

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>> Hey everyone, I'm John Furrier for theCUBE Pod here in Maui for the ECTI Globalists. Our podcast are doing pretty much all of the top leaders contributing to the community, but also it's like a retreat. It's a cultural community around technology innovation as well as sports, athletes, innovators, artists coming together, conservationists. Jeff Kafka is here. He's one that stands out in the crowd, one of the OGs of kitesurfing. Jeff, great to have you on the pod here. Thanks for coming on. You shared a story with me on the first day, which I overheard with Bill Tye about when you saw Kitesurfing for the first time. You are a big wave surfer, have the record Mavericks, you're well-known in the surfing community, and then as a surfer you're like, "What's this kite thing?" You saw kiting early. What year was that, and then what happened next?

Jeff Kafka

>> Yeah, so I was a surfer and I was passionate about competitions and trying to surf the pipeline and travel around the world, the Indonesia and stuff. And I lived on Oahu for a while and I actually got in a car accident and I had to move back to San Francisco and I thought it was the end of my surfing life. But on the way back to San Francisco, I stopped in Maui and it was like 1998 and I saw a guy on a surfboard and a kite that was probably homemade or a foil kite, and he was just cruising down the coast and I didn't say, "Oh, there's kiteboarding. I want to do it." I said, "I want to get into windsurfing." And then I went back to San Francisco and was trying to get into windsurfing because surf's not good all the time in San Francisco and you have to have a secondary sport to stay in shape and work out and stuff like that. But then it hit me and my friend said, "You should do kite surfing instead because it's a new thing and it's way more exciting. You fly in the air and everything," and I remember that guy, Flash Austin was the guy's name. And I got into kite surfing really early, maybe one of the top 15 people in California. And then I did do a stint of telecommunications for nine years, but then I ended up teaching Larry Page and Sergey Brin and CFO of Amazon and a lot of tech founders. We got to travel all over the world with them. Actually they got hooked. They had the bug, they're water sport addicts and we were in San Francisco and it's a little choppy water and sometimes cold and they're like, "We want to go somewhere warm." And I said, "I really want to go to Fiji." So we ended up going to Fiji and we would go there pretty often every year. And then that group continued on and started traveling all over the planet doing Kitesurfing water sports.

>> And I think the tech crowd, you were like the conciliary for them to learn. Tech people love kiting I noticed. And I think because it's technical, there's some control involved. Why do tech people love kitesurfing?

Jeff Kafka

>> Well, it's a bit about location 'cause we have some of the best wind in the world in San Francisco right next to Silicon Valley. So it's a location thing, but it is pretty mechanical, so it's like you don't have to be like Kelly Slater to kitesurf. You don't have to be like the mega athlete. It's more of you're a wakeboarder and a boat driver, and if you understand the mechanics of the kite, which is the boat, then you can be a lazy kiteboarder. Or if you want to just rip Jesse Richmond and fly in the air and do really advanced stuff or ride Jaws or Mavericks or something, you can do that as well. The other thing is it's very interactive. You need to have somebody help you launch and land your kite on the beach where surfing is a little bit more of a me, myself sport.

>> Yeah.

Jeff Kafka

>> Kitesurfing is a lot more of a community sport.

>> Yeah, I think that whole community thing about the kite is cool. And also it's like skiing too. You could be in a diehard steep and deep skier or you can be old and groom and get turns in on a nice groomed trail. It's a kind of for everybody.

Jeff Kafka

>> Yeah. The other thing is kite surfing, a beginner and a world-class champion could be at the same location having the equal amount of fun where surfing, a beginner might want to go to Cals and Santa Cruz with a little tiny wave, and then advanced person might want to go to Mavericks or across the world, the Indonesia chasing the waves.

>> Talk about your big surfing career. The folks who watching, some know, some might not know you are big wave surfer. So think Mavericks. So most people don't even know what a big wave surfer is. What does a big wave surfer? You held the record at Mavericks. Where was it? Was it Mavericks? What does big wave surfing mean? Is there a size that makes the difference? What is it?

Jeff Kafka

>> Well, I have a big wave that I caught at Mavericks that is one of the bigger ones over the years, but there's actually a guy, Alo, that caught a wave this year that might be in the 108 feet that blows mine away by a few feet, but we're not sure how big it is because it's hard to measure a wave when you see a photo and stuff. But the-

>> What was the estimated size, just ballpark it for your wave.

Jeff Kafka

>> It might've been like 75 to 80 feet, something like that.

>> It's like a moving house, like a building.

Jeff Kafka

>> But one thing, I don't want to take too much time with it, but one thing I'll tell you about that is it's not just the actual riding of the wave, it's the process to get to that point where you're in the right position to catch that wave. And I explained it a little bit because a friend, Ramon Navarro from Chile, and he flew from Chile over to Fiji in 2012 to try to catch this big wave and he wasn't in the right position. He did not catch the wave. And then he went back to Chile, he trained and trained and trained, and then it was in 2018, he saw an opportunity, maybe a week or so out, he flew from Chile over to Fiji. He was in the right place and caught the world record wave that year. So just the commitment of time and training to catch that wave and be in that spot within -

>> He's an expert. So it's really just timing the spot.

Jeff Kafka

>> It's like mind over matter.

>> Yeah, that's awesome. I love how you bring, let's bring this into, I know you're a techie too. This is the great thing about hanging out with you is that you're bridging two disciplines, which I think is why I love how this surfing, windsurfing community is because a lot of the achievements of entrepreneurship have a lot of similar characteristics of getting that wave. We even use the wave metaphor. I mean, I love, I mean Bill does too. All I do is talk, Dave Vellante, my business partners, is like, "The waves are here." Every wave of innovation have different sizes. And right now we're living in probably the biggest wave I've ever seen in my career ever. And I've seen a lot of waves.

Jeff Kafka

>> It's funny you say that because we were in our office in San Francisco and my team member, my product guy, he was like, "Let's position our pitch around waves." And I was like, "Oh, that's kind of cheesy," more business or whatever. But it really is, our company's called Storyboard Capital and it's really positioning the company to be ready, to be in the right place to catch the wave when the wave comes. And the wave could be its federal, state and local money.

>> Yeah, I love the name of your company. I just told you that last night. Storyboard has many implications. Storyboard like in an ad thing, you just lay out the story telling stories board, you're on a board on a surfboard. So there's a lot of cool threads there. Talk about your business now because you're connecting money to deals. You have a venture you're working with, you coach startups the past decade, you've been very active applying your knowledge and skills to help people. Talk about what you're working on right now.

Jeff Kafka

>> So I've been helping startups in a few different roles from CFO to a lot of BD stuff. And I've helped companies in the defense sector. I've helped companies in cybersecurity, a lot of platform related companies and a lot of AI projects with a lot of super creative AI devs and things like that. But about a year and a half ago I met my co-founder, Michael Lakowski, which actually met through a group that wanted to learn how to kitesurf, a nice community in San Francisco that they're working on a lot of non-profit stuff and changing the world that way. But my co-founder, Michael Lakowski, he's a business strategist, he's been doing public-private partnership work for the last 25 years. A lot of infrastructure related stuff, I've worked on a lot of the startup stuff. He's brought $1.4 billion to a portfolio of companies, and now we're leveraging AI to help position companies to draw down on other capital sources outside of DC.

>> It's interesting you mentioned the public-private partnerships. One of the hottest areas right now is that area, because of the private sector and impact investing and tech and money are converging, and all the initiatives like that I would call philanthropy projects are now mainstreaming into commercial activities. So public sector, for instance with cloud, I saw that wave coming. The AI wave is going to be probably bigger than cloud because AI will have direct contribution. I was talking with Daphne. She's got a new thing with a bunch of Google experts coming together around using AI and around this climate change, but it's not like a climate change., like "Oh yeah, we're going to solve climate change problems." They're actually got real work that they could accomplish. So things are gettable now and having a telecom background connecting the world, it's like networking is hot, putting things together, moving the data around.

Jeff Kafka

>> My wife always says, "Why do you keep bringing up the telecom work?" And I'm like, "Everything in tech relates to telecom."

>> Even Jensen Wong, the founder of Nvidia on all his keynotes talks about computer science and he talks about KV cache, which is the core networking fabric between the GPUs. Now it's a nerd term, key value store cache. That is the key aspect. He calls it the operating system for AI. Now, that's Jensen that they want to rule the world, but what he means, but that's networking. It's not an operating, it's not software. It's software for connecting data between processors. It's a networking fabric. So that's just in the systems. I think telecom background and networking background, if you have networking skills, I tell all the people I meet, like young kids, no networking, no systems, you know systems and networking, you will do well. You got a problem to solve.

Jeff Kafka

>> The dev teams that I've worked with on some other startups, they said the AI is like, they do pair coding, and the AI is like 10X their productivity. So we're using agentic AI on our platforms to help companies draw down in public, private state, local money and low interest loans and things like that. But it's not only shortening the timeframe when you're able to do that, but it's allowing to position the company where you can actually be in a skip. We talked a little bit about bringing the company to the table, to the board to even have the conversation.

>> Well, I think there's a biz dev, you mentioned biz dev. You've done a lot of biz dev work. But I think you're right. I think the demand right now is there's so much money now unseen, startups and companies, whether they're big coming together in partnership forms, have to get their story right because the money matching needs to understand what to invest in. So it's incumbent upon the companies to say, "Hey, I'm willing to accept cash." It's not like there's any friction there. I mean, it's always friction and due diligence, but for the most part, money's flowing, right? So just tell your story. Look at it, we're a dog, not a cat. I mean it's that simple.

Jeff Kafka

>> That's a good point. A lot of the environmental groups came to me with the new office and they were like, "we're screwed. This and that."

>> They don't know what to do.

Jeff Kafka

>> Big problem. They don't know what to do. But the money didn't go. It's still there. Biden deployed billions of dollars. And only we were looking at that and it's like 1% of the money had been drawn down on.

>> Yeah, well, I think environmental projects, philanthropy and impact investing, those industries are outdated how they distribute the cash, because the people that they were giving to are middlemen or middle entities and people can now go direct or sidecar in with for-profit-

Jeff Kafka

>> I mean, let's talk about that a little bit, the middleman, and then they're just sitting on that money taking a pretty large cut in deploying little to none of it.

>> Well, they don't know what vehicles to put it in, I found. And then the other thing is I talked to Sue McCormick, she's a cutting-edge attorney at Foerster and Morrison, then she gave a talk at a forward global conference and she told me that the amount of philanthropy last year was at the highest levels, and it's still small relative to say the overall number of other things and the results got worse. So what's happening is the ability to actually execute on those things in the old system is flawed. It's not working. So in other words, the old way of doing things is shifting to the new infrastructure, the new capability. So the money, people are like, "Well, that's my guy, my team," now it's gone. So I think you're onto something really huge here because now the new mechanisms are moving over to these agile projects, innovative companies, private. The public realizes that the private companies are doing the work. So I think you're seeing massive shifts on these.

Jeff Kafka

>> We do have a nonprofit arm of storyboard capital and we are helping a few nonprofits. We have one in Ohio and they're helping underprivileged kids, and they don't really know how to craft their story to go after corporate. So we're helping them there.

>> So that's what you guys do.

Jeff Kafka

>> Yeah.

>> So you guys help companies come to the table, work on the business model, positioning, how to articulate it, how to organize, and how to accept money.

Jeff Kafka

>> I mean, some of our bigger opportunities would be like Intel with Mark, he has something going on.

>> Mark Castleman. Yeah.

Jeff Kafka

>> Yeah. And they're doing a bunch of infrastructure related stuff. So if they get some traction there, we could be a really good partner for them.

>> Mark is cool. He's letting us use his deck here of his little location here, which is the best views. He said something on the podcast yesterday I thought was compelling.

Jeff Kafka

>> I just didn't know what I can say about it or not. But we see some opportunities with Mark for sure.

>> He said yesterday that when you have this gravity movement, everything's up in the air and to a little conversation around how money's flowing is that everything's up here and it's going to come back down. That's a reset.

Jeff Kafka

>> It's a total reset.

>> He's been through many ways of innovation. He's seen, he understands the money side, he understands the market side too. And he talked about value capture, value creation, and everything's up in the air. You're in a great position right now.

Jeff Kafka

>> I mean, one of the other things is not just how to position your story, but who to talk to. You hear the story, talk to a hundred DCs, and I haven't got a check yet, but it's like-

>> The wrong ones.

Jeff Kafka

>> "Did you talk to the right one?"

>> Yeah.

Jeff Kafka

>> And I wanted to talk to the Governor Gretchen in Michigan the other day. I was out there with a defense related start-up, and Michael coached me through how to get a meeting with her. And I think that's something our platform can do is we can not make that, I mean manual, I guess we can make some introductions like that, but having people understand who is in office and why you would talk to that person. I came up with my own way. I wrote her a letter the night before using AI, and then a Navy guy made the connection. And then I went there and I said, "Hey, Gretchen, we want to bring technology from San Francisco to Michigan." And she could be running for president at some point.

>> Yeah. Awesome.

Jeff Kafka

>> She's super excited. And we're going to have a -

>> Well, being connected and having these trust networks is a real value right now because we're now in an era of the internet and social media where everyone's now connected and it's not as intimate as it could be. So in the old days was, "He's a connector. John knows everybody." Well, it's not just knowing people. It's actually having context and saying-

Jeff Kafka

>> It's definitely having context. And then the AI can do so much and there's so many tools you can draw down on. We'd have this risk matrix and this due diligence documents and the post meeting, these products that we can dollarize and stuff like that. But it's actually going to make the personal connection more important because a lot of people can build a lot of stuff.

>> Jeff, not to end on a networking note, but having a switch is very good.

Jeff Kafka

>> Yes.

>> Packet switching networks work. So if you have AI, you become not just a connected person, you're a packet switcher. And at high-volume, at scale. I mean, this is where we're going. I mean, that's to get all nerdy out, but that's like relationships matter.

Jeff Kafka

>> Yeah, I'm a surfer dude, but I've been around the biggest nerds in the world, and some of them build really cool tech, but they need strategy guys and strategy AI to help, because when you're in your closet building code all day, you want to focus on a problem, not build tech.

>> Okay. So who's the better kitesurfer, Larry or Sergey?

Jeff Kafka

>> Okay, that's a good question. So-

>> I think Sergey. Sergey jumped out of a plane at a Google IO once.

Jeff Kafka

>> Well, here's the thing is Sergey is a gymnast.

>> Okay, so he can-

Jeff Kafka

>> So he can do more of the tricks and everything. Larry is a guy where you can go kitesurfing with him and you're thinking you're going for an hour or two and then you're in the water for eight hours. And he went 150 miles. And then luckily he's high up enough where he is got some wealth, where he has some boats that will follow you in the middle of the ocean and you're about to drown and you have a rescue guy -

>> So he's a analytical, precision thinker.

Jeff Kafka

>> Yeah.

>> Sergey's a wild man.

Jeff Kafka

>> Larry and I did some kitesurfing and he said, "Jeff," he was on a hydrofoil. And he's like, "Is there anything I can hit on the bottom here?" And I go, "No, it's totally deep. You're totally fine." And then 75 miles later, he hit the bottom and he's standing there and he's like, "What the heck? You told me there's nothing here." I go, "That was like four hours ago and 75 miles ago."

>> It's a coral reef, bro. I see Larry around Palo Alto sometimes when he had his newborn driving on the bike. And it's good to see those guys. I think what they have done with Google, it's been such a great achievement. And I know Sergey's kind of a wild man. I love how he jumped out of a plane one time so I can see him. I didn't know he was a gymnast, so I could see him thriving, thrashing to having fun. Well, Jeff, congratulations on your venture and what you're doing helping people, helping companies have one, and people with money, connecting money with companies. Great service.

Jeff Kafka

>> No, we're really excited and we're happy to talk to companies and partners and stuff like that.

>> Yeah, hit the big waves. We have the big waves here with theCUBE pod.

Jeff Kafka

>> We're positioning ourselves to catch the next big wave.

>> It's coming. It's the biggest one I've ever seen. The AIs, everything's coming together. All the infrastructure, the middleware and the application layer up and down the stack, it's going to make a world change, societal change, everything's changing here. Of course, we're in Maui where all the best thinkers are gathering here in ECTI Global, trying to talk about the, and then have a great time kitesurfing. Thanks for watching.

Jeff Kafka

>> Thank you very much.

Jeff Kafka, Storyboard Capital

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>> Hey everyone, I'm John Furrier for theCUBE Pod here in Maui for the ECTI Globalists. Our podcast are doing pretty much all of the top leaders contributing to the community, but also it's like a retreat. It's a cultural community around technology innovation as well as sports, athletes, innovators, artists coming together, conservationists. Jeff Kafka is here. He's one that stands out in the crowd, one of the OGs of kitesurfing. Jeff, great to have you on the pod here. Thanks for coming on. You shared a story with me on the first day, which I overheard with Bill Tye about when you saw Kitesurfing for the first time. You are a big wave surfer, have the record Mavericks, you're well-known in the surfing community, and then as a surfer you're like, "What's this kite thing?" You saw kiting early. What year was that, and then what happened next?

Jeff Kafka

>> Yeah, so I was a surfer and I was passionate about competitions and trying to surf the pipeline and travel around the world, the Indonesia and stuff. And I lived on Oahu for a while and I actually got in a car accident and I had to move back to San Francisco and I thought it was the end of my surfing life. But on the way back to San Francisco, I stopped in Maui and it was like 1998 and I saw a guy on a surfboard and a kite that was probably homemade or a foil kite, and he was just cruising down the coast and I didn't say, "Oh, there's kiteboarding. I want to do it." I said, "I want to get into windsurfing." And then I went back to San Francisco and was trying to get into windsurfing because surf's not good all the time in San Francisco and you have to have a secondary sport to stay in shape and work out and stuff like that. But then it hit me and my friend said, "You should do kite surfing instead because it's a new thing and it's way more exciting. You fly in the air and everything," and I remember that guy, Flash Austin was the guy's name. And I got into kite surfing really early, maybe one of the top 15 people in California. And then I did do a stint of telecommunications for nine years, but then I ended up teaching Larry Page and Sergey Brin and CFO of Amazon and a lot of tech founders. We got to travel all over the world with them. Actually they got hooked. They had the bug, they're water sport addicts and we were in San Francisco and it's a little choppy water and sometimes cold and they're like, "We want to go somewhere warm." And I said, "I really want to go to Fiji." So we ended up going to Fiji and we would go there pretty often every year. And then that group continued on and started traveling all over the planet doing Kitesurfing water sports.

>> And I think the tech crowd, you were like the conciliary for them to learn. Tech people love kiting I noticed. And I think because it's technical, there's some control involved. Why do tech people love kitesurfing?

Jeff Kafka

>> Well, it's a bit about location 'cause we have some of the best wind in the world in San Francisco right next to Silicon Valley. So it's a location thing, but it is pretty mechanical, so it's like you don't have to be like Kelly Slater to kitesurf. You don't have to be like the mega athlete. It's more of you're a wakeboarder and a boat driver, and if you understand the mechanics of the kite, which is the boat, then you can be a lazy kiteboarder. Or if you want to just rip Jesse Richmond and fly in the air and do really advanced stuff or ride Jaws or Mavericks or something, you can do that as well. The other thing is it's very interactive. You need to have somebody help you launch and land your kite on the beach where surfing is a little bit more of a me, myself sport.

>> Yeah.

Jeff Kafka

>> Kitesurfing is a lot more of a community sport.

>> Yeah, I think that whole community thing about the kite is cool. And also it's like skiing too. You could be in a diehard steep and deep skier or you can be old and groom and get turns in on a nice groomed trail. It's a kind of for everybody.

Jeff Kafka

>> Yeah. The other thing is kite surfing, a beginner and a world-class champion could be at the same location having the equal amount of fun where surfing, a beginner might want to go to Cals and Santa Cruz with a little tiny wave, and then advanced person might want to go to Mavericks or across the world, the Indonesia chasing the waves.

>> Talk about your big surfing career. The folks who watching, some know, some might not know you are big wave surfer. So think Mavericks. So most people don't even know what a big wave surfer is. What does a big wave surfer? You held the record at Mavericks. Where was it? Was it Mavericks? What does big wave surfing mean? Is there a size that makes the difference? What is it?

Jeff Kafka

>> Well, I have a big wave that I caught at Mavericks that is one of the bigger ones over the years, but there's actually a guy, Alo, that caught a wave this year that might be in the 108 feet that blows mine away by a few feet, but we're not sure how big it is because it's hard to measure a wave when you see a photo and stuff. But the-

>> What was the estimated size, just ballpark it for your wave.

Jeff Kafka

>> It might've been like 75 to 80 feet, something like that.

>> It's like a moving house, like a building.

Jeff Kafka

>> But one thing, I don't want to take too much time with it, but one thing I'll tell you about that is it's not just the actual riding of the wave, it's the process to get to that point where you're in the right position to catch that wave. And I explained it a little bit because a friend, Ramon Navarro from Chile, and he flew from Chile over to Fiji in 2012 to try to catch this big wave and he wasn't in the right position. He did not catch the wave. And then he went back to Chile, he trained and trained and trained, and then it was in 2018, he saw an opportunity, maybe a week or so out, he flew from Chile over to Fiji. He was in the right place and caught the world record wave that year. So just the commitment of time and training to catch that wave and be in that spot within -

>> He's an expert. So it's really just timing the spot.

Jeff Kafka

>> It's like mind over matter.

>> Yeah, that's awesome. I love how you bring, let's bring this into, I know you're a techie too. This is the great thing about hanging out with you is that you're bridging two disciplines, which I think is why I love how this surfing, windsurfing community is because a lot of the achievements of entrepreneurship have a lot of similar characteristics of getting that wave. We even use the wave metaphor. I mean, I love, I mean Bill does too. All I do is talk, Dave Vellante, my business partners, is like, "The waves are here." Every wave of innovation have different sizes. And right now we're living in probably the biggest wave I've ever seen in my career ever. And I've seen a lot of waves.

Jeff Kafka

>> It's funny you say that because we were in our office in San Francisco and my team member, my product guy, he was like, "Let's position our pitch around waves." And I was like, "Oh, that's kind of cheesy," more business or whatever. But it really is, our company's called Storyboard Capital and it's really positioning the company to be ready, to be in the right place to catch the wave when the wave comes. And the wave could be its federal, state and local money.

>> Yeah, I love the name of your company. I just told you that last night. Storyboard has many implications. Storyboard like in an ad thing, you just lay out the story telling stories board, you're on a board on a surfboard. So there's a lot of cool threads there. Talk about your business now because you're connecting money to deals. You have a venture you're working with, you coach startups the past decade, you've been very active applying your knowledge and skills to help people. Talk about what you're working on right now.

Jeff Kafka

>> So I've been helping startups in a few different roles from CFO to a lot of BD stuff. And I've helped companies in the defense sector. I've helped companies in cybersecurity, a lot of platform related companies and a lot of AI projects with a lot of super creative AI devs and things like that. But about a year and a half ago I met my co-founder, Michael Lakowski, which actually met through a group that wanted to learn how to kitesurf, a nice community in San Francisco that they're working on a lot of non-profit stuff and changing the world that way. But my co-founder, Michael Lakowski, he's a business strategist, he's been doing public-private partnership work for the last 25 years. A lot of infrastructure related stuff, I've worked on a lot of the startup stuff. He's brought $1.4 billion to a portfolio of companies, and now we're leveraging AI to help position companies to draw down on other capital sources outside of DC.

>> It's interesting you mentioned the public-private partnerships. One of the hottest areas right now is that area, because of the private sector and impact investing and tech and money are converging, and all the initiatives like that I would call philanthropy projects are now mainstreaming into commercial activities. So public sector, for instance with cloud, I saw that wave coming. The AI wave is going to be probably bigger than cloud because AI will have direct contribution. I was talking with Daphne. She's got a new thing with a bunch of Google experts coming together around using AI and around this climate change, but it's not like a climate change., like "Oh yeah, we're going to solve climate change problems." They're actually got real work that they could accomplish. So things are gettable now and having a telecom background connecting the world, it's like networking is hot, putting things together, moving the data around.

Jeff Kafka

>> My wife always says, "Why do you keep bringing up the telecom work?" And I'm like, "Everything in tech relates to telecom."

>> Even Jensen Wong, the founder of Nvidia on all his keynotes talks about computer science and he talks about KV cache, which is the core networking fabric between the GPUs. Now it's a nerd term, key value store cache. That is the key aspect. He calls it the operating system for AI. Now, that's Jensen that they want to rule the world, but what he means, but that's networking. It's not an operating, it's not software. It's software for connecting data between processors. It's a networking fabric. So that's just in the systems. I think telecom background and networking background, if you have networking skills, I tell all the people I meet, like young kids, no networking, no systems, you know systems and networking, you will do well. You got a problem to solve.

Jeff Kafka

>> The dev teams that I've worked with on some other startups, they said the AI is like, they do pair coding, and the AI is like 10X their productivity. So we're using agentic AI on our platforms to help companies draw down in public, private state, local money and low interest loans and things like that. But it's not only shortening the timeframe when you're able to do that, but it's allowing to position the company where you can actually be in a skip. We talked a little bit about bringing the company to the table, to the board to even have the conversation.

>> Well, I think there's a biz dev, you mentioned biz dev. You've done a lot of biz dev work. But I think you're right. I think the demand right now is there's so much money now unseen, startups and companies, whether they're big coming together in partnership forms, have to get their story right because the money matching needs to understand what to invest in. So it's incumbent upon the companies to say, "Hey, I'm willing to accept cash." It's not like there's any friction there. I mean, it's always friction and due diligence, but for the most part, money's flowing, right? So just tell your story. Look at it, we're a dog, not a cat. I mean it's that simple.

Jeff Kafka

>> That's a good point. A lot of the environmental groups came to me with the new office and they were like, "we're screwed. This and that."

>> They don't know what to do.

Jeff Kafka

>> Big problem. They don't know what to do. But the money didn't go. It's still there. Biden deployed billions of dollars. And only we were looking at that and it's like 1% of the money had been drawn down on.

>> Yeah, well, I think environmental projects, philanthropy and impact investing, those industries are outdated how they distribute the cash, because the people that they were giving to are middlemen or middle entities and people can now go direct or sidecar in with for-profit-

Jeff Kafka

>> I mean, let's talk about that a little bit, the middleman, and then they're just sitting on that money taking a pretty large cut in deploying little to none of it.

>> Well, they don't know what vehicles to put it in, I found. And then the other thing is I talked to Sue McCormick, she's a cutting-edge attorney at Foerster and Morrison, then she gave a talk at a forward global conference and she told me that the amount of philanthropy last year was at the highest levels, and it's still small relative to say the overall number of other things and the results got worse. So what's happening is the ability to actually execute on those things in the old system is flawed. It's not working. So in other words, the old way of doing things is shifting to the new infrastructure, the new capability. So the money, people are like, "Well, that's my guy, my team," now it's gone. So I think you're onto something really huge here because now the new mechanisms are moving over to these agile projects, innovative companies, private. The public realizes that the private companies are doing the work. So I think you're seeing massive shifts on these.

Jeff Kafka

>> We do have a nonprofit arm of storyboard capital and we are helping a few nonprofits. We have one in Ohio and they're helping underprivileged kids, and they don't really know how to craft their story to go after corporate. So we're helping them there.

>> So that's what you guys do.

Jeff Kafka

>> Yeah.

>> So you guys help companies come to the table, work on the business model, positioning, how to articulate it, how to organize, and how to accept money.

Jeff Kafka

>> I mean, some of our bigger opportunities would be like Intel with Mark, he has something going on.

>> Mark Castleman. Yeah.

Jeff Kafka

>> Yeah. And they're doing a bunch of infrastructure related stuff. So if they get some traction there, we could be a really good partner for them.

>> Mark is cool. He's letting us use his deck here of his little location here, which is the best views. He said something on the podcast yesterday I thought was compelling.

Jeff Kafka

>> I just didn't know what I can say about it or not. But we see some opportunities with Mark for sure.

>> He said yesterday that when you have this gravity movement, everything's up in the air and to a little conversation around how money's flowing is that everything's up here and it's going to come back down. That's a reset.

Jeff Kafka

>> It's a total reset.

>> He's been through many ways of innovation. He's seen, he understands the money side, he understands the market side too. And he talked about value capture, value creation, and everything's up in the air. You're in a great position right now.

Jeff Kafka

>> I mean, one of the other things is not just how to position your story, but who to talk to. You hear the story, talk to a hundred DCs, and I haven't got a check yet, but it's like-

>> The wrong ones.

Jeff Kafka

>> "Did you talk to the right one?"

>> Yeah.

Jeff Kafka

>> And I wanted to talk to the Governor Gretchen in Michigan the other day. I was out there with a defense related start-up, and Michael coached me through how to get a meeting with her. And I think that's something our platform can do is we can not make that, I mean manual, I guess we can make some introductions like that, but having people understand who is in office and why you would talk to that person. I came up with my own way. I wrote her a letter the night before using AI, and then a Navy guy made the connection. And then I went there and I said, "Hey, Gretchen, we want to bring technology from San Francisco to Michigan." And she could be running for president at some point.

>> Yeah. Awesome.

Jeff Kafka

>> She's super excited. And we're going to have a -

>> Well, being connected and having these trust networks is a real value right now because we're now in an era of the internet and social media where everyone's now connected and it's not as intimate as it could be. So in the old days was, "He's a connector. John knows everybody." Well, it's not just knowing people. It's actually having context and saying-

Jeff Kafka

>> It's definitely having context. And then the AI can do so much and there's so many tools you can draw down on. We'd have this risk matrix and this due diligence documents and the post meeting, these products that we can dollarize and stuff like that. But it's actually going to make the personal connection more important because a lot of people can build a lot of stuff.

>> Jeff, not to end on a networking note, but having a switch is very good.

Jeff Kafka

>> Yes.

>> Packet switching networks work. So if you have AI, you become not just a connected person, you're a packet switcher. And at high-volume, at scale. I mean, this is where we're going. I mean, that's to get all nerdy out, but that's like relationships matter.

Jeff Kafka

>> Yeah, I'm a surfer dude, but I've been around the biggest nerds in the world, and some of them build really cool tech, but they need strategy guys and strategy AI to help, because when you're in your closet building code all day, you want to focus on a problem, not build tech.

>> Okay. So who's the better kitesurfer, Larry or Sergey?

Jeff Kafka

>> Okay, that's a good question. So-

>> I think Sergey. Sergey jumped out of a plane at a Google IO once.

Jeff Kafka

>> Well, here's the thing is Sergey is a gymnast.

>> Okay, so he can-

Jeff Kafka

>> So he can do more of the tricks and everything. Larry is a guy where you can go kitesurfing with him and you're thinking you're going for an hour or two and then you're in the water for eight hours. And he went 150 miles. And then luckily he's high up enough where he is got some wealth, where he has some boats that will follow you in the middle of the ocean and you're about to drown and you have a rescue guy -

>> So he's a analytical, precision thinker.

Jeff Kafka

>> Yeah.

>> Sergey's a wild man.

Jeff Kafka

>> Larry and I did some kitesurfing and he said, "Jeff," he was on a hydrofoil. And he's like, "Is there anything I can hit on the bottom here?" And I go, "No, it's totally deep. You're totally fine." And then 75 miles later, he hit the bottom and he's standing there and he's like, "What the heck? You told me there's nothing here." I go, "That was like four hours ago and 75 miles ago."

>> It's a coral reef, bro. I see Larry around Palo Alto sometimes when he had his newborn driving on the bike. And it's good to see those guys. I think what they have done with Google, it's been such a great achievement. And I know Sergey's kind of a wild man. I love how he jumped out of a plane one time so I can see him. I didn't know he was a gymnast, so I could see him thriving, thrashing to having fun. Well, Jeff, congratulations on your venture and what you're doing helping people, helping companies have one, and people with money, connecting money with companies. Great service.

Jeff Kafka

>> No, we're really excited and we're happy to talk to companies and partners and stuff like that.

>> Yeah, hit the big waves. We have the big waves here with theCUBE pod.

Jeff Kafka

>> We're positioning ourselves to catch the next big wave.

>> It's coming. It's the biggest one I've ever seen. The AIs, everything's coming together. All the infrastructure, the middleware and the application layer up and down the stack, it's going to make a world change, societal change, everything's changing here. Of course, we're in Maui where all the best thinkers are gathering here in ECTI Global, trying to talk about the, and then have a great time kitesurfing. Thanks for watching.

Jeff Kafka

>> Thank you very much.