David Gurle - Founder and Executive Chairman at Hive, on Empathy, Innovation, and Disruption

0:00 Jon McLachlan

Hey, welcome everyone to another episode of the Security Podcast in Silicon Valley. I'm here today with a very special guest, David Gurle. David, welcome to the show.

0:11 David Gurle

Thank you, Jon. And the way you pronounce my first and last name is perfect.

0:16 Jon McLachlan

I am so happy about that. I'm really good at butchering names. David brings to the table so much experience. You started your career, it looks like, at Digital Equipment Corporation in France. You were a software engineer there. Then you moved to France Telecom. You were an R&D engineer, and then ETSI, you were a technical officer there, VocalTec, the VP of strategic alliances, and then you moved into Microsoft. And at Microsoft, you are actually director of program management of real-time collaboration and communication. And that was back in 2002. So, right as soon as the, right after the dot-com bust, I suppose, and we're getting serious about communications.

1:06 David Gurle

Well, the thing is, I'm very good at missing the rise of the stock and arriving at the end of the [ride]. So, I arrived at Microsoft at the height of Microsoft stock. And after I joined, it just went down and [never] recovered.

1:22 Jon McLachlan

So I'm so sorry to hear that. Oh. Okay. And then after that, you were at Thomson Reuters. You were the global head of collaboration services and head of sales and trading Asia. Awesome. And then you were the general manager at Skype for business. This is now in Palo Alto. And at this point, I think your career really started to take off. You were with Avaya, VP of corporate strategy, and then you started your own company. You started Perzo Inc. Yeah, you were the founder and CEO of Perzo. That chugged along for two years and was bought by Symphony Communications. You were the founder and CEO of Symphony Communications, which has a very special place in my heart, because I joined Symphony Communications. This is where we met.

2:16 David Gurle

Yep. I have to interrupt you right now, just for a minute, because I was thinking about this podcast and I said, what am I going to do to Jon to embarrass him a little bit? And I just want to say that I am so grateful for everything that you've done for Symphony. You made Symphony secure. You made Symphony strong. And thanks to the great work that you've done, along with your teammates, you managed to break through the impenetrable walls of Wall Street and became the standard there. So thank you, Jon.

2:51 Jon McLachlan

David, you're very kind. It was a solid team effort. And we wouldn't have had that opportunity if it wasn't for all the hard work everyone had put into Perzo and then followed through with Symphony. And a lot of, you know, Symphony Communication was where I had the first opportunity to really lead a team technically. And it was an amazing experience. And I have all of the gratitude and humility in the world for having had those opportunities and made those connections, and a spectacular adventure that we shared together, I would say, David.

3:29 David Gurle

Yep.

3:30 Jon McLachlan

So thank you. But the gratitude is a two-way street. And after Symphony, you're a founder and board member of Symphony Communications. You got involved with a lot of advising, [One] Creation Corporation, Cosmian.

3:48 David Gurle

Cosmian, yep.

3:51 Jon McLachlan

Chekk, you're advisor and board member there. Quest Partners, founder and executive chairman at Quest. Rothschild and Co., a senior advisor with [Rothschild], [and the] investment banking.

4:02 David Gurle

Yep.

4:05 Jon McLachlan

And F24 AG, you're chairman of the board there. You took a role with the government of France. You're an ambassador to France 2030.

4:15 David Gurle

Yep.

4:16 Jon McLachlan

Amazing. And now you've done it again. Once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur. You're the founder and executive chairman at Hive.

4:25 David Gurle

Yeah, one more time. One more time.

4:29 Jon McLachlan

I mean, is it something that you're really going to walk away from ever? Is it just, it's just too fun to keep doing these things, right?

4:36 David Gurle

Exactly. And I think that you mentioned the keyword, the fun.

4:43 Jon McLachlan

You really have to have that passion, because things get gritty, things get difficult. You have to reach down deep and find that drive, and not just plow forward for your own sake, but as a leader, you have to inspire everyone else around you to stick with it, stick through it, right? Yeah. So was there any part of your childhood that, you know, getting into our first question, was there any part of your childhood that really makes you you, or that was like very influential? Maybe a unique experience that gave you some of that grit or some of that drive?

5:23 David Gurle

Yeah, I believe so. I'm not sure if it's only one thing, Jon, but I grew up in the Middle East. I was born there. Parents were diplomats. And I grew up in the streets of Lebanon, Syria and Turkey, and played with the kids of my age from those countries. And, you know, growing up playing football, soccer, and all types of games that we used to play, I always was this kid who wouldn't do things like the other kids would. Kind of the [odd ball]. But I never felt wrong doing it. You know, I always felt that I was doing what I wanted to do, and if it was against what the group was doing, it was okay for me, and vice versa. So people will always call me, like, you're special, or you don't listen, and you are [hard-headed], and all of those things. And I got Teflonized into the Teflon, this thing that never sticks.

6:48 Jon McLachlan

Yeah, it never sticks to you, huh?

6:50 David Gurle

Nothing, nothing ever sticks.

6:51 Jon McLachlan

Just like [Teflon], really.

6:52 David Gurle

Yeah, exactly. Just like, very early on in my life. And I have one memory that I can relate to. I was 13 years old. We were in Turkey, and there was a military coup in Turkey in 1980. And it was curfew. But you know, who would respect a curfew when you're a 13-year-old and there's nothing to do home? And so I just got out and managed to convince a few of my friends to get out as well, by just yelling at them. And then we started playing outside. I don't know what we were playing, but eventually a military truck came by and saw us and stopped us. So [...] curfew, we can't go out. So they just aligned us like that. And I was the youngest.

7:50 Jon McLachlan

Oh, you're the youngest. Wow.

7:51 David Gurle

I was the youngest. And they started hitting us from the oldest all the way to me. And it was my turn. I was the youngest. I thought I might escape it because I was the youngest and I was the last one. It just didn't matter. And I just got a big hit on my face and a big hit in my stomach. And I just looked around and I said, okay, are you done? And so I guess this rebellious attitude that I have, the fact that I make my own rules, was probably in me. And the environment in which I grew up helped me to further sharpen that edge that I had, and it never left me. And I think it's one of my qualities.

8:56 Jon McLachlan

One of your secret strengths.

8:58 David Gurle

Yeah, maybe. Yeah.

9:00 Jon McLachlan

No, it's amazing. And I'm sorry that you went through that. I believe firmly that it's the experiences that we go through that sort of shape who we are and give us the opportunity to rise to the occasion. And it sounds like you really took it upon yourself to be yourself, even in the face of great adversity.

9:21 David Gurle

Yeah, because it was the only way. You know, I was a foreigner, right? You know, if you think about it, I was a foreigner trying to integrate. And so I faced racism all my youth. You know, I was a minority. I was the only white kid playing in those places, only white and only non-Muslim. So, you know, you had no choice but to deal with it.

9:49 Jon McLachlan

Right. And you had to deal with it at a very [formative] time in your childhood. And it sounds like you made the most of it. And it really shaped you to be able to handle, like, tough situations.

10:02 David Gurle

Yeah, but also learn respect, you know. The thing you need to understand when you are in a situation like that is the fact that where you were born affects a lot your future and affects who you are a lot. And so, rather than judging people for who they were, I was trying to understand the differences and respect those differences, right? And so, you know, even though I was this [odd] kid, because I always respected their differences and tried to understand their differences and tried to [love] their differences, eventually I was welcomed. So it was a good learning for me.

10:48 Jon McLachlan

That's really heartwarming, actually. To be different, to be perceived as different, and then to be welcomed into the group, right?

10:56 David Gurle

Yeah, it does.

10:58 Jon McLachlan

I have to admit that it sounds very similar to experiences that I had, coming out [...] in Minnesota, in a very conservative environment. You're forced to deal with differences and things that you can perceive as adversity, but they do shape you into who you become, right?

11:18 David Gurle

Yeah, of course. No, no, no. Adversity is a very good trainer. You know, if you have the right support.

11:28 Jon McLachlan

If you do.

11:29 David Gurle

Yes. Yeah. I mean, you know, being alone is not easy. I mean, some exceptional people can do it all by themselves. But if you have the right support from family, friends, you know, that helps a lot.

11:41 Jon McLachlan

That is absolutely critical.

11:43 David Gurle

I'll come back to these differences through an experience I want to share with you.

11:50 Jon McLachlan

[Oh], please.

11:51 David Gurle

We were in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon. And I was much younger then, you know, maybe eight, nine years old, but enough to remember. And it was the civil war of Beirut. And the buildings were destroyed, the roads were destroyed, and we were walking with my dad on the street going somewhere. I don't remember where. As we walk by, across the street, there is this kid, older than me, but a kid. He's got an AK-47 on his shoulders, you know, this Kalashnikov thing. And, you know, we being young just got scared, and I hid myself behind my dad. And my dad said, what's going on? And I said, well, you know, you look at this kid, you know, he's a bad person and he might kill us. And he said, well, how do you know he's a bad person? Well, I said, because, you know, he's got a gun. Right. And yes, but imagine you were born in his shoes and you were defending your home. What would you do? And that for me was the, somehow, defining experience in tolerance and in understanding diversity and not judging, you know, not judging the book by its cover. You know, it's trying to read it and understand it and give time. And so I think that would be the right answer to your question.

13:40 Jon McLachlan

Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah, I can feel the empathy. It's a skill that you can develop, right?

13:50 David Gurle

Oh, yeah, anybody can develop it. You just need to love the human nature.

13:57 Jon McLachlan

Not be too surprised by the unexpected. But, you know, one of the tricks that I've always used was, you know, when there's a disagreement, I assume two things. I assume that everyone brings something to the table, that people are smart. And it's my job as a listener to see that in other people that are at the table. And it's also my job to play with a sense of perspective and empathy to answer the question, okay, why is this the right thing to do? Like, what set of values are driving the discussion so that this is the right thing to do? And to drop my set of values and really try to pick up another set of values that might actually be a better, a better set, where the problem or the disagreement is not a problem or a disagreement anymore. You know, it sounds like you were put in a situation where you were doing exactly the same thing, except it was someone with a gun, a kid with a gun who was just defending his country, perhaps, or his family or his loved ones, right?

15:03 David Gurle

Exactly.

15:04 Jon McLachlan

I'm sorry that you have to go through those things, but it sounds like it really helps shape who you are today. And I think that's a pretty spectacular person.

15:14 David Gurle

I think so too.

15:15 Jon McLachlan

So would you like to share our listeners a little bit about Hive?

15:19 David Gurle

Yeah. Well, Hive is a distributed peer-to-peer cloud solution. It is unique in its approach to build an alternative cloud to the ones that, you know, we use every day. It has the ability to take the end-use resources of computers around the world and put them in a virtual operating system, from which we can offer, and we offer, storage and compute services. So that's really the nature of that. And I had the idea actually when we were at Symphony, 2018. The bills of Amazon and Google, on which we were building and running our infrastructure, I was going mad. And the reason I was going mad, not because the bills were going up, obviously they were going up, but because I knew that there was a better way of doing it, because I used to run Skype for business, you mentioned it earlier, and Skype was entirely peer-to-peer. So no infrastructure and no data centers. So we were using everyone's computers, you know, to do what servers do. And so I said to myself, there's really no technical reason that we couldn't do the same thing with the cloud. So I went to the board and I said, okay, guys, I know I'm running Symphony, but I have another idea, and that's really what I want to do. And so I want to have the right to start doing it, because I had to ask permission. It was in my contract. And so they gave the permission to me. And some of them even said, okay, we're going to invest in it, we liked the idea. But life happened. I didn't have time. [Symphony] just absorbed me so much that I couldn't put a minute on this new initiative, which wasn't called Hive in my mind back then. And then it's only when I decided to sit down in 2021 that I said, okay, what am I going to do next? And that became the beginning of the journey for Hive, for me. So we can obviously talk more about how, but that's kind of how it started and it's kind of what we do. And as a matter of fact, you are catching me at a very opportune moment, because literally yesterday we released our first version.

18:04 Jon McLachlan

Wow, congratulations. That's huge. That is amazing. So that was Wednesday, September 28th. And so when you say the first version is released, can I try it out? Can I download it? I can participate in?

18:20 David Gurle

You can if you have a Windows machine. We don't have a Mac version yet. I'll send you the Mac version. I'm running Mac myself. Sure. The thing is that we haven't gotten, you know this better than anyone else, all the signatures from Apple approved, you know, all the developers. So when you install Hive, you get all these warnings. And so you need to mute those warnings to install cleanly. So since you know all of this better than I do.

18:50 Jon McLachlan

Security, something like that. Yeah, yeah. No, I guess to loop in our listeners, like, what's going on with Apple. Apple is pretty famous for being a closed ecosystem, meaning they do try to control what goes into it. But on your desktop computer, it's been pretty open, but they're slowly introducing this feature called Gatekeeper, and a developer program. And so all software that runs on [a Mac] is supposed to be signed with a private key that [chains] back up to a root of trust that goes through their developer program, so that they can detect things that were not developed by a person that has an official relationship with Apple through the developer program. And it sounds like they're making great strides. I don't follow their program very closely, but it sounds like they're starting to get to the point where error messages become, like, almost like barriers to entry.

19:54 David Gurle

It is, because the error message is actually incorrect. You know, it says the program is broken, it cannot work. I mean, you know, but what you see when you try to make such an install, if you are an inexperienced end user, you're going to say, okay, I'm not going to install something that doesn't work.

20:10 Jon McLachlan

Of course, of course. But when you send me the Mac version, I'm just going to click through all of those [warnings]. I'll be like, yeah, I know what I'm doing. Don't worry.

20:21 David Gurle

There's a special command line interface, which I'll send you, which will mute all of those things. Don't worry about that.

20:29 Jon McLachlan

Okay. I'll be happy to run that. And I have plenty of spare compute. So I'll be interested to see if maybe the next big SaaS service can be deployed on top of Hive, and part of it can run on my local machine here in San Francisco, and maybe even use some of the storage, because I have four terabytes of storage on this machine. I don't use all of it by any stretch of the imagination. So, do you monetize? So as a contributor to the network, is there any sort of reward that I get for participating?

21:04 David Gurle

Exactly. You get a reward. At this time, the reward is what you share, you get in exchange. So if you share one terabyte, you'll get one terabyte from the network, which you can use to back up your files. And we don't plan to make money out of what I call this [pure] exchange. Having said that, if you want to consume less than what we share, we ought to pay you. So we're going to actually pay you a monthly fee, because we're going to use the end-use capacity that you have for people who want to consume more than what they share. And so our goal will be to kind of, in a wholesale fashion, buy all these compute and storage capacity, and then sell it at the same price, but with a 5% transaction fee, back to the users who want to consume more than the exchange.

22:15 Jon McLachlan

I think that's awesome. It's almost like taking the business model of Uber and distributing it across folks that just have spare resources and spare time, help connect people looking for rides with folks able and willing to give rides, except we're doing it in the compute space. And instead of centralizing all of the stuff, like AWS has done, like, you know, Google GCP has done, where there's a big company behind it, and the yellow taxi cab shows up, and you have to call one specific phone number, it goes to central dispatch, like, this is the decentralized model of compute and storage.

22:54 David Gurle

Exactly.

22:56 Jon McLachlan

Very nice. Very nice.

23:00 David Gurle

I'd like to ask your permission to use what you just described in my next Hive introduction video, because it is so well said and so well, you know, metaphor. I hope you'll give me that.

23:15 Jon McLachlan

Oh, please. Yeah, of course. Of course. I'm just rephrasing what you've shared. And so all of the content is yours, 100%. Please do. I'd be very flattered. Thank you. So what's been your best day along your journey so far with Hive?

23:39 David Gurle

28th of September, 2022. The release of the first version.

23:48 Jon McLachlan

Yesterday was your best day. Amazing. You're still floating on the clouds.

23:52 David Gurle

I am. I am still. But distributed cloud, you know.

23:57 Jon McLachlan

Let's not [underplay] that. Not a centralized cloud, the distributed cloud that we're floating on.

24:02 David Gurle

Exactly. Yeah. I mean, the reason it's a best day, you are a software engineer, you know, by training, and you know how hard it is to converge the first release. You have to not only converge the code, but the engineering, you know, back office things behind it together, the support system, the release system, the tracking system, the data collections. I mean, everything that needs to come together is still a lot of effort. And so what's really beautiful about this, and why I'm so happy, is not that it's the best product ever. I honestly think it's not. The first version of Hive is something we look at as, oh, why did we release this thing, a few releases from now. It is actually how everything comes together, and the team comes together. And suddenly, you know, the humans just merge with each other in this common goal, in ways in which no words, no process, no rule can describe. It just happens. And I've seen this many, many times. I mean, many, many times. And every time, I have goosebumps from it, because I think it represents some of the best of humanity, and this ability to come together for a common cause and to produce something that didn't exist before. It's creation.

25:41 Jon McLachlan

Yeah. Yeah, I understand that entirely. I remember when we first released the public version of Symphony, and there were cigars [involved]. And at the end of the day, there, in the back, out back behind the offices, it was a celebration of the greatest type. And I'm sure that there at Hive, you're broadcasting from New York, right?

26:09 David Gurle

Yes.

26:10 Jon McLachlan

I'm sure there's celebrations happening there too. Okay. So how about the worst day that you've had on your journey so far at Hive?

26:21 David Gurle

So there was a moment in October, November last year. So you have to put things in perspective, right? I did Symphony. Now I am raising for Hive. And there are things that I absolutely want to do differently than I have done in Symphony, because I have learned a few lessons. And one of the things that I absolutely wanted to do was that I am going to have majority control over some key decisions, no matter how much I own in the company. And so that basically means that my shares will have more voting rights than investor shares, which I did not have at Symphony. And so I'm negotiating with investors around that, and it's a very, very difficult topic, like you cannot imagine, because nobody wants to lose control. But somehow, you know, through [grit], through empathy, through negotiation, I managed to get the lead investors to agree to this. So I'm pretty happy with it. And I'm saying, okay, [we're there]. So I received the final draft, and I was in Hong Kong at that time. So it gave me an excuse to [sleep] over, because it was my evening, it was their afternoon, they were European VC firm. And so I said, okay, you know, I got it. You know, it's now 11 p.m. for me. I'll get back tomorrow morning. So I also had six hours in the morning when I woke up to think about it.

28:29 Jon McLachlan

It's a good thing.

28:30 David Gurle

Yeah, it's good. It's, 24 hours was very important. And so I go once more, you know, over the term sheets and kind of all the process, and I realize that I don't want this deal. I don't want it. And I don't want this investor. But I have no other investor. I mean, they're the lead investor.

28:59 Jon McLachlan

Right. Okay.

29:00 David Gurle

I have other investors, but if I basically don't deal with this investment, I don't know what's going to happen to others.

29:06 Jon McLachlan

Right. It's a very precarious situation, because the other investors are not prepared to put more in, but if they lose the lead investor, then their investment becomes much riskier, because now there's a huge chunk of capital that's not being injected, that needs to get injected in order for them to feel comfortable again, right?

29:24 David Gurle

Absolutely. So here you go, right? You know, we are almost there. All I need is to sign that thing, because it's something that I negotiated so hard that they agreed to, but I decided not to do it.

29:39 Jon McLachlan

Did they try to sneak something else into the terms?

29:41 David Gurle

No, it was just too painful. [...] And I said to myself, what if I'm in a different situation, now that the company exists, and I'm going to have to negotiate again with them? And is this really the culture, the type of investor I want in the [cap] table or not? And I realized that I didn't want that. And so suddenly, back to square one. No money for Hive. And despite the fact that I had all the money I wanted. And so, you know, the call when they woke up was not an easy call to make, to explain it. And then I have to figure out what I'm going to do next, because I have to start from scratch. So yeah, that was a low point.

30:43 Jon McLachlan

Yeah, those can be very difficult decisions that we have to make as founders. But keeping that long-term vision in mind. And I 100% empathize with wanting to retain control of the company, because if you retain control of the company, you retain control of your, you can execute against your vision, right? But if it's an arm and a leg and twisting, and is it really the optimal partner? Because when you pull in an investor, it's not just capital that they bring, right? It's supposed to be the network and the support, and maybe a couple customers, and initial traction, and advertising, and help with the marketing, or even like the security of the whole thing.

31:33 David Gurle

And on top of that, the judging.

31:35 Jon McLachlan

And the judging. Yeah. Yep.

31:39 David Gurle

And so, you know, one day I was at Microsoft, and we were in a very tough negotiation with an organization, a very, very tough negotiation. I mean, I was the one instigating the break of a massive contract, which I felt was against Microsoft. And so we are going in this negotiation with the top lawyers and everywhere, but I am the business lead. And so we arrive to this point in which, for me, I'm just not going to continue. I'm not going to do this deal. I'm saying that I'm just too tired. I'm not doing this deal. It doesn't go the way it should go. And so I go to my boss. I say, you know, Bob, his name is Bob, said, Bob, you know, I'm sorry, but I'm going to walk away. I'm not doing this deal. And he looks at me, and he says, David, you are now ready to do the deal, because you are ready to walk away.

32:49 Jon McLachlan

You mean walk away from your role with Microsoft?

32:53 David Gurle

Yes. To be totally clear about this, yes. And he said, now you are ready to do the deal. And I didn't understand what he said. But it took me, I don't know how long, but it meant that I had nothing to lose anymore.

33:13 Jon McLachlan

Right.

33:14 David Gurle

You see, at that point, suddenly, you know, all of the artificial constraints I put left and right in my decision process were gone. And I just could do whatever [I] wanted to do. And it's exactly the same thing that happened with Hive. So when that situation happened, I said, okay, what? I'm not going to do Hive. I don't care. You know, not doing it. If it's not going to happen the way I want, I'm not going to do [Hive]. And so that gave me somehow the courage to say no and to say, okay, I'll do it only in the right condition. At least I gave myself, you know, this out.

34:04 Jon McLachlan

Right. And I think that was critical. You speak from a position of power when you respect yourself, you know, and you acknowledge that, like, these are small, I mean, maybe they're not small problems to face, but you put it into context, you know, and you remind yourself, like, what really matters at the end of the day.

34:26 David Gurle

Yeah. Yeah.

34:28 Jon McLachlan

That can be very empowering. 100%. David and I, we both ride motorcycles. It's a very dangerous endeavor. I've had some very close calls, and so I count all of this as icing on the cake. Sometimes I use that experiences just as a similar reminder.

34:51 David Gurle

Yes. And I have obviously one regret, we haven't [ridden] many times together.

34:59 Jon McLachlan

That's right.

35:02 David Gurle

We will fix this.

35:03 Jon McLachlan

Yeah, we have to. We have to. Absolutely. I look forward to that too. We'll do some spectacular, perhaps longer rides through Europe.

35:12 David Gurle

Have you [ridden] any time in Europe? I mean, there are some beautiful passes and areas of Europe. I want to go from [Cannes], where I am, in summertimes, all the way to the northern tip of Norway.

35:30 Jon McLachlan

There we go. So if we step back and we look at this bigger picture, and through this lens of the bigger picture, you fast forward into the future, and I'll let you decide how much we would like to fast forward into the future for this, but you look at that future and we see a smashing success for [Hive]. Can you help us see what that is for you?

35:56 David Gurle

The moonshot.

35:58 Jon McLachlan

The moonshot. Yeah, your [North Star].

36:02 David Gurle

Well, [Hive] becomes the fabric of our digital lives. You know, it's in every device. It takes care of giving us privacy. It takes care of giving us means to have a sustainable use of digital resources that we love to use or we have to use. It facilitates the solving of massive, concrete problems that humanity faces, as we need to progress science, because we have billions of computers and only 20 million of servers in data centers around the world. So imagine you could put a billion computers together to work just for four hours, to solve a particular genome problem or a particular math problem, like Riemann hypothesis verification. And we could make maybe leaps forward in the way humanity survives, in the way humanity thrives, and offers new doors. So that will be for me the biggest reward.

37:32 Jon McLachlan

No, I love it. Very inspirational. Makes me want to go off and look to see if you have any job openings, as always. Do you have job openings for security experts? Okay, well. And you did mention privacy.

37:50 David Gurle

Yes. Oh, I'm obsessed about privacy.

37:52 Jon McLachlan

You're obsessed about privacy. I mean, when I put my data on someone else's computer, or when I run a very sensitive program or some compute on someone else's computer, I am thinking about privacy. How do you see, let's double-click on that just for a second. What's that story? What's that piece of the story look like?

38:12 David Gurle

Before we go on the mechanics of that, I think we need to think about, we need to understand what's the current situation, right?

38:18 Jon McLachlan

The atrocious current situation.

38:23 David Gurle

Yeah, the current situation is [as] anti-private as you can imagine it could be. So this is where we use services from Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and a few others, like Box and Dropbox, in which our personal data gets stored in the property of these companies, and we subject that data to their commercial needs. And so they make money in two ways. They make money in one way, which is they sell subscription services to individuals or corporates, or they sell free services in the hope that you can upgrade to a subscription service. And regardless of which path you take, on a commercial basis, that data is used to generate revenue for these companies, and increasingly for machine learning. And we are therefore a product at their service. And so, furthermore, they are subject to US CLOUD Act. And any data that is part of their infrastructure, without your knowledge, can be used against you, or any investigation by any US authority. And so we literally have no privacy. Like, it just does not exist. And if you were to read their end user license agreements, the EULAs, it's pretty explicit. They're not lying to you. They're just saying, you know, bluntly, your data is ours. We can do whatever we want with it. Don't put your data in our system if you care about privacy. Don't put your data in our system if you think that your data needs protection, because we don't guarantee it. So that's the lay of the ground. I think that's not okay. For me, there are a number of things which are great with the cloud, and there are a number of things which are wrong with the cloud, and this is, I would say, by far the first one. And so for me, building [Hive] isn't only trying to take advantage of this end-use capacity of computers and using good technologies, but it's mostly building a cloud that's better for us as individuals and corporate. So privacy is built into the DNA of the company. And so it's entirely zero trust system. Now, if you want to double-click into this, you know, it's full end-to-end encryption. There is a master key that you create, and that gets stored into your local secure vault of Windows and Mac. And you forget it, you know, screwed. There is no way to recover it. And from there, we derive from the root key, from there we derive a subset of keys. And those keys are only known to you, and only you can never, ever, ever access to it. And then we encrypt data and metadata. So anything that goes into the infrastructure, anything that goes into the internet, anything that is stored in your computer, or of someone else's data, is impenetrable, not only by the virtue of this encryption. We use AES-256, which is the post-quantum resistant certified algorithm today. But we generate a new key for every chunk of data we create. So we take a data, we cut it in size of 64 K, and then we compress it, and then that compressed file is then encrypted with a different key each time. And so it's sharded in 1 K sizes, and then it's distributed across the network. And so the data that you might host for me, maybe 3K of my [1 gig] file, that 3K, even if you were to be able to access that, there's just nothing you can do with it.

42:53 Jon McLachlan

Right. No, I love it. So it means that the places that my data ends up will never, never, never be able to access that data directly, because I'm the one controlling the key, and all of those [derived] keys from that one key. It's encrypting. So this is better than the Googles and the AWS's of the world today, because that key is actually controlled by them in their cloud. And of course, I'm sure they do some encryption, but they're also controlling the key. And this puts me as the user, the owner of the [data]. I prefer the word owner, because it is my data. The owner of my data is encrypted on my local machine before it's sent up and out and distributed across the Hive network, and maybe even used for compute operations too. So, perfect. That's great. I love that. Let me ask a follow-up question, if you don't mind, like one more double-click. So if there's a smashing success, and Google comes to you, David, tomorrow and says, oh, we saw yesterday you released this thing. It's going to fit perfectly with our vision of how we want to move forward with how we run all of the services in Google. We're going to deploy all of our services [on top of Hive]. The data that ends up inside Hive through Google, through my use of Google, could that still be encrypted using my key, so that Google doesn't have visibility?

44:34 David Gurle

[That's] the only way to do it. We are not going to do it any other way. It's just not designed nor desired to do it in any other way.

44:46 Jon McLachlan

Okay, I like the future.

44:48 David Gurle

Yeah, this is the immutable features of Hive. And this is, I would say, absolute one. No deviation around that.

44:59 Jon McLachlan

I love this vision of the future. Thank you so much for sharing, not just sharing your vision of the future, but making it, bringing it to fruition too. Let's go back to your job board for a [second]. I remember when you interviewed me, it was actually one of the best interviews that I've ever had. It was very unexpected, very unexpected, but most delightful. And so that leads into this question, which is, do you have a favorite interview question, or questions?

45:31 David Gurle

Yeah, I have questions. Can I get more than one shot?

45:36 Jon McLachlan

Sure. Okay. Of course.

45:40 David Gurle

Well, the first one I always ask, you know, after getting to know the person, is, if you [had a] superpower, what would that be?

45:52 Jon McLachlan

I really like that.

45:54 David Gurle

The second question is, I send you back in time, with all the knowledge that you have. You will not forget, you know, whatever you know. You have the right to go back in time. Pick, first of all, pick the age that you want to go back in. So that's the first question. And the second question is, now that you have all this knowledge, what are you going to do with it?

46:25 Jon McLachlan

What, I'm super curious, what time period would you go back to? I'm sure you've thought about this.

46:31 David Gurle

Of course. Every day. For me, that will be when I was 13, 14 years old. We left the Middle East when my dad retired, and we moved to Cannes. And, you know, I wish I knew what I know today, and go back and correct a few things that needed correction back then.

47:13 Jon McLachlan

No, that's spectacular. That's awesome. So you'd be part of the change that you want to see in the [world]. I feel like that's just part of the journey that we're all on, as is yours, right?

47:28 David Gurle

I think we like change. I think that's one of the essential elements of entrepreneurship, is that you are a change agent. You embrace, promote change. Always. So [fundamentally], that's really what we are after.

47:47 Jon McLachlan

Right. And having that playful sense of empathy to help answer that question, like, what does it mean to have a better future?

47:55 David Gurle

Yes.

47:56 Jon McLachlan

Right. Do you have any other interview questions that you enjoy?

48:00 David Gurle

Well, I got plenty. I'm not going to go through [...]. I tell you, I tell you, actually, for me, when I interview someone, I honestly don't care about the skills [in an interview]. The reason I don't, it's not like I don't care, is because I assume that I have a resume here, somebody who is coming with some experience, and I can always do [a] reference check, that it's very hard to lie and survive first week or two in your job. If you are not skilled, you are going to get ejected very, very fast. And so no need to bother on that kind of stuff. Now, in the engineering universe, there are a bunch of coding tests and et cetera that people make. It is what it is. For me, that is not actually what defines a good hire. It's not the skill, because I have made so many mistakes of hiring the best skilled people, that I could be jealous of because they were so good, right? But they screwed the entire project because of the problem of who they were, not the problem of what they did. And so, therefore, my focus is the person and not the skill. And my questions are always around understanding the person. And most importantly, and I can't, in an hour, get an idea of a person, it's too short of a time, whether they have self-awareness and a reality which is not distorted, so that they can improve and they can change.

50:19 Jon McLachlan

Growth mindset.

50:20 David Gurle

Growth mindset. So that's what I'm after when I interview someone. Does this person have this capacity or not? And if they do, no matter who they are, they will become better.

50:33 Jon McLachlan

It's true. You can learn new things. You can, I mean, technology is always changing anyway. You better be able to learn new things, right?

50:43 David Gurle

Exactly. I mean, I'm not done learning.

50:45 Jon McLachlan

There's so many things out there. So I'm optimistic that I think most people share that mentality.

50:58 David Gurle

Most people do. There are a few who don't, and you need to find ways to filter them out from the company you are building.

51:08 Jon McLachlan

Yep. It's that passion. It's the drive. It's the one thing that I don't know how to teach somebody, and I don't know. Like, it has to come from inside you. You have to want it. It's like a hunger almost.

51:21 David Gurle

Jon, I think everybody has it. Everyone. I think it's just not necessarily applied to the job that they're interviewing for, right?

51:31 Jon McLachlan

Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah.

51:34 David Gurle

I mean, imagine, I don't drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes. Now, if you were to hire me for one of those companies, right, you know, who are doing manufacturing and selling those goods, honestly, you will not find me passionate about it. I'm going to come flat and uninteresting, okay? Because I just don't have a passion for that. Some people do, and that's perfect, as long as that passion and skill matches that domain in which they want to work. And I think, as an interviewer or as a hiring manager, our job is to make sure that, for the respect of the people who we live with in this adventure, and for the respect of this individual who wants to join us, we make the best match possible. Because if not, this person suffers and we suffer.

52:41 Jon McLachlan

That's right. But when it's a good match, like, both benefit.

52:46 David Gurle

And this is why the two are together. Fly together.

52:49 Jon McLachlan

I like that. Yeah. Very nice. No, thank you for sharing. If you think about your experience, maybe with Hive, maybe with Symphony, and you fast forward a little bit into the future, is there one tool or service that you're just dying to have show up in the marketplace, that you've never, I don't know, maybe never had the interest to build, but have always needed, or never had the time to build, but has always needed? This is a little bit of a leading question for entrepreneurs who listen to this and are playing around with.

53:27 David Gurle

I'll show you something. These are my bills of my trip into New York. Like, there's all of these. Oh, yes. Okay, so I have to go through each one, one by one, and file it so that, you know, the expense claims is done. I want to get rid of this.

53:46 Jon McLachlan

You want to get rid of [this]?

53:47 David Gurle

[I want to get rid of this]. There's really no reason, right, in a world in which I have Google, Apple Pay, that you have to make expenses. This doesn't automatically go into my expense. Why will I have to get those things print, you know, not print, you know, I have to go and scan it and [attach] it and all this stuff? Such a waste of time. I'm going to spend probably an hour, an hour and a half, just to do that at the end of this trip. [But as long as] somebody has access to Apple Pay APIs and Google Pay APIs.

54:20 Jon McLachlan

Yeah.

54:21 David Gurle

And you can build a UI on top of that. Like, imagine a scenario in which I make a payment, it goes through, and then [poof], I have a pop-up that comes from the native experience. Is it business or personal account? Is it a business of a personal expense? It's expense. And this thing knows I'm in a trip, and voila, we're done. I mean, you know, that will be such a lifesaver.

54:50 Jon McLachlan

Would you switch carriers if it only showed up on, like, switch from Google to Apple?

54:57 David Gurle

Yeah, I would. Yeah. I mean, as long as I do business, because, obviously, you know, you travel and you have these expenses.

55:05 Jon McLachlan

Yep.

55:06 David Gurle

In a personal life, I'm not sure if that would be a good reason to switch, but maybe there would be utility, maybe it's for tax benefits. I don't know.

55:14 Jon McLachlan

Maybe. Yep. All those. That's a very good idea. I love that idea, actually. So, David, it's been.

55:23 David Gurle

Please do it. Don't hesitate.

55:25 Jon McLachlan

David, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for joining on the show of the Security Podcast in Silicon Valley, and sharing just a little bit about your great experience and your adventure along the way, and some very personal stories.

55:39 David Gurle

Thank you, Jon. Fun, engaging. I enjoyed the questions and enjoyed the interactions. It's a great opportunity. I'm looking forward to riding with you one of these days, in Europe or elsewhere around the world.

55:56 Jon McLachlan

We definitely will ride together. Would you like to leave our listeners with any final pearls of wisdom, or perhaps advice that you could give to your younger self?

56:07 David Gurle

I have only one. Don't be afraid. Just go for it.

56:12 Jon McLachlan

All right. Well, thank you everyone for tuning in, and don't forget to catch the next episode as well.

56:18 David Gurle

Thanks.