Hi, it's Chris Dixon. This is the A16Z podcast. I'm here with my partner, Peter Levine,

who, so Peter, you focus a lot on data center technology.

Yeah. When people talk about the cloud, what is this cloud? Someone has to build it.

It seems like it's an exciting time in that area. Can you kind of explain why?

Yeah, it sure is. And I'm Peter. Hello, everyone.

It really is an exciting time. You know, data center, which tends to be the plumbing of the

internet, has been one of these pretty state areas for a long time. And all of a sudden,

there's been this unlocking of lots of innovation happening in

the data center largely on the back of and not unconcidentally on the back of the whole mobile

revolution like as every human on the planet starts to use a mobile device you know tweets and

emails and applications all that information has to go somewhere.

And it goes to backend data centers.

It goes to the cloud.

And the cloud is comprised of data centers and computers.

And that whole infrastructure is now transforming to support massive numbers of users that are out there.

And eventually, Internet of Things, to support all the endpoint devices that are out there.

Can you kind of explain just like so in the old days or whatever, five years ago,

if you're, you would go as a company and you would, you would rent space from rack

space or whatever, some physical data center.

You would install your own servers.

You would buy software.

You'd install it there, like Oracle and all this kind of software, right?

...