#030 – Kubernetes For Humans Podcast with Ellen Chisa (Boldstart Ventures)

Itiel Shwartz: Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Kubernetes for Humans podcast today with me in the show we have Ellen Ellen can you please introduce yourself

Ellen Chisa: Absolutely I’m happy to be here today my name is Ellen Chisa and I’m a partner at boldstart ventures we’re inception investors in a bunch of early stage companies that you might have heard of and some that have moved along and are much bigger like Snyk buzzigID and superhuman in particular we love working with technical Founders from the very beginnings of their companies and so that means we get to see a lot of what people are thinking about on The Cutting Edge of infrastructure in kubernetes

Itiel Shwartz: So anden like you know becoming a VC is always like an interesting tale but you are a VC in a super technical infra based like VC so maybe share about like the journey how how did like set you up there

Ellen Chisa: Yeah absolutely it’s funny if you think five years ago I think the path makes a lot of sense and if you looked at my career 10 years ago you would never guess that I would be an infrastructure investor but before I joined boldstart I was the co-founder of a company called Dark and what we built was actually kind of funny to be on a kubernetes podcast talking about this but we were trying to build an application layer programming language that would completely abstract over cloud infrastructure and so our whole thesis was hey most developers should just be writing their application Level code and everything else should basically just be compiled under the hood and they shouldn’t have to think about it at all and so any dude of you know whether with the dude of CircleCI was Paul who founded CircleCI prior to Dark and so he kind of came at it from this angle of this what if we took CI/CD to The Logical end conclusion of it being fully instantaneous all of the time yeah sorry I cut you up so you were yeah so we were building that super interesting SPACE I’m sure we’ll get into that more but boldstart had been investors in Dark the company and so I’d gotten to know them from the side of being a founder and so I just knew how much more the team was excited and involved with working with technical Founders and an Elliott my partners were two of the first people to use a cloud programming language which I don’t know how familiar your listeners are but most of the time as if VC you’re not writing code you might do some on the side for fun but then just having spent the time to kind of ramp up and want to write small applications and try it out was really a strong signal to me that they really cared about technology and they’re also just in it with us the whole time and I feel like so much of the startup business is humans and so much of Engineering in general and so from that standpoint it like really set me up after I left we all knew we liked working together and wanted to spend more time doing that

Itiel Shwartz: And then basically you that that’s it like or there was another stop

Ellen Chisa: No actually it was so after I left Dark I took a little bit of time off as I feel like most Founders do I think it’s something more of us should do is kind of take time to say hey I thought really hard about like this interesting business or this interesting technical problem for four years I kind of need to refresh my brain and think about what I want that next time to be spent on and so I had a little bit of time to do that and when I joined the team I was actually still very undecided about if I wanted to start another infrastructure company and if I saw a different Gap in the market than Dark but filled if I was more interested in kind of being part of the community and helping a lot of different companies or if I was excited to invest and so when I came out and joined the team it was as a Founder in Residence and I kind of had leeway to do any of those and then what started happening was I just kept finding really exciting Founders that I wanted to work with and I was excited about their vision for the next 10 years and I didn’t necessarily have my own Vision about what the next 10 years of infrastructure would be it was narrow enough that I thought it was the right company to build

Itiel Shwartz: See it’s super interesting to be like in the middle of all of those like Founders saying that they are going to change the future of infrastructure right and go go to you to to raise money and so you know like usually most of our listeners are like platform Engineers devops people who like kubernetes and even before like buzz you are in Dark and I think it’s like right like seven years ago that so maybe if you can share bit on what changed right in in like those seven years that you see in the industry when you found it Dark like back then I remember it was there was like a lot of buzz because I think mainly like all of the circle young and so on so I remember like even myself looking into it and saying that looks quite cool but I feel that the industry is changing quite a lot and kubernetes maybe make some things well going to production a bit easier but if you can share about like what is the biggest changes that you’re seen from founding Dark T now

Ellen Chisa: Yeah I might answer it the opposite way because the things that came to me I feel like the more that changes the more that stays the same and so I think one thing that has really stayed consistent even as things have changed under the hood is everyone is still really looking for that experience that we had with Heroku and kind of right around that like pre-2010 era and everyone just wants it to be like hey this is like the one thing you set up and so almost everyone I talked to who’s in infrastructure is really still thinking about hey how do we get back to this like one-click thing where it just works and we don’t have to worry about it too much so I think what’s changed is kind of the ways that people are looking at getting to that and so I think like a good example of that is even just saying platform engineering teams when we started Dark I don’t think anyone was really talking about platform engineering teams like I think I like I talked to a couple people where I was like oh we’re thinking about hiring this infrastructure person internally and one of the titles we threw out for it was platform engineer which definitely wouldn’t have been what most platform engineering teams are now so that was like just starting to enter the zeitgeist so that that’s one big piece is we’ve kind of said hey developer experience is something that really matters and we’re going to try to enable people to have a better developer experience internally I think on top of that we’ve also gotten a much bigger wave of ways to track that and so when I think about companies like DX or like Quotient we’re starting to see these companies that are really centered around developer experience that have kind of helped popularize more of the Frameworks like we had DORA and then we had SPACE and we have the internal developer surveys but I think we’re trying to more and more sophisticated ways to look at if we’re actually making developers lives better with the infrastructure we build and the platforms we build internally so I think that professionalization of the SPACE is something that’s definitely new and different and then I think there’s something that’s a trend around how we think about the work that we do and so I think for a long time there was kind of a glorification or like a single like I’m the hero who is saving the infrastructure all of the time and what I’ve seen now is there’s been a lot more work around wanting to enable individual developers to have more of an impact as well and so it’s not that we have to call the same person every time it goes wrong it’s that hey let’s equip individuals with tracing information that would help them find a root cause themselves let’s give them self-service tools so they don’t have to reach out to us every time they want to change something and so I feel like there’s a lot more around empowerment rather than kind of keeping the power over infrastructure Consolidated in a small very sophisticated team

Itiel Shwartz: Sorry everything that you mentioned sounds super optimistic like you know we’re going to a lot of good direction maybe share a bit about the downside or or if there’s any like seven years ago were things simpler were people happier like what are the things for like what do you see as like the main challenges or like challenges and the platform Engineers or develops or infrastructure engineering are facing today that maybe they didn’t have or like what is the Dark side defend right

Ellen Chisa: Yeah H for for things that you mention for sure and I think this was also true in 2017 but I think there’s a book I really like called the Plenitude which is a pretty philosophical book but it was written in the time where I was kind of like oh we make cereal bowls then we make specific cereal spoons then we make specific glasses to drink cereal milk out of and it’s sort of like everything you invent requires you to invent five other things around it in that book it was very much about we fill our houses with random objects but I feel like the same thing is true about infrastructure technology every piece of technology we invent we then make something to make it easier so maybe we have infrastructure as code and then we have infrastructure as code management and then or like we have a data warehouse and we have a data lake and we have ETL like we just we keep adding more layers onto the tooling that we have to think about as engineers and I think that’s something that makes it somewhat hard to make a good decision about what to use and so the way I think about that for platform engineers and for devops people is like we should always be thinking about what is the core problem we are looking to solve for our users and what is the approach that is best to solve that I think it’s very tempting to be like oh this thing is like cool and new and shiny and so I want to try it out because my friend is talking about it or I want to be the first one on the buzzlock to use it but I think when we do that we get further away from what we’re actually trying to do with our jobs which is make things better and so like every time I’m talking to a startup I’m telling them to think about what pain are you solving for someone and anytime I’m talking to like a buyer or user of Technology I’m kind to say like hey what is it you actually want to happen here when you use this

Itiel Shwartz: No that that that sounds super you relevant for for the same things that I’m I’m also seen and I think the marketing is feeling so so we don’t have a lot of V I think like you’re the first V that came to the podcast so I’d be happy maybe if you can share a bit about that you’re VC I’m a developer right like I know the code I know the SPACE because I was a devops let’s say in ebuzzay I was really well when I come to pit you with an idea right what are the things that interest you why should maybe I what what does what idea do I need in order to live my day job as a platform engineer in a super successful company and come to both store them and raise money like what are you looking at and what are the criterias what are the yeah Trends maybe or things that you are looking to

Ellen Chisa: Yeah for sure I think the biggest thing I end up talking Engineers about I think is Engineers were often a little bit sheltered from the revenue stream of the business we have a specific set of technical problems we’re trying to solve and so we can have something that we’re like oh I built this and it’s us ful and there’s the Delta between I built this and it’s useful and this could be a business and then the Delta between this could be a business that like some of my friends would buy or like I can make enough to support myself on a salary and this would be a venture outcome and so the first thing I usually end up talking to people about who are kind of saying hey I think I might want to start a company is sort of figuring out where what they want to build falls on that spectrum and so if you’re going to go talk to a VC you should have in your head how you think you would eventually be making $100 million a year on this business and so like one easy proxy for that is who do you think the first company that would pay you a million dollars for this product is like if you think the company that you’re working at would pay that much externally to acquire a service to solve all these problems that’s like a great starting point so that’s one option for how to think about it the other option that all sometimes run through with people is you could think about how would what you’re building eventually acquire one of the large companies in the SPACE like you come in and you say hey this is going to be huge we’re going to be bigger than Wiz like that’s going to get AbuzzC’s attention right away because like we don’t hear about things like that very often you want to think about is this big enough and then after that I think the big things investors are looking at this is going to vary a lot investor by investor but for me and for boldstart we are always talking to technical folks which is great and one of the things that I like about that is you don’t necessarily have to think about can this person build this if you’ve been building part of the platform machine at like a large respected company that has great devops practices I’m not like hey can you write some code like we don’t need to talk about that at all I don’t need to know much about like the full bio of every job you’ve ever had because I believe you I’ve read your LinkedIn and I know about that I’m more interested in what is the problem you want to solve and like what’s your hypothesis for the first way you’re going to solve it and so the way that usually looks is someone saying hey this is the big problem this is how we’re getting to the longterm Vision but the first thing I want to ship in the next say six months 12 months is this specific product and these are like the types of the three to five design Partners specifically who within those companies would care by say job title or even frankly if they’re people in your network by name the people you’re excited about working with and then who you want to bring onto your team to be able to do that a huge part of being a Founder is the team you’re able to build around you and so having that idea of like these are the shapes of people these are specific people I’ve worked with before this is what my co-founding team will be like is also important

Itiel Shwartz: No that that makes total sense and and why or like why do people maybe like I will ask a couple of questions so like question number one is what areas are you current SC that are most interesting for you like as a VC like what what are the hot brands should I just open like a GenAI security company and raised a lot of money H should I do some other buzzword like what what what are the trends what should I do

Ellen Chisa: Yeah I think what I want to see and what are Trends are two different things so I think one thing that definitely happens is there are often trends that we’ll see and so like gen is a great example of one and there’s there’s been evolution of this over time so if we would have had this podcast last summer pretty much every developer came in who wanted to pitch me a gen company was saying I’m going to automatically generate unit tests or I’m going to automatically generate like pull request review yeah pull request descriptions for you and frankly neither of those are that differentiated and the pain isn’t high enough like sure none of us really like writing a great description but at the end of the day like people get it done it’s fine this is more of a feature that could exist within GitHub than a true product and so that’s sort of what you see when you see a new technology wave coming out I would say now we’re seeing a lot more around what is the infrastructure how do you make it easier to train a model how do you verify that the prompts changes you’re making are actually having an impact on your end customer experience so kind of little infrastructure pieces around generative AI experience for developers from my standpoint I’m still happy to see those companies and maybe someone will come up like that’s why you’re a VC is you don’t have the approach that you think is going to make it as a huge outcome company and so I’m very happy to hear people taking different approaches but my hypothesis is that we’re not going to know exactly what infrastructure to build for those products until we know what the killer applications are and so from that standpoint when I think about generative AI I’m very interested in teams that are kind of saying hey this is the infrastructure shift that I think we’re going to have and related to that I think this is the first application and like I have a novel way of how we can build that company kind of working on both of those pieces at the same time another thing I would note is because there are trends that happen over time you sometimes will see a lot of like very well-qualified teams working on the same problem one of those I would say that’s definitely happening right now that’s relevant to platform Engineers around non-human identity so it’s sort of a platform security team overlap where people are saying oh I have all of these automated service accounts that are connected to my cloud accounts I don’t know what all of them are some of them have left some of the people who used to maintain them have left my company and so that’s definitely an issue I think people are saying it’s about 50 to one to human accounts but when I look at that and I say oh I’ve seen 10 20 equally qualified great teams all going after the same problem it’s very hard to say I’m in a bet on thiSRE team unless that’s a team you’ve already worked with or you have some unfair Advantage knowing about what they’re going to do and so when you start seeing that you start going like Yeah we’re definitely going to get technological innovation in this category but you still might not make a bet what I really like seeing iSRE teams who are approaching something that’s kind of a little bit unexpected but when you start calling around to their customer base the customers go go, sign me up I’ll pay for it right now and especially if it’s not people they brought in as references if I start calling people in my network and I’m like hey met this interesting founder they’re thinking about this problem and the person’s like I’ve never seen anything like this this has been like one of my top three priorities for the year can I talk to them and they’re like trying to get the intro to the founder that’s when I know we really have something interesting

Itiel Shwartz: Give me a couple of examples right and if it’s if it’s you know if you can I’m not sure but give me a couple of things that are already public right so you don’t need to yeah for sure super cool or that people said like shut up and take my mind

Ellen Chisa: Yeah I’ll give you a couple so one that was relatively early on was Liveblocks and so the LiveblockSRE team Steph and Guillaume worked at InVision which was a design tool when Figma came out and so internally they were on the team that was expected to rebuild all of En Vision to take into account like real-time collaboration within the product and that’s a very hard Challenge and I believe Envision is shutting down at the end of this year and I’m sure there were other business problems as well but like the Figma threat was a real one for them and so when I started flying around to talking to people like kind of everyone had a problem of like oh yeah I had to add comments and then when I added comments into my product like then I needed to add threading to the comments then I needed to add attachments to the comments and then like it’s like one of those products that sprawls and suddenly you’re maintaining way more infrastructure than you thought you were or similarly like oh I’m going to add notifications then I need to add the logic around when I send the notifications and so it’s something that not everyone necessarily understood originally like you don’t necessarily think everyone needs real-time cursor flying around all the time but everyone needs this like fundamental collaboration within their SaaS and Enterprise tooling so that was one that was really easy to see and then another one I would give you that’s more relevant to platform engineering teams is Zuplo and so Zuplo is a developer first API Gateway or programmable API Gateway and their hypothesis was hey the existing API Gateway Market is sort of like someone calls you go through this like long three-month procurement process and you adopt an entire Gateway at one time and they came in and said hey most companies that are that early don’t need something that heavy right off the bat like you want to rate limit one end point you like have some little thing that you need to do and get way right long-term solution but you don’t need the full functionality today so like let’s give you something that you can adopt incrementally yourself is so that was one where I could call around and easily find people who were like yeah I had this problem but like I’m not going to spend three months setting up an entire buzzehemoth of jeweling

Itiel Shwartz: No it’s like a really cool examples and and and like now I know that a lot of time VCs have thesis like already right like you’re thinking X Y and Z and this is going to be very interesting and you’re actively looking for companies like is there any thesis for boldstart or is more like we generally we’re buzzelievers that Founders see around corners better than we do so we don’t have specific thesis I would say we come with a prepared mind to certain SPACEs so like we see enough incoming cyber security companies that like we know what we’ve seen before we know what we haven’t seen before we have a sense of the ecosystem same thing with infrastructure same thing with Enterprise application layer and so I wouldn’t say it’s that we don’t have any opinions well often say was to someone who comes in we can like like if we’re talking to a non-human identity company we can like skip through all the pieces about how many non-human identities there are we know that already and so we can skip through a lot of the problem but we’re really looking for the founders to tell us about the specific solution and why that’s what’s going to work

Itiel Shwartz: No that that makes sense and so we are seeing a lot of companies and where are kubernetes podcast what is interesting in kubernetes like in particular if there’s anything like you’re seeing that is like super friendly or sexy or whatever

Ellen Chisa: I have to admit I don’t know why this is and maybe I’ll get great kubernetes pitches after this I haven’t seen as much lately like I would say the things we’ve been talking about I’ve seen a lot of cyber security I’ve seen a lot around identity I’ve seen a lot around generative AI I’ve seen a lot kind of around some of the frontier pieces of Robotics and biotechnology but I haven’t been seeing the same wave of core infrastructure companies I saw two or three years ago that I guess maybe that’s something else also changed since Dark I felt like at that period of time everyone was looking at how do we do a better infrastructure play and I feel like that’s really gotten a lot quieter and I don’t really know why that is I’d be curious if you have a hypothesis

Itiel Shwartz: It’s a good question it’s a really good question you know like I live and read kubernetes because that’s pretty much all we do I think kubernetes now is in some weird point that there are like too many tools if you will and I think the most interesting trends that I’m seeing is taking existing tools and try to Tech them into kubernetes for example Kafka for Kubernetes Postgres for kubernetes Elasticsearch for kubernetes and it’s like taking existing tools and putting them on kubernetes on one side so I think like this is a trend that I’m seeing but it’s more like an infra stateful application of core like player that is interesting cost reduction not sure if you have seen a lot but you know like I know it’s not only kubernetes but like it’s the most common thing like where all spending on top of like AWS and kubernetes how can reduce the cost so this is like very common but again it’s part of something a bit bigger identity to kubernetes like to to take your service account like problem I think this is something that we do see but most of the startup that I’m currently seeing are taking kubernetes is like the layer that their application is going to serve but not necessarily they’re not trying to solve Kubernetes problems for buzz works like our product does only Kubernetes but it’s it’s super interesting like to to hear like your again view view on on things and maybe there are a lot of like Kubernetes pitches that you know waiting are waiting to happen because I think there are quite a lot of problems there are definitely quite a lot of problems still I think well what you know you mentioned the bit like platform engineers and we see the IDP is one of the most like interesting Trends I feel that every company that is using again like they’re using kubernets they’re doing a backstage for kuet with but it s something quite cool what do you think about that SPACE of like platform engineering specific toolings other than IDPs I didn’t really saw a lot of like success there like specifically for engineers but you know what’s your take here

Ellen Chisa: I agree with you boldstart were investors in Roadie which is a hosted backstage product we really like and believe in the founder David is great he the one it he created their internal developer portal and worked very closely with yeah yeah yeah and so when I when I think about that SPACE I think one of the challenges is as people creating platform engineering tooling we want to set up the IDP and then just have it be like everyone just plugs their things in but I think to some extent it’s still a human problem where you have to go around and kind of convince everyone that they want to put their service into the catalog and have everyone be able to use it and I think I don’t know why I’ve noticed this but I feel like a lot of times like because our ideal as platform engineering teams is to have it be hands off we tend to be like a little bit less proactive of going out and getting everyone to do those things and I think that’s a real Challenge and so I think that’s maybe a cultural thing we could do within our platform engineering teams is say like hey yeah we’re kind of like a support and experience team but like almost I know this is controversial think of ourselves in a little bit more of a salesy way of explaining to everyone why they want to use our tools and I think having more authority to do that would certainly be helpful for platform teams I do think one of the other interesting challenges around selling to platform teams is just if you think about an organization the platform team is much smaller than the General engineering team and so if you think about it from a venture capitalist mindset if you’re selling something that’s going to impact every developer in a company and like CTO or CISO would think of this as being this is a developer focused tool that’s a much larger set of people if you’re saying hey the platform team is going to buy this I’d be curious to hear from people if anyone wants to contact me after kind of how you think about your budget around platform teams but that’s definitely something we found is a more challenging SPACE compared to some other areas of technical tooling

Itiel Shwartz: What was doing oh I think it’s a you know again like we’re facing it a beat ourself like we sell platform Engineers a product that helps to D our organization I think platform engineers in most companies doesn’t don’t really have a budget per se like sometimes they are part of the infrastructure team and then no problem like infrastructure doesn’t have a budget sometimes they’re part of like the SRE team and they’re already paying like T $2 million whatever so we already have like quite a big budget but when it comes to a tool that is only internal and it doesn’t fall in that buckets of like it’s an infrastructure or it’s a monitoring it becomes much more trickier right like because you need to invent a budget and it’s always hard to invent a budget than to reallocate that existing budget

Ellen Chisa: Yes for sure especially like it’s very easy when you’re just subbing one line it them of oh we’re a better version of this tool and like you mentioned before about Cloud cost that’s been a huge thing I feel like one of the number one things I hear in board meetings right now is around you named one of the companies earlier but there are certain companies where the infrastructure just get very expensive over time and so everyone’s kind of looking at how they can bring that back down and get it under control and I think that’s partially just the macroeconomic climate of everyone’s being a lot more cost-conscious as an organization overall and I think it’s also just some of the tooling just costs more as your organization grows and as the volume of data you’re working with grows

Itiel Shwartz: Okay no I agree I agree let ask you something like a bit different like on a person you know you are our founder CEO super technical company in are PC are you going to be a Founder like in in like in two years if I’m going to interview you are you going to be a Founder are you missing that what do you think about doing that transition

Ellen Chisa: Yeah it’s definitely it’s an interesting transition it’s a very different job I think of joining a partnership the same way I think Founders think it like I tell every founder if you’re going to solve this problem and you want to be a venture back company you should love this problem enough to do it for 10 years and joining a partnership is the same thing you are backing Founders and saying hey I’m going to be on your board I’m going to be in this journey with you and I would never say that to someone and then leave after two years like I promised to them that I’ll be there with them for 10 years and sort of every new company I back that like re-ups me for another 10 years and so I think a lot of operators and Founders who go into Venture if you’re going to decide it’s not the right fit the time to do that is in the first couple years I think the first couple years you also get some of the best parts where it’s like new and exciting and you have a backlog of companies you’re excited to back and you get some of the challenging parts of like oh things not starting not to work out or maybe there’s like a dry part of the market where you feel like you aren’t doing as many deals as you want and so I think you see the whole range in the first couple years but then you really only hone it and go through the whole process with people over 10 20 so I think in two more years hopefully I’ll have slightly more Nuance takes for you on Venture and hopefully some new trends and maybe we’ll have solved some of our kubernetes problems but I’ll still be here at boldstart

Itiel Shwartz: Okay okay no that that that’s a good answer and and maybe like to to end it again our platform engineers that say that they have this idea something that you didn’t hear around Kubernetes is they’re now just waiting to pitch to and they also think that they can make money out of it which is great and what would you say is like the main thing that they should come prepared with like other than the month they are like yeah my company is willing to pay us $1 million for something that will solve I don’t know like kubernetes identity whatever what are the main things when I come to pitch to you that I should have other than that other than like the oh yeah this is this is unique to me you don’t even need to have that much come to me like frankly if someone’s sitting here listening and saying I have three different ideas that I solved internally and I would like an external perspective on which one I should build a company around send me an email that’s totally fine working inception if I’m thinking about what you would need to get to the point where we’re all ready to go I think you would have to have that conviction and like okay this is what I’m going to do this is who I’m going to work with this is like the big Market we’re going after and so like I think it’s actually more about how confident the founder feels and the direction they want to take and if I believe in that same version of the future and if my partners do as well because every founder deserves investors who are really aligned with them and want to go in the same direction there’s nothing that’s more destructive than having like a board that’s pulling against itself no yeah that that makes sense so you are saying that if I solve three interesting problems I should just reach out to you even if I don’t the revenue plan or whatever

Ellen Chisa: Totally fine I and that’s going to vary some people like to see a lot more before they want to talk to a Founder but like I also just love interesting technology as though it’s sorted like early thinking around like I solve this problem for us I think other people have this problem have you heard about it like those are interesting conversations

Itiel Shwartz: No no so sounds great I think that we talked like it was a very unconventional episode but I think Super interesting one for our C customers for our users listeners and I’d be happy to hear from you like maybe last final remarks things that I miss that you like to talk about

Ellen Chisa: Yeah I mean this just came up from what we were just talking about I think the other piece of it is not every platform engineer necessarily wants to be a Founder but I think every platform engineer is thinking about what tooling they want to use and so VC is like sure our big role in the industry is to fund new and interesting things but we also spend a lot of time working with people who are buyers or users of technology to kind of help my husband jokes that I’m a human router to help people find the right things and so people have big outstanding questions of like hey I’m really looking for something to solve this problem show me I’m also happy to answer those and try to help you find something if I know of companies in that SPACE but overall yeah I’m just really motivated by more people being able to build software I think we’re like at a really interesting moment in how that’s changing I think it might look quite different in a couple years and so I’m really just interested to see what happens next

Itiel Shwartz: Okay and it’s been a pleasure I really enjoyed like having you in the show and I think it’s very interesting like we’re talking a lot with platform Engineers but here in the other site how do like platform engineering tools are getting funded and how the VC work is like super interesting and relevant and yeah I think with that we concludes so thanks a lot

Ellen Chisa: Yeah thanks for having me

[Music] Kubernetes for Humans.

This is an AI generated transcript of the conversation