Broadcasting live from Mosconne Center in San Francisco for the second day of VMworld 2013, John Furrier and Dave Vellante, theCube co-hosts, spoke with Jerry Chen about startup, innovation, new beginnings and pursuing the right trends.

After ten years with VMware, Jerry is now a Greylock Partner, seeking to invests in new enterprise applications and in all aspects of cloud and application infrastructure. In today’s tech world, “there’s two important factors,” said Chen: “team and technology trends.” He adds, “First and foremost you have to find great entrepreneurs and great engineers. Secondly, you have to find some great trends, and the key is to ride a wave more powerful than you.”

As far as Graylock is concerned, the waves they’re chasing are:
1. Mobile
2. Post-server era of computing
3. Use of data science in building the next gen applications

Chen explains, “Culturally and strategically, VMware knows that its key success, historically, has been that neutral technology that bridges multiple vendors.” VMware constantly searches for new markets. “The level of competition forces everyone, VMware included, to be more innovative,” warns Chen. “As a venture capitalist with Graylock, I’m looking for other opportunities to capitalize on those trends.”

Chen believes there is a certain consumerization of IT and Enterprise, and picking the right trends is a little bit like theCube’s motto: “extracting the signal from the noise.” He adds, “If VMware can create a larger footprint in the data center, the partners can find other ways to add value to the product itself.”

John Furrier noted that everyone is talking storage nowadays and asked Chen if he believed there was a bubble going on regarding Flash. Chen believes the business is not driven towards the flash solely because of the reduced costs, but due to the sheer performance of it. He notes, “Once you move to flash, the speed of the applications and the data base is incredible. users now expect no latency. Instant photos, instantaneous data retrieval. THAT kind of experience drew us all towards flash.”

“The bets are far from being made in this business,” stated Chen. “I think we’re actually seeing the beginning of a new wave of franchise companies. These post-server generation companies will create the next VMwares and the next Oracles.”

See the full interview with Chen below: