A glance at the portfolio of companies for the Silicon Valley venture capital firm of Greylock Partners pretty much says it all. With a focus on startups and growth stage businesses, Greylock has successfully parlayed investments in areas of technology that have spawned some of the industry’s major players, including Facebook, Airbnb, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Red Hat and Cloudera. And much of that success can be attributed to spotting the next technology wave when it’s still miles offshore.

In 2003, a young intern working at a fledgling company called VMware Inc. witnessed the rise of virtual machines to consolidate enterprise servers. A few years later, in 2007, that same intern (now an executive with VMware) connected with some developer colleagues who were singing the praises of a new cloud business being offered by an online bookseller called Amazon. And in 2014, when Greylock had an opportunity to invest in a young open-source company called Docker Inc., the former VMware intern published a blog post that described exactly why his firm was backing container technology. His name was Jerry Chen (pictured).

Today Chen is a partner with Greylock and has become one of the leading experts in cloud computing technology. Chen and his firm have been closely tracking major trends surrounding the cloud wave, with the first shift being the rise of database migration tools to facilitate movement to and from cloud platforms. So, what about the second shift?

“The second wave is cloud-native developers … men and women coming out of college who never racked a server building cloud-native databases,” Chen said. “You’re seeing another generation of applications being built that look nothing like the generation behind.”

Chen stopped by the set of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with co-hosts John Furrier (@furrier) and Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara) during the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed recent developments around cloud-native computing, Amazon’s go-to-market strategy for developers, a continued role for the C-suite in enterprise information technology decision-making, and Greylock’s recent investments in the evolving digital currency industry.

This week theCUBE features Jerry Chen as our Guest of the Week.

AWS more active in cloud native

This next wave of cloud-native development can be partially seen through recent actions by Amazon Web Services Inc. In August, the company joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, a signal that it would take an active role in the cloud-native community. And in November, AWS introduced cloud-native networking for its Elastic Container Service containers.

Amazon’s strategy is also clearly focused on courting developers with new tools such as SageMaker, a framework for data scientists to streamline machine learning models that was introduced in November. “They’re going to try to win the hearts and minds of the next generation of apps which can be around AI and data,” Chen said.

In addition to building what Chen refers to as “systems of intelligence,” AWS is also attacking the cloud market through two other ways. One involves verticals, a go-to-market focus on industries such as government, healthcare and financial services.

The healthcare vertical represents a particularly significant area of focus for AWS, as it has been at the leading edge of IoT device integration. During AWS re:Invent, the company released several tools designed to facilitate asset tracking, security and management for “internet of things” devices.

The third component of the AWS cloud strategy is its bread-and-butter, the infrastructure platform through which the company has built a significant position, currently owning 44 percent of the public cloud market.

“Storage, security, compute … check,” Chen said.

Developers will play a key role

As the calendar moves into 2018, AWS will have to deal with competition from cloud providers such as Google, Microsoft Azure and Alibaba. Developers have emerged as a major force within the enterprise as they make decisions on which applications to build and what technology to use, so the major players will undoubtedly woo them with new tools, according to Chen.

Yet the ballgame remains the same when it comes to making significant spending decisions, something that will still keep developers in the background. “It’s not where you start; it’s where you finish,” Chen explained. “Eventually the CIO or CFO is going to write that seven-figure or eight-figure check to Amazon or to Google or to Azure because they’re going to standardize on cloud technology.”

VC firm invests in Coinbase

Although Greylock has built a track record of successful investments in the cloud space, the venture capital firm is also closely watching the evolution of digital currencies. Earlier in 2017, Greylock made a significant investment in a financing round for Coinbase Inc., a digital currency exchange. Coinbase has emerged as one of the major brokers in the exchange of digital currencies such as Ethereum, Litecoin and bitcoin.

The current world of cryptocurrencies is not for the faint of heart. The volatile nature of bitcoin’s value has whipsawed investors over the past several weeks, and a number of countries have taken steps to ban cryptocurrencies entirely. Some technology observers have been openly skeptical of initial coin offerings, believing that a number of the tokens will vaporize over the next year.

Still, many analysts and investors are bullish on the field, and Greylock’s investment caught the tech industry’s attention. “In three or four years, I think bitcoin and some of these other assets will do well, some of these token services will do well, and a bunch won’t exist,” Chen said. “But they paved the way for a new paradigm.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent.

Photo: SiliconANGLE