Hoodicobra Commander 788 here. Bacca! Dave here. So great. Top tier below. G.I. Joe. Oh, Slaughter Rising! Bite! Bite! Bane! Ready! Ready! Ready! Silence Kill. Hello everybody, Hoodicobra Commander 788 here and welcome to the first video of 2017. We made it to 2017 and what is our first review of the year? The Terror Drome. The Terror Drome. I picked this up at Jocon but I didn't tell anybody. I wanted it to be a surprise. Some of you guys saw me there, maybe you noticed me carrying out a box that was as big as I was. Well, that's what it was. This continues a new tradition on this channel of reviewing something big for the first video of every year. Last year, the first video that we did was the biggest of the big, the USS Flag. This year, while it's not quite so big, nothing is quite so big but it's still pretty big. I will also be looking at the vehicle that came with the Terror Drome, the Fire Bat and the Pilot, the Avak that will all be in this video. So let's start 2017 off right and get some momentum that will carry us through this next year. We've got a lot of great things to look at this year and the Terror Drome is pretty great. So, HCC 788 presents the Terror Drome. Here it is, the Cobra Terror Drome and the Firebat and the Avak action figure. The Terror Drome, the Firebat and the Avak were first available in 1986 and were also available in 1987 and were discontinued for the year 1988. In 1988, the Firebat was reissued as a mail away offer in a different color and the Avak figure was included with it. We are going to take a close look at the Firebat and the Avak figure later in this video but first we're going to take a tour around the Terror Drome. Just one quick note, the Terror Drome as you see it here is not resting flat on the table, I have it sitting on a lazy Susan so I can turn it to gain access all the way around. I will be using the blueprints that came with the instruction sheet for the Terror Drome to describe some of the features on this playset. Let's start by looking at the top level of the Terror Drome. The TV commercial for the Terror Drome suggested that this top level would turn but it does not. This is the reinforced heavy armor Cobra Battle Rampart and these are often broken. The plastic is thinner and more brittle than I would prefer. In fact I'd say that of basically the whole playset, all the way around the plastic feels a bit thin and a bit brittle. In fact on this Terror Drome there's a chip taken out of it here. And you'll see that a lot with Terror Drones, it can be difficult to find one that doesn't have any broken parts. The Rampart has this beautifully sculpted Cobra emblem on it and credit to Hasbro for sculpting these on rather than giving us just big Cobra stickers. There are six total Ramparts that go around the playset. Also on the top level we have two tower mounted white heat laser cannons. White heat. These massive turrets will rotate and the laser cannons will elevate on a ratchet. This ratchet effect can wear out over time so you may run into Terror Drones with floppy cannons. On the backside of the laser cannon we have a lot of room, you could fit more than one figure on here and we have a chair with a backpack and this chair is similar but not identical to the chair that came with the USS flag. In case anyone is wondering the USS flag chair will fit on the Terror Drones sort of but only at an angle. The gun turret also has some nice detail, some instrument panel stickers, very well done and this instrument panel here is attached to the gun so it will actually elevate with the gun. Just really nicely done very good gun turrets. Here's what the gun turret looks like manned by a Cobra Viper. I guess my biggest complaint would be the gunner sits so far back that he can't reach the control panel but that's a minor problem. We'll just imagine that the gunner is controlling the gun using the force. To the ramparts and the gun turrets we have this command center and the command center has computer control panels all along the outside wall. There are three different types of computer panel and they are just repeated all the way around. You have this smaller one, you have this one with the radar screens on it and then you have this larger one with gauges and dials on it. There are four of these radar screen panels and two of the smaller ones and two of the larger ones for a total of eight. Each of the radar screen control panels has a chair in front of it and this is a reclining chair. Not sure why they included that feature but there you go. These chairs can pop out very easily and they have some nice detail on them. They have a joystick right here and these can break off so watch out for that. And there are four of these chairs in total. If I have one complaint about these chairs it's that the seat is a bit narrow and doesn't fit the televiper very well. I would like the televiper to be in these command seats but the televiper has pockets sculpted on his legs and they're just a little bit too wide for these narrow seats so he sits a little bit awkwardly in these command chairs. Before we move on here is just a tour of that outer ring of the command center, the top level of the terror drone and all those computer panels and the positions that they're in. Let's look at what is probably the most important feature on this playset, the launch silo and the launch silo blast doors. As you can see the doors are segmented and form a dome when the doors are closed and we have a large cobra emblem that can be seen on the dome. The launch bay doors are activated by a lever that is behind the door that is the farthest from the gun turrets. So you could consider this to be the back door if you consider the gun turrets to be on the front side of this round base. The door for the lever is marked with a little notch right here so you'll know you have the right one. Open the door by gently pulling down on this tab and you have the silo door mechanism. When the lever is in the up position the silo doors are closed you can open the silo doors by pulling the lever down. Here's what that silo door opening looks like from the top side and not only does it open the silo doors it also raises the platform for the fire back. The door mechanism is driven by this chain which connects the lever to the platform and you have to exercise some care because that connection can wear out over time. I mean you have metal connected to plastic and that plastic is going to be weaker than metal. So do be careful about that. Looking at the platform we can see how the fire bat rests in there. It has these two clips and those clips connect to these back wings on the fire bat and these wheels there fit in these cups right here. So the fire bat really only fits on the platform one way. Placing the fire bat on the platform does require a little bit of force to get those wings to fit on those clips. So be very cautious about that. Try not to put any unnecessary pressure on the chain connection. Then of course you can close the doors again by pushing the lever back up. Here's what the silo door closing looks like from the top side. Rounding out our look at the top section of the terror drum what we basically have here is an open air command center. It has some slot advance along the inner ring of the command center and that's a nice detail. It does not have any doors or hatches or ladders that lead to the lower section. It also doesn't have any protection for personnel from the blast when the fire bat takes off. What it does have is plenty of foot pegs so you can have lots of cobra figures manning this command center with easy access. Here is the terror drum with its full complement of cobra figures. This is with a figure in every chair and on every foot peg and honestly there's plenty more room here. You could fit a lot more figures in here if you wanted to. It is a testament to Hasbro's commitment to GI Joe that they gave us a bad guy's play set of this size and quality. Very well done guys. The lower level of the terror drum has eight sections with eight outer walls and each of these walls opens up so they are also doors. There are two types of doors. There's the standard door with this triangular protrusion and this opens by pulling down on this latch and it opens downward. This latch is very thin plastic and easily broken so be careful. There are six of these standard doors. The clips that hold the door to the base are also fragile so be extremely cautious when assembling or disassembling the terror drum. There's a bonus hidden feature on these standard doors. These triangular protrusions perfectly fit the 1984 cobra claw powered glider. Just wedge the claw right on there and it works really well. It probably was not designed for that purpose but it's a nice use for it and so you know you can put a few claw powered gliders on there and I think it works really well. I think it even enhances the look of the terror drum itself. It adds some color interest and I think it just looks cool to have these winged gliders hanging on to the side of the terror drum like bats on the side of a cave. Just really cool looking. The other type of door is the gun turret door. There are two of them. One of them is on this side and the other one is way around over here on this side. There are four rooms between them and these doors open by swinging to the side like this. The gun turret is pretty simple. You have the double barreled gun with a couple caps on the end of the barrels and the gun will elevate but it will not pivot but you can swing the door itself to aim it. The gun goes through the inside of the door so the control panel will move with the movement of the gun. You have some sculpted instrument panel detail on the gun control panel and of course that will move with the movement of the gun and then you have a chair with a back peg and this is the same type of chair that you had on the upper gun turrets. It just slides right in there and the chair itself is on a platform that connects to the door. Just slide your gunner into the chair and put the back peg in his back and now he can fire the gun. I have to assume this is some kind of video screen here because there's no portal for him to look out and see what he's shooting at. Then you have these red bars and these are meant to be like kick stands for the door to hold the door open. Of course, mine doesn't reach the ground because my pterodrome is elevated because I have it on a turntable but it's meant to hold the door open when it's setting flat on the ground. Now these don't really work well and they're not very necessary. These are frequently missing parts and this red plastic is pretty notorious for being fragile and so they end up getting broken a lot. So these parts are things that if you don't really need the pterodrome to be complete, you could just skip these. You won't really even notice that they're missing. I don't even really like to put them on the pterodrome because they are so fragile. I only put this one on for the purpose of this review so you could see how it fits on. But I'm gonna remove it and the other one on the other gunner's door for the rest of this review because for this review I will be swinging these doors around and moving the pterodrome around and I just don't want these to get broken. So I'm gonna put them in a safe place. The pterodrome is a round base. So it doesn't really have a front or a back. However, if you swing both of the turret doors open they swing and face the same direction. And it's the same side that has both of the top gun turrets. So you could look at this as the front of the base that faces toward the enemy. Let's look at the interior of the pterodrome and since we have the gunner's door open let's go ahead and look at the gunner's room. The other gunner's room on the other side of the pterodrome is exactly the same. The details are the same. So we'll just look at one of them to avoid redundancy. The room is wedge shaped and the back wall is the launch bay shaft and the interior walls we have a couple doors that lead to other chambers. There is a single foot peg but there isn't very much in this room and really there couldn't be because when the doors closed the gunner's seat will take up most of that space. Here's a closer look at some of the interior detail. There's some flooring detail there. There's a reminder not to smoke around the armaments. That's probably good advice. And then my favorite detail is this ammunition box that is affixed to the floor. That is a reuse of an earlier part from the 1984 mortar defense unit. They just reuse the same thing as flooring detail for the pterodrome. And I think this is a clever reuse of parts. It is appropriate so it works. Moving counterclockwise the next room over is a refueling station and in fact the next two rooms are also refueling stations and they are identical. As with the previous room, the other rooms all have open doors that allow movement between them. Since all three of these rooms are the same right down to the placement of the foot pegs I will just look at one of them. The refueling room is pretty plain. It has minimal detail. The most important part is this refueling platform in red plastic which can slide out to be accessible by vehicles parked outside of the base. Attached to the refueling platform is a fuel pump on a long black hose and it actually wedges in there I think too firmly so be very cautious about pulling that out. Now this refueling pump is the same as the one that came with the 1985 USS flag refueling trailer. It is the same except the one that came with the flag was gray and the one that came with the pterodrome is a dark red. Starting in 1985 some GI Joe and Cobra vehicles had fuel ports sculpted on them. For example this 1986 Cobra stun had this fuel port on the side right there. So if you had the pterodrome you could wheel the Cobra stun right up to it and then you could use the pterodrome's fuel pump to refuel it. And that's kinda cool, a nice little play feature and it interacts with other vehicles. It works with some smaller vehicles as well. For instance this 1985 Cobra ferret ATV has a fuel port on it and you can actually fit this on the platform on the door right there and you can refuel it that way. So this is not a bad feature if this is the sort of thing you like to do with your play time. Since there are three refueling stations you can refuel three vehicles at the same time. And if your pterodrome is on a shoreline even the Cobra Moray hydrofoil has fuel ports that are compatible with the pterodrome. The refueling room has two foot pegs one on the floor and one on the sliding platform. Just to reiterate that red plastic is pretty fragile so be cautious when handling it. Moving past the three refueling rooms we get to the first unique room in the pterodrome, the jail cell. The jail cell is just to the left of the other gun turret door. This prisoner containment chamber is a callback to the stockade that was in the 1983 GI Joe headquarters command center. Of course the GI Joe stockade was more humane than the Cobra jail cell. It had a couple of beds for prisoners to lie down and it had no roof on it for easy escape. There were no such amenities in the Cobra jail cell. You had a red sliding door that would completely enclose your prisoner in the jail cell. You had no beds or even seating room. It's standing room only in there. There are four foot pegs in the prisoner containment chamber, two on the inside of the cell and two on the outside of the cell. The foot pegs on the inside of the cell are difficult to reach so I would recommend removing the cell wall and putting the figures in there if you want the figures on the foot peg and then replacing the wall. It's just easier that way. Here's a closer look at the interior detail of the prisoner containment chamber. Some flooring detail there. Not a lot, really pretty minimal detail. Once again we have doors that allow passageway to neighboring chambers and of course the reminder not to smoke. Then up here we have a sticker that gives us a caution that there's a forced field in use. Moving past the jail cell we will skip over the second gun turret room. It's the same as the other one we looked at. The next room over is the room that contains the launch silo door mechanism and we've already seen how that works. Other than the silo door lever, this room is virtually empty with very little detail. It does have a couple foot pegs right in front of the doorways and that's kind of where they need to be so they don't interfere with the big red lever. Moving on we get to the last room in the Cobra Terror Drone and it is in fact an empty room. This final room really is empty. It has four foot pegs and really nothing else. This really is the only empty space in the Terror Drone. The other rooms are all filled up with stuff. Even though the top level has plenty of space it also has computer panels and chairs and gun turrets and things to interact with. This chamber really has nothing. That's not necessarily a bad thing. The Terror Drone seems to take the opposite approach from the USS Flagg which had several empty rooms that felt kind of blank and felt like they needed something in them. The Terror Drone on the other hand only has this empty space and everything else is filled up. Having a single empty room in the Terror Drone doesn't give the Cobra Legion so much space to do whatever it is they do when they're not fending off a GI Joe attack. Things such as Cobra Commander getting down to 70s Boogie or Zartan contemplating his existential angst or Destro and the Baroness practicing their clarinets or whatever they do in their off hours. Now let's talk about the vehicle that came with the Terror Drone, the Firebat. It is believed that the Firebat was originally intended to be a standalone vehicle and it was later decided to pair it with the Terror Drone. One of the reasons collectors believe that is because of the Firebat's media appearances and we will talk about that later. The Firebat reminds me a little of the Bell X-1, the first airplane to break the sound barrier in 1947 piloted by Chuck Yeager. The Firebat doesn't take a lot of design elements from the X-1, but the small size and the single-seater cockpit kind of reminds me of that classic jet. With its vertical wings, it has some resemblance to the Martin Marietta X-24A. There was a 2008 re-release of the Firebat that is very similar to the original 1986 version even in color. To tell if it's a 1986 or a 2008 Firebat, take a look at the underside of the wings. On the 1986 version, the underside of the wings are very plain. On the 2008 Firebat, they added some molded detail under the wings. The maroon color of the Firebat contrasts very nicely with the white, gray, and blue of the Terror Drone. It's a nice warm complementary color against the gray and the blue. And when it's perched inside the launch silo, it adds some color interest to the Terror Drone. Let's look at the parts and the features of the Firebat. Starting in the front, we have a rounded nose. We have an opening canopy. We have on the canopy the infrared HUD heads-up display imaging. It's a radar screen projected onto the canopy. Inside the cockpit, we have some good detail. There's no joystick or yoke, but that's typical. Most G.I. Joe jets did not have a control stick or any other obvious way for the pilot to fly the jet. But we do have some good detail in there. There's a divider here right at the pilot's feet. Deep inside the cockpit, behind the pilot's head, we have what looks like an air intake for the jet. And of course, this would not work. You would not want an air intake right behind the pilot's head or inside the cockpit. I have to assume this is supposed to be something else and not what it appears to be. It does have these air induction vents on the top, and so maybe that's what's supposed to be the air intake for the jet. Let's go ahead and demonstrate how to put the AVAC action figure in the Firebat. And this is where we run into our first problem, either with the Firebat or the action figure. It depends on your point of view. The AVAC figure came with this black parachute. And it is very difficult to get the AVAC into the Firebat with this parachute on. The way that I've found his best, if he's wearing the parachute, is to bend his knees as far as they will go and put him in basically in as close to the fetal position as he can get. And then you can pretty much close the canopy, but you have to force it a little bit. And he is in there and the canopy does close, but it's a very unnatural pose and a very unnatural position for the pilot. He's not really even sitting in the seat. He's kind of just resting on the parachute pack and his feet. So this just doesn't work very well. It is much easier to put the AVAC figure in the Firebat without the parachute. He just fits in there really nicely. It's a little bit narrow still, but there's plenty of room for his legs and his head. You can close the canopy easily. And he fits in there very well. He doesn't flop around too much. He's very secure in there. And that just looks a lot better. We have these horizontal stabilizing front canards. And on the underside, we have 25 millimeter twin coaxial firing cannons. And these are frequently missing. So if you want a complete Firebat, make sure you check the underside and make sure the cannons are still there. The Firebat has folding wings that fold up for docking in the Terror Drone Launch Bay and deploy for flight mode. On the underside, attached to the folding wings, we have four bombs. They are identical. They peg onto the wings with a simple peg and slot. And the blueprints call these air-to-surface condor bombs. These condor bombs are very simple. They don't have any detailing at all. They could be based on any number of real-world bombs. They're just generic bombs. The final armament on the Firebat is what the blueprints call Hydrag Mark 38 Snake Eye Guidance Bombs. And they peg on the underside of the wing with a standard universal dumbbell-shaped peg and slot. Although these are called bombs, they look more like missiles and I'm sure kids used them as missiles. There's some detailing that makes them look unique. At a couple places on the Firebat, we have the Cobra Aircore Emblem, which is a standard Cobra emblem with bat wings. And I always liked this. We first saw this Cobra Aircore Emblem on the 1984 Cobra Radler, right there. And unfortunately, it was not used on the 1986 Night Raven, but a modified version of that emblem showed up on the Fang Mark II. Near the back, we have two removable engine covers, best removed by pulling from the top. And once removed, it exposes some engine detail. And then here at the very back, we have the Cobra Jet F-404 Afterburning Turbojet, a single jet here in the back. In the back, we have these vertical stabilizers and attached to them, we have the vertical landing strut wheel assembly. And this is what the Firebat has for landing gear. It does not have landing gear on the fuselage. So it looks like the Firebat is intended to land vertically. Now let's look at the AVAC, the pilot of the Firebat. And this is a very unique looking pilot figure. If you wanted an AVAC and a Firebat without getting a Terror Drone, you could get them both as a mail away offer in 1988. Here is AVAC in the pantheon of Cobra pilots up to 1986. There are not many. Cobra did have some aircraft that did not come with pilot action figures. In 1983, you had the Cobra Viper glider pilot. In 1984, you had Wild Weasel, the pilot of the Cobra Rattler. And of course in 1986, you had the AVAC and you also had the Stratoviper, the pilot of the Cobra Knight Raven. What exactly does AVAC, AVAC stand for? Believe it or not, there's nothing on the packaging or the file card that gives you any hint of what AVAC means. It's an acronym for something we know not what. There is a 2008 modern AVAC action figure file card that says it stands for Air Viper Advanced Class. And that's as good a name as any, but since the file card was released after the vintage era, I consider it to be a post-hoc answer to that question. Let's take a look at AVAC's accessory. He came with one, a non-working black parachute. It attached at the sides. You can unbuckle it and pull it over his head to remove it. This parachute pack is bulky and makes it difficult to fit the AVAC in the firebat as we have seen. But it is very nicely done with some excellent sculpted details on the reserve chute there. We have a knife and what looks like maybe a radio here. And on the back, on the parachute pack itself, we have a nicely sculpted Cobra emblem. Really well done. This non-functioning parachute pack is similar to the one that came with the 1984 ripcord. Now the details and the design are different, but the general idea is the same. Of course, G.I. Joe did have actual functioning parachutes like the 1985 maleaway parachute pack. But of course, the AVAC would not be able to fit in the firebat with a real functioning parachute. He barely fits in with the non-functioning one that he comes with. If they wanted AVAC to have a parachute, they could have solved that problem by giving the firebat a removable ejector seat with a parachute like the Sky Striker. But the file card for the AVAC explicitly states that the firebat does not have that feature. Let's look at the articulation on the AVAC. He had the standard articulation for 1986 G.I. Joe action figures. That means he could turn his head from left to right and look up and down. His neck was on a ball joint. He could swing his arm up at the shoulder and swivel at the shoulder all the way around. He had a hinge at the elbow. He could move at the elbow about 90 degrees. He had a swivel at the bicep so he could swivel his arm all the way around. The figure was held together with a rubber O-ring that looped around the inside. That allowed him to move at the torso a bit. He could move his legs apart about so far. He could bend his leg at the hip about 90 degrees and he could bend at the knee about 90 degrees. Let's take a look at the sculpt design and color of the AVAC starting with his head. And right off the bat, we have some weirdness. He has this bullet shaped helmet that looks a little reminiscent of the 1970s G.I. Joe bullet man. And it's a very strangely shaped helmet.  It looks more like a robot head. We have silver paint. And you always have to worry about paint wear with that silver paint. We have black goggles. On his chest, he has a red flight suit reminiscent of wild weasel. We have a silver chest plate. And of course, that continues around to the back with a black cobra symbol on it. It looks really good. We have a silver collar and silver shoulder pads. We have some silver shoulder guards here on his arms and that red flight suit. Then we have some black gloves with some silver lining and details on them. His waist piece is red and he has a black belt and some silver details. Down his legs, he has that red flight suit and he has what I guess are silver pads on his thighs. And then on his left leg, he has a black pistol and a silver holster. I used to think these pistols on the left side was an indication that the character was left-handed but that wouldn't make any sense with an army builder. You wouldn't have all left-handed pilots. So now I think that these left-handed pistols were really just put there just for aesthetic reasons by the designer and there's no other hidden meaning behind them. He has silver shin pads and black boots with silver braces. And one thing that I find very strange is that his feet are sculpted, pointed slightly upward. I have to assume they did this as an effort to get him to fit in the fire bat a little better but when he is standing flat-footed, he's tilted forward. Let's take a look at AVAC's file card. It has his code name as A-V-A-C with no clue about what that means. It says he's the Cobra Terror Drone fire bat pilot and this paragraph says, piloting a fire bat is somewhat akin to strapping yourself onto a cannonball. The cockpit is cramped by any standard and utterly lacking in even the kindest amenities. No engine status display, no weather instruments, no navigation aids and no ejection seat. Just the basic flight panel, throttle, pedals and stick. But after the initial high Gs of vertical takeoff, the fire bat levels out to become the fastest, most responsive single-seat fighter in the Cobra Arsenal. This second paragraph says, AVAC pilots are drawn from the air viper pool and this is the second file card to mention air vipers. The Stratoviper file card also mentions air vipers but there was no air viper action figure released in the vintage line. The first air viper figure was released in 2003 so it will not be reviewed on this channel because it is not vintage. But it was just a repaint of a vapor, the Cobra Hurricane VTOL pilot from 1990. I will eventually review that figure but I can tell you in advance, I'm not a fan of it. They must be capable of complex mental calculations to make up for lack of onboard computers and absolutely fearless to cope with the fire bat's basic unforgiving nature. The aircraft is not what you would call user-friendly. Surprisingly, there's no lack of recruits for the program. All of the best fighter jocks want to ride on the pocket rocket, the pocket rocket. The Terror Drone, the fire bat and AVAC all made GI Joe media appearances but the fire bat deserves a little extra attention because of when it first appeared in the GI Joe cartoon series. The fire bat first appeared in the episode Lights, Camera, Cobra. It was colored gray instead of maroon or red. That episode aired on October 10th, 1985. The year before the Terror Drone and the fire bat were released as toys. This has fueled speculation that the fire bat was first intended as a standalone vehicle. By season two of the cartoon series in the episode Once Upon a Joe, the fire bat had its toy accurate red color. In that episode though, the fire bat was flown by Stratovipers. The Terror Drone appeared in the opening for episodes in the Sun Boat series season two. It was depicted as a larger base than is represented by the toy. In the 1987 GI Joe animated movie, it was even bigger with plenty of space inside to house the bulk of Cobra forces. It was infiltrated by Python of Cobra law and by Sergeant Slaughter's renegades with Falcon. AVAC first appeared in the episode The Phantom Brigade, a 1985 episode the year before the toy was released. He made a few other appearances but not many. In the GI Joe comic book series, the Terror Drone made a brief appearance in issue number 45 but we got a better look at it in issue number 46, the issue in which the Joes infiltrated Cobra Island to rescue Ripcord. What they didn't know was Zartan in disguise had changed places with Ripcord. Several later comic book issues are dedicated to the Joes attempting to gather intelligence about Cobra's launch base. Issue number 54 shows Snake Eyes disguised as Flint intentionally getting captured so he can get inside the base. The Joes send a rescue team in issue number 55. In number 56, they set up an elaborate scheme to smuggle Terror Drone parts out of the jungle. The intrigue continues in issue number 58 where Dusty and Mainframe get computer data from a Terror Drone. In issue number 68, it is revealed that Cobra is using its Terror Drone to transmit paranoia inducing low frequency radio waves. They are using a device that first appeared in issue number two, the first appearance of Quinn. It was a nice callback to an early issue. The Firebat first appeared in issue number 46 where the Firebat is used as a computer piloted drone jet. Ripcord disguised as Zartan is placed in the Firebat so he can escape Cobra Island. Avak first appeared in issue number 54 where he had an exciting dog fight against Slipstream in the Conquest X-30. Looking at the Terror Drone overall, this is a top tier play set by any measure. It's not perfect, but its assets far outweigh its flaws. It is smaller than the 1985 GI Joe aircraft carrier, the USS Flag. In fact, the Terror Drone could rest on the flag's deck but nothing is as big as the USS Flag. The Terror Drone does outsize other comparable play sets. The 1983 GI Joe headquarters command center is a bit wider at the base but the Terror Drone is a bit deeper, much taller and much larger in overall volume. Looking at the play features, there is some redundancy with three of the rooms housing exactly the same refueling equipment and the computer consoles being used multiple times. But despite this, the Terror Drone is loaded with play features. The gun turrets are massive. The pop-up launch bay is exceptional. The refueling and repair stations give you a chance to repair your his tanks or your Cobra stuns after GI Joe has shot a few holes in them and it even comes with a bonus vehicle. But it doesn't matter what I say about the Terror Drone because it's the Terror Drone. That's all you need to say is the Terror Drone. Every GI Joe fan knows what that is and knows what that means.  And then you're like, bro, unless it's a woman collector in which case you say, sis, Terror Drone. I love you, Terror Drone. Wait, I can explain. Looking at the Firebat overall, I'm gonna call the Firebat a top tier vehicle in its size class. Of course, the Skystrakr would be rated higher but it's bigger, it had more features. Even the Conquest X30 was a bit bigger and had more features. But the Firebat is in size closer to the Skyhawk. And in that size class, the Firebat really shines with some great features, the nice fold out wings, the removable engine covers. It's really fun to play with. Even though the Firebat is a small jet, it has enough firepower to scrap with the Conquest X30 and it's more than a match for smaller air vehicles like the Skyhawk. It has an impressive number of features in a compact vehicle and I even like the color. Looking at the AVAC overall, the best I can do is the middle tier for this figure. Although it is designed to look like a deluxe figure with all the silver paint, I think the silver may have been overused and that odd shaped helmet is a bit of a problem for me. It is a nice looking figure and he definitely stands out in a crowd but he does not make my list of favorite Cobra Troopers. The figure looks a little better with the parachute on. That black adds a bit of depth to the overall look of the figure. But the figure itself to me looks more like a robot than a pilot. That's it. That's the first review of 2017 and we did a great with the Terror Drone. If you like this and you'd like to see more of this stuff, you can help me make more of this stuff. Just do a few things for me. Make sure you like this video on YouTube and subscribe to the YouTube channel. Like me on Facebook, follow me on Twitter, share this video. That's what helps this channel grow. Support this channel on Patreon for some special perks and thanks to all my patrons. Don't forget to check out hcc788.com. This video will be on there along with all my other reviews. Thank you for watching. We'll have another vintage GI Joe toy review next week. I'll see you then and until next time, remember, only GI Joe is GI Joe. That's gonna catch on. Imagine this. Deep in the jungle you discover at the Cobra launch base with gun emplacements almost everywhere and special bays for refueling vehicles. There it is. The Cobra launch base is really incredible. Let's talk to my members. And now look, they captured friends. It's time to warn the Joe's, but suddenly they launched the Firebat. That's your GI Joe. Cobra launch base comes with Firebat and pilot other figures and equipment sold separately. Yeah!


Let me start by talking about why this topic is important. In Silicon Valley, which is where I'm based right now, I mean, I work with Alain over here, but I spend most of my time outside traveling. But in Silicon Valley, there are a lot of myths about what constitutes an entrepreneur. The John Dorr, who's supposed to be one of the greatest venture capitalists of all time, famously quoted as talking about how they do patent recognition. And he also talks about the fact that they love founding, you know, the typical successful startup is founded by a young, brash, white male. That's the typical stereotype that they have, and that's the belief that they have, is that it's these young, you know, white, brash males that make successful entrepreneurs. And the problem is that that's what they fund, and it's sort of a self-perpetuating thing. I'm going to be talking about my research on entrepreneurship. I'm going to start off generic to start with. I'll talk about three research projects we did, and then get into a follow-up research we did and the difference between men and women entrepreneurs. And I'll share my observations about some of the challenges that women and minorities face in Silicon Valley. First of all, I've worked with a bunch of academics, including my friend Ben Rissing over there, who's now at MIT. He's local if you ever need to get more information. We've been looking at different aspects of entrepreneurship. We did three different research projects in which we surveyed the CTOs of, you know, different technology companies. We looked at immigrant-founded companies. We also did a detailed survey of a series of high-growth companies outside tech to see what the differences were between tech and non-tech. Now, disclaimer, and then the following few slides, I'm going to jumble all these data up. I mean, Ben is going to freak out on me. I know that, but that's okay, because I'm not trying to give you an academic presentation. I'm trying to basically share some ideas and get you thinking. That's the purpose of this talk. So again, if I mix and match data, forgive me for that in advance. Okay, now let's start with some of the myths. As I said, the biggest myth in Silicon Valley is that tech entrepreneurs are unmarried, male, rich, college dropouts obsessed with making money. I am adding the word rich over here, because that's another perception about tech entrepreneurs. Bill Gates.  So that's the stereotype of an entrepreneur. And this one won't go very well with what I am, but also that Ivy League education provides a major advantage. I'm sorry to be calling it a myth. And I get very popular in venture capital, and when I talk about the fact that venture capital isn't a prerequisite to economic growth. So I'm going to discuss these topics. First of all, here's what we found, here's what we learned. The tech entrepreneurs typically aren't young. The average age of a tech entrepreneur is 39. The average age of an entrepreneur in the high growth industries we looked at is 40. Big surprise, they tend to be married and have children. If you look at these charts, they typically have more than one child. And the vast majority of them are married. At the time of founding, there are other companies, yeah. So again, just these two slides over here, based on there is something wrong with the myth. Let's keep going. They don't come from rich families. This is actually intuitive. Until about a decade ago, you would not have thought of an entrepreneur coming from a rich family. You would have expected them to come from a middle-class family, from a working-class family. Because why do you start companies? Because you want to rise above poverty. You want to rise above your heritage, and you want to basically make it big. That's also called the American dream of making it big and striking it rich. That's what capitalism is all about. That's the American way. So the fact that the majority of them come from the lower end of the spectrum should not be a surprise. When people see this slide, they are surprised. Tech entrepreneurs also tend to be very highly educated. Only 6% of them didn't have bachelor's degrees in our sample. The vast majority of them have a diverse set of degrees. It's just not computer science that makes a tech entrepreneur. It's a diverse set of fields of study that they've undertaken. This is also not surprising that tech entrepreneurs tend to be better educated than their parents. This is also to do with immigration. It also has to do with the changing nature of society. The education level of people who are rising to the top is quite high, and it's higher than their parents. This is not a surprise. Now, I'm joking a little bit in the title of this one, but what we found interestingly was that the most successful... This is based on the sample of successful entrepreneurs who had launched companies which achieved a certain size that they did very well in high school. They were at the top of the class in high school, typically. But when they came to college, they didn't do that well. So my theory over here, not based on fact, based on personal experience and anecdote, is that they drank too much in college. Why are the young interns all laughing when I say this? You're not trying to disprove me, are you? Now, this is another interesting chart. We looked at the number of jobs created and the revenue of startups, and we compared them with the Ivy League. We found was the difference between having a degree and not having a degree was huge, statistically significant. We compared the average, which includes both groups, with the Ivy Leagueers. The Ivy Leagueers didn't do that much better in the companies they founded. So in other words, it's great to get a Harvard MBA, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you'll be a more successful entrepreneur. In fact, I've written about this in a couple of articles. Based on all the anecdotal information I've gathered, it may well be that getting the leader education makes you more likely to want to become an investment banker than an entrepreneur and makes you less motivated if you're an entrepreneur.  So this is what these data showed. Another myth that entrepreneurs tend to be very highly educated. On average, they had much more than six to ten years of experience. That very few started companies right out of college. In the zero to five year category, it's 24.6% on this chart. If you took the zero years category, it's a small, it's a tiny fraction of the successful companies that have started. Another interesting chart that entrepreneurs aren't necessarily from entrepreneurial families. Coming from an entrepreneurial family makes you more likely to become an entrepreneur. The members of entrepreneurial families are over-represented in our sample, which means that if your parents were entrepreneurs, it's likely that you become an entrepreneur, more likely to become an entrepreneur than the average. On the other hand, half of the successful entrepreneurs we interviewed were not from entrepreneurial families. What this means is that anyone can become an entrepreneur, really. That's the way I interpret this. The reasons for becoming an entrepreneur is a very wide set of reasons. People think that most of these tech entrepreneurs are start companies because they're unemployable. They're so brash and so apart from the rest of the world in the ways that they can't take real jobs, that's false. In fact, there was the lowest factor that we found for starting companies. It was more likely that they always wanted to start a company, that they got tired of working for others. Start-up culture appealed to them and so on. Based on my analysis of all the data I've seen, based on lots and lots of research and knowing entrepreneurs and being part of the system myself, my conclusion is that what happens is that people have been working for large companies for the first 10 to 15 years of their lives. They gain lots of experience, real-world experience. They get ideas on what they can develop that will make an impact. They also have savings. They get married, they have children. The children reach a stage that they're still young, they're not going to college at this stage because once they start going to college, it's a big financial drain on the whole family. But there's a point in between when the entrepreneur comes to the stage that they're tired of working for someone else and they say, okay, I've got to make it big now. This is my last chance. I'm 40 years of age. If I wait another 10 years, I'll be over the hill. And that's the stage at which they start companies. And all the data that I've seen, like I said, confirms that view. So another interesting data point. We asked entrepreneurs where they got their money, where they got their funding from. The vast majority used personal savings or they got it from family and friends. This sample included sale entrepreneurs as well as first-time entrepreneurs. When we looked at just first-time entrepreneurs, only 9.8% of successful first-time entrepreneurs raised venture capital. The proportion that raised angel capital was 9.2%. In other words, 92%, 91% of the entrepreneurs did not raise venture capital of successful entrepreneurs. This is from the sample I talked about in which we interviewed successful companies. So regional planners go on about how venture capital is a prerequisite to economic growth and venture capitalists hype the heck out of it. They put out these papers every year. And we say claim credit for 2.1 trillion dollars of economic growth, 12% of the economy. God knows what statistics they come up with. What they do is that they look at any company that ever received venture capital and they add up the total cumulative market cap and so on and they say this is the result of venture capital. So in other words, if John Doar bought Bill Gates' lunch in 1985, the venture capitalists would claim credit for the success of Microsoft. So the view of venture capital and angel capital is distorted, that we tend to overestimate its significance. The reality is that if you go and meet most successful companies, very, very few of them raise venture capital. And when they do get to a point that they're going to be extremely successful and they need to scale up, that's when they go to the venture capitalists and that's when they're successful raising venture capital. That's how the system works. It isn't that VCs go around looking for bright young kids with ideas and hand them money. That's what you read about in the Silicon Valley press and those are just the outliers. So there's just a rare few cases of companies that happen to succeed. Even Mark Zuckerberg from Harvard had built Facebook and gained significant traction before the venture capitalists started throwing money on it. If Facebook had not gained traction, there would have been no funding for it. This is from the sample of successful companies in high-growth industries. It's Piontech. So what we did basically was companies that made it out of the garage had real revenue. We basically looked at companies that were typically 0 to 5 years old and that had significant revenue. Significant. I think we were looking at the $1 to $5 million range that they basically made it out of the garage. So 5 minutes, that's acceptable. Is that revenue or net profit? No, we were looking at revenue. The revenue headcount, there were a number of factors we looked at. I don't recall the exact details. Maybe Ben can enlighten you on some of these. Would this include restaurants? No, no, no. This was companies in high-growth and series of high-growth industries. But I worked with Coffman Foundation on this. What they did was that they gave us a list of industries that they had considered were high-growth which would basically make an impact on the economy. And we worked backwards on that. Then we went through the one-source databases, tried to identify successful companies, took a random sample of them and interviewed those entrepreneurs. If you use the criteria of only third companies and only companies have gotten to go public, would the numbers be significantly different? Only companies that went to go public, you'd probably find more... That have gone public. That have not gone public? That have gone public. I think you'd find many more venture capital-funded companies. Because to get to the scale that you can go public, you require more investment, typically later in your life. And a lot of venture capitalists coming at the last second before an IPO, they take their mezzanine rounds. And that's when Goldman Sachs and the investment bank has come in. It's just because a couple of companies are about to go public. So that data would be distorted. They like risk. Yeah, they like risk, exactly. That's right. There's no exit. I mean, a lot of success is on an exit. There's no liquidity event in any of these. No, no, no. This is not that subjective on the successes. Basically, what we wanted to do was to get a sample of entrepreneurs that had made it outside the garage and that were building companies that looked like they were attraction without judging the companies. We didn't want to get into this. We did ask lots of questions about the revenue and so on. But we basically didn't try collating it back. We can do that. We have the data set if you want to look at it. So if you excluded the mezzanine round and only looked at the start-up money? We looked at young companies. If you excluded the mezzanine round and only looked at the original start-up money? That's a good question. I don't know what the answer is. That would be a great study for someone to do. That would be a... Your students would like to do it? This is about two years old now. Success factors. We were more interested in what the opinions of the entrepreneurs were than anything else. For example, we asked the entrepreneurs what they believed their strongest success factors were. And what they told us was that it was their previous industry work experience, lessons they learned from successes and failures, the management team. One big surprise to me was luck in a good fortune. In fact, we had an open category there. I didn't put anything about God in there, but I was amazed that dozens and dozens of entrepreneurs put God, good fortune, luck, faith as success factors. Well, a lot of these entrepreneurs, like I said, more than I expected, valued luck and good fortune. Find a chance to measure religion? No, we didn't. I didn't even think of asking this question. It just happened that some professor said, why don't you put good fortune as one of the factors that we did? And I was surprised that it was the third strongest factor, really. It was management teams, experience management teams, and luck was the third strongest factor in what we found. Big surprise. Who would have thought? But the least important factor was the system provided by the state of the region. Entrepreneurs didn't seem to care about... They cared about Massachusetts entrepreneurs and California. We actually did break this down by state, and I don't recall the Massachusetts data. They definitely didn't care about Massachusetts data. Right. Then we asked entrepreneurs what obstacles were faced by their colleagues who didn't become entrepreneurs. Again, if you accept the fact that they come from the workforce, well, for every person that starts a company, they probably tend to don't start a company. Why didn't they follow the trails and become entrepreneurs? And the strongest factor here was the amount of time and effort required. It's hard. The financing, experience, and so on and so on. Another interesting perspective. What stops other people from becoming entrepreneurs, essentially the strongest factor is willingness to take risk. That this is why people don't start companies, that they're afraid of failure. They worried about the time energy required and it's hard to raise capital. This is what stops people from starting companies. Mostly domestic. This is United States. Yes, yes. All US based. I'm going to switch gears now. So we did a series of studies, lots and lots of data. You're welcome to read through them and critique them as you like, but we did all this research. And then I wrote a series of articles about the death of women because I moved to Silicon Valley a year ago. And I started... I went to one event in particular, a TechCrunch event. Where I noted was that of 100, 150 people on the stage, the only women were the organizers. There were no women entrepreneurs. This was the young hip Silicon Valley crowd.  There were absolutely no women on stage. There was a big surprise. I wrote about it and I started researching it. And I was amazed at the fury that my articles caused.  I started getting indirect messages from friends of venture capitalists who started saying, you know, Vivek, you're becoming extremely unpopular in Silicon Valley. The types of comments, again, I'm going to be honest with you. So some mails are underrepresented in the ranks of strippers. Have you researched those? Are you going to get laid as a result of these studies? I mean, all sorts of abusive, nasty comments, one after the other started coming my way. Not on the open, I mean. But on the other hand, soon after this, I had a number of venture capitalists go on Twitter and declare that every single article Vivek, what was ever written is garbage. They disagree with all my posts. They wouldn't attack the women directly. It was all indirect.   And I didn't realize there was such a problem in America. I didn't realize there was such a problem in Silicon Valley until I started hyping the heck out of it. So as a result of that, I wrote several other articles that have become even more vocal on the subject. But what it tells me is that there is a real, real problem over here. And then the folks from the National Coalition for Women and Information Technology came to me and asked if they could reanalyze some of my data to look at the difference between men and women. We had lots of it. I gave them all the spreadsheets and the datasets. And they started analyzing it for me and we published a report a couple of months ago in which we looked at the difference between men and women entrepreneurs. So I'm going to give you a quick summary of what we learned. First of all, the estimated age. Women were slightly older than the men. You know, the average age of the men was 39-ish. Women were 41. But still, not statistically different. The sample of women was relatively small here. So it was statistically insignificant. Women basically were more or less the same as, you know, mental status as men in starting businesses that they tend to be married and have children. They tended to be even more educated than the men were. This was significant. That, you know, they had higher education and stronger credentials than men typically did. And then we looked at the motivations. And there wasn't a significant difference, you know, both groups talked about, you know, work experience, lessons learned from success and failure. A lot of similarities. The only significant difference were that women talked more about getting encouragement from their partners and business networks. Basically, they received getting encouragement to become entrepreneurs was more important for women than it was for men. I guess men are macho. It doesn't matter what anyone says. They're no better than anyone else does. Women take it more seriously. But the bottom line was, when we looked at this, I was surprised. You know, I told the MC Whit people, I said, where's the story here? Women are the same as men. And they said, Vivek, you don't seem to understand that is the story. That they're remarkably similar. We compared the difference in sources of the funding. Personal savings played a greater role for women than they did for men. Business partners were a lot more critical to women than they were to men. But almost other factors, they were quite similar. Again, this sample was successful entrepreneurs and you can't read too much into the fine details over here. But we were just looking at the big patterns. We asked about the challenges faced. Women felt a lot that the amount of time and energy required was a significant difference. The other big difference over here really was about the family pressures, that men faced a lot less family pressure to get a job than women did. No surprise. These are some of the differences. Business partners were more likely to have given women funding than males. Both sexes had about the same reasons of becoming entrepreneurs. They had the same life circumstances. Women were more motivated to become entrepreneurs when co-founders recruited them. Both sexes faced the same obstacles. Women faced greater pressure from the family to keep a traditional job. But these are not big deals. There was no earth-shattering revelation here when we compared men and women. But look at the data. Women constitute 50% of our population. Yet they start only 3% of the tech firms and 1% of the high-tech firms in the United States. When I say high-tech firms, those are the Silicon Valley types of web firms. 1%.  If you look around the ranks of Chief Technology Officers in Silicon Valley, you can probably name two or three. I know them all. But beyond that, you don't see very many CTOs. Women. Women are basically absent in the ranks in the executive ranks. Look at the management team of Apple. You won't see even one single woman in the entire management team. And that is the normal Silicon Valley that they're just not present in the ranks of senior execs. They contribute to an insignificant number of patents in IT and in open source. And the proportion of women receiving venture capital has dropped quite dramatically over the last few years. I'm not sure about these numbers, but the numbers I saw were 9% going down to 3% of venture capital going to women. And the data for minorities is even worse. In Silicon Valley, blacks constitute only 1.5% of its workforce, and Hispanics constitute 4.7%, despite them being a significantly larger part of the population. So I mean on this presentation, I'm focusing on women, but blacks and Hispanics in particular have it much worse than even women do in the value that's possible. Now, this is despite the fact that women-led companies tend to be more capital efficient than male-run companies. They spend their money a lot more wisely. They raise it less aggressively, which means that they have to be smarter in the way they run their businesses. They produce higher revenues than do male-run companies. Companies that have women in the top management achieve 35% higher return on equity and 34% better return to shareholders. These are pretty astounding numbers. If you look at the data of girls going to schools, girls are now doing as well almost as boys are in math and science. In fact, women are over-represented in many fields, in science and technology-related fields in the test and schools now. So something is wrong over here when you have half of the population which is equally qualified not being able to make it or achieve any success in the tech world. Benjamin? Excuse me. Do you view this as a structural constraint within the entrepreneurial environment in the United States? Or could this just be that women are disproportionately sorting into different occupational categories? So within IT or CS, we've only got, say, hypothetically 10% of the workforce in the United States being women, and this gets reflected in the start-up founding rates. I'm done with the slides. There's a lot of power over here that it starts with the stereotypes in school that girls wear pink boys wear blue and red and any other color that they want, they match up. Parents basically start programming the girls to believe that they can't make it in the tech world or they can't become scientists and engineers that they belong in these type of professions. It's the Barbie dolls versus the guns. It starts with that and then as they get into MIT is an outlier. MIT is not representative of the rest of the United States. That's for sure. And they have a female president as a technologist. That's what matters because MIT can choose. That would be the right one. So it starts with the encouragement that they receive and then when you get into high school and college engineering and science is not cool in the United States to start with, it's a problem that the engineers are the nerds and the geeks. And it's not cool to get into these professions. So it's bad enough for guys that want to do it. They can take peer pressure better than women can. So that's negative encouragement. And then when they do join the workforce they're also held back. They also don't reach the senior positions. They're not given the mentoring and the encouragement. They lack the role models that one other thing is how few women that have succeeded help the ones behind them. Because I've actually been speaking to I mean I get attacked from women as well as I do from men from successful women because I've challenged them on it. Their view is that the women that aren't making it have a chip on their shoulder. It's their problem. If we can make it, why can't they make it? I've actually been in heated panel discussions with women who attacked me for being contrascending. Men. That's also changing. CEOs called CEOs on a number of golden seats in England as we've heard. Those things didn't exist. So we just need to find a way to spread that and kind of make more of that. I agree. What she said basically was that things are changing. Compared to 1989. There's no doubt about that. To go back another 20 or 30 years before that women were perceived to be husband wives that they weren't by women. So things are changing. Let me give you some data from other research I've been doing. I've also been looking at immigrant entrepreneurs and the role of basically how the tech world has changed with immigration. We did was we analyzed we surveyed all the tech startups from 1995 to 2005. We did a survey of 2000 companies starting their time period in the tech sector. What we found was that 25% of the firms nationwide and 52% of those in Silicon Valley were founded by immigrants. The people who were born abroad. Just think about it. During the tech boom the greatest days of economic growth for America in recent history more than half of the people starting these companies were born like me basically. Immigrants who didn't understand American culture who were transplants into this country. They achieved extraordinary success. Of that group of immigrants Indians were the dominant company founders. They founded more than the next four groups from the UK, Japan, China and Taiwan combined. Now if you go back 30 years to Silicon Valley and looked at the Indians founded 15.5% of Silicon Valley firms in that time period. If you went back two decades, three decades and looked at the proportion of Indian founded companies, it would be zero. That there were virtually no Indian CEOs or CTOs earlier about 30 or 40 years ago. If you looked at venture capitalists there was one Indian venture capitalist Vinod Kosla and he was called the Indian venture capitalist. 20 years ago. Now you look at the ranks of venture capitalists probably 10 to 20% of them are maybe that number may not be right for Indians. So how did this happen? Please, no. But the data if you just look at the number of tech companies in fact Ben did put together a chart on that. He put together a cluster chart which showed that the majority of them are Silicon Valley. It's heavily concentrated over there and then you have a few tech centers where they start up activity. So I'm sorry the data is available. In fact Ben can get that for you if you need it. All right. Two things to raise. One is that you say that fairly central to an entrepreneur is risk and there certainly is a lot of writing about women and risk aversion so that might be part of it. The second is the data shows that the vast majority start by bootstrapping. Again you know we still have wage inequality and women are just you know have less resources. In other writing about female entrepreneurs generally not in high tech necessarily it shows that women are greatly under capitalized. Women started firms versus male started firms and basically women keep it going through sweat equity as opposed to being able to have access to capital. So I wonder if those two might be I think those are important factors I think you're making a very good point over here. But when you're talking about women under capitalization it's actually fault because women should be overcapitalized a lot more than men because as he mentioned most of the entrepreneurs in men and women are married and since they usually use a combined capital chances are the spouse as a male can help you a lot more while you're starting the company than the other way around. So women should be better capitalized because of that because of the wage inequality. Why is there any more than the female? Because that's a fact. Because women take a couple years off to have children. I just wonder there are two issues to me one is the entrepreneurialism and having businesses the other one is getting funded by VC round early and so focusing on that piece of it seems to me that you know when you have someone not co-slug you know who goes up and he takes care of his own the Indian community is good at taking care of their I don't know if they're taking care of their own females and that's a question I have. The other piece of it is if you look at the venture community in general those who will become partners and venture firms you click through their bios I mean how many of them are women? So those men are taking care of their own. So let's talk about that because I didn't finish my discussion about the Indian community. First of all I agree that in the Indian community women are greatly underrepresented and you've got the same problem with Indian men and Indian women in tech as you do with non-Indian or the white men and women it's exactly the same problem that you've got the male Indian boys you've got the male boys club versus the old white boys club of the venture capital system so it's the same problem there but let's talk about how did Indians rise about this how do you get people like me who go from nowhere to founding 15.5% of startups that happened that there was a generation of Indians who came here in the 70s and the 80s who came with strong engineering backgrounds who started joining companies as engineers and computer programmers and so on who started achieving success because of their technical confidence they started hitting a barrier and some of them rose above it when they did do it they said they were a whole bunch of them which achieved success they said you know we made it's time for us to start giving back so they founded a group called the Indus Antipnoras TIE we started actively mentoring it was initially focused on the south Asian community they said look we're going to go beyond not only are we going to go beyond the barriers in India because India is a very segregated company religion caste region I mean you name it and people discriminate against each other based on that and in India the concept was you never help each other you shoot each other's communities down so they came here and said let's rise above that let's start giving back and mentoring our own kind so it started with the south Asian community and it broadened to include the American community and it was active mentoring what they started doing was they started advising young entrepreneurs they started providing seed financing they started helping them with their careers whatever it took it was just a matter of giving back without taking this this went to this whole concept of the guru and the disciple they took the role of the guru and started and started teaching an entire generation of entrepreneurs what was going there and more importantly what they did was they provided role models now how do I know this because I was part of the the following I mean I was I had founded a technology company in New York which we moved to North Carolina we took it public I mean 0 to 120 million 5 years IPO spectacular success I had access to Bill Gates Scott McNally everyone returned their phone calls we came time for me to start my second company I started calling up the local venture capitalist and they wouldn't take my calls I was stunned no one would return my phone call they sent the messages they would not return my phone calls eventually what I did was I started reading about the successful Indian the Silicon Valley and I contacted a couple of them like we know Costa I call called them after my second call he said he said he'll get back to me and he did get back to me the next day we spent a couple of hours talking he spent time coaching me through the whole system and told me what the obstacles were and then he gave me deductions to several other people eventually I had VCs tripping over each other to give me financing for my company and when I and including the local venture capital and I went back to the local VCs and said you know I said I was trying to break down your doors why didn't you return my phone calls what they said was because you people don't make good CEOs literally that's what the local venture capital said to me it was you people it was the same patent recognition that I started talking about John Doar that you know people who look like me don't make CEOs people who look like me are engineers I was funded by a VC firm and I very quickly had to hire many people people that I really trusted I had money in the bank I had a lot of money and I thought I have to use this with people I trust who are the people I trust people that look like me and I suddenly kind of got it I call them the pictures on the VC sites all the guys those are my corner pictures I go from site to site they're all men and as my dad and business taught me they all look the same without their clothes on and I would like some day to go and see some women on those sites but the whole notion if someone gives you a lot of money you're going to hire the people you trust and the people you trust I think there's also the older guy helping the young guy become him I don't look like the older guy and if an older guy helps me out does his wife say who the hell is that does she say I mean there's a lot of sociology around it I'm sure I think she's hitting the nail on the head over here and if I'm going to trust somebody with a million dollars I want to know they can do it if I'm a guy I'm going to hire a guy that's the dynamic of play over here I agree with that but there's one thing that's wrong with that the thing that's wrong with that is only one in ten VC firms actually make it partially because of the way they invest and the way they manage so we spend all this time trying to figure out what's wrong with that instead of creating a new model that's better that supports what we want to do in nurturing all kinds of business it could be that only one in ten VC firms make it because of the problem we just talked about here because they're not funding the women they're leaving out half the population but women's ideas aren't as important as men's ideas I agree I mean come on we have a systematic problem over here so the question someone asked before was what's the problem over here I think it's a systematic problem in the United States against women the deck is stacked against them right now and how would I solve it the same way that my comrades did the same way that my Indian friends did the same way I did is to mentor each other that's what we did that's the problem we would openly talk about the discrimination I wasn't the only one who would tell the story about my people all of the other people in the Thai group openly had discussions about the fact that we're disadvantaged here there were no other venture capitalists so what they started doing was they started forming their own angel funds and then they started moving into venture capital once they achieved success it now became easy for Indians to get funding today if you're an Indian because people like me are perceived to be good CEOs now that's how much things have changed within 20 years look at the progress that one committee made teach about them the question is about the women who made it teaching the others a lot more of that needs to happen than is happening as I said earlier I've been taking five women because I've been pretty vocal about the fact that successful women helping others rise and not pulling the women behind them because again I've been asking why this happens it happens because women are afraid of helping others because then they'll be accused of discriminating and helping their gal friends and so on and so on they want to be more like the guys or losing their turf or losing their turf whatever it might be there are a lot of factors that play over here the other jobs we do so in your let's say fantasy or vision of preventative care shall we say at early early age what do you think could happen in the schools to try to begin to talk about entrepreneurship at very early age what would your vision be I wrote an article about in TechRush titled can Mina start the Indian Google this was an eye opening it was supposed to be a religious experience for me when I went to India there was this girl Saima Hassan her father is one of the most successful venture capitalists in Silicon Valley these people must be worth 100 million dollars Saima was brought up in the United States she went to Stanford 22 years of age she went when she was 21 to India she basically stayed there for a few months with her relatives and she started noticing that she seemed very intelligent and she started saying well what about these people aren't the human beings too can't they achieve success and she launched an experiment she found it was called Roshni Academy what she did was she got her father and some friends to put some money into the bank for her to fund a group and she decided to go and live in India for two years so what they've been doing basically is going to the poorest of the poor slums and going to schools in those slums identifying women girls basically typically 12 to 14 years of age or 15 years of age who are at the top of their classes who have aptitude but who will never otherwise make it what they did was they bring them into this boot camp six weeks at a time they do two or three of these and they teach them social skills they start out by getting to speak in English because in India you learn in English in school to speak it what they do basically is they teach these girls the basics about communicating they teach them things like hygiene they teach them about self confidence they have them play team building games the same stuff you would see in corporate outing events team building rah rah rah we can change the world and so on I went there in week three of this to see the girls and then I went there in week week five how much of a transformation that happened I saw the videos of some of these girls they would basically be sitting there very shy, very afraid not wanting to speak to anyone they were unconfident their parents were going to get them married off because girls are libraries in India many of them were basically already engaged to be married and so on the girls were library in one case I met the father also the father was a complete drunkard he had two daughters he could never get out of poverty so he would just drink all his life away and he would beat the daughters up and the grandmother and the mother it was just abusive what happened was that these girls started gaining a level of confidence I've never seen before when I went back to the graduation party in week six they were talking about how they were going to change the world one wanted to be a lawyer, another wanted to be a computer programmer and another one said I want to start a great tech company I said yes I'm going to start a Google I'm going to change the world of their daughters the father literally stopped drinking because he said my daughter is going to earn all the money that my son would have earned he's going to lift us out of poverty so what happened was that these girls developed the confidence to change the world I mean I could show you videos of them I actually posted them in my article in TechCrunch which you should do is do a search on my last name and do a search on Mina and Google with Wadhwa Mina Google and watch the videos on YouTube and later you'll be astonished at how amazing what a change happened to these girls M-E-E-N-A M-E-E-N-A What's the school called? Roche Academy but the lesson over here is that if you can take girls from the most miserable slums in India and teach them the confidence to change the world they were all now determined to go to school Roche will give them some minor scholarship but each of the parents has pledged to put their girls to school and teach their education and the girls are determined to become major successors in society and these girls will I'm a bit confused about your story I thought in India if you're at the top of your class and you belong to untouchable class and you have priority to go to college why wouldn't they major? these are really third-rate schools that no one from those schools gets admission anywhere we're not talking about the schools for the middle class you'll get into the IITs and so on we're talking about schools that are so low on the on the scale the vast majority of these people are going to become fruit sellers or cleaners or sweepers or whatever really well below the poverty line you know there's some competing narratives that I think are going on here in America that I'd just like to kind of bring into the conversation recently the Atlantic Monthly ran a cover story called The End of Men and you know in foreign policy last fall they ran sort of The End of Macho and then a sort of sidebar piece was our father's necessary I mean it's this whole notion that boys are now kind of disappearing their skills aren't wanted anymore the labor force is designed now for what the skills are those type of emails I get this is sort of a narrative one email accused me of trying to work towards extermination of white males from American society right well this is a countervailing narrative that's going on and the comments that you find on these are just similar to some of the things that you've done the other sort of portrait or narrative I'd like to point out is I had a conversation the other day with a woman who got her MBA from Stanford she now lives in Silicon Valley in one of those communities her husband is you know kind of an entrepreneur kind of out in the tech world as she said not hit it yet so they're not among sort of the rich she's a woman she's working she has children she's out there she works for the monitor group doing traveling all over the country etc but when she goes back home to her neighborhood in Silicon Valley she can't find one other woman who's working they all have three or four children they all did get their MBAs but they aren't working any longer so when you talk about the men who are hiring in these firms their notion of women is very much what they see at home what they have in their community and for a woman to go into that community and take on that role is a very isolating and difficult experience for her so there's a dimension of the personal that's very much a part of this dynamic I think that you're talking about. I wrote a business week article in which I highlighted the fact that there are more Indian women CEOs and finance in India who are the CEOs of banks in India than there are on Wall Street that there are no heads of there are no women heads of Wall Street firms what's going on here when they can make it in India which is one of the most difficult societies out there why can't they make it in the United States there are lots of issues here to get women early enough so I created a class for kindergarten children I'm a six year old I taught her a kindergarten class the teacher asked me to come and talk about what is an entrepreneur and so the only thing I could think about is how to communicate that to kindergarteners was to create a class where they actually invented something that's a great idea so I created a class where they invented board games what was interesting you know it would have been nice to study this but in each we divided the class into four groups of like six kids and in each of the groups the girls took the lead in getting the project done and without the girls' skills which are way advanced at that age in terms of verbal communication and so I think if we started kindergarten to like teach them what it is they won't get to the end of college before they realize they might like it you know I want to share that video if I can because you have to see these girls in action because I while you talk I'm going to try to load it up I assume we have internet access here because like I said there was just such an amazing thing to see how girls can be motivated to change the world and do so much it's a book about the fact that women don't ask what they need in their lives money jobs positions often because it's a great deal of social sanction against women who do ask and do get things it's a mind-blowing book it's about women don't ask and there's good reasons that they don't don't ask so your last slide you showed women going into graduate programs and into undergraduate programs and how much that's changed over the last 30 years should that hearten us and make us think that you know give it another 20 years when these women hit 41 they'll become entrepreneurs I don't think it'll happen on its own because the numbers are working going in the wrong direction that's where the problem is the screen isn't working but I'm wondering if we can alright good let me bring up the right article because I really said oh I see sorry for the division but you can see how how touched I was about these let me this girl comes from from a family there's no sound I'm a former student of and I'm a former student of Roshni this year I'm appointed as a I'm respectfully appointed as a and Roshni really has helped me I must say that Roshni has changed my life because when I came here last year my father went through a trauma and he don't want me to study because we don't have that much money he don't have that much money that he declared me and my sister to stay at home I'm not study further so I was like I have no excuse how to talk how I can convince my father to let me study but when I came here in Roshni Roshni has helped me I feel how important studies are for me and I go through two weeks program and hopefully I mean I was I got top two scholarship and I was awarded as a leader among hundred girls and it was the last year of Roshni I show my certificates to my dad and he said I'm very proud of you my child you really make me proud and I said father papa don't you want me to be always proud of you he said yeah I want always to be proud of you and he got an idea that I really want to study and study means a lot for me so I talked to him and I try to convince him I said that papa if you let me stay at home I'll be like an empty room and I feel that I'm very talented if you let me study I can do many things and I want to be a lawyer I'll make you proud and one day you will feel like I'm the best child among my sibling and he himself said when he saw my son he would not talk he would not talk and you prove to be the best among your all sibling and that's really a biggest achievement for Roshni he has helped me and Roshni ma'am really convinced my father and some of them also talked to him so that right now I'm studying and I'm a 12th standard that's really a big achievement for me what do you want to be ultimately what's your ultimate goal actually I want to be a lawyer and there's another goal also I want to be a doctor also BDS actually I'm doing my studies with science so I take it as another option that maybe if I won't be a lawyer because who knows what will happen next so I keep it as an optional goal but really I want to be a lawyer why do you want to be a lawyer let me show you another video what has Roshni done for you Roshni gave me a lot of success and some poor Muslim family she was going to be married off to speak in front of if she had not done this then she would be right now married to some poor labourer in Delhi so what's your my hesitation was completely able to speak in front of malevolence speaking English in front of malevolence you speak English before you speak in front of femalevolence so what's your goal in life now what do you want to be when you grow up what do you want to be what's your goal in life I want to become a computer engineer and also a math teacher and a computer engineer how do your parents feel about this anyway you get the idea what I'm saying is that if you can take girls like this and give them the encouragement literally these girls I mean I have seen the videos when they walked in there they were so down on themselves their belief was that they could not succeed that their life is going to be one of of being married maybe being a labourer working on some construction sites in New Delhi but this is what they can be turned into within weeks what you're reading about now in Afghanistan where finally the military commanders Petraeus and the general before him forgetting his name but the guy who was gone I mean the one that they were turning to was Greg Mortensen you know who wrote three cups of tea and they were now getting him in as a consultant to try to understand two things what the schools were doing in those communities 120 schools that he set up for girls in those communities but also as a link for the military to understand how to communicate with the tribal leaders on the kinds of issues that have to do with the role of girls in the life etc etc so it's very interesting how that's coming through but you don't have to go all the way to Afghanistan where I live in Palo Alto you have East Palo Alto which is a mile away and you see the same depressed demoralized girls and boys who basically believe there's no future for them right so if we can if Roshni can do this to his girls in India why can't we fix the problem over here where we have all the resources in the world I mean what's holding us back okay why is it that women feel like they're second class citizens in the United States question often in response I told there are already big existing programs that mentor women that serve to help them get investment that are doing all the types of things that I want to do in the field of engaging more women and people in partnership are they working programs already out there and if so why not and what can be done as a result because there really are a lot of programs that are trying to address this issue they're not necessarily collaborating we own it as well we're probably throwing billions at the problem getting nothing out of it I think also we have to make sure that we don't ignore structural inequality in terms of gender race and class that exists on a institutional level in terms of empowering young women to think more about math and science there are a lot of very empowered young women who are very interested in these issues the problem is that there are social economic and political forces that privilege particular types of experiences generally those of heterosexual white men over others so until some of those structural issues are addressed like the pay gap the gap in child care the lack of support for child care those types of things we're not those have to be addressed in order for things to change in particular realms of business sorry just to clarify I was wondering if you had a thought as to why pre-existing programs haven't had a big gender impact I have no idea I mean I got to realize six months ago I wouldn't have been able to even talk about this I didn't realize there was an issue I was one of the Indian tie guys who was totally out of touch with the fact that there's an issue for women it's only since I've started looking into the issue when I realized there's such a big problem here that's why I'm so vocal about it question you had mentioned women's involvement in the open source community and this is something that I actually had a conversation with someone about a couple days ago about the extremely small population of women in the open source community and considering that that community does view itself as a community I'm wondering if you have an opinion or a thought about the extremely low population of women I think the problem is that there are few women to start with in the tech community and those that don't have the confidence to venture out and do things like that Jennifer Palca is doing this group called Code for America which is really into open source trying to use apply all the energy towards government and so on and she's trying to have as many women as part of that as she can but yeah there's a problem there I don't know what to tell you P-A-L-K-A P-A-L-K-A I could be wrong but if you do a search on Code for America you'll find her there are also studies on women's involvement in open source it's one of those situations where it's very complicated problems it's not in the answer there's a lot of different factors that go into the whole involvement one of them is definitely the lack of women in the tech community there are some cultural issues that dissuade women from joining so it would be if people could fix it they would have I can look up some yeah the women's coalition just recently met and they came out with a bunch of recommendations but it really did seem that they were a lot of small solutions to very limited problems as opposed to actually attempting to attack the root issues what were some of the solutions? very basic more fellowships for women in open source math and science education for girls they were very basic and not really we're going to go in and confront the leaders and perceived leaders of this community in how they interact with women in an everyday environment I think that's one of the structural problems that I was talking about in general all these big communities and then drilling down to the smaller smaller communities I think you also see a very similar thing famously if you go to 2016 or DEFCON one of the big hacker conferences if you're a woman you will be assumed to be somebody's girlfriend the idea that you will actually be a female participant is something that is far into a lot of community members you have these reinforcing cultural norms that then can be needed what's incident? just if anybody has nothing to do at 6.30 there is an event tonight at the Microsoft Research Center and a woman named Bettina something rather she's pitching her company kind of as a way to show pitching to a VC Microsoft Research Center at 6.30 if anybody is curious I look around this table and I would just note that I'm old enough to remember the 60s and the 70s and what it was like to be a young woman then and in the mid 70s I wasn't plaintiff in a very well-known federal court case that ended up giving access to women sports riders to go into locker rooms and interview players I took on baseball and I beat them first person to ever beat Bowie Kuhn in a lawsuit anyway all I want to say is that women don't want to interview men they did not have the same access as male reporters to interview the athletes so we went to federal court interestingly the judge in that case was a woman named Constance Baker Motley first African American woman ever appointed to the federal bench by Lyndon Johnson in the 60s it was a very interesting moment what I'm hearing around this table and in this discussion is that during those years and the memories of those years is that girls today young women today don't like what they read women handled themselves back then because women confronted things they were sometimes perceived as sort of aggressive and ugly and pushy the name feminist was given to them it's a word that many young women don't want to use today because it has all of these connotations and what I'm hearing in this discussion is a sense of the good girls you know we'll kind of each of us make it on our own plate you know and we won't necessarily get together and confront what you talked about in some of these institutional things the 70s were about confronting the institutions that held women back in that generation and there's been a lull there's been almost a ceasing of a willingness to do that and I think it covers a lot of the conversation we're doing today so I just wanted to kind of bring a perspective of someone who has gray hair who's kind of been through the trenches who's watching what's happening today taking in what you're saying and really thinking hard about what can happen if the young women in this room and other rooms will really step forward together you know and not be afraid to confront what I've said is you should learn from the Indians if we people can do it my people can do it so can yours one last comment or question problems that need to be fixed I think there's so many problems that need to be fixed to somehow have minorities or women on the sidelines it's just it's a bomb it's terrible it's like a resource that is not used and if everything was so perfect fine we'll sit on the sidelines but it's not especially in the Middle East I think a woman and a mother's sensibility in those countries could be revolutionary and if that's not happening we all are not doing our work and there's so much work to do so that's why it really hurts me to think how much could be done to benefit all men, all women, all races and it's not happening and we can do it I think Haley summed up the meeting quite well thank you