Who's happy to be a word camp? We are really excited to kick off the 2023 word camp season here in Birmingham Hopefully there'll be a lot more in-person word camps to come. I know Phoenix is scheduled for next month And several more hopefully will be popping up throughout the course of the year It's about time right enough that we've had a lot of online word camps But it's just not the same as being in a room full of fellow WordPress folks. I'm really glad you're all here Isn't this a great venue? It's really really cool. Hopefully you've had a chance to explore a little bit Go into some different sessions and then check out some of the rooms today and our great speakers that we have And store for you this weekend. So If you noticed on the schedule at WP y'all calm There's a schedule link in the main menu. You can follow that. There's also Schedule signs outside of each of the main doors. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the speaker organizer this year And I'm really excited about the great lineup of speakers. We have in all these rooms throughout the weekend if you're gonna be in the business track most of the time that's in here all day and It will be in the theater where opening remarks were tomorrow This room will be the workshop track tomorrow. So it's a lot more room to move around and be workshoppy in here So we are going to get started this morning with a little talk that I call what I wish I'd known about business My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm here from here in Birmingham, Alabama I am the creator of monster contracts, which is our proven contracts for WordPress client work I'm also the host at iThemes training and I'm the founder of Brilliant Webworks a small agency here in Birmingham Where we build and manage WordPress websites When it comes to these business topics, I like to say I'm an expert by the definition of Dr. Niles Bohr who said an expert is a person who is found out by his own painful experience all the mistakes That a person can make in a very narrow field and that is me So anytime I'm on stage talking about anything relating to business It's because I've made a lot of mistakes in the years that I've been in business I started working with clients building websites in 1995. That was a long time ago and I've done a lot of things the wrong way over the years and One of the great joys of my life in this season of my life is helping people who do WordPress things with clients Avoid the mistakes that I make and speaking as part of that coaching is another part of that And I like to start a talk like this and just a reminder that as we come into a space like this where we're in with a lot Of other WordPress people maybe doing business maybe doing development Maybe whatever it is that you do that you are not alone. We really do share some common struggles You know word camps are an amazing thing But it could be that even as you walked in this morning you find yourself you found yourself clustered with some people Who started talking about things that you had no idea what they were talking about They started using acronyms that you'd never heard of before or maybe you heard some people talking about how well their business has gone through the Pandemic and maybe yours didn't go so well Or whatever it is It's very easy to come into an event like this We're rubbing shoulders with colleagues and other professionals in our area and to think that I'm the only one who has the challenges that I face And let me just tell you right now that that is not true We share common struggles So I've been coaching WordPress solopreneurs and micro agency owners for about eight years now I've had hundreds and hundreds of conversations with folks that do what we do This is word camp number 61 for me where I've presented and I make myself available to anybody that wants to talk during those word camps to help Solve business issues and all those conversations. I also do an office hours on I themes training every week It's been now for the past four years. I've answered over 2,000 questions on those webinars about business and technical issues and all that to say this I've heard thousands of questions from people who do what we do and there are no unique issues The the the details of the problem may be different, but our story is the same So I want to invite you this weekend that if you feel compelled to put on some mask to make people think that you're Something that you're not don't do that Because we grow when we're vulnerable. We grow when we share our challenges and we're real with each other That's where we can learn So don't project just your highlight footage Let people see the real struggles that you're facing because that's where we can really start to make some changes All right, so you're not alone. So what I've got here are 10 lessons We'll see if I can get to all of them depends on how we do if not, there'll be like eight and I can give you the slides later But there's at least 10 things here. I want to share with you and it starts with this The first thing that I wish I'd known about business was you don't have to know everything Do what you do best and find trustworthy partners for the rest So back in the early days of my business. I started this thing when I was in college I was doing some IT consulting alongside working with a nonprofit, you know Just doing things to make ends meet, you know I had a few design skills like very light design skills Which in those days meant I could use Microsoft Publisher and make things look decent, you know And so I was doing some of that. I was building computers And then the web happened so I started, you know building some websites And you know, I was really just doing anything I possibly could to monetize the skills that God gave me to do You know, whatever I could do to make ends meet in our home And you know that worked for a little while But then I started to realize I can't do everything like the web thing got really big and you couldn't just be a web Person you had to decide well what kind of web person am I going to be am I going to be like a coder am I going to be You know use this software like Microsoft front page Which was awesome to build, you know back in the day to build websites and all these things You know, so you get into an event like this and you might think well if I'm not a developer You know those people over there in that room If I'm not one of them that I'm not really a web professional or you know if I'm not really a designer Then you know, I'm not really doing web design What I've discovered is when we talk to people in the WordPress space We tend to fall into one of three very broad categories and think of it maybe as like a spectrum Across the you know what we might be as identity in the WordPress space on one end way down here We have the developers. These are people who love to code. They know where the semicolon goes and all those PHP statements You know, they know when to use the squiggly bracket and the other things and all that which just you know I know enough PHP for self-defense. That's it And they're way down there on that end of the scale and over here on this end of the scale We have the designers, you know developers can make things that work They just make them bright pink and they don't look nice. But down here on the On the design scale they might be able to build something that looks really pretty But it might not necessarily work But then there's all this space in the middle between developers and designers where I find that a lot of people In the WordPress space rest and it's what I would call in a similar people who can take You know themes and code and maybe page builders or Gutenberg or whatever and you can Take things that other people have done maybe some design ideas or some code ideas and put them together Into a solution that solves a problem for the client and that's great And there's a lot of money to be made in that space The interesting thing is the people who occupy that space Which I would say is probably the middle half of people doing WordPress things with clients We tend to have identity crisis like I'm not really as good as designers I'm not really as good as developers and so I had this imposter syndrome of everybody else knows more than me and is Better than me and it's just not the case So if that's where you find yourself in that a similar category, you're in good company. How many of you say I'm an assembler. That's what I do Yeah, I think you'll find that happening so My point here is that you can't know everything Wordpress is too big. You can't be an expert at everything in wordpress You can find yourself some middle ground where you can do some great work on the foundation that really smart people in our ecosystem have Done and you can make good money solving problems for clients that way You don't have to know everything so partner with people who do if you're not a pure designer Find somebody that does design if you're not a peer developer find somebody that does development and work with them Together to solve a problem for the client. We're gonna have some Pardon me We're gonna have some boards out to connect like if you're looking for work if you need help in a certain area We're gonna have some whiteboards out throughout the weekend where you can sign up there, right? We're going old school this year, so you don't have to know everything if you if you have realized that it's a good thing My seventh grade prealgebra teacher said never waste an opportunity to use a good Venn diagram And so this is what we tend to think like this is what everybody else knows and this is what I know But the truth is really more Something like this I know some stuff you know some stuff sometimes that stuff overlaps But oftentimes it doesn't like you there's some things that you know and things that you can do as your superpower That maybe nobody else can do as good as you the trick is finding those things and then finding a client that wants to hire You to do those things All right, so do what you do best find trustworthy partners for the rest number two You are your most important asset Don't neglect your physical or mental health and by the way you are not the exception to this rule So physical health y'all is critical for what we do Back in 2019 I went on a fitness journey and I lost a hundred pounds. It was a big deal for me I went on an eating plan that was built on layers of micro habits and those things have Pretty well stayed the same You know, it's like drinking enough water eating correctly getting enough activity sleeping well all those things It I cannot describe to you the cascade effect that those changes have had in my world I it wasn't just in the physical health area. It wasn't just a weight loss thing It was like a transformation because when I started changing some of those habits Notice to me like I'm more productive at work like I'm doing things now that I wasn't doing before we can't neglect our physical health It's super important. Our mental health is perhaps even more important for the space that we work in Early on I had a mentor that said you can make a decision at this point in your life Whether you want to make a living working with your body or working with your mind Because you can learn a skill and make good money in this world Matter of fact, you know the skills gap is huge today Like, you know the trades that they're looking for people and you could make really good money in those areas But you have to make a decision am I gonna work with my body or am I gonna work with my mind and Whichever you choose make sure you take care of that because you are your most important asset And I think for some reason we find it easier to relate to the taking care of our body part and that's important But in our space where we make a living with how we think and process and do We don't take care of our minds and By that I mean, you know, we understand that if you know if I work really hard I need to rest like my body says I am tired But when I work really hard with my mind and I find myself dealing with anxiety or depression or whatever We just tend to want to power through that And that's it's a danger. It's a real problem Not realizing that we need a mental break Is a mistake Therapy can be a powerful ally and I'm grateful that one of the things that's happened through the pandemic Is that a lot of the stigma around mental health is really it's One of the things the pandemic has done is take away some of the stigma to helping our mental health And that's a really good thing in my view great services like better help have come along to do virtual therapy And it's great. You can connect with a therapist and you know, I'm a huge huge fan of therapy The problem is we can think we're the exception to these rules, but we're not we're not Our minds work similarly and we need somebody outside of us That we can be real with To help us sort through some of the things that we struggle with And it's important So one of my friends mickey trivet was supposed to be here this weekend and he had a great talk called The cost of doing business mentally and physically mickey has a great story. He was going to share But he had to make a decision a couple of weeks ago to back out because he was having some health struggles And I applaud him for that like I would love to have seen mickey this weekend He had a great talk to share but he made a great decision to say, you know what as much as I want to be at word camp I've got to prioritize my health and so good for mickey. Hopefully he'll get to come to another word camp later this year and share that So You are your most important asset don't neglect your physical or your mental health number three completely shifting gears here debt Man debt is a ball and chain When it comes to business debt Is a ball and chain money mistakes will cripple your business I in the early years I had to learn this lesson the hard way being in business is like running a marathon Debt while you're in business is like running a marathon with a ball and chain around your leg It's just it's very very very difficult You know debt buying something today on the assumption. I can pay for it tomorrow You can't assume that in business.  That's life In our world. We have good months. We have bad months. We have good seasons. We have bad seasons You know in my in my story Back in my 20s I got into huge debt like by the end of my 20s I was 30 000 in credit card debt because I was I made some really stupid decisions Didn't know any better. Was it really I had some great training in other areas did not get good training in financial areas So I finished my 20s with 30 000 dollars in debt I got in debt in my 20s got out of debt in my 30s and it was a hard lesson to learn I know it maybe that's where you're at right now Like I know what it's like to sit around the kitchen table with that one light bulb kind of dangling above my head Like I'm in a police interrogation looking at the bill spread out on the table wondering who's going to get paid this month And who's not like I've been there. I know what that's like.  It's just it's horrible The stress of that is incredible And it's really difficult to be in business When you have that sort of Ball and chain around your leg they cripple our business and it it comes sometimes in unexpected ways Like there's a direct connection between having bad clients in my business and having money problems Because what will happen is you'll come you'll find this client that comes in and immediately like five minutes into the conversation You're like, this is not somebody I want to work with But you have to work with them because the bills are coming due and you take this bad client and that causes this ripple effect Because you start you start giving all of this mental and emotional capital these bad clients And you're exhausted and you can't do as much work and you're not enjoying your work And then you still have money probably it's just it's this cycle that just continues on and on and on debt is a ball and chain so If you are in debt as a business owner my advice to you is do whatever you can to get out of debt as quickly as possible There's an old proverb that says Free yourself from debt like the gazelle frees himself from the hunter and I take that literally like that's You know, have you ever seen those wild kingdom? Uh, you know documentaries where the the gazelle is you know, there comes the cheetah chasing it That's what it's like. I get out of debt as quickly as possible get out of dodge Get those problems solved When people ask me a lot of times I'll have conversations at a word camp or wherever and they'll say, you know I'm thinking about like I've got this full-time job, but I really want to go on my own What's your advice and there's two pieces of advice I give and this is the first one get out of debt as quickly as possible You do not want to start a business with a lot of personal debt It's going to cause problems the second piece of advice I give them is number four Which is build recurring revenue as quickly as possible Get out of debt as quickly as possible build recurring revenue as quickly as possible because I promise you It is virtually impossible to survive in our business without recurring revenue long term. It is virtually impossible Uh, this is another one of those things where you might think you're the exception to this and you can just live on project by project by project It lasts two or three years. I promise that you'll be working for somebody else. I've seen it happen over and over again So we eliminate recurring expenses by getting out of debt and being very wise with how we spend our money in our business But then we build recurring revenue, you know a great thing that we can do as wordpress People is to you know have a recurring wordpress care plan that sort of thing. That's a whole separate talk But you know great hosting and backups and wordpress updates and security and all those things we can provide in a monthly service to clients For every single website. It just grows and builds. It's not quick. Usually it's slow But gradually it happens and you know I've got a graphic in a minute. It can really produce freedom in our lives and the interesting thing here is um How many of you have taken on a rescue client? And a rescue client is a kind of client that comes to you and says I was working with this developer and now they're poof They're gone. They're like gone They just evaporated And I don't have access to my domain or my hosting and I got this website I don't have to do with it and whatever this is my suspicion I don't know but like I don't have a crystal ball, but my suspicion is Somebody was doing some wordpress stuff right and they're working for somebody else Or maybe they had their own business and they started doing some wordpress stuff and they tried to live project to project to project And they had all these clients And finally they got like I'm not making any money like I'm struggling like I got debt maybe or whatever And they got tired of the up and down up and down. They said forget it I'm just going to work for somebody else and who gets left on the hook. It's the client Right and so we end up taking these rescue clients of people who have disappearing developers And if you want to avoid becoming that next disappearing developer build recurring revenue as quickly as possible Here's why This is a little graphic that I use sometimes and this might look like a Typical way that a lot of businesses are structured budget wise So like we've got this much expenses every month Maybe a teeny tiny little bit of recurring revenue And then every month we got a sell sell enough projects to make up the ends meet to get to what is called the burn rate This is how much money you burn every month And so, you know, these are my expenses and I've got a sell enough plus maybe some recurring revenue Just so I can break even and for a lot of folks. This is where they find themselves in business And it's it's fairly normal now the trick here is maybe you have a good month And your project revenue goes up or maybe you can lower your expenses And you have a little bit of gap there and that's a good thing So whether you can sell some more or whether you can get out of some debt or Make good decisions with business expense to bring that down. That's great.  This is the magic moment of Freedom which means that even if I don't sell a lot in one month My expenses are still covered. I can still say no to those bad clients Freedom now as you continue to grow your recurring revenue something else beautiful happens When your recurring revenue exceeds your burn rate This is going to give you some flexibility to do some new cool things Maybe to take some risks. Maybe to bring somebody into your business So you can maybe work less or do something different or whatever This is where we want to be in our business. This is magic And this is something I help people to do in a coaching situation And it's something that I've experienced personally. It's a beautiful thing So build recurring revenue as quickly as possible. It's virtually Impossible to survive long term without it. All right number five Focus on process not heroics Systems and processes will make you better. Now. Here's what I mean by heroics Do you ever feel like in your business that you have to put on a cape and tights to show up and save the day? Like you're the only one with the answers You're the only one that can solve the problem and you've got to change clothes in a telephone booth and pop in That shows my age doesn't it and pop in and save the day, right? That's heroics That is not scalable Heroics will exhaust you because none of us has an s on their chest probably if you do we can talk after but probably you don't Heroics is exhausting heroics means you can't ever take a real vacation Focus on system on process Not heroics, you know, we live in I live in Alabama. I'm a bama fan That's gonna make some of you happy and some of you not so much. That's okay But we have a coach at alabama who's the greatest college football coach probably of all time and he says focus on the process Of what it takes to be successful. Don't focus on success Focus on the process that gets you there And we need to do the same thing. It's a great lesson to learn So what this means is how do I get everything out of my head? That only I can do And put it into lists of things or short videos or whatever that somebody else can do And as much as you like to think that you're indispensable I promise you you're not and if you think that you're indispensable and that gives you joy I want to gently suggest that you alter your perspective on what it is that you're doing Because if you are indispensable, yes, it makes us feel good that we can solve problems and that's a good thing But if you're indispensable, you're also not replaceable, which means you can't leave you can't do vacation You can't rest you can't take a weekend. You are Locked into your business forever And that's not good It's not good So my suggestion to you is to incrementally start to improve your processes There's a great book that I recommend to everybody. I thought I had a graphic, but I don't it's called the checklist manifesto And it teaches you how to make checklists if you are not a great reader Then there is a summary of the checklist manifesto also available on amazon That's like the cliff notes to the book and it just leaves out all the stories and it's just as good You can read it in a couple hours So we just put everything down like start getting things out of our heads and into lists And it's hard. It takes a while and you don't don't do it all at once It's just the next time you do a thing that you're going to repeat write it down And then the next time you do that thing Look at what you wrote down and improve it again every time you iterate and iterate and make it better and better And gradually you start to build a system that works. Here's how I represent that visually not a Venn diagram, but close So we're going to say the system. This is our business Our business is the system of things that we do And within our system, we're going to have a process. Let's just say how many of you can launch a WordPress website? In your sleep probably I mean, we've done it right. We can figure it out How many of you have a list that you follow every single time you launch a website far fewer hands? Yeah, that's the way it works Okay, so we're going to say that this process is our website launch process It's a checklist that we run every time And when i'm coaching people through this process Uh, I'd say a process is a collection of some combination of these three things Tasks templates and tools So within your system, you have multiple processes Each of which are composed of some combination of tasks templates and tools checklists tasks Templates may be things that you type over and over those emails that you send every time at certain parts of a project You just save those like don't Think about those every time. I mean chat gpt is great But I don't want to have to go to chat gpt every time I write this email to a client You know So templates things that repeat and then tools like use the same tool set It starts with the way I build websites from a common theme and plugin stack every single site is built around that You know, uh, the the thing that I use to manage in a dashboard of site every like there's Things that they're consistent tools that I use throughout everything I do So there's consistency and the more you do something The better you get at it And by the way for those of us who struggle with imposter syndrome And that's probably every single person at one level or another When you start to use the same tools over and over again, you get better at it It starts to make you feel better about yourself and you will be surprised How much less of an imposter you feel like because you're great at using your tools It's this weird extra little benefit of doing this So in your business you have a collection of processes And if you look at your business and you right now and you go, I'm like, well like this is not even near where I'm at That's okay. We start somewhere. We start with one One system start with how you launch your website start with how you onboard a client Wherever you want to start start somewhere and gradually improve and over the next couple of years You'll find that you'll start to have much more of a system than you have today. Does that make sense? All right number six There are seasons in every business don't waste the slow times We talked about this earlier up and down up and down my revenue, right? And we struggle with that and here's how it tends to go in the conversation. I have with myself between my ears Oh my gosh. I have so much work. I'm so stressed And then maybe two months later. Oh my gosh, there's no work coming in. I'm so stressed What's the commonality between those things? I'm so stressed, right? Because I forget the fact that business goes up and down. It's just I mean, I've never found a way to to change that It just is what it is What I've learned to do though is not to waste the slow times Look at this picture That is the Costco in Hoover, Alabama, which is about 20 minutes that way This was taken in early 2020 when I went to get gas And look what they're doing This was freaking brilliant I mean our Costco we have one in Birmingham and it is always busy.  So what did they do? We're going to seal our parking lot That's brilliant Because when else are they going to be able to block off half their parking lot at the time and let somebody come in and do Asphalt work is brilliant So how does this translate to my world? For my world, I keep a someday list I got a big Trello board full of someday ideas some blog posts that I read some great webinar that somebody presented on iThemes I thought that's a great thing. I need to do that And I don't have time to do it right now because I'm busy But I'm going to stick everything over in this someday list the tool by the way doesn't matter It can be a word document or sticky notes, whatever.  It's cyclical So there's seasons in business Don't waste the slow times and by the way sometimes don't waste the slow times means take a vacation Take a break Right or just work two hours in the morning to clear the deck of the email and then go do something fun, right? Don't waste the slow times. All right number seven Bad clients are never worth the hassle I touched on this earlier They are never worth the hassle They always cost you more in mental and emotional capital than they ever bring in on the revenue line always There's very few things I will say always to and this is one of them. I've learned this the hard way How many of you have taken a bad client to put food on the table? Yeah, me too Um And we get that like that's sometimes you just got to do what you got to do But when things are going well How many of you have also taken a bad client because you're like, huh, it's money Me too Yeah The money you make from a bad client is always always always going to cost you more than they ever bring in on the regular On the revenue line. It's going to cost you mental and emotional capital. It's going to cost you functional chaos in your business It's just a mess. It's not worth it. It's not worth it So when you start to meet with a client for the first time, remember that a client meeting the first time is like a first date When you go on a first date with somebody You're getting the best version of that person that you're ever going to get They're on their best behavior, right? And it's the same way with a client So when you meet with a client and you're like Something just not right here Listen to that because that's just the tip of the iceberg Clients don't get better over the relationship. They tend to get worse It's this rule of client entropy. They tend to get worse over time not better And you know Just look for those red flags. Do they interrupt you? Do they not listen to you? Do they always talk over you? Are they rude to the server if you're at a restaurant? Listen Watch out for those red flags If your gut says go go It's not worth it So I wrote a book about this a couple years ago three years ago something like that pre-pandemic. It's a lot of fun It's on amazon. It's a kindle. It's a print on demand that sort of thing Grab that. I mean, I highly recommend this book But Here's what I'll tell you good clients Are not like unicorns like they actually exist Sometimes we can get in a group like this and we hear people in business talking about how great their clients are And I've got some really great clients today and you might think I've never experienced that before Here's the way it happens And you know, maybe you're you're just getting started out in your business and you've never really experienced the client that values Your opinion completely that pays you what you're worth and that stays out of your way while you do it Isn't that like the holy trinity of clients right there?  That's like like you cut your teeth in business That's just how it goes and then one day through some connection It's usually a referral this magical client appears in your world that Pays you what you're worth and listens to what you say and stays out of your way and just lets you do your job And you do get to do great work for this client and you're like I am never Gonna let another client treat me bad again because I've seen what it's like And one client one good client tends to lead to another I think for two reasons first of all good clients refer good other good clients to you Good people refer good people to good people. It's just a law of human nature Good people refer good people to good people. You just got to find that first good people But also you start to realize I'm not going to let them treat me that way anymore Right we start to grow backbone in business So it kind of happens that way one good client leads to another good people tend to move in packs And pretty soon you've got a whole business full of good clients. It's a great thing All right number eight we actually might finish these number eight don't be a hero Fixing the client is outside the scope of work Don't be a hero So you've all probably heard of imposter syndrome That's a thing that gets talked about a lot blog posts word camp talks all that sort of thing Imposter syndrome is when I feel like I'm the only one that has the sets of problems that I have There's something else that I've defined several years ago. I called it hero syndrome It's almost like a codependency Where like something in me needs to be seen as the hero to the client and like my Value as a human being is that I can come in and solve a problem and get the pad on the back No matter how much it costs me personally to do that like y'all. I'll just tell you I suffered from hero syndrome so bad in the the early years of my business so bad like My daughter's for a four-year-old birthday party I left early because I had a client that had an it problem that I had to go solve I'm embarrassed to say that But I had it bad y'all like I needed to be the hero I'll never get that day back I will never get that day back.  Let me just say therapy is your friend Hero syndrome is when I have this need to swoop in and be the hero fix the problem I need the client's affirmation I'm crushed if they don't give it to me if the client is critical. I can't sleep Right. Is that I'm sure nobody in here has that issue I'm this is completely hypothetical.  But we forget that it's the same principle in business like I take this client. Oh, I can fix them. I can make them Okay, they'll behave once the It's the same thing Fixing the client is outside the scope of work unless you're a therapist then, you know, okay So in the book that that I wrote I called it building fences around friendly monsters And so we need to build these fences around problem clients to keep them in check And don't try to fix the client like if they're not going to obey they need to go find somebody else They need to go make some other web developer successful. You can't fix the client. It's outside our scope of work Okay, by the way, there's more to life than building somebody a website This is not worth it. Okay number nine Your business should serve you not vice versa So set your own priorities. What is your why behind what it is that what she what it is what you do?  It lets us set our own schedule It lets us set our own priorities, you know for years my story was I worked in nonprofits for about 20 years while I was doing business and building my business and my business was great because The nonprofit could afford to pay like 20 30 hours a week and I would just fill the gap with business And some weeks the the demand on the nonprofit side was more and so I could be flexible with what I did there And sometimes a business was getting I could kind of flex backwards the other day It was it was a great great partnership between what the two hats that I was wearing back in those days But about 10 years ago I made the pivot to go full time and it's it's it's I was able to do all that because it was my business and it was my priorities and I could set The priorities for my business to be whatever I wanted them to be whether it was to make You know just enough money and like there's people I've coached They just wanted enough money like I want to work eight hours a week And I want to make those the best eight hours I can make them Right great You can totally do that or I want to work full time and I want to you know be able to you know Optimize as much of this 40 hours in a week as I can do awesome. There's people I've coached who I had a coach incline in the uk who She had some significant health issues So what we focused on was building enough recurring revenue in her business So that she could take time off that she needed to for her health There's another client that I coached up in canada who wanted to take six months off to have a baby six months off And she worked like crazy and did it To build her business structure things put in systems and processes bringing some help and she took six months off When she had her baby There's another person that I worked with a long time ago. He's now a member of my team Who at that time was a missionary to ukraine that came back because of the war But they had adopted several kids with special needs And he's like we need we're gonna go to ukraine and do the same sort of work there that we've been doing here with kids With special needs and it's awesome And he needed to make enough money to take up the gap for support there They had raised for their the ministry they were doing there And so he was doing wordpress stuff It's like I need to work this much and be as you know make as much money in that time as I can So I can do this thing that I'm really called to do awesome. Let's do it That's the beautiful thing about having your own business. What is your why why are you doing this today? What is your why? The challenge is a lot of times our business can take over And we forget why it is that we're doing what we're doing So just remember what is your why why is it that you're doing What you're doing and let your business serve you and not vice versa and last of all It's gonna work out. Well two minutes and we'll do q&a number 10 Being busy is not a badge of honor Being busy is not a badge of honor I still I still to this day answer this question like this mindlessly sometimes how you doing I'm busy Like busy is good It's like one of these mindless responses. I don't know why it's just in there I'm good busy busy like when did that start to become a mark of success Because that's a relatively new phenomenon The harvard business journal wrote about this in an article back in 2017 called crazy busy the new status symbol Because it used to be like in the last generation The the symbol of success was not that you were busy all the time but that you had leisure time That's you could spin how you wanted it And they actually did this test where they made fake facebook profiles go figure of you know people Doing different things and like one person was always like at the beach or playing golf or whatever And the other person was always you know posting things like i'm working late. I've got this thing I've got and just had this success and whatever And which of these profiles are the successful ones And it was like two to one people picked the ones that were always busy and had all these things going on about what they are Doing rather than the person who was showing all the leisure time Like when did that happen? I'm not sure when that happened people with more letters after their last name to me You're gonna have to figure that out, but It's a thing isn't it like why is being busy a badge of honor I don't know But what I do know is that we need to create margin in our life for what really matters And that goes back to a lot of the things that I've talked about with finances and You know systems and processes and getting our mind on straight about how we deal with clients It's about creating margin margin for what matters you get to define what that is What is you know, what is it margin is a mechanism that allows you to make an impact in whatever area you want to impact Maybe it's your kids. Maybe it's you know, some cause you believe in maybe it's like I want to retire 10 years early So I'm going to use the margin that I build to work more and that's fine Just have a goal in mind and know why you're doing it and just don't mindlessly go through the process of being in business Sometimes you have to say no to good things. So you have margin to say yes to the great things So thanks very much. My name is Nathan Ingram I'm going to be here all weekend. I would love to chat with you about anything going on in your world That's why I'm here this weekend also to put up signs and stuff because I'm an organizer So we've got about 10 minutes for q&a and or nine minutes and melanie. You've got the mic, right Please use the mic. We do a video crew back here and the mic will let your voice get captured on the video for wordpress tv questions Comments night remarks all of the above Hello How long did it take you to get to the point where Your recurring revenue Was paying all the bills Once you realized that you needed to focus on that let's put it that way From that point forward, how long did it take you to get there? Yeah, because those are two different questions Yeah, as soon as I it took me far too long As soon as I realized oh, I really need to focus on recurring that was about 2008 And by about 2013 that was happening Yeah, now also in the middle of that I had a I stopped working in the nonprofit world And so I had to make up 100 of that revenue that I was making there as well. So about five years And it happened one website at a time one care plan at a time It's slow, but it's so There was a day back in 2008 where I lost a third of my income And health insurance for my family I walked into a business It happened to be a very swanky hair salon here in Birmingham I know you look at me and you think this is clearly a guy that does work for hair salons But you know y'all remember 2008 like it was bad finance Right, and so they let me go and you know I was doing web and graphics and it for them And it was a lot of money and the health insurance for my family And I made a decision that day in 2008 where I said I will no longer I will never let that happen again I will I got little kids. I will never let that happen again And that's when I made the pivot. I would I just really found wordpress at that point And I had a few clients with large numbers and that's risky And I decided I'm going to go more clients smaller numbers and I've never looked back Good question a couple of hands up back here Thank you, Nathan In terms of good clients bad clients, I'd like to comment about how one good client will attract another good client Do you think What is what is the role that plays when you have a good client and your confidence goes up and your I guess your your skill in dealing with a client and putting proper fences up Can you train other clients who maybe aren't necessarily bad but clueless on how to deal with you? You train them to be good clients. Do you think that's a thing or do you just jettison them? Oh, what a great question okay, so um You know you watch those shows like Caesar. What's his name and he can take any dog in like three minutes and they're just fine I don't think that works with clients so Yes, you can train a borderline client train is such a bad word. This is a human being You can train a borderline client to be a good client There are some clients though that are Whose psychology is such that they will never treat you well I'm trying to be nice Some people are just jerks y'all and they don't get better and you know who they are So just don't make excuses for them in your mind And if they need to go they need to go There was just a discussion on a facebook group. I'm part of the other day of like, how do you tell a client?  You don't like and refer them to them Don't do that though. That's not nice But yeah, give them the opportunity to make some other wordpress developers successful I think some can be trained but it comes down to this you've got to have a great process You don't break and sometimes it's simply as simple as the wording can be just like this This is the way we do it Our process looks like this When before we can move into the development phase you have to sign off on the design phase or however you're set up And you don't vary from that and if they push back on it. I'm sorry. That was in the contract you signed Blame the contract, but yeah Great question Dorian flowers here. Um over the five years Um, what method of recurring revenue worked best for you? Was it coming in like coming up with like custom services that you built that generate revenue?  Yeah, so, um My I'll just answer for me. Thanks Dorian For me the core business is building and managing wordpress websites, right? So we're building websites for clients every wordpress website unless You know virtually every wordpress website is going to need somebody to manage it So if i'm building a site it just makes sense for me to offer hosting and backups and security and wordpress updates and occasional content updates and I put those packages together. I've never done affiliate marketing any well I won't say that like teeny tiny a little bit but just It's all about the wordpress care plan Yeah, and I'm happy to talk more about that throughout the weekend I just want to give a plug for the process idea A couple years ago. I I signed up for an online course Um, I decided that I think it was 2019 was going to be my year of the process Because of so many screw-ups and mishaps um We're going to do some work in our kitchen And the company we picked had a very set Organized six step process boom boom boom boom as The client it makes me feel confident That I have a clear understanding of what they're going to do and how it's going to work and what the costs are um I was able in in in my business to create this um Sort of an intake form and if somebody doesn't want to fill out that intake form And it's not super lengthy. It also has some numbers in there pick your cost range that you're interested If they're not going to fill out that form We're just not going to do business. I mean This is how it works. I you know I'm a business. I'm not your buddy. I'm not your therapist But when you think about it in terms of home renovation or or a major plumbing project, you know You're not going to sign with somebody who's just going to tell you something verbally and you fling them a Venmo You you want The assurance That there's a process in place. So it's a win-win for both sides 100% could not agree more. Thanks for that Maybe one more question and we're out of time I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit about How you think about the balance between products and services because I think monster contract is a Product or a SaaS kind of type thing rather than a service building website So how do you think about that balance in your own business? Oh, it's a great question So I do a lot of things right like I've got the agency stuff. I've got items training I've got coaching and I've got monster contracts The only way that I can do all those things and stay sane number one. I have good help. I've got a great team member The other thing is all of those things are aligned So everything I do comes out of the client work that I do that informs the training that I do The monster contracts is my agency contract that over 20 years. We've made bullet proof The coaching I do is based on my experience, right? So then everything is aligned. It's in the same Sector. I just took something that I did and turned it into a product If this was something completely way out here on its own, I mean, I wouldn't be able to manage it all Yeah, so if you're it maybe you're you're in and you have an agency you're doing something And maybe there's some secret sauce that you have that like that you do really well productize it Like you guys did that, right? Like if y'all this is amber hind. She runs equalized digital World renowned accessibility expert in the house, right? She's doing the accessibility workshop on sunday, which I would highly recommend You guys took the work you were doing in your agency Accessibility remediation and you built the plugin that helps with that. It's a very similar thing, but it was aligned Just like you guys. So that's the only way I can do it and stay sane I highly recommend it because I use it for my clients. Yeah All right, y'all. Thanks very much. Next up here is somebody


Mr. Smeagol, I will take the advice of the member for Shosa, Mr. Smeagol, and ask to include in the schedule Jimmy Kupen and SportsFishing. Mr. Smeagol, having said so I will ask members to approve the motion.


OK, so now I've got a few frames done. I've not let it do all 720, because I just don't have time in my life to let things finish. I want to show you how you'll preview your completed animation of one of the camera angles. So yeah, you need to find an application. So in my case, I'll just search for it. I assume it's going to let me. There we go. So it's called fCheck. And then you need to open that up. And this is a utility that comes with Maya that allows you to just check any animations that you produce. So what you need to do is just go to File, Open Animation. And then you're going to find your folder.  And you just need to click on frame one. And the application will do the rest. So there you go. You can see that is now starting to show me the render of that animation. So it's just going to show me the first 30 something frames which I've got done. But if I let this do all 720, it would obviously show me all of that. OK, so that brings this little motion path animation exercise to an end. If you saw video one, then you will have seen what the finished article looks like. Or you can follow the link below to see what the finished animation looks like as well. If you do complete this animation, then get it rendered out, upload it to YouTube, and then share it on the Facebook page. I'm always happy to see the work that people have done based on any tutorials that I put together. If this particular tutorial has been of use to you, then be a hero. Go through and click on the thumbs up for each of the steps. It encourages me to put more of these together and make sure that other people can find them as well. And absolutely, you should be subscribing to the channel as well for more of these sort of things. OK, thanks for sticking through to the last video. It's been emotional. I feel like we've bonded. And I look forward to you listening to me in future videos.


Okay. Everyone, welcome. Sorry to get into a few minutes late. I have a, we have a great panel here for you today to talk about driving ROI in OpenStack and how they did it, especially from a startup standpoint. And we're also fortunate to have Martin here who can also give you, I think, some really perspective in how he sees it from HP. So let me quickly introduce the panel and we'll get, we'll get right into it. So starting off is Joe Arnold, who's CEO and founder at Swift Stack. Prior to that, spent some time at cloud scaling and at Engine Yard. Next to him is Jim Morris Rowe, who's CEO at Piston Cloud. Prior to that, he was Senior VP GM at Zimbra, before getting acquired by VMware. And then last but not least is Martin Mikos, who was CEO founder at Eucalyptus, was recently sold to HP and is now Senior VP and GM of Cloud and all things Cloud at HP.  So with that, just, you know, I think it'd probably be great to just jump right in. What I thought I'd do first is have each of them give, instead of talk about their companies, give maybe a couple of examples of some customers and how they drove ROI and how they showed ROI in those customers. So Jim, maybe start with you. You've got, you know, some customers like Candy Crush and, you know, King, I don't know what you can talk about. Zulily, what can you tell the audience?  Yeah, sure. So I think it's becoming, you know, somewhat well known, certainly at conferences like this, that private cloud infrastructure done well can drive cost savings even versus Amazon. So, and there has to be a certain scale until you get there. It's not at, you know, 5,000 a month, but at 25,000, 50,000 a month, customers can start to see value if they build efficient in-house systems. And I think we certainly take some debate on that, but we've seen it at Candy Crush and at Zulily and at ChartBoost and these are, you know, six-figure Amazon bills that have come down by 60% in some instances. And how did you tell, how did you convince them? They must have been skeptical at first. Yeah, so how did- What I think Piston ultimately does well is we enable the private cloud deployment with minimal upfront costs. So we have a piece of software that installs super quickly on commodity gear in a very scale out web-scale centric model and it allows the customer to see that it's not no ops, but it's fairly limited ops because if you have a huge professional services engagement, a big hardware buy, four admins that you have to hire, you're not going to realize those savings. And I think the way Piston goes in quickly and easily in a POC fashion gives customers that comfort level. I think the other point is that the, you know, one of the best benefits of cloud in the public sense is its linear scalability. It scales indefinitely, but the cost scales at that same pace. And that's not, that's very difficult to do in-house. And I think the one, you know, really unique advantage Piston has over some of the other OpenStack solutions is everything runs, network compute, storage, and the management plane all runs on every node. And, you know, there's certainly challenges where there is huge object stores are a challenge for us and so we partner in those scenarios. But in general, for most of the cloud's requirements, the costs will scale linear as well. So as you need, you start with 10 nodes, as you need more capacity, you add 11, 12, 13, 14, and you have this very kind of consistent cost curve. And I think those two kind of attributes, very hands-free system, not no ops, but close to it. And this linear cost curve really helps us kind of drive that mindset. So, Joe, does it work the same way in storage as it does on the compute side? I mean, there's some slight differences there, right? And I echo this statement. It's really easy to figure out what the CAPEX costs are gonna be when you're doing your own private cloud. What's a lot harder to figure out is the operational expense. How many administrators are you going to be adding to your team or augmenting to your team to run that? And I think the goal on both of our fronts or everyone here on the panel is to really reduce that operational costs of running these larger scale clouds. But particularly with storage from our point of view, there's actually a bigger change going on, to a commodity-based, open-source storage environment. That's new for most people.  But once you realize that challenge and realize that it doesn't necessarily need to be a project that you need to take on, that's where it gets a lot of benefit. So, Martin, you've got a very interesting perspective here, having sold to some degree against OpenStack and aware as a competitive framework with Eucalyptus and having to convince customers to trust you on that. So, maybe you can give us a little bit of insight from that point of view, but then you've also now got this insight being inside of HP. So, can you compare, contrast? Okay, how do you kind of think about that? First, from a Eucalyptus and OpenStack, similar now with an HP? Yeah, I'll be happy to. First, if I may correct a little bit. I'm not the founder of Eucalyptus. I was not the founder of MySQL. I'm a hired gun. I'm smart enough not to follow my own ideas. But anyhow, I think you could ask, why do we have to have a panel on ROI? Because it should be obvious. So, if we have a panel and the room is full, it means that we have some concern or question. And I think it has to do with the fact that the first benefit of cloud is agility. It's only later that we get into higher utilization and automation, which bring the direct financial benefits. But early on, it's agility.  But it is for companies the ability to move faster, to change plans faster, to do things in smaller increments and be much more responsive. And it means that the organization becomes more productive. Their R&D is faster, or they serve customers better. And then when we go back and say, so what was the ROI of the private cloud or a cloud in general? It's difficult to know because it's not exact dollars. So that's one problem. The other problem is that private cloud projects are messy. I know, I've seen two. And it means that as you are deploying your private cloud, you spend a lot of time just getting it going. And then at the end of the day, you must say, so what's the ROI if it takes this much work to get going? And then you have to rationalize it for yourself and say, oh, I'm learning, that's a thing. I'm developing my skills. And soon it will be so automated that we get the real benefits. And I think all of those are true. But that's why we are sitting here today not knowing what the ROI is because the real benefit, first benefit and the reason to move the cloud is agility. The straightforward financial benefit comes a little bit later. It's even agility when you go to AWS if we use that as a contrasting point here.  You go to AWS to get more agility. You move much faster. And I know a customer where they make large telecom equipment and they use to test them four times a month. Then they built a private cloud and they started doing tests 4,000 times a month. And today they do about 4,000 tests per day. And most of them take less than 10 minutes to run. So they split the R&D function into such small pieces they can test everything all the time. How do you do ROI on that? The result is faster R&D, higher quality sooner and not necessarily a saving in the actual IT cost. And that's why I think we must ask ourselves, how do you do ROI calculations when you have to measure something that's very difficult to measure? So either you could let this right now, the HP is maybe newer or harder to talk about since it's so new. How do you sell agility? I mean, how do you go in and pitch agility to a customer, especially against me if they're looking at AWS which is the ultimate agility in a way? Yes, that's a very good question. How do you sell agility? Well, first you say I sell only to those who know that it's agility they're seeking. If they're not asking for agility, don't sell to them. Because there's more customers than we need today. So we can select those who really understand it. And then why would you use something other than AWS? The thing is that there are customers who need control. And that is the thing you sell to them.  And at that point, they have to choose something that they can control. Well, I see this agility bit. There's a little bit of twist, at least from our point of view at SwissStack with storage. And we're seeing customers like in life sciences doing cancer research, a lot of video and video distribution. And what they're being asked to do as operators inside their organizations is to 10x the amount of data that they're needing to store but they're not getting any more headcount. They're not getting any more budget and they're just having to figure it out. And so to them, it's this deluge of projects that they're trying to take on. And this is a way for them, an alternative path for them to go down in order to get done and enable those projects that they weren't able to do before. Yeah, so I think it's a great difference in kind of Martin's spot at HP and the resources that he can bring to bear for a customer that has to understand their business problems and translate that into agility and translate that into private cloud or public cloud. As a small company, I don't have the benefit of that sales cycle. And so we're agility spot on and I think even more of an indicator for us is that the applications that our customers have created or are creating are cloud applications natively. So we're not helping people port their legacy workloads into a piston infrastructure. We're helping companies that have already built their stateless tiering and their redundant data structures in the application and we're helping them achieve this linear cost savings as they scale out their application. And I agree, agility is the key and it's hard to quantify at that level. It just for my team and certainly when we talk to customers, if that agility light bulb hasn't come on, we run away and even more clear than that, if their application set isn't very clearly already kind of cloud architected, we also run away. And so I think that slightly puts us in kind of different engagements, but I think agility is key. I think we kind of, some of the same perspectives coming from doing products around it and who's heard of like the bus number, which is we used to use this in development parlance. Like how many people in your team that they got hit by a bus would the project be totally like screwed? And what products do around an open source ecosystem is that it gives you a vehicle to take on these projects and it de-risks taking on these private deployments for yourself. That means you have more organizational support, you have the project is on a different set of rails so you can get support throughout the project. And I think that helps also on return on investment because you need less team members in order to get the same amount of functionality and benefit out of the cloud that you're building. I'm gonna save time at the end for questions so everybody please think of some questions, we'll make sure we'll make some time for it. Just switching gears a little bit. I imagine a lot of people in the audience are thinking about how they build a case internally. You spend collectively all three of you, you spend a lot of time convincing customers that OpenStack makes sense in respect of solutions. What advice would you have for engineers, for people inside of companies that are champions, they wanna do it, they're trying to convince the organization to do it, there's some resistance, there's someone that really likes VMware or whatever. What advice do you have for them? The first advice is to go for open source solutions because then you have less lock-in. Not that you avoid lock-in completely, just have less of it and you have more opportunities to choose among vendors and do things. So for most customers that's the main choice and then when they go into the OpenStack world they can grab any of us. I'm happy to recommend Piston and all the other companies in this space. That is the beauty of the ecosystem that you can try out with any of them and switching from one to the other. Sure, it's a little bit of a headache, but not a huge headache and you will have headaches anyhow, some headaches anyhow. So just picking up on that, a lot of people, they resist open source because they view it as just being difficult to deal with and a bag of bolts and internally it's just so much easier. I can just buy a solution and we talked about de-risking things. So what advice, I mean, you've been in open source for a long time. What, if you've got an organization that's just resistant to some of the things, how do you help them get over that? Those who resist open source shouldn't use it. Let them overpay for proprietary crappy software. That's what you must let them do and they'll lose in the market because if you, I mean it seriously. So it sounds like your advice to those engineers is leave that company. No, no, I mean it not as a joke because you must pick your battles carefully and you must know where you can win and if you try to go out evangelizing open source then you need to sell your own product. The beauty of the open source movement is that it evangelizes itself. You don't have to sell that notion but if there's still people who haven't understood it or don't agree with it, leave them. Because selling to them, that will destroy ROI both for them and for you. So just leave them because there's so many and I've seen this from my skill days when open source really wasn't accepted but now it is mandated by large corporations. And the fact that you in the open stack ecosystem you have all the major IT vendors, IBM, Cisco, HP, Red Hat, and so on and very few are not there. So if you still face resistance to open source then just leave those guys. You will never be able to sell to them. So leave your job or leave your job or change your job for a change your job type of thing. Yeah, I mean kind of more pragmatically we use a lot of spreadsheets and help people through it and we get asked that question by people who are in the seat of trying to convince their management and here we go. Here's what this looks like. Here's how to amortize the cost. Here's how many operations. So I mean there's an exercise there that you can go through really to kind of pragmatically build it out. And let me tell you, it makes a ton of sense across the board whether you're replaced so in the storage base so with Swiss stack. It's super easy compared to storage appliances that you would buy and everybody has lower than Amazon costs when they're deploying with us privately as well. Yeah, so on the ROI assistance, very tactically we have a page on pistoncloud.com. It's a TCO calculator that allows you to put in your cloud requirements, storage, memory, compute capacity and then compare that to your Amazon bill and it's a fully loaded operational cost model three year amortization on the hardware and you'll be able to see your direct monthly savings with a set of assumptions. Have some questions on how we built the model. It's fully loaded, pick up the phone and we can talk you through that. So that's one help there. Back to Martin's point on the broader open source technology, I think we in this room certainly in the community have a particular challenge with OpenStack in that it's a framework that really by itself does very little but with all of our assistance it does so many different types of things from a use case standpoint. There's obviously tremendous amount of NFV discussions here. There's this private cloud conversation that we're having for both enterprise workloads, web centric workloads. There's the VMware oriented environments and so we're particularly challenged in that we have to have some kind of focus inside of this framework and then we also I think are going to see this adoption pace continue for a little bit kind of because of the complexity lag behind some of these other things. I bet when Martin was four years in at MySQL there were millions of downloads at that point and that because it was solving a very focused problem. We put up Zimbra and the first month we had 18,000 people trying a mail server and we don't have that pace yet because this framework is so vast and there's so many different use cases and I think we'll see it. I'm already seeing it this year but it's I think a particular challenge this piece of open source technology that we should be conscious of. Well, I think it's a little bit different too because of who is trying to adopt it like with a developer tool or something like a database it's downloadable, it's consumable, you can run it on your laptop but when you're building out a cloud environment that's a set of operators and what I think is so great about OpenStack as a movement, as momentum is that it allows this generation of operators to learn about it and get trained up and I think it's a very elevating thing for to bring on because it's a very portable skill set from job to job. It's not like learning a proprietary technology and getting certified in that technology. It's, I think that's a really neat thing about the OpenStack as an organization because so many companies can get involved. So Martin, I'm interested in your perspective. Do you think that the case, the ROI, the justification for OpenStack is it increasing? Are we kind of peaking? Does it just get, does it get better over time like a good wine? What's kind of your experience in looking back on your history with open source? It will definitely improve. It is improving and it will keep improving and one reason for that is automation. That we are building a very complex product and we are not done yet with making it easy to use. It's complex for those who build it and complex for those who use it. When it reaches maturity, it will be complex for those who build it and easy for those who use it and that's when you will see the scalability where you can scale the cloud without scaling your organization and ROI will only improve and I think also we will learn to reach higher densities of whatever it is, hardware density, software density. Using containers, we will have more efficiency if for certain workloads, not all of them and we will learn to sort of pack more stuff into the same space and that's why I used the analogy of maybe containers are like mopeds and hypervisors are like cars in a big congested city but we should look at the biggest cities of the world like Sao Paulo or Delhi or something and see how the heck do they get so many people to move around so quickly every day and it is by optimizing the system and using the same street area for multiple different purposes and sort of really maximizing the heck of it which we have never learned to do in the Western world. Los Angeles is heavily congested partly because every car is of the same massive size and there's nothing else. There are no buses practically and no mopeds and none of that. So it's an analogy but I do think it will apply to the open stack world and we'll learn to optimize the heck out of it and I think it will happen through vendors and we will specialize in our certain ways and then it'll come to us because we make it very easy to consume and we figure out a way that's suitable for your workloads. And of course HP, we sell to very large enterprises who will do massive, massive things so we optimize for them and I guess Piston optimizes for a slightly different target market. Yeah and I think we're like, so Swiss stack is in a little bit different position because we're just focused on open stack Swift and the object storage workload and after working on the project for several years at this point, we've now we've moved to more of that download model particularly for testing and development and now we're at a point where you can go to, so Swissstack.com you can go create an account, download the software and not really engage with a project manager to get up and running and so I think with this project with Swift, with what we've done around Swissstack, you're starting to see what the maturity is gonna start to look like coming from the ecosystem. So I'm looking forward to the stats that I hope you'll publish one day about how many petabytes are managed by Swift in the world and showing a curve growing. That's an awesome idea. Do you have that? We have the data. So just picking up, Marta, you mentioned about how HP thinks about selling open stack versus maybe like Piston. Just pros and cons, how do you guys think about it? Where does Piston fit in terms of a ROI to a customer versus where does HP fit and where does it overlap? Good question. I can't speak for Piston but I do know that at HP we serve very large enterprises. So they're giant IT operations and they do everything you can ever do with computing. They have their own data centers, they outsource some and they use managed clouds and public clouds and we serve them across the whole range. So one of our unique selling points at HP is completeness. If you need a private cloud, we got it. If you need a managed cloud, we got it. If you need a public cloud, we got it. If you need hardware, we got it. If you need services, you got it. Whatever you need, we have it. And we have it worldwide. We're already selling in every major region in the world. So, and of course, large companies need that and that's where it's what we specialize in. Whereas I would assume that Piston takes a more limited geographic scope and limited scope on certain types of customers. I imagine, Jim, you don't have people on every comment. Not yet. Not until I buy HP. That was Josh's joke, I kind of stole it. So, yeah, I think we obviously have to pick our battles. And I think it's not just geographic battles. It's also this light bulb that has gone on for the teams that we work with that, their application. The agility light bulb has gone on. The architecture of their application has been cloud from day one and they're looking at either rapid growth of in-house infrastructure in a more efficient way or looking at bringing public cloud workloads back in-house without having to hire a huge staff of SIS admins. And so it's that use case that we're kind of laser focused on. I think Martin's point though, because I think at the end of the day, the underpinning technology is the same and we completely agree that whether it's VMs or containers or bare metal, big data instances, the infrastructure shouldn't really care and the customer shouldn't have to do specialized work to get that particular workload onto their infrastructure. And so I think a lot of the technology challenges, even though the use cases are different, are very similar. How about Joe and storage with you competing? How do you think of that? What do you use at SwissStack to differentiate and what's a better fit for let's say maybe an HP or maybe even a more traditional solution like from EMC?  So that's easy, right? Well, let me back up a bit. We focus on a very specific use case, which is object storage for unstructured data. And that means we're not taking on database workloads. We're not taking on virtual machine workloads. We're taking backups, archives, documents, media, and that's the work that we focus on and that's all we do. And so when a use case comes up, that is to take that on, we get calls from other folks in the OpenStack ecosystem to help them to take that on because we're so focused on that use case. And I think where we differentiate against other competitors like with an EMC, they're taking on those types of workloads which are more traditional workloads which are still absolutely essential for applications. It's just as the scale in the data center gets bigger, as applications become larger and larger and you have this trend towards software as a service, which means more users are using an application and that's just growing in the data center versus each enterprise having their own version of exchange server in the closet. That's a situation where you can use general purpose storage. But when that exchange server in the closet moves to Zimra or metaphorically, then the scale becomes much larger and the storage requirements become more specialized and that's where we come in. So let me pause. Any questions from the audience? We've got about 10 minutes left. Yes. Yes. Yes. For legacy. Yeah. Have a short tactical answer then pass the mic. Yeah, so very pragmatically what we've done is we've also realized that. So Swift is an object API and so what we've implemented is a file system gateway that speaks SIFS and NFS so that we can offload the type of storage which is optimized for unstructured data into it and so that's a way that we help out with onboarding and then the transition's important so what we've executed is you can put files in and they get objects out so that way in 2019 or whatever the timeframe we spoke of when you're ready to build those next applications the objects are waiting for you so they can be served out. So pragmatically we've been thinking about that and have built that. Yeah, so first off, our current go-to-market strategy is hopefully not our indefinite go-to-market strategy. It's a focus of a small company to solve I think the most pain that exists in the market for the product and listen, we didn't come to this without talking to hundreds of enterprise customers like yourself and the conclusion that we came to as a small company is that our architecture of web scale everything hyperconverged, the technology is ready for the enterprise but the enterprise isn't ready for the technology if that makes sense, right? There's too many antibodies around CCIE certifications and EMC relationships and pre-bis of hardware and VMware multi-year contracts and that the enterprise is just kind of not ready for web scale open-scale. Have you run it? That's today and hopefully that changes. But if you run it, it sounds like it was more of a how do I move my legacy applications? Yeah, but in the meantime, how do you do that? Then I would introduce you to my friend Martin Picos because companies like his or even what VMware is doing, my old friends there I think are at this stage probably perfectly suited to spend lots of time with you. Thanks for the lead. Thanks for the lead, Jim. That's very much what we do and when HP decided a few years ago to become a leading vendor of cloud, they knew that it meant building fantastic cloud products but also becoming experts on the transition from what we call the classical IT to the new style of IT. So that's why it is for HP a giant undertaking because we are not just building products on top of OpenStack and Cloud Foundry and so on, we're also building a practice of transitioning, helping our customers transition from the old to the new and managing, there are many ways of dealing with legacy. Sometimes you just isolate it and manage it as such. Sometimes you isolate it and manage it with new tools and sometimes you migrate it to the new environment and run it on top of the new environment. The good news with a cloud platform is that you can of course within an image and an instance you can spin up any environment you like. So the underlying platform can be very modern and you can spin up an instance that mimics an older world environment with an older operating system and so on. So for us it's a very high priority so I'd be happy to have a discussion at American Airlines and others. I'd be interested to know at American Airlines, do you still run mainframes? Probably a few? Okay. Yeah, gotcha. Yeah. But it's an excellent point, I mean we still live in an age of mainframes. I mean it's interesting in a history of compute, people rarely ever rewrite applications. It like never happens. So I think living with a diverse IT environment is probably something that will be here. 99% of switch ports by 2019, is that a friend's at Gartner or who? IDC? Listen, I don't know if we'll get there but I would say if that happens we've all collectively kind of failed to some extent because I think the inevitable is that the big guys are on pace to do it more efficiently than we can but that shouldn't be the case and I think these Amazon savings that we're seeing today in real world environments are a great example and I think if IDC's right then we've all kind of screwed up. Any other questions? Any other quick questions in the audience? Well let me get a question then for the panel. So from a startup perspective or from an HP perspective what's the biggest myth about OpenStack today that you deal with in talking with customers? In terms of what they believe to be true and is not the case or what is the case and they just don't believe it. Specifically with storage it's how quickly they can get up and running and how product companies have solved that and I think there's this eye opening that happens when they use a product that's a little bit more refined that can glue together open source software and commodity hardware and I think that's a shock for people at this stage. Yeah, I think outside this conference the biggest myth is that OpenStack is not ready for production deployments and it's propagated by some of our friends at VMware and they're wrong, it is and it is and I think all of these use cases are number one and then the one that I think we deal with the most is that the public cloud is cheaper and it's not, if you do it wrong, it is. If you do it right, you can save a lot of money. What do you think Martin? Yeah, I don't really have anything to add. I agree with those and I'm so new at my job I haven't seen any of them. All right, well with that, listen, thank you everybody. Give our panel a big round of applause. Thank you.


Azobenzines are ideal candidates for molecular switches due to their ability to exist in two forms, cis and trans, which can interconvert through photochemical or thermal processes, inducing significant geometric changes and making them excellent building blocks for dynamic molecular devices. This article was authored by Estibalismarino and Maria Ribigorda.


Welcome to 2020 and your first Space News of the Year. And we have got an excitingly, epically amazing year ahead of us, which Jared is going to be talking about in just a moment. And then after that, we've got Dr. Tammotha Scove, not just bringing in a space weather, but also a deep dive on the Parker Solar Probe. It's a pretty awesome segment. But also we've got a whole lot of really great content coming out for the rest of the year. We're throwing in new graphics, we're throwing in a whole bunch of new stuff. And if you like to stay up to date with what tomorrow is doing, make sure to like and subscribe on YouTube and hit that notification bell as well. We're trying to hit 100,000 subscribers before the end of the year. And our analytics say we're gonna be about 15,000 short. I would love to prove the analytics wrong. All right, my name is Jamie Higginbotham. We're gonna get this show started. Let's head on over to Jared, giving us an update on what to look forward to in 2020. First and foremost, a literal flotilla of orbiters and landers will be heading off to Mars when our launch window reopens. We've got just enough rocket power to make the shortest duration trip every 26 months. So what'll be on its way this year? NASA is sending Mars 2020, which looks a lot like Curiosity, but has upgraded mechanical systems and instruments. It'll also carry the incredibly epic Mars helicopter scalp. This is going to be the first powered flight in atmosphere vehicle on another world, which should snap some nice landscape shots with the Mars 2020 rover in the frame. In addition, it will have a system to cache samples for eventual return to Earth, keeping some pristine before humans arrive and make a mess of everything. The European Space Agency partnered with Roscosmos, which will be launching the Rosalind Franklin rover and the Kazachuk lander. The China National Space Administration will launch its X-H1 mission, its first mission to another planet where it will be all Chinese vehicles from launch to surface operations. X-H1 includes an orbiter and a lander with a small rover. The fourth player joining the Mars fray will be the newest, the United Arab Emirates. They're going to be sending their hope Mars mission orbiter on a Japanese H2A rocket. It'll study the present climate of Mars to help generate better weather forecasts and look for evidence as to why Mars climate changed so rapidly and catastrophically in its past. And we'll potentially have three sample return missions in all three phases of operation. China will use its recently flight-proven Long March 5 heavy lift rocket to send its next mission to the moon, Chengdu-5. No information yet on where it will land or how large of a sample of the moon it will return to the earth, but it will be the first sample returning from our closest celestial neighbor since the Soviet operated Luna 24 in 1976. So we'll see how well the cheese has aged over almost half a century. In July, NASA's mission with the best background ever created, OSIRIS-REx, will gently lower down to the surface of asteroid Bennu and grab a sample using a nitrogen gas vacuum on the end of a robotic arm. There's enough nitrogen available for three sample attempts and those samples will return to earth in 2023. Then in December, JAX's Hayabusa-2 mission will deliver its samples of the asteroid Ryugu, multiple samples both from the surface and using an explosive charge to excavate below the surface were captured. So we'll get to see just how much Hayabusa-2 snatched of Ryugu and I'm really hoping that it's a lot. And when 2023 rolls around and OSIRIS-REx drops off its samples of asteroid Bennu, then we'll have some very exciting work in comparing those two samples with each other, seeing what's the same and also what's different. Someone please alert Dr. Scove, we've got two missions to study the sun launching this year. The first is Solar Orbiter, an ESA mission which will launch in February and help with understanding heliophysics as a whole, along with more data to improve space weather forecasts. ISRO is also jumping into the solar mix with their own mission, Adida-1, being sent to the Earth's sun L-1 point. Parker's solar probe will also continue its present orbits around the sun. And just one more thing, ESA's Beppe Colombo mission to Mercury will perform two gravity assists. First at Earth and another at Venus to bleed off energy as it heads in towards a Mercury arrival in 2025. Getting to Mercury is extremely difficult. But don't think that the robots are gonna be dominating 2020. You're about to see the inevitable rise of humans with their spaceships from Earth. Almost every single instance of the return of human spaceflight capability to the United States of America is something we watched play out for the entirety of the 2010s, and now it's finally paying off. SpaceX's Crew Dragon and Boeing Starliner should begin operational crew rotation missions to the International Space Station, returning human spaceflight capability to the U.S. Suborbital flights from Virgin Galactic carrying paying customers and Blue Origin carrying company astronauts should occur, and the debut of the Alpha launch vehicle from Firefly Aerospace, along with Launcher-1 of Virgin Orbit should occur as well. And NASA is also preparing the first stage of the space launch system rocket to carry the Artemis-1 mission to the moon through what's called a green run, where they're basically gonna fuel it up, run everything and see how it works. And a few larger rockets are also expected to make their first flights in 2020. This includes Japan's H-3 vehicle and Arianespace's Arian-6, which both of these rockets are intended to lower launch costs for their current operators thanks to the pressures of SpaceX. And speaking of SpaceX, we can't wait to see Starship Mark III and Mark IV begin to make high velocity, high altitude test flights, and construction of prototypes for Super Heavy should begin as well later in the year. Also, the launch cadence for Falcon 9s will absolutely crank as SpaceX works to build out its Starlink satellite internet constellation as fast as possible. And SpaceX isn't the only one building out their satellite internet constellation. The OneWeb is also expected to begin to deploy their satellites en masse for their own constellation. 2020 is indeed shaping up to be an amazing year for spaceflight. Now, if time allows the day job, I'm also hopeful that later this week, I can produce a separate video outside of Space News talking about what to expect later this year and then over the next five to 10 years, kind of a high level picture of why this year matters so much for humans living in a working space. And in that, I'm also probably gonna update is to some of the new elements that you've seen already in the Space News episode and kind of what we're working on for our live shows as well. So again, make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel. Now, we're hoping to cover some launches last week, but there weren't any, but we do have a launch coming up this next week. And of course, the return of an old musical figure. -♪ From her destination, cause she's flying, walking, she's flying. Yes, I think my plan is to keep flyer walking back in the show. I might change that graphic a little bit, but y'all loved it, y'all told me you missed it, so back in it goes. All right, now it's time for me to hand it over to Dr. Tammeth Ascove, who'll be talking about not only space weather, but also the Parker Solar probe. Space weather this week is definitely starting out the new year with some promise. As we switch to our front side sun, it all started with region 2753. This is a solar cycle 25 sunspot. It occurs at high latitudes, very far away from the magnetic equator, but no sooner than this region rotates off of the earth-facing disk, then yet another solar cycle 25 sunspot appears that's region 2755. As we switch to our far side sun, you can see it from stereo's view. This is stereo looking at the sun from the side. Right about the beginning of the year, you see that solar cycle 25 sunspot emerging right about the center of stereo's view. This region is the second region of the new solar cycle that we've seen in just so many days, and even though we do have yet another solar cycle 24 sunspot that has emerged in stereo's view that will be rotating into earth view, having all these new sunspots emerging so close together means these new regions will start flaring soon. And that means we're gonna start having to worry about radio blackouts, not just for amateur radio and emergency communications, but also for radio comms when it comes to rocket launches and other types of space traffic. Last year, NASA's Parker Solar Probe made records around the world as it flew closer to the sun than any other spacecraft. The probe has now made three of its 24 plan passes through the sun's corona, and scientists are beginning to unravel longstanding mysteries. Four papers published back in December in nature, described early results from the data, but one discovery in particular has everyone in the scientific community talking. It's the discovery of kinks in the magnetic field near the corona at the edges of equatorial coronal holes thought to be the birthplace of the slow solar wind. These switchbacks, as now they are affectionately called, are created when the sun's magnetic field folds back in on itself, which can only occur because the field is frozen into the charged gas of the solar wind as if glued there by magnetic and electric forces. The reason why these switchbacks are so noteworthy is that they might finally be leading us to understand why the solar corona is so much hotter than any other region of the sun. Considered to be the holy grail of solar atmospheric physics, the coronal heating problem has plagued the physics community since before scientists even knew the solar wind existed. And now finding these switchbacks is like finding the smoking gun that will dramatically change current theories of the solar corona and the solar wind. At the American Geophysical Union meeting back in December, numerous solar and space physicists gathered to discuss the origin and nature of these switchbacks. As it turns out, near the sun's surface, small fast jets of solar wind can overtake slower ones, thus causing the magnetic field that is glued to these different jets of solar wind to fold back in on themselves in kink, like ribbons or flags kink while flapping in a rapid breeze. But in space, these kinks imply a very specific kind of wave process called alphane waves, which have long been postulated as a source of heating of the corona. The longstanding question has always been, well, what would be causing these alphane waves to develop? And now it looks like Parker Solar Probe has found the answer. Impulsive jets from things like spike fuels, jetlets, or even bright points on and beneath the solar surface may just be the source of coronal heating. But the final word is yet to be written. As Dr. Tim Horbury from Imperial College said at the meeting, quote, the nice thing about the sun is that it has so many possible sources of impulsive events, so clearly we need to work back over the next few years to find out and sample what they are, unquote. For more details on this week's space weather, including those new cycle 25 sunspots and what it means for radio communications, come check out my channel and see me at spacewetherwoman.com. And that is our first space news of 2020. And I hope you're as excited about the new year as we are. Now, before we go, I do want to thank all of the citizens of tomorrow who helped to make all of these episodes happen. You are the people who help keep the lights on at the station and keep us on orbit without you there is no show. And we are updating our rewards for you in 2020. You're gonna see those very, very shortly. It's gonna be amazing. You're gonna get an incredible behind the scenes look at how we produce every aspect of the show from news to live shows to everything else. It's going to be pretty awesome. And I'm looking forward to sharing all of this with you in 2020. And if you'd like to learn how you can get access to the behind the scenes footage and behind the scenes access as well as help support the show so we can keep doing this week after week. Head on over to youtube.com slash TMRO slash join. All right, one last note. And that is remember that Jared Head has his own channel on YouTube now. You can go over to youtube.com slash Jared Head. And if you really have an interest in astronomy as opposed to industry news that's really where you're gonna want to follow that. We'll have some astronomy stories on tomorrow in 2020 but really our focus will be industry news into the new year. So if you really, really, really enjoyed those astronomy stories from Jared and Jade and Sarah and so forth Jared Head's channel is gonna be a better place to pick those up kind of moving forward. Thank you all so much for watching. We'll see you next week.


According to Paho, quote, one of the essential components of the safe vaccination system is the surveillance of events supposedly attributable to vaccination or immunization, more commonly known as ISAVI. The ISAVI surveillance is aimed at early detection of any adverse events that may occur following immunization in order to monitor and classify risks related to a vaccine, the manufacturing process, transportation, storage, administration, and any pre-existing condition in the vaccinated person and to rule out an association between the event and the vaccine, end quote. In November, a Paho consultant visited St. Lucia to facilitate an ISAVI and the Health Surveillance System rapid assessment exercise and the development of a surveillance manual through a one-day critical pathways workshop for officials and staff of the Ministry of Health, Wellness, and Early Affairs. Chief Medical Officer Dr. Sharon Belma George says the training session is a timely venture as the region battles to regain confidence in immunization. One of the areas that this workshop and this critical, the rapid assessment exercise is going to assist us in seeing the gaps and strengthening our capacity, looking at events that are supposedly attributed to vaccines and immunizations. One of the areas which I think will definitely help is for us to work on the confidence of the public on parents in our capacity to monitor the effects, side effects, or anything related to the vaccines that may come up. Puminous Secretary Jenny Daniel says the development of the ISAVI surveillance manual is also expected to guide policy for effective immunization in a country as well as implementing a high-quality surveillance system. The Ministry of Health and Wellness and Early Affairs and the expanded program on immunization therefore thanks the Pan American Health Organization for the joint partnership and its support in launching an ISAVI manual for St. Lucia. So given these remarks, it's really evident the importance of this manual and therefore the importance of this workshop starting here today. I do hope that we speak and we bring about the discussion points that would lead us to establishing this critical manual as we go forward with our vaccination program. Country Program Specialist Mr. Renal Yewit expressed PAHO's continued commitment to ensuring proper monitoring of vaccine events. To ensure that vaccines-related events are monitored, PAHO trained approximately 25 healthcare workers on events supposedly attributable to vaccine or immunization. Today you will be going through several exercises. You'll be looking at the surveillance system, you'll be looking at gaps in the surveillance system. The ISAVI manual will provide a comprehensive and technical review of all processes and procedures for applying and implementing a high-quality ISAVI surveillance system in the region. The manual is expected to bring together the knowledge of vaccine safety specialists and other experts within the region and from around the world. The session was held at the Coco Palm Resort in a blended format and was facilitated by PAHO consultants Mr. Akil Williams and Mr. Koen Rock. For the communication unit of the Ministry of Health, Wellness and Early Affairs, I'm Sant Justin.