be joining us. Welcome to another episode of the nonprofit show, but not just any episode because this is Friday and Friday is Ask and Answer, which is my personal favorite day. Maybe it's because it's Friday too, Jack. But today I have the great honor and privilege of doing Ask and Answer with Fundraising Academy's trainer extraordinaire, Jack Elotto, CFRE. Welcome, my friend. Thank you for having me again. It's always great to be on this Friday, Ask and Answer show because I love the questions and I learned so much from the questions as much as the answers.  People will ask us when we're out in public. Sometimes they call, email. I mean, it's really an interesting way that these questions come to us. Sometimes we feel compelled to withhold a name or withhold a community because they can be a little dicey and we don't want to put anyone into a precarious position, but they come from all over the place. So it's really exciting. And thanks to our sponsors who allow us to do this exciting work without any interference. They never use any of their muscle on our editorial content or direction. And those folks include Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, your part-time controller, which is celebrating your 30th anniversary in business this week. Nonprofit Thought Leader, Fundraising Academy at National University, Staffing Boutique, Nonprofit Nerd herself, Jared Ransom, and Nonprofit Tech Talk. If you've missed any of our episodes, check us out on Roku, YouTube, Amazon Fire TV, and Vimeo. And you can now download all of our episodes on podcast format. So if you'd like to consume your content that way, cue us up. Okay, here we go. Josefina, I would say Josefina or Justifina. I don't know how she says it. Josefina in Los Angeles, California says, I know you were asked this question quite a bit, but how do we get our board to be more present in the process of non-profit fund development? They seem to think that success is all on the backs of our development team. They are not stepping up and helping us. Wow. This is a common problem, isn't it, Julia? I mean, we've heard this before. I like to say the first thing is that fundraising is a team effort. It's a team that involves staff and leadership and board. And here's another thing. It's not my thought, and I can't remember where I read it, but the role fundraising, the role the board plays in fundraising is inescapable. They must have some role in fundraising. Secondly, I like to say Josefina, manage up.  One, the first thing that I think is critically important, Julia, is that development team members must present at every board meeting. They must present their success and they must bring their challenges so that the board can discuss those challenges. Successes and failures must be achieved. Josefina, here's something I would recommend. I would recommend that you do a training assessment of board members as it relates to fundraising. So you can make this up or you could go online and find some instrument out there, but I like for you to create your own. So here's how you would do it. You might say to your board members, on a scale of one to five, rate the following things. One, your knowledge of prospecting. If they say, I have no knowledge of prospecting, that's a one. If they say, I have a huge knowledge of prospecting, that's a five. What is your knowledge of cultivation? What is your knowledge of stewardship? What is your knowledge of solicitation? And have them rate that. Also, I'd include in that assessment. I understand my role and responsibility as it relates to fundraising. Get that assessment back and then create a training system that you will do with the board, maybe 20 minutes at every board meeting, maybe 30 minutes at every board meeting. Finally, and Julie and you and I have talked about this before, we both endorse this, create a board engagement agreement. In that agreement, they agree that they're going to introduce you to their network. They're going to, they know somebody at a foundation, they're going to have a house party. They're going to make this gift. They're going to serve on this committee. They're going to be involved in fundraising in this way. So all of those things, I think, are really important with managing up, because that's what we have to do as fundraisers. We have to manage our board's work in fundraising. You know, Jack, I love that you said that because this is undoubtedly the number one, I truly believe this is the number one issue that comes my way. And it has for my entire career, serving on boards, serving in the community, you know, asking for money. This has been at the heart of so much heartache, if you will. And I think that it's because that the development team, one, they are not present at the meetings unless there's like a drama. And that could be, we got this huge gift or lost this huge gift. It's two extremes and not the everyday grind. But I think you are right. We are not educating our board members to understand this. And we're not accountable. Yeah. I don't think they have to be at every single meeting. I agree. And when I hear from staff, staff who say, well, I'm not invited to the board meeting, hey, I've left jobs or I didn't take jobs when they said you're not going to be at the board meeting. I didn't, I just so critical. Here's the thing that board members must understand. Money fuels mission. Yeah. That's a simple three word sentence. Money fuels mission. What are we talking about money? We're talking about fundraising. Right. Well, you know, I say, I say the same thing, but probably in a more punitive manner. I would say no money, no mission. Exactly. Absolutely. This is the thing. You can have, you know, all these great intentions and you can want the best for your community and you can want to solve a problem. But if you can't fund, if you can't use the concept of cause selling, selling is not a bad word. Nope. Selling for your cause. You cannot achieve these, these goals. And so. And if you don't, if you don't understand that money fuels mission, then maybe you're on the wrong board. Yeah. Well, and board leadership is not on the right place. I think that's right. For me too, Jack, before I move on, this is a board leadership issue too. You know, you've got to have board chairs. You need to have a CEO that pushes that a board liaison position that pushes this that understands why this is so critical and that it's not just a if wishes were fishes, we'd all have a fry kind of. Yeah. How about having board members paired with development staff as a mentoring relationship where the staff is mentoring, especially new board members around what the fundraising initiatives of the organization are. I love that. There's so many ways to manage up at your point about who is responsible for monitoring those, those board members as it relates to fundraising. It's the board. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's the board. Well, Josefina, you did get us on a power hour day because we've just been railing on this. Yeah. But I'm glad I'm glad you're asking the question questions, Josefina. It's it's so important. I think it's really amazing. Okay. This is an interesting question. We've had this kind of before in a way this comes from name with held from Las Vegas, Nevada. I actually took this person's name off. And the question or the comment was we have a development director who's going to lead another organization in our same space. You could say she's going to a competitor. This is great. We don't hear this word a lot, but this is this exists in our sector. She will be their new CEO and we are fearful that she will take all our donor relationships with her. Wow. Yeah, I love this question. You know, one of the things I love to ask organizations is who has the relationship with the donor? Is the donor's relationship with the fundraiser or is the donor's relationship with the organization? If you are building relationships with yourself and that donor, you're following the wrong path. In cause selling, we build relationships with our causes and with our organizations with the people that depend on us as beneficiaries or clients of the organization. So that's number one. You build donor relationships with your organization, your mission, your causes and not with the director of development. Okay. I love that you said this. And to me, the minute you said this, a lot of fear and stress just washed off me. Because I'm like, yeah, that's the more holistic way to look at that. AFP reports association of fundraising professionals, which is really the big umbrella group for our sector and fundraising. They report that the average development officer only lasts 18 months in a job, 18 months.  So that's another reason why you are building relationships with your organization, your mission, your cause, the people who benefit from the work that you do, whether it's an arts audience or animal welfare or whenever it is, you build that relationship with the organization. The other thing is, and you mentioned AFP, and this is so true, confidentiality. Donor information is confidential. It doesn't belong to the director of development or the CEO of the organization. It belongs to the organization. And you cannot share that information unless you have the donor's permission. She cannot take pieces of your donor database with her to the new organization. That is an ethical violation. And if your donors, unless they opt in to be their name and address to be shared, then you cannot do it. And I'll tell you something else that's really important as it relates to this. In the future, this organization in Vegas or these individuals, you might consider having staff and board members sign confidentiality agreements where they agree that they will not do this kind of thing. Well, there should be, and this is a discussion for another day, but there are a bunch of things, conflict of interest. I mean, if you are dealing with anything in healthcare, they're the HIPAA, you're dealing with minors under the age of 21, children under the age of 18. You have policies that should be signed that way.  And those I believe should be done in December so that they are in effect for the turn of that next year. And that should be a pro forma kind of thing. It should be. You know, when we talk about handling objections, we say anticipate. Yeah. And that's true for all of the things that you anticipate as it relates to staff and board members. Hey, I was a consultant to an animal welfare organization. And I have signed a confidentiality agreement. There's nothing wrong with that. Yeah, yeah. No, I think it's really important. And again, depending on where it is that you serve what sector within the nine main sectors, there are specific documents that need to be not only executed, but they need to be reported on your 990.  And now if I'm not mistaken, the whistleblower policy has to be declared on the 990, you know, do you and the questions are, do you have it or do you not? It's so, you know, but yeah, things are being looked at. So, okay, well, this has been a doozy of a day. But this question came in specifically for Jack. So I love this always gets me really excited. This is a question for Jack. How important is it to have a CFRE certified fundraising professional or executive, right? Yeah, certified fund raising executive. I want to stay in fundraising. I really like it. And I'm good at working with donors. However, I want to earn more money. And I'm wondering if the CFRE will help me with this goal, goal name withheld from Tampa, Florida. CFRE's earn on average more money. They do. It's a national statistic. I can't remember what it was. And it may have changed over the course of the years, but at least a 25% increase in earning. And that's important because this individual wants to maybe needs to earn more money. So yes, it's really important. The other thing is, it's a credential. It's not a certificate. It is something that you keep. My dad used to say to me, Jack, when you get your bachelor's degree, no one's ever going to be able to take it away from you. That's the same thing with the CFRE. You get it. It's yours. You have to renew every three years, but that's an easy task to do, just getting past it. Here's the other thing in my experience of working with hundreds of CFRE candidates, Julia, is that they bring their best to the profession. When they call me and they say, I am interested in earning my CFRE, I got an email today or actually on LinkedIn, someone connected with me from Great Britain about the CFRE. You know what? I look at them, especially women and women of color. And they talk to me and I say, why do you want it? What's going on? What's your study style? What's your, you know what I see in them? Leaders. I see in this group of people, and I tell them this, I say, you know what? You may be successful at getting your CFRE, but the fact that you're interested in it, like this individual from Tampa, Florida, tells me that your journey is going to end with you being a leader. Maybe the leader of development department and maybe the leader of the foundation, the community foundation, or a corporate giving program leadership. And the other thing I find is that even those who have not passed the test yet, they call me up, they say, I haven't passed the test yet, but they say to me, I've learned so much from doing this process. And I may not get the CFRE when I'm fine with that, guys, when people tell me that, but I've learned a lot that I could take back to my work. And that's important. It's really important. And I got to say, when having this discussion with you, I'm noticing more and more people outside of the development team, like COOs, creating officers, CEOs, even people just in their own ecosystem, somehow working in the nonprofit sector, but maybe not fundraising, having this designation, you know, which I think is really interesting. So I don't think it's just being limited to working on a development team. I love what you said. It just gives you a broader picture for leadership in general. And that's a good thing. Right. And in fact, one of the modules is leadership and management. And I love that. I love talking and talks about teams, it talks about working, talks about evaluating staff, working with volunteers, marketing, all of the things that are necessary. And, you know, Julia, to your point, I have had individuals who are executive directors, and they say, why do you want your CFRE? And they say, I want to be a better manager of my development staff. Yeah. Yeah. Because it goes back to the previous conversation, no money, no mission. I mean, that's the bane of many a CEO's existence is that relationship with fundraising and everything. Well, good luck to you in Tampa. And I'm thrilled to get this question. And I'm thrilled that they've obviously seen you, Jack, enough to know of it. I'm so happy. You're the man. You know, we are both giving back to this profession. And that's one way that I love to get back. I love it. Well, let's go to B from New Orleans, Louisiana, which by the way, in New Orleans, we're going to be at Icon. Jack's going to be there. You need to come by. We'll be broadcasting for several days from the Bloomerang booth. And so anyone who's in New Orleans during that time, it's going to be in April. Yeah, come by and say hello to us. Okay. We're a small but growing nonprofit and are getting more organized on our board policies. Can you help us understand the COI policy, where it should come from and how often board members need to execute this? So conflict of interest policy is really important. And whenever we talk about policy, we're talking about the board's responsibility. It is the board who creates policy. It is staff who implements that policy, whether it's HR policies, financial policies, gift acceptance policies, or a conflict of interest policy. All of those things come from the board. They have to approve them. They have to discuss them with staff. I'm not saying you're out of it, but it does have to come from the board. Where the policy comes from, it really doesn't matter. AFP has conflict of interest policies, a code of ethics, AHP, other organizations. I think there's like 22 organizations, higher education, healthcare, whatever it is, they all have policies around a conflict of interest. And it's really important that you have this policy in place. Every organization should have a board and staff conflict of interest policy. It protects us. When I signed a conflict of interest policy, I'm protecting myself as much as I'm protecting the organization. And as I said earlier, excuse me, the board must approve the policy. The board and staff members must sign a conflict of interest policy. The board's- Let me interrupt you. Let me interrupt you. Go ahead. Excuse me. Because I got y'all choked up with this question. So I get on the board. I get the board signing the COI, but you introduced the staff level. So let's talk about that because I don't hear that as much. Is this C-suite? Is this everybody on the staff? I think everybody, you know, they have- And one of the things you see in a conflict of interest policy, Julie, is I disclose to the organization that I have a potential conflict of interest. My husband is a printer. My wife is a printer. And on the staff person, they say, oh, you should hire Joan Smith to use for printing because she's going to give you the best deal. And I happen to have a relationship with her as a spouse or as a close friend. I need to disclose that. That my opinion of her work and her is not completely free of conflict. So that's important. A child, a board member who is on a foundation that gives scholarships away.  And then you have to recuse yourself as part of the discussion. Staff have to do that and board members have to do that. I think B, the important thing is that in these policies, it's not 100% punitive. It's also a discussion on how it gets managed. So it'll generally direct what you have to do, how you disclose it, if more bids have to be taken. I mean, if there is a recusal during any voting. I mean, so that policy is the actions, I should say, are defined. But you know what, Jack, where I'm seeing the question, the second part of this is where does it come from? I'm seeing more and more accounting companies that do the annual audits or do that work tracking this. So whoever's doing your books, they should have access to that as well. Because in, and we just talked about this, you know, a few minutes ago, the 990 is now asking, do you have these policies in place? They're not asking to see the policies. They're not asking to see anything other than check the boxes at yes or no. But I would, if you're not sure where to get these documents. Yeah, donors could ask for it. What if your donor asked for, found out that a foundation, a board member at a scholarship gave a scholarship to a child. And they asked, what happened there? How was that able to happen? And you could, you would say, well, they are eligible. So you're right. What you said is really important. It protects the individuals, but it also outlines the different ways that we get out of potential conflict of interest. So those are all really important. You know, one of the things that I find with working in the nonprofit space, we have an intimacy with donors, with our board members, that very few other industries do. Our donors tell us about their wealth. They tell us about their connections. They tell us about their families. They talk about their wills, their bequest and all of those things. And when I look at other professions, maybe a lawyer gets that kind of intimacy or a clergy person gets that kind of intimacy, we have so much responsibility around that information, confidentiality and conflict of interest. They're giving us their money. So that's a huge thing. And they're telling us things that are very personal about themselves. We ask those questions. That's what cost selling does. We ask open-ended questions.  That's a personal thing. I never thought about that, but you are really spot on.  And I think it's a pretty august responsibility as well to understand that this is intimate. You made this brilliant context of one of our first questions is the relationship should always be about the organization and not the individual players or leaders within that organization to the donor. And that kind of fits with that. But I love how you brought that forward because I think that's really true. You said august responsibility is to me a sacred responsibility.  You wouldn't expect your attorney or your tax advisor or any other host of people. We're in the same category. Wow, I love it. Well, Jack, always you bring forward super cool concepts and ideas. If you were with us earlier in the week, Jack spent two days with Jared and I talking about handling donor objections and it was riveting. And so this was another riveting day. I really appreciate your wisdom and your fun. And yeah, I just think it's great. Yeah, he's like, yeah, I'm Jack a lot of CFRE trainer. I'm going to add extraordinaire. You got a new title trainer extraordinaire fundraising academy fundraising academies at national university and you can check them out fundraising dash academy.org fundraising academy has some really cool things coming up. You'll be hearing more and more about them. You have a big conference coming up and we do and I believe that we're going to be there broadcasting from that conference. And so yeah, a lot of fun and what an amazing place for our sector to go and get really good information. So check out fundraising dash academy.org. Again, thank you to our sponsors who've made this conversation possible. They include Bloomerang American nonprofit academy, your part time controller, happy birthday to them for 30 years of service in our sector, nonprofit thought leader fundraising academy at national university staffing boutique, nonprofit nerd and nonprofit tech talk. Hey, everybody, have a great weekend. Jack, thank you once again. Thank you. Thank you guys. You ignited a fire. I love it. I really do. As we end every episode, we want to remind everyone out there to stay well so you can do well. We'll see you back here, everyone. Thank you, Jack.


Hey guys, does anybody else have a bin of dyes, especially the thin lits and embossing folders and stuff that looks like this? Or is it just me? I Recently was chatting with my friends the zoomers and one of our friends Vicki Brown had said she had a couple of these Empty boxes these are from crafters companion And I don't remember what they're called some of you may know, but I will Link it in the description below She said they have she had them she had some of the plastic dividers She didn't have any of the magnet pages But if I wanted a couple of them I could have them and I said yes And she said for the magnet pages of course you can buy them from craft crafters companion or what I did is I went to the hardware store and I got Magnetic vent covers for like your heating ducts, and these are 8 by 15 and A 3-pack was $4.98 cents at my local home depot And I cut it up and out of one I got six full-size pages and three Sort of half-sized pages. So what we're going to do is I'm going to speed through it, but I'm going to Stick my thinlets to these I'm going to put one of these clear plastic ones in the back And I'm going to show you what I do. I'll be right back Okay, the bin still looks really full and I'm okay with that I didn't really think it was going to save a lot of space But all my thinlets are now in these two boxes and I don't have to worry about them getting bent or damaged Which was a big deal when they were just in plastic bags I have lots of these kind of dies which you don't really have to worry about what with the thin ones I always worried about pieces getting lost broken bent or otherwise damaged. So this way I don't have to worry about it I'm going to put links in the description below for the materials. I used Thank You Vicki Brown for the boxes. They worked out great They are both full though. So if I ever acquire any more dies, I'm gonna have to get another box right now I don't have any attention of doing that, but this worked out fabulously. Thank you so much Don't forget to check out the description below where all the links will be for products used My link tree link is down there. And if you click on it, you're gonna find all the different places I am on the internet Including my Etsy shop my society six store red bubble my Facebook groups my website all that stuff So click on it and look around Don't forget to Go out though and have a great day do something nice for yourself because you deserve it I'm off to physical therapy for my shoulder and I will see you later. Bye guys


Alright, in this video I'm going to explain exactly why I think NFTs are going to completely change the stock photo and video market over the next 10 years. I'm going to start by going through how the stock photo and video market works today, talk about what the disadvantages of this are and how they can be solved with blockchain technologies and NFTs. So let's get into it. So I can't really get into how I think NFTs are going to totally change the stock photo industry without talking about how stock photos are bought and sold today. So that's where I'm going to start. If this is something you already know, you already know exactly how the different ways people can buy and sell stock photos, feel free to skip ahead using the timestamps below. But let's just take a look at the different ways that I can sell my stock photos. The first way that I can do it is a direct in-person sale. Now this almost never happens. Actually, this really never happens, right? But it's totally possible that somebody could come up to me and say, hey, I want to buy a license to one of your images and I happen to have a hard drive with those images. They then copy them and they hand me the money, like hand me the cash. Now if they were to do that, then 100% of the money, or all the money that they sold for the license, would go to me, OK? Now that is very rarely the case because most of the photo sales that happen these days is happening online. But I wanted to talk about that it is possible to sell photos or sell licenses to photos without a middleman in between. It's just very rare that that actually happens. Now obviously a lot of people aren't going to want to email a photographer every time they want to purchase a photo, right? So because of that, I sell my photos online. I've got a website and I can go on to that website. You know, I upload all my photos there. I've got a clearly marked price. So anybody who wants to purchase a license can go to my website, see what the price is and decide to purchase that. Now I personally use Smuckbuck for that. There's lots of other solutions out there, but they all work in similar ways. They are portfolio sites, e-commerce sites that allow photographers to sell their photos. And the advantage of this is they take a relatively small percentage compared to what like an agency would take. So for example, on Smuckbuck, the markup is 15%. So if I want to make $10 for a photo, I can charge $10 for the photo. The end customer will end up paying $11.50. $1.50, that goes to Smuckbuck. $10 of that goes to me. And the advantage of that for the buyer is that all the photos are up there and they can easily go through. Now the disadvantage of that obviously is there's a lot of photographers out there. I don't have a photo for every single advertising campaign. So what buyers would typically prefer to do rather than going to every photographer's website and purchasing them, although they do definitely do that sometimes, they prefer to go to an agency where they can search a large number of photos and more quickly find the photos they're looking for. And that's where microstock sites come in. Sites like Shutterstock, Alamy, Adobe Stock, a lot of what I talk about on this channel, all of those are microstock sites. Microstock sites work differently. Microstock sites, what they're doing is they're creating the collection and they're selling the collection directly to the customers. And they're really keeping the photographer out of it. The photographer doesn't necessarily even know specifically, in a lot of cases, who purchased their photos. Microstock sites also do a lot of advertising. So when you look at like a Smugbuck site or when you set up a photography website, you're responsible for driving all the traffic there.  You can do social media. But it's your responsibility to get people to that website. Microstock sites work differently. They actually bring the customers to the website. So they run advertising campaigns. They run email marketing campaigns. They do a lot of work to try to get customers to come in. And oftentimes they run a subscription base as well too. So they offer subscriptions. Now, the reason the buyers like these sites is they offer consistent pricing. So every photographer has to agree to the site's pricing before they get in there. So it doesn't matter which photo they find. They can basically get the same pricing on it. As well as there are a lot bigger companies, right? These are big companies with more advanced websites. They can add more features to their websites because of this. And because of that, they're very popular in a lot. Most photos, I would say these days are licensed on Microstock sites. OK, now, however, the disadvantage of this is for this service, they have a very large markup and, you know, a lot of the times the markup will all the time the market is at least 100%. So they're at least doubling it. But that's very rare. Most of the time it's 5, 600 or 700% markup. OK, so as an example, if I have a photo and I make $1 from that photo, then I'm selling that photo for $1 or licensing it out for $1 on one of these sites. Well, what's happening is at the end, the person who's taking the license is probably paying $7 or $8 and Shutterstock or one of these other companies is keeping $7 and they're giving the photographer $1. OK, so these do provide some services. They do provide some ads. But they do also take a huge markup in response to this, right? And this is, I think, where the opportunity lays, right? A lot of people when they look at, you know, the stock photography industry, they look at, you know, we just want to raise prices, right? We want to be able to charge more. Well, it's unrealistic. There's a lot of photos out there for a certain amount of sale right now or price right now on these stock sites. And I don't think, you know, other companies would try this to raising the prices is the solution to get photographers more money out of that. OK, but what we can do is reduce the amount of markup that these middlemen are taking, right? And that's how they want to talk about what NFTs can do in just a moment. OK. But before we get into that, there's other ways that photos can be purchased, right? This, you know, industry of middlemen is just expanding and it continues to expand. So if you look at companies like Facebook or Wix or HubSpot, right? Think about Facebook, for example. Facebook has ads, OK? So Facebook wants to sell ads to small businesses. Well, those small businesses sometimes don't have stock photography. They don't have good photos for their ads. OK, so Facebook, they basically saw an opportunity here.  Why don't we sell them stock photos from directly when they're creating the ad? They'll buy more ads. We can also make a bit of money off stock photography. But Facebook had a problem. They don't have a collection, right? What are they going to do? How are they going to sell photos?  They also don't want to go out and try to get photographers to upload photos to their platform. It's a lot of work to get, you know, millions of photographers in cases of Shutterstock and some of the other sites to upload their photos there. So what they'll do is they go to Shutterstock and say, hey, Shutterstock, you know, can we resell part of your collection? OK, and this is set up via all programmatically done via programs and an API. But then what Shutterstock does is they can say, OK, here's your price, Facebook, for these particular stock photos. And obviously they're marking up, you know, 250 to 700 percent. But then Facebook can mark that up further. OK, so as an example, you know, I can be selling a photo for $1, right, on Shutterstock and then somebody goes onto Facebook and purchases that for, let's say, $12 or $13. Well, I had that $1. One dollar goes to me. Let's say two or three dollars goes to Facebook and then $7 goes to Shutterstock. OK, so you see here that again, we're starting to talk about a thousands of percent markup to buy on these particular platforms. And, you know, Facebook doesn't want they prefer to, you know, take a larger portion of the market themselves, but they just don't have the collection to sell. I think, you know, Facebook and some of these other sites would prefer not to use a solution like Shutterstock, where they're already marking where they're doing a double markup. But again, there's just no options out there, but there could be, let's say, with NFTs, all right. And the last thing you want to get into is collection resellers. OK, so you look at someone like 500px or I am, what these are, these were platforms where people uploaded their photos. OK, and what they weren't able to do is they weren't able to go and find buyers, right? Another thing that's really difficult to do is find buyers and they couldn't find buyers. So instead of, and, you know, they tried, actually, 500px tried really hard to start up a stock photography business, but they weren't able to do it because they weren't able to compete with some of the micro stock sites on getting those. So what they did is rather than they still wanted to make money from photographers' photos, so they took those photos and they basically sold the rights to resell the collection to some of these other sites. So you can go on to, let's say, Getty Images and you can purchase photos that were uploaded to 500px. And again, everybody's taken a cut here when the photographer ends up getting the smallest one. OK. So basically you've got 500px, which takes a markup. It's very difficult to figure it out based on the way they do it. But then Getty also marks it up as well.  And the photographer is only making a very small amount from these photos. Right. And that's how the stock photography industry works today. Right. The vast majority of the money that's made from selling stock photos goes to intermediary companies, not the photographer. OK. Another way to put it is that intermediary companies do vast, very high markups based on all these digital photos that people have taken in the past. And there's good reasons why the stock photography industry has evolved this way. You know, buyers want to go to a website and search through a large collection of photos. And they want to be able to know that the photos they find, if they find the ones they like, they're going to be part of their budget. OK. And so the only way to do that with the technology, the way that it stood was for a company like Shutterstock or Adobe Stock or any of these other sites to set up a website, set up the servers, do all the technology. However, the way it is today, you know, there's only a handful of these stock photography companies and video companies.  But it's very there's a handful of these that dominate the industry. And it's very hard for a new company to be able to compete with them, right? Shutterstock and Getty, they have so many images, right? They put a lot of effort into getting those images, getting licenses or the rights to license those images, putting them on their servers.  And that's a huge upfront investment. And they'd have the same costs as those companies. So they wouldn't be able to do it at a cheaper price or do any better. And because of that, the stock photography industry has really stagnated around these top players, you know, they do acquisitions. If anybody comes up with a good idea that they may be able to compete with them, they just end up purchasing those companies and, you know, integrating them into their own. So over the past couple of years, there hasn't been a lot of changes to the way the stock photo industry works. However, I think that is going to change. And the thing that changed is NFTs and the blockchain. And I believe that the blockchain with NFTs, if done correctly, can give buyers everything they want without a middleman. And because there won't be a middleman, they will be getting rid of the middleman price, price markups and without those price markups, I believe it is possible to compete, right? And that's why I think that NFTs are really going to be able to disintermediate the stock photography industry over the next 10 years. However, the way that NFTs exist today, they're not really suitable for disintermediating the stock photography industry. I want to get a bit more into the details around this, because they're getting way too technical. But there's two types of NFTs you see out there, ERC721, which is used for collectibles. So when you think of NFTs, you probably think about these collectible NFTs, where basically someone creates a unique NFT and then they can then go and sell it to someone, that person can then go and resell it to someone else. OK, and they're basically used as collectibles like trading cards would be done. OK, there's another type of NFTs that are called ERC1155. And they're basically NFTs that can have quantity to them. So they're kind of more like prints. If you think of a photographer prints, right, they go out and do 50 prints of the exact same and then people can then go buy those prints and resell those prints. OK, but there's more than one. It's not a unique thing. There's like 50 of them, right? So it's more of a limited edition, right? And these have become very, very popular for collectors. And, you know, they've been popular over the last year, but they don't really help the, you know, stock photographers because what stock photographers want to be able to do is they want to be able to license their photos to many, many people, not not just a limited number of people. All right. And that is where the technology needs to be improved. So what I'm proposing is the creation of a new type of NFT being a licenseable NFT. Now, the way a licenseable NFT will work is it'll kind of be the best to both worlds, OK, when a photographer uploads a photo, they will upload a photo and it will create an NFT. Now, that NFT will represent the copyright for that photo. So most photographers will never transfer that photo and never sell that photo. However, when they upload that and they say they have the copyright, they will then be able to license that photo. So what a buyer can then do is come in and say, OK, I want to, you know, licenses photo for use. And then what they would do is pay what the photographer is asking. We'll talk about how that works in just a second. And then they would pay that money to the photographer. It would go directly to the photographer. And then they would receive an NFT that represents the license. OK, so what I'm saying is we need to have kind of a dual NFT system where an NFT represents a license to someone who's purchased it. That's going to prove that they've purchased it. And then we also need an NFT to how's the copyright for the particular photographer, right? So if you can imagine, let's say somebody, you know, has a large collection of stock photographer stock photos, what they could then do is let's say they've got 10,000 stock photos. They could then go and say, OK, this is what my minimum price is for each of these photos, right? And and upload them to this new NFT service. All right. So let's say, for example, they are already selling their photos on Shutterstock and they're willing to sell a license for a dollar. OK, so when they create that NFT, the minimum price to buy a license in that NFT would be one dollar. All right. Now, as part of this, there'd probably be a small markup as part of the fee. Probably, you know, two percent is what a lot of them are doing. So if the photographer says their minimum price is one dollar and there's a two percent fee for using the service, then if somebody wants to go and buy it, they could buy that license for a dollar and two cents. All right. And anybody can go through and purchase that. Now, if we go back to the original example, that kind of replaces the direct sale model, right? Where basically someone can go through and purchase it directly. But as we know, that's not going to be the only way that photos are going to be sold. So the reason the way that this will work is that anybody can go on to the blockchain, the advantage of blockchain is for permissionless and trustless, anybody can use it and they can purchase a license as long as they pay the photographer that one dollar. So for example, if a photographer wanted to set up their own website and was going to do their own marketing, the minimum price is a dollar, but they could mark it up for more. So you could set up my smug mug site, for example, to sell the photos for ten dollars. OK. And then what would happen is when a license was purchased, you could go through and the photographer being me, we get one dollar. And then the website owner also being me would get nine dollars and that could be split up that way. OK. So it's possible to use the exact same NFT to do direct sales, but then use the same NFT on a photo. All right. Now, third party agencies could also use this as well, too. Right. I think the thing that a lot of people have tried over the years is to get rid of the whole agencies, but we have to realize that agencies are going to be part of the stock photography industry forever. OK. That there's need that they do provide a valuable service. Right. Maybe today they've got a bit too powerful, right. But they will be around. But I think there'll probably be new agencies that will come up as part of this. All right. Now, what an agency can do is they do all the things that agencies do. Right. They can do the they can set up subscriptions. They can go and they can do marketing. OK. But the way the NFTs will work is there's that minimum price set by the photographer. So if somebody wants to go and purchase a license, what these agencies can do is basically advertise that license for five dollars, let's say, and then they can when they purchase that license for those dollars they can keep. And one of those dollars has to go to the photographer. OK. The way this works differently is the back end system for this will be NFTs and blockchain. It won't actually be the servers run by the company. They'll have to have their own web servers. But there's a it may sound similar, but there's a technology difference here in that the photographer is putting things on a blockchain. And then every other company that wants to sell photos is referencing that blockchain and they can sell them for as much as they want. As long as the photographer gets the minimum amount. OK. And what this is going to allow people to do is because the there is they're going to allow much better competition between these stock companies. And because of the stock companies, I think what you're going to see is that those margins of that markup is going to go down because it's going to be much easier once we have a collection of these NFTs that can be sold by anybody. Now, because of the way blockchain technology works, you can do a lot of other cool things around this, too. Right. One of the things that with these stock photography companies is that a photographer uploads a photo and then basically they get sold in once a month. They will then get get paid from that. However, you know, you can do a lot more if you're programming in how the payment works. As an example, let's say a model and a photographer want to go out and do a model shoot, you know, the photographer could go and create an NFT. But in that NFT, it could say that I want 50 percent of the sale to come to me. And I want 50 percent of the sale to go to the model, for example. Right. You can have it distributed in different ways. And it doesn't matter where that photo is licensed from, the model will always get that that amount. And the photographer will always get that amount because it's programmed into a smart contract, right? What this is really doing is it's taking, you know, the contract away from the agencies and putting it onto the blockchain, where basically everybody can see it. It's very it's much more. Accessible to everybody. So now I've tried to, you know, keep this video as non-technical as you can be possible in talking about NFTs, because the real, the target audience for this is photographers and creators to kind of understand how this technology can work. However, you know, I'm a very technical person and I have been working on this and it is technically possible to do all these things. However, it doesn't exist yet. There's no such thing as a licensable NFT, right? And what I'm talking about is, you know, this is the first video where I'm kind of explaining it in a bit more detail. But this is something that we're working on creating, not something that exists out in the world today. Now, if this interests you at all and you want to be involved in this project, once we get it going, you can go to uniquestock.io. We've got a mailing list there. You can basically go and sign up for the mailing list. I'll kind of keep you in the loop at what's happening and how our development is going, because we are going to need, obviously, a lot of people to upload their photos to this if we really want to be able to disintermediate the stock photography industries. We're already kind of starting to collect those names and, you know, we've already got thousands of people that have already signed up for that mailing list. However, we are really early stages, right? And, you know, when I say early stages, we've kind of got a proof of concept for how the technology is going to work, but there's still a lot more work that needs to happen at the blockchain development side of things. But we also need to do a lot of things regarding marketing and putting this out there, right? And we don't even really have a full name for this yet. So that's why I wanted to do this video as well, too. Just get your feedback. If you stuck along this long, this has probably been a pretty long video. You're obviously interested in this. And we're trying to figure out what the best thing to call this is. Right? One of the things to know is that when we set up our company, Fortaleu, right, we've kind of tackled this problem from a different way before and setting up the Fortaleu website and app where basically people can upload to all these different agencies, right? But one of the things we didn't think of is that when we named it Fortaleu is that in Britain, Lou means toilet.  So we obviously don't always know we're not the best at naming. So I wanted to get some feedback from you guys and what you think the best name for this would be, right? A couple of the names we're thinking out here is licensing NFT, license of bull NFT, digital asset licensing NFT, royalty free licensing NFT, you know, global stock asset licensing NFT. All things around licensing NFT. But what do you think this should be called? If there was an NFT out there that could be used to license photos, right? You know, what would make the most sense to you? You want to kind of understand, you know, come up with a name that most photographers are going to understand. So let me know in the comments what you think about the different names or if you have a better name for it.  The one of the things we've really struggled with or I really struggled with, I guess, is just how to explain this, right? I've got this picture of how it can work in my head, but trying to explain this with the technology of blockchains and NFTs. Everything is really new here. I know NFTs have really become more popular this year, but I think it's there's not a really good understanding, you know, of what they are and even myself. It took me a good six months to actually really understand and play with them and go in and start programming them even to really understand exactly how these work. OK, so want to make sure, you know, one of the biggest issues I think we're going to have with this is as we go forward, right? Is how are we going to get everybody on on board and understanding how this is a better way to do things? OK, and that's what I need your help with. Now, one of the things to note is that this is not going to take not going to happen quickly. OK, there is so much work that needs to happen to be able to compete with these large stock agencies, right? And we're talking about years of work. However, if you look at it, this is a fundamentally better way to do things, right? They having a decentralized system where there's a whole collection where anybody can go in and purchase the photo for a price that a photographer is willing to accept is a significantly better way of doing things than the way that we're doing that right now with all these middlemen in the markup. So although it's going to take a lot of work and a lot of time, it's definitely worth all the things that's inevitable, given where the technology is going. It's kind of like the whole DSLR versus mirrorless, right? Do you know what I mean? There for a very long time, cameras had to have mirrors because of film. Then we went into digital and the easiest way to move from film to digital is to keep the mirror in there. But once you moved to digital, you didn't really need a mirror, right? However, there's a lot of technology built up, a lot of lenses, a lot of other reasons why it just made sense to keep the mirror in there for a while. And it took a very, very long time for cameras and mirrorless cameras to catch up with the technology. And I think we can say today safely that mirrorless cameras can be made as good as mirror cameras, right? You don't really need the mirror in there for digital. It just took a long time and a lot of people fought it tooth and nail. And but eventually now there are mirrorless cameras. I think most people agree that, you know, mirrorless cameras are probably the future. And eventually, at some day in the future, mirrors will go away. Although there's still great, you know, mirrored cameras out there. I don't want to say there's not some comments about the Nikon 850 that's still a great camera. You still can take great photos with mirrored cameras. But going forward, obviously, the market is moving towards mirrorless. It's kind of the same thing. It's going to take a while for NFTs to be used to license photos. You know, once this is set up and it will take a very long time. There will always be people that are going to want to go to agencies and not use NFTs. But over time, because it's fundamentally a better technology, it will, I think, you know, increase the number of people purchasing licenses via NFTs and decrease, you know, the number of people purchasing licenses through traditional stock agencies. And the great news, too, is for you as a photographer or as a videographer or as a vector artist, the people that jump on this earlier get an earlier going to benefit, right? If you're going to look back to the whole mirrorless debate, Sony went full full in to the mirrorless day and look how they came out. The companies that jumped on mirrorless early, you know, had a lot of advantages and did very well compared to the companies who didn't jump on mirrorless early. And it's going to be the exact same thing for photographers. They're going to be huge advantages for those that get in early and, you know, start using this technology. Obviously, there's always road bumps when it comes to getting in early. But the type of technology is maturing. But I think, you know, if you've been around doing photography a while, the people who uploaded the first photos to Shutterstock did very, very well. And I think it's going to be the same thing with NFTs. The people who can get into this early are able to figure it out with us and they'll go forward. As as it grows, those people are going to get the majority of the rewards and the ones that, you know, wait behind, wait behind until it's everybody's already moved over. It's going to be much more difficult for them. So again, if this is something that interests you, make sure you subscribe to the channel, go to uniquestock.io and sign up for the mailing list and, you know, keep an eye on the space. I'm going to keep posting videos as much as I can about this as we kind of make progress through the bill and setting up these licensable NFTs. And as always, anyways, best of luck selling your photos online.


Back to Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the advanced instructor student from The Noise. We are live in Las Vegas for HP Discover, day one of three days of wall-to-wall coverage, and a lot of exciting things happening here at HP. Obviously, a ton of news is coming down the pike, more coming every hour. Keynotes starting at four o'clock today with Meg Whitman. But a lot of the big news here is around software, software-led infrastructure, software-defined infrastructure, storage. I'm John Furrier, the founder of my co-host, Jeff Frick here, and our guest is Dave Donatelli, the EVP and General Manager at HP Storage. Dave, welcome back to theCUBE. Great to be here. As always, it's always fun to have you here because you run a very large business of HP. It's getting bigger every day. You've been on, I think theCUBE, since we've been doing theCUBE at HP multiple years now, three on our fourth season here with HP. HP is a spring in their step right now. I was just commenting on the opening about the culture here. People are smiling in a good way. They're happy, they're approachable. They got a spring in their step, but they're still working hard. So, how is business? And then we'll talk about the announcement. Sure. Well, we're excited at HP. We talked about going on a five-year journey to really change the company. We think we're making tremendous progress with it. You saw our financial results for the first half of this year have beaten Wall Street expectations of both quarters. And we talked about really this being an IP-led turnaround for the company. And we've been introducing all kinds of new and exciting technologies across our entire business. And we think not only is that important, but we find ourselves at an incredibly important time in their industry. Where I think the industry is undergoing its most significant change in probably the last 20 to 25 years. And we're excited about the technologies we have, both in the current world and to help people get to the new world. When we first did an interview when you first time on theCUBE, we were talking about big data. And big data was just kind of in the early stages of Hadoop and Apache. And it didn't really hit the mainstream radar. Now obviously big data's going supernova right now in the industry. But also you said multi-vendor open was always a big philosophy. How is that accelerated? I don't want to talk about big data because we're going to have more guests on from HP. But specifically to the multi-vendor open, take us where it is now because right now software defined, Bill in the blank is really the hot trend and it's relevant. So how is the open multi-vendor positioning helping you guys from a product and customer leadership perspective? So multi-vendor and open runs across really our entire product set. And I'm sure you'll have folks from PPS on they'll talk about how they're multi-OS, multi-platform now. If you look in our space, EG space, our cloud system now has approximately a thousand customers out there. And that is built on OpenStack and as well as our own HP technology that supports multi-vendors. Multi-vendor hardware, multi-vendor in terms of virtual devices supported, virtual machines supported and multi-OS's. And then if you look at today, we made some more announcements in the storage space. If you look at software defined storage. And there we have both direct storage products as well as backup products that support multiple hardware vendors, not just HP but others. Multiple virtual machine types, multiple OS. So we think it's a key part of our strategy whether it's in storage, whether it's in networking, whether it's in servers. And the great news is it's not just talk, we have products that people can buy and use today and get great value from. It's not just a storage conversation anymore. And one of the things I noticed on stage is that Jim Ganti was on there as well as David Scott. So storage is still going to be needed because storage isn't slowing down. But it's being abstracted away. The talk about software and across multiple environments opens that particular points to what enterprises want. That is a manageable cloud, a manageable data infrastructure. How is storage conversation moving to data management and data infrastructure? And do you see, what do you see happening from a product and business standpoint around data management? Well I think from the enterprise, one of the big challenges they've always had data is really seamless movement, seamless tiering, seamless performance. And so if you look what we've been doing, this is really a software problem. Storage themselves, storage arrays themselves are really software operating systems are really what run storage. And so what was exciting about a lot of things we announced today was really giving people one architecture that they could deploy in multiple ways to meet many of these challenges. So as you know, today we announced a flash array. It's an all flash array. It has incredible performance. But it's just not a standalone siloed flash array. It's part of the whole overall three-par family that enables people to seamlessly move data between tiers within an array but also seamlessly within arrays. So as companies have to deal with this influx of data that they're seeing, they want to be able to do that with less management time. They want to do that in store less data. And they have to do that at a lower cost. And we think we're addressing all of those. And that's why you're seeing so much growth in our storage business currently. Our converged storage products last quarter grew 48% year over year. Much faster than before. Three-par has just been a great leader there. And Jeff and I were talking about before you came on. We always talk about startups. And startups always have that shiny new toy. And flash has been a big part of the startup scene in terms of growing companies. But HP really doesn't just jump into things. And you run a pretty large part of the business and now flash is into the portfolio, right? So what have you learned? And what do you see flash? How does that fitting into the, because you have a huge install base and you got new customers you're attracting. So you have to make the right calls on flash. And so what is that? How do you see that evolve? What's the beachhead for today? And you land and grow? What's the strategy? Sure. And just to talk about startups for a second. If you look at three-par and we'll talk about how that's morphed into flash. When we bought them there, doing approximately $190 million in revenue, we announced last quarter, we're in excess of now a billion dollar annual run rate. So we've seen huge customer acceptance, huge scalability with that. And if you look how flash has evolved, you know, several years ago, three-par had the ability to have flash within the array and then the ability to automatically move data amongst tiers. And that was all good. But we've also seen a need really to have just full flash arrays as well. And there's a lot of startup activity, you know, as we discussed in that space today. The challenge is this, is that customers have been faced with what I call compromise solution. So traditional storage, you know, if you will, old line storage, did not have the bandwidth, let's talk about non-three-par, did not have the bandwidth to really exploit the full level of flash. So in essence, they could support flash drives, you could put them in there, but you want to see the full performance because the array would bottleneck out. Startup said, let me solve that problem. I will get you a very, you know, non-bottle-necked flash array. The problem was it had no software on it to help manage it, make sure it's resilient, do all the feature function that people want. What we did today is say, we'll give you the best of both worlds. Three-par by its architecture is non-bottle-necked. So we can see the full performance of flash. At the same time, we have that full software stack that it gives you all the feature function you need for the enterprise. And it's part of a bigger family. So you can have an entry-level three-par, a flash array-based three-par, all the way up to a high-end three-par. And we think that's very, very unique. And then where it's going is that HP is already working on next-generation technologies here. And these are non-bottle memory technologies like Memistor, which I think we've discussed on the show before, which are going to bring even more non-bottle high-speed into both servers and storage, and it's going to completely change the infrastructure stack, I believe.  It's really a new phase to the storage industry. And I use that kind of generically because it's now a little bit more comprehensive in terms of product mix. So I have to ask you, obviously the old storage world, which you've been a big part of, going back to your career, has changed a lot. So I want to get your personal perspective.  I mean, how has the storage company changed relative to this new industry landscape?  Or I'm going to store on HP, EMC, IBM. So storage is becoming a commodity and that's just a natural progression. So now the software conversations on top of it. So, how do you say it? So my belief in general is it's not becoming a commodity. Yeah, I think because of all the feature function that has to go in there, which is you're correctly saying is driven by software. And again, when we talk about software and operating systems, I'm not talking about Linux or Windows, I'm not talking about, you know, specifically written storage operating systems. We think is what's happening. But I think what the bigger picture is this is that for 20 to 25 years, we've talked about everything individually. Storage stack, networking stack, server stack. In the new world, those are all merging. So you can't just be a standalone and you can't just design in that vacuum anymore because it's not going to work with the other people. So you're saying silos don't work? Silo's will not work going forward. And then I think the market is further segmenting. You know, you have your traditional enterprise market and then you have the new, you know, cloud-based marketing, cloud-based storage is where you'll see a lot of software defined storage because they want to build customized servers with storage on top, running those operating systems and again, reduce the cost, reduce complexity.  So I want to ask you kind of a question that kind of, I want you to kind of go on both sides to keep that hat on both sides. What do you hear from customers right now, the big HP customers and potential customers that you don't have yet when you go talk. I know you do a lot of traveling. What are you hearing from customers right now in terms of what their business needs are and how does that render into a technical solution? Sure, so on the business needs, I think it's actually very straightforward. They all want to get more agile. They want to respond to their business much faster than they have for a long period of time. Two, they want to simplify. Their current infrastructure, they think is too complex, too fragile, takes too many people to manage. They've got to make it simple. Third, it is a very rare company on Meet that does not have some form of IT cost reduction goal. So, you know, they're being asked to do a lot of very new things very, very quickly and do that much more efficiently than ever before. Those are the big customer requirements we hear. I think what we're seeing out there is that the move to new style of IT is happening at an accelerated rate. So we've been talking about this, you know, for several years, many of the early adopters have already been out there adopting. But we're seeing with each progressive quarter is people are moving faster. And which style are you talking about referring to? IT as a service, is it more? A lot of service led IT, you know? So, whether it's their own private cloud, whether it's a hybrid cloud, whether it's public cloud use, going up a lot. Software bought as a service, you know, consumed as a service, I should say, happening a lot more. Moving to different architectures than what prior generation architectures have been, happening. So, you know, we're not saying everybody in the market has moved because it's going to take a while to move everybody. But I can tell you, we are seeing this at a faster increasing rate by the quarter. So on the hyperscale market that Dave and I always talk about, it's like, it was once called the web scale. You had the Facebook, you had the Twitters, the Pinterest, and they had to build their own gear or buy a lot of HP gear. Some actually build their own, Google builds their own, the other ones actually build their own, I think. The rest, I think, pick HP customers. Unconfirmed. But they're massively building out. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you have the generic enterprise. And everything in between. So, the basic enterprise are buying commercial, general purpose hardware software networks. And then they bought Oracle. And then on the other side there, there's a lot of homegrown open source.  The, I call it, mid-range hyperscale. That's where everyone seems to be wanting to go to. And it's a little bit of open source. If they need some software-led infrastructure, how do you see that market? How do you guys talk about that internally at HP? I mean, I'm just putting, that's what, those are our words that we talk about. It's a very big question there, right? And there's a lot we can talk about. I think at HP, our advantage is that we plan today's market, which is what you described, the current enterprise. But we're also very big in the cloud market. And obviously the cloud market is doing things very, very different. Like you said, much more open source focused, much more scale out focused, new storage, new networking, new server technologies. What we believe we're doing is we can obviously always help people in the current, but we can take everything we're learning here, all these new market technologies, and bring them to the enterprise. And you see examples of that all the time. You saw that today with our announcement on the, you know, software-defined storage. You saw that with our announcement of Moonshot. I mean, the inspiration from Moonshot came from looking at these large cloud providers and saying, look, running traditional servers is unsustainable going forward. You literally cannot get enough power and enough real estate fast enough to keep up with the growth rate. So those technologies, believe it or not, are very applicable to the enterprise. One of the things I'm going to show on my keynote tomorrow is how HP ourselves as a company is using them to run our business. And we believe customers an increasing rate will use it for theirs. Simply put, for the reasons of it's simpler, it's more flexible and costs less money. Yeah, I think that's a great opportunity for you guys. And I think that mid-range is going to explode because people look to Facebook and they want to be like Facebook. In fact, EMC actually used that in their keynotes when the EMC world, it's funny they actually said that. So I think that's kind of like a, people look at that, but it's not as easy as to pull it off. I know we're tight on time. We got a very busy schedule. So my last question, Jeff didn't even get a question. Maybe Jeff, you want to ask a question? Well, no, I was just going to say what are some of the things that customers are being able to do with this new infrastructure with Flash, with suddenly having all that available that they could never envision before? Yeah, well, I think with Flash, I mean we are seeing a Flash revolution and Flash like all new technologies started very expensive. It's going to keep coming down to price. We see it used in our servers. We see it used in our storage products. And we think that's very, very exciting. But what I really believe is that if you look at all these new technologies we're inventing, it is enabling the next generation of either analytics, big data, mobility, and software. Because it's my fundamental premise that the cost of technology has to come down so that more of these new models can flourish. And the more that we do that, the more that we've always bought costs down in our industry, the more new technologies happen. And so if you look at big data, the concept's not that new. It's just been unaffordable before. Well, you're enabling innovation. See, what you're doing is, you're lowering the cost church, but you're enabling more. If you look at OpenStack, great example. Enterprises love OpenStack because it's like a warm blanket. It's so early, but they want the cloud, but they don't want necessarily go with Amazon. Well, they want a trusted partner. And what HP has done for just about 75 years next year over the 75 years, has been that trusted partner in the enterprise. And what we're trying to show people is, we can give you all the latest and greatest, but you can do that with a trusted partner that can help you do it. Because to your point before, most companies don't have the scale of Google. They don't have the 400 PhDs just working on infrastructure. We have more than that and we can help you get that in your own environment. Well, this is theCUBE. I want to ask one final question, a personal question. How are you doing? Obviously, you've been on a rocket ship at HP. You guys have been growing. A lot of changes.  Things going right along on schedule. How has your organization, the folks who've gotten to know you on theCUBE and what's going on with you? I mean, how's the organization? How are you managing? Just share some personal insight. Well, we're obviously working really hard. So for all our customers out there, we're working really hard to bring you great products and great services. And our big goals this year are to always bring out these new technologies. Again, today was a great example of that. And there'll be even more announcements coming soon. The second big thing we've been working on really hard is to become a much easier company to do business with. And we think about that every day. Either with our partners, and about 66% of our revenue comes from our partners, or with the other percent who we serve directly, is we want to be, even though we're a large company with 300,000 people, we want to be as nimble as we can be, as quick as we can be on the response, and make sure that we always provide the best service. And that's what we're focused on. Same work structure. Everything's all set. Do you work structure? We did a big change last year. Yeah, so it's nothing from last year. And we are sticking to the EG award structure. Okay, Dave Donatelli, the leader of the enterprise group. It's getting bigger. It's now software driven across all their products. General manager as well. Manager, huge part of the HP business. Very successful one. Congratulations on all the three part. Love that success story. A hundred, somewhat million in revenue startup gets bought by HP. Now, billions of dollars of value. That was a great move. Congratulations and now adding flash, that's going to be good. Big news here at HP. Dave Donatelli sharing that with you on theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. Thank you.


Alright, so let's take a look at doing some divisions, and because multiplication and division are related operations, it shouldn't come as a surprise that any method we have of doing a multiplication immediately translates into a method for doing a division. So one of the approaches we had to doing multiplication was through the use of the distributive property. We can also use the distributive property to construct a method for doing division, and that comes about in the following way. So my distributive property gives me a relationship between a product and a sum. So here the product A times quantity B plus C is the same as A times B plus A times C. And so this gives us a couple of steps that we have. First of all, I can reverse that multiplication B plus C times A, and then my definition of division says that B plus C is D divided by A. Now let's think about this. This B and this C are actually going to be rewritable in a certain way. B A equals B A, again, is the same as. So that says by my definition of division, B A divided by A is going to be B. Likewise, C A divided by A is going to be C, and so these two summands over here can be rewritten as quotients. B A divided by A, C A divided by A, and that's still my quotient D divided by A. And here's the important thing, which is that we know that D is AB plus AC. So this D I can replace with AB plus AC and divide by A. And so that says that in general, if I have a sum divided by something, I can break that apart as each of the add ends divided by the same thing. This looks a lot like the distributive property for multiplication. I can distribute the multiplication across a sum. I can distribute the division across a sum. And it looks a lot like the distributive property for multiplication, and it's not an accident because multiplication and division are closely related operations. So let's take a look at this in practice. So here's a problem by 540 divided by 45. And so the question to ask here is, I'd like to find something that I wouldn't mind dividing by 45. And maybe the way to start is to think about finding this 540, and I'm going to break it into something that is obviously divisible by 45. And then whatever we happen to have left over, we'll deal with later on. So for example, I might take this 540, and if I break that into 450 plus 90, well, that is easy to divide by 45. And I do have this 90 that's left over, so I'll have to think about what 90 divided by 45 is. But at the very least, I can rewrite my division this way. And I now have a really easy part, 450 divided by 45. That's just going to be 10. And 90 divided by 45, well, here's where knowing what division is. I'm also answering the question 45 times what gives us 90. And if I think about that for a moment, 45 times 2 is 90. So this second quotient, 90 divided by 45, is 2. And this first quotient here is 10. So my overall quotient, 10 plus 2, is equal to 12. Well, that worked out pretty well. Let's consider another problem. How about 425 divided by 17? So here's an easy one to think about. I can split off the 170s pretty easily. Because again, 170 divided by 17, that's something I can do without any real difficulty. So I'll split off a 170 and have what's left over, split off another one, and have something left over. And so that tells me that 425 divided by 17 is just 170 divided by 17 plus 170 divided by 17 plus whatever's left over divided by 17. Again, easy, easy, somewhat more difficult. We have to think about that for a moment. But again, I can ask the question, 17 times what gives you 85? And after a little bit of effort, we find that 17 times 5 gives us 85. So our quotient is 10, 10, and 5, which we can reduce to 25.


Today we are opening an old school Yu-Gi-Oh! Collection Minder. What's up guys? Today we're going to be opening an epic collection that I may or may not purchase. A friend of mine sent me this on Instagram, Yu-Gi-Oh! EXE, and he said, I want to sell this. Check it out. See if you want to buy it. We can maybe figure out a price. Even if you don't, I want it to be shown on the channel. So I was like, okay, let's check out this collection. And I know for a fact that it's a lot of old school stuff because I know a lot of the recent collections we bought have been more newer stuff and a little bit of old stuff, but not as much as this one. Before that, I'll be giving away these three cards. We have three versions of Swords of Revealing Light.  Let me know your favorite card from the collection. There's a lot of good old school throwbacks to choose from. So this was in the binder that I showed in the intro and on the thumbnail. But you guys know that it's kind of hard to see those. So I pulled them out. So we're going to start off with, there's some commons in here from like Retro Pack and some stuff like that. So we're going to start off with a little bit lower tier stuff. So we've got Tornado Bird. Here's some TP5 commons. We've got a TP3 Patrol Robo. It's cool. This was a Super Rare TP1. They reprinted it in TP3 as a regular rare. I think they did that with every single TP1 Hollow and made them rares. It's kind of weird. Then we have a Phoenix Wing Wind Blast. Pretty good card from Flaming Eternity. We opened a whole box of that. If you guys have not seen that, go check it out. Those are really fun opening. Stop Defense. That's first edition Legend of Blue Eyes. We've got Aqua Meduor. We've got Flower Wolf, Spirit of the Harp, Grapecubers of Salem. These are Retro Pack 2. So all these are Retro Pack 2. Retro Pack 2 commons for the most part aren't too crazy expensive, but they have a little bit of value. Spirit Message in. Spirit Message i. All this is still Retro Pack 2. Retro Pack 2 has so many cool, epic commons. So like just really good cards that were printed as common. Speaking of that, we're opening an entire box of that when we had 100,000. We're very, very close. I think we're around 96,000 right now. About 4,000 ago. It's insane how close we are. So that's going to be extremely fun when we do that. We're going to see a lot of this stuff again. Retro Pack. We've got Mask of Restrict. It's just a regular common. Curse of the Mask Beast. Gemini Elf is a common. Mad Sword Beast, Gravity Bind, Skull Invitation. I think we get into Retro Pack 1 eventually in here. So I think all of these are Retro Pack 2. I mean, look at those. Those are great Goat Format cards. If you guys want to see some Goat Format duels or I'm thinking about doing a Goat Format video, just kind of talking about the format in general, I think that could be pretty cool. I actually got a request for that and they're like, I want to play Goat Format. I don't really know where to start or anything. So maybe I'll do that. Dark Paladin. That's a cool one from Duelist Pack Yugi. It's one of the best cards. It's still like $3 though, because they did new Ultimates in Duelist Pack Yugi for some reason. Inmeido. I think he just has this because it's hilarious and it's a classic card. Why is the Bargo is going through his face, which is kind of scary if you think about it, but Inmeido. We got the Cherry Inmeido. Oh, I'm hearing something. What is this? The Shining Darkness. I didn't notice that when I opened this. Cherry Inmeido. That's cool. I really like that card. Okay. And three more Cherry Inmeido. Okay, so that's kind of the lower tier stuff. There's a few other cards before we get into the big hitters. Then we have the Gigantic Germ. Retro Pack 1. We got the Luminous Spark. The Flying Coming Curie Number 1. Mystical Space Typhoon. Mahavilo. We got the Harpilate. That's probably worth something. These are actually expensive. I think Rise of Destiny. They're like $7, $8 front limited. Man-Eater Bug. We got the Arm Ninja. Swap Frog. Swap Frog. And here's where we stop getting into the comments. We get more into the foil stuff. And there we have the Legendary Knight Critias. Hermos. Comic Hand. Tyrant Burst. Comic Hand. We got the Mother Grizzly. See, here's some Secret Rare. Some Legendary Collection. Yugi's World, which are really, really cool. Secret Rare, Commander. Covington. Solemn Judgment. Horn of Heaven. Solemn Judgment Secret Rare actually looks really cool. I really like that one. Feather of a Phoenix is nice. Two Atta King Rex is just a classic from the anime, so you love to see that. Torrentials are also a good one. Torrentials aren't in general expensive, because I think they're being used. I think traps are kind of more in now in the meta. So Torrentials still good, you know, nowadays, even though it was printed in 2003. Right Leg of the Forbidden One. We got a Secret Rare there. You can really see these Secret Rears very well for some reason. It depends on what card it is, so you can see it a little better there. Mystical Space Typhoon. Very nice. Another one. A Book of Moon. That's a nice copy. All these are Secret Rears. Brain Control. Rygeki. There's a little bit. Exchange. Exchange. Okay, so awesome Secret Rears from Legendary Collection. Yugi and a couple other things. So those are nice. Now we're starting to get into more like heavy hitter stuff. So we have some Ultimate Rears. We have the Strong Wind Dragon. The Cyber Prima. Forbidden Chalice is not an ultimate, but it's a nice Ultra. Flame Veil Commando. We got the Multiple Piece Golem. We have multiple Multiple Piece Golems. Okay, that was a bad joke. Blue Eyes White Dragon from B.P.T. 2002. This is from the original 2002-10. They also printed the same artwork in 2003, but it had no limited edition. Tribe Infecting Virus First Edition. That's just a good card in Goat Format and any format where it's legal, honestly, until and probably now in the meta. It's not very good. They just unbanned it recently. Red Eyes V Dragon. Call of the Haunted. Triangle X's C. Okay, those are pretty cheap. Earthbound Immortal. Asla Piscu. Earthbound Immortal. Kapakapu? Kapakapu? Kapakapu, I think is how you say that. Then you get some cool stuff like Dark Paladin. We've got Cyber Jar Ultimate Rare First Edition, Gullus Pack Hybrid. That's really, really cool. Someone told me that they may be sending in a booster box of this set to be open. Hopefully that happens because that would be really fun for you guys to see and for me to open. We've got the Earthbound Immortal. Kakaraya, Kakarai, Krakahua, Kakaraiyoyoyoba. Red Dragon Arts Fiend Assault Mode. Ultimate Rare. That's extremely cool. Majestic Star Dragon. Ultimate Rare. These are all First Edition. Powerful Dragon, First Edition. Ultimate Rare from Raging Battle. Ancient Fairy Dragon, First Edition. Ultimate Rare. We pulled this in a video. That was really cool. Phoenix Wing, Wind Blast. This is a Super Rare from Champion Pack 6, so it's pretty valuable. It's like $200, I think. Breaker the Magical Warrior, First Edition from Magician's Force. I haven't checked the conditions. I think a lot of this stuff, let's just check one randomly. I know it's not all like mint or near mint even. Like some of it's going to be light play, moderate play, even heavy play. So let's see what we can expect sort of. So the front looks pretty good. I think that, okay, yeah. It looks like it has some a little bit of stuff on the top. It's got a little corner issue maybe. Yeah, back's definitely like moderately played. Maybe you probably moderately played cards. So a lot of this stuff is probably moderately played. Make sure you guys let me know in the comments what you guys think I should pay for this, by the way. But keep in mind a lot of it is not near me. So maybe we'll check out some of the bigger cards like that later. Then we have Nightmare Wheel, the Mask of Restrict, and a Goblin Attack Force. Really cool card. I always liked this one. That was Skill Drain. It's insane. 2300 meter. Then we have some Dark Mirror Forces in case you want to counter their Mirror Force. Probably never should do that because really bad. Yada Garasu is really cool. Exodia Necrosse. Another Yada. So we've got two Yada, one Exodia Necrosse. Another Nightmare Wheel. Three Nightmare Wheels actually. I remember this pulling them out. Last turn. Very weird card. I mean, there's like a 13 page document talking about how to actually use this card. I think it's something crazy like that. Fiend Skull Dragon. Ryusenshi. We get the Dark Balter, the Torrible. Hino Kagusuchi. Marauding Captain. Freed, the Maxwell's General. Dark Magician Chaos. I think there's a playset of these. Look at this. Dark Magician of Chaos. Three First Editions. Let's check out one of these. See what kind of condition we're looking at. I know for a fact some of these he got from me. Not these Dark Magician, but like some of these cards he actually got from me at some point. So I'm not sure if he, like he's selling a lot honestly of his collection. So I don't know. I think he told me what he was doing. It was like moving or something. I can't remember exactly, but I don't know if he's selling like everything or if he's just selling a ton of his binder maybe just to help pay for it. That's honestly not in bad shape. Pretty good. So there's going to be some nice stuff in here. If we do buy this collection, then some of this is going to be for sale. So you guys, if you're interested in something, you can hit me up. I'll let you know if we actually got the collection or not. Air Knight Parshath. Dark Ruler Hades. Very cool. All right. We're not even close to done by the way. So get excited for more epicness. Magical adds. And the front is where it was actually insane. So we'll get there. Gear Free, the Iron Knight. Beast of Talwar. We've got the Gear Free, the Iron Knight. Fairy Meteor Crush. Nobleman of Crossout. Another Fairy Meteor Crush. We've got the Masked Beast himself. How about another Masked Beast? How about another Masked Beast? He had play sets of some of the stuff, which is really cool. First Edition Masked Beast. I love this card. I mean, look at this guy. Does he not look awesome? I think he looks really cool. Yeah, it's pretty sick.  The Thousand Eyes Restrict. Speaking of Go Format, very good card. Buster Blader, First Edition. Thousand Eyes Restrict. We've got Shannado, one of my favorite cards ever. We pulled it the other day. Check that video out.  I mean, Shannado, King of the Hieroplane. Black Luster Soldier. Another Shannado. Tarantial Tribute, First Edition. I mean, this is probably actually pretty valuable now because of how good Tarantial, and there's a play set of them. So whenever I'm playing that Dark Magician Trap Deck that I'm going to eventually build, maybe we'll use this. King of Destruction called the Haunted Seize Fire. Seven Tools. Seven Tools. Seven Tools. The card you don't want to pull from Metal Raiders. Vanishing of the Light. Three of Spellbinding Circle, First Edition. Trapple, First Edition. Legend of Blue Eyes. Yeah, that's a Super Rare. And Spellbinding Circle again. So I mean, just really awesome stuff. Just some classics in here. We still have quite a ways to go and quite a lot of awesome stuff. Invader of the Throne, some Super Heirs. Here's some Super Heirs from Magic Ruler. I keep saying Magician's Force for some reason. Messenger of Peace is extremely annoying. Confiscation is very strong. Black Pendant is not very good. Axis Spear is pretty good. Delinguendo is pretty good. And it's another MSD. How many is that? Now like five in this? Pot of Greed, First Edition. Super Rare. That's cool for goat format too. That's just a nice rarity. Let's see if you guys can see a little better. Lighting is a little bit weird because we got some natural light coming in today. But we got the Creature Swap. Pot of Greed, First Edition. Legend of Blue Eyes. That holds some value. Even just a regular Rare. Then we get into a Lot. He is a big Dark Paladin fan. So you guys will notice this here. Dark Paladin. These are all Dual Masters Guide copies. So they were a promo. You guys can check out this set number right here. Dual Masters Guide. It doesn't stand for Dark Magician Girl. That's the promo that came with an SDK and an SDY deck. So we have all of these Dual Masters Guide Dark Paladins. Absolutely awesome. Koitsu. I think he got either this one or the Aitsu. Maybe it was the Aitsu for me from my Magician's Force box. Or it was the Magician's Force pack. I can't remember. There's an XYZ Dragon Cannon, First Edition. You love to see that one. That's a cool one from Magician's Force. YZ Tank Dragon XY Dragon Cannon. This is a mouthful. One's an Ultra. One's a Super. And they're both just like combinations of two. It's kind of funny. And the next thing, that's another Super. So maybe they ran out of Ultras. They didn't have something else. They wanted to be Ultra. Z-Metal Y and an X-Head. So all of those. More Dark Paladins here. Got Dark Paladin from Dark Revelation. One. The First Edition Secret Rare from Legendary Collection. Yu-Gi's World. I think this is the one he bought from me. I could be wrong. But that's a nice one. And then the... Is this the MFC Unlimited? Yeah. The artwork that was supposed to be First Edition, but they accidentally messed it up. So this was the... They actually did it right in the Unlimited. So... And then here's another Unlimited MFC. Then we have more Paladins. MFC. We got First Edition MFC. First Edition MFC. First Edition MFC. So that's a lot of Paladins. First Edition Megamorphs. We've got Tune Mermaid. Tune World. Tune Summon Skull First Edition. All this stuff's First Edition almost. AXA Despairs. A whole playset. We've got Mystical Space Typhoon playset. First Edition Black Illusion Ritual. Relinquished for Master Collection 1. We've got a Retro Pack 1 Relinquish. That's really... Actually really rare as an Ultra Rare. First Edition SDP. We got a whole playset of those. First Edition Legend of Blue-Eye Stuff. Now Maneater Bug. Maneater Bug Faded. I mean, just check out that fade compared to that one. I mean, both are First Edition LLB. But they look completely different. Really cool. And then a very beat up one. As you can see those corners are not looking so hot. But another First Edition. Flame Swordsman First Edition. Mirror Force Faded First Edition. Flame Swordsman First Edition Faded. Just a ton of awesome stuff. And here's the final stack. We're going to get into some absolute fire here. Maybe we'll look at some more conditions. We've got Suijin. Kazijin. Sanga. No Gay Guardian, unfortunately. But we have a Rygeki First Edition. Monster Reborn First Edition. Swords Revealing Light First Edition. Trihorn. Definitely has been through the ringer. But it's First Edition. Dark Magician First Edition Legend of Blue-Eyes. We got to check this one out. There's a Red-Eyes, by the way. So let's check out this condition. See what it's looking like. I'm guessing it's not great. I think he said the Ultras were not in good condition. Yeah, check this out. This one's been bent down the middle. So that's kind of the condition on some of the cards. But I think it's more of the really expensive ones like Dark Magician First Edition. But even then it's still a cool card. We've got a Red-Eyes. Let's see what condition this guy's in. Red-Eyes has been bent as well. So they're not in the best shape. But they are still really cool cards. Oh, it looks like this one was graded previously. This was a very good three. That's actually generous. I feel like that card looks pretty rough. Then we have some other cool stuff like Polly's. Faded Polly looks really good. I love how that looks. Another Polly First Ed. Injection Fairy Lily First Edition. We got Injection. Injection. That's three of those. We got Serpent Night Dragon 1, 2, and 3. A playset of those. Diffusion Wave Motion. The MFC Secret Rare that you do not want. Thousand Dragon First Edition. Is there something going on? There's some junk on it. Okay. Diffusion Wave Motion as well. Imperial Order is a very good card as well. First Edition. Three of those. And then we get into the Genzo. You can see this guy's creased that way. But don't worry. There's another one. Corner's a little messed up. And then a third one. So a playset even though some are very beat up. Still really cool to see those Genzo's First Edition. And then three Magic Cylinder First Edition from Pharaoh's Servant. So that's the entire collection that I may or may not buy. The conditions are they are a wide range. Either bent. Some of it's near mint.  So this is a cool old school collection. We haven't opened a big old school collection in a while. So I hope you guys really did enjoy this one. If you did, make sure to like the video and subscribe because we're getting close to 100,000. But before we end the video, I have to shout out my ultimate supporters on YouTube and Patreon. Shout out to TCG Trusted Cards, Toe & Foe Show, Tomato Juice, Stanley, Mike Nance, and Mimic Gekko. Thank you guys for supporting the channel. That's it for this one. I will see you guys later. Peace.


Welcome back to AIM Newsweek, your go-to source for everything insurance. I'm Agent Ivory, bringing you the hottest celebrity insurance news. Please like, share, and subscribe to the channel. Also join us live each Friday at noon CST for our coverage over coffee podcast. Music Times asked the question, were P&B Rock and other rappers' death planned? Fans are still talking about rapper P&B Rock being gunned down while having a meal with his girlfriend Stephanie at Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles. An investigation has been opened by the Los Angeles Police Department, but fans speculate this may have been an inside job. On Twitter and TikTok, many are alleging that Empire Distribution Music Label planned P&B Rock and other rappers' death to get their insurance policies. Some of the artists under the label who died in the past years include Moe 3, Drakey O'The Ruler, King Vaughn, Young Doth, and XXX Tenacityone. Some Twitter fans are stating that hip hop labels are taking out insurance policies on their artists. So when the event of their death, the record label receives a payout as the beneficiary. One example of this includes the issue between rapper Bushwick Bill and his label over a life insurance policy in 1998. He alleged the label demanded all artists on the roster allow the record company to take out life insurance policies on them. This form of insurance is called Key Man Insurance, also known as Key Person or Key Employee Insurance. This is a life insurance policy that a business takes out on its most valuable employee or employees. Under a Key Person life insurance policy, the business owns the policy, pays the premiums, and is the beneficiary. If a Key Person dies, the business then collects the death benefit. That money can be used to help a business replace lost revenue as they search for a replacement. So would a music artist fit the definition of a Key Person? For a Key Person insurance, a business focuses on the employees it considers indispensable. A Key Person is often the business owner, but could be someone who has a highly specialized role or is responsible for bringing in a large share of sales. Such employees can be extremely difficult and expensive to replace, and their loss would resonate throughout the entire business. So as you can see, it is legal for a business to obtain Key Person insurance. We know, however, it is not legal for a business to intentionally murder their Key Person to collect the death benefit. Do you believe record labels are preying on their music artists? Let us know in the comments section below.