Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018, brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. Been a busy day today. Welcome back to Washington D.C., everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with John Furrier. We're covering the AWS Public Sector Summit. Barry Russell is here as the general manager of Worldwide Business Development and Operations for the AWS Marketplace and Service Catalog, and he's joined by Dmitri Al Parovic, who's the co-founder and CTO of CrowdStrike, hot new company. Just raised the boatload of dough. We're going to talk about that, but welcome gentlemen. Thanks for coming to theCUBE. Barry, let's start with you. So we saw Teresa pull up a slide. I tried to count. I think it was over 200 ISVs and SaaS providers for GovCloud. The marketplace is booming. What's going on from your perspective? Yeah, well, so we launched Marketplace into GovCloud at New York Summit last year, back in 2017, and we launched a little over 400 products that were available, and the team is more than double that now. There's 950 or more products available, but the exciting thing for us is that today we were able to make SaaS, SaaS subscriptions, SaaS contracts available from partners such as CrowdStrike. It just gives customers more flexibility and choice in how they deploy software into a region like GovCloud. Yeah, so Dmitri, we're going to get into the funding and the news in a second, but from your standpoint, Marketplace, why the attractiveness, no concerns, it's all systems go, go hard in, what's your perspective? Absolutely, AWS has been a huge partner for us since really the beginning of the company. We built our entire business on AWS, we're a cloud endpoint security vendor, so we have a little agent that lives on every server, desktop, laptop, in both on-premise and cloud environments, but the back end is all on AWS where we process massive amounts of data, and the exciting thing in the last year or so in partnering with AWS is being able to offer that capability to their customers through the Marketplace where every asset that you have on AWS can now be protected by CrowdStrike, and we're very, very excited about that, and actually today we launched our Falcon, is the name of our product, on GovCloud offering to target primarily the federal government as well as the state and local, and other enterprises actually, they're interested in that higher level of assurance that GovCloud provides. What specifically, can you just drill down the product? I want to make sure we get that right. So you're on Amazon, you're protecting Amazon endpoints within their cloud, that's great for Amazon, commercial enterprises. What's the, just repeat one more time in the public sector piece, how does that work? Who's the customer, is it just the agency or is it also enterprises who work with that? Talk about the dynamic. Yeah, so when you look at our customers, it's a mix of large enterprises, about 20% of Fortune Firing companies are customers, and various federal agencies, and basically we install on every machine they have that runs Windows macro Linux systems. So servers, desktops, laptops, everything within the environment, but there's no on-premise equipment. So the agent connects to our cloud, which runs on AWS, and we collect all the execution activities that are taking place and apply machine learning and artificial intelligence to discover security threats. So it's a big data problem, and we collect over 100 billion events every single day, just to give you a sense of how much that is and in two days we process the amount of data that Twitter processes in a year. So really huge amounts of data. So Barry, would you go out to partners?  Are they like beating down your door? What's that dynamic like? Yeah, no, we work with partners to, well first of all, we have to get them to architect for AWS. So before we even think about listing a product in Marketplace to meet you, I'll tell you, they have to first architect to run well on AWS so that when the software is deployed or the customer access is that environment, it's running optimally. And the customer is protecting both assets that they have running on AWS and on-prem. But I think vendors have really warmed up to the idea of Marketplace as a sales channel for them. And the reason for that is we really serve two different types of customers. One type of customer who can go to the public Marketplace website, subscribe to a product, deploy that, and immediately purchase it. And then for large enterprise and public sector or federal government customers, we still have that feature of private offers, which enables the customer and the vendor to negotiate on price and terms, but still transact digitally through Marketplace and have it all seamlessly billed by AWS. Lots of flexibility for sales teams that are in the field. Okay, so they work out the financial arrangements and you guys facilitate that experience. That's right. We handle the deployment subscription and billing for the customer. So obviously, the commercial space SaaS is exploding. What are the drivers in federal? Are they similar? What are the differences? For customers that are wanting to move to SaaS-based applications, I think it's pretty simple. Customers have reached a point where they don't necessarily want to manage the underlying infrastructure or software itself. So they're really looking to manufacturers like CrowdStrike who have a fully managed SaaS-based environment running on AWS. All the customer wants is the outcome, the functionality of the software for it to be performant and do what the vendor said that it was going to do. Managing all of that infrastructure and underlying technology, that's the expertise of the manufacturer themselves and the movement to SaaS is all about simplifying for customer. Talk about CrowdStrike news. I want to get to the valuation question. You guys are valued over $3 billion, just reported on SiliconANGLE.com and around the world. You guys raised $200 million in a round of funding. Total capitalization is about $400 million, roughly? Yeah, over $400 million. Okay, so you're feeling good today, right? Very good, very good. More than anything else, it's an indication of our growth. We've doubled the company in terms of revenue last year. We had a year-over-a-year increase of 500% in terms of $1 million deals that we've closed. So it's really an indication we're separating ourselves from the rest of the pretty crowded endpoint security marketplace and establishing ourselves as a leader. And what's the money going to be used for? Mostly expansion, sales, marketing? It's further expansion of growth, internationally, sales and marketing, engineering, helping build out more of the platform capabilities. I want to get your take on the cloud, because you guys built your business on day one. We were commenting off camera saying with our company, we've never owned a data center. Have you ever owned a data center? We do a few things, small things, but most of our stuff is on AWS. So what's the, for the people out there that are trying to do cloud that don't have that clean sheet of paper startup like you guys were seven years ago, the key to success, to really take advantage of the cloud, not just migrate to it, but actually use it? Well, you know, it's interesting. Insecurity has been an interesting journey because when we started back in 2011, doing security in the cloud was a heresy. In fact, I remember meetings with major banks back in those days when we're telling them about our plans and how we're going to do security in a very different way. And they said, you know, this sounds intriguing, but we'll never be a customer because we never do cloud. Now most of these guys are customers. So the mindset has definitely changed a lot. And what we're seeing now is actually our competitors that for years have been trying to compete with us by saying, well, we're on premise, crowdstrike is cloud, you can't trust cloud. Now they're desperately trying to move to the cloud. And of course, unless you build it natively in the cloud to begin with, it is very, very hard to do. You can't just put an appliance in a data center and call the cloud, and that's what they're struggling with. How do the customers determine whether something's got this, how does it pass the smell test? Because, you know, you can say you do things, what's the flaw in having that non-optimized, fully cloud-ready or born-in-the-cloud solution? What's the test? That's a great question. So one test of scalability, we've replaced a lot of our competitors because they just couldn't scale because they used traditional SQL-based databases, single appliances, not a multi-ten environment. They deploy it to 200,000 endpoints and the thing just comes crashing down. So that's one big thing. And then in terms of better security, unless this is what the cloud really gives you in security, unless you can aggregate all this data and we process 100 billion events per day and do machine learning on that data to try and discover new types of attacks, you're not leveraging the benefits of the cloud, you're not delivering better protection. We've had many interviews over the year, Dave and I went around security with Amazon and you took a lot of heat, unlike it's not secure. Turns out cloud is actually becoming more secure. You're an expert in security, you've done a lot of thread analysis over the years and looking at your bio and you're successfully leading a great company. Hackers love to attack where the data is, right? So the cloud's complexity, if you will, or the distributed nature, makes it less hackable some say. What's your take on that? How do you view that opportunity to say, look, if I put everything in one spot, I can brute force it or I'm going to get a hack. What's your take on using the cloud as an opportunity to have better security? You know, in this day and age, almost every single company that is not considering moving to the cloud is making a huge mistake because the reality is when you look at the security teams that Amazon has or other cloud providers have, they're way ahead of virtually everyone in this market. They're way ahead of the big banks that have a lot of money. They're certainly way ahead of the federal government. So you are getting the best of the best in security technologies. They have the same level of scale that we do in terms of seeing all these types of attacks and can react a lot faster. So yes, while it may present itself as a bigger target, the reality is you're getting much higher level of protection than you can ever do yourself. So what's the inside scoop on the tipping point? We were talking before, years ago, financial services customers, for example, said, never, we'll never go to the cloud. We've had many interviews. That's an evil word. That's right. What was the tipping point? Was it the realization that companies like Amazon could do a better job? Was it fear of missing out? Was it economics? Was it the losses that they were taking? What was it? I think it was a combination of everything. And it's funny because in those days, we actually asked them, well, how did you feel about virtualization when it came out? I bet you didn't like that either. And they're like, no, we didn't like that. Now we use the virtualization. How'd you feel about open source? No, no, no, we hated it. Now we use it, right? So it's a journey for a lot of companies. Whenever something new comes out, that's a big paradigm shift. But a few years in, typically they realize the adoption. What we're seeing now, particularly in the public sector, is that realization that the commercial sector went through probably three or four years ago. And now we're seeing the big push and the executive order from the president that you have to adopt cloud. You have to move to modern IT infrastructure. And we're seeing a lot of success in the federal government agencies that are realizing we need to do security in particularly very differently. And the cloud is a huge differentiator. Talk about anything you'd add to that, Barry, your perspectives on it? No, we're seeing enterprise customers and not just financial services across all industries. On the public sector side, you have organizations like Goodwill or City and Newport. And then on the enterprise side, you have really large organizations like Siemens or 3M that are not only leveraging AWS, but have also started leveraging the solutions that are available in the marketplace. And I think in the past couple of years we have seen a turn both in enterprise customer and public sector customers that are really starting to adopt cloud and move to that as their primary mechanism. And we have seen in the last year huge adoption in the public sector across many sensitive agencies that are starting to adopt our solution on the GovCloud platform because they're seeing the benefits of that security model. It's a no brainer really. If you look at the speed and scale, you can do things, but you got to check the boxes in public sector. A little bit different than the commercial enterprise. So talk about the public sector. We're here at the public sector summit. It's like a reinvent in and of itself for that ecosystem. What's the current landscape look like? What's the orientation? What's the posture of their technology strategies? What's their appetite? I mean, can you guys just give us some color commentary on the public sector customers? Sure, go ahead. Yeah, you know, one of the reasons that GovCloud was built and stood up was to give customers that needed, FedRAMP or ITAR Compliance an opportunity to environment, operate those workloads that they were moving over. Here's what I would say. It's not just traditional public sector customers like government agencies or the federal government that are operating in GovCloud. It's also enterprise customers that serve those needs. So there's this cross-section, a pollination of customers and consulting partners that are serving the federal government and government entities and large educational institutions or state and local government. But they want the same level of innovation, scale. They want to free up their developers to develop new applications and services for the citizens that they serve. They want all of the same things that the enterprise customers that we've been talking about have had for a number of years. They want the exact same thing. The paradigm shift to me, we were talking off camera about public sectors looking for the private sector because there's leadership there. No one says, hey, let's just do what the government does. There's no real inefficiencies and use cases there. You mentioned paradigm shift. How has the paradigm of operating and servicing and selling and delivering product value to the public sector changed? I mean, we still hear the Oracle thing was in the news about the DoD Jedi project. We're on you guys. So the old way of selling and procuring is changing. It is and the fact that customers can now leverage in Amazon and buy through the marketplace all these services directly from Amazon without having to go and do separate contract and vehicles and separate procurement is really huge. But the other benefit you get is the SaaS deployment model and time to value. Traditional security solutions as an example take literally 12 to 18 months to deploy. We had an agency in the US government that bought our solution recently and deployed throughout the entire agency in two weeks. So that ability to automatically get value of the solution helps secure the enterprise is something that you can only achieve. You know, I talked to a lot of people in DC we've been covering, we'll open up more coverage here. It's so hot market for the cloud area and certainly government as well. And then off the record conversation, he won't say the name, but he says, look, I can't deny the Amazon solution. This cloud native stuff is amazing. When have prices ever gone up? They don't, they go down, but they take more account control because they get more penetration. So the prices go down and the old way prices went up. So again, this is the shift of the mindset where you get more business but you're driving the prices down at the element level. Is this a key thing that you're hearing too? Absolutely. And when you look at some of the customers that I don't want to speak for you but that Amazon has acquired in terms of the intelligence community and others that you would never think would ever move to the cloud given the sensitivity that they have. And yet they've realized that to do things differently to accomplish their mission they have to use the cloud. So we're absolutely seeing that paradigm shift and the nice thing is that it's coming both from the bottom up with these agencies realizing they have to do things differently and there is support in the White House in terms of IT modernization that we need to adopt the cloud to be successful. So do you feel like we'll finally start turning the corner in security? What I mean by that is if you look at, you know, some of the metrics about, okay, a company gets infiltrated, they don't even realize it for whatever, 275 days. We spend more on security every year but we feel less secure. Is the cloud beginning to change that? Are there some of those metrics or even subjective measurements? Are we starting to, I'm happy to spend more but I want to be more secure. Are we starting to see the fulfillment of that promise? Absolutely no question about it and I'll give you a very concrete example. We actually launched two weeks ago a guarantee. If you're a customer using our service and you get breached on a system we protect we pay up to a million dollars of various costs that you have because we believe that we can actually secure you and we're willing to put our money where our mouth is and establish that guarantee and there's no one in the industry that's doing anything like that.  I mean, that's fantastic. I mean, usually these guarantees are okay. Well, you get a free month of service. No, no, no. We will pay cash to reimburse various expenses and certain response, legal fees, everything else that comes into the breach. Congratulations for taking that step. I mean, others are going to have to follow. Yeah, that's good leadership. Well, what would the guy from the CIA say on stage, Dave, you had the quote. Yeah, he said that cloud security on its worst day. Right, cloud security on its very worst day is far better than my client server systems. Yeah, so there it is to your point. Okay, let's get the plug in for you guys. So you got eight months and you started working together at the marketplace. We did. Talk about that relationship. How's it going? How's it working? What do you guys do? You're doing selling products together. Give a quick update on the relationship between them. Yeah, so our Falcon platform in the last eight months has been on marketplace where customers that are coming in and provisioning resources on EC2 on AWS can immediately get Falcon to protect those resources. And that's been a fantastic growth area for us. We've also been partnering on the new guard duty offering that Amazon launched last year where the intelligence provider for that platform. So it's been a great partnership. We're looking to do a lot more and particularly with the Guff Cloud and the public sector. Last work, well, for us now we're able to have a solution we can recommend to customers that's fully SaaS based running on AWS, you know, improving in its capability. So it, you know, it's great to partner with their sales and alliance team on the commercial and public sector side. We're going to look forward to seeing what we can do for the rest of the year. Well, Barry, thanks for coming back again. It's great to have you on theCUBE. Dimitri, wonderful. Congratulations on the raise and making some progress. Really appreciate your insights. Thank you so much. You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, buddy. John Furrier and I will be back with Stu Miniman. We're live from AWS Public Sector Summit. You're watching theCUBE.


First of all, let me tell you the background of this discussion. Originally, when we started and conducted IST, so IST has some norm for conducting IST workshops. As per those norms, for a two-week program for 35 teachers, their approved budget is some 1 lakh 5000 rupees for a two-week program.  In that 1 lakh 25000 to conduct the program, pay the honorarium to co-ordinators and support staff and to take care of stay, food and travel of all the participating teachers is impossible. One of the problems was that the participating teachers could come from any part of the country and therefore expenditure on their travel was a significant part. But even otherwise, the budget was not adequate. So what we did is, we had a very elaborate discussion with the co-ordinators. I am sort of telling you the gist of it. The gist was, firstly we recognized that independent of the number of participants, there shall be some fixed cost. After all, if there are even five participants someplace, the preparation that you will have to do and to execute the workshop, you will need one coordinator, you will need a couple of teaching assistants, you will need some technical staff. Now this is independent of the number of participants. So we decided that we will define a budget which has a fixed portion and a variable portion. And that is what this sheet shows. So in the fix, this was of course, that thing was a 10 day workshop. Now this will be a 15 day workshop, we did not… So let me put it this way. There are actually 10 working days in a two week workshop, Monday through Friday if you include. We would ordinarily include also part of Saturday or part of Sunday in case some teachers want to work in the labs and things like that. But that is left to the initiative of the participants. Usually what we have noticed is that the enthusiasm level of participating teachers on an average is not very high. In every group you will get two or three teachers who will be more enthusiastic than you. They will really participate very hard and in some places the number could be larger. Similarly, there will be two or three teachers who are coming there just for the namesake. They are physically present but their mind is not there. That happens with our students also. So we cannot blame them. But on an average the general enthusiasm level is low and that is one of the objectives of this workshop is to fire them with the kind of ethos that prevails in your institutions. It is very, very important that they take away not only the technical knowledge but the ethos of your place. And that is the reason why I always want a good number of people from your institute to be participating in this interview. Because then when they interact with individuals that is where they learn to get the fire. So what we said is that you should take ten working days on which the people will have to sort of participate and engage. We have said we shall have one coordinator. We shall have teaching assistants which we said will be five in number. Then we said we shall have some technical assistant. We had a V-SAT coordinator. The objective is this. You know, those institutions are going to use EJU-SAT. Now EJU-SAT facility is controlled by somebody else not necessarily by our department. And there is a technical coordinator and there is an assistant or something like that. But usually they are not considered for payment of any honorarium because that is part of their duty. In actual practice you will agree that this does not work.  So that is why we had put this as 3000 rupees. So we have said coordinators. There could be some one technical person or two technical person. I will give you a simple thing. Suppose our session starts from 9 o'clock in the morning and let's say their official time is 10 to 5. Now during the workshop they have to come at not 9 but even at 8.30 and start the activity. Why should they be so enthusiastic to do that? So they will be enthusiastic if we tell them that look we will recognize your contribution and we will as a token will pay you an honorarium. There will be a greater chance of their being enthusiastic. That is the reason we had calculated all of this. So this part you can see is for 10 operational days. Of course the coordinator has to slog out. The coordinator will have to work early or later and whatever. So that's okay. But we presume that coordinators are all self-driven people and the 6000 rupees is a notional honorarium. I had a big problem convincing IST that 6000 rupees should be paid to a coordinator. They have no such notion. I don't understand. They have I think budgets approved in some Babadam's time and they are just continuing with that. But that's okay. That's their life. Now the second thing we said is that there could be miscellaneous expenditure at each remote center which cannot be tacked to some specific expenditure. It could depend upon the situation that you have. Similarly there could be occasions when suddenly some money has to be spent and people should have budget. Just like we are autonomous, not only institutions, individual faculty members ought to have autonomy to execute an activity. Effectively then the miscellaneous expenses and contingency you can regard as 20,000 rupees which is a total fund available at disposal with the coordinator. So each one of you can decide. If something has to be spent, if 300 rupees have to be paid to someone to get something quickly, you should go ahead and do that. You should not feel constrained because otherwise you will be administered by the institute rules and if there is no budget head, the institute may find it problematic to permit you to spend money. So this is the budget we have kept. If you don't use it, of course you save the money, the national mission benefits that money can be used to support some more teachers elsewhere. But if you need to spend, please go ahead and spend. So this is the buffer that we have decided on and I think many institutions did use this properly and they said they are happy with this. They could quickly do something that they wanted.  This institute overhead is a lump sum of 10,000 rupees which we said should be given to the institute and to be used in whichever manner the institute feels. So typically the head of the institution can use this money in whichever way. They can either take it into their own books of account or the head of the institution in consultation with the coordinator may decide to use this for whatever purpose. We are saying this is an institute overhead which we recognize as part of the workshop and we will pay that. So this is the total amount of fixed cost for a workshop we said 60,000 rupees and even if there is one participant, 60,000 rupees will have to be spent. Now this was the toughest part to convince what you call ISD. So what we did is we said alright let's have an MOU where we will conduct these workshops on your behalf and we will not ask you for any money. We will arrange from funds from somewhere else. The moment we said we don't want money from you, ISD was very liberal. They said you do whatever you want to, not any issue. So then that is where we made proposals to MHRD saying please fund us and accordingly we have a funding approval for the pilot and funding approval for this should come anytime now. So this is the fixed part. Now in the variable component we had discussions what we found out is depending upon the place and the cost of the place bigger cities will be costlier, smaller cities will be cheaper. So the estimate was that food per day could vary between 100 rupees to 250 rupees. Now we don't know what the food cost is. Actual cost will depend upon the actual cost that you will incur. We just arbitrarily decided to take an arithmetic average and calculated based on that arithmetic average. So for 15 plus 1 days because the total working days may be 10. The actual days will be 13 or something. But we have calculated this for 15 days just to be on the safer side. So this is the kind of budgeting that we are doing. So we said this much will be the money spent on food. Again stay depending upon the hostel accommodation and other things that you have the accommodation cost may vary. The only request is since it is part of a national mission project your institution should charge people stay at the official rate that you charge for official work because this is a national MSR mission project. It's not any private enterprise or something. It's a government activity. And that most of the issued directors will agree if there is a problem I can have the joint secretary write a letter or something but that would not be necessary. If necessary I will write a letter requesting the director to make facilities available at the normal rates which are charged for officials like you invite somebody as external examiner. So whatever be the charges some similar charges should. We believe this should be national charges yet we have taken a variable between 100 to 175 again divided by 2 and calculated an approximate cost. Travel reimbursement we said we will limit to 1000 rupees. So even if a faculty member comes from a very long distance we will say you or your institution will have to bear the travel cost. Suppose there are local colleges where people are staying in their own house. They don't need accommodation from you. Consequently you don't have to provide them accommodation and you don't have to give them dinner. You have to give them only lunch and tea and everything. But they will be spending money for coming to your place and going back. Let's say they come by auto rickshaw and go back by auto rickshaw. Comfortable. There will be some cost that they will incur. What we are saying is even to such people you can reimburse up to 1000 rupees as travel expenses. The travel expenses incurred for participating in the workshop is what we mean by this. The limit on 1000 rupees is to ensure that people do not unnecessarily travel from Jammu to Trivandrum to attend a workshop. Let me also tell you last time because we did not have many remote centers in North India there were people from Uttar Pradesh and there were one person from Srinagar there were some people from Uttarakhand and there were some people from Aligarh and they came all the way to Amdabad and Surat and to Indore to attend this workshop. And they were warned by the central coordinators that look we will not be able to reimburse you more than 1000 rupees they said we don't care, we will spend from our own pocket. So such was the level of enthusiasm and therefore people will not find this sort of amish. This is okay. This is a variation from IST. IST says you have to give money for all travel but we are told IST that since we are funding ourselves we will go by these rules. So is that okay? You feel that this is what we have run our workshop. The methodology of usage is this is the total amount A plus B is about 240,000 rupees. The way we operate this is as follows initially after some enrollment is known that there is non-trivial enrollment at a center IIT Bombay will transfer I think 50% of the total amount immediately to you. And the day and when do we transfer the remaining during the workshop. Now for that we will require specific information because we are able to transfer money to your accounts directly. In fact we will not like any check or draft or any such thing here. IIT Bombay can transfer money directly into your account. Depending upon the procedure at your end you can either open an account or if the issue says in this account number you can deposit but they will keep the account separately. We have no issues. You can follow your own procedure. Yeah, most places they open any account. Now we expect that you maintain the accounts exactly as you would diligently for any other sponsored project. So you should have all bills. You should have everything, everything with you. However, you need not submit all of them but you have to submit an audited accounts report. You can get any local auditor who can go through all your bills etc etc and say so much money was spent on this. Something like a utilization certificate. But MHRD we are required to give a utilization certificate. Our audit however says because our auditor gives a utilization certificate based on the internal audit they conduct on our accounts. Since the money is being spent by your institution they can't audit your accounts. So what finally we have worked out between our dean and ourselves because this is a very new situation. So what the dean's office said is that look we want auditing of the accounts. So whether it is done at your place or at our place we will consider it equal. So as long as there is a charter account and certificate that your accounts have been audited and that audited account certificate only you send to us that is the end of the matter. It could also be the chief accounts officer of your own institution. It need not be a chartered account. That's right. That document has to be formally there because our auditors will use that certification. So usually with government institutions there is absolutely no problem. As long as the chief accounts officer or deputy or finance or whosoever it is he signs that he has seen these accounts and this is the expenditure that is incurred. But the coordinators are expected to first collect bills, vouchers, whatever. Wherever there is no formal receipt available for example a participant comes and claims that I have spent let's say 25 rupees per day on auto rickshaw one way and auto rickshaw another way you get a letter from that participant. That is good enough. Basically participant is also a teacher. So when a teacher certifies that I have spent this money for this purpose that is perfectly acceptable. So we have tried to simplify the process as much as is possible and we will to repeat we will send half the money immediately by wire transfer and the remaining half we would try to do it last time we did it during the workshop I think. But now that we have enough time we can even do it just two days before the workshop. Basically you will not be short of money as far as these budgets are. So do you think this process is okay? Any suggestions or observations? No. We had a problem in the pilot our office first insisted all vouchers must be submitted and I think two centers did that that volume was so much then I went and met the dean I said do you specialize in reading meaningless vouchers because we are going to run this from 30 centers and I am going to do this 12 times in next two years then he understood. Further I asked him if you are asking him for the vouchers you have no business asking him for account certificate because then it is your problem auditing is to be done by you then then they made a special rule for FATA which says that a certificate from the institution either from the chief accounts officer or from a charter accountant that the expenditure has been audited all that we require is somebody certifies that the expenditure has been audited and that one page certificate is good enough now whatever is the amount stated there that amount could be different from the total amount that we have paid to you so there would be maybe an excess amount that has been given to you or a shorter amount and in either case there will be a single transaction between the two institutions if there is any excess money you will refund it to the project and if there is an excess expenditure within the budgets of course the issue will for example let us say we have done this calculation a variable thing of 35 people 30 people we ordinarily expect 35 people our budgets actually are for 35 people so you can add 5 more people and this will extend suppose you have 42 people at one place then obviously there will be excess expenditure suppose there are 24 people only at one place suppose there are only 10 people at one place now we had a lot of internal debate between ministry and us is it worthwhile to run this workshop for only 10 participants and we had different opinions the finance people from the ministry said it is not cost effective but I took a stand that even if 10 of our teacher colleagues benefit it is worthwhile to run this program because 10 teachers would mean 300 or 400 students and therefore it is worth it do you agree with this philosophy at least so that is how we will go by we would like to maximize the number of participants yes minimum number of participants which can well we discussed it around 10 now what should be the exact minimum number it is a call we have to take okay and let me tell you there is no steadfast rule by the way all this procedure this procedure is now steadfast in the sense that it has become a rule because we have practiced it but each one of these rules is modifiable either by mutual discussion or by me alone I hold that privilege every project investigator in IIT or in NIT holds that privilege to spend money as per this so to answer your question let me ask you how much you will define as minimum I give the argument about 10 suppose you had 9 does it change the argument in any way suppose you have 8 suppose you have 7 suppose you have 5 now suppose you have only 2 then perhaps I should worry that for training 2 people you have 1 coordinator 2 teaching assistants 3 technical assistants is it worthwhile then so it is not in terms of money but in terms of efforts that you are spending your institute is spent it should not happen that very few are taught by very many people now what is reasonable is very difficult to say can we arrive at some consensus as to what should be the minimal number good one to one correspondence but again I will say you have to take a call personally I will be very disappointed if we run a center with less than 35 people because for the first time last time when we ran we had 980 enrollments we had to curtail those enrollments because we could not run at more than 22 centers we finally ran with about 650 or how many teachers 637 teachers at 22 remote centers there were some remote centers which said we can do double the capacity so Anna University and Sona college somebody is there from Sona college no these two these two centers said we have excellent lab infrastructure and we can accommodate 60 teachers so 60 teachers in a single lecture hall is okay but what about labs so they told us that they have labs and they will have technical assistance so we made a special provision which I must tell you also we said that if you can take 60 or more participants then we will double this expenditure barring of course the institute overhead and some contingency but we said we should have two coordinators because after all ultimately we are dealing with people you should have 10 teaching assistants et cetera et cetera and we said instead of 60,000 whatever is it 60,000 is it I can yes it is 60,000 so it was not 120,000 but it was almost like 100,000 or something so that's again an ad hoc decision which we took at two centers the enrollment exceeded 30 students were willing to run actually Anna University enrollment went to 90 students and the professor said sir doesn't matter we will handle 90 but I got scared so I said we will transfer 30 people to some other place so the ambition here is to get as many teachers to participate as you can last time there was also a problem there was a significant delay in circulating the information about the workshop because the pilot money itself was not released for a long time actually I was on a tender hook for a period for which I was spending money effectively from my own pocket from my consultancy project and thing like that but fortunately the funds came and there was no issue now this time the brochures that we mentioned she tells me that about 300 brochures will be printed by afternoon so each one of you will be carrying back at least 10 of those brochures yourself objective just look at them ensure that they are okay and if you want you can actually hand deliver it to your friends in your neighboring colleges or send it by post for some people who may take more time to decide the other brochures should be reaching you before within 5 days similarly we will make the enrollment site up within 5 days which means that the enrollment registration can begin very quickly this is the time when teachers are still there in the colleges so if you can reach the heads of the departments besides we shall be sending two brochures with a letter to each of the 4000, 3500 engineering colleges whose addresses we have but our letters necessarily go to the principal or director and what we have seen is they remain on the table of the director for quite some time the advantage with you is possibly in touch with the comparison department professors and heads of the neighboring colleges so additionally if you send these brochures to those places because the name of your center is there and you say you want to enroll go to this website enroll and I think by end of May itself we will know what is the status because the last dates we are mentioning for enrollment is I think 4th June and for finding we have two stages intention to join but whether the person is registered or not we will decide now that decision we would like to take in consultation with the center coordinator so they will mention which center they want to go to and I am suggesting that they should mention two optional centers first choice and second choice because in case the first choice is full which is the next center they would like to go to so with that once on 4th June once we have the total this thing we will send the you will be visible to you as well because the list of enrolled candidates including their institutions etc etc is on the web it is open to everybody but we will make specific list per center and we will tell you we would like you to go through those names in case you find something amaze and I will tell you where you may find something amaze the lady mentioned about a teacher who is not on roles but that is because the person has been thrown out after one semester and he is not yet joined in the next semester suppose there is a person who has never been a teacher who just claims to be from some college but you know for sure that this fellow is a fraud now you should be able to advise us he might have enrolled don't register suppose there is a teacher who is teaching programming in a science college which is not an engineering college college professional college course you may use your description that you believe that this teacher and those students will benefit so you recommend we will take that is the approach that we want to follow buy some internet bandwidth or which money there is no money for v-set or v-set coordinator is there so we don't have to v-set can we use that money as a well this is a very small amount of money v-set coordinators this is actually to be an honorarium to v-set wherever there is a v-set there is a infrastructure provision in the institute so somebody has been appointed regularly to take care of that v-set center so what we said is this is some additional honorarium to be paid to him but if you don't have v-set so what you should do then you should say internet coordinator whatever because you will be using some bandwidth you will be using either v-set or n-k-n so those institutions which are likely to use n-k-n for example can consider this to be the n-k-n coordinator's honorarium which is not the head of n-k-n but the technical staff you know who will ensure that like you have seen our people all the network in this room by the way was not set up by computer center it was set up by our own people jointly with computer center so when they did that last time we paid them a little bit of extra honorarium so this is meant for that you are right so we will say don't say v-set coordinator you say network coordinator's whichever name any other observation for teaching assistants most welcome most welcome that is the reason why we are calling them teaching assistants they need not be staff members as a matter of fact I would love to see postgraduate students or even postgraduate students being used the objective should be that they should also learn something but they should be meaningful they should be doing that job and in fact I want participating teachers to learn that we don't feel there is anything wrong if I have to learn from a student we will communicate that ethos to our participating teachers very good no problem and you can pay them the same honorarium or whatever it is entirely up to you and if you ask me sometimes some of our M.Tech students or Ph.D. students would be more motivated than technical assistants to participate in it it all depends actually I will tell you it is the individuals who matter as long as you choose the right individual and all the technical staff who is dedicated may be far better than a flamboyant student who will come today but not come tomorrow you choose the people that is why the entire liberty central coordinator in a remote center in any institution is exactly what I consider my replica in that place and whatever freedom I have I want each one of you to enjoy the same freedom at your place if you have any problem this is some experience I want to share regarding the clicker last time we had only the last stage we realized that the clickers won't work if there is a proxy in your network the clickers will work only without a proxy so we had to have some contingency expenditure buy an internet access and through a Tata photon we could do it so those sort of integrity instructions which you need to supply to the coordinators you should do this very good point because last time we used clickers as just experimental thing and it did not work properly as he rightly said people had to buy immediately some access and so on but this time it will not be so first of all at our end we are getting a two Mbps bandwidth for this project from our computer center which will be outside the proxy and that will be set up in about 15 days time that is why the trials with that AVU etc we shall have only after about 15 days not immediate so we can start from 20th May and between the week of 20th May to 30th May we can do one or two exercises similarly the clicker protocol now has been grossly simplified and at your end you still need a connection to FTP server but our FTP server will be outside the proxy so that should not be a problem and yes in case you have to incur any expenditure of buying some equipment for 2000 rupees equipment for 5000 rupees or something please go ahead and do that that is the purpose of objective of this contingency and let me tell you this particular institute let's say your contingency expenditure is 30,000 rupees instead of 10,000 rupees ordinarily as per laws of the land if you exceed that is your problem as per laws of this workshop no issue but just justify why you have to spend that extra money that you needed to do this as long as it is related to your ability to execute the project I don't think of my dean R and D will have any problem if I recommend that out of these 30 institutions institutions had to spend 1500 rupees extra on this I don't think there should be any problem so but don't if all 30 institutions start doing it then my dean will have some very strong word with me essentially along with any freedom comes also responsibility and accountability so as long as you exercise those absolutely no issue like confirm by visat coordinator or network coordinator generally what we have in charge who is looking after the visat center yes and then we have a technical assistant who is helping so by visat corner do we mean the professor in charge or the technical we generally mean the technical coordinators who are expected to be present for some time every day to ensure that there is no network breakage and so on but if you want to break it up between the two we have no issue generally the professor in charge invariably is the one who is involved in the initial conceptualization in laying out the plan in ensuring all the equipment is bought and it is established after which the running around is done by the technical so we had the coordinator means we had this the technical stuff do you think that it will be useful if we rename that item here as yes so we say so instead of saying network coordinators can we say network technical support exactly so our network assistant whatever you want to say technical assistant network Anirban as usual has the last laugh so take this name technical assistant network I think that is the word that we use sorry no we want like to distinguish say I will tell you teaching assistants are the people who run my labs and tutorials these technical assistants are people who will help you set up open to ensure that you are held up works or moodle works or whatever so these are the people who are sort of hardware software people to manage the lab whereas the network is a generally a third person so I would say teaching assistant technical assistants and we will say technical assistant network I think that phrase is ok distinguishes but good point thanks for pointing this out yeah basically our colleague professors who only exercise the right of signing somewhere should not be entitled for honouring this honouring is meant for people who actually do work whosoever it is that professor is so enthusiastic and personally comes and sits there absolutely no problem do honouring we respect work anybody who contributes any colleague junior or senior whosoever does that we should not take work from anybody free of we should acknowledge after all all these honouring are what they are not like Mukesh Ambani's thousand crore rupees or something small amount we are giving it's more like a curtsy just recognizing that people have continued so we do that here I am the only person as a rule I don't take a single paisa of honourarium for either conducting lectures or doing something but that's a idiosyncrasy of an old man I believe it's an MHRD project and my life is dedicated to them but when my other colleagues help me I have to recognize that so when other colleagues take lectures or participate in something we give them honourarium as per our norms and you should do the same thing the last thing that I wanted to tell you is that this is a three year kind of project and we are going to encompass multiple subjects if any one of you know absolutely excellent teachers who have reputation for having taught a subject for 10-15 years and their top class do discreetly let us know through an email or something because for subsequent workshops next year I have convinced my colleagues that all teachers need not be from IIT Bombay alone they could be from anywhere in the country whosoever is the best teacher then we would like to involve such teachers if not singly maybe jointly with two or three other teachers maybe there is a coordinator for the subsequent workshops then they could come here stay for those 15 days and act as teachers from this side so this is just a request when you go back just tell us about whoever that teacher and what we also propose to do this time is we will have an FAQ section for coordinators so anytime a question is raised by a coordinator we will classify it and put it along with the answer there so that other coordinators could benefit from that I had one more query regarding stay so we have calculated some amount some average amount so is it required that we need to spend that into number of 30 participants so for example right now we have a guest house so the cost of each room it falls will be within this but just before coming over here I had a talk with a professor who is looking who has additional responsibility for looking after guest house and he said that there is a chance that in the next senate meeting in this month itself it may go up so right now it is around 250 rupees and it may go up to say 400 or 500 rupees for twin sharing so the per person may become 200 or 250 there is a chance so it is not it is not hard and then maybe what we are thinking we may put a request to director special case because this is a national mission in fact I think you should make all attempts to make some special cases like this because this is after all an internal adjustment yes a particular institute says no we cannot do this or the director is unable to take a special case do write to us and we will immediately respond and 99 percent the response should be ok go ahead because after all see that is not something where the money is going into somebody's pocket that is something that the institute charges what we would not like of course is to have a situation where the normal official rates for official work of an institute is say 100 rupees and just because M.H.R.D. is funding it we said 2 X rupees will be charged to the participant that will be very unfair and unfortunately that should not happen as long as these are normal official rates for example you are stay here our rate for usage other than IIT work is 1000 rupees a day but the institute is charging us for the official rate because all of you are supposed to be on official duty for IIT work which is not strictly true you are on an M.H.R.D. these are the privileges which every institution should extend that is then you are right if that happens so keep this budget in mind and anywhere you see that because of the institute rules or something something is changing ok then please inform us immediately simultaneously make a pleading request when you inform us what I will tell you the reaction from here when you inform me I will be writing a personal letter to the writer request him to kindly consider this and reduce this and in case he is not able to do that he will convey it to you and me in which case you spend the month but as far as the participants are concerned they do not see you just accommodate them and go ahead actually previously there are hostels sufficient but the previous 2 years the seats totally increased same thing in IIT so the students are accommodated in faculty guest house have 10 to 15 rooms so you have a problem you have 35 colleges in Bhopal right 50 colleges most of the thing also tell them that for this workshop the accommodation available will be only for so many people other people will have to come from their homes ask them to start early take an auto rickshaw Bhopal is big but not that big local so local candidates please tell them that accommodation is not possible in Bhopal city we have put in our brochure also a star mark and said that accommodation will be provided wherever available so that will have to be checked in fact such details if they are known to us in our website we will put already put as first come first serve also and yet the participants traveled every day and did that perfectly but I will tell you ideally if the faculty members stay on the campus there is a great advantage there is no pressure on completing the evening schedule some enthusiastic fellow can stay for an hour longer and if you have a student teaching assistant the student will not mind spending for some time these are some of the advantages if they are on campus there will be some discussion even on a Saturday Sunday which will not happen during the working days if people are like different between scholars and australisks you can even do something fancy if some other college has a guest house which can accommodate these participants within these costs and if they are not very far from MA and IT you can even have an arrangement with that college and transfer money lump sum to that college and get a single receipt from him and include it in your auditors be as innovative as possible the limits are the total amount of the budget as long as you spend it to maximize the number of participants no problem you can have partial accommodation and some coming there use your discretion


I want to welcome everyone back to the Independent Investor Channel for a follow-on here with one of our favorite companies, it is Box Royalty. It's Kyle Floyd, the CEO. He's come in to give us an update on the company after an absolutely barn burner 2022 and high hopes in 2023. Kyle, welcome back to the program. Please give our viewers kind of a run down of what I considered an across-the-board home run for 2022 for Box Royalty. Yeah, thanks, Ryan. It's always a privilege to be with you and you're right, 2022 was a fantastic year for our business. In the backdrop of very challenging times in the equity markets, rising rates, outflows out of equities, and really compressing margins with inflationary pressures, Vox withstood all of that. We had immense margin expansion, immense revenue growth, and with all of that, last year we announced a dividend, we commenced trading on the NASDAQ, and then as you noted, just this week we announced record revenues that exceeded our guidance, went beyond what we expected, the high end of what we expected to deliver, and exceeded analyst expectations as well. In a market where I think there's a lot of companies struggling, facing higher costs, margin contraction, we're really the opposite right now, and these market dynamics are wind at the back for Vox and our business, and what I think will be also reflective for our shareholders. Fantastic, and mentioned shareholders, I just want to understand or disclose to the viewing audience, I've become a share owner in Vox, I've actually owned the shares now for a couple of months now, and proud, I'm actually a long share owner, I will be disclosing that in the description below. The whole purpose of these profiling is to update the viewing audience firsthand from the CEO, and all the information is going to be provided there, VoxWorldt.com, and like Kyle mentioned here, the uplifting fall of last year to the NASDAQ, the ticker symbol there is noted for your viewing pleasure. Fantastic, I just want to double down on the 2022, you guys had some massive improvements with your guys as operating partners as well, so I do want to really footstomp how great of a year it was, I couldn't find a weak spot, Kyle, and you talked about exceeding expectations, that's what I saw across the board, and I think coming into 2023, I think it sets up very, very well to carry that momentum forward once we get a little bit more conducive markets here going into 2023. Yeah, absolutely, I mean we increased our producing asset count significantly, obviously revenue has followed in line with that, we're expecting additional assets to come online this year as well, so we'll continue to bump that producing asset count, that ultimately leads to revenue growth, because recall, and for all your viewers out there, we're a loyalty company, so we take a percentage of the revenue that mining operations generate all over the world without any exposure to the cost that it takes to get that metal out of the ground and deliver that metal, so we get a pure revenue base, basically profit to Vox when we buy these royalties, and so it's been a tremendously productive 2022 with more assets coming online, more ounces being discovered and de-risked, so across the portfolio we had almost 200,000 meters drilled last year that we paid nothing for, so those meters means more ounces, more tons, and more future royalty revenue for Vox, Royalty Corp, and our shareholders, and again we didn't have to pay anything for that, so when we saw a market climate where costs were going up significantly on the mining companies, that wasn't impacting Vox, and that being said, we have royalties over some of the best projects, a lot of those in Australia where the operators have continued to execute at a very high level, and we're seeing that play out within the portfolio where the assets that we cherry picked that had great royalties over them are outperforming our expectations, and therefore also delivering revenue and excess of our expectations, and so a really fantastic 2022 for us, excited about the dividend, that was a new development since I think we were last on air with you, Ryan, and we were excited to be able to start delivering tangible cash back to our shareholders, we always said we believe our business is going to be able to produce a dividend for investors, and when we do that's going to be sustainable, and something we also believe is capable of growing, so I expect some positive developments around our cash generation for shareholders to continue. Well, you know, there's a lot of value attraction for me, the dividend was part of it for me, but you guys on the back half of 2022 have experienced some significant stock appreciation as well, six months up 20%, the last month you guys are up 11%, just coming into 2023, we talked a little bit off air, Kyle, about this kind of renewed sense of coming into 2023, coming off of a very poor 2022, and to your admission, kind of just weather in that storm and just digging your heels in, focusing on the business, to set yourself up for coming into 2023, can you give us kind of set the stage as a share owner in the company, what to kind of expect as we unfold 2023, as we grow the portfolio, we embolden those relationships that you've got with your operating partners, just kind of set the stage for us going forward as we look to get on a little bit more stable footing in what has been very, very volatile markets in the last couple of years. Yeah, absolutely, and you touched on my shareholding and management shareholding in totality is approximately 15% of this company. So one of the reasons why I would attribute a lot of success for the business is that management looks out for its shareholders, it has the right people with the right capabilities and the right expertise, working hard and working disciplined to bring value to our shareholders. And so we've made some very good strategic long-term decisions for this business that were designed to maximize long-term shareholder value. And so a lot of those decisions were made years ago and are producing value now and that will continue to be the case. So for your viewers that are out there looking for a management team that they can trust in the commodity sector that has the right capabilities and expertise to go out and create value. Yeah, I would encourage you to look at Box and look at our company because we're out there working hard for you every single day and it's a privilege to do so. But as we look forward to 2023, in our time as a public company we have not had this type of wind at our back. The commodity prices that we have exposure to, gold, iron ore, copper, you name it, it's one of the most I would say productive metal price environments that I've seen in my career. And that is huge wind at our back. And what I'm also seeing is with the NASDAQ listing, with equities generally feeling a little better, with the expectation that rates are going to taper off here in the relatively near future, I'm seeing a lot more interest in commodities in general. And that is starting to also flow into Box because I do believe we're one of the best, if not the best play in commodities right now. We're trading it less than our net asset value synonymous with intrinsic value or a meaningful discount to that valuation. And so I think 2023 is the year that our stock price and our market valuation starts to more closely reflect the fundamental valuation that we know we have. You cannot be ignored forever, I agree with you. It's got to be frustrating to be doing everything that you can possibly do generating those exceeding expectations. I mean, you guys exceeded your year over year from 2021 to 2022 by 160%. How does that go unnoticed? It's got to be frustrating for you guys. But you know, I give you credit. It's been tough markets, especially in the microcap space. You touched on something really interesting to me as a share owner.  I mean, you personally have over 10 years in royalty experience. You guys have got over a billion dollars of transaction experience within your team. Kyle, I'm busy doing other things with my time.  It's with box royalty. It's not with the high cap X commodity space that I do cover and I'm intrigued by, but it just seems the right fit for me in that I let you guys do the hard work and I benefit as a share owner. It's easy to own your company and I'm absolutely long your company. So if you guys want more on that current position, I will be looking to add to the position for full disclaimer because this is the company that like Kyle's talking about with the 1.7 nav right now, it's on the low end of net asset value and it cannot be ignored forever. Switch gears a little bit. Kyle, I think this is going to bring home for our share owners and perspective stewards of your company came across the Segolola project, which the payback has just completed, took you guys six months to pay back a $900,000 initial investment. Frame that for a would be stake owner in your company and what that means in how you guys can get in so quick and provide value like that with now zero overhead commit. There's nothing maintaining that except for just having that provide value to the share owners now for, I don't know how long that value is going forward, but it's paid off. And now as the portfolio, it's just one of many of your generating portfolio values. Can you speak a little bit about that on the specific Segolola payback? Yeah, I mean, that was a fantastic acquisition for us. That was a royalty we acquired for about 900,000 Canadian around 600,000 US. Ultimately, we're going to generate close to five times our invested capital amount on that. That royalty was unique in that there was a seller that needed liquidity to go and use funds for another purpose. That one, unfortunately, is capped. So we'll be capped out at about five times our invested capital amount on that. That'll happen this year. But we are able to find royalties that have those types of properties embedded them in them in terms of return expectations. For example, we also bought a graphite royalty a few years back. We're able to sell that for almost 10 times what we purchased it for. We see a tremendous amount of uplift in the value of our portfolio that's not reflected. These royalties that we bought that we on average are buying at 0.1, 0.2, 0.3 times their NPV as they stand now are increasing in value. So when I talk about the intrinsic value of our portfolio, I think if we went to go liquidate all the royalties, it would come in a much, much higher premium than anything close to where we're trading today. There is a tremendous amount of value in the royalties that we're acquiring. We have a track record that's been validated that we are buying royalties at a fraction of their value because our mining engineers and our geologists are underpinned by our advantage with the third party royalty database that we've talked about extensively with you, Ryan. Those two things compounding in the favor of our investors is what's allowing us to drive this kind of growth. We're finding value that others can't. We're systematic. We're disciplined, and that continues to compound in the favor of the business and our shareholders. Does absolutely. And I'll ask you, Kyle, and this might be a question that Pascal might give us a little different answer on, but the financial position of the company here in 2023, how is it looking with regard to the debt posture, what your strategic goal?  So what is the capital allocation strategy as you roll out? Are you quick to jump on new opportunities? Are you looking to grow? How on that with the capital structure? Well, the great news is we're free cash flow positive, obviously paying the dividend, something sustainable. The cash flow is growing, I expect over the medium and long-term, the dividend also grows. But we're also still allocating a meaningful amount of that free cash flow to new asset acquisition opportunities, new royalty acquisition opportunities. But we have zero debt on the balance sheet, a very good cash position. And so one of the things you have to worry about in the mining industry, and it's just an unfortunate reality, it's so capital intensive that when you own mining companies, they have to raise capital almost like clockwork in a lot of ways that is deleterious overall to shareholders and they're obviously deluded and sometimes it's the wrong times. The cash flow that we're generating now, the no-debt position of the business gives us tremendous flexibility in terms of just continuing to build the business without dilution or if more capital is needed to do it at the right terms with cost of capital that's attractive. So we're just in a very strong position, probably the strongest position that we've ever been in as a company. And that's just a product of the fundamentals continuing to get better every single day. That kind of news, a rhetorical question. I knew the answer you were going to give me. I know how strong you guys are financially, but I tell you what, when I do my due diligence on companies that I own, I fail to find a dark spot with you guys. You guys are hitting it on a lot of different areas of the business, and I just want to congratulate you on that success. It's been fantastic. 2022, you guys have updated your investor slide presentation to talk about 2022 as a year of acquisitions. And it was a year of acquisitions that is worth noting. Can I just get your thoughts on what you think that means for the industry as a whole and what we can expect maybe going into 2023 if we can assume that there's going to be more acquisitions or what your thought is on those acquisitions in 2022? Sure. And Ryan, you're referencing the extensive M&A activity that's happened within the Royalty sector. Five Royalty companies were acquired or merged last year alone. And overall, I think it's very healthy for the industry. There's a lot of Royalty companies out there that don't present anything unique for investors, nor do they have competitive advantages. And meanwhile, there are some very good Royalty companies like Fox and like others that are operating that know their niche, they add value to the good teams. But there was a lot of reason to start to have consolidation in this sector take hold. I think that will continue. But from a Vox perspective, we're focused on building this business for the long term. I have been consistent in that if selling was the right thing to do, there are companies with lower cost of capital out there that that would be something we would consider as shareholders and for shareholders. So that's ever the right thing to do. There's no entrenchment of management at Vox. We would do the right thing for shareholders. We always built the company to in all ways and all facets of this business to be looking out for our shareholders and do what's right there. But with what we're trading now, there is this huge disconnect between our real valuation and where we're trading at in the market. And I think that's got it. I'm working hard to correct that. I think 2023 is the year that you see Vox trade at a range that makes sense for what the value is in the business. You see that the fundamentals are delivering the market that the tailwinds are really kicking in at a macro level. So all that combines and just the continued productivity of what our team is generating, I think this is the year that you see Vox be much more trading in line with where it should be, which is a premium on where the stock price is to date for sure and probably a very significant premium on that. Does the macro commodity market from a macro perspective need to be strong for a Vox to survive? And the follow on question is that there's discussions in 2023 to be in an elevated higher interest rate environment, perhaps maybe even entering into a mild recession. Can you talk from a macro perspective on how you see that influencing the business? Obviously, the positive commodities market, I know gold and uranium right now, lithium in the EV space is a real hot ticket. So that's going to be obviously a tailwind for you. But can you talk about, as 2023 unfolds, if we do keep these higher interest rate environment and maybe even do enter into a recession a little bit or a light recession, what that could potentially mean for Vox royalty and your performance? Well, I think you got to look back at history a little bit. And one of the things that we modeled out and what we've done some research on is coming out of heavy inflationary environments and inflationary environments and in recessionary environments, when those all seem to be overlapping, metal prices have been one of the shining stars in terms of price appreciation and price performance. So it's really more of a tailwind for us than anything. And again, the start of the year, commodities are up significantly and the Goldman Sachs has predicted is just one of the many analysts that commodities, metal commodities will be up by around 42%. So while a lot of the markets forecasting deleterious returns for equities, commodities seem to be one of the consensus picks for price appreciation. So really, I'm feeling tailwinds in our backs from a macro perspective, which might seem crazy to say while we might be on the cusp of a recession. And that's what I think makes Vox so unique. I believe we're a somewhat uncorrelated asset or contrarian asset in many respects in that we're able to find value, find great assets, great royalties that are producing immense value for our shareholders day in and day out. Whether commodities are up, commodities are down, we've always forecasted in backwardation. So that means metal prices going down. So metal prices go up. That's just leverage and icing on the cake for our business and for our shareholders. So I really view us as a somewhat uncorrelated investment, if you will. But there's no doubt about it. Rising metal prices is huge when they're back. Do we need that? No, we don't need that to be successful for our shareholders. But it certainly provides an immense amount of leverage and upside that's certainly far from captured into our stock price. Fantastic. The dividend yield and the NASDAQ uplisting happened fall of last year. So really kind of a double shot of good information for you. For the viewing audience that's new to it, the dividend from my perspective is fantastic. I'm a value investor as well as a growth investor. I get both with Vox. I really can't differentiate. I mean, up 11% already just this month here. We've started out of the year from a cannon. It's been fantastic. But being on the NASDAQ now, this is a big accomplishment. Can you speak to shareholders a little bit from your perspective, Kyle, about how the environment is different, how making it off of the OTCQB, which does incur some scrutiny, how this changes the game, perhaps maybe even from a visibility perspective, more eyes on the company is going to mean more notoriety, which is really what you guys need for Vox Royalty. Yeah, it certainly helps on the investor awareness and investor relations for our business. I think that's one area for improvement that we can certainly make as a corporation is to make sure that we're getting the word out that we think we're a great investment opportunity for investors out there. Ryan, one of the things you noted is you've got a lot on your plate. We built this company for investors like yourself and the viewers that you have, which is you want commodity exposure, but you want to know that you have the right people doing the job, getting that exposure in the right ways. I believe royalties are the best exposure you can get within the hard rock mining commodities basket of assets. We built a business around capturing that value. It was always really with the investors that want to be investing in NASDAQ listed and US listed securities. It was really exciting for us to finally be able to offer ourselves as an investment opportunity to the investors that I built the company for. It's very hard to redrill results and understand them. It's hard to read metallurgical results and understand mining engineering and know the background in assets when you've got a thousand other things pulling at you. I always wanted to be in a position where we could offer investors exposure to commodities and what we thought was the best asset for exposure with a team that was disciplined in creating value around that for investors and doing it the right ways and built competitive advantages to do so, not just now, but for years to come. We're building competitive advantages now that are going to serve our investors for three years, five years, and 10 years down the road that while most of the space is essentially waiting for bankers to shop them the next group of royalties, we're out there creating proprietary deal flow that will be available to us for another decade and excited to do that, but it was always for really the generalist investor that doesn't have the capacity nor do they want to have the capacity to go in and understand the details of this very esoteric industry, which is hard rock mining. Yeah, and I've been studying your company now for a better part of a year and it's been intriguing and it wasn't until last fall where I was like, okay, I'm out of reasons, I have to invest, I just have to finish my due diligence and really kind of understood a lot more about the royal business, but really getting to know you and your team, you guys are amazing. I'm really good at my job day to day and I trust that you guys are and the results really speak for themselves. Kind of getting to the end of the interview, Kyle, but coming into 2023, any highlights on any projects that you've got that you can speak about now that we can potentially put on the horizon and maybe expect to talk about next time you're on the channel, Kyle, as we kind of look to close this out and send you on your way with your evening? Well, I'll leave you with one that's really exciting for us. You have some assets coming online that we've noted we expect to be in production this year. One asset that's not expected to be in production this year, but is in a relatively near-term time horizon. It's called the Bowden Silver Project. It's the largest primary silver project in all of Australia. They came out with some very good preliminary news around permitting and we expect them to essentially receive that final checkbox or box to be checked in the first quarter this year based on the operator guidance. That's the largest primary silver project in all of Australia. We have a great royalty over that asset and as that asset kind of clears that hurdle, it's really going to be successful for that business, that mine, and ultimately us as royalty holders as well. So that's something we're keeping our eye on. We've guided to that in based on operator guidance that came out already this year, but excited for what happens there. We have a lot of exposure to great assets, not just what it's producing now, but what's going to be coming online over 2020, the back half of this year, 2024, 2025. We've got a business that is very strong and growing stronger by the day. So that's just one exciting asset that we're watching. And I think that if your viewers look at, they'd be pretty excited to have some exposure to. Yeah, fantastic. Kyle, I'm going to give you the last word. It's always a pleasure. I'm going to leave every video that I've done in the description for the viewing audience to go back and kind of help themselves chronicle the story, the Vox royalty story. I am intimate in this story. It's fantastic to watch these guys. And when they got uplisted last fall, I just about fell off the couch, man. They got a fist pump from me. I'm just super stoked. And Kyle, I just want to give you the last word here for your closing remarks for the shareholder base, please. Well, Ryan, thanks first of all for having me back on the air with you. It's always a privilege. We're working very hard for our shareholders like you. We appreciate the opportunity to do so. This is an interesting climate to be investing in, but Vox from the seat that I have, we have an amazing amount of tailwinds at our back. The momentum is with us. We are growing this business for the long term. We have unique capabilities in terms of creating value in this sector. So I would encourage investors, if you're looking for an avenue to get commodity exposure, do some research on our business. We're very excited about 2023, the momentum that we have, and excited to continue working hard. So appreciate everyone's time and worrying about our business. We're equally excited to keep building value every single day. Fantastic. On behalf of the channel here, I want to thank Kyle Floyd, CEO of Vox Royalty, traded on the NASDAQ. Vox are, and you can find more information at VoxRoyalty.com. Kyle, be well. Thanks Ryan, you too.


in the course of the bulletin. Now, Oyo State Police Command has reaffirmed its commitment to leaving no stone unturned as it continues protecting lives and property. To this end, the command has employed high octane, proactive security measures, deliberately designed to provide comprehensive security for the citizens. The commission called for more synergy between Nigerians and the police and assured of adequate deployment of operational intelligence and tactical assets across the state. Since Monday, we've been doing it every day. Maybe other times when I do like twice a thrice in a week, but we've been doing it every day and it's simultaneously in the state. So that is happening in Niger. Also, it's happening in Oyo, Obomosh, or Ibaraka area. So it's a simultaneous suppression. Hello. Hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.