Everyone, thank you for coming. Can you hear those? Was OK? Yes. So, hi. Our topic is the future is messy, and this is because we believe that companies all around the world are causing great disruption in various industries. Sometimes governments are causing disruptions in various industries. So in today's talk, we'll be talking about how we see digital leading this change, and how we believe that inculcating a mindset of design that's user-centered is actually going to help us navigate this disruption and make some sense of it and build something useful at the end of this. My name's Sneha. I've worked with ThoughtWorks for several years. At the time of submitting this talk, I used to work with ThoughtWorks products, products division. I used to manage an agile project management tool, which when it was launched many years ago, we believed was the first digital card wall, which is now so mainstream. Since though I've moved out of that role, I currently work with our clients in Southeast Asia, startups in various stages, helping them with their product strategy, and setting up teams of show that can help them execute on that strategy. Hi. So I started my journey in ThoughtWorks in 2003, played roles of business analyst, program manager, project manager, with different clients, like small clients, about 10 people to about clients which had about 200 people in our teams. I've also interspersed that with doing some roles within operations, running an office, starting off practices, being part of the demand team, and working with the market in Europe. My current role is that of the head of operations or CEO for ThoughtWorks India, where I basically look after how we are servicing clients, how we are bringing on board people, and how we are basically looking at improving the way we actually deliver software to our people. So as Cia mentioned, we would want to share with you our thought process in terms of the journey that we have taken as an organization, because we have been using Agile pretty much since 1999, 2000. And a large part of the conversation that we'll be having today will be using examples. Some for clients that we'll name and some for clients that we won't be able to name. But it'll talk you through the design thinking approach and how we'll be able to do that. All right, so oh. So it's Uber, right? OK. Thank you very much. All right, so we believe that the world has seen four industrial revolutions so far. The first was when steam became a way to mechanize production. And that changed the way various businesses were run. It opened up opportunities for new ways to run businesses. The second industrial revolution started with the advent of electricity, because then mass production was enabled. And that created more opportunities. Then we believe the advent of the internet brought about the third industrial revolution, because that spawned off some of the internet businesses and changed the way people were doing business. The World Economic Forum dubs, what we're in right now as the fourth industrial revolution, where technology is at the heart of value. And what this really means is that businesses today no longer see IT as a separate department, as a supporting department, but actually crafting business models around the technology that's available at that time, which is right now. For example, if you take Netflix, if streaming as a technology had not come about, Netflix would have never figured out a business model where they can use it to create a new offering for their customers. And now that they have, traditional cable companies are at threat completely. And they don't know how to deal with this change, this kind of disruption that's happening in their industry. And all the time we're hearing about this. Every supermarket chain is worried about the threats that Amazon is posing on them. And they're wondering how to catch up. And that's where really all of the industries is really, it's very hard to think of an industry today that's not being disrupted by some sort of technology advancement that's happening in this space. So what we're really thinking about, and something for you to think about as we proceed today, is tech is no longer a separate function, which is just getting requirements that are thrown over a wall to them, and then executing and throwing something back. Tech is actually at the heart of every business. And a business is crafted around tech. And the scale at which this is happening is unfathomable at this point. Most industries, most companies don't know how to get around the sort of complexity that this is causing. Entire systems have to now be rethought. Because in the past, if you think about it, when steam came in, when electricity came in, it was about automating manual processes, to make them faster, to reduce manual labor, to make things higher quality, for instance. But today, what the kind of disruption we're thinking about is it's not just to automate things. It's actually to think about things being done, things that were done a certain way for several decades, being done completely differently, like Netflix has. So it's causing a kind of complexity that no one's ever dealt with before. And today, we'll be talking about some of our clients and how they have steered through that. So before we do that, let's just look back in terms of how we've actually got here. And around that, Srinath spoke about the third industrial revolution. And that brought to the fore certain ways of actually looking at problem spaces, breaking them down, and actually solving them. So Arnold Smith introduced this whole way of what we call reductionism, which essentially takes up problem space, which is well-defined, well-understood, and then decomposing it into component parts, subcomponent parts. A large part of it was, how do you break down a problem, decompose it into small parts, analyze, solve that specific problem, and then decompose it, bring everything together to actually finish the solution. Now, this kind of problem spaces, if you look at it. So the y-axis is showing uncertainty. And the x-axis is showing the scale of such problems that you could solve. Essentially, you're talking about ones which are fairly certain. So the uncertainty is low. The change is low. And you can actually scale it out in terms of this particular approach. What this does mean is that it does take a fair degree of time. Like, some of these projects could actually run for years, where you're doing the problem understanding, the decomposition, the analysis, the build, and then decomposing and putting everything together. Now, if we were to look at the other end of the spectrum and start thinking of what this led to. So a large part of what this whole approach, in terms of decomposing well understood problems, doing that analysis, led to is management structures, which really started resulting in ways in which the primary objectives was to actually reduce and mitigate the uncertainty. So it was all about risk mitigation. How do you put in structures which were around approval, command and control, which really meant that all you're trying to do is, as the different components were being decomposed, you were putting an approval process to ensure that the respective steps were done the way the approval had been given. So that when the whole thing was composed back together, it would work, because you had very little ability to actually adapt and respond to change in this kind of a model. So this is basically at one end of the spectrum. And today, as we move forward, we brought about another end of the spectrum, which is types of problems where you know that there's going to be a lot of change. There's a lot of uncertainty. So there's a fair degree of discovery which has to be done. So in this kind of an approach, there was this whole need of looking at a problem space, picking up a very specific small problem, and then trying to see that, OK, what can I learn about that space? What can I go and try out there? And basically use this whole cycle of the test, learn, evaluate, apply, and then again, learn. And this became very apparent with a lot of the things which started in the lean manufacturing world, where there was production processes, production systems where you didn't want to really impact operations. You wanted it to go as per plan, but at the same time, you wanted to bring in improvements. You wanted to bring in incremental change. And this kind of approach is what basically allowed us to move ahead. Now, if you look at these two, the second one deals with uncertainty, deals with change, but you have to do it at a small scale. So what it essentially means is that as we start looking at the class of problems that we are encountering today with the kind of rapid change which is happening, the fourth industrial revolution, there's this huge white space which is over there. And this white space is something which we will have to tackle. But before we get into that white space, just move a little ahead in terms of seeing how in terms of understanding things which are changing a lot faster than, let's say, of a standard SDLC model, led us to another way of actually solving software problems. So in the early 90s and 2000s, there were opportunities where with the internet becoming pretty much accessible to a lot of folks, there were digital products being built, especially on the web and mobile. Now, this allowed that whole approach of looking at change, addressing that uncertainty, and starting to iterate through what essentially became the lean product model, where you started to understand a class of users, come up with a solution, take out MVPs into market, and then iterate through the product. So this allowed us to start, and a large part of what we talk about in agile around failing fast, doubling down, pivoting quickly, started actually getting ingrained in the way we work. And this essentially was a big change that we started seeing. Now, I spoke a little while earlier about this space, the right-hand side still being an empty space. Because now you have two ways of solving problems. Problems to well understood, problems which were not that well understood, and you were trying to tackle some degree of uncertainty. The class of problems that we are now starting to encounter brings a quantum leap in terms of the uncertainty. And this is what we are referring to as the messy middle, because in terms of the scale at which we are having to solve these problems, they are a much larger scale. And if we start thinking through what causes this kind of complexity, so a lot of this is in terms of the different types of users there are.  We are literally trying to figure out a solution where you can't make everybody happy, but you are trying that. There are innumerable connections which start coming in. And this is in terms of the different processes which may be there. So we are talking about large scale digital transformation. Organizations trying to change from being a traditional business to a digital business. So that means the existing system, the process, and all those interconnections have to be overhauled. At the same time, like in today's world, in the fourth industrial revolution, the speed at which technology is changing means that you don't always know that the technology that you're going to apply, whether it will solve the problem. So you're going to take some incremental steps to try things out.  So net-net, like when we are talking about building these systems, so you don't have any patterns which you can drop on. A large part of what we did over the 2000s in the agile world was being able to apply patterns. There are so many books which have been put out there in terms of design patterns, patterns in which you build certain types of systems. But this whole paradigm is what's shifting right now. So we are not really good at solving these messy problems. And as we said, we want to take the whole approach around design thinking to see, can we solve these messy problems? How have we had some successes? I just want to take a feel of the room. How many people are familiar with the design thinking steps, these five steps in design thinking? Cool. I'll spend a little bit of time on this then. The design thinking approach is all about thinking about the users much earlier in the lifecycle of a product, rather than when the requirements have been firmed up and then you're starting to build and then you're testing with the customer. This is about actually trying to design your solution itself around the end user right from the start. So not only at the point when our solution's already figured out and it's already gone into development, but much earlier in the game where you're trying to figure out the idea itself by understanding the user, rather than by understanding the process or the industry, but actually put the user at the heart of every solution and design around them. So typically, this process is broken down into five steps when first you try and understand what an end user might look like, what are the day-to-day motivations and gains and what's irking them right now, and how we can start to solve some of their problems. And defining the problem statement from the perspective of the user, rather than a problem that exists in the industry that needs to be solved. So how we define the problem itself, how we articulate the problem, has to come from the perspective of the user. And then we brainstorm, do blue sky thinking and figure out all kinds of possible solutions to this problem. Some things that may not even exist today, right? May not even be possible, but just to keep our options completely open and then see if we can innovate using those ideas which are really blue sky.  And this, I think, is familiar to everyone where we first start to build out small prototype or a quick minimum viable product and test that, get feedback on that with the same users and iterate as we go. So the process of involving the user and keeping them at the heart of the process starts much, much earlier in the product lifecycle. And that's really what design thinking is all about. So what we'll be doing is spending some time on examples where we think our clients and we have worked well on each of these different places, where they put the user at the heart of the problem and done a good job with dealing with that messiness that's up those talking about earlier. Sure. So we'll take some examples. And what we're essentially trying to do is try to talk through what each of these steps predominantly looked like in one of these examples. But each of these examples had to be solved by going into the entire whole talk. So just to help from an audience standpoint for you to understand where did the primary step coming and how did we actually go about looking at that solution. And to start with the first example, so Hemant Khandilwati is basically a friend of ThoughtWorks. And when we started having conversations with Rivigo where he actually plays the role of the person who gets innovation, like we started to get some insights into the way Rivigo was starting to look at the kind of users that they were working with, which were permanently track drivers in the logistics space. So how many people here are aware of Rivigo? Not too many, so fine. So let me just quickly give you an idea of what this landscape of logistics looks like and this whole landscape of delivery looks like in India. So in India, like obviously, we still are investing in building infrastructure and we do have a very constrained road infrastructure set up right now. What this essentially means is that the costs of moving freight is pretty high and from a comparative standpoint, if it takes about 10% of the GDP in the US and about 8% in Germany, India is about 30% to 14%. So it means that there's a lot of investment needed and a lot more players who need to come up with innovative solutions where they're looking at the kind of problems which are there and trying to solve. Now, in terms of productivity, one way in which productivity is measured in the logistics industry is how long do you travel in a particular time duration? So for India, it is about 15 kilometers an hour in which people are able to travel distances. Now, what this means is that we're all taking advantage of the e-commerce boom in India, right? But we have a constrained system out there. So it puts a lot of pressure in terms of the people who are actually working in the space and a large part of it are truck drivers. So truck drivers, in terms of trying to cater to this particular need which is there, there's already a shortfall of about a million. A lot of truck drivers are looked down as a low-cast and we have that problem, something that we have to acknowledge in India. At the same time, they spend about 25 nights away. So in terms of looking at it from a truck drive as a user, they really have a pretty bad space to be in right now. So Rivico started looking at this and started thinking through, how do you solve this particular problem? And that's where starting to empathize with what goes on in a truck driver's life and how do you improve that led to the solution. Now, in terms of the solution, a large part of it was looking at, how does a truck driver operate? What is the entire process in which it's happening? So a key innovation that Rivico brought about is to bring in some form of a relay system. What it essentially means is that you obviously invest in technology. You put in tracking mechanisms, GPS systems into each of the trucks. So you're collecting a lot of telemetry data. You are collecting at what speeds they are traveling, what the bottlenecks are. You basically throw in all the algorithms around optimization, scheduling and all of that. But along with that, what Rivico did is that by putting in this relay system, so drivers had to basically go from point A to point B, which was roughly about 200 to 50 kilometers before that same truck was picked up by the second driver and that with the relay system continued. At the point where the relay or the big exchange happened, that the first driver used to take a truck to come back to the point of origin. What that meant is that it allowed the drivers a lot more time at home. You're not spending 25 days on the road. It led to obviously a lot of improvement in productivity because more engaged drivers, you're tracking a lot of metrics around them. You're basically going to make their life a lot more successful given all the constraints around road infrastructure. And what it meant is that productivity shot up about three times. In India, about 25% of the rolling stock, which is basically trucks, are usually like setting idle. And Rivico was able to actually improve that turnaround time by about close to about 50%. And so this driver relay model was one of the great things that at least we started learning about when we started having conversations with Rivico. So I'll hand over to Sneha to talk about the next step. Again, in any of these examples, we had to go end to end in terms of the design thinking approach, but we'll focus on some key steps. Oh yeah, so empathizing with the users the first step and being able to understand what motivates them and what problems are really worth solving for them in designing around that is important. But what we do with all of that insights that we get from understanding the user is that we start to define the problem from the perspective of the user. It's something that we're used to doing in the agile world with a micro level with stories. We say as a user, blah, blah, blah. But this is about stepping back in ideating itself from that process, from the perspective of the user. So it means that we apply that thinking, that user-centered thinking, right from the start, right? From before we even got an idea. So I'm really inspired by clients that we're working with right now who's in the insurance space. I mean, insurance traditionally has been a complicated space, right? I mean, it's a messy domain and there's so much documentation. There are so many different types of insurance cover. And our client now is focusing on employee insurance that's employer provided. And it's a messy place to get in because I don't know about you, but my experience is while we have great cover that's provided by my employer, I've never really clear what my policy covers, right? And it's not easy to get that information. It's always a few steps away. It always feels tedious to get to that information. There's so many times I've not put in a claim because I know that the process is so heavy. There's so many steps. There's so much documentation that's required. Generally tend to stay away from it. It's not something I enjoy doing or that I can do painlessly. Is that relatable or do people feel that way as it just wouldn't? Insurance is just like a messy area, right? That we don't want to get into. From the employer side as well, a lot of HR time is spent adjudicating these claims, right? Because if you look at every claim that comes in, see if it's covered by the policy, see if there are any other things they need to look at and then approve or rejects that claim. And a lot of employers do want to get into this space so they outsource it to somebody else, which is a big expense as well. And then adds to the process because now you also have to send it somewhere and there's that paperwork as well. And most insurance policies that are out there these days are all about curative care.  If you can do that, but it's about first falling sick and then using your insurance. What our client is doing, you could step back. Step? What our client is doing is actually thinking about preventative healthcare, which is a fantastic idea because the founder believes that has studied this extensively and believes that in Asia, heart disease and diabetes are hitting people in Asia 10 years before it hits the West. This is something that's underreported so it's not something that's as well known. And she believes that preventative healthcare should be the way forward. This is what will disrupt the insurance industry. So giving employees the cover for gym memberships or making lifestyle changes such as like an anti-tobacco program or things like that. She's saying that's where your insurance cover should really be, you should be allowed to spend it there. And so what she's doing is she understands and we've been helping her with this is that the end user doesn't really like to get into this messy area of insurance like you and me. So by actually understanding that user better and seeing what really their problems are and then articulating what we can set as a goal for ourselves, but from the perspective of that end user, it makes all of the difference, right? So she's basically scrapping existing insurance processes not constrained by the way the insurance industry is working right now, but it's thinking about redesigning it from scratch from the perspective of the user. So in this particular case, she's thinking if an employee is resistant to submitting their claims, there's a few reasons why. And so let's try and make it better. Let's put the wellness of the employee first. Let's have all of the employees start to think about their healthcare in a sort of preventative manner. So they're thinking about having better lifestyles and creating better versions of themselves. And that's a great goal to have and that's how we define the problem in this for this particular client. And this is something that's hard to measure, right? The one that says better version of themselves. We put what we call measures of success on it so that we can track how we're doing on this. These are actual values that we're hoping to give that end user. So that's how we'll track whether we're getting that user to that goal. And so then we extrapolated from there. We said, okay, great. So the end users, the employees who are actually availing of the service of insurance are of course our primary stakeholders. If you take a step back, the HR also has problems, right? They also have the hassle of going through all of the claims manually and then figuring out the paperwork around it and all of that. So if you can understand their problems and create a goal from their perspective, define the problem from their perspective and then put some measures of success on that, that's helpful as well. And then we took another step back and said, distributors who are actually providing these insurance products to the employers who are in turn giving it to their employees, how about solving their problem as well? And so then we defined a problem from the perspective of the distributor, the insurance product distributor itself, as well, and then created a measure of success from it. And then what we did was, this became our guide rail for developing the product, for figuring out what kind of features need to go into the product. Because if a feature did not help us get better at one of these measures of success, there's no way it was gonna get us to this goal. And so we defined our product vision from the perspective of the three individual users in this system. And we talked about it in terms of what value they will get at the end of it. And it wasn't really process-oriented, right? What man, about automating a process that's to allow for adjudication of claims, which is mostly manual. It wasn't about just automating that system, but about actually rethinking how we can redesign the whole process of insurance altogether. So, moving ahead, so in, we so far spoke about really empathizing, defining, but a lot of times like while we have been talking about being tech at core, sometimes tech is an enabler. And in some situations, tech may not actually be the solution. So we also wanted to talk through one of the examples where really the whole power of ideating becomes very important for the way you solve a problem. And you could take a process where you look at similar class of problems and come up with a solution which is very convergent. Or you could look at a class of problems, see solutions, and then come up with something which is very, very divergent. And so we wanna talk through one example where we came across where we felt that the way this was solved was really unique in terms of the approach that was taken. So, how many of you are aware of Arvind Eye Hospital and the approach that they did? That's great to hear. So I'll try and talk through what they've done. And maybe some of you can chip in like if you've had a chance to experience them or actually understand much better how they work. Now, so blindness is a global problem. So worldwide, we have about 45 million people who are blind and every year, there are more people who are being added to the list. India contributes to about 25% of global blindness. And this is a problem which can be solved. Essentially 80% of the cases are preventable. What it needs is a good set of ophthalmologists which are available to actually work with patients, do surgeries, bring in preventive care. And in certain cases like there are these intraocular lenses which are available which actually help alleviate it. Now, in India we do have a constraint system again like similar to what we were talking about really go in the transport sector. And this is more in terms of the lack of doctors, right? Lack of trained ophthalmologists. So a typical surgeon can do about 400 surgeries a year. But clearly like if you look at the scale of the problem in India, which we have 25% of the population which is affected by blindness, it is not something which is solvable. And at the same time like importing some of the the intraocular lenses of products, it's fairly expensive because each costs a bomb for the typical traditional Indian out there because they are constrained in terms of money as well. So if we look at this constraint system and think about okay, how does one hospital with maybe one ophthalmologist, one nurse, one operating room actually solve this, it is not something which is solvable through the solution. So no matter how much of technology you throw at it, the constraint is really in terms of the kind of people who can actually solve the problem. So the way Irvind, IK basically went about trying to solve this is what really brings out the whole aspect of like how do you ideate something and come up with something which is a really divergent approach. Now what Dr. Govindappa did is that near Mathurai, he started going out to villages where he started recruiting about 100 women and training those women to actually become nurses. So in a way they were being trained to actually support ophthalmologists, become semi-ophthalmologists. And essentially along with that, there was also investment that he did in trying to figure out like how do you manufacture these intraocular lenses at a much lower cost. Now a combination of these two, it may have been enabled by systems. It may have been enabled by software products that Irvind IK obviously either built or leveraged off the shelf. But net debt, the solution that they came up with in terms of like actually training a set of nurses to actually solve the problem around the constraint on doctors, meant that there was a five x productivity. So instead of a doctor being able to do 400 surgeries in order to do 2000 surgeries in a particular year, the cost reduction came down because instead of a $150 intraocular lens, the manufacturing cost brought it down to $5. With the nurses who were basically being trained and supporting, the cost of the surgery came down for people. So what this is allowed Irvind IK to do now is that they are doing close to half a million surgeries in a particular year. So again, we wanted to talk through this particular example because this is one where technology is an enabler. Technology is not the only solution. And there are ways in which you could solve problems where you don't always have to depend upon technology. Ideating and improving the way and taking a divergent approach is something which also works. Yeah, so moving ahead, before that, did anyone want to share something that they are aware of Irvind IK and any experience? Yeah. What I read is that going the pub and igniting the idea about how we can go about it through the McDonald, the bar counter. So that's where the mass production was at the low, I mean, high volume, low cost. That's where it triggered. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Shalini. Okay, so moving ahead. We're moving on to the other end of the design and thinking stages. We were talking about prototyping or building something really simple and getting feedback on it before we're actually going Big Bang on the launch, which is a concept that I'm sure is familiar to all of you. We worked with a client that initially started out as a ride-hailing service that onboarded hundreds of users, thousands of users onto their platform, as well as thousands of drivers onto their platform. And then they chose to open up more product lines where you can actually order a masseuse to come to your place and give you a massager or get someone with a salon specialist to come to your place and give you some sort of service. And they really widened the spectrum of offerings that they had because they had the assets for it already. They had a customer base. They had a driver base that they could leverage. So they started to increase their product lines. And so now they work with all types of merchants and vendors and not just drivers anymore. So the problem that they were facing was on how to create a sort of settlement process with all of the vendors that they were working with, all of the different types of merchants. If you can move to the next one. So tracking the cash flow itself became messy. Settlement itself had to be largely manual with these people, spreadsheets flying back and forth. And they thought this might be an interesting challenge to solve. And this is something they could potentially build as a new product that is available on the merchant side. Because basically what they've done is aggregated all of these apps into one super app. So they thought maybe on the merchant side this is another product they could introduce where settlement can happen through the app. So, but what they found was that it's not as easy as all that, right? Because each merchant has a different settlement process. They have different payment payout methods. There's a lot of paperwork and manuals sort of tracking of all of these expenses that has to happen. So what they decided to do was to start really small to deal with this. What they did was they took one actor in this entire system, which was their own people. And they said, you know, let's try and figure out if we can solve cash flow problems within our organization. So let's do expense reimbursement that our employees, you know, any expenses they have and they're traveling and so on. How can we start to automate some of that in-house? And so they built this product. They tested it with their own customers. So they sort of dog fooded that product and said, are we able to build this out? Is this something that, you know, is this an area that we can get into? They didn't want to invest very highly in this because this is not really in their space. But they wanted to build something simple to see if that actually is worth building out further. So they did that. They dog fooded it. They created an expense reimbursement application that was being used internally and that went okay. But it was a point for them to look at it and say, hey, are we doing okay? Should we continue to build this out? Or should we just trash this product now and move on to something else, right? And that worked out okay. So then they looked at another set of actors. You know, they look at one set of merchants and look at the transaction between their company and that one set of merchants to see, okay, can we now solve the cash flow problem between this set of merchants and us? Because now we're extending that problem a little bit. Okay, so the previous product sort of worked as a POC to create this new product, right? Because they were just extending on that. And again, they were at this point where they were like, okay, hey, let's go test this with this merchant. See, does this work? Does this not work? Should we scrap the product? Should we stop where we are and go back? Or can we continue to build it out? And so this is what they continue to do. After a period of time when they started to build out this product to satisfy different types of vendors, they found that this really wasn't a product that would scale well. They realized that one single product couldn't really solve the problem that everyone was having in the system. So then they stopped. They decided to stop where they were and continue to use the product for whatever little it could do. But they decided this was a good checkpoint for them to say, should we really invest in this further? Maybe not. Let's channel our efforts elsewhere. So the whole concept of your product itself being a proof of concept for you to build out the next version of it is a fairly powerful way of thinking, especially when money is tight. So we have another 10 minutes, so we'll try and see if we can wrap up the rest. So we spoke about the design thinking approach and I think by now a lot of you would have realized that it needs teams which really come in with a very different mindset. And this mindset is possibly when we're talking about solving big, messy problems, that mindset is something which is plus plus agile is what I'll call it right now. But really the class of problems I'll be talking about it essentially means that the entire team and when I talk about team there are different roles, different actors who start coming in. The way they start interfacing with each other, the way they start influencing an organization has to really change dramatically. And if we think about where this complexity is going, like it is just going to grow bigger and bigger. And there are a lot of organizations who are basically going through this digital transformation. They're trying to become digital businesses. Essentially a large part of it is more different types of users, more interconnections, processes which have been baked into the system which really have to be overhauled completely. Now what this leads is that in terms of some of the kind of personas, some of the kind of teams which really become start becoming successful in an organization is ones which can deal with the tech complexity, the business complexity as well as the complexity of how do you grow and onboard people to be able to work in this kind of a culture. So as we have been working with a lot of clients the last two, three years, especially clients who are trying to become digital businesses, what we have been realizing especially in ThoughtWorks is that there is a lot of need for actually having people and teams who are not afraid to cross silos, who are not afraid to go across departments when it's needed. So it's basically like people who are actually willing to break down walls. There would be initiatives which are possibly faltering but a set of go-getters who are going out and actually rescuing these initiatives and taking the onus on themselves or actually bring the transformation because a large part of design thinking is less about process, it's less about the technology. A large part of it is like how do people apply themselves especially through it and it goes without saying. It's like a leader with no need, right? You lead without a mandate and that's what becomes important for people as well as teams. So in terms of how the world is changing, let's just do a comparative analysis and say if you can talk us through that. Yeah, so we were to rewrite the agile manifesto today given what we know of how the industry is changing. We wrote our own agile manifesto style and it's where there are two things. The thing on the right or bottom in this case is good but the thing on the top or the left is we think is better and that's where we need to channel our efforts. And the first one I'll talk about is about not really being, not focusing all our efforts on delivery plans because we obsess over that a fair bit, right? Every time we're in agile team we're like all story points, velocity, scope. That's what we're talking about all the time but if we change the conversation and talk more about the value, the measurement of value that we're giving to these end users whom we've started to empathize with right in the beginning, that would be a better way. We'd be building more valuable products rather than worrying about whether we'll do it on time and whether we've got the right scope in place and all of that stuff. Not that that isn't important, that should just be an aid but really we should be tracking progress by the kind of value that we're giving to the end users which really means putting the user at the heart of the problem rather than trying to meet metrics that the business has decided, putting the user at the heart of the problem and the solution in figuring out if we're making their life better. And like Saptoh said earlier, we need people that are willing to play dynamic roles and not being restricted to the role boundaries that traditionally we've all grown up seeing but we have a fixed job description that we all fall in but rather somebody that's a lot more dynamic who's able to move across different roles in different departments to do the best job possible. And what this means is that you can't have an IT team sitting in a silo saying, hey, we're good at tech, we'll do tech well but instead you, because business models are being crafted around technology, your tech folks also really need to understand business well.  And really what we're looking for every team to do is to be able to take a step back, not just look at the immediate problem that they're trying to solve, but look at the larger picture and see the ecosystem that we've told you in all of the examples. So the problem is not a point problem, right? It's all about taking a step back and looking at the larger ecosystem and seeing are we really making an impact in the larger ecosystem. And required elicitation is a very transactional process that we're used to, right? Because at the end of the day, we wanted to create like a spec document. But what we really want to emphasize now is having meaningful conversations because that's how you bring about empathy and that's how you bring about curiosity in your team to solve the right problems. So having more meaningful conversations, challenging, questioning what users really want and whether our solutions actually solving a user's problem will require much more meaningful conversations than we have traditionally had. Yeah, in addition to like those conversations around users, a large part of it is like helping with the entire change in issues which organizations have to go through. Which means conversations which are also in terms of working with teams which have built and maintained systems for ages and how do you change that given some of the choices which have to change? And finally, we can no longer have roles in teams that say, hey, I'm not a techie, right? I don't get technology. We can't afford to have that anymore because technology is so ingrained in everything that we do that now understanding technology where then figuring out what business problems this tech can be applied to or how you can leverage the tech to create a business model is going to be more important than just being aware of what it is. Think again about Netflix, right? If I didn't understand what streaming was like, there's no way I'd be able to create a business model around it and offer that as a service to my customers. And to flip it on its head, it's also technologists who come in not with a specific solution and this is the technology stack that we would want to solve a problem. But sometimes maybe technology is not going to give you the solution as we saw in one of the examples with that in the decade. And that is the kind of collaboration with people that we're talking about. And so while those are some good things to keep in mind for teams, as we go forward, the kind of people that we would like to recruit into these teams, we have to think about whether they bring these traits to the table, right? These are traits that we will have to work. If we don't already inherently have it, we'll have to start to learn to develop it because this is what is going to be valued. Interview processes should ideally be designed to figure out if people have these traits inherently in them, right? Because empathy, like we've said, is such an important part of the world going forward. Being having sort of the resourcefulness and taking leadership, being able to be dynamic, these are some of the traits that you will start to value in people more and those are the kinds of people that we will want to bring on and more teams going forward. So we want to end with a small video. I'll just give you some context around that video before we start it. So this is a client that we work with in Toronto called Natural Food Markets. And essentially it's a grocery chain and they sell a lot of organic produce. And in terms of one of the key problems that they want to solve was how do they make payments seamless within one of their stores and then take it out to different stores. So the video will talk through the obviously the approach that has been taken and the whole collaboration which have to be done between business leaders and natural foods, people in ThoughtWorks having to put on multiple hats to really understand it from a design thinking approach and then how do you solve it specifically for this class of problems? Significance of the new restaurant and store concept was to integrate number one, first integrate a market concept, a what we call retail food concept into a food service concept. From there we felt and knew that we needed to really operationalize the space and make it very, very efficient. It's in a mall, it's one of the largest malls in all of Canada, it's one of the most populous. We have hundreds of thousands of people who are passing by the restaurant on a weekly basis. And we knew that we had to provide a great service to those customers through offering food quickly to them as well as offering great food which is providing organic and natural food, food that is antibiotic free, hormone free, that is local, has been a real focus of ours and bringing that all together was really what we set out to do. From day one, he had a very, very clear vision about creating a very unique customer experience whether it was in their restaurants or if it was in their grocery formats. And that's I think what grocers and retailers today are faced with. It takes them from being undifferentiated to being completely differentiated. We knew that everything had to be consistent from both the customer experience and also behind the scenes for the data. And so we decided to pick technologies that were both mature enough to support what we needed but not so bound up with their decisions that it dictated the vision that natural markets was able to take. When we opened the Rich Street natural market restaurants here at the Eaton Center we put together the best in technology to really allow the customer to have their choice. Our goal is to let the customer pay any way they want throughout our entire market area from an operational perspective. We really wanted to find a way to bring together many ways of ordering that is transparent to the customer so that they can order while they're on a train and pick up their meal that are expressed to go. At the same time, we wanted to be able to allow a customer to stand in the kiosk in order for multiple kitchens while sitting at our foundation bar and enjoying a drink. We created a mobile application that allowed our customers to quickly download it associated to a credit card and then utilize it at every station, keep track of their orders and it'll enable them to really feel like they had one form of payment that they could quickly utilize or furnish across these stations without having to take out a credit card or without having to see multiple transactions on their bill. Our core focus was how are we gonna really improve payment and people being able to enjoy great food across multiple areas. So getting in depth with MarketPass, we took a multi-pronged approach to this and we started with a minimum viable product. The minimum viable product hits at the core of our message around service augmentation and allows a customer to check out quickly. That's it. Another area that we really focus on was children, making it a family-friendly environment. So you can see what we did with the children's interactive wall. We call it the market garden. It's a farm type theme so it's consistent with the Rich Street Natural Market brand but it allows kids to have a good time. We have tables nearby where parents can enjoy a meal while their kids play and have a good time. Natural markets is really doing something important for society. The importance of getting healthy and organic food to people during the midst of a busy work day through their location and shopping centers, their grocery stores and the combination of stores like the Eaton Center here with a restaurant and a grocery together, we truly got excited on getting behind us. The industry itself is growing and to have a player with the integrity of the natural markets folks doing the bold things they're doing, you know, we couldn't ask for a better partner. We've got to continue to strive to take a mobile experience which is a very individual experience and really make that personal. So in terms of going into a grocery store and buying food on your mobile phone and not even having to interact with a cashier, that's something that we absolutely want to do, but we also want to ensure that we're still providing a great experience.


The study revealed that the knowledge of osteoporosis among female university students was low, suggesting a need for greater awareness campaigns targeting this population.


Coming to you from RGIS Studios, I am Anisia Antoine and this is your midday news brief. Under heels of the announcement of the Common Entrance Examination results, the public was urged to refrain from becoming exam focused. Minister for Education, Innovation, Gender Relations and Sustainable Development, Honourable Dr Gail Rigabat, indicated that while results are significant, there are even more pressing matters requiring attention. Human and Secretary in the Ministry of Education, Innovation, Gender Relations and Sustainable Development, Michelle Charles, recently announced that the Centre for Adolescent Renewal and Education, CARE, agreed to accept 50 of the students who obtained between 9% and 30% in the 2019 Common Entrance examinations and will allow them to follow the Junior Life Program at the CARE Institute. The Minister for Education also urged parents to take advantage of this opportunity. The national mean for the 2019 Common Entrance examination stood at 60.09% and the composite scores ranged from 9% being the minimum to 97% being the maximum. The Ministry of Education hosted a three-day disaster risk reduction summer program for students from ages 8 to 10 in schools located in castries and environments. The students participated in hands-on activities such as basic first aid and CPR classes and were given an opportunity to visit the Nemo headquarters to gain insight on the role of the organisation. The Ministry of Education also collaborated with the fire service department to educate students on the various fire hazards. Brenda St. Helen, a teacher at the Abermeria School, stressed on the importance of educating students on both man-made and natural resources. The disaster risk reduction summer program commenced on Monday, July 8th and culminated on Wednesday, July 10th, 2019. The ambassador of the Kingdom of Norway to the organisation of Eastern Caribbean States, OECS, presented her credentials to the director general of the OECS on Monday, July 1st, 2019 at a ceremony held at the OECS commission at Monfortune Castries. The ambassador outlined several avenues of cooperation that Norway is keen to explore with the OECS, especially in the areas of marine management, biodiversity preservation, the effects of climate change and the elimination of marine litter. Both parties agreed to work as expeditiously as possible in pursuit of common objectives and deepening relations. This has been your media news brief. Thank you for watching.


Thank you. Hi, everyone. Thanks for having us today. I'm going to make sure I have my notes all ready to go. So I'm Jen Wolfe, and I'll introduce, tell you a little bit about Tracy here, and then she's going to tell you about her company Tiger Eye. And then we're going to get into the topic at hand, which is how to set up great companies and how to deal with being remote and build a great culture and everything from there. So Initialize, as I said, is a seed stage venture capital firm. We've invested in Tracy twice, once when she was the CEO and founder of PlanGrid, which was acquired by Autodesk several years ago. And then she was a visiting partner at Y Combinator for a while. And then she decided to start Tiger Eye, which Initialize funded as well. And she's sort of done everything from starting a really early-stage company to growing it to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. So she's got some great lessons from that experience. And we're excited to share them with you today. So thanks, Tracy, for joining us. Why don't you start out and just tell everybody a little bit about Tiger Eye and what it is? Hi, everyone. My name is Tracy. I am the CEO and co-founder of Tiger Eye. Tiger Eye is actually still in stealth. We're launching early next year. But what I can tell you is that Tiger Eye is a go-to-market platform that helps you track and predict the future performance of your business. I'm so happy to be here in Finland. It's my first time. I haven't been to Europe in a long time. We've been working closely with American companies on building out our platform. And we haven't shown any European founders or operators yet. And so if you are a founder or go-to-market leader and you would like a sneak peek before we launch, please DM me. I'd love to give you a demo. Awesome. So we're here to talk about the advantages of building a company with distributed teams and a lot about how remote work works and how to really build a healthy culture. So I can't totally see everybody, but we kind of want to do a hand raise here to see how many people either work for or lead a company that's totally remote or maybe just a little bit hybrid. Looks like a fair number, but not everyone's totally convinced. So we should have a good conversation today. So also, not only is Tracy a little talk about the tiger eyesight, but initialized is also a hybrid approach as a VC firm, which I think is probably a little bit unusual, at least in the US. And we do have offices in San Francisco and New York, but we kind of let people live wherever they are within the certain set of time zones. And we also work on a lot of cultures. So I think we'll have a really great conversation today. So let's talk about distributed work. Actually, when you were at a planned grid, I met with your head of design, and I went and visited your office, had an amazing, beautiful physical space there, and now tigerized completely remote. And you've taken a really strong stance in favor of that. So maybe what are some of the benefits from your point of view on having a ROTE team and going with that approach this time around? So I've had the privilege to run one startup for nearly 10 years with a beautiful office. We had 30,000 square foot of office space out of San Francisco, and now I have the small startup that's completely remote. And I will say that there are trade-offs to being remote, but for us, the positives outweigh the negatives. And there's two positives that come to mind. We want to, as startups, recruit the best talent possible, and remote gives us a competitive advantage against bigger companies that are pushing their workforce to go back into the office. I believe that the best talented people want flexibility, they want work-life balance, they know how good they are, they can get their work done, they can take care of their families, and they can work from home and do a great job. And so that's one. Recruiting great people is one. Two is the cost. Our office space, all in space, was, let's say, anywhere between 10% to 15% of total spend per year. So not only to rent the space, but to get security and a cleaner and stock it with good snacks and have lunch, et cetera, et cetera, 10% to 15% of what we invested every year went straight to our office space. Today, we still meet in person every month, so we have T and E costs, travel costs, but it's only three to 5% on a given month. And we can take the delta and invest it back into the company in product development and in salaries. But there's lots of benefits, of course. Yeah, I think when I speak with a lot of our portfolio founders about it, I think, you know, the sort of the hype around being a founder is like, you're grinding all the time and you're sort of, you're just working around the clock, but I actually think people are more productive and they have better work-life balance. And maybe you can speak a little bit about that. Maybe for you personally, I know you have kids and a family or I think sort of being able to balance that out actually makes people more productive as well. I have three kids, five and under, and I can tell you that I would not be able to do what I do if I had to commute to and work out of an office all day long every single day. And this is true for my incredibly talented team members who are either parents or they have aging grandmothers, grandfathers, and mothers and fathers that they are responsible for it. And, you know, as a good child, they're taking care of, so they have elder care duties. And especially in the U.S. where we don't have the support structure that many of the European countries do. So that falls on, you know, it falls on the workforce to both work and take care of children and their families. And look, my team members get to take care of their families and they're producing good work for us. And it works because we have six hours of time where we overlap, everyone's in different places, but we work together in the same six hours so we could get problems solved together. And then there's two or three hours during the day where it's completely flexible. For me, my kids, one of my kids is up by five and I give him some food and I'm on my computer. For my other teammate, he's a night owl and he might be on his computer from midnight to 2 a.m. I don't care as long as work gets done and we make progress in the company. So it allows me to have that flexibility. Yeah, that's amazing. And I think it also lets you really build a very diverse team of people with different ideas and different ways of working and they can really bring that into the product as well. That's such a good point, Jen. In the U.S., and I think this is true for many countries, COVID hit our women in the workforce. Millions of women exited the workforce during the pandemic to take care of their families, many of which have not returned back to work in the U.S. So I'm all for a building a strong economy and the only way we're gonna build a strong economy is that 50% of the population is contributing and working and paying taxes. And I think remote work is one way to help out. Yeah. So let's talk about maybe the reasons some people state that they might be against remote work. I think a lot of times there's a Microsoft survey I think you've referenced in some of your writings that 85% of leaders say they don't know if they can trust their team to work remote and that's something that's why they kinda wanna monitor what they're doing in an office. And maybe you can talk about how are you assessing if people are getting things done, how do you build that trust with your team so that remote... Yeah, one of the biggest fears of remote work is that people aren't actually working. They're watching Netflix all day. Or the other fear is they are double timing you or triple timing you, they're actually not just an average engineer, they're just working three jobs and you wouldn't know. So there has to be a lot of trust. And you said that word earlier, it's one of our core values. But for companies to say that, look, it's mandatory. You have to show up in the office. What you're signaling to the team is I don't even trust you to work. Can you imagine that? I don't wanna work for anyone that doesn't trust me. And I don't think any of you guys would either or your team. And so it's just really important for us to understand that. And I will say that after just being in business as a founder as a leader for 12 years now, the best managers that I have worked with know exactly what their teams are doing. They know exactly how much work their teams are producing regardless of where they're sitting in the world. That the best managers already know how to hire and fire and manage the best and worst people, manage the worst people out. And they don't need to be watching their every move inside an office. And the challenge with I think bigger companies is you have dozens of layers of management and most of them are very mediocre. And so this is why they're forcing their workforce back into the office. And you mentioned some of the pieces that you, some of the processes you have in place like the flexible work time. Maybe you can talk about also how you guys measure performance. I know you have the show and tell and some of those other tools as well. Okay, so like tactically what we do. Okay, so I talked about flexible work hours. It's really important that we have overlapping hours because there's real work that we have to do. Everyone that is on our team is an excellent communicator. So much of our jobs as founders and as operators is to communicate the vision and the plan so that everyone knows what everyone is doing so that we don't overstep each other. And so communicating not just verbally but written communication. We have an incredibly, we have an insanely organized G Drive which is our company Wiki where everyone can find everything easily. And it does require a very OCD G Drive cop which is my co-founder and CTO. Like he is the police for that drive. You are not allowed to dump any garbage in there or file things away. Like everything is organized, everything is exactly where it is and you can find it. So that's another tactically what we do. I'd like to see his closet at home. You need someone to enforce it. And then the other things that work for us is a regular cadence of meetings which I'm sure you guys have that too. For us there's two really important meetings. All hands is Monday morning. We have all hands every week. Everyone knows we're trying to accomplish this quarter, this month, this week. By Thursday evening we have another touch point. We have a meeting called Show and Tell. Show and Tell is exactly what it sounds like. You show off what you have built even if the thing doesn't work. You show it off or if you're not on the R&D team you tell about what you've built and how you've helped the company progress. And if you are the person that has been silent week over week at Show and Tell, everyone on the team, and certainly Tracy is gonna notice, you want to be the teammate that is presenting something awesome at Show and Tell. So this is how we hold each other accountable.  For me it's like we just have to get 1% better every single day. I don't care what it is, whether it's our product, whether it's the way we service our customers, whether it's our processes, if we are able to get better 1% every single day we will be able to win. We will run faster than everyone. So I think a lot of the ideas you're talking about are touching on company culture and how that's really an important aspect of how you set things up early on, especially when you're remote. Maybe you can talk about from your past experience what made you kind of realize that setting up the culture, the values, that set of things early on was important. Yeah, well I made the mistake of setting up core values that no one knew what they were.  Actually HR came in at some point and they were like, you can't use that word, it's no jerks. So clearly, like everyone can agree, no jerks is a good core value. It's nice and simple and we don't wanna work with jerks. Okay, except that we had jerks in the building and I didn't fire them. And what that signaled to the company was, hey, if you just perform for Tracy you can get away with murder.  So you don't have to follow any of them. And in the end, you know, Planger had an amazing outcome for all our investors and everyone involved. But we were number two in the market. We sold to Autodesk and the reality is there's no more Planger today, it is dead. There's some merged together product that's still being sold, but there's no more Planger today. And I really believe that if we had the right people in the building with shared aligned core values, we could have been legendary. So that is the promise for our current company. What if we just had the best team and we had shared core values that we all believed in and we all lived by, could we build a better company? And that's where we're at today. Do you wanna hear about my core values? Yes, I have them here too. Do you want me to read them off to you or do you have them all there? No, no, I know my core values. So the first core value at Tiger Eye is whole-heartedness.  Whole-heartedness. I have three young kids in the state somewhere. They're with their grandparents and dad. I am here with you at Slush, speaking to you. I'm with Jen here on the stage right now. I am really not thinking about them. When I go home on Friday morning, I'm gonna be with my kids and I will not be thinking about Slush or any of you guys, maybe only telling stories. So the idea of whole-heartedness is it is the antidote to being overwhelmed. It is the antidote to feeling burnout, which is what many of us in startups feel constantly, the constant pressure, the constant stress and anxiety. One way to counteract that is just to be present in the one thing you're doing right now. And we practice this every single day at Tiger Eye at work and in our personal lives. And I expect this of every single person in the company that when they are at Tiger Eye, bring 100% of yourself. Don't split yourself into multiple directions. When you're with your family, eat dinner with your family. Don't check Slack, don't talk to me, don't talk to anyone, don't think about the company. Just have dinner with your family and be with them. That's what whole-heartedness is. And for the interest of time or other four core values is humility, humble people are great to work with. We are all experts at something and we are amateurs at literally everything else. Trust, we've already touched on the importance of trust. Without trust, you have nothing. Simplicity is core to our product, it's core to our processes. We want to see simplicity in everything we do. If we can onboard our customers in a few steps, why make it 15 steps? And our last core value is Kaizen, the Japanese philosophy that stands for continuous improvement. In fact, this is so used at our company that when we show each other something that just isn't quite that good yet, we'll say, that's okay, we can ship it, but we'll Kaizen it immediately. And so everything is always, we'll just Kaizen it. Let's just ship it. There's Kaizen, or when we think something really sucks, we won't say it sucks, of course, because that's not nice. We'll say, ah, there should be Kaizen moments here. Let's talk about how to improve this. And as founders, what we want to see is decisions being made from the core values. Yeah, I really like how those core values are very specific to how you guys do things, because a lot of times when we're advising portfolio founders, they'll say, hey, I have some words that I want to kind of throw out there, but they can't implement them, so I think that's super helpful. I think the last part that's very practical for people is I know you guys have sort of a agreement that you have employees make with one another and with yourself, and maybe you can tell everybody a little bit about that, because I think it's super interesting. I love our 10 commitments to each other, and everyone has to agree to it when they join the company. So the 10 commitments to each other is just clarifying our core values, because they're written in the way where it's like, wait, what does Kaizen really mean? What does simplicity really mean? And there's statements, so I'll give you a couple examples, our 10 commitments to each other. One of them is, I will walk it like I talk it. Or another one, I will never speak destructively behind my teammates back. If I have an issue, I will talk to you directly and trust that I can have the hard conversations and we can work things through, like adults and the professionals that we are. So those are just two examples of where it is very clear what is expected of you to follow our core values, because if you do not behave that way and the last commitment is, if my teammates don't live up to these core values and these commitments, I will let them know. Or if I, in return, are not living up to these commitments that we've promised each other, this is how we're gonna work, I expect you to tell me and point it out. And they sign it. Okay. I think we'll just quickly go to scaling teams and the hiring and maybe the necessary evil of firing sometimes. I think how do you, how do you, maybe what's your best tips for hiring the right people in the organization, especially since you're remote and knowing if they fit in with the culture and the guys? I love the Jim Collins motto of right people on the bus, wrong people off the bus. But I think where we failed in the past is, we knew, and these were probably the biggest mistakes I've ever made, we knew in our gut, we knew in our stomach that this person just isn't gonna work out for a variety of reasons. But we didn't have the courage to fire them because we knew it was hard. Or I remember I would justify, it's like, I know this person isn't working out, but my life is so stressful right now and I just, you know, it'd just be better if my life would just be better if there's just in that seat so I don't have to have a shittier life and take over that entire department. And so I think the advice I would have here is actually how to fire someone. Because I think you all know in your gut when someone doesn't work out. Just like listen to this, there's so much intelligence here. This has taken me 10 years to learn how to fire so I will tell you how to do it. You get them in a room, you look at them eye to eye, if you're remote you try to get them in person because it's the nice thing to do. And you say, these are the expectations of the job. And you really have to clearly say, and you are not meeting these expectations. You can either fire them in the spot, I think it's really important that we try to give people a chance. I think even if you know it's not gonna work out, everyone deserves a chance. So you say, this is how you can fix it. Talk to them about it, listen. It's really important to listen. And you tell them you have three weeks, you have four weeks, you have a generous amount of time to turn it around. And what I have found is that once you have that hard conversation, only 10% will turn it around, 90% you'll realize quickly will completely check out because they're interviewing, they're talking to recruiters, they're interviewing somewhere else. And it's usually because they've lost faith in you, they lost faith in the company or they've lost faith in themselves. So it's just not gonna work out. The other 10% where it works out, you just see them feeling really disappointed themselves and they just bring it. They do everything they can to fix their mistakes or to be, to grow, to remove themselves away from their own ego and then just be a better teammate for the company. And it's really important for the teammates that actually do that for the company to without, with humility, take that kind of feedback and grow and change. It's really, really important that we reward them and thank them. I think it really goes back to the core values you're talking about. It really mirrored in that approach as well because it's sort of having that direct communication with someone and I do think I find people want to be nice or they want to avoid conflict and it is very easy to beat around the bush and not be very clear about what the expectation is or what the person should do. And I think your examples here are a very good way to say, here's how to have clear communication be very direct and still find people who are very humble and hardworking and can turn it around. So I think that's a really great example of applying your core values to how you do things. All right, in the interest of time we're going to the lightning round. So why did you decide to become a founder in the first place versus sort of continue to work in another company or finding a job and kind of sticking with it for a long time where someone else was the founder? I was a construction engineer by trade. I built Plangerd as a fun project with my friends and so I think we benefited from that. There was no expectations. It was just something we could do together. We loved, we were all builders. I was a construction engineer. My friends were software engineers. We just wanted to build something cool that I could use in the field. And then we made our first million dollars and then we made our next 10 million dollars. And I think at that point I was like, whoa, we can build a big company out of this. This product's really good. People are paying us money for it. And we eventually grew that to 100 million in ARR and that's when I stepped down as CEO and handed over to the Autodesk team. But why do I continue doing this?  It is a very hard job. It is truly a very hard job. Having to meet so many people. It's fun, but some of the painful parts, yeah. Having to be really friendly to founders that you might not even like. To know if you did a good job or not and it's gonna take 10 years for you to know that. I'm a founder at heart, I'm a builder at heart. It's very rewarding for me to actually work and then see progress every single day. That's awesome. Let's go to the last question, which is what's your final advice to founders or sort of your parting thoughts that you would give to anyone here who is a founder thinking of being a founder going through that journey right now? Being a founder, working in startups, being investor, it is fast paced and it is hard. There's product market fit problems, there is competition. But what makes it hard also is that life doesn't stop just because you're doing the hardest thing you've ever done before. We all have to deal with aging and sickness and death.  That is the one common thing that all of us have. And this was true for us. One of my co-founders at my last company died at 29 years old while we were building our startup in the early days from cancer. And this is the best gift I have ever been given. It is a gift that I think about every single day and it is a gift that I'm gonna share with you that I hope you will take something from. Antoine told me before he died, life is short, life is short, take care of the ones you love. You okay? I would say normalize crying, normalize crying, I would like to say. It's actually really good, so I really need to spit this out because I'm out of time. Life is short, take care of the ones you love, don't be afraid to try new things and never ever do anything that makes you unhappy. Thank you. Amazing. Amazing. Amazing. Thanks everybody.


here. We're doing a full sellout promo random from Monday, January 30th. The full sellout promo was $1,000 in break credit total. Every single spot from a group break tonight is going to be in the randomizer here. The top five in the random or each going to get $200 break credit added to your account, you must have an account with us to receive your break credits. If it is after the fact and you're creating account afterwards. So say you like you're kind of new here, please email us and make sure because I'm going to go on after this and actually add the break credit myself. I'll go back and make sure it's done just right after this, you know, just after midnight tonight. So let's go ahead and do this random things again, everybody for fully selling us out this fine Monday night, we did pull some nice cards, had a lot of fun as well. So good luck, just like any other random here. We'll go seven times two and five. And again, after seven, those top five are going to get 200 break credit a piece. Here we go. So you'll have a name or a team if it's a PYT next to whatever break it was. So if there's duplicate names, it's not going to be an issue whatsoever. Good luck here, everybody seven times. Again, top five, top five, one, two, three, four, five, six, and seven. They're already top five. The Warriors and Mosaic NBA four box number 21, Gregory M in flawless MLB one box number 20, the Miami Heat and Immaculate basketball case 46, Joseph P in the National Treasures Triple Threads dual case from tonight. And the Rockets from Mosaic four box number 20. There you go. Those are the five right there. These are going to get posted to the website as well. I will scroll through pretty quickly here. But again, I'm going to post this to the site. And you'll be able to see it there. And obviously this recording is going to get uploaded as well. And we're doing it live. So congrats to the winners. Thanks again for the full sell out, everybody.


James we're gonna take a look at your Instagram page.  Yeah, that's not much on there But we can we can check it out First one, of course, we're here in the Bronx. Oh, yeah, so we got to talk about this pizza Ruben Rosa. Oh, delicious It was great. We so we visited this off-season Went out for dinner with friends and they recommended this place and the pizza was fantastic I love pizza and this is some good pizza. Now you're from Canada. Are you a big-time pizza guy or what?  We order pizza It's kind of pizza night back my parents place. So, you know, really enjoyed this pizza. It was just awesome All right, so how would this pizza compare to your parents pizza? I'd have to say this piece is better than the stuff we get back home Here we go. We got s'mores. There's nothing like making some s'mores. That's a nice smile like this Yeah, this is Christmas time my wife and I spent Christmas with my my folks this off-season They have a you know wood-burning fireplace in their living room And we thought that would be great to roast s'mores just on the wood-burning fireplace And it was it was great. We're talking food. We're talking some sweets. Yep That's a nice captain you got there. That's that's that's a good husband Yeah, so we that was on our honeymoon actually in Maui found this spot that was recommended to us And they have great milkshakes. We love the milkshake said good food to burgers and fries and stuff But really enjoyed it Katie loved your milkshake. I think we might have shared that one It was great. Sure. You got some brownie points. Oh, yeah, of course speaking of that You guys do like to go out have a good time check out some restaurants. Yep Got a chance to crack open some crabs. We did. Yeah, that was in Seattle and yeah They give you the mallets and you get to break it up. You kind of get a little messy That's what we got the bibs on and stuff, but I love seafood and it was great I really enjoy checking out different places in different cities when we get a chance to On off days or if we have a day game and we're not flying somewhere It's great to get around get around town and find different spots to go to perfect segway It's like you knew what the next picture is gonna be off day during the baseball season You go to San Francisco Giants game. Yeah, how much fun was that being there actually enjoying a game rather than Planet and obviously being with the loved one. Yeah, it was great. You know, it was a different feel for sure I'm used to being on the field But it was awesome to just go like as a fan and watch the game with my wife You know have a beer and a hot dog felt like a regular guy It was it was great good experience. It's nice going in regular street clothes rather than actually having to put on a Uniform, I'm sure too, right? Yeah, I got to show up at you know, 645 right before the game relax It was it was cool. I like being on the field, you know, I choose that first But it was awesome for to go with my wife on that off day and kind of spend some time watching the game together So you got that hiking done in Hawaii. Yep. You got this beach in California Game from Canada. Do you prefer this? Over that kind of beach setting well, I'd say for now, I love the beach The beach is great, especially like off-season little vacation, you know hang out in the beach relax I love snowboarding. I had to quit when I was like 15 because of baseball, you know I don't want to break a wrist or something like that. So Had to shut that down But someday I want to get back to snowboarding. Hopefully it's not for a long time But when I'm done, I think I'm really gonna enjoy getting back on the mountain and ripping up some trails Because of your Canadian roots. Yep fan made you this big maple. It's pretty awesome nickname. Very cool. Yeah, absolutely I mean someone gave me that so cool There's been a great, you know following of the Maple Grove and in Seattle They've got a group out there that goes up when I pitch they have a cars instead of K cars You know Felix has the K cars and Kings Court over there But they've done this themselves and they they have a great time doing it and I actually got to meet them last year as well They came down before a game and I gave them maple bars and we took some pictures and hung out really nice people It's just so great. They have such an awesome time Out there watching my games cheering for me and that was a just a really nice gift from one of them Which brings us to this post of yours the no-no shirt That is a very cool very like personalized like custom type shirt for yourself. Yeah That's got to be sweet to wear that and actually I've pitched one. It's that was amazing I mean what a game and I've said in the past that game belongs as much to my teammates as it does to me it's some of the defense I got in that game was unbelievable and It's just really cool that they made this t-shirt for me, you know with the Canadian Maple Leafs inside the O Just really special. It was an amazing game and having stuff like this to remember it by is awesome So once you posted this photo how many friends and family reached out to you text me like oh, hey Can I get one of those shirts? I think a few actually reached out one some of those I think I directed them to the place online where they can take an order them There's that shirt and then you've posted a few times about socks. So you big time sock guy These socks are pretty sweet the Mariners lineup and yeah, of course you got these ones right here Yep stride line I've got a friend who knows the guy who is a part of that company and they've hooked us up with socks a number of times And I just posted to say thank you for the awesome socks They gave us and I know if you tried those socks, but they are extremely comfortable and check them out You should check them out. I think they actually just got a deal with MLB to make Socks so they can put players faces on soft now. So yeah, really good really cool company before we go let us know What you love about Instagram most and why somebody should follow you Instagram's great, you know just to keep up with friends family see what's going on pop culture I say follow me to see what I'm doing out and about on the road or You know just whatever if you really want good good stuff on me probably follow my wife Katie Joe Paxton on Instagram. She's always got the best videos of me She's always bringing out her phone when I'm doing funny stuff and catching catching things So she's definitely the one to follow in our family


Hello, and welcome to another software overview. This is where I show you a program that you may not know exist back when I first started using Linux like 10 years ago. I used to like to just try every program that was in the repositories installed on distributions I use just to see what they do. And one of the ones I really liked was a one called BB. If it's not installed on your system, it should be in the package manager on Debian based systems such as Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and Debian. You can use apt-get install BB. Actually, it could probably be sudo apt-get or do it as root. Once it's installed, you can type BB and hit enter to start it up. It's going to ask you if you want music or not. I'm going to hit no to start off here. And what it's going to do is it's going to start playing this animation and ask key art.  And I used to love to just watch this back when I first switched over to Linux. I just thought it was a neat little thing. And also the music that went along with it was pretty cool too. But one of the problems I have found, and I don't know if it's modern sound systems, but for years I have not been able to get this to work with the audio that goes along with the animation. It would go to just about where we are now in freeze when the music starts. And I've tried it on multiple different computers. And it's not as impressive without the audio. I mean, it's a great little animation, but much more impressive with the audio. So how can we get the audio to play? I'm going to go ahead and close this. Well, I Googled it and I found that the audio file is a separate file. It's actually under USR Share BB and then it's the one labeled BB.S3M. So you can play that with Mplayer to hear what the music sounds like. And so that's great. You can hear the music and we can play the video separately, but let's play them together. I've timed it out. So again, if you do BB and you say yes to audio, and I've tried changing all these different options here and haven't had it and haven't had any luck. And it plays fine and doesn't lock up when the music starts. Just go ahead and do that. But if you're like me where the audio does lock up, I have timed it out and the music starts 24 seconds into the animation. So what we need to do is we need to write out a command that will allow us to do that. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to type in BB to start the BB command, the animation. And I'm going to do the ampersand there, which basically says run that command and also continue running the next command, which we're going to say sleep for 24 seconds. Semi colon, which says to, you know, here's a new command. So it's going to sleep for 24 seconds. And then we're going to do M player, usr, share BB, BB dot S3M. And to get this time right, we have to hit enter and then the letter N right away. Because we want to keep the timing so I'm going to hit enter and N. And that tells it, no, we don't want to play music in the actual BB program. But it is going to start playing an M player in 24 seconds. So again, this is a fun little program. Just to view this out, you can install it and watch it. It's great. If you don't feel like installing it, you can also YouTube search, Linux BB and people have put the animation up online, but we'll watch it a little bit of it here. I won't play the whole thing, but you guys can go and watch it yourself. Well, I'm going to stop it there, but I definitely recommend that you go and check it out. It's just fun to watch.  And this was a software overview. Thanks for watching. Please visit FilmsByChris.com. That's Chris with the K. There should be a link in the description. I also hope that you have a great day and be sure to like, subscribe and share. Have a good day.


Where it up? Where it up? That's right. What's it up? Thank you for your crossing the camera.  Fire! You guys are going to go one o'clock. Let's go, got two. Let's go go one. Open it. Again!


Magnetic stimulation of peripheral nerves requires high currents, which are generated by large, expensive, and complex devices. These limitations make magnetic stimulation unsuitable for some applications such as rehabilitation therapies. To overcome these challenges, the geometry of the magnetic coils must be carefully considered. This study investigated the electric field distribution of 14 different coil geometries at a typical peripheral nerve stimulation, with a 27 mm distance between axon and coil. Field strength and focality were determined using electromagnetic field simulations. Additionally, the activating function along the axon was calculated, which quantified the efficiency of neuronal stimulation. Power efficacy was also evaluated based on ohmic losses. Results showed that power efficacy could be improved by up to 40% with optimized coil designs. This article was authored by Philip Braun, Jonathan Rapp, Werner Hemmert, and others. We are article.tv, links in the description below.


Welcome folks, this is Tom O'Brien of TFNN. We got five days a week, we go seven hours a day, we go 24 hours a day on the internet at tfnn.com. Always remember folks, whatever you think about, you bring about whatever. You focus on growth, hope everyone's having a great day, safe day, let's make it a great night folks. Cultivate wisdom. You don't need to accumulate knowledge to become wise. Anyone can become wise. When you become wise, you respect your body, you respect your mind, and you respect your soul. When you become wise, your life is controlled by your heart, not your head. Not gonna wise, let's take a look at it out here. We have the Dow industrials trading down 280 NASDAQs off 118 S&Ps down 36 gold. Gold contract down $21.30. Excuse me folks, trading 18.37 an ounce. We got silver down 62 cents, $23.34 an ounce, light sweet crude up 95 cents, $73.80 a barrel, notes and bonds, a 10-year note. Down six ticks, trading 113, 30-year flat at 127.16 a king dollar. King dollar's up 843 ticks, trading out at 105.091. Euro is at 105, yen is at 133, and the British pound is at 119 to one US dollar. Our phone number's<PHONE_NUMBER>. It was called folks, I know it's going on in y'all world. In the world of the S&Ps, let's take a look at them. Let's take a look at the futures for us and see where we're going to go in these next 60 minutes. So if we take a look at the futures out here, you're going to see is that, there we go. We've been bottom line, we started out today, seven o'clock this morning at 38.85. Got down to a price point of 38.22. You had a little pop intraday up to the price point that was some volume too, by the way, okay? That pop that came in at 120 this afternoon, that had, let's see, 79,000 contracts, but yet you're going into 89. You see how it works, right? Then you basically tested the 89 with 22 versus the 89. When you get used to using how these, if you use any type of bars, folks, okay? It doesn't, I use 10-minute bars, I've tried a million different kinds, but it just depends on what time frame you're actually dealing with and how much clarity you're trying to get. This happens a lot, and this is always really cool, man, when you see the first one get up and it can't make it, and in this case, you know, it didn't make it, and it was 10,000 contracts shot, and if you bearish, that's what you'd want to see. You want to see that, okay, we tested it with 22,000 versus 89. Then when you look for, is an expansion of volume on the way down, and guess what, we're getting it. So this is saying that we're going to go right back to the lows here, and more than likely, yeah, I'd say we're going back to the lows of the consolidation, and in this particular case, and the S&Ps, that's going to be 38,22, and we're at, well, we're at 38,37. We go to the NQs, we take a look at the NQs, we do the same exercise inside of the NQs, we take a look at the NQs here, and you can see, oh, they're so weak, man, it's unbelievable. This is wild. So the NQs, same exercise though, you can see that we got up to, we did 31,000 versus 33, you tested the top with 9,500 versus 33, then we just did 9,000 on the way down, this is the same deal, man. Now the difference of the NQs, I think the NQs can go right to the very bottom, meaning the bottom was established out here at 8.40 a.m., which would be 10,814, you know, so I think we're going to have a messy close coming in here. We got to take a look at the gold contract. So gold contract out here has not got inside the lower range yet, the lower range a couple dollars lighter, well, it's getting closer, okay. The lower range would be 18,3690. We hit that today, 1829, but right now you're at 1837, 30, you've done 176,000 contracts. We go to the dollar, we take a look at the dollar is in the dollar folks wants to go to this 107,108 area. You can see the dollar has strength, man. That's a second, in three days, it's had two days of strength. We take a look at this and you put this up and you just do your levels on it, you can see 107,16, it's a .382, 501,108, and the 618 is 109,48. What I would be doing out here is that you'd line up, if you're looking to buy, if you're looking where the buyer's going to come in, you line up the dollar, because I think this is the counter trend bounce. My take is this counter trend bounce, that we're going to see the dollar get up there, you're going to see the ABC structures finishing the way down, and you got to remember something, when ABC structures finish folks, they do something other than basically continue the same way, right away. It can finish, then it can start going sideways, it can do a counter trend bounce up, it can build cause sideways, and if you see that finish, it's simultaneously, you see the dollar making the .50 or the .618 retracement, that's a really nice setup, that that's where all the reversals will take place. If we go over to the interest rate structure, right now you're at 3.718, and bottom line, numbers that came out this morning are still saying flat out that there's plenty of jobs out there. Yes, you have layoffs that are happening that are terrible for the people that it's happening to, but the jobs are out there, and this interest rate structure is going to be here for quite some time, and along with the interest rate structures here, the lower the market will go, the lower, and we'll see if we get followed through tomorrow, you know, inside of the gold market. What you have inside the gold market right now is that some of the equities, you know, they were down, but they weren't down as much as they were up yesterday. They are pulling back, and as the pullback, they are coming back with lighter volume, but my take is that everything is going south. Good babies, bad babies, whatever kind of baby it is, down we go. Let's go take a look at Apple. Apple, bottom line, and on top of that, I think Apple's going to take them down. That's the real bottom line here, because what you have is that, you know, Apple's got hit, but not like the rest of the market, and what Apple has done, you know, Apple is a 103 on it right now. Apple has broken its consolidation. If you take a look at this, you're going to see that you're going to make the case going all the way back till, what is it, September? That's June, no, June, August, August of 2020, that if you bought Apple, you're just about in a losing position. You're definitely in a losing position if you bought it from July 2022. The reason I'm saying that, you can see, if you see this line, it was underneath it. Apple at 103 are going to shock the markets, they're going to shock folks in the markets, and then Tesla forget it. Tesla's going to 50 bucks. Tesla here, Tesla right now is trading out there today. It's down two bucks, you know, it's light volume, it's a 110. It probably has to build some more cars, but 50 bucks here we come. Stay right there folks, come right back.