And welcome to Work Reimagined, streaming live on Pink Tech Hawaii and brought to you from Honolulu, Hawaii. Why do we need to reimagine work? As we're seeing, there are so many massive disruptions to our labor markets due to automation, of course, now with the pandemic. So we're asking ourselves questions like, what is work gonna look like when we return to some type of normal after the pandemic? And then how will automation affect the kinds of skills that we will need as workers for the jobs of the future? On Work Reimagined, I talked to innovators and entrepreneurs who are creating innovative solutions that are helping us navigate these effects of these massive disruptions while making a positive social impact in people's lives. I'm Ruby Menon, your host. And my guest today is Liza Rodewald, and she is the CEO and founder of Instant Teams. And they provide an on-demand remote workforce using an untapped source of professionals. Now, who is that, you might ask? Well, she has tapped into military spouses. So I'll be talking to Liza about her journey and what motivated her to create a remote work opportunity company for military spouses and at the same time providing employers with these on-demand teams for different types of positions. The company is growing and Liza has big plans. So we'll have a chat about where she's headed with her company. And with these rapid changes happening in our labor markets, I believe we can expect to see more of this future of work model. So Liza, I'm so excited to have you on ThinkTech, Hawaii and Work Reimagined and wanted to say welcome and Aloha. Aloha Ruby, and thank you for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity to just talk about the journey and to share a little bit. Yeah, you know, I remember the first time I saw you when you were with the Blue Startups organization or the accelerator and you did a pitch at the Dema Day. And I have to say that I was so impressed at that time when I saw you. Well, number one, you were doing something that was very unique along, you know, I mean, all the pitches were great. However, what you were trying to tackle was so different. Like everybody else was doing something maybe around, you know, advertising and marketing analytics and things like that. And you were tackling this HR issue and I have an HR background. So I could completely understand where you were going with this. And so I've kind of been tracking you and, you know, watching what you're doing and, you know, I had the opportunity to do this show. You came up on my radar, because I was thinking we've got to talk because you've kind of like cracked, I think it sounds like you cracked the code on creating these teams and cracked the code on how you can make this work remotely. And this is such a huge topic for us right now where employers are really trying to wrap their head around the whole issue of remote work and how do you gel the teams and all of that. So I'm excited to get into all of those different conversations, but let's start out with you and your career journey. Like what led you to this moment with Instant Teams? Sure. So, you know, I have a long history of working remotely myself as both an employee, a contractor and an entrepreneur. So Instant Teams is my fourth company. I have a software engineering background and so I built a lot of software for the government, healthcare agencies, things like that. And in the journey of running my own companies, I saw the need for the technology piece of what Instant Teams does for a sourcing solution to get high quality talent, be able to scale up a team quickly to deploy on the projects I was doing for software space in the government world. And then at the same time I met my husband, he was active duty military before then he was in the reserves. And when he was in the reserves, that's when we got married and he decided he wanted to go back active duty like I think of like four months after we got married. And so I was like, well, my company at the time was completely distributed, the one before Instant Teams. So I was like, sure, let's go on an adventure. And I moved into my first predominantly military neighborhood and had always had this idea for Instant Teams. In fact, I bought the domain like 10 years ago, a long time ago. I had this idea on the technology side and then every single spouse I would meet would come up to me and say, Liza, how are you working from home? How can I get a job working remotely? I've been unemployed for the past X number of years because they move on average every two degree years. But highly skilled, highly capable, have a lot of great soft skills that translate good into the remote workspace. And so I just started thinking, okay, I know there's a big business need here for high quality scalable remote team. Now I've been introduced to a completely untapped talent resource of these military spouses who need these remote work opportunities. How do I bring these two things together and create something that solves problems on both sides? And that's kind of how Instant Teams was born and how we started iterating on creating the solution. So I know that you, and I have to say that when I used to hire military spouses, they were always so talented, very professional. And the only thing though, that was always a little bit in the back of our minds as employers is we knew that we only had them for a limited amount of time, because it all depended on the tour of duty. So I was very curious about this Instant Team concept because as leaders, we're always grappling with team dynamics. How do you get the best people on the bus? How do you get them to work together and align on the mission or whatever the project goals or values are? And the notion of creating an Instant Team is kind of hard for me to wrap my head around only because I've been there where I've tried to gel teams and it's like you have to have a lot of FaceTime with them. So how does that Instant piece kind of work? How do you make that work with this instant timeframe that you're doing? Sure, so Instant Teams builds teams on average for five to seven days for a company. But there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes prior to that working. So we have like four layers of vetting that spouses go through before they're even available to be matched to the company. And so there's some pieces of that assessment and personality testing and things that we do in automation and our software platform prior to them being matched to the team. And what we're doing is gathering data on not only like skill-based matching but personality, soft skills. Like what is it that's really making these team members be successful with the companies we're pairing them with? And how can we learn from that and model that so that we can put it back into the technology to make sure that as much as we can we're automating that process at scale. Oh, that's fascinating. So you're using, is it artificial intelligence or machine learning or what type of technology are you using for that? We have plans to start going into some AI but we're just using our own datasets right now to gather as much of that data as possible so we can start to build the models for it. Oh, cool, okay. So you're talking about matching people to projects. So I was curious as to how, so you're gathering all this data there and I looked at your website, I guess they're doing like a digital profile, right? And then you're from there being trying to match them.  Is that one of the criteria? Yeah, you can be just anybody. We do have a focus and mission to help military spouses and military spouse employment but we have civilians and veterans and all kinds of demographics within our town. Okay. So if I'm coming on your website and clicking on join your team, what's the experience? Like what could I expect in order to be able to get my foot in the door? Yeah, so you would fill out a profile, what we just call an RD profile. It has several different steps in it. So it'd be like a basic resume, online resume type system where we'd have you enter your backgrounds, your skills, your education, that type of thing. And then once all that information is completed, then it'll go through some of our automation skills matching to see that the things that you wrote and put in there kind of match the rest of your profile and at that point you get invited to some automated video interviews. So based on which buckets you've been placed as potential role opportunities. So we kind of segregate things into like customer support and customer success, operational teams, project managers, that kind of thing. So you'll get kind of put in a bucket based on your assessment. And then you'll do the automated interview process. Our HR team watches all of them. So we do touch every application that comes in in some form. And then they will score that. And then the final level is called remote pro. Once you reach remote pro status, you're available to be matched to a company coming in and asking for certain skill sets and things for instance. So you'll be notified all along the way where you're at in the journey, what else you need to do to move to the next steps. And then sometimes bigger companies will have an additional assessment or something they'll want you to take in addition prior to starting them. So at that point we may send you a personality test or a skill-based test depending on the job or the role. And then that would be the last layer before you get to actually what we call an intro view, which is like a meet and greet. So it's not interview process because we do all of that, but it's just a meet and greet with the customer to make sure that it's a good fit and then you get onboarded. And about how long does that take, that process take, would you say? It can go really quickly. So as long as you're on top of your game and you're doing all the things to progress, you can get it done within a week. Oh, okay. So you're mentioning the types of positions, customer service and a few others. What skill sets are you looking for in terms of the types of positions that you have available? Well, we saw a really huge need in the customer service industry, especially with the fits of our talent. So we didn't necessarily start off to focus there, but it became pretty apparent that we had the ability to have US citizens that were located around the globe and in every time zone, which made it very easy for us to do 24-7 support for companies and everybody kind of worked during the day. That became a really huge value problem in some teams and a lot of big enterprise were very interested in that. So we doubled down and kind of focused on customer support and tech support in all kinds of roles, right? So there's tier one, two, three, managers, supervisors, things like that. So it's not just entry level, but within that framework. So we really, three main things, customer success, customer support. We do operational support-based teams, so project managers, data entry, back office type things. And then we have some telemedicine teams that do virtual thriving and virtual receptions work for medical companies and for the Air Force in particular. Wow, that's, so it sounds like, yeah, because a lot of times I think that, you know, people think that it's just very, that the lower end data entry types of jobs that, you know, or I guess at some point, they're easy to get your foot in the door, but they don't have much career progression I guess now. Yeah, so let's say that you come into that position. Well, it's interesting that you're saying that there's a huge demand for customer service.  And there's so many people who have hospitality skills that I think is a very transferable skill that they are able to put into a customer service. Cause it's like, if a person was like at a hotel desk, concierge type of person chances are they've got the kinds of customer service skills that you would need. They would just have to translate it maybe to being on the phone, on a computer or whatever. So I know there's a cool project that you're doing with the state of Hawaii. So why don't you tell us about that, what you're doing with them? Sure, yeah. I definitely saw the same need, right? Hospitality does translate really well into customer service. I started actually being part of a group that's all about digital equity here in Hawaii and making sure broadband is available to the outer islands and things like that. And those discussions got me leading to kind of iterating on some ideas that I had and how Instant Teams could help Hawaii and retrain some people that maybe were in hospitality and displaced and put them in jobs, just like we did for the military spouses. So taking that same model and bringing it here to Hawaii. So through that group that I was a part of, I got interviews to DBET and we started talking about how we can maybe do an initiative, a pilot together when the state to offer some training and some re-skilling and then put some people here into some of the jobs that Instant Teams have with some of our large enterprise such as Walmart and the Air Force contract and the different things that we have going on. So we have what we call Remote Ready Hawaii. If you wanna find out more about it, you can go to instantteens.com slash Hawaii so you can read the details. But the overall idea is that we're building a program here so that people can upskill, reskill short micro. So we're not talking about going to college and getting a big certification. It's all about short skills that can get you into a job fast. And so we're doing micro-type training and a paid internship and then straight into remote jobs for Instant Teams. So we have kicked that off this month which is our first cohort starting to go through which is very exciting with the state. And in conjunction with that, we're building a sales team with an Instant Teams to go out and reach some other countries that we think the time zone here in Hawaii is a selling point for. And so we're building an internal sales team here in Hawaii to start going after some of those countries that might want the bilingual nature and the intermediate time zone in between East Coast time and times over in Japan or Korea, Australia, these types of companies who need kind of that bridge gap. So we're really excited to take this model we've seen successful with military spouses and open it up to appear to the local people in Hawaii. And how many people do you have in your cohort? There are 88 spots in the pilot. Oh, okay. And the pilot is going to last how long? Until June. So all 88 will be have gone through the training and into the jobs by the end of June this year. And we are working to prove the success of the pilot so that we can extend it and start offering it to more and more people here. So you were mentioning that you work with companies like Walmart or the Air Force of what types of businesses? Because I'm really interested and we were talked about one side of the labor market which is the town pipeline, but on the other side are the employers. So I was curious to find out if, well, what is your observation of the employers? Because this is a different model, people. It's like the pandemic kind of 100 X the whole remote thing because at first, it's always been looked at as it's a perk especially in tech companies. You either have to prove that you're trustworthy before you're given the keys to the kingdom which is like working from home type of thing. And now out of necessity, employers had to go, well, whatever. I mean, we can only conduct business if we're doing with this remote. So I was curious to find out, are you finding that that paradigm is shifting and will continue to sustain after our pandemic COVID stuff is over? What are you seeing in the market? Yeah, most definitely. So a lot of our customers pre-COVID were involved in technology in some sort. So technology based type companies, SaaS based companies, tech-enabled service type companies because they're early adopters to remote workforces, right? It's not really not used them to utilize a distributed workforce for different reasons. And I would say like sometimes our number one objection to working with companies prior was like, I don't know if I really want these people remote. I think I'd prefer to have them on site but I might be open to it. And then of course after the pandemic, it's like, okay, well, everybody's remote no matter what we've got to still keep moving. So it just, I would say 10 years sped up that adoption that was already starting to happen. So we saw industries like healthcare that have been wanting to move to the model but were just slow to kind of adapt, have to change and adapt overnight. Banking, like a lot of industries that were concerned of security had to figure those things out. So they spent the first half of the pandemic figuring out, okay, how do we secure everyone working from home? How do we put those things in place? And then after they did that process, now they're ready to scale their remote workforce. So I think overall those slower to adapt and change industries that just because they've been around and had older technology systems and things, it's sped that adoption up like government, I mean, just so fast. So it just opened doors really for us as an instant teams and areas that we might not have targeted pre-COVID. That would have been a harder sell and maybe a longer adoption to where they were just like, hey, we need help. All of our people are working from home. We're ready to engage with you guys and figure out what the best practices are and how to make this successful. Wow. Now speaking of security, I mean, that's obviously, and if you're dealing with insurance, healthcare, banking, I mean, those have to be airtight, right? So from the person who's working with instant teams, do they have to come with their own computer or is the equipment provided or how does that model work? Yeah, we have both scenarios. So it depends on the company. So some companies will wanna send a secured laptop that connects to a very specific VPN and has no ability to connect to anything else for security reasons. And then we have other customers where they'll use their own device and we've set up remote desktops through like an AWS to create secure protocols that way. So it just really depends on the customer and how, at what level they wanna do it, but some of our team members get equipment issued to them and some of them bring your own. So I wanted to kind of get back into this team thing. So you were mentioning that you'll select a group of people to form this team. And did you say that they would be working on a project for maybe five days or so or is it longer term? What's the use of the term? Most of our teams are full time, 40 hour a week. We have some going on two years working.  They are much more longer term hires and teams for the company. We build them in five to seven days, but they last a long time. Oh, got it, okay. So if you get placed in a team, do you wind up working with the same group of people? Like are you in a cohort or is it constantly changing and people coming in and out and how does that? Yeah, you work with the same team. The team may grow, we may add in new people, but yes, they're all in like Slack channels together. They all have community cohorts together, which is part of what makes instant teams work so well as we've built like a soft, strong sense of community within each other. So they have their own meetings together. They are cohesive in teams together and then we just add more to them or somebody does leave, somebody else gets replaced. They all have team leaders and supervisors and a whole virtual structure built around them to help give them support. So the virtual structure of the team leaders, are they part of that team or are they part of your group that's coming in and leading? They're part of our group. So everyone is employed through instant teams. So W2 employees, we don't do hardly any 1099s we're mostly W2, I'd say 98% are W2s with instant teams and the team leaders may work on the customer account maybe like 10 or 20 hours a week and then work the rest of the hours for instant teams as the team leads. Sometimes we split their time so they can kind of be in the weeds and really understand the job and what's going on with the other team members and then also they usually split their time like that. Ah, I see. And how many people are working in instant teams not as a remote team, instant team worker in your company? How many do you have so far? I think we've got 42 that work well on teams on what we call instant team headquarters which is everywhere, all over the world. Yes, we have team members in Japan and here and in Hawaii and all across the United States. So we're all completely distributed but there's about 42 that work in our headquarters and the rest of the team members are deployed to customer accounts. Okay, and then how many people do you have in your talent pipeline that you would say are like ready to just get deployed into a project? We have 15,000 people registered in the team's platform at various stages. I would say there's probably 7,500 at remote pro and the rest of them are making their way there. Oh, wow. Now you're saying that the teams are, you're helping them to build communities through Slack and different things like that. Because you've been working as a distributed company and I know that this is something that I think a lot of employers are still trying to figure out like how do I gel my teams? What have you found works really well to make people even though they're not face to face, feel like they're part of a team, get that sense of belonging and feel valued, all the soft stuff that we have a hard time, the squishy stuff that we have a hard time trying to wrap our heads around. How do you kind of engender that feeling for them? Yeah, so we have very specific culture building programming that we've built out. So not only are they just in a Slack channel together but there's programming that goes to them on a daily, on a weekly basis that promotes engagement with each other, engagement with instant teams, engagement and maybe additional content that we're bringing in. It could be additional training, it could be a donut and coffee morning, it changes but there's very intentional programming that we have that all of our team members get within their Slack channel.  The other thing that we have is an anonymous feedback tool that we've looped in to Slack, which prompts people to really share how they feel. And so if people start feeling disconnected then we dig into that. Okay, why? What could help asking questions? And I think having those anonymous feedback tools are really important in a distributed environment because people won't always tell you or come to you and say, hey, Liza, I'm struggling but they might send you an anonymous message or a message even that has their name on it that says, I don't wanna bother anyone but I'm really feeling disconnected from the team. I would love to see X, Y, Z, right? And we get so much great feedback through there and we're able to just take that feedback and then implement improvements. Wow, that's really that, cause I mean that takes a lot of trust, right? To be able to put yourself out there and say, hey, I feel like I'm not quite engaged here and help, I'm out here by myself. And that takes a lot of trust and courage. So that's kudos to you to be able to make sure that especially in a distributed environment for giving people that opportunity to say how they really feel. The other thing I wanted to ask you about when I was looking at your website is that you have like a whole set of remote courses that you offer. Can you tell us a little more about that? Sure, so what we found when we started building teams is we had a wide variety of people that had different types of experience levels and maybe more traditional careers. So they may have been in-person but they're not familiar with all of the tools we use like on Zoom right now in Slack, email, calendar integration, things that they may not have had to use in an office environment. So we saw a gap there. And we decided, you know, part of our process would be to have a workforce development piece within Instant Team so people could get what we call like digital readiness. So we've got a digital readiness bootcamp that basically just shows you the best parts of Slack, Gmail, calendar integration, shortcuts, how to use an online project management tool, right? Just things that they might not have had an introduction to as they have never worked remotely. And then that leads into some more advanced type skills that training that we have in those remote work areas including remote leadership. We have some remote leadership courses. And then we have some very specific industry. So customer support type training that they can take. And then any kind of training like I said that some of these bigger enterprises want to integrate within their talent pipelines as well. And the, so once you're part of Instant Teams is that something that you just have access to and you can take on your own time or do you have to pay for it or how's it all? Yeah, so some of them are free like the basic general level ones like digital readiness boot camps, those are all free. Once you've got a profile in Instant Teams you have access to our workforce development programs. And then some of them are paid for some of the more advanced ones and some of them are paid for by companies. If they want you to take the course in order to come into their talent funnel then they will pay for some of the training too. So there's kind of a hybrid approach. Oh wow, okay. Well, oh my gosh, I could talk to you for so much so I have so many questions but let's wrap up with maybe you can tell people how they can find you. Do you have social media and website and all of that? Sure, well, you can find me on LinkedIn at Liza Rotowald, L-I-Z-A-R-O-D-E-W-A-L-D. That's my personal page. I post a lot of things on there. And then of course, instantteens.com our regular website. If you wanna find out about what we're doing specifically for Hawaii, instantteens.com slash Hawaii and it has all that information. And then you can find the instantteens on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, all just under instantteens. Awesome, awesome. Well Liza, thank you so much. This has just really been enlightening and I wish you the best of luck.  Yeah, that was the life of military spouse. Yes, so thank you so much for joining me and thank you for sharing your journey and all the cool stuff that you're doing with instantteens. And thank you listeners for joining in and please tune in on Wednesday, April 7th at 3 p.m. where I'll be featuring somebody else that you'll be able to have a better understanding of what's going on with the future of work. Until next time, be safe, take care of one another and aloha.


You are listening to the Make Change Happen podcast from IID, the International Institute for Environment and Development. Sustainable Development Goal 14, Life Below Water, seeks to conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources to meet the 10 targets of the goal and ensure the many benefits from ocean seas and coasts are available to everyone in an inclusive blue economy. Action is needed both in the policy arena and in fishing practice. What is the economic value of marine and coastal ecosystems and small scale fisheries? How can incentives be employed for sustainable fisheries management? How can we ensure future high seas governance regimes or treaties are equitable and benefit all? To answer these and other questions, in this podcast our Director of Communications Liz Carlisle talks with two expert colleagues who are leading IID's research in this area. Hi and welcome to IID's new podcast, Make Change Happen. I'm your host today, I'm Liz Carlisle, I'm Director of Communications at IID and I'm going to guide us through a conversation with two of my colleagues. I've got on my left, Esam Yassin Mohamed, he's head of the inclusive blue economy team here and a fisheries economist.  Yes, absolutely fine. And formally you are head of the Fisheries Promotion Unit for the Ministry of Fisheries in Eritrea. On my right here is Laura Kelly. You are head of our Sustainable Markets Research Group and formally I think you're with Department for International Development as head of business engagement and the business hub. Have I got that right? Yeah that's right Liz, great to be here and part of this conversation, I'm very much looking forward to it. Good, I think we've got a few little issues here we can tease out. Esam what got you into kind of fisheries? I know it's been one of your particular passions. So it goes back to when I was in Eritrea very long time ago. I have this slightly unhealthy obsession with one particular fish called orange-faced butterfly fish. They're extremely beautiful creatures, they're ornamental fish in the Red Sea. And essentially I spend an awful lot of time maybe hundreds or thousands of hours strokling and diving to understand their behaviour when they breed and how they mate and all that. And that's what got me into fisheries in the first place. I decided to train as an economist and then end up being this very funny hybrid of marine biologist and an economist. Well I'm glad you're here with us and we're going to benefit from that funny hybrid. Laura what about you? I suppose the fish in your sea are kind of businesses, supply chains, all sorts of different characters. What's the interest for you around fisheries? Well I think as Esam explained from his own personal history, oceans and fish mean a lot to people. And putting people at the centre of development is really important for success and for sustainability. And I actually think the approach that we take here at IID is really about trying to get people at the centre of things. So we've got lots of fish and they're important but the people are really important too. And I think that leads us very very nicely to what we're talking about today. And so perhaps you can kind of kick us off, perhaps you Esam. I know this is a conversation but I think giving our listeners a bit of context would really help. So what do we actually mean by an inclusive blue economy? So I would say it is an ocean based economy that tries or aims to balance economic games of course and cultural and environmental games. So how do you strike a balance between all these three? But at the same time when we do so making sure that the people who depend on these resources for their livelihood are not left behind. I think that's really key. In business they often talk about the triple bottom line, something that's important for people and for the environment and for business. And I've been really struck talking to you about some of your work working with small scale fishers. I mean it's amazing that most of the fish in the world are actually caught by small and medium enterprises. They're not the big international, transnational companies. And I think that that's really important to remember in this debate that actually when we talk about business we're not just talking about big trawlerships. We're talking about small, often fisherwomen. It was great. I went to the Blue Economy Conference in Nairobi back in October last year. And it was great to meet some of the fisherwomen there, women from the Tanzanian Fish Workers Association. The great story is to tell about how they're mobilising and bringing their issues into these sort of real, really important debates about development. Absolutely.  You must give us an example of maybe a fisherman or a fisherwoman that you've met and has really struck a chord with you. I can give you an example in Bangladesh, since you mentioned Bangladesh Liz, where we went with this very well developed research proposal to work with fishers and with the government to find a way how to maximise the benefits that these small scale fishers receive. And as I will share my story, my project plan with the fisherman that time, and he completely dismisses our hypothesis and research questions, etc. The greatest lesson from that was to be able to listen to those individuals and see them as a source of inspiration and knowledge and information, and factor that in our research approach. So these are the people experiencing that catch every day. It's ups and downs, when it's working, when it's not, when they can make enough money, when they can't and so on. And if I were to pick up on what Laura just said about the significance of small scale fishers, as we call them, essentially small scale fishers, of course, what it means is that people who've got small capacity boats, maybe some of them have very small powered engines, some of them don't have any engine, etc. And globally speaking, they contribute up to more than 50% of the seafood supply globally. And guess what? They employ more than 95% of the global fishers as well. So we're talking about a large economy labelled as a small scale. But the other thing is those 95% don't get 95% of the benefits of global fish stocks. They also only go out a couple of miles from the coastline. What about the big oceans? Because that's where a lot of those fish come from. They go to spawn. We really need to think about the ocean in its entirety, even though we're focusing on small scale fishers. So the best way to put it into perspective is, so when you look at the planet, of course, about 75% I believe is covered by water, a significant portion of it being the ocean. And in terms of how we manage it, 50% of that planet's surface area, at this point in time, as we speak, we don't have any legal instrument of any sort to govern 50% of the planet. So this means that whoever's got the best resources and who can ever can go out and do what they want with the ocean for their own interests can do that at the moment. That's exactly what's happening as we speak now. So whoever's got the financial and technical means to go out there and explore the ocean resources is able to do so. But Esam, there's a new international negotiation that's sort of just been going on for about a year or so that's actually trying to redress that imbalance and it's a negotiation between national governments. What's your sort of perspective on that as a way to try to regulate a bit or to better distribute the benefits from that deep sea?  Anything beyond that doesn't belong to anyone. That's what I was referring to as what's commonly called as the international waters or the high seas. Now the positives and the story is member states of the United Nations have agreed to come together to negotiate and strike a deal in developing a legal instrument to govern this portion of the high seas and to exactly redress that point that you mentioned about Liz earlier which is now anyone who's got the financial technical means can go and exploit it. But now we're saying now this one, this almost half or 50% of the planet belongs to everyone. In legal terms we call it a common heritage of mankind. This belongs to me, you are children, grandchildren and the future generation as well. So therefore how do we make sure there is a fair and just and sustainable way of managing this resource and whatever benefits extracted from that part of the world is shared fairly and equitably. These are the areas beyond national jurisdiction. That's correct. That this new process run by Unclos is looking at. Unclos Liz, what's that? That's the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. I'm just getting my head around some of these terms. It's a very technical area. There's another agreement around biodiversity. There's just been this report showing that we are losing biodiversity at an alarming rate. Millions of species, some we don't even know yet. But it seems to focus quite a lot on land. I imagine there's also a water-based marine aspect to that in terms of biodiversity loss. There's an intergovernmental body that was set up that has thousands of experts in it brought together. And this is ITBERS. This is the Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Exactly. In short, IPBS or ITBERS as people call it. So these experts came together just to assess the magnitude of the threat that the planet is facing by diversity or nature is facing. And what's very striking in relation to the conversation that we're having today is the identify of a fishing as one of the major threats to marine biodiversity. Now, let's link that up to what we've just been discussing about these high seas negotiations. Within the high seas negotiations, there is no mandate or scope to discuss fishing in the high seas. Because that's better dealt according to some UN Fish Stocks Agreement or regional bodies. But what we're saying is we cannot talk about biodiversity in the high seas without tackling this biggest threat that marine biodiversity is facing, which is fishing. But exactly, there's a huge threat because a lot of that large-scale fishing is heavily subsidized. There are a number of large-scale fishing fleets from Europe, from other parts of the world. And it's really difficult to address that issue of subsidies. I think the negotiations have been going on in the World Trade Organization now for about five years. I think there's an opportunity potentially at the end of this year the governments have committed to reach an agreement on reducing subsidies. I think we also have to remember that sometimes some kind of financial support to the small-scale fishers is really important. Because if you want to protect fish stocks and you have a closed season or a marine protected area, if you're a small-scale fisherman who relies on that resource, you've got no other source of livelihood. So Esam, the team, you've been doing some work looking at how to actually use subsidies, and we do call it subsidies, in a way to support better fish stock conservation. If a fishing fleet was to go hundreds of miles from the coast and do fishing there and come back, that would be economically not feasible. The only way it can be economically feasible is when governments provide an offer of subsidy to reduce the cost. It could be the fuel subsidy, for instance. Don't worry about the cost of fuel. We'll give you this much money to subsidize that. And that's what's enhancing the capacity of these fleets to go out there and hoover the sea, essentially. So what we're calling for is we need to bring an end to that. And hopefully governments have agreed to hopefully strike a deal to eliminate quote-unquote harmful subsidies. We must make it clear at IRID we're not necessarily against subsidies. We're against harmful subsidies. What we say is there need to be a transition from bad to good. One may ask, what's a good subsidy? And that goes back to exactly the point that Laura was mentioning about. For instance, you impose a no-take season in Mauritania or Bangladesh or elsewhere. How do you expect them to survive throughout that closed season? That's what you bring in subsidy. Provide them subsidy to survive during the closed season. Allow the fish stock to recover for the fish to breed, produce more fish. And then that would sustain the sector and the economy. So yes, again, I can't emphasise more, but I think we need to work with governments to support them and put pressure on them to strike a balance by the end of the year to eliminate harmful subsidies. And this is a target within the sustainable development goals that need to be met by 2020 a few months down the line. 2020, but the goals overall are 2030. So we've got another 12 years, but those are 17 goals and goal 14 is on life below water. So it's a really important part of the sustainable development goals. But there are other things that obviously marine life can contribute to by diversity as we've already talked about. But also tourism, small scale fishers are obviously one part of the coastal economy. But tourism, we've got many beautiful parts of the ocean, the reefs, and they're all under threat as well from overuse. So finding sustainable ways to use the oceans as a whole, I think is really important. I've been quite interested recently looking at things like marine protected areas for tourism. But many developing country governments just don't have the resources to set those reserves up and then to actually pay for their upkeep or to pay for them actually being properly monitored. So we've done some work looking at the role of private finance to support that. There's a really growing movement now of impact investors, people who want to see really positive social and environmental outcomes for their investments and they're prepared to sort of accept a slightly lower rate of return. But they're the kind of people who you could attract to invest into a coastal reserve off of Mozambique or around Laos in Kenya or in places in the Caribbean. But it's really important to have a really good system by which you can demonstrate to those investors that there's really been the impact they've hoped to invest in. And sometimes local communities can be part of that kind of monitoring. But again, the SDGs can provide a framework. A lot of targets within Goal 14, but that is a way at least that everybody is judged by the same principles in terms of reducing fishing or concerning the environment. So that's an area where I think the private sector again can play a role. We've talked a lot about small scale fishes and we're talking also about the deep seas. To what extent, Tessam, do you think things like deep sea mining are really going to take off? If there was any positive development in the way we govern the ocean or the marine environment, it's the setting up marine protected areas. A number of experts and others who work in this space would agree with me in saying that that's the only aspect that we are on track in achieving. Of course, there's a debate about quality versus quantity. As Laura was mentioning earlier, of course, when you talk about the effectiveness in the way they're implemented, the way they're financed, et cetera, we can raise so many questions. But at least if we were to look at the surface area that's being put aside as marine reserve, there's a very encouraging development. Now, the second question is with respect to the deep sea mining is a very interesting development as well. When the law of the sea was codified in 1982, became an international treaty in 1982, we didn't really anticipate as much prospect for deep sea mining, but suddenly technology allowed us to do more of that, hence why people are taking it very seriously. Therefore, that's where now the International Seabed Authority and other partners are working together to straight a fine balance between allowing human prosperity from an economic point of view, but also making sure that activity doesn't harm or doesn't pose a threat to marine life. So as a lay person, this sounds overwhelmingly complex. We've got the bad things that are going on, the kind of the dumping. We all know about the plastics that's been raised and people are very much behind that. We've got overfishing, we've got big vested interests. We've got small scale fishers trying to make a livelihood. I think you said earlier that 50% of this resource belongs of our world is oceans and that is something that we need to get better at governing, understanding and sharing as a kind of common heritage of man, equal benefit. So this sounds a little bit like a free-for-all to me. It sounds sort of complex and disorganized. And I'm assuming that this process around the A, B and J, the areas beyond national jurisdiction is a way that we're trying to get that organized. So why is this an issue now? Why is it important now? And I think also between us, does everyone agree it's important now? I think to come back to the lovely David Attenborough and the Blue Planet and now his series on Netflix, my daughters have just been blown away by watching that. The technology enables the most incredible photographs to be taken. But just to see the scale of these shoals of fish and to see the dolphins in the oceans, it brings it home to people in a way that I think it's a really timely moment to act. It's almost like the tipping point that more people are concerned about this. So it is taking advantage of that public interest and pushing governments across the world to seize the opportunity of the A, B and J negotiations. But I think business is also realizing that a more sustainable use of high seas resources is in their interests as well. Businesses employ people, even the large-scale businesses. And many of them have committed to the SDGs, there are many SDG frameworks. But as I think I said earlier, a key thing is how do we demonstrate or how do they demonstrate and how do we hold them to account for delivering on these things. So SM, we haven't mentioned BB and J, which is Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction. So that's clearly important, and from an IAD perspective important to people. So can you tell us a bit about that? Indeed, indeed, yes. So BB and J, we referred to it earlier as the high seas. There was sort of the comment about wrong perception about the high seas. That it's too remote to matter. Coastal communities, they don't go beyond three to six or 12 miles. So why are we bothered for something that started plus miles away from the coast? And this is exactly what we did very recently in IAD in partnership with the National Geography Centre is we tried to look at the fact that the high seas and coastal waters are highly interconnected systems. And the best way to explain this is using rubber ducks. That famous story about this container, that was abundant in 1992 with thousands of rubber ducks. And that's what changed our perception when these rubber ducks were being found in a number of other thousands or hundreds of miles away from where they were dumped. And this is due to the highly interconnected system of the ocean. So what we've done is we tried to look at the reliance of coastal developing countries, particularly the poorest of the poor of the countries, how those coastal communities or their coastal ecosystems or waters were interconnected with areas that were hundreds of thousands miles away. And therefore that sort of information becomes very important for two reasons. One is to emphasise that the health of the high seas is extremely important for the livelihoods of coastal communities, particularly in those poorer countries. And the second reason being the government's measures that we take for the protection of the high seas need to take into account how they may benefit these coastal communities. I loved your rubber ducks story, Esam. I mean, it's like, is that the origins of the plastic pollution problem we have now? All of those rubber ducks. 28,000 Laura, 28,000 Laura. Interestingly, people refer to them as friendly rubber ducks. Because there is a... Friendly floaties or something. Yeah, friendly floaties. Right, exactly. It's because it's huge following globally.  We have identified a found one and they post them in this website.  I think that's brought us to a very nice place because all of this was looking a little bit high level. But I think we're sort of drawing to a close now. So I'd like to ask, how can we get this down to, you know, what can the person in the street do? Is it any good, for example, buying fish with a sustainable sticker? What's the message here for those of us who are not deep in the process? I guess I think the public awareness through this excellent documentary such as that of David Attenborough for instance, that raises the awareness of the public, sort of, you know, making sure that whatever is on their table is sustainably sourced, sustainably in a sense that ecologically sustainable, but also making sure that no one was harmed when that fish was caught.  They said that we need to be aware of. Of course we can discuss that. But I think people making conscious decision in terms of demanding a sustainable seafood for instance. And obviously the business will be able to react or to respond to that demand. And presumably with the growing interest that, you know, we've got a climate crisis or a climate emergency rather than just a climate change. This must have a relationship. This must be something that people can be interested in and understand. The oceans are a huge carbon sink. So if we start overfishing, we start destroying natural habitats. CO2, more COTs going to be released into the atmosphere and that's going to make climate change even while sea level rise. And of course it's going to be those poor coastal communities that are going to be hurt. But those of us who live quite near the Thames in London, we might think it's quite nice now. But when we're six feet underwater, we're not going to think it's so good. So it really is about changing our behaviors more broadly and, you know, turning off our lights, not driving so much. All of these things are really interconnected.  And what it is, as you say, is the ordinary person in the street can do. So to finish then, Sam, I'm going to ask you what change do you think can happen quite soon in the work you're doing that would make a difference? I guess the most important thing that needs to happen or that can happen is that as we started this conversation is bringing people at the heart of the core of this blue economy discourse. So for me, it's about making sure the integrity of our blue economy or our ocean and marine resources is not compromised and we're not compromising the livelihoods of those people who neglect on this resource to survive. And that can be done 100% sure, sort of as there's a political will to end harmful subsidies and making sure that those systemic constraints that stop people from maximising their benefit from the ocean in a sustainable way are eliminated. So this is possible? I generally believe so. Good. Laura, what about a change that should happen that you're perhaps less convinced that we can do it quick enough? Well, I think we should be able to reach an agreement in these ABNJ negotiations but as we've seen in other international negotiations like the World Trade Organization or on climate it takes a long time and there are lots of competing interests around the table but at IID we are working with the poorest countries in those negotiations to make sure that their concerns are taken forward. So I think their concerns should be part of the negotiation and we're working to try to support that. Excellent. Thank you. I hope it's okay to do a little plug before I say thank you. We've got three animations that I think your team was responsible for as Sam. One is called No Hidden Catch. The other is about fiscal policy tools going back to your point and I think not having subsidies that support bad practice but thinking of them incentives to support good practice and then we have something that explains governing the high seas. Short animations to be found on www.iied.org if you'd like to know more. But can I finish by thanking Laura Kelly and Esa Myasin Mohamed for a very interesting conversation. And for more about Laura and Esam's work and the issues discussed today visit the Fisheries and Sustainable Markets sections of our website. You'll find them under the Our Work menu on the homepage. You'll discover related projects, articles, news and multimedia along with many freely downloadable research publications. You have been listening to the Make Change Happen podcast from IID the International Institute for Environment and Development. The podcast has been produced by our in-house communications team. For more information about IID and our work please visit our website at www.iied.org


Live from Anaheim, California. It's theCUBE, covering Nutanix.NEXT 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.NEXT here in Anaheim, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We're joined by Sunil Patti. He is the Chief Product and Development Officer here at Nutanix. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Glad to be here. So we are talking about the era of invisible infrastructure and this morning on the main stage, there was many, many different announcements, new products and adjustments, augmentations to products. Can you walk our viewers a little bit, walk our viewers through a little bit what you were talking about today? Yeah, I mean, I have to do so. In fact, our vision really hasn't materially changed over the last few years. In fact, my team always, you know, teaches me that all I do is essentially change the timeline, but the same slide shows up. But you know, there's something about vision being consistent and we've sort of broken that up into two major phases. The first phase is essentially to move cloud from being a destination to an experience. And what do I mean by that? Essentially, everybody knows about cloud as being something served by Amazon or Google or Azure. And ultimately, our belief has been that if we do a honest job of what Amazon or Google provided natively, but bring cloud to the customers rather than having customers go to a destination, then they can essentially get maybe 60, 70% of that experience but maybe at a 10th of the price or a 10th of the time. And most human beings, as you guys know, is that once you get 60, 70%, you're happy and you move on to other things. And that's really the first act of this company is to sort of bring cloud to the customers. And in doing so, in my opinion, solve one of cloud's biggest, you know, perennial issues, which is migration. Because that's essentially what lift and shift gets in the way is that I got to change something that I've invested 20 years in and I've got to lift and shift it. And if something comes to you, that gap is dramatically reduced, right? And sure, we don't do everything that public clouds do, but like I said, if you can do an honest job of that 60%, then it turns out that most customers now adopt Nutanix, looking at public cloud as a tailwind instead of a headwind because the more they taste Amazon outside, the more they want Amazon inside, right? And so that's really the first act of the company.  So it's all about increasing the layers of abstraction to the user so they can do one-click operations. So that's the first act. And the second act, which is much more, if I can call it a longer-term bet for the next decade or so, is that if the first act was about bringing cloud to you to re-platform the data center, customers are also going to redesign their apps. And when they redesign their apps, do you want to do it on an operating system that locks you only into one public cloud or do you want to do it in something that can move across clouds? And that's our second act of the company. And there's a lot of details there. So hyper-convergence was a great concept and proved it out, great customer base, core businesses, humming along, solid. But the growth is going to come from Essentials, which is the enterprise, and multiple clouds. So I get that. As you guys look and build those products and you're the chief product of them, keys are in, you're the keys to the kingdom. It's all on you, it's a deal. It's in my guide, for now. So you got your team, but this is a big, this is the pressure, this is the opportunity. As you think about it as a software company, as you guys are shifting from being hardware to software, things start to be different. So as you start thinking about the act two, the convergence of clouds, that really is a key part of it. When you did it for the data center, ACI, you're doing ACI for the cloud. What does that actually mean? Yeah, totally. So explain that concept. No, it's a great question. And some of this, obviously we are struggling through ourselves, but we're not afraid of making mistakes in this transition. As you've seen over the last year, we've gone from being an appliance company to a software that runs on third party, to being a subscription company, to now running on clouds, right? All within a span of 12 months, while building a business, right? And sometimes it works, sometimes we pick up ourselves and learn from mistakes and go, but to your point, I think, Dave, we're not afraid to become an app on somebody else's operating system. Just like Microsoft said, look, I'm going to release Office on Mac or iPad before I even do it on Windows. That kind of thinking has to permeate, in pretty much in my opinion, every technology vendor going forward. A good example of that is, look, if somebody wants to consume their applications that they've built on Nutanix on-premise, but their idea was, look, they don't want to be in the data center business tomorrow, without changing the apps, they should be able to take that entire infrastructure and applications and consume it inside Amazon's fabric, because they provide a bunch of other services, as well as data centers. So our recent announcement of Nutanix in AWS, not on AWS for a reason, is an example of us becoming an app on somebody else's operating system. That's an example of us transforming further away from being an infrastructure only or an appliance-only company. What does this mean for your customers and your partners, because you guys have taken an open strategy with partnering, the HPE announcements very successfully off the tee in the middle of the fairway, as we say, looking good. That seems to be the trend. Others taking a different approach. You can do what that is, own it all. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In fact, I would say that, look, in some way internally we joke about ourselves as we had to prove the, we used to always think about ourselves as a smartphone for the enterprise, consumerizing the data center, but we had to prove that model by owning the full stack, like Apple did. But over a period of time, two democratization happens by distribution. And so in some way we have to become more of an Android-like company while retaining the best practices of the delight and security of an Apple device. So that's the easiest analogy where we're trying to work with partners like Dell, Lenovo, and now increasingly Hitachi, Fujitsu, Inspire, Intel, everybody is signed up, just because everybody now knows that the customers want this experience. And now the latest relationship with HP takes it to the next level now where we want to bring essentially super micro like appliance goodness, one click firmware, upgrade, support, everything, but with a HPE-backed platform that both companies can benefit from. You know, one of the big complaints from customers I hear on theCUBE and also privately is there's so many tools and management software, I got a management plane for this, I got this over here. So there's kind of this, you know, tool shed mentality of, you know, new hire, learn this tool for that software. People don't want another tool, they don't want another platform. So how do you see that? How do you address that with going forward this Act 2 as you continue to build the products? What's the strategy and what's the value proposition for customers? Yeah, I mean, I think it's no different than I think how we've sort of launched the company in the first place, which is there's no way you can say we'll simplify your life without removing parts. That was the original Steve Jobs thing, right? The true way to simplify is to remove parts, right? And essentially that's what hyperconvergence has done. It just, we're doing this not just for infrastructure, but for clouds because when you use Nutanix, you throw away old compute. You throw away old storage. You throw away old virtualization. I mean, that's the only way to converge your experience down to one tool. You can't stitch together 10 tools into this magical fabric, right? Doesn't work that way. But that's hard because not every customer is ready to do that, every partner's ready to do that. They've got their own little incumbencies. But that's the journey that we are on. It's a ride of passage for us. We have to earn it the old fashioned way and we've done reasonably well so far. So you mentioned Steve Jobs. He also said when he was alive in an interview on the last interview, it was on Netflix. I watched it recently. He said also software gives you the opportunity to move the needle on efficiencies and change the game much more significantly than managing a process improvement, which can give you maybe 30% yield. He's saying you can go 60, 80% change over with software. This is part of your strategy. How do you guys see Nutanix in the future with the software led or approach changing the game for IT? What's the ultimate? I think clearly software is fundamental. I mean, the whole point of us, our product was, I think we have some folks on the platform group that help make sure that the software runs because software has to run somewhere. By the way, it doesn't run in air, right? It runs on hardware. So let's not under emphasize hardware for that reason, but most of our IP has been in software. But I would say that the real thing for us that has kept us going is design of software, which is essentially also when you go back to the Apple thing, because there are a lot of software vendors out there too. It's how you design it, starting with why, rather than going directly to the how, is how we see ourselves differentiating what we deliver to our customers over the next five years. I want to ask you about innovation and your process, because here you are, you are the chief product officer at this very creative company. I want to know what sparks your creativity. Where do you get your ideas?  Yeah, I mean, I think it's an age old problem. I'll give you my personal answer. I don't think it's representative of everybody in the company, obviously. And that's one of the good things with Nutanix, that each of us have their own point of view on things, right? It's okay. We have this term of let chaos reign and then reign in chaos, right? To some extent, that has been done well at other companies like Google and so forth. So, at least I've always believed in, obviously, a couple of vectors for inspiration. The most obvious one is to listen to others, more than talk, whether it's listen to customers, listen to partners, listen to other employees with other ideas, and have a curated way to do that, because if you only listen to customers, you'll build faster horses, not cars, as Henry Ford said, okay? So that's what I would call a genetic theme, and you'd think that it's easy to do so, but it's very hard to truly listen from the signal, from the noise, by the way. So there's an art there that one has to get better at. But the DNA has to be there to listen. That's the first thing I would say. The second thing, which I think is maybe deeper, and that's probably more in the, the first one applies to 1%. The second one probably applies to maybe 0.001%, which is having intuition of what's right. And this ability, people call it, I don't know, big words like vision and so forth, it's ability to see around corners or anticipate. My old manager, a guy that I respect a lot, Mark Templeton, he was the CEO for Citrix. He used to always ask this question, do you know why Michelin has three stars? The first star is for food, obviously, it has to be good food. Second star is for service. The third star, not many people know why it's for. According to him, and I haven't really checked it yet, even too many Michelin's three star restaurants, is anticipation. And product strategy is a little bit like that, right? And so to me, I think that's where Nutanix really trumps the competition. It's that second dimension of intuition, more so than even listening to customers. It's seeing around those corners and knowing which way the winds are blowing. One of the other things that we're talking a lot about here on theCUBE, but particularly at this conference, is the importance of culture. Nutanix, we had Dheeraj this morning talking about the sort of playful nature that he tries to bring to the company, and that really has filtered down. How would you describe the Nutanix culture and how do you maintain the culture? So I think we, I'll tell you personally, the journey that I was on, that there were a couple of things that I brought to the table, a couple of things that I learned myself, as well as what I could see, is a couple of things that you will see in a company that has been built by founders, in my opinion, I'm not a founder or entrepreneur myself, but I've seen them in action now, is they bring one dimension that I've not seen in big company leaders, which is continuous learning. Because that's the only way they can stay in the company when it goes from zero to 90, right? And the folks that continuously learn stay, and they don't, they leave and we get professional leaders or whatever, right? So continuous learning, if it can be applied to the generic company, becomes an amplifying effect now. The people can learn how to grow, look around the corners, they can learn things that otherwise they're not born with, in my opinion. So I think that's one unique dimension that Nutanix, I think inculcates in a lot of people, is this continuous learning. The other dimension which I think everybody knows about Nutanix being this humble, hungry, honest, with heart, those four words sort of capture the essence of the playful authenticity, but I think we're not afraid to be wrong. And we're not afraid to make fun of ourselves. We're not afraid to be, I guess, ourselves, right? And that, I think, is easy to say, very hard to do. You learn through your mistakes, as they say, learn through failure. So, you mentioned intuition. What does your intuition tell you about the current ecosystem as the market starts to really accelerate with multi-cloud, on-premise private cloud, which by the way, good intuition. Of course, Wikibon had the first private cloud reports to Miniman and Team, they got that right. The waves are coming, and they're going to look different. There's going to be more integration, we think. What does your intuition tell you about these next couple waves that are going to come in to the landscape of the tech industry?  Okay, that's where the next set of cloud wars are going to be fought, is who's going to provide not just a great database as a service, but a great database itself. Because Oracle's time's up, as far as I'm concerned, right? And you're going to see that with many traditional software stacks. Some of them are SaaS stacks that have been around for 20 years, by the way. Some of the largest SaaS companies have been around for 20 years. It's time for a reboot for most of those companies. How about the Edge? What's the intuition tell you on the Edge? Certainly very relevant. You got power, you got connectivity expanding. Wi-Fi sticks around the corner, we're seeing that. 5G and all that. 5G, okay, I buy it, but as it starts to really figure itself out, it's just another note on the network. Yeah, I mean, this is one area that I'm not too deep in. I've got other guys in my team who know a lot more, but my intuition tells me that the more things change, the more they'll remain the same in that area, right? So don't be surprised if they just end up being another smartphone. You know, it's got an operating system, it runs apps, it's centrally controlled, it talks to services in the back end. I see no reason why the Edge should be any different, if that makes sense. Yeah, exactly, yeah, great. And the data, big part of it, big part of your strategy, the data piece? Of course, of course, yeah. I mean, I think data being a core competency of any company is going to stand out, I think, in the next five, 10 years, man. Awesome. So what's going on at the show? What's been your hottest conversation in the hallways, talking to customers, partners, employees? What's some of the trending conversations? This conversation is pretty interesting. I agree. We agree. My intuition is tell me it's a good conversation. Hope it comes out good. Keep using that word, man. I love it. Anyway, we always date to be with you guys. Sunil, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, coming, returning to theCUBE. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Any time. Any time. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. We will have much more from Nutanix.next coming up in just a little bit. Stay with us.