updates. So, security, I believe you are first. Who do we have? Oh, I didn't expect that I'd have a little bit more time to wake myself up. No, we're going to move faster. Thanks, Liz. Yeah, so we have 56 members now, three more from since the last time we gave an update and now 40 plus affiliations. I stopped counting on the number of affiliations. It's too hard. So, cloud native security day. Thanks to Michael. Do see an Amy and Emily. It's come together really nice and we have 150 plus people that are registered and the talks are full and we published the schedule out there. We do want to see if we could encourage more diversity by giving out more diversity passes for attendants. So, Sarah and I are working on that. We'll circle back on that with any asks to the TOC. Governance, we've finalized the definition of the roles. We've put together tech lead, project lead and assessment owners for some of the assessments and I'd highly appreciate if any people can go in and then chime in on any of that. We're almost done with the assessment for OPA. I think we're actually presenting it later today. We are presenting it later today. Thanks, Sarah. That's going to be fun. So, we did learn quite a bit in that OPA assessment and any inputs and any intakes on that so that where we can improve the process or where more clarity is required would be a super helpful input from this group. Policy working group, we are folding that in, I mean we've already folded that into the security. There's more work going on in the policy working group. There's a proposal for formal verification that's happening there. I'd encourage people to go take a look at it. It's sort of trying to use a single language to define the security posture for the entire of the infrastructure. So, it would be useful for people that care about distributed systems, which I think most of them here are to take a look at that and chime in and help. We do have assessment priorities that we've published. We sort of agreed on the criteria and condition with Joe's today list. I think if there is anything that needs to be changed on how we think through in terms of what the criteria is for picking up of assessment, we'd be open to, but right now we have sort of finalized on that and then we've put together the list of things that we are going to be assessing there. The second ask is also guidance on who the audience for white paper is. I'm starting that process with the help of TOC liaison. So, any input there would be super helpful. You could either chime in here, ping me on Slack or the best possible place is Six Security Depot, like chime in on the issue. That's update from Six Security. Thanks. All right. Here we have from storage. Erin and Alex are both on, but I'll be going over the review. And Quinton is on as well. Apologies, Quinton. So, right now we're going through reviewing Dragonfly. We're looking to engage the tech leads from the storage SIG as well to help with the project's review, just making sure that we're looking at the process of scaling going forward and how to best utilize all the team members. We completed Longhorn and Chaboa FS. Longhorn, we're going to talk about later today on this call. So, ongoing, we continue to update the landscape white paper along with database updates and also documenting different use cases, you know, what is commonly available, and then we're looking to also put in some metrics around performance and benchmarking. And then the next steps, as I mentioned, is we're defining a process for reviewing these projects. Since the current review criteria for Samba incubation and graduation were based on a non-SIG process, we recognize that we need to work with the TOC in a way that makes sense to provide recommendations for projects so that we're not doing the due diligence twice. So, we've started a very rough draft of this process. The link is on this slide. And we'd love to talk about that in more detail, perhaps maybe in the private TOC call to figure out how we best go about that for all the SIGs. But this is our first run-through on that. Are there any questions? Florent? I think that process document looks like we need permission to access. So, we might get a few requests for that. Okay. So, SIG App Delivery, do we have Brian? Brian's here. Yay. Yes. So, we're still ramping up and trying to get up to speed, but I wanted to call out a few items that we are touching right now. There is this cloud native app delivery dictionary that Harry from Alibaba started. And what it's trying to do is bring a set of a standard set of words or maybe a consensus around a set of words that we use to describe cloud native terms in respect to the SIG App's delivery. So, that document is up for review right now. And probably in about a week and a half, we're going to start really pressing on people to get the words in so we can turn it into a deliverable. The next item is this creating this application definition document. And really what we want to do there is we want to start thinking about what it abstract from an abstract point of view, what it takes to describe an application and get that down into words too. So, there's no link because the document doesn't exist yet. It will over the next week. And the final item was that we are working out logistics for KubeCon. We're going to have two sessions. And it's pretty helpful that I can actually affect that, but we're making sure that we have two interactive sections to introduce the new group. And as far as notes, Quentin brought up last week that the second and fourth Tuesday of the month was a little contentious at 11 a.m. Eastern time for meetings. So, we're going to move it to the first and the third Tuesday at the same time because looking at the calendar, it's a lot better. We're working with Amy to get that taken care of. And then also, this is something we need help with. We have a pull request to update the SIG App's delivery repo so that myself, Alice, and Harry can access it. And that PR has been sitting out there for a little bit. So, we just need someone to. We will get it fixed. I already know that. I was just bringing it up. Amy and I did talk about that before. Shame. Shame. What did you say? Shame. Your name's up there. Come on. Hurry up. So, that's about it. But really what's going to happen now is I think that Harry, Alice, and I have a cadence and we can start moving on to more complex things. And something I didn't put on this list was there's no way we can do this all. So, discussion around tech leads for some of the things that we're trying to do will be coming up and we will definitely be discussing that next on our next call. So, that's it for me. Thank you, Brian. And the new, the latest SIG to join the ranks runtime. SIG now known as runtime. Hi, yes. Sorry about the very busy slide there. But basically just a public service announcement. We have a draft charter. Quite a few people have been through it. I think it's kind of getting to the final stage now. There's a little bit of time left for chiming in if you would like to. We've provisionally changed the name of the SIG from core to runtime. There were some pretty valid objections to the name core. Runtime was, I think, the best we could come up with, but probably still not perfect. So, if anyone has any better ideas, please feel free to contribute. And if you would like to get involved further in the SIG, please reach out to myself, Brian or Brendan, who are the TOC liaisons for this SIG. The scope is everything to do with, you know, execution stuff. So, Kubernetes type things. So, workload execution, management systems, components, interfaces, general orchestration, auto scaling. I'm not going to read through the whole slide there. But also specialized architectures of these things. So, you know, for example, the container orchestration systems aimed at edge computing, IoT, batch, etc. and incorporating, you know, specialized computing elements. So, the projects that are kind of in that scope at the moment, pretty much as per the original TOC specification of the SIGs. So, Kubernetes, container, deharbor, dragonfly, virtual kubelet, CRIO, kube edge, and the new kubevert. That's it for me. Unless anyone has any questions or comments. Thanks, Quinton. And then, I like how we have other SIGs, question mark, SIG network. You've got to read that question mark, right? Yeah, I've already learned to be on the right side of Amy. This is just a reminder. Oh, very good. So, this particular SIG has been, I don't know, embarrassingly a long time coming. It's a bit of a reincarnation of the networking working group. We had, it was our goal shortly after KubeCon, the EU in Barcelona to reincarnate and reform, can reach charter with a bit of an expanded scope. We're finally doing it now. So, there's a draft charter that's been sent out for a broad review. There've been a number of folks who've signaled interest in this area. And it makes a lot of sense when you consider how networking as a discipline is just part and parcel to every request that flows through a distributed, you know, system through a distributed application. So, so networking like some of the other SIGs ends up touching a fair number of areas in general, I think that we consider topics and kind of projects that fall within the crowd-data network, API gateway, coordination and service discovery, service mesh, service proxy, and RPC categories within the landscape are, you know, a foremost focus and will be topics of discussion. One of those actually that falls within coordination and service discovery is EDCD that I think is already the focus of SIG storage. And so we've kind of pushed EDCD from focus. I think that there's a lot of other backlog to go through. There are open standards, open specifications that are emerging in the space for things at proxy layers, for things at service mesh layers. This provides a good vendor neutral venue for those discussions for helping advance some of those initiatives. Initially, we're intending to hopefully be light on some of the governance, be light on some of the roles, and that's all of TVD based on how many folks and participants descend upon the SIG. And everyone is encouraged and welcome to do so. There's a channel in the CNCS Slack, a new mailing list, and what will be an intro slash deep dive session at KubeCon. And so please do go, if you're interested, please do go review the charter. We're hoping to respond to comments and solidify within a couple of weeks. Terrific. Glad to see all these SIGs forming. And it looks like we're going to have a full compliment by KubeCon, I think. I actually have a question just related to the sort of other SIGs question mark. And this may be a question particularly for folks in SIG app delivery. I'm wondering whether it might make sense for a serverless SIG to kind of form out of what is currently the serverless working group. I wonder if anybody has thoughts around that, whether that would make sense to be another SIG? I think we did discuss that when we were formulating the draft SIG breakdowns and at the time application development fell under SIG apps and we thought that serverless was a kind of application development. There's also the issue of serverless platforms and the kind of support that things like Kubernetes need to provide for, you know, fast containers, etc. And so that was the thinking at the time that it fell under SIG app delivery. And are folks from SIG app delivery kind of happy to continue to cover that space? Does it feel like a natural home there? It does. But like Quinn said, there's the application side and then there's the like if you think about like Knative with the eventing side which is under the cover. So there are two ways of looking at it. We can actually start looking at it from the front side and we probably and we actually are going to. But I think the other side does need some love. So your decision there. There hasn't been a lot of movement in the serverless working group for a while since that group has moved to the cloud events sandbox project and trying to get that wrapped up. I anticipate that we'll switch back over to doing some work on the serverless working group. You know, try to look at updating the document and everything. But you know, I agree that there are two sides to this. There's, you know, kind of the more general where's serverless going, etc. that the serverless working group is looking at and then that app delivery, which I think belongs in, you know, in the current. Yeah, we sort of when we completed the white paper, we kind of presented that back to the TOC and kind of made a decision not to do anything further with serverless at that point.  We kind of moved over to the cloud events and started working on that is for the action we took away. And so if there's other things we want to do, that definitely makes sense to that in the CNCF, I believe. Hey, Liz, this is Jeff. I think we should have at least try to do a serverless thing. So I'm pretty passionate about it. Can we can we put that on a potential to kind of move the serverless working group to a serverless thing? I personally think that would be a good thing to have as a, even if at this point, the existing working group is relatively quiet, maybe we should have a, I think right now there's a PR or an issue that has the kind of list of those things. You could have it as a possible feature sig at the point where yeah, I worry that there's a bunch of underlying serverless infrastructure, serverless projects maybe don't quite form naturally into that delivery. Well, I can take that one and try to talk with the current serverless working group and see if we can do it, describe a pull request for that sig. There's another option here that we have, which is to keep it as a working group that is focused on serverless inside one of the sigs. And the two, obvious sigs, one would be app delivery and the other one would be what we've now called runtime. Because a lot of having been involved in some projects that are building serverless layers on top of Kubernetes, for example, there's quite a lot of general purpose useful stuff that needs to be added to Kubernetes to make it suitable for a serverless platform. And I think that would, it would be useful to have those conversations in the runtime sig, for example, because they're not all serverless specific problems, they're actually platform general problems. Just a thought. So maybe we could just re-energize the working group and drive discussions in those other two sigs. Exactly. Have the working group be the place where serverless specific stuff is discussed, and it can be homed in either of those two sigs, whichever that working group thinks is the best home for it. All right, why don't we, I think as well as suggested, let's have the existing serverless working group discuss amongst themselves for a while. I just wanted to flag that as a possible area that right now feels a little bit buried away from the other sigs, but I think we should probably move on and talk about Longhorn. That's okay. And Liz, if Doug is on and I can take the action to get back to you guys with the feedback from the serverless work group on that. Thank you, Ken. Great. All right, so Longhorn, Shane, do you want to take it from here? Yes, thank you, Liz. So from last time, the presentation of Longhorn in the TOC, we get some feedback about we currently don't have very strong development community-driven development. So the current situation is we do have pretty active user communities, but we have to admit that there are many contributions from developer outside the Rancher Labs. And we have identified a few reasons. The first one is we think the Longhorn's technology is really considered a highland curve compelled to some others. And in this case, we need to invest much more into providing a guidance or documents for developers. We mainly focus on providing documents and the guidance for the user at the moment. So that's one thing we need to change. And the second thing is the development process is mainly driven by our internal Rancher Labs engineers. And for the outside, they can see what issue has been working on and when it's been done and when the release is going to happen. But they don't have the full view of the process and how to get involved. That's probably another barrier as well. And also, the project's wellness is not really high enough. So that's, I think that's basically, I would think that if 100 people start using your project, probably, I don't know, less than one percent, probably going to contribute. So in order to get higher contribution, developers, we also need to increase the product's wellness by all means. And finally, we think as the Rancher Labs, as the parent company may make people think Longhorn is biased towards oil truth with Rancher. And there are many people asking if Longhorn can only be used in the Rancher and can be used on the OpenShift and on other like AWS or GKE. The answer is, in fact, Longhorn can be installed on any Kubernetes, but with the Rancher's umbrella on that, so that makes me think if Longhorn is probably biased. Next slide, please. Yeah. So based on what we observe and what we think may be the potential reasons, we have formulated the following actions to make sure the growth of a developer's community. And the first is we are going to make a barrier, the technical barrier lower for the new contributors. And we are going to invest more time and providing the architecture design doc and all kinds of design docs. And the document for the developer to understand how Longhorn works and how the components impact each other. And also, currently, the Longhorn's development requires three node cluster on Kubernetes. We normally do that on some digital ocean cloud provider. But if you think that not everybody has a cloud provider backing them up, so we are going to make it possible to complete the development setup on a laptop. Probably going to utilize K3S or some technologies to make a standalone Kubernetes small footprint setup and make it possible to complete the development there. And also, with some other small things like we can mark small issues and help on it to have the user to know which issues they probably can use as a gateway to get into the development in the long run. And the second thing is we want to make the development process more transparent. And from now on, all the new features design doc will be shared. And currently, we are thinking about using the form as either Wehe or using Google doc because the new development, new design doc normally going to be modified a lot. So probably, we haven't decided to adapt to the Kubernetes KEP style, contribute to the design doc, probably going to be too big for us for now. But we can see down the road how it goes. And also, we are going to hold a monthly community meeting. We've got the latest design and update of the project. And as we have just decided the meeting, we're going to be hold on the second Friday of each month. And next week will be our first meeting. And speaking about how to raise the awareness of the project, and of course, we're already trying to speak as we've already tried to speak as many community events as possible, but we haven't do much on the development meetup and the small conferences. And we are going to spend more time on that and try to reveal, try to raise the awareness on that part. And finally, regarding the Rancher Labs as a parent company, so that's also one of the reasons we are going to donate. We try to donate phone horn to the CNCF. So with the CNCF serve at the mutual room, a mutual phone for the project, I think the concern on the bias towards the rancher will be diminished. So that's what we get the feedback we got and the things we are planning to do to address these feedbacks on the community side. Can I say if you think? Sure. Thank you very much for doing this. Thank you. Well done. I think that we already did, Liz, confirm or not, did we already vote on Longhorn for Sandbox? Well, it's Sandbox, so it's more... My recollection of this is that there were some concerns raised about whether or not Longhorn had a sufficient community or planned to engage with the community. I absolutely echo what you're saying. This is great to see this conscious effort going into making this work. So I think the concern that was raised was about whether Longhorn had a that kind of breadth of community or had a plan to achieve that breadth of community. I try to remember, I think yourself, me and Shang might have been, sorry, Shang might have been the people interested in sponsoring. Yeah, just, hi, it's Alex over here. So it's probably worth just noting that the SIG had to review the Longhorn project and we had sort of given it the thumbs up and send the information to the TOC. And I believe last time around when we got to this point it wasn't so much about the community, but there were sort of a couple of question marks around things like the CLA, which were things that we kind of all agreed were things that can be sort of sorted out post adoption as a sandbox project. So honestly, I think it's just a case of, you know, if there are two TOC members that are ready to sponsor it, then it should be a sandbox project at this stage. Right. So I would like to apologize to the Longhorn team because we've put them through a lot and you've done really great and you've been incredibly patient. And I think everybody now thinks that your project is more than worthy of the bar that is sandbox. Would anyone like to dissent with that statement? I completely agree with that statement. Fantastic. Well then Liz, unless you disagree, I'd like, I propose that we move forward and Longhorn become a sandbox project and thank you very much for to Shang and team for doing this. And I think it's a good template for other projects that have come through this process where they've been shepherded very much as a sort of single vendor saying and trying to open up in stages slowly little by little as they come into the foundation. I think it does point to the improved process that we were trying to work on. I'm trying to open up the docs. I got to move it to my Gmail account, but where we don't require poor people like this to present twice then I think we want to reduce the work, especially for sandbox. Please contribute to that doc so we can harden the process. Amy, I wonder if we could essentially reuse some of this plan here as a kind of template or have it somewhere as a reference because I think it's great. Some great ideas. Yeah, we can work on that. So I think that means that we should now consider Longhorn a sandbox project. All right, thank you. Congratulations. Thank you. I also want to thank Shang for guiding us on this community growth plan. And of course, thank you Alex Liz and Alex and helping us to get this in. And it's been a long journey, but it's definitely we'll see what we're lacking of and what we can improve. And I definitely believe Longhorn will be a great sandbox project. And yeah, let's see when will we become incubator and even graduate. We have had a higher goal now. Fantastic. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Right, what's next? Is it Yeager? Yuri, hi. Hello. All right, thank you. So Yeager is just as a brief introduction. So as a brief introduction, Yeager project has several different parts. And so I have a kind of a diagram here on the left. We have what the seven official repositories with implementing Yeager clients, implementing open tracing API. Those are the that you put in your application for collecting tracing telemetry. Then we have the main repository, which is a Yeager backend. It also has another repository with the visualization front end. And we have several other repositories that implement various data mining tools, like aggregations, dependency diagrams, and all that. Next slide, please. So as an overview of the project, the development started at Uber in August 2015. And then in April, we open sourced it. Red Hat came on board at that time and started actively participating in development. And so they actually the ones to encourage us to apply to CNCF, which we did. And we were incubating since September 2017. I think we missed our annual year last year. So one thing that, so we have a number of users using Yeager in production. There's a doctor's file in the repository, although it's not super up to date. There are many more users than what's listed there. We recently published a number of case studies after interviewing some of these companies, specifically Mastegra Fun and WeWorks. So they're posted about how those companies are using. And obviously Uber is probably one of the largest users of Yeager in production. Next slide, please. So this one, Matt Klein, who is a sponsor for Graduation, asked me to put a couple of slides talking about Yeager versus Open Tracing and Open Telemetry, which are other tracing projects in CNCF. So here, first, Yeager versus Open Tracing, which is a current state, as we can see in the diagram. So if you have a user application process, it can be actually instrumented in different ways. You can directly instrument your code, or you can use some framework like JRPC, which comes with tracing instrumentation, or sometimes you use an automatic agent, which will do monkey patch and some other type of instrumentation. But all of those types of instrumentation, they ultimately talk to the Open Tracing API. And so therefore, instrumentations are portable. You can take any other vendor as a tracing. And then what Yeager does is that starting from the blue line, it implements the Open Tracing API. So all the calls from the instrumentation come to our library, and then we collect data and ship it out to Yeager back and components. Yeager itself, as a result, does not provide Yeager project, does not provide any instrumentation whatsoever. So if you want to use JRPC with tracing, you would go to Open Tracing contrib organization and you pull some library, which actually implements that. So that's part of Open Tracing project. And again, that's the instrumentation that's portable. So next slide, please. And now the question about what about Open Tracing sensors, open sensors and telemetry. So Open Tracing and open sensors are emerging into Open Telemetry as the sort of the next major version. And that project has a bit more overlap with Yeager, but it's still very synergistic overlap. And so as we can see here, Open Telemetry also provides an API for instrumentation, and it will provide in the future the actual instrumentation code. And so that part doesn't really change that much from the Open Tracing state of the world. However, Open Telemetry will also come with the actual SDKs, the implementation libraries running in the application that will collect the data. And so that will compete with Yeager client libraries that we have today in multiple languages. And we as a project kind of leaders are actually very happy to discover that work from the Yeager project because it was a lot of work. And there's not something that's that much unique in the Yeager client libraries almost. So if Open Telemetry can provide those libraries, we would focus our effort instead on the backend and visualization and data mining, which is really the meat of the project today. And the last part is open sensors and Open Telemetry by extension had another two components called agent and collector. And the reason they did that is I think one of the challenges with Open Tracing was that if you are shipping the binary, then you as author of the binary, you kind of have to make a choice which tracing implementation you bound with that library, unless you provide some flexible plug-in framework because you can change out, but in like in the global binary you can't do that. And so that was always a friction because people didn't know what to choose which tracing library to choose. And so with Open Telemetry, you can choose the default implementation of Open Telemetry. And it so that you don't have to configure it. It will also export data in the default standard format. And therefore agent and collector, which are simply components, which accept the data and forward to the backends, whether it's tracing or permissive backend, those components can also be implemented as a standard component in Open Telemetry. So again, in the current state, we have a duplication of Open Telemetry, but in the future, if those components develop parity with Jager, then we'll be happy to switch to them and not spend cycles on these two components. And again, our main focus will be at the bottom box, which is like a tracing backend, storage backends, visualization and data mining platform. Next slide, please. So this is as far as aggregation. This is some of the stats about the project. We have over 1,000 contributors, which I think since it accounts them like as authors of commits and pull requests and comments and issues, specifically of commits and pull requests, we have over like almost 400 authors. And across different repositories, we have currently, I think 15 maintainers with official commit rights. And for the backend repository, it's seven maintainers from Uber and Red Hat. And some other stats are also on the screen. Next slide, please. For the graduation criteria, so we have a pull request for the proposal, which has a bit more details than the slides. So as I mentioned, we have a successful production user document that Red Hat actually bundles Yeager as part of their service mesh product. And so they support it on that front as well as actual commercial product. We, as I mentioned already, we have a pretty healthy community, although I would have liked to have a few more maintainers. We have a couple more people who are currently actively contributing to the backend and they might become full committers if they meet the requirements that we have in the guidelines. And finally, in terms of like velocity, we do releases of the backend approximately every two months. Client libraries release on different cadence as features are added and needed. And yes, in the backend, at least, we've had over 1000 PRs merged last year. So I think it's project has a pretty good velocity. I think this is my last slide, so any questions? My recollection is that Matt Klein is working on the due diligence document right now. I think Matt isn't on the call today. Yeah, he couldn't make it. Yes, he and I will be working on that document. I think I looked at the template, it's a bit more questions than what's in the GEC gradation. So yeah, that will be forthcoming. And I think obviously, subject to the due diligence, it does look like you're in very good shape from what I've seen there. Anyone got any comments or observations or questions? So I have a question on the process. Once the due diligence document is available, what is the next step? Really, it's a vote from the TOC. I'm sure if we have questions that come out of the due diligence or following on from this presentation, we might come back and ask questions. But really, once we have the due diligence document, we can just take it to a vote. Well, thank you very much for the presentation. I think the fact there's no questions probably means people are feeling pretty comfortable with what you've shown. So thank you. All right. What else do we have? Open Policy Agent, Security Assessment. Sarah, is this you? Hello. Ash is going to kick it off doing the left side, which is really about what OPA is. And then I'll follow up with the recommendations. Good morning. I'm Ash Narkar. I am a software engineer at STIRA and I'm a core contributor to the Open Policy Agent project. Thank you so much for this opportunity. So let's talk about OPA. So the goal of the project is to provide a consistent policy enforcement across the stack. And about OPA itself, it's a general purpose policy engine that can be used to enforce custom security policies in disparate systems using a high-level declarative language called as REGO. And some of the benefits of OPA, if you think about it, a single organization can have like thousands of security components that require authorization. Each domain, vendor, and product has its own authorization paradigm, expressiveness, and interface for administrative control authorization policies. So the challenge with achieving a least privileged authorization is the number, the complexity, dynamicity, and the heterogeneity of software systems that organizations are embracing. And so OPA provides this unified approach to authorization, giving organizations context aware visibility and control over their authorization posture in dynamic environments. Using mechanisms such as admission control, OPA provides card rails so that organizations can impart enough power to their employees to promote rapid innovation without compromising on security and safety. Regarding OPA's maturity, Netflix is one of the earliest adopters of OPA, and they are using OPA for authorization of the HTTP and GRPC APIs. Companies like Chef use OPA for API authorization and auditing API access. And there are more than 20 companies who are actively using OPA in production for use cases such as ABAG, RBAC, admission control, risk management, and so on. Regarding OPA's community, we have around 78 contributors on GitHub right now. The project has been started more than 2,500 times, and we have a healthy slack community of around 1,200 people. OPA has integrations available with more than 20 open source projects such as Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Onward, Istio, and they keep on adding more integrations. So that's pretty much on OPA overview side. Sarah, I hand it over to you. So yeah, I also want to point out on the bottom left is a link to the full security assessment, which includes a self-assessment of the project, which we all on the security review team chimed in on and worked on clarifications and contributed to the security analysis. And it's still in PR, so we welcome people on the call or anybody to review in detail and give us feedback. So coming to the recommendations, highlighting part of the security assessment is in OPA, taking these heterogeneous environments that are so common in cloud and unifying policy then presents its own security risk. So part of the risk of the project is really two-fold, one that it's not implemented correctly, so you could have a false sense of security in thinking you have all these policy controls that you don't have. And in whether you've actually expressed the policy you intended to express. So it's important that people adopting these security measures don't consider it to be a panacea. You also have to be attentive to whether they have correct implementation and whether your design is implemented and expressed appropriately. So the recommendations for our security assessments really fall into two buckets. One is what could NCF, what could we all do to improve security of the ecosystem in helping this project? Really things that are maybe outside of the scope that the project itself could really execute on effectively. So one idea is that a study of the user practices, if we were to discover CNCF members or companies that have implemented OPA, that would be a great resource for finding what are the things that people might have inadvertently deployed something incorrectly. Are there common patterns there? Are there also common patterns in insecurities? This OPA allows custom policies, therefore every policy is different, right? However, we all believe that there are actually common policies. OPA has like a rich set of examples. Maybe we could expand that by discovering what are emerging commonalities across its users. And that's where CNCF has visibility into a wide spectrum of users and could help this project. Another analogous recommendation is that it may be that individual companies applying OPA all have common dependencies, where if OPA were to integrate with a common dependency, maybe that would accelerate adoption of OPA, as well as adding security by creating robust implementations of integrations that are used by, which would then be used by many vendors. So that's one part of the event recommendations. The other part of the project itself. OPA has really vast documentation that is generally very good. We felt that the attention to the gotchas, to the potential problems could have more attention in the documentation. And we also brainstormed some ways that OPA could help be a little more secure by default. Like we had some ideas about how the implementation of the language or the tooling features could help that. And the easiest things were things that, or the most straightforward things I should say, are already on the roadmap in terms of improving testing and playground. So that people can validate their policies. But we also had some ideas about some changes to the language itself. And then also kind of a call to action for people who are using OPA. We'd like to see more companies represented on the security team. So if you're a company that's using OPA, maybe you could consider having one of your security experts join the group. So there's also a link to the security assessment overview. And I'd like to invite questions. Discussion. Thank you. Actually, one little question is Rego used for anything else or is it purely used for OPA? So Rego is OPA's high level decorative language. So it's like at the core of OPA. So it's for OPA itself. So it's made for OPA. So yeah, one of the things that I had learned about OPA ages ago. And it kind of has some heritage and like ZACMOL. And there are predecessors that influenced its design. So there seems to be... Yeah, I was going to say the same thing. There's a long history of use of similar types of tooling and security use cases, but not in cloud native ones. So just to add to that, it's inspired by Datalog. I'll just give some history on Rego. Just a comment. I don't think that assessment link exists. I can't find that document. Is it? Because the PR is not merged. Oh, it was supposed to link to the... I will stick it in the chat. That is... So if you read the text, it's not linked. That's where it will be. I just put it in the chat, the link to the commit so that you can read it ahead of time. And then we can look at the PR. I suppose the following question is really for Ash, how the OPA project feels about the assessment process, whether those are useful recommendations, whether the project is planning to follow up on those recommendations. It'll be useful for you. Yeah, sure. It's been really helpful to work with the assessment process. We identified certain issues to this entire process and we opened up issues for this, which we will definitely tackle because we want to be as secure and user-friendly as possible. Some of these are valid concerns about users not being sure about what the policy is they're authoring because the policy language itself is so strong. So adding more documentation and whatever checks that we can put to reduce user errors is definitely helpful, which came across to this process. So yeah, I would say it was very helpful for the project itself and we hope to tackle these issues in the near future. That's really good to hear. Good to hear that the assessments are bearing fruit. So thank you, everyone who was involved in putting that assessment together. That's great. Any other questions for me? Yeah, I had a quick one. Sorry, I was just looking at the PR. It's called a self-assessment. It's not entirely clear. So did the project assess itself or did the security thing assess the project? Both of them. So there's two parts to it in the assessment process. One is that the project goes through and is asked to kind of answer and fill out a bunch of information and then afterwards the group that does a security assessment effectively also writes a document and there's a couple of reasons why we have this structure set up. One of which is that the project may feel that they've made a step that their documentation on a certain item is an adequate way to address something or that some security concern isn't under their purview. Whereas the group that does the assessment can in their other document sort of be able to have a different perspective on items. In this case we didn't really find a strong need for the two to diverge greatly, but I think there were quite a few places where we stress things differently. So it's helpful to have the documents so that different perspectives can come through. Okay, thanks. So it's actually done independently by the project and by SIG Security, it sounds like. Yeah, we do talk with each other a lot obviously throughout this process and interact with each other and make suggestions to the other document, but they have ownership of their self-assessment. We have ownership of the like the summary assessment that the assessment group did. This is actually quite nicely documented. SIG Security Assessments Guide lays out the steps. I think that's quite nicely evented. Yeah, and I think that I'm also finding that the the commonality in the breakdown of the sections helps quickly scan these documents. And so it's my hope that having the same format for many projects will help people look across projects and pick the one that is appropriate for their use case and their risk profile. Okay, I guess one other follow-up action we could take here is to loop in Cheryl and the user community and see whether there's interest in getting some more case study information together for this kind of the CNCF recommendation side of things. So yeah, I had an initial meeting with her a couple of weeks ago and she's very interested in, they don't, isn't currently a structure for how we would do that kind of outreach, but she's very interested in trying to figure out what would be the way that we could do this kind of user research and Amy and I are trying to figure out the right, you know, kind of set of folks who could execute on it. I mean, I think it would be an effort from SIG Security, but we tend to have security experts rather than, you know, the people who really know how to frame that type of research project. So we're still kind of feeling our way through how we would execute on it, but I'm really excited about the opportunity of reaching out to that end user community. All right, so we're bang on the album. Thank you everyone who has presented today. Perfect timing and talk to you all again soon. I'm sure. Yes, we'll be putting together next meeting's calls together. We were prioritizing our graduation reviews. So pin me if you are a project that would like to be able to have your graduation reviews introduced. Thank you.


Hey, okay, so we got six paintings here Six paintings done. They're great. I want to be colorful and happy So I did six times Three small and three big Fun project Great, hey, so we need all of them the bottoms taped next see that's got Tape so we'll tape all these bottoms, and then we're gonna resin one small one big absolutely perfectly That's the project Anyways, let me show you around so right now we have if you buy like a one-gallon kit We'll give you a 16 ounce kit with it These ones the Bogo If you buy the two-gallon kit you get that And here's some of our art that has resin on it This one's cool alcohol ink This one see there's a face in there This one I stole there's some there's a painting of something similar to this an old painting And it was in the calendar or something and so I got that idea and I went tonight Took a picture. That's me and then I Painted it this one anything else this one's nice a over the coffee Put some resin on it. Okay Bye. Have a good night. I hope you're making something So January 1st, we're gonna do the 100 days of our challenge again. Okay, January 1st. Bye. Bye


Hello everyone and welcome to Blackstar Potential. My name is Lee Fuge and I'm here today with MusicTeacher.com and in this video we're going to talk about harmonics. All the tones you're hearing in this video are coming from the Blackstar Studio 10 6L6 which is mic'd with a Lute Audio LCT 440 condenser microphone. So harmonics are something which occur on the guitar all across the length of the string. You may or may not have heard these already but in this lesson we're going to break down what they are and look at how you can start using them. Harmonics exist in two main categories that we're going to talk about. We've got natural harmonics which occur through our open strings and artificial harmonics which are other types of harmonics we can apply to fretted notes. So harmonics actually exist all over the guitar and you've probably heard them even if you don't realize it. Many of your favorite players may have used these techniques in songs but also they are things that you've probably just come across on a day-to-day basis anyway. In fact all notes on the guitar actually have harmonics present in them but we don't hear them all the time. There's a reason for that. So when you play an open string you're actually hearing a series of overtones and harmonics combined but what we hear is the loudest one. This is known as the fundamental note. So if I just play the G on this guitar open there's actually a series of harmonics and overtones within that note but when we hear that all we hear is a singular note. So we can use the technique of playing harmonics to isolate specific overtones. These overtones actually occur at set intervals along the string. So the most common type and the easiest type to play are what are known as natural harmonics. Now in theory any harmonic that we physically play and isolate overtones by doing so is actually an artificial harmonics. So the main two types we're going to be talking about are natural and artificial. Even though technically the natural harmonics are a form of an artificial harmonic we refer to them as natural because they apply to the open string. So to play a natural harmonic we first of all need to divide up the string into equal segments. The points that the harmonics occur are at these equal division points across the string. So the first one to start with is actually the 12th fret. Where your 12th fret is on your guitar is exactly halfway between the nut and the bridge. So if you were to measure from here to here right above the fret wire on the 12th fret is the exact halfway point. So this is a place where we can find a harmonic. So to play this harmonic I'm just going to rest my finger lightly above the fret wire. So I'm not above the fret I'm actually above the fret wire. So those are my natural harmonics that sit on the 12th fret. Those are actually the same notes as the open strings but they're an octave higher. So what I'm doing there is taking my three fundamental notes of G, B and E, playing a harmonic on the 12th fret. By doing so I'm dividing that waveform in half which increases the frequency that we hear. So we've isolated the overtone there that exists at the halfway point. I've actually divided that string perfectly in half. There are other harmonics that exist when we take the string down into further divisions. So let's say I want to break the guitar down into thirds. The first place I can find one of these points is the 7th fret. Now this is actually mirrored up here at the 19th fret. So that means from the nut to the 7th fret is the same distance as the 7th fret to the 19th fret which is also the same as the 19th to the bridge. So I actually have the same harmonic in two different places there. I can also break the string down into quarters which would actually give me a harmonic at the 5th fret and that would also be repeated at the 24th fret. Now I don't have 24 frets on this guitar. I just have 22 but I can still play that 24th fret harmonic by resting my finger at the point where my 24th fret would theoretically be. And that gives me the same harmonic that I get on the 5th fret. Because again these distances are equal. So the distance from the nut to the 5th fret is the same as the distance from the 24th fret to the bridge. The other main type of harmonics are called artificial harmonics. Now these are harmonics that don't exist across our open string. We actually have to fret a note and apply a harmonic to it. Now the same rules apply but now our division takes place from whatever note we're fretting to the bridge. That's our new scale length. So the easiest way to do this is just to imagine things in twelves. So if you're playing a note the harmonic will be situated 12 frets higher. This is the easiest one to find. So the first way we're going to look at doing this is by playing a small four note phrase down here at the lower end of the neck. I'm just going to use a 5th and 7th frets on the D and G strings. And I'm going to find the harmonics 12 frets higher. So 12 frets above the 5th fret will be the 17th and 12 frets above the 7th fret will be the 19th. So these are my harmonic points for those notes. So I'm going to be using my index finger to just rest above that fret while I fret the same note 12 frets lower. And then with my thumb I'm going to reach behind which you can't really see too clearly on the camera. And I'm going to pluck that string. This takes a bit of practice because you have to hold your index finger lightly above the harmonic point and play it with your thumb. You can also do this with your little finger if you're dexterous enough. I always do this with my thumb. So it's going to sound like this. Then I can add the 7th. So I'm fretting the 7th fret and moving my finger above the 19th. And then same on the G. So that's a pretty tricky way to play harmonics. It does take a little bit of practice. Another way you can do this is by tapping. So again if I'm going to play that same phrase five and seven on the D and then on the G what I can do is take my index finger and tap the fret wire as I'm fretting the lower notes. You'll notice that I'm pulling my finger away really quickly. I don't want to actually tap and hold down the note because I don't want to hear the fretered note. I just want to essentially flick the string and bounce it off the fret wire to create a harmonic. Another way you can play harmonics is a technique called a pinched harmonic. And this is a favorite technique of many rock and metal players. It's a great way to make your guitar scream and squeal with different harmonic textures. Now this is done by playing a note with your pick and using the side of your thumb to brush past the string just after the pick. Now this is a very tricky technique because there are various harmonic points all over the guitar depending on where you divide that string up and what notes you're fretting with your fretting hand. Because there are different harmonics at different points of the string what this means is the sweet spot for each pinch harmonic technically moves with the fretered hand notes. So you're always going to be looking for different sweet spots to suit different notes. An easy way to do this is again the 12 fret rule. So if I'm playing those four notes once again. If I pick above the fret that is 12 frets higher so again 17 and 19 right above the fret wire and just after my pick leaves the string I brush it with the side of my thumb. So that's an easy way to start doing pinch harmonics but the most common way of doing them is down by the pickup area. This is where we get some more interesting harmonic overtones because we're actually shortening that string and we're getting some of those higher harmonics out. So again this does move depending on what note I'm fretting a great way to find your sweet spot is to pick a note. So I'm just going to pick the seventh fret of the D string and I'm going to pick from around about the start of the bridge pickup up to the neck pickup and I'm just going to apply that pinch technique all the way up and listen to the different sweet spots. So you can see there are different places there where I can apply that harmonic. So I can either stick to one place and play my little phrase or I can try and move with the phrase. Now this is tricky because if you do get this wrong you do end up with just a muted note. So pinch harmonics do take a little bit of practice to really nail down when you're doing it. Listen for those sweet spots and try and remember where a few of your favorite ones are. If you can use a reference point on the guitar like the edge of the pickup for instance or a certain point between the pickups or rough distance that's always useful as well when you're trying to nail them without messing them up. Pinch harmonics are made easier by gain so if you have a little bit more gain set on your amp you will find it a little bit easier to bring those harmonic overtones out and remember don't let your thumb sit on the note for too long because it will deaden the string. It's also quite useful to try and hold the pick a little closer to the tip if you're not already doing so. If you've got too much of the pick showing you're never going to get your thumb to actually contact the string to create the harmonics so the closer you can get to the edge of the pick the easier this technique is to apply. So there you go there is a breakdown of the different types of harmonics you can use on your guitar. So you've got your natural harmonics and a bunch of different types of artificial harmonics you can use as well. So try those out try and find the best way to apply this to your playing and remember those sweet spots as well for the pinched harmonics. Let me know down below in the comments how you found this and if you've managed to apply any of this to your own playing. Thank you guys so much for watching I hope you've enjoyed this lesson like I said let me know down below in the comments what you thought of this lesson and how you got on with this technique and also let me know down below if there are any techniques or anything you guys want to see us talk about in future videos. Don't forget to check out the Blackstar amplification YouTube channel for more free videos just like this and if you're looking for a guitar teacher in your local area please check out musicteacher.com they're a great network of guitar teachers all around the UK waiting to help you guys out. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you soon.


Hi everyone, Sean with jasperyscasebrakes.com here doing 2020 tops finest baseball flashbacks single-pack break number 11 where we're giving away six spots in the Baseball mixer which hopefully we can do later on tonight So the way this works 30 spots will first open the one pack of finest flashbacks at the end of the break We'll randomize all 30 customers names again top six names when a spot in the baseball mixer Here is our customer list from Mike Krasinski all the way down to Nick Stober and last spot mojo times four and The team is from the Diamondbacks down to the Washington Nationals dice rule to randomize both lists and pair them up two and a six eight times eighth and final time from Ryan Kason down to Martin Close So eight times on that eight times on the dice now eight times on the teams eighth and final time Tampa Bits Down to open Somebody's gonna transfer the list over Okay, so I'm not gonna read through everybody's names on this since it is a filler pack, but we will go through Get it all on screen White Sox Lou Bob Kevin Hull Nico Horner for the Cubs Martin Close Blue Jays Boba Shet Stephen Kendrick Astros your Don Eric Costang you there you go No trade window. Let's print and rip and then give away those spots Boba Shet Toronto Blue Jays Stephen Kendrick Nolan Aaron Otto. I love the flashbacks. Look at that 1996 design, I believe Colorado Rockies Nick Stober and there you go Simple quick pack good-looking cards though Now back to the randomizer give away those spots. So here is the original list again from Mike down to Nick Stober dice roll four and a three seven times and it's the top six top six names Get in So four and a three seven times top six after seven Seventh and final time Cool. So from spots seven through 30 Thank you very much for getting in on the break and hopefully I can do better for you next time But congratulations to Mike Rosinski Nick Stober Nick Stober Bill Doherty Ryan Kasin and Martin Close You six now have spots in the baseball mixer, which hopefully we can do later on tonight There you go guys That was 2020 tops finest baseball flashback single-pack break number 11 from jaspyscasebreaks.com. I'm Sean jaspyscasebreaks.com. Thanks for hanging out. We'll see you next time


Good evening, thank you so much Babna and thank you to all of you for staying back last session of the day We've had a long day You know when we started this conference in the morning at 9 30. I spoke briefly about You know how the CMO's role has changed, you know the theme as you I'm sure you all have you know gas today is about you know agile marketing the agile marketer Those of those of us who grew up studying Philip Kotler remember the four P's today I think if Philip Kotler were to write his thesis book to again It'll become some some 20 P's cues and RS ours from you know Personalization permission and you know what have you so thank you. I'm reached for doing this. Thank you for taking time out You know straight off the bat Jyotsana spoke about you know I mean nobody here needs an introduction to what pepper fries. It's you know in a short journey Ambrish tells me it's 11 only 11 years old now and in a short span of time It has become an iconic brand a brand that you know I'm sure a large number of us sitting in this room have interacted with bought and sort of experience in the last decade Let me ask you Ambrish first about you know what this conference is You know agile marketing agile marketer and pepper fry when it came in it really disrupted the you know ecosystem of how we are buying You know furniture and you know stuff for home So in that sense, how does sort of pepper fry? Signify agile marketing because you know, you had an entrenched ecosystem. You also had competition, right? What are the things that you did? Adith was here two minutes back spoke about how you know Instead of giving the customer what you think is your USB You know give them what you need. What did pepper fry do to disrupt that market? That's it. That's a great question. I was in thanks for having me here the I think it all started with With the vision that we had and and here's the thing, right if somebody hangs around for Long in a place. So suppose somebody's been working in an organization for ten years Typically the the word that gets used for that person is ya insan to furniture over here, right? So this place that we were operating in was some which is was one where furniture wasn't really Even thought to be agile or thought to be something that's glamorous new trendy and so on So the vision that Ashish my co-founder and I had was that we gonna make this category really exciting and It started off with frankly our name. I mean we could have been called. I don't know fabulous furniture, right? But we didn't choose to be to be called that we chose to be called something which has nothing to do with furniture Which is pepper fry and I think that's where it started After which we realized that you know when you when you're when you're on a journey where you're looking to create something Which is lasting and forever then the way you approach it is very different from how everybody else has approached it So, you know we fundamentally on online play However, we spend most of the money on brand building So interestingly most of our budgets typically go into television media into outdoor into things like those Yes, we do internet marketing. There are people out there who you know need to Find us online But the interesting thing is by virtue of having created our brand more than 75% of our business today Comes organically to us. So, you know, we don't even need to pay Anybody anything in order to drive a customer in our direction and then the entire journey just continued like that We figured that so we wanted to be Somebody who changes the way people think about furniture, which is a happy furniture to be happened We spend on brand and our thesis continued into, you know, the way we built out our only channel presents and and so on So we've we look I Shouldn't sound too proud to say that I think we've been a child across Everything and I think there'll be five other things that will happen over the next ten years and we will have to respond to it We will have to Prepare for it well in advance and we'll we'll look to do that. Yeah, that's it, you know Lot of legacy industries legacy businesses, you know in the last 15 years 10 years Especially have been disrupted through the use of technology. I remember a conversation I had with a friend today who spoke about how Netflix fundamentally is a tech company which is doing fantastic content and you know using the base of that tech they're able to discover what better, you know If you look at really content Very few companies close come close to you know, what HBO does globally, right? But Netflix their technology base really gives them a huge advantage on the other hand you look at, you know legacy media companies Let's take the example of Disney for it Disney does great content, but perhaps the technologies, you know, not as superior to you know, what what Netflix does Pepper fry again is in a business where you know, it's a legacy industry Which you're trying to or you've tried to change through technology and now also build, you know, many offline legs to that one, you know what What what all role does technology play in this because at the end of the day, you know, what you're doing is You know offering products which are brick-and-mortar Right, which consumers have been buying for Ages and on that you're trying to build a layer of you know consumer insight knowledge better distribution better better supply But as you expand and build your brand What is the balance of technology versus, you know old-fashioned insight that you kind of Hardwire into the business to kind of scale it up So very interesting So we fundamentally know we're a technology company right and if I were to add to it I would say that we are a technology supply chain company at our core Everything we do is about making decisions Regarding our customers in sync with them using tech. So for example be it your Virtual experience on site be it on an app or be it on, you know, your mobile website Everything has to be done Using technology which gauges how customers Want to interact with you and therefore you interact with them and you present the interface that works best for them And on top of that we've added this entire layer of supply chain supply chain And I don't know whether are they created covered it in his conversation, but supply chain is everything for any business which delivers goods And for us we realize that very early we one of the things that's Fundament or used to be fundamental when pepper-fly wasn't there in the whole whole furniture in a home space Was that you must have noticed folks in the audience also that it used to be a very local business So used to have a manufacturer who would be say based out of Delhi and he would be selling products in a hundred kilometer radius around them And we realize that for variety and choice to actually proliferate We needed to create pipes which allowed a person in Delhi to sell to a person backlock And so therefore the supply chain was something that had to be created and done really well But then again, you know, there are supply chains and there are supply chains The good supply chains are all got to operate on data And data therefore is the bedrock for almost every single decision that gets made in our supply chain So, you know, you've you've heard of the traveling salesman problem It's it's like an OR problem classic or problem Which used to be how much do you stuff the containers that you move and how fast do you move them? And so our entire supply chain is actually in works on that algorithm and works on works to get That data which allows us to be super efficient while ensuring that you know user experience is maintained So everything we've done is technology and I think that's how we think of ourselves a tech company even our stores You know, we don't sell anything from our stores. Our stores are provide a virtual shopping experience to people So if tech wasn't there frankly a stores would have existed because at the end of the day in a Let's say a 3000 square feet store. How many pieces of furniture and decor can you put in perhaps 500? We have a hundred thousand pieces online So therefore if there was no tech, I would never have been exposed able to expose my Catalog to people so everything we do is technology is where we come from absolutely I mean data drives decision-making to the you know point of Human intelligence kind of being undervalued these days I want to tell you a small anecdote about decision-making Amrish went to I am Cal and after finishing that I read about this online After finishing that he had a few days before the next job started and he decided to go for a short break So after he came out of his college with his friend To decide where to go He did a coin toss Right, there was no data available at that time if there was he ignored the data Right, he did a coin toss and where to go heads was left tails was right He got heads and he ended up going to northeast if I'm not mistaken But you can't do that today if you're running a business like pepper fry Though having said that I'm sure gut feel and you know things that you've seen also play a very important part in your Decision-making apart from just what your data analyst is telling you absolutely. So data analysis I think is So there are there are two types of decision-making. I think there's deductive decision-making Where yet, you know, you look at the data and it tells you an answer and you deduce from the data The answer and the other type of decision-making tends to be inductive data Inductive decision-making inductive decision-making is what we are fans of at pepper fry So you have a bunch of data you recognize the patterns that that data is is Establishing in front of you and you look to seek the insight in those patterns and based on the insight on those patterns And hopefully we won't get replaced by charge dbt soon But based on the insights from those patterns. We are able to you know do something which is So one of our values and I'm sorry if I'm digressing a little is is this thing called making magic So making magic is you know effectively you you find out the difference between what people perceive and You find out what is reality and in the middle of which lies an insight which you can actually build a really great business on And that's all about pattern recognition That's all about inductive logic and that's something that you know We keep trying to get better at but that's something that's part of our DNA at pepper fry Yeah, I mean there's a joke in the you know consumer business that most of the time research is used to back the decisions You've already taken so I think inductive decision-making is you know something on those lines Tell us you know a lot of businesses a lot of industries, especially the brick-and-mortar ones are sort of You know standing between two stools on one side is the Like in the case of furniture there is these mom-and-pop stores and you know old sort of Markets on the other hand you have multi-nationals like IKEA Which are again doing fantastic work? You are trying to disrupt an ecosystem which where the where consumer habits are very entrenched To some extent the product requires touch and feel Right visually as well as you know otherwise So how do you kind of you know go against these two entrenched ecosystems on one side large Multilationals on the other side entrenched markets and also user behavior, right? You can't change user behavior unless unless you do a Very superior quality product with you know very strong usp's So it's very interesting the so let me take this example of perception and reality So all of us believe that and we I'm certain most people in this audience would believe that Furniture requires touch and feel But if you go back 20 years and you look at a typical buying experience for anybody in Furniture or in home decor there would have been one small mom-and-pop shop Which would have been near your house. You would know the uncle who runs the shop you go to that shop Uncle would have one sofa and you would say Do you have more and uncle shop would be perhaps 1500 2000 square feet large and outward come a catalog and He would order BBC good homes or some great indoor magazine and he would say you know what I can and he would point out a So far then it's I can make it for you and We would place our orders for the sofa based on the picture that we were seeing in that magazine so effectively even when we were buying furniture we went touching and feeling it and That was the insight that Arshish and I had when we started pepper fry. We got to our first About 60 million dollars Without ever having anybody touch any piece of furniture for us And you know and that was the insight Indians all of us were actually buying off pictures And we said you know what the in the internet is perhaps the best method of showcasing pictures And so therefore let's build a business which relies on the fact that the internet can Demonstrate to a customer every possible angle through a picture and people will buy and that was our bet The other interesting thing was our bet was the more you show to customers The wider selection they will buy which is completely counterintuitive to any manufacturing logic So therefore when it came to you know the entire ecosystem the point that you made We actually decided we are not going to fight anybody in the ecosystem We're actually our job is to get everybody in the ecosystem on to pepper fry dot com You know today IKEA doesn't sell on pepper fry dot com But we'd love for them to sell on pepper fry dot com right? I mean every possible mom-and-pop store that you can think of sells on pepper fry dot com And and that's how this works. I mean we work with thousands of merchants who manufacture great products We manufacture nothing. So therefore our incentives are not misaligned with their incentives Their goals have to be in the ecosystem to make great products. Our goal is to get them buyers and I think that makes for a great partnership. It makes for great synergies. So it's a method of figuring out how you how you You know kind of disrupt the ecosystem without actually disrupting it and I think we did that quite well Yes, the new P of marketing as I mentioned the beginning partnership Becoming even more relevant in marketing in the content business. Let me come to the sort of marketing part of the business. I'm rich now you know You mentioned You know, you're a company unusual technology digital company which still spends significant amount of money on you know Advertising on legacy platforms on traditional media While digital advertising this marketing through digital means occupies a lot of mind space lot of you know bandwidth of CMOs and Founders today one as a founder. How much of you know, how much of time and bandwidth do you spend in you know looking after marketing activities or what kind of detailing do you get into and and With regards to digital marketing, you know, where does that spend go to you spend more on search You look at more of influencer marketing. You look at more of you know content curation. What kind of sort of you know spread do you? So it started the beginning. I'm an ex marketing. I so I started life as a brand manager with Cadbury And so therefore there's part of marketing which is in my blood, right? I Wouldn't say that I was a great marketing ever. I was a marketing guy So therefore even today when it comes to figuring out, you know, how the brand needs to be positioned How do we evolve the brand for a evolving customer? That's stuff that really interests me I also think that as a founder it gives me an early insight into what's going to happen five years from now Look, our category is not one where you're gonna have Penetrations for online home furnishings and furniture going up from 3% to 13% in the span of one year It's not gonna happen ours is a category where this will be a multi-year compounding, right? So you'll go from three to four to six to nine over 20 years So if you're in a category such as this you need to know what's gonna happen five years from now You need to know what's gonna change seven years from now And if you are connected with the customer your ability to figure out what's going to happen a few years later Tends to be higher. So therefore as a founder that's something that I gain from right What are the things that I'm really interested in of course research is awesome. I mean it tells you things which frankly You otherwise would not have known and I think the best form of research and I was taught this in FMCG was Sit in a store quietly in a corner and watch our customers basically interact with your product And so therefore as we set up pepper fry studios one of the things that we do fairly consistently is Basically spend time in our studios and just watch what customers are doing and you learn so many things from that, right? Plus then there's proper quant research. There's quality search and all of that So research is something that's super interesting the other area which I focus a lot on and this is perhaps also because We are a technology company is this entire area of natural search Right, there is so much you can do to make your Site your business more attractive to people out there and you don't need to really spend money to do that You need to get your tech right.  So I'm really interested in anything that doesn't cost us too much money, right? So as a founder again and as a businessman that's super important the third aspect of of marketing, which I am is is You know, I love being involved in the filmmaking process I don't know whether I add much value, but it's great to see your brand come live, right? So it's something that I I wouldn't sit in for a PPM, but I mean I would definitely hear the script before, you know, it's it's approved for production So these are three things which I think from a from my roots as a marketer as well as my Requirements as a founder. I think are both Actually come together quite well As I mentioned, you know digital marketing though you still use a lot of traditional Means of marketing but digital marketing is really One of the driving forces behind a lot of technology companies and it has many sort of Legs Which are the key areas that you focus on do you spend a lot of money on you know, for example curating content? in your space is You know search a very prominent part of the piece Influencer marketing, I mean it's it's you know the earlier era was hiring brand ambassadors That is kind of morphed into now hiring influencers across, you know, digital media or doing that What have you been have been your experiences with you know these various facets of you know digital? I think as the customer has evolved one of the things that's changed is earlier customers. Okay, so I'm sorry. I'm just taking a step back and doing a marketing thing. So I think most products in this world Follow a continuum, right? So you have on let's say the left side of the continuum is something called routine response behavior and on the right side extreme end of the continuum is something called extensive problem-solving Routine response behavior most customers will listen to anybody tell them what they should buy Right, it's fine. And that's where most celebrities most of the you know endorses Etc. Etc. Operator when it comes to the right side of the continuum, which is extensive problem-solving You need to be hearing what they should buy what customers should be buying customers need to be hearing this from people who know the space because information asymmetry tends to be very high in extensive problem-solving area and wherever there is information asymmetry you need people who actually Understand the product telling you about it. So therefore from that context Content so we we're a business which has you know, which operates on three so to speak Coordinates, right? So you have commerce, which is what we are all about There's community which is the people who actually understand the product people who are who make the product people who Influence others about the product and so on and then there's this entire area of content Which is a combination of how does content make commerce happen? How does content make the community more effective, right? So that's the that's the three things we operate on and therefore community for us is really important So you call them influencers. We call them homies So we actually have a program called pep homies and that program has close to about 500 die-hard interior decor aficionados who basically, you know Talk about us mostly good. Sometimes they don't like stuff We also tell them you know tell say stuff that we need to improve on because that's credibility, right? I mean that's also a way we will learn so we have the entire homies system which you know Basically generates a lot of traction for us. We reach close to let's say just on Instagram Close to eight nine million people through the pep homies community and eight nine million is not like small reach right, I mean, it's fairly significant reach so The entire community of homies works really well then the entire area of content for example Which is how do you have a great blog? I mean if you if you for example check out the pepper fry blog It's called bond homie and you'll find amazing stuff You'll find how you can do space savings for furniture in Bombay. You'll find how do you prep your furniture for? Monsoon, you know any kind of wood furniture in Bombay You would notice that the drawer gets stuck in monsoons. That's basically because wood expands So it's got things like what you can do to ensure that that doesn't happen Because I mean those are things that consumers really seek and by virtue of us sharing that information We are settling the information asymmetry and it's very important to settle it in an extensive problem-solving Business like ours. So those are things we do. I mean and we are about commerce community and content I mean we are the confluence of it.  Let me you know come to now a few larger things I see time is up. I'm gonna take you know maybe five ten minutes more About what's happening in the larger, you know startup D2C ecosystem You know we've seen The last six months bloodbath on in the D2C startup space I was chatting with somebody about you know what's happening in the media content space I won't name the company, but this company reported a revenue of 300 crores last year and a loss of two and a half thousand crores, right? These gaps while you had funding and you know sky-high valuations were sort of Funded by you know the money that came in now naturally valuations are impacted your business growth is impacted revenue Is not coming in hence the layoffs and so on so forth. What is your view as a you know as a founder of a? you know company About you know growth Versus profit right naturally when you when you look into grow a business You have to invest perhaps also take some losses on your balance sheet In hindsight, it's easy to look at all this and say you know this was madness But it happened, you know across the board across hundreds of companies billions of dollars was spent Now, you know when some kind of rationality is Settling down if you were to give a view on you know how to balance these two aspects and you know while you're building a business A sustainable business which last long term. What is what would your advice be? So I think every business. Okay, it's the so let me It's the duty of every business to grow Okay, if you set up a business and you say you know what? I don't want to grow It's not going to work then don't set up a business So it's the duty or the responsibility of every business to grow and I think that's that's paramount, right? However, it's very important to figure in this is where the aspect of profitability comes in right as to where is it that you lose money as You're growing and in this I actually break this up into two parts There's stuff that you there's the money that you make and you know in e-commerce in digital commerce you hear this term unit economics, right?  You'll just sell more product and you will lose more money So that's something which I think is non-negotiable from the standpoint of profitability You have to have unit economics which are kosher which actually make you money Then there's the second aspect which tends to be you know, you can call them corporate overheads You can call them Investments behind the brand you can call them capex investments behind setting up new stores or creating an extensive supply chain All of that I think you're allowed to lose money on It's okay because those are investments which are going to last you five ten fifteen years and as the business grows You will get as long as you're making money at a unit economics level You will at some scale be able to cover off the costs that you're incurring on the rest So that's how I have always thought about it. So in our business You know, we have the fortune of being operating in a first a high margin category Be we have super differentiation, right?  So if you're building out a differentiated brand, you have to make higher margins It it's a spark for the course if you are not making higher margins, you don't have a differentiated brand So therefore we have the fortune of being in a category which has high margins. We've created a brand which is differentiated So therefore at a unit economics level we make tons of money After that, it's only a question of how much do you need to scale the business? How many thousand crores do you need to get to in order to be able to defray all the rest of the costs below the Unit economics and as long as you got that positive you will be profitable and that's how I've always thought about Fantastic, I think that's a that's a great answer last question. Umbrish as I said time is up Since you are a marketer yourself, you know In today's time when companies have made huge losses and valuation expectations was sky-high Cmo's typically struggled to explain to their CFOs specially and the founders whether Marketing money being spent is investment or cost, right? What advice would you give them? I? Would say change the conversation So never have a conversation with so you know what happens is CMOs will come from a perspective CFOs will come from one The conversation should not be about either of their perspectives They should potentially you know over a drink sit and discuss what the future of the brand should look like and Eventually, I'm telling you in the hardest of CFOs Understand and love brands who doesn't love a great brand doesn't want to spend Who doesn't want their name to be like or their brand name to be talked about by millions of customers? So even CFOs are softies I mean I would think so and it's it's just about having the conversation in the right manner Not having a conversation saying you know what I have this campaign lined up. I need 10 crores That's not the conversation. It's about the longer term vision for the brand etc. You know one of the interesting things that pepper fryer My CFO is a geek. He's a tech geek. He's He is CFO. Let's say 50% of the time the balance 50% of the time He's Chasing every possible tech thing that's happening and so on and he's also a great brand geek So having a conversation regarding marketing spends with him I think it's easiest conversation than marketing guys So you just got a you just got to pitch it right the way I read advice Don't go to CFO for asking for money for performance marketing show him a brand vision Chances are you you'll come up with you know more money than you originally asked for with that? Thank you. Thank you for the beautiful nugget umbrish and thank you for joining us in the evening And thank you for intently listening last session of the day as I said we started at 930. So it's been a long day Thank you. I hope it was insightful and we'll take a short break. I think and before we start the award ceremony Thank you. Thanks