ISMB ECB Day 3 recap. Yesterday I spent the day listening to talks about synthetic data, used a large language model and visualization. The morning started with an excellent keynote by Ginny Jessi Kali, who received the overtone prize for her work on statistics and bioinformatics, especially related to synthetic null data as control. She talked about how problematic assumptions in RNA-seq analysis can lead to identifying wrong regulated genes and presented a method SCD to evaluate Disney and UMAP representations of SC RNA-seq data. Afterwards I went to the special session on large language models, where a good introduction led to a discussion about how these models are mainly reactionary, not doing deep thinking. We had a presentation about the acceptable use in publishing and reviewing, and then one about the impact on learning and evaluation. Next I went to BioVis. Here I learned about a method, FastNetVis, for kinase substrate network construction and visualization in 3D, and an invited talk on photorealistic molecular visualization using both VR and 3D printing.


We explained the 2016 Nobel Physics Prize. Meet Tess.  She knows that innovations in technology rely on our abilities to understand the materials that create them, and that physics is one way to uncover these insights. So she is curious to learn more about the Nobel laureates who discovered a new set of regularities in the way matter behaves. Tess learns that David Tholes, Duncan Haldane, and Michael Kosterlitz made new discoveries in physics using concepts found in a branch of mathematics called topology. Topology describes properties that are preserved under deformations and manipulations. In topology, an integer number called a topological invariant can be assigned to all objects that share the same properties. One example of a topological invariant is the number of holes an object has. An orange, a ball, and a muffin all have zero holes, so they can all be assigned the topological invariant n equals zero. In contrast, a coffee cup and a bagel each have one hole and can be assigned the topological invariant n equals one. Objects can't transform from one topology class to another unless a significant force is applied to them, like cutting, gluing, or tearing them. Their topological properties are protected against small changes. This was noteworthy to scientists because microscopic objects are usually observed as being fragile. They typically can only survive in very specific conditions, but physicists observed some objects that had surprisingly robust properties. They were puzzled by these exceptions. This year's Nobel laureates discovered that the robust properties were caused by the topological nature of electrons in those objects. From this realization, Tholes used topology to explain the famous Quantum Hall Effect experiment. This experiment showed that in very thin layers and in the presence of high magnetic fields, electrons behave in such a way that the conductance through the system is robust against disorder and can only change in steps as the magnetic field is increased. Tholes was able to explain this behavior by assigning an integer n to each of the conductance steps observed. Later, Aldane predicted that a similar effect was possible without having a magnetic field. Before, scientists believed phase transitions could not occur in extremely thin layers of matter. However, Kosterlitz and Tholes found that it was possible for vortices to appear in some 2D materials. Because of their topological nature, they found that each vortex could be assigned an integer number determined by the number of times it turns. At low temperatures, the vortices are always seen in tight pairs that stay together. These pairs influence the electric conductivity of the matter, but when the temperature is raised, the vortex pairs break away from each other. This is a completely new kind of phase transition. Finally, Hall-Dane studied one-dimensional change of atomic magnets. He found another example of topological order. A different type of topological object, called a scurion, explained the change from conducting to insulating behavior of the chain. Tess is excited to hear that the ideas developed by the Nobel laureates have sparked revolutions in many other fields. Scientists hope these discoveries can be applied to the development of new materials used for electronics. Tess thinks that's pretty cool and wonders what the future may hold.


There's sort of this popular conception right now that in order to gain expertise in any behavior, any activity, any event, you need to put in at least 10,000 hours of effective practice to reach that level of expertise. Now, whether or not that's an accurate number or just a good estimate or a good framework, I don't know, but if we take that to heart and think about, okay, 10,000 hours to be a real expert in anything, listening is no different. Listening is a skill that requires that kind of effort and that kind of activity, that kind of intense focus to improve upon. So let's talk about some of the things that we can do to improve our listening competence, to improve our abilities as a listener and to make strides toward becoming better listeners. So first of all, we're going to really focus on the concept of active listening. We've discussed before that listening is not a passive process, excuse me, it's an active process that requires our engagement, our direct effort and engagement. So active listening is the process of pairing outwardly visible positive listening skills with positive cognitive listening practices. So in other words, what's on the outside needs to match what's happening on the inside as far as our listening behaviors. It requires both of those things. It pairs outwardly visible positive listening skills with positive cognitive listening practices. So let's break that down and kind of right down the middle. Let's start with our cognitive skills. What are we talking about with cognitive skills? What does that mean? What can we do to improve them? Well, the first cognitive skill that we can improve and first way that we can improve our cognitive skills is first of all to prepare, to listen, to understand that listening again requires our active involvement, our active focus. So we can prepare ourselves, we can prepare our minds, we can clear the clutter both from our environment around us, we can turn off the TV, we can shut down our email, we can put our phone down and we can also clear out the clutter in our mind cognitively. We can put things away, we can lock other things out for a bit while we're focusing on what that person is saying. If we're engaging in active listening, then our mind ought to be focused there as well. So we need to prepare ourselves for that and say, okay, let me push all this other stuff away, let me clear the mechanism and get rid of all that other clutter so that I can focus in here and be prepared to listen to this person. We can also work to maintain our focus. I mean, and that's not always easy. You know, if you've sat through a class before, especially a long class, if you have one that's three or four hours long or something, at the end of it, you're just exhausted and you may think, gosh, I'm just, I haven't done anything. I've just been sitting here listening to the instructor and trying to take in this information. But even that requires our effort because it's not a natural setting for us. So maintaining that kind of focus takes a lot of energy and takes our effort. It takes an active effort on our part to maintain that focus. So we can be really focused on maintaining our focus and not letting ourselves get distracted and not chasing down those rabbit trails in our mind. We can find our motivation. We can make an active effort to say, okay, this is why I need to listen to this. This is why it's important. Either this information is important to me and I need to listen because of that. That's why I'm motivated to do this or this relationship is important to me. And so I'm going to listen for the sake of the other person and for the sake of our relationship and developing that because I know it can further and enhance that relationship. We need to find whatever it is that motivates us to do anything and to find that motivation to listen as well. We need to take advantage of our rapid mental process and we've talked in the past about barriers to effective listening. And one of those is that our mind moves faster than the other person is speaking. On average, the average English speaker in the United States speaks at a rate of 150 words per minute, but our mind processes things at closer to 450 to 600 words per minute. So our mind is moving three to four times faster than the person is speaking. That can be a significant barrier because it allows us to get off trail, get off track and really lose focus very easily. But we can also flip that around in a variety of ways to take advantage of the fact that our mind is working faster. We can engage in a sort of internal dialogue, still focused on what that person is saying, but we can engage in internal dialogue through things like covert coaching where we're talking to ourselves, you're doing a great job, keep it up, whatever a self reinforcement of you're a good listener, stay there, you're a good friend, keep at this, whatever. Covert questioning, maybe asking ourselves questions in our mind and mulling things over what they're talking about. But still, again, important that we're still staying focused on that conversation, focused on what that person is saying, but we can engage our mind in internal dialogue, not spoken, not interrupting the other person, but this internal dialogue to keep ourselves focused and take advantage of the fact that our mind can still be listening effectively and doing these other things at the same time. Not totally different tasks, but still things that are related to that particular listening task can handle those things. We can engage in related thoughts, again, still staying on focus, still staying on track with what that person is saying, but related thoughts, parallel thoughts that we can add in our mind while still listening simultaneously. We can engage in mental bracketing where we're sort of closing off other things. We're literally compartmentalizing our mind and bracketing it around these things, only allowing these thoughts that are related to what that person is talking about and that maybe have helped us in that conversation. We can spend our time developing mnemonic devices to help us remember what that person is talking about for memory and then for feedback as well and responding. Mnemonic devices can be very important, so we can be thinking of things like acronyms or rhymes or visualization techniques that help us remember what that person is saying and then help us later on provide feedback and respond to what that person is saying. So all of these things, again, designed to take advantage of the fact that our mind is moving faster than the other person is speaking, so we're using it in pairing with active listening as part of listening to that conversation. We're doing these things simultaneously. Again, all still focused on that conversation, though not trying to divide our attention and do two things at once necessarily. So these are ways that we can develop cognitive skills that will help us and benefit us in the learning process. There are also then some behavioral skills, and we talked about that, pairing those outwardly behavioral positive skills for listening. These are some of those behavioral skills that we can use. First of all, we can establish and maintain eye contact, not to an uncomfortable level, but to a level that indicates that we are paying attention, that we are focused, that we are right there with that person. We can maintain eye contact. We can use other non-verbal behaviors, non-verbal behaviors like touch. If we're trying to convey a sense of compassion, we can touch the other person in the arm. Again, all of this as appropriate, you'll have to make that determination in your own communication scenario, but using touch, using smiling or frown, using our facial expressions for those types of things as appropriate to indicate outwardly that we are listening and that we are following along through our, and that's supported by our non-verbal behaviors. We can use what's called verbal back channeling. So we're not really saying much, but we might be indicating, you know, it's basically prompting the other person, yes, I see, go on, yeah, I understand, sure, why not, you know, those types of things. They are verbal, but at the same time, they're not trying to take over the conversation, you're just, you know, they're prompts to let the other person know that they should keep going or that you're hearing what they're saying and so forth. We can use those kinds of verbal back channeling. We can also refer to previous statements. We can reference for those previous statements and bring them back around again to connect and demonstrate, yes, I was listening, then let me show how that connects here and establish that that can support the idea that we are engaged in active listening. We can ask questions, again, appropriate questions, effective questions, pertinent questions, not just questions for the sake of questions, but questions that apply, questions that are relevant, questions that are pertinent. We can ask questions to kind of pull more information out of that person, but also to give a signal that we are listening, we are connected, we are on track. We can avoid interruptions. I mean, just the fact that we stay off of our phone while we're in a conversation with somebody else can be a significant indicator that we are listening. We can make a point of turning off the TV, we can close our email, we can put our phone down and leave it down while we're talking to this person. We can avoid those kind of interruptions to show that they have our full attention. That's a powerful behavioral support behavior in listening. We can even take notes. You wouldn't do this if it was like a personal conversation, somebody talking about their personal life or whatever, but if it's a business conversation, an organizational conversation that somebody's giving you instructions on how to do something, we can take notes while they're telling us that. That can be an indicator that we are paying attention, again, provided we're taking notes about what that person is talking about and doing so in an appropriate way. Those are some of the behavioral skills. Again, we can engage mentally and cognitively more effectively in listening. We can also demonstrate that listening behavior better through our own behaviors and demonstrate active listening through our behavioral skills, and we can improve in those ways too. So what about for some of the specific different styles of listening? We've referenced these in previous videos as well. Discriminative listening and informational listening, critical and then empathic listening. Now, we're not really going to get into discriminative listening because that just means you've made a point to select this is what I'm going to listen to as opposed to I'm not going to listen to the train going by or the TV I'm going to listen to or this conversation over here. I'm going to listen to this. That's discriminative listening. So there's not much there other than making better choices. So we're going to jump into these other three informational, critical and empathic listening just for some quick points on how we can improve in those areas. So just a reminder, informational listening has to do with listening with the goal of comprehending and retaining information. So think about when you're in like a classroom setting. So if you're just trying to learn some information, we're really just our goal there is comprehending and retaining. That doesn't mean we abandon all critical sense. We need to make sure that what this person is saying doesn't make sense and ring true to us. But at a basic level, we're just trying to learn some information. So we're listening for information. So in order to improve informational listening, first we can paraphrase what was said. We can either either in our notes if we don't want to speak it out loud or we can to that person say, So this is what I hear you saying. Now, remember paraphrasing puts it in your own words does not use the exact words that the other person was using. But it paraphrases the key concepts and ideas for verification and for clarification if needed. We can remember that not all information is equal. Not every word that comes out of the other person's mouth has the same amount of value. And I hate to say that as an instructor as a college professor, but not everything that I say is equally important. You need to listen for key concepts, key ideas and pull those out. Be able to identify and really retain those focus on those and remember that not all information is created equal. We need to allow for the fact that we may not know at all. It's hard to do sometimes, right? Because we tend to think of ourselves as an expert in different areas, and we may think we know it all at different stages of life. But the fact is we don't. So an important part of informational listening is admitting, Okay, I don't know it all necessarily. So there may be something here that I have to gain from listening to this person. And we can listen for substance over style. Not everybody's, you know, an expert communicator, not everybody can express an idea with the greatest penash and clarity and clarification and those types of things. But we need to listen for those key ideas and those core ideas and focus on substance over style. Whether that person is the most interesting speaker in the world, or whether they're dull and dry and it doesn't matter if that information is important. So we can focus on substance over style. And those are all things that can help us improve our informational listening. But when we move into what we call critical listening, which is evaluating the credibility, completeness, and worth of a speaker's message, there are some different things we want to do. Again, we should always, you know, have a little bit of a critical edge when we're listening, things ringing true, not true, so forth. But when we engage in critical listening, we want to step that up a little bit and say, Okay, is this person credible? Is their message complete? Is their value here? So when we're improving our critical listening, one thing we can do is distinguish between facts and inferences or facts and opinions. You know, we see some oranges and somebody says, These are oranges. That's a fact. Those are oranges. Okay. And that's what they are. Whether you like oranges, whether you don't, that's what they are. Somebody else may say oranges are great. We need to differentiate between the fact that that person is expressing an opinion or an inference that they would like an orange as opposed to not like an orange. But that's different from somebody saying, These are oranges. We need to distinguish between those two things, between what is a fact, what is that somebody's expressing, and what is an opinion that they're expressing. We need to evaluate their supporting evidence. We need to make sure that they have their ducks in a row. We need to not just take them at their word. When we're engaging in critical listening, we have to be ready and able to evaluate, you know, does that supporting evidence make sense? Is the data that they're sharing ring true? Is that, is it have value to me? And is it something that is verifiable and that I can go look up on my own even? We need to discover our own biases. So when we're listening to somebody, we tend to listen with a bit of a bias that leads us toward agreeing with things we already agree with and disagreeing with things we don't agree with already. We need to discover our own biases when we're listening in a critical sense so that we can more effectively evaluate what that person is saying and evaluate their credibility as a speaker. And so we need to listen beyond the message too. We need to listen beyond the message beyond just what that person is saying. What is the intent behind it? What is the purpose behind it? Where is this person coming from? We need to evaluate them as rhetorically in terms of what's their motivation? What's their background? What are their biases? We need to listen beyond just the words and focus on a variety of other things and listen more completely in that regard. Finally, we can look at improving our empathic listening, which is where we're listening to understand or experience what a speaker may be thinking or feeling. So we're getting beyond just is this true or not true and into where is this person coming from? Why is this their perspective? How might this be affecting your mindset? And how can I better understand that? So for improving empathic listening, first of all, we've got to clear out judgment. We've got to withhold judgment. Again, whether we agree or disagree with the person doesn't mean that we should be, in this case, assessing right or wrong. In my younger days, I worked with young people a lot and I had a youngster in middle school that I was talking to, and they were telling me about the heartbreak they were suffering because they broke up with their boyfriend recently. And the next step of laughing about this was somebody saying, you know, this person doesn't really know, this young person doesn't know what love is. So I mean, they've been seeing this person for like two weeks and so they don't really understand love anyway. So it's kind of funny to me. And the person I was talking to is very wise said, you know, puppy love is real to puppies. That really struck me. Puppy love is real to puppies. Whether or not I thought this person, you know, knew what love was or had experienced love, whether or not they had is really irrelevant. They felt that I needed to withhold judgment. If I was going to listen empathically and understand that whether or not factually, that was true is largely irrelevant compared to the fact that that's what they were feeling. Right. So I needed to withhold judgment. I wasn't able to do that at that time. And I've really made an effort to do that since then because that's an important part of empathic listening that we'd be able to withhold judgment set aside there, you know, almost set aside the facts and what we consider the realities and just focus on where's this person coming from. So withhold that judgment. We can again use paraphrasing and questioning when talking with this person. Just to get to, you know, where they're coming from to draw that out of them and to pull those things out of them. Paraphrasing and questioning can be really valuable in those instances. We can engage in nonverbal mirroring, which is basically just taking a posture, taking a stance, taking a tone that is very similar to the other person. You see this a lot in interviewing as well, that people will adopt a posture of the other person and kind of mirror them in a sense. It provides a sense of comfort, of connection, of those types of things. So we can, you know, nonverbally, we can, when we're listening empathically to improve that we can engage in nonverbal mirroring. Most importantly, when we're looking to improve communication skills in general and specifically listening and improve our listening competence here, we need to keep in mind what I call Whippy Wigo, which is essentially what you put in is what you get out. It's a really unwieldy acronym I know, but what you put in is what you get out. When we put in the work to becoming a better listener, that's what we're going to get out of it. And if we don't, then we're not. You know, we look at, you know, NBA superstar, for example, LeBron James. Now he's just a phenomenal basketball player, right? He's got so many different skills and, and has just developed all parts of his games, of his game to this point where he's really just such a well rounded player offensively, defensively. And he came in with a lot of physical gifts, but a lot of skills. But the truth is he started off as a scrawny little kid who didn't have an inside game, who didn't have much defense, right? So, and he didn't have much of an outside shot. So he was really limited. He was physically phenomenal, but he was fairly limited. But over time, boy, he has put in those 10,000 hours. It's not come just from, just from sitting around on the couch and letting it come to him. He has put in the work. I'm telling you, but I'm not a LeBron James guy. I'm not a Lakers fan or Cleveland plan or anything else. I'm not, but I have so much respect for the work that he has put in to become the player that he is today. That's exactly what we need to, to do in the mindset that we need to have if we are going to become better listeners. We've got to be willing to put in the time. We've got to understand that even if we think we're good listeners today, we've got that raw product. It still takes that energy, that effort, that focus and that work to become really a competent and effective listener. If you have questions about improving communication competence, improving listening competence, improving anything at all about the listening portion of your communication skills, please feel free to email me. I'd love to hear from you there. In the meantime, I hope that you will begin to put in those 10,000 hours or continue putting in those 10,000 hours and understand that this is a lifelong process. It's not something that's going to happen overnight. It's going to happen slowly over time and it's going to require our continuous investment to really get there. You can improve as a listener and you will improve as a listener if you're putting in the time working toward improving your listening competence.


Welcome to the fourth of our entrepreneurship panel sessions brought to you by the John Martenson Center for Engineering as well as the Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship. A special thanks to Professor Young Lu for organizing these panel sessions and for all the panelists for making time this afternoon. My name is Arnold Chen and I'm the managing director for the Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship on campus. And for the current students who are listening, I'll be uploading into the chat a few documents. The first document just so you know is just a high level overview of all of the different resources that are available to students. And then the second would be a one pager that describes our particularly our Center for Entrepreneurship. And the last one will be a call out for our annual business model competition which crucial knows much about having been the winner as well as Katie back in 2017. So today you'll be hearing from four alumni entrepreneurs who just a few years ago were sitting where you were sitting today. And we're going to be hearing about their startups and their journey. So first I'd like to introduce our two moderators for the panel session today. The first is Isha as she mentioned earlier. She's a senior in computer engineering and psychology. She's participated in business competition and is interested in going to graduate school to create technology that can potentially be used to create new industries. And Fisher who also introduced himself earlier is also a senior in computer engineering. He's been part of Dr. Lou's research team for the past year and a half. Fisher is aiming to be an entrepreneur and is working on submitting an SBIR proposal to help fund his startup. Both Isha and Fisher are co-leaders of the COVID-19 team in Dr. Lou's lab and they'll be interviewing our panelists. Isha and Fisher. Thank you Dr. Chen. Thank you. Yeah so thankfully we have some great people attending the panel today. I'll go ahead and introduce our panelists. First of all we have Kushal. He is the co-founder and chief product officer of Glimpse. He's currently a senior studying computer engineering at Purdue set to graduate in three years. The company he co-founded Glimpse was the winner of the Burden D. Morgan Business Model Competition. Glimpse does product placements in Arabian bees and has received an investment from Y Combinator which is the world's top startup accelerator which has built companies such as Airbnb, Stripe, DoorDash, Instacart and Twitch and he is currently building his startup full-time. Catherine is the chief executive officer and co-founder of Omnivis. Catherine works at Omnivis where they produce devices to detect infectious diseases to prevent wide-scale outbreaks. She believes health care should be a right, not a privilege. She received her education at Purdue University and the California Polytechnic State University where she studied biomedical engineering. And finally we have Everett Berry who is the CEO of Perceive now known as Visitor X. He's a graduate of Purdue University. He used to be in the ChemSquared team as well with Dr. Liu. He studied computer engineering and he is the principal investigator for a National Science Foundation SBIR proposal where he received a federal grant. So those are our panelists today. Before we move on to any questions, Isha is going to go over a entrepreneurship course that Purdue is currently offering. Yeah so I'll quickly talk about Build My Startup. So Build My Startup is a course designed for companies in execution and expansion stages. The faculty advisors and the industrial mentors will help the students improve their value propositions, identify markets, assess business models, create product prototypes, and develop strategies for raising funds. The students must have already completed an initial assessment of the value proposition, target markets, and customers. And this team is designed for student entrepreneurs that are already building their startups and the student must have already registered their companies before joining this team. So this is a new VIP team at Purdue Vertically Integrated Projects. Isha. So before moving on, I'd like to ask the panelists to take a couple minutes to talk about their journey and what motivated you and inspired you to move into entrepreneurship. So Cuchon, could you go ahead and start us off? Yeah, thanks for having me guys. But I'd love to talk about how I started off with glimpse. So actually what motivated me to get involved in entrepreneurship was in high school, my senior year of high school, I started a tutoring business in my town. And that went really well. I had like three employees as tutoring at 30 students. And that's when I first got involved in entrepreneurship and I really fell in love with the entire process. So coming into college, I was looking for ways to get involved with entrepreneurship on campus. And that's when I joined an entrepreneurship professional fraternity called Delta Mukappa. And that's where I met Akash. He's one of my co-founders. He was my big DMK. And so we started working on side projects for a whole like a few months for entire semester, trying to get to know each other better and starting to build working on problems and trying to build something to get it off the ground. And I think that's what really sparked the glimpse. We started off doing like small college startups. So we would do like campus deliveries. We were doing like try before you buy service for clothing. So we created a business where people could basically rent clothing. We'd go and pick it up from the store. They could try it out in their dorm. And if they like it, they purchase it. If they don't return it, we tried a lot of different ideas. And then that's when my third co-founder, Anuj joined. And we started working on pop-up shops on campuses. And this is really where things started to take off. So we started doing pop-ups on campuses and we would basically cold-call brands tell them like, hey, do you want to get in front of tens of thousands of students? We can help you do that. And so we started getting in contact with different brands, bringing them onto campuses and tried to create like experiential retail marketing initiatives. And I think the entire process of just doing things that we wanted to and creating a product that we really enjoyed and passionate about was what started us getting involved in entrepreneurship. And this was when I was a freshman. So we really got our toes dipped in into the world of entrepreneurship. And then going into sophomore year of college is when we really got serious about it. And then we started looking for ways to scale the business. So we were doing things like one-off consultant type pop-ups for these businesses. But we were looking for ways to use software to scale it. And that's when we stumbled across the idea of Glimps using Airbnb and other short-term rentals. You get products from these brands placed as kind of like a marketing initiative. And I guess that's where the whole journey started for us. And then we got funded by Y Combinator and we're working on it full-time now. Awesome. Congratulations. Catherine, could you go ahead and tell us about your business? Yeah, sure. And how I got here. So I did biomedical engineering as an undergrad. And I really wanted to do that because when I was a little kid, somebody in my family had died from full-blown AIDS. And it was the first time I understood kind of what disease was. And so that stuck with me throughout the years. And I go to college and I'm a little bit bored. I liked my classes, but I didn't know where I wanted to go next. And I did a study abroad trip and was working in this rural area in Thailand with engineers without borders and began to learn about appropriate technology. How can you bring medical devices or other types of technology more out to the user, make healthcare more accessible? And so I was graduating from my degree and I'm sitting there going, I still don't feel ready yet. I want to do something with appropriate technology. I don't know what. And so I went to Purdue for my PhD and I see Steve Worley is on the Zoom call. He was my PhD advisor in the mechanical engineering department. And I wanted to build up my tool belt. And when I was there, there was a gal in one of the labs I was working in who was telling me about this disease cholera. And it was kind of like all these things came together that my love of appropriate technology, my love of making healthcare more accessible. And I have learned cholera was something that didn't exist in Haiti for 100 years until the earthquake. And it came to the country and it went across the country in a matter of weeks. And it created outbreaks and deaths until really recently. And it's not just Haiti, there's 41 countries around the world that have cholera. So I kind of said, this is the moment, this is the moment where things are coming together. What can I do? And I've been working on my PhD on a variety of different things and decided to apply some of the work I was doing to see if we could do some sort of detection platform. And particularly with cholera, this waterborne pathogen. And saw that it was successful. So how does this become a company? Well, I never thought that it would become a company, I'll be honest, but started to enter these pitch competitions around campus, like the Shurs Innovation competition and the Burton Morgan business plan competition. And kind of started to get that feedback. And that was really exciting. And then started to go out more into the community and talk to people and see if there is that interest and create that fire. And so we started the company officially in 2017. I was completing a postdoc after that at Purdue and then did a few accelerators after that to see how we could take off and finally moved to San Francisco and got funding for the company and have been going ever since. That's awesome. I'm glad you took advantage of a lot of things in college because I think a lot of people here will be interested in hearing your experiences with those programs. And finally, Everett, thank you for coming. Could you tell us a little bit about your journey and what motivated you to start? Yeah, for sure. Hello, everyone. I know it's it's really an honor to be with these other great panelists. In fact, Khrushcheva was just talking to Akash last hour on another Zoom call. So in Catherine, we haven't met yet, but I'm also in SF and so we're about to connect when we get the opportunity. But yeah, so Steve was a camera technology company. We started several years ago while still in college with Dr. Lou who's also on the call. And we were fortunate to write and receive at this point, nearly like 1.8 million and NSF grants, non-dilutive grants to kind of build out the research technology for the company, which involves behavior recognition. And today, as visitor X, we provide a UX research product for real products. So think faucets, furniture, mattresses, one of our customers, the largest faucet maker in the US. And we record video clips of customers interacting with these products and and help them kind of design them better and market them to the right set of users. So yeah, we are dealing with the physical world a lot and COVID has had a massive impact on our business positive and negative. So excited to be here and tell you all about it. Awesome. Thanks guys. Okay, so we'll get right into the questions. We got questions from a lot of people that registered for the panel. And one of the most popular questions was, how did you get your initial idea for your startup? So we've heard some talks about that so far. But I'll take it a step further and ask, how do you know when you have an idea and you're ready to transition it to a business? How do you know when you're ready to take something full time and really start developing that into a commercial opportunity? So anyone can just jump in and answer if they have anything to say on this matter. Yeah, I think I can go ahead. I think in terms of first coming up with an idea, I think that in terms of coming up with ideas for me personally, it was just looking at problems in our every day and just starting to work on it with people who are passionate about starting a business. So for me, I was just working with Akash and Anuj on the various different problems. And I think that just getting stuck on solving something, even if we didn't have an idea at first, but we had a problem to solve, it helped us get to that solution. So really what we realized, and I think the best way we've seen to start is just find a problem you're passionate about and start doing customer discovery. So find people who have that problem of similar set of users who deal with that problem every day and run interviews with them, figure out like, what are their major issues? What are their major concerns? And I think one of the strongest points for us is we have the .edu email. So as college students, we can send emails like marketing heads at tons of different companies, which really worked for us and they would be able to get on the call with us for 30 minutes. And so that was really helpful for us to identify that a lot of these direct to consumer online companies want to get their products into the physical world. I think that's where we did a lot of the learnings from. So when you have a problem, in mind first identify the problem, find people who share that set of problems and then try to interview them, see if there is something that's similar across all of them. Once you identify that, you can definitely build a solution based off feedback you get from them. Cool. So you'd say it's about essentially validating that the problems you want to solve actually exist. And that's how you determine if your idea is marketable. Yeah. Yeah. I think if a common set of people share the same problem and the market size of large enough, then it's definitely a business that you want to attack. So a lot of you guys started working on your ideas when you're students. And a lot of the people that are interested in this panel are also students that want to develop their commercial ideas. So how do you balance that sort of work life between your academics and your efforts growing your company? I can go on this one. So one of the things is it's really helpful if you have awesome founders that can help balance some of that load, for sure. I think I got really lucky. My founders are professors at Purdue. So if you see them around, you should go say hi to them. But also balancing the workload, it's not easy. If you really want to be successful, it's not easy. Somebody on this panel said that they're working right now full-time and they're going to be graduating in a few years. For me, it was part of my thesis as well. So I like to say it was a two for one. I got to work on a thesis and do some of the underlying work. But I also got to do the pitch competitions, which I think helped me when I had to do my defense because I already knew how to talk about it to all kinds of people. So I think that was a huge way that helped me balance my workload, for sure. And just kind of seeing how many times I could get a two for one experience out of something. Yeah, I think Catherine's absolutely correct because I think for many including myself, there actually is no balance. If you want to pursue a company, many people end up dropping out or they let their grades completely go to the wayside, unless it's maybe a research opportunity, which is a slightly different case. But the great news is the college is a great time to explore ideas. And a lot of the very, very early stuff is exploration and talking to people. And so no one was more open to talking to me than they were when I was like, hey, I'm a student. I would love to ask you a few questions about your situation. We talked to the CMO of Adidas and CMO of Nike and a bunch of these extremely high level people that I emailed with my Purdue.edu address at Lawstone College. So there are pros and cons, but I think if you're trying to maintain your GPA while really doing it, it's probably losing proposition. They've said .edu address. I can attest when my .edu email went away. I was really sad because people are less likely to talk to me for that product market fit. So take advantage of it. That email is awesome. Awesome. So as executives in these startup companies, you obviously have to work a lot of time and initially maybe for not that much reward. The idea is that it works out in the long run. So to be such a hard worker, what kind of skills do you think you need to succeed as an entrepreneur, especially a young student entrepreneur? I think the biggest skill is just ability to learn and try new things. So when I started working on Glimpse, so just to preface a little bit, in high school and just background, I'm very engineering focused, very numbers and data driven. But now I'm working in a business that's very marketing oriented, more real world product oriented. So be able to shift that mindset going from just being pure, trying to build technology aspect to understanding the marketing aspect of a business is really important. And I think I had to pick up a lot of skills that I didn't have before, like being able to sell, being able to negotiate things like that, understanding the marketing landscape and how to build a product are just things that I had no experience with before. But I think just being open to learning and trying things out of your comfort zone is probably the most key and needed skill to start a company. Awesome. Okay, well, one of the biggest topics right now is obviously the coronavirus and the pandemic we're facing. And a pandemic is obviously going to affect how all companies do business and especially startup businesses. So Isha is going to ask a few questions about how the pandemic has affected your businesses and how you guys have adapted to it. Okay, yeah, thanks for sure. So we have a question for Catherine specifically. How do you think the world of research and development specifically for biotechnology will change post COVID? What can we continue to do post COVID that we've been doing during COVID? So the one thing I will say about biotechnology, so I'm in California, the second to that everything shut down, everybody said, Nope, you can keep coming in, you're doing biotechnology, even if you're not doing COVID some discovery you make could help us with COVID. Go, go, go. So I think that this is actually a very interesting time to be in biotechnology because suddenly everyone I know understands diagnostics, everyone's an expert in sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, limited detection. And I'm going, Dad, you know what that is now? Really? I never, I never thought that this would be the day. So I think that this holds a really interesting future for biotechnology because people are getting why diagnostics are important. I think people understood why vaccines are important, but now that nobody wants to get SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19, everyone's like, Yes, I am on board. When is the vaccine coming out? I'm watching the news every day. Come on, let's go. In terms of also going into work versus not, I think it also showed a lot of the scientists and engineers they got to kind of go in. They got to do the testing, but it really helped show too how, while you can do some of the remote work, if you're not that scientist or that engineer, or maybe you're just writing a grant, so you don't really need to go in. But I think it really showed how to create that communication, how to get that work done. And yeah, the appreciation behind biotechnology has really, really taken off nowadays. And I hated that it came to be a pandemic to have to be at that point of understanding. But it is very interesting from being a founder and seeing this huge shift in the community and understanding. Yes, congratulations actually. I don't know if you're announcing it or not, so on the grant front, I think it has been a good time for you guys, right? It's been all right. Yeah, it's been all right. Cool. We've been following along too. We have been following along too. So yeah. I have another pandemic related question for Kushal this time. So for Kushal, how has your company used the COVID crisis to foster innovation in whether technical in your programming or how your team works? Because I think you guys are a team, a group of three founders, is that correct? Yeah, it's three of us. And yeah, COVID definitely hit our business a little bit hard when it first came because we are doing product placements in Airbnb's. And as you know, when COVID hit, definitely short-term rentals, hospitality market took a really big hit. I think what really got tested was our perseverance and continuing to push through the business. So in March, when bookings in these Airbnb's went very, very low, a lot of the work we'd done, we'd seen basically kind of diminished for the entire month. And what we kept pushing, and what the good thing is, is that luckily bookings came back, state restrictions have been lifted and Airbnb's at the same point it is now that it was in January. So bookings have come back. The thing that's changed is how travel looks like in the US. So I guess August, about one year ago, there would have been a lot of international travel. Instead, a lot of travel is now happening to getaway stays about 100 to 300 miles away from big urban centers. So like right out of New York or right out of LA, there's a lot of travel. So we really got tested in our perseverance as well as ability to adapt. So we had a lot of properties in our platform that were in these major cities, but we quickly adapted and onboarded a lot more properties that were in some of these getaway stays, whether it's like upstate New York or like Big Bear Lake out of LA. I think that's really where we had to make a quick business change, but it did pay off and Airbnb bookings are coming back. Good to hear. And then, Everett, you mentioned in the beginning that the pandemic has affected your business both positively and negatively. Would you like to speak on that? Certainly. So we deal with a lot of retail and places with high-foot traffic, and I think we are seeing a complete transformation and acceleration of things that were already happening before, but they're happening in a drastically accelerated timeframe. So we have completely re-imagined our product to be less about foot traffic and converting people in the moment to more about sort of brand engagement and experience and converting people when they buy online potentially later. So yeah, we have actually leaned into our largest customers, and to be quite frank, some of our smallest customers either cancel contracts or have shut down or it was a really crazy time. I had one contract canceled because of force majeure, which means act of God. So in California, when they forced everyone to shut down, that was the impetus for one of our customers to cancel our contract. So yeah, it was a massive impact, but I'm actually heartened by it a little bit because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity or once-in-a-decade opportunity, shall we say, for the way we do business in the US to completely change and several elements of our product fit into that narrative. So yeah, I would echo what the other panelists have said, and that I think anytime you have massive structural change under foot, it's a great opportunity for entrepreneurs. Thank you guys for your insight. I think for sure we'll have some questions regarding business life. Thanks Sichuan. Okay, so maybe Everett and Catherine can answer this. For day-to-day life, what does day-to-day life look like for an executive from a startup fresh out of university, just in a general sense? Well, it's highly different. Most every day is different. I typically do it in weeks, so I have kind of things I do on Monday and things I do on Wednesday, and then also between months it varies. So for me, we are in about a six-month fundraising cycle. So six months ago I was raising around, which means I was doing entirely VC means and kind of content around that, and that's happening again now. And then between those times, typically there's been something that's like falling apart in business that requires some focus. So over the summer, I was actually back in Indiana at our Indianapolis office working with our engineering team on reliability and kind of when you shift from smaller customers to larger customers, there's an expanded set of requirements to deal with. So yeah, it's quite varied. And the only thing I try to do or I'm working on doing is just trying to be more consistent, going to bed at the same time, waking up at the same time to deal with the variability. So yeah, not a very specific answer, but it varies widely. I can second that so much when you're saying, you know, it changes day-to-day week-to-week month-to-month. I'm going, yep, changes hour-to-hour sometimes. When I first left and started kind of doing this full-time, I eventually just had to sit down and say, okay, Monday's is to focus on product, Tuesday's is to focus on marketing, Wednesday's is to focus on finance, Thursday's operations, Friday, because things do change so much.  And you're going, okay, well, there went my marketing day. And that's okay. I think flexibility is incredibly important to have and a lot of hustle at the same time. And that's kind of what helps with that variability. I think a lot of entrepreneurs like to wear many hats, so it's a little bit easier to navigate around that. So yes, you're going to be wearing all the hats when you first finish your, there's not going to, you can't say I don't like finance, so I'm not going to handle it. Finance is kind of the core of what you're doing. You better be able to handle that. Or marketing. You can ask me any day, marketing is not my specialty at all, but I had to do it. I had to work on it. So then you look to hire people and raise that money and grow so that there are people that can help wear some of those hats over time. But right away out of school when you're kind of doing this, yeah, you're bouncing around doing everything day to day. And I can't say that one day was ever like the previous day. So what do you think has been the hardest part of business life so far? I'll let Catherine ask. Yeah, I was going to say the hardest part. I think, I don't know if it's the hardest, but it is the one that you're always putting a lot of energy into is one, team dynamics and team culture, because you want to cultivate something that is incredibly positive and that you work as a united front to get something out there. I would say that that's one. The second that I've heard from a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of programs that I've been in is that sometimes entrepreneurship or being a founder can be a little bit isolating because you are kind of at the forefront. You are trying to figure things out and you're trying to be that steady ship to navigate around. And so that can be a little bit nuts sometimes. Yeah, I'd agree. I think I like to kind of push individual projects forward, but it's a come around to the view that a whole day spent meeting with people and listening to them is actually worked on as well. It doesn't have to just be pitch decks or spreadsheets or reading codes. So yeah, the communication aspect and if you can really be the multiplier for your team, if you can offload things that you do, you know, that's I think difficult, especially if at first those things might be done in a different way or, you know, in brutal honesty, a less effective way. But in the long run, the training and focusing on the collaboration of the whole team is kind of your job versus just doing things and then like passing down, passing down orders. So that was a big shift for me, still ongoing, but I definitely agree with Catherine that just the raw emotional communication of a startup is probably one of the most important, important and difficult things. Would you say your experiences are similar? Yeah, yeah, I definitely think so. Right now, we're going through Y Combinator and so we're at the stage where we go through this three month accelerator program to try to build the business, get it off the ground, and then we go and raise a seed round of financing, which our demo day is actually next week on Monday and that's when we present to like a thousand investors try to raise new round of financing. So like the last few months has just been straight, like working nonstop, trying to get everything off the ground. I think some of the hardest things for us in the early days is operations, operationalizing everything, figuring out who's going to handle what and staying in order, especially when we're trying to move as fast as possible. I know Catherine talked about things breaking, you're trying to get something done one day and then something breaks and you're like, oh, I got to put my goal for today on the whole and fix this issue is having another client. I think these are problems we all face and it's definitely been really pleasant. So one thing you guys brought up was the team atmosphere of your employees. So as fresh graduates especially, a lot of students might not have a ton of leadership experience. So what do you think the best way is to encourage and be able to lead your employees? And how do you think you can most effectively foster a positive atmosphere? Well lately, I've been working on being more straightforward with expectations. So coming out of school I've been found it was difficult to kind of say what I was really feeling or say in a way that was productive for the people. But this often causes more problems later than the initial maybe difficult reaction that someone might have. So for example, we had someone who was working on our hardware and one of the things we did during COVID was we were transitioning to more of a software company. So our computer vision software can now run on many more types of cameras besides our very specific cameras that we built. And you know, so I had to say to our hardware person, look, you have three months to learn these kind of the set of software skills or else like there's really no place for you on the team anymore. And you know, this is not something I would have communicated before. I think but experiences taught me that not saying the like severity of the situation, the need of the team, and then like being frustrated later and everyone's freaking out would be worse. So I think that's one thing I find many people I talk to straight up college are they actually feel very strongly, very passionate about certain things, but they don't really want to surface it because you know, someone might get a little bit offended or a little bit scared or panic. And actually you want to know about if they're feeling that way about what you're feeling like right away. So that's just personally I don't know that I'm working on at the moment that I think has been broadly very helpful for me. Would you agree, Catherine? Do you have similar experiences? I mean, absolutely. But also to add to it is when I was having some troubles in my own company with particularly like culture and things like that as I sat down and I had studied how all these companies had cultural values. And at first, you know, I have this engineering background, I was like, cultural values, it doesn't feel like it means that much. It's just like five words, somebody chose like happiness, humility, and I was like, what does that mean? But then I said, I'm going to try this. And I came up with five cultural values that we had on transparency, communication, you know, showing gratitude to work together as a team.  And then what I noticed is that when I started sticking to my cultural values and sharing this directly with my team, they also started to reflect these cultural values. And when we weren't, I don't know how this has happened, we keep very open communication because that is a cultural value, we check each other on it. Sometimes it's hard to be transparent, I will be honest. Sometimes it is so hard to be transparent, but that is one of our core values is transparency. And so that's, that's really helped me. So I think that's one way that it's really helps working as a team and helping my leadership skills is to create this idea of, what do I really want my company to look like? How do I want people to truly behave as a team? And so that was one really big thing that I would say helped quite a bit.  I'm willing to be with my team to, you know, run the air into FedEx. And I think that that's incredibly important because when you're there to build a shelf together, or a chair, or put together lab equipment, or figure out some software that makes you want to like drop, kick, kick your computer across the room. These are huge team building experiences because you're doing it together. You're not acting like there's some strange hierarchy. People respect you a lot more because you're willing to sit down and build that shelf or to get angry at a piece of software and start yelling at it or something, but it helps create that team dynamic and that leadership. And then the final one that I would say is that when your employees shine, you shine. So I think people are really ready to take a lot of credit for things. But when other people on your team shine, you also shine.  That is a huge part of being a leader. Thanks. For future entrepreneurs, if there's software that's making Catherine pull her hair out, you know, maybe you should ask her about it, you know, it could be an opportunity. Yeah, so on the topic of team atmosphere, one of the most prevalent sources of feedback I got when starting to write my NSF SBIR proposal was that I need to have a co-founder I can trust for my company. And that founding company is many, many times easier if you have someone that you trust or someone you're friends with to found it with you. So a lot of students might not have someone that's exactly like that, not immediately. So what do you think you should look for when determining is this person just a friend or can I found a company with this person? What kind of skills do you think that person needs to bring to your company? And if you don't have this kind of person, how do you think you can find one especially now in this virtual kind of world we live in? Yeah, I think the most important thing is I think shared values. So if you can find people you share the same values with or the same goals, I think getting started with them is probably the best way. So Akash, Anuj, and I, the three of us, we were all in Delta Bukapa. So we were already in this community as very entrepreneurially focused. And the way we started working was starting to work on side projects together. So it wasn't a commitment, we weren't starting a company off day one, it was more to get to know each other. I think that worked really well. We became really close, like we're basically all three opposite brothers now. We live together, we're very close, but it started because we're looking to do a side project together. And I think even if you don't have a co-founder in mind, if you have someone who you know or someone in the community that you're a part of, you probably share some set of values, and you could get along and starting to work together with them on side projects, seeing where something goes for 30 days, seeing if you work well together, it's probably the way I found to get started the best. I see. Cool. One question that we got, and I just wanted to hear your guys' opinions on it because I thought it was an interesting question. Someone asked, as a student without entrepreneurial experience, do you think it's better to build experience at a company beforehand, or should you just work on studying entrepreneurship and starting a business on your own as soon as possible, if you have an idea already? So for me personally, I think getting started, you can start anytime, and some of the best experience comes from trying something and learning. I think no experience is the best experience, to be honest. But experience doesn't matter. So my freshman year, I did a internship at the startup in California. They're called iFi, and they build these AI-based nano-stores. And for them, I learned a lot. So I was doing a lot of different things for them there, and one of the things was selling, and that's where I really got into the side of business development. And combining that with a tech background, I think that's what really helped me start this business. And I think that you don't need to have a lot of experience to start.  I remember when Anuj, Akash, and I started, there were so many things we didn't know. We didn't know how to onboard a customer, how do you invoice a customer, how to price. Like these are things that if you try to focus on from day one, you won't make any progress because you're too focused on the small details. I think if you just look at the big picture, if you find a problem you're passionate about, you can get started any day. And I think that really no experience or experience, you can still get to the same place at the end of the day. Yeah, I would say if you don't want to work on your startup right away, don't join a big company because you'll stay there forever. Mine is much better. That makes sense. Yeah, I don't know if there's a perfect experience that you need. I can definitely say I had zero business experience, but by remaining coachable and just trying to do everything, like biomedship at Purdue, trying bitch competitions that I could find, doing accelerators, whoever would accept me and talk to me, that was the part of the way that worked for me. But I think everyone's going to be so different. And it's hard to fit into a box, which I know is a really frustrating answer because you're just like, no, tell me tell me the exact answer to my path to this question. It really does depend, but you can find ways to be coachable. Yeah, I agree. I definitely don't think that a lack of work experience is a giant barrier to entry, especially because of how many entrepreneurship programs places like Purdue offer. And we have about 15 minutes left. So I'll go ahead and pass it back to Isha and she will ask about opportunities to help students build their entrepreneurship skills. Yeah, thanks Isher. So I have some questions here about opportunities to help students, but before that I have a question specifically for Everett. So Everett, can you talk about how you acquired your largest customer? Yes, our second largest customer showed them our product. So that's what you want. When that starts happening, that's a great time. But to get our second largest customer, I connected with, I was actually a home builder in Indianapolis who I knew was connected to the guy I wanted to speak to at this company. So it was actually, it was research working backwards on LinkedIn in general, and then kind of purposeful introductions and relationship building. So very different, but in the enterprise space, this is often I think how it's done. I know of one company where their investors just called their first 10 customers and was like, why don't we sign you up? And they basically said yes. So it's very different in different sectors, but in enterprises generally some sort of relationship thing. Yeah, that's really interesting. Okay, cool. So I'll move on to the opportunities to help students. So for any of you, what kind of support was available for you in school related to entrepreneurship or was there none? Can you guys also talk a little bit about that? Yeah, okay. I think I can start. There was a lot of support for us in particular from Purdue and from some of the communities on campus. So coming to Purdue as I mentioned, I joined Delta Moog Kappa. I think that fraternity was really helpful in building the entrepreneur community on campus. So there used to be this building called Angle.  And I think that that was really helpful having a shared space to work. On top of that entrepreneurship 200, that certificate program class, I took it as a freshman and I was in the learning community. I think that was really instrumental. My professor was Mike Pasady and he did such a good job at sharing his experience, his personal experience of starting a company that I think it really motivated me and I know a lot of other students in the class to work on something. And I think that he was instrumental in opening my ideas, my eyes, the idea of starting a company and how accessible it is for students to do so. And then also alongside that, I know Purdue has a lot of resources. So Firestarter is a program for boundary runs and they help you get your company off the ground. They have like weekly meetings where they give you advice and tips. And I think that that's really useful for someone who has an idea and kind of wants to go through kind of like a class environment to get the company off the ground. And then on top of that alumni have been really helpful. Especially right now, we're raising another round of financing and alumni connections in Silicon Valley have been really helpful for us to get some money and like start investor conversations and pitch people. So I think if you can reach out to Purdue alumni or start building those connections, that's really, really valuable. Yeah, totally. So I think three Purdue alumni are angel investors in our company. Not to brag, but I introduced the glimpse guys to one of their angel investors. So I do think that's, that's a big part of it. Being on this call is a great start. You can, I think, email any of us and we'll always talk to you. And then I think our research too, I love research, still a big technology person, you know, and almost too much in the eyes of some VCs, but that's okay. And so I was involved with a lot of student research at Purdue. And honestly, that's where that's where the passion came from. That's where the opportunities came from. And Dr. Liu, who is on this call was, was one of the great, great influences in my life. So yeah, for me, it was a lot of research opportunities at Purdue. For me, it was my co-founders or professors had had experience already at Purdue. So they were able to kind of guide me and say, Hey, some of these resources exist. Go take a look. I think that was one. The second is some of the competitions that they have around campus that I mentioned earlier in the call. I don't know if they do Shers or not anymore. The Shers Innovation Competition. That was the very first one I ever did before I knew what the heck a pitch was. And then the Burton Morgan as well. And then also just going to the Foundry and people are very receptive to talk to you there. People want to talk to you. And I got an entrepreneur in residence at the time for a year or two who was excellent. Loved working with her was just a huge saving grace for me. And then finally, I know, like somebody mentioned entrepreneurship 200, or I forget what the class was called, but also in the grad school, they have bio medship for biomedical engineers at the business college that comes together and merges teams that are business students and engineering, which is fantastic to find that product market fit or any like nodal I core kind of programs is really good to find that product market fit. Yeah, we encourage everybody to take advantage of all the opportunities that Purdue provides. Have any of you studied abroad? And if so, how vital do you think a study abroad experience is in relation to starting your own business? Well, I went into within a field of some classes because I was working on this company. So I had to take more credits. So I guess it's not that I studied abroad, but I want somewhere else for my undergrad. And I think it was huge for me because it changed my entire path of wanting to do appropriate technology rather than work on pacemakers and stance. So for me, it was a huge opportunity and it completely changed what I wanted to do. I think I can ask one more question about opportunities to help students and we'll have a final wrap up question. So what do you think universities can improve on to support student entrepreneurship or what do you wish that was there to help support you as you took on this journey? So I've been agitating for Purdue to set up their own venture fund. IU has a venture fund. So I really think Purdue should have one. But in all seriousness, I think it's just the facilitating connections. I'm not sure what the current status of the anvil is. I have heard that it's slightly changing or something, but that was a big, big part of it for me could go ahead and out with all other students that were interested in startups in a bit of an informal way. So more of those spaces is definitely helpful for students. There are actually really good questions in the audience chat box. Sorry, Kushal, were you going to speak on this topic before I move on to the next question? Yeah, I was just going to add, I think one thing that could be really helpful is even in the very engineering focus classes, tying in entrepreneurship. So like EC368 data structures algorithms, or maybe EC20875 Python for data science, I can see a lot of applications of how you could tie in industry type of projects where you have to actually create something that can potentially provide business value. And so you have that engineering side of that component, but then also you have the opposite side where you see how can I turn something I have built for a classroom project into seeing does it have market viability, how can that work? I think that can foster like a community or get into the mindset of students to look at like everything from a business perspective. I think that that could be something that can be interesting. We have one good question from the chat. What advice would you give to students who want to pursue a business idea but might have student debt that might dissuade them? I think you should pay off the debt first. So I've actually gone into debt and of course this company in some cases. So I think you should actually have some reserves before you do it. Yeah, our work part time while you have a job that really is helping with that debt and getting those bills paid off for sure. It's tough as an entrepreneur and there is a likelihood that you can go into debt. We have another question about Purdue education. So one person would like to ask about how a Purdue education reflects on the startups of entrepreneurs and what they have learned in class that helps them the most in running their businesses. You know, I think one of the biggest things that I learned from Purdue and class in general is a solid work ethic. I think that a lot of the things that we do in class may not directly translate into everyday to day work and operations. But the basic foundation of working hard is what has been built through our classes. And then a lot of the classes that have been really instrumental I think came a lot from working hard as well as an entrepreneurship side that's a certificate program learning from past experience hearing other entrepreneurs do something like this before and what their thought process is like that's been really helpful in getting off the ground. Yeah, if I could interject for a moment speaking about university opportunities at the beginning of the lecture or sorry the panel it's not a lecture. We talked about the build my startup VIP team and that's for teams and students that already have their business idea but Kushal also mentioned entrepreneurship 200. So I would that is for students who don't have this idea yet and aren't ready to take this idea to business. So if you're interested in entrepreneurship I think those are the two top things to look for. I also did fire starter myself and can recommend it. It's modeled after the National Science Foundation's iCorps program. So those are three great opportunities for all students to look into. Fisher if I can interject also our business model competition all you need to have is a rough idea and it's a great opportunity to flush it out and as well as two of the panelists win some money to get your your startup going. There's actually a question about business competitions as well. If you've been through a business competition which I think all of you have how did the experience help you or how did it not help you? One thing that helped is it made me get my butt in gear to have a really good pitch and to have a good plan if it was like an actual business plan type of competition and also the questions from the judges that is amazing practice because sometimes I mean especially when you're starting somebody's going to come out of left field and you're going to go I did not think about that so I think that those are some really great ways that helped. It also helped me get a thicker skin for some of the types of judges that was asked certain questions because people are going to question you no matter what you just have to have the conviction to know why it can be done and so I think that that's also incredibly helpful. Yeah I definitely agree with what Catherine said and I think one of the really valuable things especially for the Byrne de Morgan competition is that it provides a lot of structure for your company so the way that one works in particular is they it's a you have to basically build a business canvas and you're basically pitching your business model so a lot of the a lot of the conversation questions you get from judges is around the viability of your model and you proving it so it provides a lot of structure for like entrepreneurs especially because one of the biggest challenges in building a startup is making decisions with very little data a lot of the decisions you make it's like how to make iterations on your product it's from anecdotal data you might hear from customers and not really anything that you can do like statistical analysis on so I think the business model canvas is really really helpful in that it's very formulaic and structured in building a company and they test you to see how you've made decisions how you've validated invalidated hypotheses cool well I think that just about covers everything we're just about out of time here that has covered all the different topics that we wanted to discuss I think we got a lot of valuable information especially for students who are looking to become entrepreneurs and maybe aren't totally secure in the decision yet so I think we're going to end it here thank you so much you guys for attending the panel especially our panelists who spoke and I wish you guys well and good luck


Thank you so much, Lisa, and thank you for reminding me of that story. You know, one of the most important things, as leaders, as politicians, is to stay connected with people. And over the years, I've been able to travel to Hamilton and come here a number of times for great announcements, but right across the country as well, where you spend time hearing about the concerns people are facing and try very much to build solutions that are going to respond to them. And that's the work that we have to do as politicians. And there's a lot of time for cynicism and criticism, absolutely. But at the same time, the incredible hard work done by MPs like you, Lisa, by the team we have here, is first and foremost always focused on connecting with people and working with them to build a better future for themselves, for their communities. That's why I'm so glad to be here with the Deputy Prime Minister, with ministers Gould and Tassie and Hussain and Chad Collins as well. Okul MP. Yesterday, Christia presented our 2022 budget. It's a plan to make life more affordable for Canadians and to grow our economy, a plan that invests in people. Making life more affordable for Canadians, as Lisa said, has to start with addressing housing affordability. It's a big issue for a lot of Canadians, and it's a big issue to solve. There's no one silver bullet that's going to solve everything. That's why our plan has three key pillars. The first is helping people save to buy a home. The second is focusing on housing supply to make sure we're creating more homes across the country. And the third is putting an end to the speculation that is driving up housing prices unnecessarily in places like Hamilton and quite frankly right across the country. Canada needs more affordable housing. When Canadians work hard and save, they should be able to afford a home. That's certainly what Peter and Felicia did when they bought this beautiful home a few years ago, but even they've seen property values skyrocket since then. For too many families, the dream of becoming a owner in today's market is simply out of business. And it has to change. Young Canadians deserve to be able to build a future in a house that belongs to them, just like their parents could do before them. I met Allah and Amit earlier today with three young children and rent their home. We talked about the challenge of home affordability and the fact that even as they're working hard and trying to set aside some money, the growth of prices, the exponential costs of housing just get further and further out of reach no matter how hard they work now. That's not right. In a country like Canada, we should be able to make sure that people who work hard, who want to start a family in communities they love, should be able to find a home. Well, we need solutions that will work for them and for Peter and Felicia and for families right across the country. Every family is facing different situations, which is why we're putting forward a range of solutions that each of them will help. One of the many challenges for Canadians is to be able to save enough money for a down payment. So to help people do just that for their first home, our budget introduced the new tax-free first home savings account, where people can save up to $40,000 tax-free. And that's tax-free on the way in and it's tax-free on the way out as well. Plus, we're going to double the tax credit they get when they'll buy their first home, which means an extra $1,500 in their pockets. To make the housing more affordable, you also have to tackle the shortage of housing. The population of Canada continues to increase, but the supply of housing is not following. And for too long, too many governments have neglected the problem. So we need to attack the challenge of supply. This budget puts Canada on a path to double housing construction over the next decade, and that'll mean working with provinces, territories, municipalities and builders. The new Housing Accelerator Fund will help municipalities, including small towns, unlock supply. We're also investing in clean energy-efficient housing, and we're investing $4 billion to close the Indigenous housing gap. Finally, our third pillar is in our plan to make housing more affordable by curbing speculation. When foreign investors and corporations use housing as an asset, it drives prices higher and higher and makes homes out of reach of the middle class. Homes are to live in, to raise a family in, to build a life in, not a way to boost a balance sheet. So in this budget, we're going to be banning foreign buyers for two years, curbing speculative practices, and moving forward on a homebuyer's Bill of Rights. All Canadians deserve to have an affordable house. With this budget, we give ourselves tools to change things. These targeted measures will help millennials and all middle-class Canadians achieve their dream of owning a home. Budget 2022 continues our work to help build a strong recovery. Today's historic job numbers show Canada's unemployment rate is now at 5.3% the lowest in decades. Our plan is working, but we need to keep working to make sure that as our economy grows, it brings everyone along. I know for a lot of families, it does feel like there's a bit of a disconnect. We talk about how the job numbers are great, we talk about how the economy is growing. They're having trouble affording their groceries and the dream of home ownership seems further and further out of reach. That's why the work we're doing in government is focused on making sure that even as the economy grows, which we want, all Canadians get to benefit. That's where things like childcare, things like housing supports, things like investments in students, investments in seniors, all help us move forward in the right direction.