I think most of us have been in this situation before. We've had this dead battery and didn't quite know how to recycle it properly, so we just threw it in the closest waste bin. I've done that before I found out that a tiny battery can actually be a ticking bomb. My name is Sinez Awad and I'm the CEO and co-founder of Leetech. Now I'm here to tell you that the waste industry is on fire and not in a good way. But we can actually do something about that. This is Ibad. He's a store manager at one of the busiest yosks in Oslo Central Station. One day in 2018 he was cleaning up his magazine section and naturally he just threw everything in the cardboard paper trash. But what you didn't know was that in one of these magazines there was a toy, a toy with a lithium-ion battery. And if lithium-ion batteries are exposed to external damages, they tend to self-ignite. And that was exactly what happened at Norskjianvending in 2018. This is one of the most modern and largest waste facilities in Norway. And in 2018 it was up in flames. And it was all because of these. Incorrectly sorted lithium-ion batteries. And this is not a rare sight when it comes to waste management. In fact, 50% of waste facilities will experience fires on a weekly or even daily basis. And 80% of these fires are caused by incorrectly sorted lithium-ion batteries. When we first became aware of this problem, we started investigating existing solutions. And they were not really doing their job. By looking at this birthday card, are you able to see if there's a battery inside? That's the problem with image recognition. It will never be able to penetrate any objects nor any layers of waste. X-ray definitely have those penetration abilities. However, it's both expensive and invasive to the waste stream. And then we have what is in fact the industry standard. Damage control measures, like thermal cameras and robotic extinguishers. However, these measures will never be able to prevent a fire from happening in the first place. And that was exactly what we wanted to do when we started Litec two and a half years ago. And since then, we've been testing and failing and testing again. And today, I'm very proud to present to you Lyda. Lyda is consistent. She's cost-effective. And she's active. She can detect batteries with 85% accuracy, which is actually good enough for our first movers. She's made with safe radiation and in mind to how the waste stream looks like today. So let me walk you through how Lyda works. We've made modular sensor boxes to retrofit any type of assembly. These boxes are inducing a magnetic field through all conductive materials, creating eddy currents. When we read out this data, we get a unique fingerprint of the composition of the materials. And by looking into the details, we can classify even complex material combinations, such as batteries. By clustering this data, we can make informed decisions whether or not there is a battery hidden in the waste stream. It's the average yearly cost of smaller fires for one waste facility.  And due to this, insurance prices are spiking. There are 40% if they can even get an offer in the first place. There's about 16,000 recycling facilities worldwide. We're targeting 6,000 of them located in North America, Europe, East Asia, and the Pacific. Our total available market is 5.2 billion. Our obtainable market is 2 billion. And our obtainable market is 280 million. And to get there, we're now co-creating our solution with our end users to make sure that we meet their needs as well as requirements. And then we're partnering up. We're partnering up with leading industry players in our target markets to help us with extraction of the batteries, installation, as well as scaling. And a nice thing about operating in a niche is that your product is more adaptable to new geographical markets, which allows us to effectively scale in 2025. And this is our team. We're a young team. We're passionate. And combine our drive with our competence within economics, industry expertise, hardware, and artificial intelligence. With support from our mentors, we have exactly what we need to take our product global. And so far, we've proven that. We've raised about one million US dollars in governmental grants and our pre-seed ground. We've been announced with prestigious awards like 30 under 30 and entrepreneur of the year. And we've created and tested the first version of our sensor. We're now securing our IP. We're applying for patents. Then we'll be conducting a pilot project at Norsk Janvening in the exact same facility that was up in flames in 2018. In Q1, we will launch our seed round, raising two million US dollars to take us to market in 2025. So if you want to be a part of our journey and agree that we shouldn't play with fire, let's not waste any time and have a chat. Preferably I'll watch trash. Thank you.


All right, what's up guys? I thought I'd make a very quick video just to show you these new reality check stickers that I've had created.  So they're fundamental for lucid dreaming, right? You need to constantly ask yourself, am I dreaming? And then the idea is if you do this regularly enough, then eventually in the dream, you'll do the same thing and you'll ask yourself, am I dreaming? You'll do your test, right? Whatever that test happens to be. Say if it's trying to push this finger through this palm.  Whereas in a dream, it will happen.   You're able to control and decide what you do. The hard part is remembering how to do the reality checks. And that's why I've created these stickers.  And they say, literally, are you dreaming? They just ask you directly the question, are you dreaming? And you might notice I've got one in my chair here, a couple just here by my light switch, they're all over the house. Simply because, simply because, the more often you see this sticker, the more likely you're gonna do a reality check. That's the whole idea behind these. And so at the moment, you can get them on red bubble, I believe. If you just type into Google, howtolucid.com sticker or reality check sticker, I'll put a link in the description as well. And I'll make sure that wherever you're seeing this video, you can easily get these. These are simply to help you remember to do reality checks, remember to dress in lucid dreaming and be able to actually have your reality checks show up in a lucid, in a dream and make you lucid. These things are really useful. And I think these are, to be honest, one of the fastest hacks that you can do to quickly push yourself from not having lucid dreams to doing reality checks, having them show up in your dreams and becoming lucid. Now here's how you use them.   This is, and maybe the fridge as well. These are the most common areas for most people. More common than say your loft or your shed because you don't often go to those places compared to the bathroom, obviously, your bedroom and the front door and the fridge. Okay, especially if you work from home, the fridge is gonna be a very common place because you gotta eat several times in a day. So what I would suggest to do is to stick these in those areas on your bathroom mirror, above your front door, in your bedroom door. And the idea is that the more often you see them, you're gonna see the sticker, think, bang, am I dreaming?  It's gonna remind you and it's gonna be actually quite hard not to do a reality check. That's the idea behind these. So that's it for today, guys. I know it's a very short video, but I just wanted to explain to you how if you're struggling to lose a dream, these are probably the fastest way of getting your reality checks to show up in your dreams to help you become lucid and to give you lucid dreams at the end of the day. Now I have actually got a huge bundle of these stickers. I've probably shown you before, I've got several stacks of these things. I'll give a bundle for free to the most interesting or entertaining comment. Now you have to make this comment really witty. You know, have to make it interesting. Maybe it's a description of your dreams or something entertaining. You know, something that's really gonna be funny. So I'll give a free bundle to that as well. Also, if you happen to share this video and if you can in some way prove that you've shared the video, then I'll also take that into consideration as well and you're more likely to get a free bundle of these stickers. Really cool. Are you dreaming stickers to help you remember to do reality checks? Done.


What's up everyone it's your girl Kenzie here from Layton Sports Cards, and I'm ripping two personals here for Noel B We've got two of the 20 22 leaf autograph jerseys multi sport edition boxes. All right Noel. Thanks so much for hopping back in Let's see what we get ya Let's see what we can get ya on these jerseys Sam ripped a few to start us off and then bunch of them came in again at only 145 a box Let's steal for an autograph jersey especially with some of the names on this checklist Absolutely crazy. All right jersey number one here. We've got oh, wow. I haven't seen one of these yet coach Holtz Little coach jersey that's sick Lou Holtz Sign that pretty big too beautiful looking autograph Lou Holtz again, you got your jsa sticker right here with the matching jsa Um Hard blue Holtz for the first auto there. All right Reach that jersey number two. Let's see What's up Jason football as well? Jersey number two good luck We've got oh is that who I think it is is that a drake london It is nice one there drake drake london auto Very nice. I think he's gonna have a big year too in Atlanta Nice one there.  No, well congrats on those. Thanks again for hopping back in and we'll be getting these jerseys right out to ya


The mid-speed valve is one of the least understood components of a front fork. However, it is, without a doubt, one of the best solutions that came to existence to follow the evolution of motocross and supercross. Stay tuned to find all about it. If you watched our episode on how front forks work, you should know that, besides the compression base valve, there's another valve that provides additional compression damping, the mid-speed valve. But why would you need additional compression damping? As the sport progressed, the jumps and speed got higher, thanks to the increase of performance of both bikes and the riders. The suspension setup had to be increasingly stiffer on high-speed compression damping and this had some limitations. In a cartridge fork on a compression stroke, the volume of oil pushed through the compression base valve to provide compression damping is simply the volume of the rod entering the cartridge, which, let's face it, isn't that much oil. On the other hand, during the rebound stroke, the volume of oil that is used to provide rebound damping is the same as the area between the rod and the cartridge times its displacement, which is a lot more than in compression. The industry came to the conclusion that only increasing the stiffness of the compression shim stack wasn't enough. It reaches a point where the suspensions become unrightable and start having cavitation issues. This is where the mid-speed valve changed the picture. The mid-speed valve is, in essence, a shim stack combined with the check valve of the piston rod's rebound valve. When the suspension gets compressed, the mid-speed valve lifts, allowing the oil to fill the chamber above, although a bit more restrictive when compared to a regular check valve. The amount of shims placed above the shim stack determines how much float the mid-speed valve has, which limits its vertical travel. If the pressure inside the cartridge keeps increasing, the shims bend, allowing more oil to fill the chamber above while creating additional compression damping. There are two things you can do when you introduce a mid-speed valve. First, it can significantly increase the volume of oil that is used to dampen in compression, since the volume of oil going through the mid-speed valve is equal to the area of the valve, times its displacement, which is around three times bigger than just the volume of oil going through the compression base valve alone. You can look at it as increasing the compression stroke used for damping, without increasing the fork's length. And number two, you can reduce the stiffness of the compression base valve while still providing more compression damping. The mid-speed valve became such an important step in suspension performance that it naturally became a component in every open cartridge and closed cartridge fork from that moment on. But how does that affect the compression damping of your forks? Damping is additive, meaning that the total damping of the forks will be the sum of the damping created by the different damping circuits. In the compression base valve, we have the low-speed orifice, which is the first circuit creating damping, and it's responsible for the initial spiking damping. Then, we have the low-speed shim stack circuit. This circuit usually doesn't open right from the start, but as soon as it opens, most of the oil flows through this circuit. Adding to the low-speed, we have the stiffer high-speed shim stack circuit, which follows the same linear damping as the low-speed, but with a bigger slope. Each damping circuit contributes to the overall damping of the suspension, according to its compression. If we now have compression damping in the mid-speed valve, everything adds up as well. Usually the mid-speed compression damping doesn't start right at the beginning of the suspension travel, thanks to the float. The amount of damping provided by the mid-speed valve depends completely on the stiffness and setup of the shim stack. For motocross, the mid-speed valve usually has a smaller float and a stiffer shim stack. This is useful because it provides additional damping between the low-speed and high-speed damping shim stacks, hence mid-speed, while providing better barming resistance. For enduro, the mid-speed valve usually has a softer shim stack and a bigger float. This is useful because it allows the suspension to absorb the bumps, but still improve barming resistance. But be careful with how you tune them. You shouldn't tune a mid-speed valve the same way you tune a base valve. The rebound piston on the left and the compression piston on the right are from the same suspension, and we can clearly see that the mid-speed valve's ports are a lot bigger than the compression base valve. Why is this important? Well, the chamber between both valves will be under the same pressure, so if you want them to open at the same pressure, the valve with larger ports will require a stiffer shim stack, and the valve with smaller ports will require a softer shim stack.  Subscribe, if you have any questions, leave them on the comments below, and give it a thumbs up. Thank you for watching.


to the season. What are the things that made the difference now? It's made a difference having to stand low this season. For sure. I think coming off of the year we had last year and installing these plays and the good OTAs, communicating better. And I think we're moving more as a unit than we ever have before. So I'm excited for what we're going to do this season. What are some of the ways that you over Sean compliment each other as a linebacker to do it? Being that this would be our fourth year together as a duo, we think very similar. React off of each other. It's just it's a lot of non-verbal communication and verbal communication. It's like we got telepathic powers. So I love playing next to him. And I'm excited for what we're going to do this season as well. Playing next to Rashani, he makes really good plays. Hits hard. And I'm just glad to be here another year to play with him. Shane's biggest strength as a coach. I'll say everything that a coach has as a strength. We trust him. He teaches us in our defensive unit meetings. He tells us why we run these plays and the situations. And just inform us so we have a better understanding of why he's calling these plays and what we're trying to defend.  And we've got a better understanding. When will you legitimately be able to tell if and how much better you guys are on through them? How better I have the team? We just got to see at the end of the season where we at, the games we win, and how far we go. And we do all this stuff to try to win a Super Bowl and anything less is failure. So and that goes on for any team in the league. If you don't want a Super Bowl, it's not a you know. But building off of what we did last year was winning the division for the first time in a long time. Just take a game by game and just keep getting better offensively and defensively. You've obviously made a lot of plays here. I mean, when you look ahead, what's kind of next for Jayon Brown in your state of your career? Just keep on making plays.  And I just want to go out there and enjoy every last game. Getting hurt last season wasn't the best.  And being out here with my teammates and coming back to this organization to get coached up with these guys and these coaches. And I'm excited. What does that mean to you? How is Jayon Brown a leader? Man, I'll leave by example, you know, we got our rookie Monty in there. But just all throughout the day, we got KB. That's a vocal leader and leads by example as well. And just be a guy that can be counted on. And I want my teammates to hold me accountable as well. And just nothing personal. We all want the best for each other. We all got the same goals that we want to hit. And just keeping everybody accountable at a high level so we can be the best that we can be. Not afraid to get after a guy if you think he's slacking or making the same mistake a couple of times. We all have our own ways of it. I'm not much of a yeller, but you know, there's no need to embarrass anybody. But, you know, you can just talk to somebody on the side. Everybody has their own little ways of it. I don't know the years for sure, but did you compete against Barclay when he was at USC? Did you ever pick him or I mean, memories of games against him? I actually went to when I was getting recruited to UCLA. So his senior year, I was a senior year in high school, but I did see him play and the game that I attended, we won. But no, no all about him. Happy to have him here. He's a really cool dude and glad to have him. Tell the young guys in the secondary, whether it's Elijah or whether it's Farley or maybe some of the news. What do you tell those guys to kind of get them up to speed and encourage them? Me, just doing a great job coaching those dudes and getting them up to speed on our playbook. And, you know, they got leaders like KB in the room and they're in the rabbit. So I'm letting those guys, you know, stay, I'm staying in my lane, in my linebacker lane, but when we're out there on the field, you know, helping guys communicate and just make sure they're decisive and trust in their process of what our coaches coach. What are your precious minutes of Monty so far? Monty, Monty's been doing really good. He's smart, he's very athletic, that's a big boy. So I'll see what Georgia had somebody special and I'm glad to have him here. Man, it's been an honor. It's been an honor. I don't know if it's gonna take another five years for me to get up here, but I'll see y'all soon. Oh man, man, well I got it, well I got it. Shout out to the linebacker room, man. BJ Locker is right next to mine. He said give him a shout out. So shout out to everybody in Locker Room. Shout out to my parents. It's an honor to be up here, it's an honor to be up here.


Another group known as the Narvan Consensus Movement is called on President Bola Chinubu to seat the position of Senate President to the North for equity, fairness and justice. The group took its rally to the Government House and the Zonal Headquarters of the APC in Kaduna State. Speaking during a one million-mile march organized in Kaduna, the President of the group, Dr. Arwal Aliyu, premised the group's argument on the fact that the President amassed a total of 5.5 million votes from the North towards his electoral victory, making it justifiable that the number three position in the country should go to it. We are demanding the President, as those who voted for him, who worked time to find the law of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, for him to be elected as the President. But it is only there after giving him 2.5 million, 5.5 million votes that he's shifting the seat of the Senate President to the North. The seat of the President is in the South, the position of the Senate President should go to it. The group also urged the President to allow democracy prevail on the National Assembly by allowing members of both chambers to choose whoever they prefer to lead them. The question, President Bola, to shift the position of Senate President to the North, that is one, to take it to the North, he should allow a level playing ground. The National Assembly is the most democratic setting all over the world, under a democracy. Also tell the party democracy to prevail, just like democracy prevailed during the election of the President, and that is why today, democracy to prevail, allowed the National Assembly to decide who is their leader, not the party to its own leadership position, or the President to interfere in the position. We know he's a Democrat, we know him to be a Democrat, and the Democrat that he is, he knows what democracy is, and also it's a game of the people. We have provided those numbers. The National Assembly will be notified about fresh news updates.


Welcome to Every Way Woman. So women are launching themselves into entrepreneurship and today we're talking to Anna about just that. She turned her passion for makeup into her career.  Girl, it's not all glam as it looks in the social media. What do you mean by that? You know honestly like if you look through the social media all these people you know put up pictures We only that you see what we want you to see it is not all glam. It's you do put on a good face It's long hours a lot of driving. I mean really my friends really know they hardly ever see me And it's a workout. I've seen I've seen the case you are lugging Yes, you have to be in charge of all your own tools your products Yes, it's a lot of tools a lot of products, you know Searching for different type of brands, you know that fit different types of people Not the expensive kind to sometimes so more rewind take me back to the moment when you decided you wanted to become a makeup artist Wow, well, I never really wanted to become a makeup artist. It was more of a hobby. It just happened You just what just happened. I mean I literally had a full-time job and Doing makeup and hair was just a hobby. I would do it for prom. I started back when I was 16 girl So how did you turn that into a business? It just naturally happened people were calling me I remember I ended up doing a friend that ended up was gothic and she ended up saying, you know Glamia for my wedding. She wore the whole red. No, she wore a red dress for her wedding with the white veil But I ended up transforming her. It was a whole transformation that people were like Wow, you did that and I think I was probably like 20 when I did that how did that make you feel when you were able to transform someone one the beginning It felt good now It's a different feeling because I end up helping organizations and our profits where I end up transforming them giving back And it's different like cancer patients, you know stuff like that and to see them pretty much, you know Get teary-eyed and stuff like oh my god. I can't believe you're doing my makeup. It feels good It feels good. It feels like I'm doing something and even if it's for those couple, you know Minutes, you know that they're sitting in my chair. I'm happy that I touched the life Yeah, to make someone feel beautiful is a true gift and you really have it But thank you. There must be a pressure to always feel beautiful yourself. Oh, yeah, oh, yeah Every time I go into a job. I mean all my ladies here probably know that when you go into a job It's kind of hard to wake up every time every morning to put on your hair and put on your makeup You know what I mean?  You have to be the part Oh, yeah, and especially me. I'm known for retro. So I got to wear my red rose But so how long have you been working as a makeup artist 18 years 18 years? You don't look all nobody just send my age right now. Yeah, nobody's doing math at home Yeah, I promise I promise you that so what's next for you as a makeup artist? Well, definitely I want to do my own salon I I I'm a type of person that anybody that knows me I reach for the stars, you know and and nothing's impossible for me So right now I have plans to be able to open up my own salon But tell me about the networking you have to network being a makeup artist It's it's really important to network a lot of people that I that I interact with Inspiring makeup artists. They always tell me like I don't like to work with other people or you know stuff like that And I just look at them and even though I shake my head. It's like girl. You got to learn to work with other people It's all about that. Well, yeah, what's the dynamic with your team? Oh? Everybody in my team needs to know how to work with each other. That's why you're in my team But definitely when you network you end up finding another job, you know a wedding could turn into a fashion show The next person has maybe a connection to a celebrity You know what I mean? So it's all like, you know, then you're working on movie sets Then you're working, you know, so it's and you're working on every way woman making us all look good and feel beautiful Well, we're gonna have more of your tips on a few more episodes of every way woman Of course, you can find tricks on everywaywoman.com more when we return stay tuned


From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. Welcome back everyone to the CUBE coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We've got a great guest here, Scott Hebner, Vice President of Marketing at IBM for data and AI. CUBE alumni has been around the wave around data, had many conversations over the years. Scott, welcome back to theCUBE. And I wish we were in person, but we're remote for the virtual conference of Think 2021. Thanks for coming on. Hey John, great to be here. And yeah, I guess we have adapted to the world of being on a screen all day long. Well, great to have you in one of the things about virtualization of media is that we get more content. This year, there's so many more signature stories around IBM Think. And one of the things that's really fun for us is the data conversations and AI as the transformation and innovation equations are coming together at scale. You're seeing an accelerated piece here. My first question for you is this digital shift that's going on, the preferences are shifting to virtual now digital in the wake of COVID. What do companies need to adapt from your perspective? As you see this playing out, what's your perspective? It's interesting to use that term because we've been calling it the great digital shift. And yeah, there was an interesting survey, a pretty big survey of global C-suite that McKinsey did. And they pointed out that 79% of those leaders felt that COVID highlighted the immaturity of their digital capability. And while they thought they were on the right path and they were building strong digital capabilities, the whole world of the pandemic, remote work, how you engage with customers, call centers going off the hooks in terms of people calling. It just goes on and on and on. And they also pointed out that 90, I think it was 96% of them are going to speed their digital reinvention. And you mentioned data, if you think about it, it's data that fuels digital capabilities, right? What could as digital if it's not data, right? It's all data. So it's the fuel that makes it all work. And when you think about the ability to leverage all your data, you got to democratize it because it's siloed all over the place. It's growing at six times rate over the next three years. It's really all over the place every touch point across the digital ecosystem. And the only way to deal with the data and to unlock its value, particularly in predictive ways is through AI, right? And so what we're seeing is a huge amount of investment in multi-cloud, really bringing together this notion of hybrid and then applying AI as the intelligence to create a more predictable and resilient business, right? Through a digital model, right? And it's really, the investment is really going through the roof. I think AI has been demystified over the years been a lot of people saw the machine learning and now you got NLP and data control planes that are making it more addressable. But the real thing that comes up here I think this year is this role between business and consumer and AI has that kind of dynamic. And I want to ask you because I was just having a conversation with one of your partner, IBM's partner, Samsung Casey Choi runs EVP for the B2B B2G group at Samsung. It's a huge IoT thing and AI is a big part of that consumer. We talked about the consumer electronics, business issues. How is AI different for business versus the consumers?  What's the difference? I mean, someone asked you that between business and consumer AI? Yeah, I mean, actually, I think that's one of the areas that we really differentiate ourselves and we're putting a bulk of investments is notion of AI for business, right? And a lot of people think of AI sometimes they think of Siri and Alexa and things that go on in your car and all that. Obviously that's a big part of applying machine learning and all that. But when we talk about AI for business, we're thinking about four core attributes. One is that it needs to understand the unique language of your business and industry, right? And that's not just natural language, but it's the ability to debate. It's the ability to read documents, interpret documents. It's the ability to really understand the context because you and I can ask the same question in five or six different ways. And it needs to understand the business to be able to interpret that and help answer the question. Unlike Siri or Alexa, where you really got to have the right semantics and it won't understand the nuances as well. So understand the language of business is one. Two is that we believe AI is the engine for automation. So AI is really about automating workflows and experiences. Because anything that you want to automate and make more productive, you have to have some predictive capabilities to it to understand what to do. You have to learn about what's trying to be accomplished, which is always unique and personalized. So that's the second one is about automation. The third is about driving trust in outcomes, right? In the business outcomes, which means if so many of our models say, Scott, go jump off a bridge, I probably wouldn't want to do that unless it really explained to me convincingly that I should do that and maybe I will. But explainability and trust is such a critical part of AI for business. And then finally, it needs to run everywhere. It has to integrate everything. And we believe, unlike a lot of the competitors where you have to bring the data to AI, we're saying leave the data where it lives and bring AI to the data. So it runs anywhere from the data center to the edge, the same model, the same capabilities in a distributed environment. So those four kind of attributes come together to what we call AI for business. And that's what's going to allow call centers and supply chains and business planning and risk and regulatory mitigation, those kind of things to really come to life in a predictive way. Without those attributes, it's much harder to do a lot more coding and you're not going to have as much accuracy. Yeah, I mean, what you're just walking through there is interesting. And if you think about consumer, okay, yeah, Alexa, go get me, you know, what's the weather like in Palo Alto or whatever, you know, those kinds of things, it's all back in pretty complicated, but it's not as complicated as moving data to the edge and moving computer around. And the complexity of dealing with data has always been an open discussion, but now with AI such at the center point of the value project and becoming table stakes. I mean, we're hearing companies say, if you don't have an AI innovation strategy, you're going to be irrelevant or even delisted from the stock market. That's some radical views, but talk about this complexity and how it's being tamed for customers because if you don't have the data exposed, you're only as good as the data that you have. And this has been a conversation we've had on theCUBE many times before with you and some of your other peers here at IBM. If you can't get the data, what good is it? The insights are only as good as what you can program. So this means that data's got to be accessible and it's also complexity to move it around. So can you unpack that equation?  And we have a quib that we always say that there's no AI without an IA, an information architecture. And we are well over 30,000 engagements among our clients around AI. You know, we have the AI ladder, which is our prescriptive approach. We've learned a ton over the years. And we said before, you know, the great digital shift, well, the great inhibitor is the complexity of all this data. And the average large enterprise has over 1,000 repositories and sources of data. As things go out into the edge, that's just going to multiply. There's more and more movement to put applications, you know, software as a service applications on the cloud and most businesses have multiple clouds. So you're further fragmenting all the data. And if you look at what like Gartner has said and many others, these big data projects of the past are very slow, they're costly and they've had limited impact. This idea of moving data, replicating data is just not going to work as the explosion of data increases in terms of touch points, in terms of types and just terms of pure velocity. And also at the same time, the value of data, it's lifespan is rapidly decreasing. A customer record that was created yesterday may not be as valuable a year from now or even in three months from now because things change so much, right? Yeah. All right, so I got to ask you the question then because this is kind of, I'm a customer. What's in it for me? End of the day, I got data problem, you got my attention. I got to move data, I got the edge, hybrid cloud has been defined as bona fide, it's done deals, hybrid multiclouds around the corner, but that's just a subsystem of the operating system that's business now. So hybrid cloud is the operating model. Data is super critical. What does IBM offer? What can you offer me as a customer and why is it good? You guys got some announcements with CloudPak for data specifically here at Think. What's the solution? How do I solve this? What's IBM offering? Yeah, so I think it starts with the fact that we have a fully unified data and AI platform, meaning that they're not separate thoughts, they're all unified together as one life cycle and it runs anywhere on any cloud data center to the edge. So it starts with that notion, it helps you collect, organize and analyze data and then use AI throughout the business. Now when it comes to the data complexity, three core principles that we're putting to the next version of CloudPak for data. One is automation is inevitable. It's the only way to deal with all this complexity. Leave the data where it is, where it lives, where it thrives and bring AI to the data. And so what we are putting into the next generation of CloudPak for data is an intelligent data fabric, right? That is fueled by AI and that is going to abstract a lot of the complexity out of all of this. Let you keep the data where it's at and be able to discover that data intelligently, be able to catalog it, be able to understand it, right? And more importantly, be able to do unified queries and updates across all these distributed sources of data and bring the records together without having to take weeks and months to build new data pipelines. And across that entire ecosystem, be able to enforce universal privacy and usage policies, which is absolutely critical. Forced estimates at 50% of the data is not used because they're afraid that it's going to break policy. Oh yeah, I mean, that's a huge trust issue. I mean, I was talking to a practitioner and he's like, you know, we don't even want to do some of these transactions that are interesting experiments and cloud opportunities because of the compliance risk. They're afraid to get sued. Yeah, no, that's right. And each one of those data stores, just think about the ecosystem we're talking about here of sources and consumers, data consumers, AI consumers, and of course, all the sources that are siloed all over the place. A lot of these repositories and a lot of these different cloud environments have different policies in terms of usage and privacy, right? So how do you bring out all that together? And what we're delivering in the next version of Cloudpack for data is a universal privacy plane, if you will, which is called auto privacy. And it will basically abstract all the complexity of the different policies, allow you to create them and enforce it universally. And you couldn't imagine the productivity of being able to deliver that versus having to hand deal with this in a manual way. That's an example of what a data fabric would do. You know, what's interesting is you're getting at these, I mean, I'm hearing the conversation about the solution. It's okay, I'm not in mind going, okay, what's the benefits I hear? I hear speed, I hear ease of use, compliance, trust, but what you're really getting at is agility. And there's a upside for agility that's moving fast and taking advantage of new opportunities for automating something away. But you mentioned the trust piece because that's where I see people afraid, like, okay, if I move too fast, will I trip on over or some governance issue? Like that's a huge thing. This is a big problem. It's a massive problem. I mean, I think there's four, four areas from a business perspective, right? One is think about digital experiences. And we know that six in 10 customers that defect from a brand because of some bad experience usually don't return. And it's estimated that's costing the industry, you know, close to $500 billion a year. So optimizing that digital experience, which is all driven through personalized experiences, responsive experiences, which is you have to bring the data together to be able to do that, right? The second is the regulatory and reputational risk. That's another 180 billion or so, which in many cases is 8% of revenue, just to mitigate all that risk of using data, not only regulatory but reputational. Just think about lost productivity. How many hours every week is a worker doing mundane tasks, low value work, because it's not automated. That's like another hundred or so billion dollars of cost for enterprises. You can go on with inaccurate planning and forecasting, supply chains being inefficient. All this is being fueled by the data, right? So the more you can bring all this data together, unify it, create new views that are aggregate in nature and uncover hidden insights that you couldn't do before, that's the magic sauce here, right? Well, my last question for you on this product before we wrap up is there's a huge trend towards ecosystem network effect integration, right? There's more integrations, people are partnering. I mean, you have solutions where that rely on different people in the supply chain or value chain of a solution, whether you're a concession at a ballpark or an enterprise, you're connecting with other APIs. This is cloud, right? How does your cloud pack for data handle that integration and that trust because this is really the deployment scenario, your thoughts? Yeah, I mean, I think the core of cloud pack for data is it's going to greatly enhance productivity. It's going to lower costs of these, you know, complex data states, it's going to lower risk of all this and it's going to help you uncover hidden insights that you couldn't see before, not only because of AI, but because we unify the data to get more out of it. We then go on to really point out that it's a truly open platform with an open ecosystem. So we are partnering with all the cloud partners, right? We have a vast network of software providers that can extend and endlessly customize the platform. We have integrator partners and it's all based on open source communities. So it is fully extensible and it's customizable to unique needs of every customer on any cloud you want or across any cloud you want. All right, Scott, that's great stuff. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Great to see you. Scott Hapner, Vice President of Marketing at IBM for data and AI, the hottest area. Great, great CUBE alumni, great insight. Thanks, Scott, for coming on. All right, thank you. Okay, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. You're watching IBM Think 2021 coverage. Thanks for watching.


The one big mistake to avoid when trying to be rich When I was around 14 years for whatsoever reason, I don't know I started writing I would leave my parents noisy room to a lonely secluded environment and I would start writing Looking back now. I can't tell what I was writing. I was just writing. I grew up to love writing and by the year 2014 I got to understand how blogging works through a friend who is a blogger Since I am a writer. It's just natural that I love to start a blog and that's what I did But there was a problem a big problem and I'll soon share some details about that with you very soon So I'll try to use this story to show you the one big mistake You have to avoid when trying to build a business if you're new here Consider subscribing so you won't miss other interesting videos like this Now back to my story. I started my first functioning blog in December 2014 And my objective was to build a reasonable blog and make money from it Since I love writing this should be pretty easy, right? Not necessarily So it happened that almost immediately when I started blogging I started seeing a million other online opportunities To make this matter worse many of these so-called opportunities will be introduced to you by your close friends Some asked me to try affiliate marketing Some wanted me to do email marketing while some wanted you to do social media marketing and a million other things One big mistake most young entrepreneurs make is to jump from pillar to pole moving from one business to another In search of the so-called opportunities This is a big mistake because except you can focus on a single thing for a decade You can't build a million-dollar company Many people start one business and just three months after their friends tell them about another business that makes fast money They dump that business They just started for the new shiny object and just five months after they read about a new shining object and jump again That's not how to build a business Jeff Bezos focused on e-commerce for two decades before he became the world's richest man Bill Gates focused on computer software Zuckerberg focused on social media Don't make the mistake of thinking that these people don't have distractions They have other shining objects inviting them. They only learn to say no Steve Jobs is one of the most respected entrepreneurs ever in the world Job said I make it one of my mantra focus and simplicity focus and simplicity These two things are very important because of the way our brain works Your brain can only do its best job if it's focused on a single thing for a long period That's why multitasking is anti productivity Your brain cannot just do the best job by moving from a to w2k Why I said no to Bitcoin Sometimes last year one of my childhood friends came to my office and spent several hours to explain to me how cryptocurrency works I believed him and I trust his judgment, but there was a problem I was building a young company that needs 1,000 percent of my attention To get into cryptocurrency means that I had to take time out to study and use my resources to invest The problem with this is that my young company needs my 24 hours attention plus every dollar I have if I want to make it a great success. I Said no to cryptocurrency even though I didn't have anything against it Today my company makes me more money than most people can make from Bitcoin And that's because I said no to the shining object Andrew Kennedy said concentration is my motto first honesty Then industry then concentration to be successful as an entrepreneur You must be willing to concentrate all your time energy and resources on a single thing for at least a decade Why concentration matters For many years Henry Ford was competing with other automobile companies He studied his industry and always learned how to improve the production process He bought every car his competitors made to study them and know what they were doing better He had failed and got rejected by many of his investors, but he wouldn't give up One day Ford discovered the source of better raw materials for his vehicle and that changed the entire game At a point in his career almost 50% of all the automobile in America were made by Ford But give the credit to his raw materials discovery Now here's the thing Concentration is very important because it takes a whole lot of time to beat everyone In fact, it takes a whole lot of time to know your market your best product and the best way to serve the market a lot of studies A lot of sleepless nights a lot of trying and errors That's what it takes to build a business and you can't do that when you move from one pillar to another pole What happens when entrepreneurs jump from pillars to pole or do many things at the beginning is that They are not able to learn enough Try enough things and make enough mistakes on anything because they are not able to do enough studies or make enough mistakes They are not able to discover what the competitors can't and when your competitors know many important things You don't know you're dead a Man who concentrates on a single thing wakes up every day to such thing Dreams every night about such thing Reads everything about such thing knows everything about such thing and because he has become addicted to such a thing It's easier to know what no one knows and when you know what no one knows about a business or an industry Your kingship is sure Why Robert doesn't invest in the stock Robert Kiyosaki is an entrepreneur and investor, but he never invest in the stock market Contrary to this is Warren Buffett. He made his billions by investing in the stock What is the difference between these two people? interest Buffett started investing as early as 11 because he loves investing in stock He has read far more than any living being about the stock market and this makes him know more than anyone When you know more than anyone in a given field you become a king Robert at the other hand doesn't love the stock market. So he couldn't invest in it What makes you a human is when you know who you are This is very basic because until you know who you are you can't know what to say no to You have to know what you're passionate about and focus on that more than anyone else But what about the rich who have a hundred business? One other thing that confuses young entrepreneurs is that they see many rich persons having 10 or 20 companies Now this is it. Google has more than a hundred products Facebook has Instagram WhatsApp and many other investments And Jeff Bezos owns Washington Post and other businesses What we have to understand here is that none of these guys owned two businesses when they started Now this is the game when you build a company that makes you a million dollars every month You can buy the best brains in the world If you can buy the best brains in the world You can start 100 companies because the brains you buy can wake up each morning to study the new market Read about what's going on in the industry Take important decisions for the company and make the company succeed This is very different from someone who just started business last year And starting another one today or jumping to a new thing today When to throw in the towel Yes, there are times when the smartest thing to do is to quit Or you have to be sure that you're not quitting because there's another shining object you want to run after You can only quit a business when every data shows you that you can't make it what you want Not because bitcoin is better than what you're doing Here's my encouragement for every entrepreneur out there It's a long journey. It's a marathon Don't ever give up because things are not working the way you want them to work right now As long as you believe in this venture, keep your faith alive Wake up every morning into it Read every day about your industry make your night dreams about your business Be obsessed about it and say no to every other shining object Concentration Focus concentration Focus those two words are very important Don't ever make the mistake of running from pillar to pole Thank you very much for watching our videos. Are you between the ages of 15 and 40? Then we invite you to join our new channel Which was specially created to share with you inspiration and life's lessons to succeed in life We call it under 40 TV kindly look at the description box to join the under 40 TV We love you


Welcome everybody. We are super excited on the nonprofit show because this is something we do only a couple times of every year and it is nonprofit power week. We are sharing time and talent with your part-time controller who is bringing forward their best minds and voices to talk to us about accounting and nonprofits and we're going to kick off this week with how to have a best-in-class financial department which is a great way to start the conversation. Hey, no pressure, Angela. We're putting you in the hot seat to tell us all these things. Yeah, sure, Julia. No problem. Just kick off the week and get everybody started. We have the best woman in the hot seat today, Angela Cuxham. We're very very excited to have you and we're gonna dig in here in just a minute. If we haven't met before, I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. My trusty co-host, Jarrett Ransom, is not going to be with us today. She is the nonprofit nerd CEO of the Raven Group. She'll join us back tomorrow. For Nonprofit Power Week, we want to make sure we thank all of our presenting sponsors, Blumerang, American Nonprofit Academy, your part-time controller, Bee Generous, Fundraising Academy at National University, Staffing Boutique, Nonprofit Thought Leader, and Nonprofit Nerd. If you have missed any of our episodes, Angela, we are well past 600 episodes of Resolutions. Thank you of the Nonprofit Show, but particularly this week, you can access us on Roku, YouTube, Amazon Fire TV, Vimeo, and now in podcast form. So wherever you like to consume your digital media, queue us up and we'll be there in your ear as you move about your life. Okay, Angela Cuxham, we are so excited. We've had you on before. We've brought you back to talk about this really important issue that I think sometimes we talk about accounting, but we don't look at it as a whole department. So you're gonna guide us through this conversation. I say, let's get started. Focus on the department? What does that mean? Haven't we already been doing that? Well, no, not really. A lot of times where or management and the board are really just focusing on getting me those numbers, getting us the financial reports. What do we need to send to a funder or to get to the board? And really the finance department is much more than just, you know, producing those monthly financial statements or getting that report turned around when they need it. So we're going to talk about some tips on how you can better focus on the department itself, the people in the department, and what that department can really do for the organization. And a lot of it is education. So, you know, the folks in the finance department can provide education for the board and for management. So they're not just there, you know, just to produce those financial statements. But there's a lot that goes into it. You know, it's interesting because a lot of times I can see that that we give the folks in the finance department the worst offices, we put them in the back, they're not really front facing, you know, we don't have them be a part of the team. Maybe like we do other other departments. So this is going to be really an interesting conversation to have. And we're so delighted that we can do this. So tip number two, hire the right people. Wow, that's a heavy lift kind of given where we are. Everybody seems like they're having trouble hiring staff. What does this look like to you? Yeah, so it actually is. It's it's a difficult thing for nonprofits to make sure that they have the right people in their finance department because it comes from a number of different places, not just where we're seeing folks within, you know, the pandemic and coming out of the pandemic and people shifting jobs and, you know, not wanting to continue kind of what the things that they had been doing. But even before that, it was very difficult for nonprofits to make sure that they had the right people in place because nonprofit accounting is not basic. It's it's it's not easy. It's, you know, a lot of people think, well, it's just nonprofits. It's simple. Well, it's really not. It's it's actually very complex, determining, you know, the various different types of reporting that you need for the various different types of revenue that nonprofits generate. So you really need to make sure that you have folks on your accounting staff who have experience, they have the right background, they have the right training, and they need continuous training as well, because things change, you need to make sure that they're staying up to date. Wow. So that kind of blows my mind because I've always thought, you know, you need to find to your point at somebody who knows accounting, then drill down somebody that knows a nonprofit accounting, very specialized. But this is kind of a hair on fire moment for me, because you brought up this element of change, and having to be refreshed or retrained, I would imagine recertified and continuing education credits with that. Yeah, that does factor in because you want to continue to make sure that you're that you're growing and your knowledge.  You know, I love that you said that because we don't really talk about that enough. It seems like we talk about this more and more. And tip number three is promote secure internal controls. I don't know about you or your clients, but man, am I seeing an escalation just with my business, the American nonprofit Academy of scams that are coming in or trying to get into our accounting through mail and you need to reset your password or you know, it's like, so this is an interesting thing. Talk to us about promoting internal controls. Yeah, something we need to be continuously vigilant about within the organization. But the first point here that I want to make is that you have to set the proper tone at the top. So obviously, you need the proper internal controls, you need policies, you need procedures for everyone to follow. But you have to make sure that within the organization, the tone comes from the top. So that means the board, that means the executive director, executive management, you want to make sure that they're kind of towing the company line, that they are actually following the policies and procedures, and then you can expect everyone else to follow those policies and procedures. And, you know, with that, you also need to make sure that you have the right policies and procedures in place. Kind of getting back to what you were talking about. One thing we always encourage our clients to do is make sure that they are actively looking at a daily basis at their bank accounts. We want to make sure that somebody is checking that activity to know what's going through the bank account, what's hitting there. One are the activities that you expect to hit hitting the bank account. But is there any other activity that you're not expecting that somebody's trying to, you know, warm their way into your bank account, where you could have problems in the future. So you always want to keep an eye on that. So Angela, maybe I framed this up incorrectly, because I was thinking maybe more external things coming in. But when I hear what you're saying, you're really saying, okay, we need to look within to internally, that we might be able to protect ourselves or stay off fraud, or maybe poor, poor management, would that be part of this? Or is it not? Yeah, so yeah, it really looks at it from both perspectives. You want to look internally and make sure that your folks, your staff are doing the things that they should be so that there's policies and procedures that govern what they do. But then there's also, you know, you want to make sure kind of from an external perspective that people don't have an opportunity to kind of take advantage of the organization. So again, policies and procedures from that perspective. One other thing I would point out from the internal perspective is segregation of duties. That's always really important, especially for nonprofits, smaller nonprofits where it's harder to maintain that segregation of duties. You always want to make sure that as an example, you don't have the same person writing the checks, signing the checks, doing the bank reconciliation, you want to separate those duties. And that's really where that tone at the top comes in, because sometimes you need your board to be involved in check signing. Sometimes you need your board to be involved in reviewing payroll or reviewing the disbursements of the executive director, so that others in the organization can see that kind of no one is above reproach. I love that you just said that that no one is above reproach, because at the end of the day, as we serve our communities in the nonprofit sector, yeah, we need to be less charismatic, if you will, and more democratic and moving that across. Really, yeah, really interesting points. And I appreciate you talking about now. Now, tip number four is something that seems like it would be kind of basic. But I'm assuming because you've brought it up, and you mentioned it now, and now we're talking about it again, performing monthly bank reconciliations. Yeah, you're right, Julia, it is basic. And it should be a basic thing that every organization does, no matter how many bank accounts they have, on a monthly basis, they should reconcile those accounts. But what we're talking about is one, making sure that the reconciliations get done, but they need to be done timely, and they need to be done accurately. So you can't wait until year end, when your auditors are coming in to do all those bank reconciliation, because you know that that's the first thing that they're going to ask for. It's not a catch up thing, you really want to do it as soon as the month is over. You want to download that bank statement, and do that reconciliation. And then the accurate part of that is you want to make sure that there's no reconciling items kind of hanging out from month to month, you know, your deposits in transit should clear out in a day or two, they shouldn't lag over from month to month.  If there's things hanging on that bank reconciliation that could actually impact the validity of your financial statements, if it's not corrected. It's such an interesting thing, because for so many of us, again, that's another one of those back of the house, somebody else is taking care of it, and we're not really looking at it. I've got to throw you a curveball question here. Who's looking at the reconciliation? Should that ever go into, like, a CEO dashboard or the board seat? Like, how can you understand? Yeah, that's actually not a curveball question, because the executive director should absolutely be reviewing the bank reconciliation once they're complete. So, you know, some, some smaller organizations who have a really tight focus on cash, they might, you know, include that cash activity or include that reconciliation in their treasurer's report, maybe, but at a minimum, that executive director should be reviewing those bank reconciliations when they're completed on a monthly basis. And in order to do that, they have to have the bank statement, so they can't just review the reconciliation, they have to have that bank statement to compare it and make sure that all the activity is there. Yeah, smart. I love that you, that you added that, because yeah, absolutely. Otherwise, it's, it's, you could just be looking at anything, right? Exactly. Just numbers on a page, if you're not validating it. Very, very smart. Very, very smart. Okay, so we're talking about, again, understanding how to have a best in class finance department, no matter the size of your organization, whatever type of nonprofit you might be. And we look at tip number five. And I think this is one of those things that is a grand mystery to so many people. Management, compliance, and board fiduciary. I can't wait to hear what you have to say about that. Like one of my hot buttons, sister. Yeah, I'm going to tell you. Yeah, it really is very important. And the connection here, and I'll go into a little bit of specifics on exactly kind of what we expect from the board fiduciary and the management compliance. But the real tip here is that the finance department can't function in a vacuum. So they need the, they need management to know what the compliance issues are, they need to train management on what those compliance issues are as they relate to their contracts, local laws, federal state regulations, they need management to partner with them on that. And to know exactly kind of what finance needs to do because finance can't do it all on their own. They can't manage all of that. And then from a board perspective, it's also an education process. So making sure that we're educating the board to know, you know, what's going on with the finances of the organization, but also what are their responsibilities? And there are some specific responsibilities that the board has. So from a fiduciary perspective, there are, and I'm sure all of your viewers are familiar with these, the duty of care, the duty of loyalty, and the duty of obedience. But they need to make sure that they're staying on top of that. You know, from a care perspective, they need to participate in those board meetings. They need to show up, they need to review the material, they need to be informed about what's going on within the organization. They need to make sure that the organization is in compliance following the laws and regulations. And then from a financial responsibility perspective, how they can really help the finance department to flourish is to focus on the information that finance is providing. So reviewing those reports from a finance committee perspective, reviewing the reports, understanding the budget, helping to monitor the policies and procedures, even getting involved in the audit. So maybe there's an audit committee of the board and they're, you know, interacting with the independent auditors, having actual conversations with them, reviewing their reports. And then from the investment perspective, there might be a separate investment committee of the board, or there might not be, but someone on the board is reviewing those investments, they're understanding what the policies are, how the investments are managed, and then presenting that information to the board. You know, Angela, I'm so intrigued by this conversation because I think a lot of times we, we don't take the boards in the non-profit sector, don't take the lead from their finance and accounting departments on compliance, until it's too late or there's a problem. Or do you see that? Yeah, well sometimes they're, they're not sure what their role is. So part of it might be that they just don't understand their role, or, you know, management isn't being as transparent with them, bringing that information to their attention so that they can act on it. So it really kind of has to be a two-way street. The biggest thing we tell the boards are ask questions.   And that's, you know, true of boards as it is in anything in life. You have to ask the questions to find out what's going on in the organization. And from a compliance perspective, it's, it's a little bit harder. You know, a lot of board members come from a non-profit background, but a lot of them are coming to the board because they have a particular expertise that doesn't involve nonprofits at all. Right. So they're learning the business of nonprofits while they're, you know, providing their legal advice or investment advice for the organization. But they really do need to get up to speed on, on kind of what some of those non-profit compliance issues are. You know, Angela, I've got one more question before we get off on tip number five. And again, this is like such, I think, when I'm out and about and when I'm working with boards, this is kind of like the meat and potatoes of what I'm seeing. I get these questions and, and the fear, the fear level of fiduciary leadership and what it means. It's just fascinating to me, which always harkens back to education. To me, it seems like we don't, and you started us off with that comment. We have to be educating our teams and our people to understand this. I'm hearing more and more, it seems like that on IRS forms, and now even on grant applications, that more and more organizations are asking about compliance and saying, you know, are, are, do you have these policies in place? Are you seeing that as well? Well, definitely on the IRS, on the Form 990, there are very specific questions that the IRS requires.  And so if the IRS is asking for an answer for this, you really want to say yes, right? You want to say yes, that I have a complex of interest policy. I have a whistleblower policy. I want to be able to say yes that the board is reviewing the 990 and that they're reviewing the executive director's salary and they have a process in place. So if the IRS is asking the questions, you want to be able to say yes. I'm doing that. And, and I do think, you know, funders are picking up on that more and more and wanting to know the answers to that. Because they recognize that even though it's on the Form 990, the answer might be no, but that might not be the answer that they want. So if they push the agenda a little bit further, maybe they'll get to the answer that they want. It's, it's fascinating, fascinating stuff. And I, I think that's just for me, again, what I'm seeing, what I hear really, really important. But another big part of this, and this kind of dovetails to an earlier point, is understanding payroll issues, tax, employee benefits. It seems to me, and I can't wait to get your opinion about this, is that because we have the WFA work from anywhere, work from all, but work from anywhere, we're changing how we're doing employee benefits. We're changing how we're doing payroll because now we have people that are working out of state. I mean a lot has changed. Help us navigate this. Yeah, so I guess two points that I want to make there. One, you know, the timely remit is obviously very important. We need to make sure that you know, as we're collecting, as we're withholding those taxes from our employees paychecks, the benefits, the 401k contributions that we're remitting that on a timely basis. And basically, you know, the regulations say as soon as reasonably practical. So one or two days is really all it takes. Once you've got that money in your bank account, just send it right back out or you can contract with a payroll provider who actually can do that for you. So most payroll providers do pay the tax and we've strongly urge our clients to get with a reputable payroll provider who can calculate those taxes and remit them on your behalf because payroll taxes are very specific and they're very specific for the federal government as well as for states. And with what you said as far as, you know, working from anywhere, you really have to be on the ball on paying taxes for wherever your employees are working from. You have to know what it is within the state that they're living in. And if they're living halfway across the country and working for you, you still have to pay taxes for those states. And if you're here where I am on the east coast, the narrow on the west coast, then you might not be knowledgeable about that. So having that payroll provider who is really the expert on that is really important. Yeah, I think that's brilliant advice and I have, I don't know what you think, but I've got to believe that there have been a lot of nonprofits that got kind of caught up and not really knowing where their teams were or underestimating how hard this would be once everybody started spreading out. Yeah, it's complicated. And again, that goes back to having that right people, having the right people in your finance department to recognize again, it's not easy. It's complicated. So let's get an expert involve someone who does this every day as far as those payroll providers. Yeah, I love that. I think you've got to find people out there that can be your champion and know more. You don't have to know everything, but you need to know where to get the right information. Absolutely. So now again, in honor of what's been going on in Great Britain, tip number seven, mind the gap, which is talk to us about what the gap is in accounting. Yeah, so the gap in accounting terms is generally accepted accounting principles. And those are important for any organization and the important part here is it's not easy. So we really need to make sure that nonprofit organizations are following gap so that they are following those generally accepted accounting principles in recording their transactions, producing their financial statements. And again, not a situation where this goes back to having the right people in your department. You need to make sure that you have folks who understand nonprofit accounting and the changes that go on. So a couple of things here that we specifically encourage is or say as cash basis of accounting is not gap. So if you are keeping your books on the cash basis of accounting, you really want to change over to a cruel basis of accounting. One, it's not gap. So if you're getting an audit, you're going to be reporting in that audit on a basis that's different than your internal financial statements and you always want to follow what the auditors are doing.  What it's going to look like in your audit. You don't want them to be surprised at the end of the year with a bunch of adjustments. But also from a forecasting and comparative analysis perspective, you really want to do that on an accrual basis so that you can have a good understanding of what activity is occurring month by month. And if you're recording that on a cash basis, then you're not going to get a really clear picture of the impact year over year. And then the other thing is accounting for contributions. And we touched on this a little bit before, but revenue recognition for nonprofits is complicated. It's very complicated. You need someone who's trained in that. And again, that ongoing education, you know, determining how to record a contribution versus a grant versus program service revenue, you need to know basically how to do that and how to differentiate when to record revenue if it's restricted or if it's conditional. There are specific rules that need to be followed. So I've got to ask this question and this is like my, you know, non-accounting brain. But, you know, we understand gap and we, you know, you hear that, maybe you don't fully understand it. Is it fair to say that there's gap for nonprofits? I mean, is it something that is actually divided down a little differently because things are so different in the nonprofit sector? There are very specific rules for nonprofit organizations. There's gap overall, which for the most part, nonprofits are responsible to follow. But then there are some subsets that are very specific to nonprofits. So especially when it comes to revenue recognition, there are some elements of transactions that nonprofits have that actually follow for profit gap. And then there are other portions that own nonprofit gaps. So you actually need to know both. Okay, interesting. That's cool. I'm glad that you, uh, you kind of helped us to understand that because it even illuminates the fact even more about different this concept is for profit versus nonprofit. So, wow. Well, you know, we kind of tease the concept that we had, we had 10 major items. Got through seven of them today. YPTC has a really cool event coming up that is going to go through this whole process. It's going to be held Wednesday, September 28th. It's only one hour and it's free. Anybody can sign up. You can go to yptc.com, which is short for your part-time controller, which makes it easy. It's going to be held one o'clock eastern standard time and folks can expect what when they sign up to watch this or participate in this webinar. Yeah, so we're going to kind of take a deeper look into one of the seven tips that we talked about today, but we have three additional tips. So it's a full 10 tips for our best in class finance department and go into a little bit more detail on each one of the things that we talked about today, but also talk about financial statement audits, the importance of monthly financial statements, and what the organization should get out of those, and just general information on how to have a best in class finance department. So Angela, would it be fair to say that this would be good information not just for the internal folks that are dealing in the financial departments, but maybe management, board members, board leadership, executive committee. I mean what's your thought on that? Like who should be watching this or participating in this? Really anyone certainly finance, any finance folks, but anyone in management within a nonprofit, certainly executive management, anyone on the board of a nonprofit I think would benefit from this information. As we talked about today, the education that the finance department can provide to the board and the things that the board should understand about their finance department, the things that management from a compliance perspective and also just from a fiduciary perspective, what they need to know and how they can support finance, and how finance can support them in the program side. I think is all very important and things that we will touch on. You know it's so interesting. I love how you phrase this and how you set this up because so often when there's any financial reporting, certainly when when the auditors come in or release their results to the board or whatever, so often it's crickets. You know and the board members who are so passionate and ready to speak up and go at it during the meetings, shut up during that piece. And it's it's just such a problem that when we're not communicating and it's such a fascinating thing. I have just learned so much from you as I always do. I'm just thrilled that you would join us back here for Power Week on another episode of The Nonprofit Show. Angela Koch's a manager. Now you're based where because I know you're in the east. I'm in the east. I'm in Delaware. Delaware, okay great. So check out yptc.com, your part-time controller. They are one of the nation's largest non-profit accounting specialists. They work with all different types of nonprofits throughout our wonderful sector. We learn so much from your team. They're really a lot of fun. They give us a lot of things to think about in the non-profit sector and I think they've certainly demystified some of the fears that we can easily get consumed by when we think about being stewards of our non-profit sector. So Angela Cox, thank you so much for being with us. Thank you Julia for having me. Appreciate it. It's been a lot of fun. Hey everybody, this is Monday. If you have not joined us live or you're finding us on our archive, we have a lot more coming up on the special segment of Nonprofit Power Week with your part-time controller. Again, I'm Julia Patrick, my co-host Jared Ransom, the non-profit nerd. We'll be back tomorrow. Part and parcel with these amazing episodes where we get to bring these thought leaders in. We have amazing support from Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, fundraising academy at National University, Be Generous, your part-time controller, staffing boutique, non-profit thought leader, and non-profit nerd. These are the folks that join us in this March, day in and day out. Okay, Angela, are you going to be tuning in for the rest of the week? I will be, absolutely. I want to see what my colleagues have to say and I'm sure it'll be very insightful. Well, I don't know. I think you've set the bar pretty high my friend. I'm sure they're out to that. They're all out to what I know they're from. Well, we have a very exciting week planned ahead and I think that it's going to give us a lot of confidence when we talk about these things and the accounting piece is so fundamental to the success of our non-profits. As we end every episode and especially these special episodes with your part-time controller, we like to remind ourselves and our guests and our viewers and our listeners to stay well, so you can do well. We'll see you back here.


If one wants to explore the mystical nature of our existence, then enhancing the Akash is a very vital and necessary aspect. Once there is a certain amount of mastery over the five elements, one will find there is no such thing as what is inward and what is outward. The five elements that we recognize as the basic ingredients of life, this elemental magic, I'm calling it elemental magic because just with five things, not five million, just five things. With five things, too much has been done. With five things, what is presenting itself as cosmos, what is presenting itself as life, what is presenting itself as everything that we can see, hear, smell, taste and touch is well beyond the permutations and combinations that we can think of. If something goes beyond the permutations and combinations, then it's no more mathematic, it is magic. So this elemental magic, to master this elemental magic is the most fundamental dimension of yoga. Essentially, when people want to be physically robust, then earth would be important. But for one who is on the spiritual path, one who wants to perceive, the most important thing is Akash. Why Akash becomes most important is, in the making of this human form, seventy-two percent of water, twelve percent of earth, six percent of air, four percent of fire is largely determined. The rest is Akash. When we said rest, we did not mean six percent, we said rest. Now, if you increase the proportion of Akash within the system, if you increase the proportion of Akash in the large escape of who we are, then our ability to perceive is tremendously enhanced. If this proportion remains low or Akash is at its minimal in one's making, then their ability to perceive will be very minimal. Even if they have a great intellect, this intellect will forage in mundane things. It can never rise to perceive something more than that. So in this context, one important aspect of spiritual progress, one important aspect of the Gyan or Vishis Gyan, if one wants to perceive beyond five senses, if one wants to perceive that which is not physical in nature, if one wants to extend his antenna to larger dimensions of life, if one wants to explore the mystical nature of our existence, then enhancing the Akash is a very vital and necessary aspect. Akash is a boundless dimension. When the composition of Akash is enhanced, then boundlessness becomes the nature of one's being. If not boundlessness, at least a boundary that you cannot see and feel. This gives the individual person a great sense of freedom, a great sense of not being tied down to anything. This lack of bondage within oneself is an essential amount of space that one needs if they want to have some mastery over these five elements. This goes for human system also. To keep the system well, to keep the system in an efficient and effective mode, but not being identified with it is a very important or the very important step one has to take if one has to have mastery over elements. Once there is a certain amount of mastery over the five elements, one will find there is no such thing as what is inward and what is outward. Because elements don't respect your boundaries. To put it in the simplest form, as you sit here, you breathe. The air does not respect your boundary, it is constantly in an art. This is not just air, this is happening with everything. The food that you eat and whatever substance we relieve ourselves of and everything else is in constant transaction or the elements do not respect the boundaries of your body. The boundaries of your body are only for your psychological comfort, but the five elements have no respect for that and they anyway transact without your permission. So if you have some excess to experiencing the nature of the elements, then you also lose the boundaries of your body. Or in other words, you have sacrificed your privacy because there is no such thing as privacy because you know everything is seeping in and everything is seeping out constantly. When one wants to gain mastery, one of the things that are commonly done is those of you sitting in America or anywhere else in the world right now, including India, don't try to do this. You will see the spiritual moments of the past, whether you take the yogis like the Nagas or the Gauraknathis or the Jains. One of the things that they do at the basic level of sadhana is first thing is to expose themselves to elements because they want the transaction to happen freely. As today, walking around naked in the world is not a possibility, though in India it is still in practice. You will see thousands of them walking naked, not bothered about the social norms. That is not a possibility for all of you. So one simple thing that you can do is move to a looser level of clothing. Well, you may not look shapely, but there is no shape to you on the elemental scape. It is in constant transaction. To facilitate this, to be able to be conscious of this, one important thing is there is a little bit of space between your body and what you wear, that it is not tight-fitting clothes. This is one step that one can take to… If you pay attention, you will see beyond this breath a whole lot of transaction is happening constantly across the body. If one pays enough attention to this transaction, then one will also slowly understand the nature and the composition of the elements within us, then enhancing one dimension or increasing the akash in the system through appropriate practice becomes a possibility. And of course, once I say this, the first question is, Sadhguru, what is that practice? Practice doesn't come fast. Attention comes fast. By attention, if one knows that there is transaction, not by intellect, but by attention, if one knows that there is a transaction, then how to tweak the transaction in our favor is something we can do. First thing is to take charge of the most obvious transactions. The most obvious transactions are breath, food, consumption of water and the temperature of the body and the temperature outside. These are the most obvious transactions. Just pay a little more attention to these obvious transactions. It always amazes me how breath, which is such an obvious transaction and it doesn't happen quietly, it moves the entire body. But most people never ever notice it. If you can't notice your breath, how to notice anything subtler than that because breath is a noisy activity, it is happening. If you bring attention to these things, how you eat, how you drink, how you breathe, how you touch everything that you touch, you will see the experience of life will rise to a completely different level. These simple things most human beings are not doing. They're gulping down what they eat and drink. They breathe completely unconsciously. They touch anything and everything without knowing what they're touching or feeling it. Largely it's happening like this for most people. If you bring awareness to that, if you bring… let me not even use the word awareness because it means many things to many people, bring more attention to that. If you are far more attentive to these things, then without slowing down anything, this is important because people think that when you're breathing, you should not be doing anything else, just you must be breathing. When you're eating, you must be eating. When you're drinking, you must be drinking. No, that is the beauty of being human, that we have a cerebral capability of conducting complex activity within us and still be able to pay attention. It is like you're driving and you can still have a conversation with somebody. So two levels of attention are happening just like this. You could be doing whatever you're doing but pay attention to the breath. Breath is one thing that is always happening, so you can pay attention to that. You can also pay attention to the food that you eat and water that you drink. Let it not happen all the time. So the possibility of knowing dimensions of the beyond, the possibility of dipping into the mystical nature of the existence, is very much rooted in the elemental composition of who we are. Bringing about a transformation in this can do fantastic things to you but one must also understand that fantastic things can also turn your life upside down. That is the nature of fantastic things.


Tom here from Orange Systems, and I was a skeptic when I seen this headline right here. Dependency, confusion, how I hacked into Apple, Microsoft, and dozens of other companies. That includes Shopify and PayPal. And I was a skeptic at first, but this was a really interesting supply chain attack pulled off by a security researcher. Legitimately pulled off and also with authorization. That's an important distinction and this write-up is very detailed. We're just going to cover the basics of what happened here because wow, is it interesting after I read through it twice to try to gain a better understanding of what was going on. Now, this is a supply chain attack. It's a software supply chain attack because the idea is if you can get into the supply chain, then the distribution models of that software will allow you to get whatever you wanted out there, out there at scale. And hopefully no one will notice. This is the same type of attack that happened with the SolarWinds, different methodology. But this is what happened in December of 2020 when we discovered the SolarWinds attack. It's a software supply chain attack. And as we know now, those are definitely something that, well, it happens at scale and it can be very, very scary and very, very hard to find. And that's where this security researcher went. And it starts with this idea right here of the way software is built with dependencies and the leak that occurs with some companies when they're building that they leak what those dependencies are. So when you're building software, you have two pieces. You have your external dependencies and then your internal dependencies. And you glue them all together. The external dependencies are essentially so you don't have to rewrite and reinvent everything every time you want to build a new product. There are common libraries out there to do common tasks. They're well vetted, they're well documented, especially when it comes to things like cryptography. You want a package that is well good and well put together versus trying to write your own crypto. This is where a lot of companies do try to get in trouble is without going to external dependencies, they try to write everything from top to bottom themselves that takes a very big team, a very talented team. And it can sometimes lead to problems. So the more common process is to rely on these external dependencies. And that's not exactly a bad thing because now they're using common libraries, like I said, that it can be well audited and well vetted. But there is, of course, the time when it pulls internal dependencies. And if that information gets leaked out, such as in your package.json file, and through a series of interesting steps, this security situation was able to find the dependencies many companies have, you're able to look up what is being asked for. And we have files like pplogger, auth-paypal, wrfl-paypal, analytics-paypal. These are not public facing pieces of dependencies that are out there. This is actually internal ones. So where this attack actually occurs is at the build server level. And once you know what it's calling for and it's looking for it, what if, what if you took and registered those names in the public registry of things? And that's exactly what this person did. What happens if malicious code is uploaded to NPM under these names? Is it possible that some of PayPal's internal projects will start defaulting to the new public packages and some of the private ones? Will developers or even automated systems start running the code inside these libraries? If this works, can we get a bug bounty off of it? Would this attack work against other companies too?  And skipping down towards the results, and I'll leave a link so you can read all the details. This is essentially what they came up with here. The system checks if the library exists on the specified internal package index. The system checks whether the library exists on the public package index. And it installs whichever version is found. If the package exists on both, it defaults to installing the one with the higher version number. So in short, what you have to do to make this happen is create a version number higher than the one that they have. And this was found at quite a few companies that they would simply accept this. And he come up with a few different clever ways to prove that he got into the servers because he's not actually getting remote access to them. Just pulling these public code, grabbing it down and matching it essentially. So if we know that we have this PayPal dash off file, we created a public version of it. And now it can see both and it wants to pull from the PayPal off internal. But then it finds out there's a newer one available on the internet. Well, we want to use that newer one because that's what the build server defaults to. Now, the good news is this was paid out as bug bounties from a lot of different companies. And that was wonderful. They are a little bit less than clear what they did to mitigate or fix this because this is kind of their internal secret sauce of how they actually build software. My guess is be they just removing any external dependency for certain packages and probably creating some locks that, well, stop these packages from existing anymore or being able to be pulled anymore from any external sources. So they're probably just doing a lot of implicit stuff that should have been done a long time ago. It's exciting to see that a lot of money was paid out for these. Some of the bug bounties rewarded from each of these companies was 30,000, which they may have even awarded more. But I think there's some maximums that they have set for how much they'll reward for each bug found. So this bug was repeated off several different companies. Shopify, Microsoft even had one and PayPal and lots of companies, of course, leak what their build data is. And that's download detailed out in here and is able to get copies of companies list of dependencies, which offers up the opportunity to go register more names, even companies that may not have participated in bug bounties. What this also means is there could be someone exploiting this or has been exploiting this. And I'm hoping that this information really gets out there to people doing development. Now, obviously, going after big names is big headline and very important because of the scale and scope at which these companies operate. But there's going to be a ton of smaller projects and smaller developers that I'm hoping change the ways they're doing this because they could already have this problem. This problem could have already been exploited on them. And we wouldn't really know they're not big enough to even offer that kind of bug bounty program yet. But this is one of those things we're going to have to keep watching in the software ecosystem as things get developed. Honestly, it's going to come down to a much stronger build process, much more scrutiny of where those dependencies live, which versions you're pulling from. And if you do have your own internal dependencies that they probably should never exist or should never be pulled. If you know that PayPal dash off should only ever be internal. There should be no way to ever have your build server pull that externally. And I'm sure that's the type of mitigations lots of these companies are doing right now. But I just thought this was a great read a great write up and just some fun security research that is complicated to get to this conclusion. But boy, the execution of it a little bit more simple, the fact that these systems are able to pull from this. And raising awareness is how we get further. And we're going to just keep locking things down that much more in the years to come. All right, thanks. And thank you for making it to the end of this video. If you enjoyed this content, please give it a thumbs up. If you'd like to see more content from this channel, hit the subscribe button and the bell icon. To hire a share project, head over to LawrenceSystems.com and click on the hires button right at the top. To help this channel out in other ways, there's a join button here for YouTube and a Patreon page where your support is greatly appreciated. For deals, discounts and offers, check out our affiliate links in the descriptions of all of our videos, including a link to our shirt store, where we have a wide variety of shirts and new designs come out well randomly. So check back frequently. 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