Welcome back to the weekly deal room and as ever I'm joined by Stephen, our director of corporate finance to chew over some of the real stories happening in the world of corporate finance. If this is your first time listening, we hope you enjoy it and if you do, please do leave us a rating or a comment depending on what platform you use to listen. If you're a regular listener, make sure you hit the follow button and also hit the bell icon so you get notified of all the forthcoming episodes as they come out and do share this with a friend. I was on campus yesterday and there was a couple of people in the room that were using it and a few that weren't. And so look, let's share the love. Let's get this out to as many people as possible. So if you find it beneficial, the aim of these, of course, is to bring finance to life and actually talk about theory but in an applied way to real deals that are happening right now. So yeah, would love to have more people involved in the community. You know what I would like to see and I would like to see people at dinner table discussing the latest podcast, you know, family, mother, father, kids just getting around and going, all right, what was it that aunt said about she in this week and what are the IPO prospects for for the London Stock Exchange. I can see this happening nice fire in the corner glass of wine. Let's make it happen. Well, yeah, I mean, whilst my daughter's saying, dad, can I get that top of she and I can say, well, did you know? So there's a little something in there for everyone. But yeah, let's let's let me give you an overview first of what we're going to discuss in this episode and then we can dive into the first topic. So we're going to talk a little bit about Morgan Stanley's, one of the major US investment banks their wealth management arm is giving its clients a chance to buy and sell quite coveted shares of private companies. Before they're available to the wider public. So again, this kind of leaves in discussions about IPO, but interestingly, how does that process I've just mentioned work, but I'm going to talk again, a little bit of MS, the special here. They are our global partner after all so at the moment, a bank group spearheaded by Morgan Stanley are in discussions with Elon Musk and his team about refinancing a particularly large packet of debt. That supported the takeover of the social media platform X for many Twitter. So we'll have a look at that. And then read it. You've probably heard about the story. You might have even been part of the Wall Street bets forum, which this is where it gets a particularly interesting story because there's an update on the IPO which we can cover Stephen will go through, but also about the very in finance forum that brought, I guess, read it right into the spotlight a few years ago, could well be something to keep an eye on, as as of when this company goes public and will explain why. And then finally, Alibaba, the Chinese company is leading a financing round of at least $600 million for Chinese AI startup Minimax, which we'll have a look at as well. So, yeah, Stephen. So this situation at Morgan Stanley, what is happening with the IPO market. Yeah, this is this is a great story. And I think it's too pronged. I'm going to talk about Morgan Stanley, but I'm also going to talk about Jeremy Hunt as well. UK Chancellor of the Exchequer because there's two elements to this pre IPO secondary market story. And I think we'll take it through through a little bit of history, actually, we'll start from the beginning. So, you know, 2030 40 years ago, companies tended to IPO to go public a lot earlier, at the earliest stages of their value creation cycle.  There was not as much private capital out there, venture capital and private equity and large high net worth individuals and institutional investors were not going that far down the food chain. So the likes of Amazon had to IPO at a valuation of $300 million. That's crazy. Do you want to know what it's if you had invested in Amazon's IPO at a 300 million market capitalization? What would your returns be? My returns be that is the biggest mist. I'm feeling FOMO flowing through my veins because it's got to be in the in the multiple thousands, I'm sure. Yeah, I mean, 6,133 X returns. I would not be doing that. Dad, why didn't you buy me some of the stock when I was a team? Come on. I would say, yeah, I would say I would no longer be doing this podcast, but I probably would still be doing this podcast, but I would also be sponsoring this podcast as well with some, you know, headbrain scheme that I've got with my with my Amazon winnings. But the same, you know, the same went for Tesla $1.7 billion IPO compare that with the Rivian IPO a couple of years ago of 60 plus 50 plus billion Google IPO $23 billion. That was still a mega IPO, but still not massive. And obviously Apple's IPO in 1980 at $1.8 billion. So what's happened is, as more private capital has flooded into the market, especially for early stage technology companies, these early stage technology companies have been able to go longer and longer and longer before listing before the call of the IPO, which is fine from their perspective because the longer you stay private, the less scrutiny you have, the less quarterly reporting cycle you have to put up with, etc, etc. The issue is that for the majority of investors, whether you're a pension fund or whether you're a retail investor, you've got very strict limits on what you can and can't invest in. Many pension funds can only invest in certain asset classes, one of which is public equities, often not private equity or private capital and retail investors in order to buy into private companies. It's extremely difficult, and often you need a very, very high sophisticated investor income threshold to do it. Now the problem there is that so much of the value creation cycle is kind of happening behind closed doors. It's happening in this private capital market where high net worth individuals, hedge funds, some institutional investors are getting a lot of that upside. And then the company's IPOing when it's already pretty mature. So just a couple of examples of that. Uber, one of the standout startup stories of the last 10 years, with IPOed an evaluation of $75 billion. IE, a lot of the value creation, a lot of that kind of 10x, 100x upside had already been satisfied and already been given to the private investors, to the venture capitalists. And it's only doubled since it IPOed. Airbnb, $47 billion IPO evaluation is now worth $75 billion. So yes, the retail investor can get involved, but often you get involved too late and you're carrying a pretty mature asset. Yeah, that's super interesting. Because I think you always get, whenever there's a big IPO, it's probably part of the mastermind tactics of marketing. You start to get these infographics of some of those aforementioned ones like Apple in the 80s, Amazon, and you're thinking, crikey, yeah, that would be a steal. And so you kind of naively, if not fully informed, think that, yeah, well, why can't these new companies equal that type of magnitude of gain? But you're absolutely right. And it just feels so utterly unfair in terms of how this works, or am I actually missing something here? Yeah, I think it is, well, it's unfair if you're on the losing side. I think it's very fair if you're a VC that gets access to all of this steal flow. I think the problem, you know, private capital, private equity, private investing, the major downside as an investor or as an owner of those shares is that it's super liquid, right? So in public markets, you can buy and sell, you know, the bigger the stock, the more liquid it is and that's all good. Whereas often, when you invest in an early stage company, you know your money is locked up for a number of years. And with good reason because these companies are growing and they need long term supportive investors. Now, what is what is happening is because these companies are staying private for longer, there is a greater requirement from investors, early stage investors in those companies and founders to have a liquidity event before the IPO happens. So this is selling shares in the secondary market. But obviously there's no secondary market like there is for public equities, you know, it's very, very kind of who do I know, can I phone up my broker, you know, will another high net worth individual buy my stake in SpaceX or whatever it might be. So these two initiatives, Jeremy Hunt's on the UK side and Morgan Stanley on the US side, provide this kind of free IPO opportunity for early stage investors and founders to get an exit event. Whilst also giving opportunity for non traditional private capital investors get in on some of this value creation. So for example, in the UK, Jeremy Hunt outlined a couple of which was last week, he outlined an initiative called the private intermittent securities and capital exchange system. Pisces, which basically allows pre IPO companies, private companies, the opportunity to sell shares at periodic times during the year. So this is not a kind of always open liquid market. There are six or seven times during the year where the secondary market for these private companies opens and founders and employees and investors can sell to pre IPO investors. So it's kind of creating this very, very infant pre IPO secondary market, which will set a lot of these companies, you know, will almost kind of prepare the ground for them to go through that IPO. Whilst being whilst making the UK slightly more attractive, maybe from an founder and investor perspective. So if I'm a founder and I go, Oh, gosh, I don't have to wait until IPO. There is this Pisces thing that allows me in a few years time to maybe sell down in the kind of private secondary market. This is, you know, I think it's a pretty, I think it's a pretty sensible thing. Just one very quick note on this. This has been happening in the US since 2013. I was going to say, it feels like a pretty natural evolution.  So pre IPO mature companies selling down, you know, periodic times during the year, NASDAQ private markets allowed the trading of private companies share since 2013. So it does show that although we're trying to make the UK a little bit more attractive from a startup perspective and from an investor perspective. My gosh, we're still quite a long way behind the April. What I'm going to do is I'm going to put a poll on this episode. And I want you to tell me, I you the listener, what is the largest private company in the world in terms of valuation that we know of? So yeah, I'll put a couple of options into a poll for you and you can have it, I guess. Very good. Well, I won't, I won't give it away then.  I it's gone public.  So I'm not going to get the upside. So just very quickly on the Morgan stand on the other side of on the other side of the pond, Morgan Stanley. So this is, I mean, this is a relatively interesting story, but it's just indicative of this structural change in the way that private and public markets are working. So Morgan Stanley offers private share trading. So Morgan Stanley is today, as of today, offering their wealth management clients the opportunity to invest in private companies through periodic secondary market sales. And I think, again, this is relatively smart. The head of private market solutions at Morgan Stanley says there's been increasing pressure over the past number of years to get into these companies while the value creation is occurring rather than having to wait until the IPO. He goes on to say that this is actually quite a good time to do it in 2024. I remember in 2223, there was a pretty big gap between the valuation expectation of existing investors and what potentially new investors would value the company. There's been a lot of haircuts on venture backed private company valuations and that bid offer spread, as it were, is narrowing and narrowing and narrowing in 2024. It's quite a nice time to start this private markets transaction desk product. Again, if I was to do this in the US, I need to have 200 grand of annual income, reasonably expect to maintain the same income in the next year, or possess a net worth of a million dollars, excluding my house, or hold a series seven license. So it still comes with the restrictions. The normal person on the street probably couldn't get access to these free IPO stocks. As is always the case. I think what I love about finance and just human kind of ingenuity is the ability to come up with new ways of making money. It just seems like just when you thought, you know, this is a business and this is what we do. There's another element of the process that gets almost monetized, if you like, for the benefit of, like you said, different different parties in this aspect. But I think it's just so interesting how these things evolve and change and adapt and quite rightly so because you say that the situation is different now in terms of the late stage at which these private companies are. Yeah. And I think this is why this is why so many listeners to this podcast are interested in getting into careers in finance because it is so multifaceted and there are so many different angles and so many different parts and so and still so much innovation that's going on. It is, you know, if you it can take up your whole brain very, very easily in the way that maybe certain other industries can't. Okay, so I've just jumped in the elevator elevator Ms. I've just gone from the fifth. I've just jumped up to the 15th floor and I've got out and everyone's talking Elon Musk. What's going on on this floor. Yeah. So the story the story that came out in Bloomberg a couple of days ago was that the banks that are stuck with act only Twitter debt hold refinancing talks with Musk. So let's take you back to the back story when Elon Musk completed the acquisition of Twitter for whatever it was $44 billion or $41 billion. They Elon Musk put together a syndicate a bank syndicate of seven banks led by Morgan Stanley to lend Elon Musk $13 billion of what we call leveraged finance Levin, which is a division within a bank. To complete the acquisition of Twitter. Now, leverage finance within banks is a is historically a pretty lucrative area of the market. The way that it works is that these seven banks, Morgan Stanley leading the syndicate and taking a quarter of that $13 billion will lend the will lend Elon Musk $13 billion and then they will look to sell that debt to investors. They will look to sell down. They don't want to keep that debt, which has a relatively high or equity tier one capital requirements set against it because it's a bit risky. They will want to sell that down as quickly as possible. Now the problem, as we all know with Twitter or X, the problem is the valuation of Twitter almost immediately got massively slashed due to Elon Musk's slightly sclerotic ownership style. Which meant that the value of this $13 billion of debt also decreased. So if I was to sell down that $13 billion within six months of Elon Musk taking control of Twitter, I would have had to take a significant haircut on that $13 billion. In fact, in 2022 Morgan Stanley marked to market $876 million worth of leverage loan losses, of which the Twitter stake was quite a big one. I let's not get rid of it that these banks have come together and said, let's hold on to this debt. Usually we would sell this down. I know it's annoying to hold on to this debt because you need to post a lot of capital against it and it's not really part of our business model. But we think that in 12 months, 18 months, 24 months time, this debt is going to become more attractive to investors. And we won't have to incur the actual losses that we would have to if we sold down today. So they've come together and said, look, all right, we're holding this debt. We all agree to hold this debt. So it's not one bank HSBC can go off and sell its portion. They said, look, we're going to hold this debt together and we're going to wait for a time to sell down. Now what's happening now is Morgan Stanley is leading negotiations to refinance this $13 billion of debt. This is really interesting, which could reduce the cost of debt, i.e. the interest paid by X on the debt, because it makes it less risky for banks and therefore investors to hold because the chance of default is lowered. If I'm paying 10% interest on my debt, I might default because I've got a lot of debt servicing. I've got to pay a lot of interest. If my interest is only 5%, then my default risk goes down. Now this is interesting because what the banks have clearly discussed is we are happy to take a lower return, i.e. a lower interest rate in exchange for the lower risk associated with holding this debt and the greater likelihood of being able to sell this debt on to investors in a couple of years' time. So it's a really interesting insight into the way that banks think risk versus reward, capital versus liabilities versus... It's very, very interesting. You can imagine, turn the clock back two years ago, when Musk first picked up the phone and said, right, I need $13 billion. They would have been chomping at the bit. This is going to be the best kind of income we're ever going to make, only for them. As you said, a lot has changed since then. What could be Musk's input into this? I mean, I think we've lightly touched on this before, maybe with Piers and I, where we've talked about Musk engineering, that he wants to hold Tesla's management feet to the fire so he can get an extra 10% uptick, which just so happens to fill a void of a large financing gap he has with the Twitter acquisition. So can Musk do anything here to influence their decision making that could be preferential to him in any way? Yeah, I think the story from Musk's perspective, he came out in October and said, look, banks are not going to lose money on this debt. He made that statement that the banks have supported me, I will turn X around and you're not going to lose money. This is part of the reason why the banks are still holding this $13 billion worth of debt. So I think Musk probably, I would say that Musk is a man of integrity and he's a man that sticks to his word. But actually, maybe I'll kind of, I'll road back on that comment. This could be that Musk is probably saying, look, stay with me. I've got to clear a lot of dead weight within the company. I've got to reposition the business model. You've seen me do it a number of times, banks. So just hold on to the debt and I'll make it worth your while.  He's not, you know, he's not a charity case.  Let me get out my checkbook. But he's putting his name and to an extent his reputation on the line with these seven banks. So the balance being then is that if I'm on the bank side and Musk is telling me, look, perhaps handle the situation.  So just chill. Let's keep, keep hold of it, restructure it and let's business as usual. 100%. And yeah, so Elon Musk, I think with all of these banks probably has pretty significant leverage and quite big wallet sizes across his other interests and companies and things like that. And he probably just from a, he probably isn't someone that you'd want to get on the wrong side of because he is very vocal and does have a very big following. So I think, I think, yeah, it's a little bit of a bit of a poison challenge of Chalice getting into bed with Elon Musk from a bank perspective. You want to tread carefully, I think. All right. Well, look, let's move the show on two more to go. Let's talk Reddit. I know there's an update on their IPO status. Yeah. I mean, so we, so we covered this, we've covered this couple of times on Deal of the Week and also on the podcast and the reason why we keep covering it because it's because it's an interesting story. So a little bit of, again, a little bit of reminder. Reddit, the online community forum company. I'm just actually, I'm just going to take what it says from its IPO prospectus. Reddit's mission is to bring community belonging and empowerment to everyone in the world. Well, that. Wow. Well, I think you might have to sort out internet connection to several countries around planet Earth. Absolutely. Total addressable market, 8 billion people. Not bad, is it? So, so I actually put out a piece earlier on this week, I give, you know, I've given a bit of a bear case for Reddit. It's loss making it relatively subscale relative to the big social media players. How is it going to make money? I put out a bit of a flip side. So Reddit's IPO price was coming in at around I think 5.5 to 6.5 billion dollars market capitalization. And I was trying to create a bit of a bull story in the Deal of the Week on Monday. I was like, look, you know, it is the 10th most visited website in the world. I couldn't believe that when I read it. Isn't it? Yeah, it's got 73 million average daily active users, which is, which is not bad. 267 active weekly unique users. It's not bad. And it's just signed a $60 million like AI licensing deal with Google, where Google can access the treasure trove of reddits and subreddits data in order to boost its AGI models. And this is something, by the way, $60 million. I think that this is, you know, this is a, this is small fry. I think this, it could probably get two or three times as much. I think they're just proving the market. Remember this all goes to their bottom line as well. It's just getting access to the database, right? It's not, they have to create a load of new products. So there's a lot of, I'd say there's a little bit more full story than bare story in my own mind as I work through this IPO. But the story that really grabbed my attention a couple of days ago, as this IPO gets closer and closer and closer is that the reddit means meme stock forum users threatened to bet against this IPO. I love this. There's something very kind of ancient Rome about this, the kind of, you know, the kind of peasants revolts or something. So, so wall street bets, which is the biggest reddit thread 15 million users. Is it actually the biggest? Yeah, it is. It is. I think Taylor Swift might be second voted to boost a forum post about shorting the company. By the way, they usually are very bullish wall street bets and they usually like going long, you know, so they went long GameStop and AMC in order to stick it to the short seller hedge funds. So it's a kind of like, all right, you know, okay, the consistency is not really there. Although I don't think we expect a consistency from something like the wall street bets. But yeah, look, they are, you know, there's a decent sub community within reddit that's basically saying one, let's short it because we don't really believe it's revenue model. It's revenue story. It's not profitable. It's not growing quickly enough. It's fundamentally not a good enough company to invest in. But they're shorting it point to you because they believe that the user experience is going to get worse. Now this is super interesting from a kind of broader perspective. What happens when a much loved product online community forum goes public and starts getting real challenges to its revenue model, real challenges to its growth prospects, quarterly reporting cycles, activist investors. I'll tell you what happens. The product probably gets worse. And this is what all the redditors are getting worried about. I don't want to be spammed with advertising. I don't want to get blocked out of certain features due to paywalls. You know, this, this thing is going to get worse for me. And therefore I don't think, you know, I think I'm going to short the stop. I love the solution. If you can't have it, I'm just going to kill it. Can't have it, short it. But I think this lends itself, this lends itself to, I was reading a very, very good article the other day in the FT by a guy called Horry Doctorow. I don't know if you've heard of this bloke. He coined the term, and excuse my language, but he coined the term the end, the end of the shitification of everything. And what this means, what he's saying is due to the pressure to make money and the pressure that comes with the hyper growth of the likes of Facebook and Google and Amazon and Apple and all this kind of stuff, these products that we love and we got loads of value out of have started, well, not just started, have become a much worse because we're just spammed with all of this advertising stuff and B have become a lot more insidious because they're stealing our data and they're just exploiting us. So he calls it the end shitification. Everything online is becoming worse because of this business model. And I think this is what we're potentially seeing with Reddit, independent, much loved place to kind of hang out with people online. If it goes public, is it going to be in shitified? Well, Sam Altman just needs his money out so he can pursue his next project. And you need seven trillion. We're going to talk about that in a second. We're going to talk about that in a second. So yeah, I think it's just an interesting story. It's one to follow from an IPO perspective and obviously if it flies, then there are other IPO candidates waiting in the wings. But it's also a bigger story about, all right, what happens when a company IPOs and what are the dangers in terms of the quality of product, it's very hard if you see a company and it's got all of these different stakeholders. It's got shareholders, it's got customers, it's got employees, it's got supplies, it's got the government. Very hard to serve every master. And when you become public, your main master becomes the shareholder, not necessarily the customer. And this is kind of what we're seeing play out in Reddit. I'm assuming, because there's no precedence, there isn't a defined tactic that the bank will deploy to counteract this kind of behavioral notion of the short sellers that are sitting there waiting to hit it when it goes public. Because this sort of thing hasn't happened before, right? Yeah, the only thing you can do is as you're going out to IPO, you fill an order book with really high quality institutional investors and have a decent lock in length so that there isn't actually much free float or much liquidity for the retail investors to buy on the IPO. So even if they wanted to and even if they can get 3% of the IPOs actually actively traded, it's not really going to do that much. So that would be my strategy. And by the way, Reddit's got, you know, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Citi, Anchor America, all on the ticket. So they know what they're doing. Yeah. Okay, cool. Final one. And this is one I haven't been following. So I'm interested to hear what this is about. But Alibaba and there's an AI action. So what's this about? Yeah, so Alibaba has just made its second investment into an AGI company in the last two weeks actually. So they've just invested in a company, an AI startup called Minimax, $600 million investment at a $2.5 billion valuation. And this adds to the, I think again, $600 million investment in a company called Moonshot AI which happened at the end of last week. So few things to talk about here. The first is from an Alibaba perspective. So Alibaba has been absolutely crushed by the Chinese government, by the Chinese National People's Congress over the last few years. The kind of headline story is the founder of Alibaba, Jack Ma was getting a bit big for his boots. Firstly, they blocked the plant financial IPO a couple of years ago. Jack Ma effectively went into hiding. If you remember for six plus months and came back a much chastened individual. I'm going to love it when he's on his deathbed and he actually spills the beans of what happened over those six months. I remember it's a bit like the kind of Taylor Swift flight trackers that you get on Twitter these days. There was a Jack Ma flight tracker like, where had he been? Anyway, so Alibaba has been massively, massively chastened and the share price has been destroyed over the last couple of years. It's 65% down in the last five years. Compare that to the equivalent US company which is probably Amazon, which has been rocketing over the last five years. And you're thinking, alright, what's going on here? Now, Alibaba historically has been extremely successful investing in technology companies that support the infrastructure of Alibaba's marketplace and its super app and things like that. But it basically hasn't invested in any companies throughout the last three years because of the government's oversight. So what is interesting here is they come out with two big investments in the last two weeks and the Chinese government is actually endorsing the new CEOs, co-ceos Joseph Tsai and Eddie Wu, the China Internet Overseer is basically saying, look, these guys are good people and we are desperate to get to speed with artificial generative intelligence. Alibaba is a key player in this and we support them doing these investments. China is very different from the US. If you get the stamp of approval from the China Internet Overseer, that is going to give you great confidence that you can go out and do some pretty significant things. So from an Alibaba perspective, this is them starting to wake up from being out in the cold for a couple of years from a China perspective and making a couple of pretty big waves. Yeah, there's probably two timely catalysts, one being the arms race for AI and then the other being the current macro climate in China. And so nothing sharpens and focuses the mind and unifies what otherwise could be competing forces than saying, right, we've got a greater enemy now presenting in front of us. We need to unite and come together and work together and complement one another rather than before a few years back when Jack Ma was becoming a stud at somewhat of a risk. Yeah, I totally agree and I agree with the arms race analogy and it's an interesting comparison between a quote-unquote control economy and China is not a control economy anymore but under a communist system a control economy is what you go for and there are still elements of it there versus obviously the kind of entrepreneurial spirit of the US economy. And with regards to AGI the US has had a massive head start, right? In terms of amounts of funding in terms of, you know, in terms of NVIDIA in terms of open AI in terms of Anthropic, the US is miles ahead of China and it's probably got there because of this entrepreneurial spirit the availability of capital China is probably now going to catch up and going, hey, the control economy elements of China need to start directing towards AGI hence the China into their overseer going, by the way, we support this and we want to back you. They're quite a long way behind because these investments are not massive, right? You know, $600 million is a lot of money but we've seen the size of investments in the like of Ohir and Anthropic and open AI and this leads me to my favorite story Sam Altman. He loves it. He loves a headline almost as much as Elon Musk. Clash of the Egos, that's what that is.  You know, I'm already blown away by some of these valuations in early stage AGI companies I'm blown away by NVIDIA's valuation as well where's the $7 trillion number come from? So that has to be framing for a future project or ambition where the $7 trillion is like a moot point that doesn't matter, it's not $7 trillion it just opens up them doors and conversations with let's say sovereign wealth funds of the Middle East in order for you to have dialogue then and an exchange and then you might secure $100 billion whatever it might be, like the $7 trillion I think is just like the selling point to initiate the conversation because everyone's in this euphoric kind of high on AI. Yeah, someone tried to break down that $7 trillion and they were like you can buy every data center, every advanced semiconductor fabrication plant, every AI company and NVIDIA for that $7 trillion and the steelworks and the utilities that go behind that you can buy all of that, so maybe that's what you want but it does remind me to your point on the Middle East it does remind me quite a lot of SoftBank's Vision Fund the Masayashi son going out and saying we're going to blow venture capital out the water, you think a billion dollar fund is big? We're going to raise a $100 billion fund and obviously we've covered this on the podcast that had significant inflation re-ramifications for the venture capital industry. So I just wonder what's, you know, this seems like a kind of vision fund moment and as you say he's definitely positioning, he's a smart guy definitely positioning for something else but yeah, this headline took me by surprise. Yeah, all right well look, we're going to wrap it up there and end the episode. So thank you very much as always Steven, any questions at all for us, just drop us a comment I know you can do so on Spotify I think on Apple, if you just drop us a review you can include a comment in there, that would be cool as well so until next week, take care and yeah, have a good week ahead Thank you, Anne


and you have what you call an air ticket to take you out of the country however the disadvantage part of it all that you need to understand you will not be able to return into the country reason being that your employer did not prepare for you what you call an exit permit into mattress so if you are going to exit with what you call unexpired let say for example you have completed up your contract yes definitely go out and move out of the country but make sure you are not going to return and you are not dreaming of returning into Katal because you will not be allowed to come back in the country hope I try to share something for you hope you definitely now understand you can exit the country there is no problem but make sure as you are exiting with unexpired QID you do not have any plans of returning back to Katal otherwise if you have plans of coming back to Katal then definitely you better have to tell to resign in a normal way give a notice period then your employer will prepare what you call an exit permit and exit permit in you or exit in mattress then you will exit amicably and when you get a new opportunity you can return into the country without even hassle


So we're back again. This is common troubleshooting tips for domains. And to be honest, this is gonna be kind of a jam-packed session here in terms of little topics we're gonna cover. So yeah, put your seatbelts on, you may need it. We're gonna talk about, basically, we'll show a couple of things that are real common problems that may happen with a site or an account, or just like talk about a couple of administrative things that you may want to know about. All of the things I'm gonna show are covered in documentation as well. And they're linked on the session page. So I'm going to actually be referencing that quite a bit. And so you'll be able to kind of see that as I go here. But exactly, here, let me get my screen up here. I'm a little bit disorganized at this point. So I just want to mention, if you click on the Common Troubleshooting Tips for Domains session in the headless, in the workshop site, that's gonna have all the documentation I'm talking about. And I'm sure we'll put a lot of it in Discord as well. So the first thing I kind of wanted to start with is a doc we have called Common Troubleshooting Fixes. So a few things to mention in here is password, IP addresses, in case you have folks working with DNS, and cache clearing. These are like the first things anytime any of your users are having trouble with the site to make sure that these things are good. Is their browser cache the issue? Is their IP address the issue? In case it's like DNS related, someone can link the DNS flowchart. Was the problem DNS? No, I don't know if anyone knows what I'm talking about, but it's always DNS flowchart. And sometimes that's only gonna be relevant for your users, mostly if they're using top-level domains or if they're mapping a top-level domain into their account. And then can they log in and do they have access to that? So a couple of things, and I'm gonna try to do almost all of this from the WordPress front-end because I think most of the time that's the easiest way to get in to help your users, especially in the case of you've got a user who maybe wants to do this themselves. Like you can send them some instructions in certain cases, that's maybe what you want to do. So I actually have three StateU accounts and I have to pick the right one here because two of them are expired. So if you're in your WordPress front-end, you can switch to the user that needs help. And once you're in their C-Panel, you'll note that their IP address, that was one of the things I mentioned, right? Their IP address is always gonna be on the right side of the C-Panel. So that's always available to you there. That's the IP of the server that their account is on. If they're pointing like an A record or doing some DNS stuff, that's what they need. The password. So there's a couple different types of passwords in the domain of one zone that they may need. Of course, if we're talking about the user can't go to your main domain site, so like in this case, StateU.org, and they can't log in there, that's likely single sign-on if your institution is using that and most are. At that point, whatever change password process your institutional accounts use would be the thing. But if they're needing to do something like they can't log into their WordPress site with credentials, they can always do that stuff from the My Apps tab in Installatron, right? So all they have to do is go to My Apps and they can click on the Configuration button and they can set a password right from there and hit Update, and that will change a WordPress password. The other type of password that comes up really often is a cPanel password, and that's probably less often for most domain of one's own users, but that is something that you actually would have to change in WHMCS for the user. The only types of users who are probably needing a cPanel password is if they're using SFTP to manually move files into their account with a client like Transmitter Cyberdoctor, something like that. So that is available to you in WHMCS. So this is one of the few things that I will have to do from WHMCS. So if I look for my account on state U and I click on the person in the account, I can just go to the Products and Services tab and the password is actually in plain text here. So we'll wait for this site to get hacked now that everyone can see the password here. But yeah, I could change the password, and then all you need to do is use the Change Password Module command to make that change. So the other... So kind of going down the list, those are some common things. Oh, I forgot about cleaning your cache. So you probably are familiar with browser cache if you've done any helping folks with website stuff. But I wanted to point out a couple things, and I think we may need to update this, but refreshyourcache.com, this is a good resource, but I'm not sure how up-to-date this is anymore. Yeah, Google Chrome 27 is super old. So I will say if you need a resource to point users to, so they know how to change, clear their browser cache, we at Reclaim Hosting have our own documentation on that, and it goes over several different browsers. I would link to this if I were you. We've got one for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, Opera, and Brave. And I would use this because this is, at least for me when I work on support tickets, this is something I end up sending users pretty often. So there's a pretty good chance that we will be updating this for our own purposes before you would ever need to have your own version. So that's the main three things you want to make sure are set before you do anything more drastic. As far as other things that you may need to do administratively, a big one is changing the user's primary domain. And again, we have this documented, and it's pretty simple, but the first thing you want to need to make sure before you do any domain changes is that the domain isn't already used on the server. If it is, it'll give you an error when you're following these instructions. It's not the end of the world, it's just the change won't go through. So you want to make sure that no one, you can search on this on WHMCS, or you just try to visit it in the web browser. That'd be a pretty good indication it's not really being used. But the big one is a user wants to change their subdomain on a domain of one's own. Once you're sure that's not being used, you just go to their WHMCS profile, and you can change the domain in the panel there. The tricky thing with this is you also need to make this change in WHM. Unfortunately, this is one of those things that doesn't sync. So what you're doing is you're going into your WHM, and in my case, I'll go in and state you here, and log in. I'm going to go to List Accounts. Normally, you can actually search in the newer WHM from there too. I've gotten kind of used to that. Oh, it's because I'm looking for... List Accounts. Yeah. Well, I need to find the actual username. List Accounts is always the answer. In WHM it is, you know it. Yeah, List Accounts is everything, honestly. Okay, so once you're in here, you modify the account, and you would be able to change the primary domain up here. So you type in the new primary domain, and then you would save it. And it's important to note that you're... When you're doing the second step here in WHMCS, that that's really for your record keeping purposes so that you don't have conflicting data. If you do this in WHMCS, it's not going to force that change on WHM. Yeah, that's a great point. You have to change them in both places, because WHMCS is what's helping create that bridge between WordPress and the server, right? So having that in sync is really important. So after those changes are made in both places, you can click Change Password there, that module command, just to make sure everything is syncing up. One question that comes up here is also, okay, I'm changing the domain name, so can I change the cPanel username to match? That's easy if your cPanel is empty. Sure, go for it. If you've got stuff on your cPanel account and you try to change that cPanel username, you're going to break everything because that cPanel username is associated with database prefixes for all of your site installs. So it's purely back-end stuff that you... So the answer is no, please don't change it, because it would be very manual to go into every database and fix that. So we just say, change the project domain name, leave the cPanel username as is. Yeah, leave the gun, take the cannolis. And I think the... I mean, back to a point you made, the point before then, just as a kind of reassurance here and a reaffirmation, understanding how WHMCS links to WHM conceptually is a really big... If you're a starting admin, it's a really big, kind of like hopefully a-ha moment or light bulb to understand by you changing it in WHM, but then you're syncing with it with WHMCS because that's the place where all record keeping and accounting happens. So it's almost like you begin to understand through this process of changing a primary domain how those two systems relate. And I really believe that's a conceptual understanding that will help you down the road. So if you have questions about that, reach out to us, but it's a really important point to reinforce as you're getting familiar with how these things work together. Awesome. So a couple of the things that come up quite often as problems and I think probably the most common one I see happen is folks that see that dreaded site URL in WordPress and they want to change their domain name and so they go into WordPress and change it there because there's a setting called WordPress address and site address. Frankly, I have no idea why this is in the user interface for WordPress because anyone that is actually making that change on purpose probably could do it in a text file in a database because you almost never would need to change it in the...anyway. So what happens is someone will go, I have TaylorJaden.com but I want TaylorJaden.coffee and they don't really understand that they have to go register that domain name and all that stuff or maybe it's a subdomain thing and they're just trying to move to a different subdomain. They are conflating this field here in WordPress with them being able to change that and the problem is WordPress really only wants to know this so that it knows the base URL of the site and can do its WordPress eMagic, right? So if they change this here, what will happen is the WordPress site will no longer load if they change it to wherever the site is not installed. So how do you fix it? Well, you have to go fix it in the database. It's not too hard but it is something you have to go into the database to do. So if I go in here and I totally did a bad job of prepping this here so I'm going to quick flash install a WordPress site here on my state.org demo account but what we'll do is we're going to go into PHP MyAdmin and we can use the database tables in there to fix this. And the reason that you have to go into the database directly is because when you fill out that settings field with something else and you change it in two places in the WordPress dashboard, the WordPress dashboard breaks so you can't go back in there and change it in the same place. You have to go kind of behind the scenes into the database directly. You lock yourself out essentially but often we get tickets from students who are like or just people who have installed WordPress who are like, hey, I changed my site and it's no longer working. Right. And while Taylor's working here you can see the field in the settings place where he's making that change but you'll notice he's changing it in two places which means we're going to have to fix it in two places but that's kind of the painful part of this is not only are you going to break the front end of your site but you're actually going to break the backend dashboard as well. So that's usually where you get a support request. Hey, I think I broke something. I can't even get back in to fix it. What's up? And so this is that handy trick where, okay, we're going to go back into the dashboard and or to the database I should say and fix that. It's nice too because as Em brought it up in a previous session, you get a little glimpse into database management with PHP My Admin as well which is always a good tool if you haven't explored it yet to see. Yeah. So this is a common kind of result here. So what you'll see is that there's there's actually some stuff loading and this is mostly a browser cache related that's even doing this but if I go try and log into the dashboard it's going to try to redirect me to a domain that doesn't even exist. So we have to fix this. So to do this we go into PHP My Admin and again you can do this right from the user's C panel so you would go to your WordPress site for your domains project switch user to that person and then you can go so that you're in their C panel and you can go to PHP My Admin from here and I pretty much always use this search bar but it is in the databases section I always just type in PHP My Admin but you can also find it in databases so once I click on that it's going to bring me over there and it's really important that you are looking at the correct database or database table if they have multiple different sites or it could be WordPress sites it could be Omega sites or whatever if they have multiple sites and you see multiple entries in the left sidebar here you're going to want to make sure you're looking at the right one. You can easily see that in Installatron settings if you go to the Installatron page and you go to the I think it's the advanced tab of the application that you're looking at. Yeah so if you view and edit the details you can see it in files and tables and it will give you the well that's the files but at the bottom it will show you the name of the database right in here I think advanced also shows it but this is often where I will find it. Actually from that window I believe if you scroll up you can click directly on one of those links and it should take you into PHP My Admin so it's pretty slick. You're right so if you click on the folder up here that would go into the file manager I didn't even know that and this one here will go right to the database which is awesome. It's beautiful. That's cool. That's super awesome. So the first thing we want to do is go to WP Options that's the table in the database we want to look at and we need to find the key for the site URL in home so you can see here those are both tailor.state.u.co so I'm going to edit those I could be wrong but note that sometimes the ordering of this is different you may not always find these at the top or am I just remembering that? I think at the point that we wrote the documentation one field was on page one second field was on page two I think they have made changes where they've pushed both fields to the top which is kind of nice but the actual fields that you'll need to change site URL I believe is one and the second one is home those just be on the lookout for those. Yeah you can always they will always be called site URL so that's the real thing you're looking for so I already did site URL but before I do home here I figure I should probably zoom in a little bit so this is a little bit more readable so once you go to a key and I'm going to go back before I change this so once you just go to the row that has site URL in home click edit and then you'll fix the URL to what it was before note that in my opinion I better off to fix it back to the old URL and then ask them about where they would like to move their site because that's probably a domain name change or a subdomain change like I just showed before or maybe some other process The subdirectory is another one too where I think you know while you're making this change I think when you're installing WordPress for the first time in installatron it will recommend a slash blog subdirectory to try and remove the slash blog and it still breaks things in my opinion you're better off just fixing the site so it works by putting the URLs back to what they should be and then using the installatron clone tool to move it wherever they like it to be to move it somewhere else in the cpanel directory or if you're using an entirely different domain name and you need to change that at the cpanel level that's where you would change it in WHM CS and WHM kind of where we started the session it's also good to note and point out too that like your options here are numerous in terms of where sites are like as you mentioned you can add in a new subdomain to an existing account but you can also move account to ownership to a different person and change that primary domain name or subdomain name so there's a lot of options and if you're confused about what may be the best way to do something I would put in a ticket to support and say here's the situation we want to do this what path would you recommend I also blogged about site organization and thinking about am I using subdomain, sub directory should I use one cpanel or separate cpanels and just thinking about scenarios where each of those makes sense and I think it's going to vary by user it's going to vary by institution I'll link to that okay so I've set the while you're looking for that I've set the URL correctly here and I'm going to need to go to the bottom of the page and hit go it's super important I've definitely forgotten that you won't save anything this isn't google docs until you tell it to go because you're changing it's go because you're like running sql code but it's really weird I wish it was save but I understand their thought process I guess are we going to test it does it blend let's yeah does it blend let's see so if I go to tailor.stateu.org whoops let's make a new page it's funny because as you're doing this one of the things there you go that I believe let me just confirm this but one of the things that Jackie brought up was if I have access to my host file I can just change it to the mistaken domain and then change it and then you know get it out of my house I was like you're doing that on your host file you are free and easy you know what's going on that's awesome so good for you host file modifications are for the real ones out there I use them all the time because we have to when you're doing migrations you want to be able to see before you actually change the DNS but all host files are doing is changing your DNS locally so you can see what it will look like before you actually change the DNS but DNS becomes a very powerful tool we'll talk about it in another session but it is definitely worth understanding some of that even though it is complex and never predictable I wouldn't be 100% sure I think in WordPress's case on domain of one's own that totally would work that way but there are some applications that are very picky about when they will and will not work with host file host file changes will work what I'm saying is the application may not always load properly with the host file change especially if you have things like non-relative URLs and things like that there are some weird cases where that doesn't work perfectly and of course the fact that it would only work on your computer yeah okay so we are almost out of time because I am bad at pacing things so some of these things we can get to later in another Q&A section if we have time but again they're all documented here and I kind of briefly breeze through them here just so people are aware of what we're even talking about this is brought up earlier when you have a page that the application will not load at all or you get an error of 500 you should use the file manager go to where the application is installed so in my case for tailor.stateu.org that's the main site at the like the root of that account so that would be in public HTML but if I made a subdomain call it coffee.stateu.org coffee is on the brain that would be in a different folder that would be at coffee.stateu.org you should see an error log if it's a WordPress site and you can open that error log up right in the file manager and scroll to the bottom of it to find the most recent stuff and you should be able to see probably error references often it's a plugin or a theme that's bad if I can't even load WordPress and the main thing you're going to do there is you're going to go in the file manager and rename the folder we have a big guide on that but basically you just you will go to the individual plugins path and we have this documented here as an example for this Google Calendar events plugin in this case and you just rename the folder and again this is also the kind of thing where if you're at this level of troubleshooting and you're not sure what to do definitely feel free to reach out we can help you and show you how you would deal with that next time the last thing I want to mention is JetBackup and just that that is also always available to users and that's right in their cPanel you can do file backups or database backups or the entire account often times it's kind of nice to restore only the things that you want to restore and start there but if you're not sure or it's multiple sites that are messed up the full account backups are also available to you right in there so with that I'm trying to think I'm still trying to recover from the speed of that session so I got to look at our schedule here so the next session is at 235 it's supporting and administrating domains long term so we're going to take a few minute break here and then we'll meet you all over there is there anything else I think that's good that's everything sweet see you soon


Hi, you're still watching Waze. Now multiple cirrhosis day is observed on the 30th of May every year to create awareness among people to accept and support those affected by this cirrhosis ailment. This ailment is an autoimmune disease in which the central nervous system, brain and spinal cord is severely affected. It is one of the most common disease of the central nervous system and today 2.8 million people around the world have this disease. Multiple cirrhosis or MS as you call it could impair the patient's ability to walk, move various body parts and may even lead to vision loss. I don't know, I don't think I know anyone that maybe in close proximity they have this disease. But I mean the closest that has happened was when my grandfather had a stroke. It was not funny. Like having to see him partially paralyzed and he's not able to do the things he used to do. So I don't know how people cope with some kind of ailments. It's really really a tough thing. I don't know, Noma or Uti do you have any experience with this ailment? I think just from my mom's time as the medical professional just seeing some of the patients, it's quite a debilitating disease over time. And just to see how people manage it, to see how it breaks down the nerve endings and the impact that it has on people's physical abilities. It can be quite distressing to see actually. But for days like this, it's always great to be able to raise awareness about diseases like this. Most people, if you say MS, most people sort of know and have an idea what it is. But I guess we never really give a second thought to it if it's never really caused a close person that you know. But it is quite a difficult one to manage. Absolutely. Alright so let's quickly run through our news like a minute each. And let me come to you first. So my story this evening is quite a funny one. It's an incident that happened in Brazil. During, so it's a story about an enraged husband who smashed the beauty pageant winner's crown. It came second. It came second place. So if, I don't know if we're going to play the video, but the video shows, you know, they were about to, you know, just at the point where Yeah, now's the winner. They were about to crown the new queen. So it's a, so he, you know, they announced the crown is in the middle and then they announced and then they're about to... Because the wife didn't know him. The man was like, hey, you said my beautiful queen. He literally went berserk on stage, you know, he took the crown, threw it on the floor, took it again, threw it on the floor and he literally had to be escorted out of the... I think he should be arrested and he should be charged for something. And he was trying to actually pull his wife off stage. You know when I saw that video, the only thing I'm saying is that God help this wife because you don't enter one chance with this marriage. That's not a husband. You're really going to explain why you came second. It's not even that. It was too outrageous. It's not even that, like, how can you not control your anger to that extent? That means if I mistakenly offend you in the house, probably I'm going to do it. Now my body, you go take on that. Because it's true. I mean for me, when I saw it, I said this man must be a wife better. Nobody can tell me anything otherwise. When I saw that video, I said must be a wife better. It's too violent. It's too violent. It was too extreme. You can be upset due to the emotions and all the energy that you have put into it. Yes, now destroying the crown. She should run for her life, fight for a divorce. Because in the video, you see... He pulled her, that's what I'm saying now. He was pulling her out of the stadium. So, that is domestic violence right there. It's a very disturbing video. Nama, what did you fight for? Alright, for me, it's about the field cubes that have resurfaced and he bad on as residents engage in panic buying. And you had mentioned the fact that this panic buying costs so much trouble already because now the queues are beginning to resurface everywhere. It's not just in Lagos, but also in Ibadan. And this has come as a result of the after effects of the removal of the subsidy and of course with the announcement made by the president yesterday during his inauguration. So, some residents are already feeling the aftermath.  The prices for local transport has greatly increased. The fuel queues are getting longer. And people are already wondering how they are going to be able to get to work or get around. I mean, it's really already costing some level of panic. So, children are finding it difficult to get into school due to the queues that are all over the Ibadan metropolis. So, already we can see that this is already taking, it's going full swing and this is just the one into that announcement. You can imagine what the rest of the week will hold. I think we should just plan for, yeah, that's part of what we want to discuss. So, just prepare yourself. What's your story, please? All right. So, my headline basically says that Mephila meets Tilumbo at Paso Rao. So, the story reports that the president arrived at the villa at 2.30 this afternoon where he was received both by the vice president Kasim Satima and Mephila, the CBN governor, and Fedekir, who is the GMD of the NMPC Corporation Limited. Some other senior members of the government are also being present. But the main story basically just talks about the fact that the assumption is that they meant to discuss, of course, the rising fuel queues as well as the one of the charges that the president had made during his inaugural address around to find the exchange rate, which is believed to be the topic of conversation between himself and the CBN governor where he's been charged to look into that and work towards a unified exchange rate. The governor left apparently without addressing the media. But what's it called now? The CBN GMD, sorry, pardon me, the NMPC GMD did go ahead to address the media to give some insight into the conversation and pretty much saying that the policy around, also around the new cash lesson policy also should be looked into. So, it doesn't give us much information, but basically that both of those senior officers or officials met with the president today and ideally thinking that they're discussing what are these two issues at the moment. Okay. More stories on this, what's it called, fuel subsidy. So, I'll just quickly take mine because, I mean, that's a conversation for today. So, we'll just don't, so that we don't overflow it. If you recall the incident of a young boy or a young man rather, there was a controversy around the circumstances of his death at Hilton Hotel in Ileife on the 6th of November in 2021, three days after he had lodged at the hotel to sit for an examination at the school distance learning centre in Morro. He was subsequently buried by the hotel management in Nishalu Grave without the knowledge of his family and police, right? So, today there was a sentencing. So, the court has sentenced the popular Qashun hotelier, Rahman Adidoye, to death by hanging. Adidoye was the owner, or he is the owner of the Hilton Hotel in Ileife. He's been sentenced to death over the happening of the murder case of the master level, because he was a master level student at the Obathemiah Olo University. His name was Timothy Adigoke. And the court, the presiding judge Justice Oye Bola Ojo found Adidoye and three of his staff guilty of murder and conspiracy today. And the reports that he made the declaration while reading his judgment during the ongoing trial of Adidoye and the other suspects. And I think some of them were given like life imprisonment, so it was just multiple sentences all for the four of them. So, I was listening to the news and the attorney for the victim that passed said, okay, at least they are happy that even though it might not bring the young man back to life, but at least justice have been served. So, looking at the time in November 2021 to date, I mean, I think we are getting better with delivery of timing. We hope it can even be shorter than those long length of what's called trials that are always delayed. But I'm happy that justice has been served. Well, the story was the boy lodged into the hotel and he was supposed to write his exams. He was a master degree student and all of a sudden, how can somebody die? You bury the person even without the family or anything, nothing. And it was a hotelia. So, they were arrested and now today they found them guilty. And believe that they must have carried out the thorough investigation before coming to that conclusion. Alright, so we'll take a break now. When we come back from that break, we want to discuss what's it called now, subsidy, right? And how we should handle the matter. Stay with us for a ride back.