And the next pair of speakers both run successful incubators with components of co-working and accelerator programs in different parts of the country. They both include a theme of social impact and they both have some connections to city government. Andrea Chen is Executive Director of Propeller and Rick Terosi is Co-Founder and General Manager of PI. And I believe Andrea, you're going first. Hello everyone. It is really exciting to be here at Columbia and having talked to some of the folks here at Columbia it really feels like the architecture school is at an inflection point where this whole series of conversations is about challenging the status quo and creating space for new ideas. And so I just feel very honored to be part of this conversation and where the school is at. So a little bit about myself and Propeller in the room. Okay. Yeah. And so I'm actually not going to be talking about empathic communications although I had my first experience with an energy healer intuitive empath by phone and so she claims to do exactly what you just described so you may want to get to know her. But in any case, I'm the Co-Founder of an organization called Propeller. We're a social innovation incubator and we're located in New Orleans and really how we got started was really in response to Hurricane Katrina. You all know about that. That happened in 2005. And throughout our entire history and I think David you talked a lot about kind of measuring success and reflecting on what success means. We've gone through that our own journey and it has been very difficult at times of like how have we... What is it that we're doing? What does it mean to actually do meaningful work? Because what seems good at first ends up upon reflection maybe not so good. So going back to our Katrina story. So this is right after the storm 80% of the city flooded. A million of residents left the city. A month later only 600,000 people still hadn't come back. And even though it is what 13 years later we are still experiencing the effects of that. And there was so much destruction. And one thing that happened though and this is more about kind of like human survival and just kind of like getting things together when you have no other options. So right after the storm, people started the people who were able to come back. We didn't have the infrastructure. We didn't have street signs for at least two or three years after the storm. And you had artists coming in and they were the first ones. And all for a while in New Orleans, every street sign was made by an artist. And so teachers were coming together to gut homes. People were getting together to try to fix the levee system. And so there was all this incredible energy and civic engagement right after Hurricane Katrina. And we wanted to make sure that that energy didn't fizzle out because right after the storm we had a ton of media attention. We had volunteers coming in funders.  You could do something that you could make a difference. And a lot of the companies and organizations that started after the storm were started by people who didn't have those backgrounds. And so that was kind of how we got started. And as we were going, actually let me say this too. So where we are, that was back in 2005. We started in around kind of like 2006, 2007. Where we are now is I'm just going to give you some kind of like by the numbers. So at this point we're about, since 2011, 200 entrepreneurs supported through our accelerators. They have generated, or 85% of them are still in business, 71% of them are owned by entrepreneurs of color and women, 105 million in external financing revenue with the alumni, 460 plus full part-time jobs. And we've had, I'll go there next, we've had companies who have gone out to raise millions out in Silicon Valley. They've been featured in all kinds of different national publications. But when we were first getting going, it was kind of like people were just throwing all kinds of ideas out there. And it was kind of innovative, but it's like someone might have an idea for something related to criminal justice, here's something for kind of maybe like rain gardens over here. And there really wasn't that collective effort. There were single point solutions. And about five years down the line, and this was kind of upon the reflection of what does success mean. It was great that we had all these social entrepreneurs, people who were making change, making things happen. That was good, maybe. But we were also seeing at the time that there were these massive challenges that our city was facing. We had huge educational disparities prior to the storm, after the storm those kept on going, although there had been a lot of education reform that happened after the storm. Same thing in food, health, the environment, anything, right? And we wanted to see, okay, was there a way that we could actually move the needle on an issue? Say childhood obesity, right? Could we actually move the needle? And we knew that it was not possible for one company, one entrepreneur to actually take on childhood obesity and solve that problem. That was not possible. And so we started shifting, kind of like how do we actually see our work as being meaningful, right? And so we started kind of coalescing around this idea of more collective impact, the networked approach where, okay, so take our food system in New Orleans, right? We have, well actually food systems anywhere in the country. You've got distributors, you've got aggregators, you've got the producers, you've got retail, you've got people and they're kind of like buying decisions around food. So take kind of like childhood obesity, right? That problem, it's about what kids are eating and how much they're moving, right? And so if we're actually going to tackle the childhood obesity problem, there are so many layers to it, right? And so what we started doing was curating our entrepreneurs and recruiting entrepreneurs to tackle the same issue from all different levels, all different angles. So I'll give you one example in food. So now we have five, kind of like five target areas. There are food, health, education, water, and then inclusive entrepreneurship more generally. So just a quick example around food. So, you know, we had, this was right after the storm and the food, the school food in the schools was terrible, terrible. There was like frozen, like hamburger meat being served to kids. It was not good. And we saw this as an opportunity to change the healthfulness of the food in the schools. So at this point in time, about 40% of public schools in New Orleans, I think over 20,000 children are under this new program with healthy school food, but that wasn't the only piece of it. So we also had worked with distributors and aggregators to provide local food and that was part of the food service contract. There was another company that was doing education curriculum. We found that kids were not eating as much of the healthy food. I mean, they were eating more than before, but they weren't eating kind of like at the full USDA kind of like capacity and calories. And we found that the kids were going to corner stores to get, you know, like, you know, junk food, chips, sodas. And so we started a healthy corner store program and incubated a company that was doing local food distribution, sorry, produce distribution like fruits and veggies to the corner stores and kind of get working with the corner stores to get cooler. So we kind of see how it's actually like as we better understand the problem and peel away the layers like they're kind of like how we need to make sure that our entrepreneurs are kind of like tackling it from different angles and those entrepreneurs come together and, you know, this is, you know, it includes our alumni, it includes our current ventures to really work on the same issue. So, you know what, I'm skipping all around with my slides. So, okay, so what is it that we do? Okay, so we're an incubator and so there are lots of different parts of the assistance that we provide to the entrepreneurs. So at the very kind of like core, like early stage level, we do a lot of pitch competitions that happens in this building in that front space and you guys are design architect folks. So one of the ones that, you know, designers and architects really like is we did a pitch competition called Lots of Progress and this was at a time when the city owned all the, the majority of vacant lots in the city were owned by the city. And so they, you know, we had a competition, they gave us, I think, 50 plots of land throughout the city for this competition and people in the community, if they had, you know, great ideas, they could pitch to win land for their project and start their company or business. So I actually need to speed up here. So let me, okay, so I'm gonna roll right along. So this is where our incubator is, well, this was our old co- sorry, this is where we're currently located. This is part of the construction of the building that became this. This is our 10,000 square foot co-working space. We also run a million dollar social venture fund where we, you know, invest in our alumni and so those are all parts of our program. So these are some of our entrepreneurs. Oh wait, those are, okay. So right before the 10th anniversary for Katrina, we started getting a bunch of kind of like national attention and this was part of the dominant narrative. So like pretty much drum beat, regular drum beat every month. We get articles saying things like, New Orleans is the number one brain gain city in the US. I don't know if anyone here has seen that. And we were like kind of the social, sorry, we had experience as entrepreneurial renaissance and things were so great after Katrina. And so we started going back to the measurements of success. From the external perspective, it looked like we were doing great, right? Everyone, the national media was bullish on New Orleans and we were starting to believe our own hype as well. But then we started peeling back and looking at the data a little bit more and we were like, huh, are we actually doing better? And we're like, well, maybe we're not doing that much better, but we couldn't be doing worse. Okay, so let's take a look at some of the data. All right, so this came and I have to, I'm low on time, so I'm going to go quick through these. Okay, so this is just for New Orleans, but what I would like to say here is that these, this data actually mirrors the national trends. So we think about kind of like, post the civil rights era, racial gaps, that we have closed racial gaps, like things are better, right? We can't really discriminate legally as much anymore, right? But here's, this is just on income gaps. So this is like right after the civil rights era in 1979 to 2016. This is the New Orleans data and you can see the blue line. This one is for African Americans, this is for whites. And you can see that line trending upwards for whites in New Orleans and that line trending downwards. This is where Hurricane Katrina was right here. That going significantly lower since Hurricane Katrina. Okay, so that's an important data point. An employment gap, same thing, are widening. And you can see here, again, this blue line, right? This is for black males in New Orleans and you can see post Katrina.  So you can see that, right? Entrepreneurial boom, so it is true. Entrepreneurs, we did experience an entrepreneurial renaissance in comparison to other kind of similar metro areas. However, we've left entrepreneurs of color behind and so you can see here, like even though, this is for kind of like black entrepreneurs has grown significantly since Katrina, the total percentage of receipts has stayed the same at 2%. So in New Orleans, New Orleans is 30%, white about 60%, black around 2% to 3% Asian. And even though, so you can kind of see that disparity, right? It's 60% to 2%. Who's making the money in the city? That makes sense, yeah? Okay, so this, so we realized, so kind of like thinking about, okay, basically looking at the data, every single system that we were working in, whether it was food, water, entrepreneurship, everything, the challenges there, all the disparities in that sector broke down along racial lines. So we have to start thinking, why is that? Is there a pattern? And I challenge anybody in this room to look at one system where that is not the case. And so we were kind of, you know, and I think we're running out of time, but like in terms of like doing the analysis of this, it was like really for us, our analysis is that it is structural racism that is feeding every single one of these systems. And if we tackle these, each sector on its own, again, kind of like the cross sector approach, we won't get anywhere because it's basically, it's in the ground water. And if we are not tackling the underlying structural racism that is feeding everything, it's just gonna recreate itself. And so we kind of from that, we were able to, to kind of do a lot to change the way that our organization now functions and the way that we work. And so this is our, so this is our mission, is to support and grow entrepreneurs to tackle social environmental disparities. This is our vision. And the way that we see this is our theory of change, of, you know, working with institutions that are, you know, kind of like equitable from the get-go or startups where we can influence them to have equity baked into their business practices, from their HR policies, what representation looks like, how they do recruitment, culture, all of that, bake that in from the very get-go. We want those companies to grow, scale and make a ton of money. On the other side, institutions that are not as equitable, we're working to kind of organize within to help them shift. So I think I will pause there because I am out of time and then we can talk more about this later. Thank you. It's an honor to be here from Portland, Oregon. Well, they get my slides up. How many people here have had an idea or thought about starting a business at some point? How many of you have provided feedback to somebody that they have a really bad idea about starting a business? All right, so that's basically the premise of Pi. A bunch of people who want to start businesses and a bunch of people with knowledge who want to provide feedback or opinion to the people building those businesses. So at its very most basic, Pi has always been an ongoing experiment. We've figured out in the Portland community that we have a wealth of untapped knowledge that has no infrastructure to give back to the community and we have a community of entrepreneurs who have no mentorship to help them bring their companies forward. So that at its very most basic is what we're always trying to do. Find well-established entities with a ton of knowledge and engage them with people who are trying to improve their business, create their business, or start something new. So how did we get started? Our humble beginnings with Isaiah Mustafa. So I usually start with this slide because our original partner in this project is a company called Widen and Kennedy. They have an office here in town, but they're headquartered in Portland, Oregon. Most people, if you're not in Portland or in the design industry, have never heard of Widen and Kennedy, but they generally know their work. They're the old spice guy. They are the Just Do It campaign. They are the new Colonel Sanders. They do very big brand, generally television advertising. And they do really well with brands that have significant capital built up in the brand, but have somehow can blast their voice. So they do a good job of kind of reinventing that. So your question is probably like my question when Widen and Kennedy approached me. What does a global advertising firm want to do with the Portland startup community and why? And their response was two-fold. One, they felt like they had been a startup not so long ago and they wanted a way to give back to the community. They wanted some of that infrastructure to help the community get better at being a startup. And second, as a creative agency, they were very interested in staying on the cutting edge of what was happening with technology so that they could figure out ways to apply that technology in new and interesting ways for their big brand clients. So we started that experiment. Originally it was just a co-working space. It was the mortgage crisis.  So they shoved us in this little corner of 3,000 square feet and we started filling it with startups. And then brands showed up. So this was at a point in time, again, just pure dumb luck. It was working for the Portland startup community, but it was also at a point in time where major corporations were super interested in innovation. And you'd say, well, what do you mean by innovation? And we don't know, but startups seem innovative. So put us near startups. So a bunch of people found their way to us, worked with us as mentors or participants in the program with Daimler in particular, which has a large trucking headquarters in Portland. We helped them build an incubator within Daimler that was designed to take employees through the process that we take startups through so that they would learn a new way of thinking about problems and then take that back to their groups for learning. They're not all obvious. So Target, obviously Google, Coca-Cola, Autodesk is our latest partner, and then the city and the state have also been involved. So again, we're not a typical accelerator. We track the typical numbers. I think like Andrea, like that's an expectation of the industry. They want you to report on certain numbers. But what we're really actually good at is convincing people not to do the business they thought they wanted to do. That's our real skill. We get a lot of first-time founders who believe the mythology but don't understand what it really takes to build a business. They want a product to exist, but they're not always trying to build the business around that product. So we work to educate them really quickly about what it takes to build a business and help them decide if they want to be on that path or not. If they don't, that's great. That's a win in our book. That's a lot of time saved and a lot of money saved. If they do want to build a business, then we help propel them further faster than they would be able to go on their own. So Pi stands for Portland Incubator Experiment. We take that very seriously. So we're always kind of reinventing, re-experimenting. It keeps me pretty close to the startup vibe when we're always changing what we're doing and trying to iterate more and more. I think there are a variety of things there. The ones that I want to call out, the diversity and inclusion project, the reason there's a gap in that one, and for context, if folks don't know, Portland is literally the widest city in the United States. Like, that is a fact. And so what we've been trying to do is change the conversation about who can start companies, why they should start companies, and how they start companies. And so we originally started with youth. We started a youth program. It was an internship kind of training thing. And what we discovered is training youth up on entrepreneurial efforts or getting them jobs at startups doesn't really work if they're the only person of color in that company or if the culture has been so defined by white male tech bros that they don't feel at place. So we stopped that program and then repackaged it so that we were actually working with entrepreneurs of color, women founders, who are building diverse companies from the ground up rather than trying to help people try and reverse engineer diversity into their company. Oregon Storyboard was an experiment around VR, AR, video games. So people who are creating more communicative digital assets, could we use the techniques we had learned in software to help them improve their businesses? And what we discovered was the application of the programmatic elements was working but the market wasn't there in Portland. It just wasn't the right time for us to be pursuing that so that's on hold. And then the Pie Cookbook came out of we started our accelerator based on kind of prevailing accelerator models three months, $20,000, a bunch of mentorship, stress for the sake of stress, not really because it's helping one way or the other but just because that's the way people do it and kept changing it. We're like, this isn't working. Are we doing this because we should be doing this or because it's working? So we kept changing, changing, changing as folks were watching us do that they would come to us and say, hey, can you help us reformat our accelerator program or can you help us start a program from scratch? We weren't really staffed to do that. So what we did was write the Pie Cookbook which is an open source document for anyone who wants to start a startup accelerator. We continue to revise it with new techniques that we learned or new ways that we manage our program and there's a small community around that that's feeding in details about how they run their programs or saying that may work in Portland or Oregon but that doesn't work in New Orleans so you need to do it this way. And then our newest project is with Autodesk who folks are probably familiar with. It's called Pie Shop and Pie Shop because we always have to have bad pie puns for everything that we do. Pie Shop is working to see if we can take the techniques we've learned and apply them to manufactured objects preferably with a digital component. So what I'm learning now is like how much space do physical object companies take up or what type of different mentorship do they need or where are the gaps in their knowledge base. Again, we all have to report these numbers so here they are. I'm actually more... The top line is kind of the traditional everybody pays attention to these numbers. I'm more happy with the bottom line which is the number of entrepreneurs who've been attracted to the program we have. I'm most proud that we have 300 mentors who volunteer their time to help other startups on a yearly basis and the six continents and just to have that kind of impact and potential for the program has been really rewarding and if anybody from Antarctica wants to apply we will accept that. So I think the big secret in just a slide I want to finish on here is we thought we wanted to be a startup accelerator. What we realized was we were actually a community development tool or a way of better connecting people who already lived in the community in a way that was compelling for all of them. So all we are is a means of extracting knowledge that exists as an asset and providing it to folks who desperately need that knowledge in the most efficient way we possibly can. Thank you. Sure, I'll start. I think this idea... So going on the diversity and inclusion front I think that's definitely been a big theme in a lot of incubators, accelerators and ventures and investors kind of around the country and I think people have really struggled to figure out how to do it and I think there have been a lot of fits and starts and sometimes people do or it may seem like people are doing harm rather than good with a lot of diversity and inclusion efforts like what have you seen with yours? I think the most interesting and it's across all accelerators but I think it's a problem we can solve for particularly with the diversity and inclusion stuff is I rarely see upward... Oh, there I am. I rarely see upward mobility in the accelerator environment so generally in the world of accelerators there's a role of a program manager which is kind of day to day dealing with the startups and there's the role of this managing director which is funding or the mentors or those kind of things and nine times out of ten, never the twain shall meet. Rarely do program managers become managing directors and so one of the things we've been trying to do specifically with our effort is try and create that path for folks and find folks it's not a white cis male's job to tell people how to do diversity or where those accelerators should be located we're working to kind of train the program managers up so that they can become managing directors of their own programs and take that program and make it work for the community I think that's one of the challenges is people often try and do the cookie cutter thing and it just doesn't... I think that's a recipe for failure. Yeah, what have you seen with your companies? With the companies? Yeah, with the companies in terms of equity and inclusion. So, thank you because I'm all shaky too. So we originally, we admittedly were pretty much a white tech bro space and we got... we would get women in the space but not like by intention we would just get lucky with some applicants and a few applicants of color who would be in the space I think what we're seeing now is back to my point about the internship


okay we got three pickup trucks in the race to win the EV first EV pickup we got the Cybertruck we got the Rivian we got the Endurance who's gonna win who's gonna be the first EV okay Tesla just surrendered the lead some more definitive news came out on this today they're sending out emails telling people hey you know it's gonna be a while till you get your Cybertruck why don't you lease a Model 3 in the meantime they're saying but different people are getting different emails that were or not getting emails and getting emails I don't know I don't have one on order but now they're saying the release of the Cybertruck is going to be 2022 not 2021 in the beginning you know I thought the Austin factory for Tesla it was going to be for the Cybertruck only but now Model Y actually I think they're giving Model Y a priority and somebody that there's a thing on the internet you can find it they got the status of the different plants and they say what they're gonna build for Austin they have the Cybertruck listed as in development okay so the cyber the giga factory is set to open on May 2021 but they say open I don't know if that means operational spitting out cars or what of course they do know what they're doing they have set up a few of these factories and if they're going with the why they know how to do that already you know they're going to for the redesign on the Cybertruck here's the thing I saw a thing the other day you can get an app that gives you the virtual size of the Cybertruck and you can see if it fits in your garage the Cybertruck is 9 over 19 feet long and most normal garages are 20 by 20 so I mean it's real close the other thing is everything's load bearing on the on the Cybertruck you know the front hood the all the structures and everything it's built like a bridge you know that's the arch of a bridge so there's no crumple zones or I guess they're good engineers I'm sure they can figure out how to do that but I think they might be going for it if you if you make a vehicle big enough then you get a commercial or a farm I don't know what it is you got to look this up but it's like a commercial rating or a farm rating and they put this in the loophole in for the farmers a long time ago so they didn't have to get special stuff for their farm equipment and their farm trucks and so forth but if you get a big enough one it waves like the mileage requirements the sizes the crumple zones a lot of stuff I think that might be what Tesla is going for I don't know anyway they got no they got no rearview mirrors and you know I'll tell you let's thinking about it the the pillars the roof pillars are very structured structural in that truck they're load bearing so they ain't gonna mount the mirrors there they're gonna have to mount them on the doors but see every time they put a hole in that body it weakens it again because it's like a bridge anyway there you go I think Tesla I think they basically gave up the ghost I mean they ain't coming out and saying it but read between the lines so here's a picture of the Gigafactory this is like yesterday in Austin and I don't know it looks like a big parking lot to me but anyway they build them really fast they know what they're doing they build a lot of them I'm just saying anyway I think we got a little clip of Elon talking about the SpaceX program coming up next Elon Musk is working on SpaceX this is his quote animals could be brave and slaughtered now let's get the Rivian you know Rivian's a private company the ST-1 they said was going to be the first pickup truck they are really guarded you can't get in information but it's hard to get information about it's not impossible they're a private company they don't have to do anything about it about reporting so they've said now that the 60k the cheaper model is going to be out in 2021 and I don't know before these dates are questionable anyway there's a video out with the new CEO but not the new CEO the original CEO the CEO the guy from MIT he's talking about some supply constraints until 2023 on production and he mentions having to build the Amazon Vian and a bunch of other things I'm going to include a clip following a clip here of this interview and you can listen to this for yourself and check out the images stealth mode and since that time you've made a lot of headlines bring us up to speed on where Rivian's at in terms of production and when we might see the R1T pickup delivered to customers and the R1S SUV listen to this you said we've made a lot of progress in the last couple of years we're approaching our launch date so we launched and start delivery of our R1T the truck in June of this coming year in 2021 and then the SUV shortly thereafter in August 2021 and I'm actually sitting at the plant right now and you can see vehicles on the line these guys are building the cars by hand coming down so we've got a white one snow robots coming down as his feet but we're in midst of really bringing the plant up and getting everything set in terms of quality systems production systems and it's not a small task because in parallel of the launching the truck in the speed we're also building a vehicle for logistics for Amazon and that's also going to go to a bit further back in the facility but nonetheless that's launching in 2021 as well on the consumer cars talks to me about the kind of pre-orders level of pre-orders you've had and what you're targeting in terms of production volume initially in 2021 and then from that point onwards yeah the reaction of the product and it's been great you and I met right so he's not saying what it is and started to show the product we've still tried to be relatively quiet in terms of how we communicate and talk about what we're doing just in general we like to let the product and interaction speak a lot of words so with that what we've seen is just a great sort of level of interest the ground swallow of support what we're doing and you know the configurator launching this week this past week for pre-order customers okay was really fun it doesn't give any number okay in this last section I have some video from Lordstown Motors they did a press junk at a zoom thing for a German trade show and anyway it was pretty interesting I hadn't heard a lot of this information anyway I'm gonna play some clips from that and then but first there's a clip of this some guy I don't know I'm gonna put a link in the description got this video of the interior of the endurance it's the best video I've seen I really like the interior it reminds me of an old 62 Buick I used to have nice this guy here has the best this is some of the best interior now this is not a word this is just a display model it's not it's not running but it's to show this is the interior that's gonna be on the truck which I like I think it's great there's the dash and see how clean it is I think it's just great what a grad it's a great simple refreshingly different design there's your three in the back two in the front there's a wheel hub motor charging port of course there's a frunk in this car here's a good shot of the interior coming in and I don't want to get flagged for this so I'll just there's your interior is going to be the same see but this is this is a mock-up but anyway this is the best video I've seen of the interior just to give you an idea what the truck looks like there it is again alright this is a presentation they did for a German press junket for the and this is Lord's Town's guide Steve Burns this guy call them flannery anyway just to let I just wanted to point out a couple interesting things here 250 mile range blah blah blah blah blah blah it's got a five star crash rating okay we don't know about that we don't know about the cyber truck it's got the four-wheel motors traction control blah blah blah I think this is might be what Rivians have in trouble with because theirs is extremely complicated this is extremely simple now this is interesting 4,000 pound curbway the lightest full-size pickup a fleet pickup on the market that's that's like and now this is the fleet model has a 5.5 second zero to 60 and this is with it detuned as I said in another video I think it can do 3.5 with if it was running at full capacity this is just a chart showing the five-year this is for fleets but you can see that the endurance five-year 16,000 miles the cost to operate it for five years is 34k versus the Ford F-150 probably the most popular fleet truck is 51 grand so what is that 16 grand more so it just gives you an idea you can see these again this is for 16 this is total cost of ownership for these different brands and the Rams high they're all higher than the endurance I thought this was a very interesting this is a better look at the plant you can see how big it is it's a 6.2 million feet I think they've got 10 million feet of possible usable space there the annual vehicle capacity here is 420 under the EVs they can do 600,000 which is the first year order for the Cybertruck that's the amount by the way the replacement value of this plant is three billion dollars okay and interestingly enough they have a solar array which is right here 2.2 megawatts I'm gonna play this with the sound off this is I think this is a pretty good video showing giving you an idea of it's a flyover by a drone of the plant and so forth and it's I haven't seen it before but it gives you an idea of how big it is I mean you know these are just different angles I don't even think they can get the whole thing on one angle there's the solar array that's in front of the place and there's everybody seeing that that's the and then this is look at look at this plant compared to the Rivian clip of the Rivian video look at this there's Steve Burns but and these are just little snippets again the size of this plant I forget how many robots they said were in it and this is all a bit dusty but this was an operating plant just you know less than a year ago so you know they ain't running around with feather dusters when they're building cars yeah anyway just give you an idea of the immensity of this of this plant and oh call them over there said you need a scooter or a golf cart to get around the plant because that's how big the plant is this is a the some of the management team there's more people involved and there's there's people from VW and Toyota and all kind of stuff I just wanted to point out this guy right here is a rich Schmidt leaving force beside behind the design conversion and improvement of 12 automotive plants including Tesla's plant in Fremont California and you can see this is he's one of the OG's from Fremont and Tesla Toyota Nissan Hyundai and Volkswagen these work for them all a couple of interesting things column mentioned one was that they're planning to ship vehicles to Europe at the end of next year or the beginning of 2022 so that's in their plans and did mention that they're selling the fleets but they're also selling the individuals and a very interesting thing he said he kind of let the cat out of the bag a little bit here but that this line is capable and it's basically all set up and they're going to be running and I mentioned this in another video the next product is going to be an SUV and then a van


Welcome back everyone here live in Silicon Valley in Palo Alto. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick here at peer2.o conference getting all the data around all the networks, all the action and our next guest is the Ali Khan director, network engineering at LinkedIn. LinkedIn, one of the big three I call them in social networks. Obviously, you know, you got Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn all really demonstrating huge success in the marketplace. Also, big fan of LinkedIn and theCUBE. We've been pretty much every Hadoop world since existence that we know their prolific use of data real time and so they got to have the network to support it. Zade, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Appreciate it. Great to have tech athletes on like yourself who are, you know, you run the plumbing for all the action for LinkedIn, right? So, is it stressful? It is, yes. It's fun. You got a big smile on your face. A smile of nervousness. I can only imagine the pressure. Obviously, huge success story, Silicon Valley, but you know, the growth has been well documented. Obviously, when public earnings are doing well, but what kind of rocket ship was that like?   Well, you know, a lot of it was wrong growth when I joined about three and a half years ago. The company was already formed and growing a lot of products and I think that the biggest challenge was, you know, how do you scale this, right? How do you meet the amount of, you know, hundreds of millions of users that we were scaling to? So, the challenge was keeping up, you know, the growth and making sure that your networks were stable and the site was always up. So that was a lot of the work. There still is a lot of work. We're growing users every day, so there's a lot of challenges there, but it's fun building networks at scale. Jeff, what's your take on LinkedIn? You've seen their growth. Yeah, I'm a huge fan and I think it's a phenomenal application, but I'm curious in terms of on that growth. I know there's a lot of like constant innovation inside of LinkedIn, trying to develop new apps and push out new functionality. Are you guys big enough now where things have kind of smoothed out in terms of the growth rate or is it still kind of lumpy based on, you know, pushing out new features or pushing out new things from inside the company? Oh, we're always pushing on new features. We are growing a lot of users, so that keeps the momentum going. It's never slowed down, so we're constantly sending new users and growing the network to meet it. And also the international expansion, I think, has been dramatically increased over the last several years. So, speak a little bit about kind of unique challenges as you increase your global user base.  And every geographical region has a unique challenge from sort of making sure that we deliver content fast. And so we, you know, how do we build our networks to sustain that? So, we care a lot about that. We go into different markets and build networks to reach eyeballs as fast as possible and deliver content quickly. So, that is a fun and exciting challenge. So, talk about the Peering Conference here. It's about openness, a lot of education in the foundation here, first event. The network community is pretty tight. Pretty much the guys at the scale levels that you guys are talking about are a small community and it's growing. But a lot of new blood is coming in. You have a lot of young guns, the DevOps mindset is pretty much part of that culture of the new guard, if you will. What is the big conversation happening right now in the community? And why is it important for companies to get involved? Well, I think, John, a lot of it is that the ecosystem is changing, right?  But as you build more content out there, you want to deliver these things really fast, right? So, the entire sort of ecosystem is changing. And so, you have a lot of people coming in and inquiring about, you know, hey, how do I, how do I do peering? How do I actually connect to networks so that I don't have to go through the congested internet? So, that is, we've seen a lot of that. And it's fun to see a lot of people come to this conference, you know, curious about it, to see how other people do it to learn. So, it's been really exciting. So, is it a roll your own market right now in terms of networks? I mean, that kind of saw that with the data centers and hosting people are kind of saying, hey, I can just have them host my own data center. That kind of roll your own concept. Is that what we're talking here? People say, hey, I want to bypass the congestion. I want to build my own routes. Is that what's happening? Well, people care about their applications a lot, right? They want to be in control. So, how do you be in control? You get involved as much as possible. You don't leave anything to a particular vendor. So, people want to peer because they want to control the packets going from their network to another network or reaching their eyeballs. So, this is all about making sure that in the end of the day, you know, you're building your application to a certain level where you're in control of it end to end. And peering is a huge part of that. And what's the challenge before and after? You have to look at, you know, before peering, open peering, to after the ideal state. Is it how much pain? Is there pain relief? Is it an aspirin? Is it steroids? I mean, what do you get for this? I mean, what's the value? So, the value is, you know, comes down to a lot of it.  So, at the end of it, you are improving your site performance. And that's generally what the content companies do. They want to get into peering so that they can deliver their content fast. So, in the end of the day, it's not just a little aspirin relief. It's actually, you know, long term relief because you actually have control of these bits and how you move them around. Just competitive at that point. Yes.  Exactly. It's all about the users at the end of the day. So, how about real time? Because this is something that's come up, mostly the vias on here talking there obviously real time. They don't bump it up. You can't go anywhere these days without talking about mobile. And you guys have a great mobile app and you just live a lot with big data. Real time is real time. It's like latency is an issue, right? So how do you guys, latency is obviously something that network guys are used to. How does that factor in when you have an application driven marketplace that's going on now where people are really looking at the application centric view down at the network. Latency is a big issue. But how does that impact the real time for the end user experience? What are you seeing the issues around real time? What kind of make it better, faster, easier? Well, building better networks, right? Building better networks, connecting to as many networks make the real time piece real time. So as real time as you can get. So what what's happening is basically networks are connecting much more tighter with each other, not relying on, you know, upstreams or various other third parties, they're just going down to the core of the net core of the internet and just saying, let's connect at the core. And when you connect more at the core, that is where you get near real time exchange. See, talk a little bit about the conversations when you're setting up a parent relationship. So if it's a content provider to a content provider, and they've got different types of content, it seems pretty equitable, probably if you're of similar size, like in traffic. But what if there's a disparity there? How does that negotiation go? How are you assigning value? How are you trading value? Or is it just, you know, we're all in this together and we just want to deliver better performance? How are those conversations? So you mean between two content providers? Well, between two content providers or a content provider and not a content provider. So as you said, the the the ecosystem is changing. And we're before it was kind of the tier one providers appearing or the tier two providers. Now you guys are, right, are doing it directly with other content providers and other folks. So how's that? Sure, how's that kind of value established that that enables you then to put together a good relationship and a good arrangement? Okay, so let's talk about the content, the content. So kind of content providers, they're very open to peer with each other, because it's mutually beneficial. There's really no argument.  It's just the two content providers just naturally form a marriage, right? It's easy, no problem.  And that's that's their stance. There are many that actually a little bit more open, they're there. They see the value in it, right? So if you're a heavy content provider, and they have access to a lot of networks, one thing to note is that transit price has gone down over time. So it's really, really cheap. So, so why do you want to charge a content provider so much? Money for it, whereas you know that at the end of the day, you're going to make that money out of the access people. So you benefit from peering with content providers, so that in the end of the day, you provide better performance to access networks. So that is actually a value that many providers see themselves. And those are the ones that see the value in the relationship with content providers. And so openly peer with them. Okay. And that is actually beneficial for their business at the end of the day, because they actually do make, you know, they can deliver the condo a lot faster. In the end of the day, their users are happy. They will not leave their networks, right? And stay on with them. So it's a mutual win and win. Yeah. So basically, the value of the content has increased so much. And then the revenue opportunity on the transit has decreased so much that they've kind of, they've kind of passed now, which is much more logical to go ahead and do that peer relationship. So at the end of the day, you're getting the money down at the other end of the pipe. Exactly. Interesting. So what's next on networks? Obviously, virtualization has a huge impact on it. We'll be covering VMworld coming up for our 50 or now. And, you know, Paul Moritz laid out his vision, you know, five years ago, now he's at Pivotal, you know, essentially the main software mainframe is the cloud. And the network has always been kind of the last stomping ground to really get tweaked and seeing, you know, it's actually moving down the stack versus we used to be saying, everyone's going to move up the stack in the old, old, old conversation, you know, now that's happened. Now all the force is coming down the network. SDN has been a big hyped up area, software defined data center. How is all that those drivers changing networking? Is it forcing behavior change, some technology change? Can you comment on that? Yeah, sure. So I actually just gave a talk on on peering automation and and and the way we look at it at LinkedIn and a lot of content companies like us are doing is the role of the network engineer is changing.  But that is not the best use of an engineer. An engineer should be spending more time writing code to manipulate these devices. So these devices now have gone to stage where they've become far more sophisticated. So the trend is actually going towards writing software to manipulate the changes. So the network engineer spending more time or in the future will be spending more time having to shift away from the mentality of getting on the router and writing and making these changes as opposed and moving to like actually writing code to make it. It's a better use of that time. It's more challenging. It's more innovative. And it's the future. The old days we used to say I used to do a lot of networks stuff that network plumbers. Now that's changed. You mentioned software. So how is this definition change amounts? So it's kind of in terms of a dear me kind of joke, but you know, it's certainly it's kind of plumbing, I guess, but like with software you mentioned the roles are changing. So what do you see the key change on the software side? You mentioned productivity. Is there a new discipline when you're hiring folks? Is there a new skill set? Is it the same? How do you look at hiring? What do you look for? Is it the old days? Hey, good disguise smartness networks? Now, is there a new criteria for hiring? Yeah, so I think someone that thinks outside the box differently. Someone who has some programming skills is interested in programming skills as definitely appealing to sort of the next network engineer. So we look for people who are, you know, have a Python skills and stuff like that so they can actually write sophisticated code to actually make changes on routers and things where so that there's less human involved, everything is getting more automated. And that's the way to scale. It's interesting. There's a lot of talk here about the young guns that you guys, you know, the old the old dogs are training the young guns on kind of what was before and it wasn't always so easy and it wasn't always just so push button. Is it refreshing or is it frustrating when you got guys that just expect everything is going to act like like Google or LinkedIn?   Is it refreshing that they just expect that? Or is it frustrating because they just a lot of them don't really appreciate either really what's happening behind the scenes and the complexity and or you guys have solved a lot of the big issues now. So in the reality, they don't really have to worry about it and they can move on to some higher value items. I always think that you have to constantly reinvent yourself, right? In any any occupation, you constantly have to invent yourself. And I think the people that I've been doing this for 20 years, I'm still going to be on the routers. I'm not going to, you know, do this new SDN stuff or whatever. You know, I think it's just one of those. It's unfortunate, you know, because there's so many things that you can do when you just get out of that mode. And I think it's just the future is just going to be that. I mean, I'm sorry to say, but people will just have to step aside and let the new sort of way of thinking take over. And how do you do more automation? How do you do software manipulation to drive changes in your network? And that is the future. So we're here at the peer 2.0 foundation event, an overall event, and talking about networks, LinkedIn, huge stuff, pressure on the network. What's the number of active users now? I mean, the public number, I'm not asking the confidential information, you know, what the, can you share any public numbers? We have more than 300 million uses. And so get a lot of action on the thing. One of the things that Twitter has always been kind of, you know, been holding on that rocket ship with their, their fingers holding on, not trying to get it fall off with the infrastructure has been well storied with Twitter, the fail whale and trying to keep up with support. You guys have done a good job at LinkedIn. What's your biggest lesson learned in the past three years than this growth? LinkedIn has never really had any big public snafus like Twitter. But you know, I'm sure that there's been some channels, what have been your biggest learnings that you can share the folks out there? Well, keeping the site up, constantly worrying about it, keeping it up. That's that's, I think, every any network engineer, any network team, you know, cares about, and scaling and meeting the demand. That I think is, is one of those things that we got constantly.  So that kind of makes you think differently, you know, how do I constantly build a network to scale? And, and that's the challenging. It's fun. Yeah, I love the Jeff Living in Silicon Valley. You get a lot of pioneers, certainly, you know, we were based in the Cloud Air office when they started years ago, Amaral Adela came from Yahoo. And a lot of the web scale companies really were pioneers in large scale. Now on the social network side, you guys have done a great job of scaling up and in a modern era, I call it a little bit later than some of the some of the older web scale companies. But now every corporation is trying to do that. You're seeing almost like the vertical stacks, you're seeing DevOps. What is your advice to companies trying to do a LinkedIn? I'm not saying they're going to try.   You're not whether your enterprise is going to do what you guys have done, certainly from a scale standpoint, but they want to get there. Hyper scale has been a huge thing and it works out as well.  What's your advice?  So any company that wants to provide good content, like LinkedIn, Twitter, or any, you know, the focus is you end user care more about them, like make sure that, you know, when you design products, when you design infrastructure that you're actually making the end user experiences as as great as as possible. And that should be only driver because at the end of the day, that's what matters. That's what actually makes people come back to your side and be engaged. So so that is like the fundamental thing that I would I would say that every DevOps or infrastructure person should really care about is how do you make the site scalable and stable and and and and provide the best end user experience. Final word for you to get the final word into this interview. What's what is the peer to event like what it's the vibe here? What's the mission? What's your takeaway? So peer to is I think a great event for people who are a step back. So basically, peering has been, you know, around for a long time, but but it's been sort of a very select group of people, small and people know each other. The community is very tight. But we found that some of us found that there isn't a forum where new blood can come in or new people or people just want to find out, you know, what is what is peering? You know, how do we get involved or how do how does it benefit me? So this event is the first educational forum that actually creates that atmosphere for people to come in and and and and just want to learn that, hey, you know, how does Pandora do it? How does LinkedIn do it? You know, so we are able to share like our information on like, how do you get involved in the peering community and and and help build your system. Some big technical challenges to solve some big hard problems to solve, right? And to this business opportunity. If you get some challenge, right? Right. Absolutely. It's great. So Jeff and I are covering like a blanket. We appreciate your times the at Ali Khan appreciate that from LinkedIn director of network engineering. Big job at LinkedIn. Obviously great site that great social that we use all the time. And this is the cube we're live here in Silicon Valley in Palo Alto for peer 2.0 Foundation event. We'll be right back after this short break.