So, how did it start? So, I think that's interesting. What is it? Well, it started very, you know, gradually in the sense that we met the Honourable Minister Bartolo in the 19th Conference of Commonwealth Education Ministers in the Bahamas. And he was interested in MOOCs. He was interested in skills development. He was interested in the recognition of qualifications, quality standards for online learning. And Col is interested in exactly the same things. And we decided that, I think, one of the leadership roles which Malta can play, which has, it has been playing, you know, in developing the Transnational Qualifications Framework because it has this interface with the European Union and their qualifications frameworks and your own. And I think you contributed a lot, your colleagues have contributed a lot to the development of the Transnational Qualifications Framework, which is being used by all the 31 small states of Commonwealth under the Virtual University for Small States project. I think what's interesting is, is levering on, Malta has always had this thing about being strategic and it used to be about place. And I think now we're trying to move on to this idea of being strategic because of education, because this is a small place where you can test new things. And I think that's a fantastic opportunity if we try and lever on what's good about the very robust accreditation system that we have in Malta. I think the fact that we have schools and children who are now looking for a new type of education. And I think Col's experience, I think both grass roots, working with teachers and with learners, I think there's room for pilots which could be developed both here, maybe from here we take them elsewhere, I think. I think it's very exciting times and I'm seeing this new institute really starting by being almost like a virtual network in a way, but levering on more just, you know, in-house strategic importance, I guess, and both historically and within education. So that's where we should go, I think.


So before I introduce our distinguished guest, I'd like to welcome Marguerite Serres, who's the managing director of ESB Networks, to give just some introductory remarks. You'll be aware that this breakfast briefing is part of the ESB's Powering the Future lecture series and we're always enormously happy to have an opportunity to have ESB address us here and to be present and their huge supporters for this series of lectures. I want to thank the ESB again for that and welcome Marguerite. Thank you Chairman. Good morning everyone and as the Chairman says it's great to see so many people here so early this morning. We're a little bit later starting than we thought but I'm sure people were here very promptly. On behalf of ESB I'd love to really welcome first of all our guest of honour Julia Ham, who's come here today to speak to us. I'm sure he's going to give us a lot of food for thought but also to thank yourselves for coming here this morning as well. It's a great pleasure to have this Powering the Future lecture on behalf of ESB. My day job is to manage ESB networks and that means I suppose among other things one of our licenses is to be the distribution system operator in the Republic of Ireland and traditionally that role was fairly easy to explain if not always easy to execute and it effectively meant that our job was to connect up new customers and then to keep the lights on and to do that as economically as possible. Now the network has grown because of that organically over the last 90 years and you know it has built up in line with demand and I think largely has served us very very well but it was built for a particular set of circumstances and was built in a particular time and that has all changed now so typically in the past I suppose what we had were quite high voltage lines leaving a small number of generating stations effectively big wires be conductors and then that would taper its way down through the various voltage levels until it reached customer premises where it entered at obviously much lower voltages and much smaller lines so a lot of tapering from big down to little we typically had currents flowing in only one direction and we typically also had very predictable loads so we knew based on yesterday or based on last month or based on the same time last year typically what load levels would look like so it's very predictable now as you know that's all changing and generators can effectively pop up anywhere and tend to they actually tend to be more at the more remote ends of our network at the very end of those tapered networks and that gives us an awful lot of challenges to system operators because now what we have are unpredictable load flows we don't can't predict today what's going to happen versus what happened yesterday we have to remote the network that is very remote we have to reinforce and that's not particularly popular as goes with landowners and customers at times and while we're trying to do that and connect up the new generators we also need to make sure that we don't adversely affect existing customers so there's a lot of challenges in there and it's a complex mix and really again what we have to do despite all those new challenges obviously is to keep the lights on so it's not an easy balance I suppose and it's getting more complex but because of that in ESB networks and in ESB in general we have been investing heavily in both the transmission and the distribution grids over the last two decades to make sure that we can accommodate the increasing levels of renewable generation and it is quite significant I think we were just talking over breakfast there and the peak in the Republic of Ireland last year was just under 5000 megawatts and by the end of 2017 we'll have about 4000 megawatts of renewables connected and we have a queue of lots more wind and about three and a half gigawatts of solar so there's a lot of interest in renewables and a lot of demands for it but for the next hour or so I suppose we can forget all about those realities that I've been talking about and I suppose maybe indulge in the luxury of a blank page and what we would do if we could start now unencumbered totally by our history in our case 90 years of it and consider how we would design a network from scratch and indeed how we would design legacy or ignore our legacy market systems and how we would design market systems Julia's organization she just told me to change the name of it I had the solar electric power lines but I think now it's the smart electric power lines or SIPA it's an educational non-profit organization and it helps utilities to deploy and integrate solar storage demand response and other distributed energy resources several years ago SIPA kicked off the 51st state initiative in the US I think sometimes we think of ourselves as the 51st state but this is the real version and it was a unique project which asked people the question what would you do if you could create the perfect energy market from scratch if you could not have to deal with legacy infrastructure and you were unhindered by the existing market design the idea of a 51st state is very liberating so considering what we would do with a clean sheet of paper it gives us the freedom to look beyond the here and now beyond the current constraints and realities towards a broader vision of the future and the real strength in the exercise is that it allows us to define where we would like to get to and gives us a path to planning the future and particularly how solar and utility industry transactions could look in that future I'm really delighted to welcome Julia here she's the president and CEO of SIPA and is gracing us here today I know she's on vacation as well but she's coming here today to talk to us as part of the CSB power in the future lecture series she has more than 15 years experience advising and collaborating with utilities manufacturers government agencies etc on renewable energy and energy efficiency strategy and programs she's one of the world's foremost experts on the nexus between utilities and distributed energy resources she has expertise on the business models and solar programs for more than 400 utilities in the US which fascinates me because I'm having trouble with one but as well as utilities in Europe and Asia prior to joining SIPA she worked for ICF international where she supported the implementation of the energy star program she's a graduate of Cornell University and she also walks the talk living in a PV powered energy efficient home in northern Virginia so ladies and gentlemen please welcome Julia how so this year my husband and I both turned 40 and so we decided earlier this year that we were going to go somewhere that we had never been before we've traveled the world throughout her 15 years together but we've never been to Iceland so we decided in May to get on a plane and go to Iceland do something we had never done and we decided we were going to go ice climbing on a glacier and so we spent this day with two guides who took us up onto the glacier and we started you know put on our crampons and our climbing gear and we started going up and down these little ice walls and it was fun we're having a great time we felt like we knew what we were doing it was it's a very repetitive process to just keep sort of keep doing the same thing over and over with your arms and your feet and then sort of the end of the day we're exhausted and then the guides tell us we're going to take you over here and we're going to go down this giant crevasse and you're going to climb out on the other side this is me climbing out but as I was on the top on the other side I froze and I couldn't figure out why and I thought I've been doing this all day I can do this this one's bigger it's deeper there's sort of a hole at the bottom that goes into the middle of earth but I can do this so I climbed down I got across and then I got to the bottom again and I froze again and I really was like literally paralyzed in fear and as I thought about why was I paralyzed in fear I think it was really because it was a long day we were tired and I didn't know what was on the other side of that wall I didn't know whether we're going to get to the other side of the wall and it was going to be an easy walk down and we're going to go back to the bus or I didn't know if there was going to be another crevasse just like this one on the other side that I was going to have to climb again and another one after that another one after that I just didn't know what was on there on the other side of the wall so what does this have to do with what I'm here to talk to you about today well interestingly as we embarked upon this 51st state exercise two years ago I've been traveling the country ever since in the US talking about it and I've been talking the entire time about about the about the bfw the big freaking wall and I now have my own real bfw experience and there is a really a clear parallel in terms of what I've been talking about with the 51st state and the big freaking wall and my own experience and that's as we think about the electric utility industry in the US we've been talking for probably five six years now about the utility of the future but what is the utility of the future there is no clear definition of what that is and so if we think about sort of as utilities in the US who are over here and you think about okay if we make little incremental changes maybe we can get to here but we think we need to be over here either we need to be over here because our regulators or policymakers or our customers are telling us we need to be or we think we need to be the problem is between where you can get with those little incremental changes and to over here to where you need to be there's this big freaking wall in the middle and you don't know what actually is on the other side of that wall so this is really sort of the whole design of the 51st state in terms of how do you first how do you figure out what's on the other side of the wall how do you create a common vision for what obviously there could be multiple visions but how do you define what those might look like and then what are the steps you need to take to get to the wall and then get over the wall under the wall through the wall somehow to get to the other side so I'm going to just play for you a quick video here companies industry and consumers wondering where they fit as we move forward that's why there's the 51st state we start in a new safe space beyond existing paradigms and current market structures it's a platform for innovation building on the best ideas and business models to create multiple road maps for the future this is a structured conversation that includes all stakeholders from the companies that make and install hardware and software to the electricity providers who deliver the power and even the consumers who use it there are multiple solutions for the future and the 51st state champions the premise that everyone can win we've attracted the brightest minds and thought-provoking ideas to the 51st state now it's up to all of us to turn these ideas into realistic functional road maps utilities industry and consumers are all invited to help construct the electricity market of the future it's now up to you for more information visit sepa51.org going back to 2013 in the us in arizona we started to see extremely heated debates between the local utilities and the local and national solar installers really around primarily around break design issues and it it got to the point and honestly continues to be not a constructive conversation in that state people on both sides really have their have had their heels dug in they have their entrenched entrenched interests that they're trying to protect and it's been challenging to to move things forward in a constructive way for anyone in that state in particular so back when those conversations in arizona or I wouldn't even call them conversations when when the that discourse or started in arizona 2013 our organization started talking about what can we do to help we are a neutral unbiased nonprofit organization half of our membership our electric utilities half our technology companies and government agencies and others that have an interest in collaborating with utilities so we said what could we do to help in our organization it's not our nature to go into a specific state and try to solve their problems it's just not what we historically have done so we decided we did not want to get involved specifically in what was happening in arizona but we wanted to do something that would help the conversations in other states be more constructive in nature so we started talking about well okay so arizona is very heated the conversations are ugly what if we went to another state like Mississippi where in 2013 there was essentially zero solar at that point could we pull together all of the stakeholders in Mississippi to have a constructive conversation about what changes could be made in order to optimize distributed energy resources and for us it's about it's not about maximizing it's about optimizing but as our as our team talked about it what we came to realize was it would be extremely difficult to do in Arizona because of the state of the industry but it would still be very hard to do in Mississippi even though there was no solar already in place just because of the hundred years of the electric utility business it would still be very hard to make progress other than very incremental changes so that led us to well what if we just made up a state let's make up a 51st state so that was where the idea of this blank slate 51st state came from and we've designed I'm going to tell you a little bit sort of about the process of the initiative and then we'll talk about some of the takeaways that we've got up until this point and where we're going to go from here but we've designed the initiative in a phased approach the first phase was a year-long process between the fall of 2014 and the fall of 2015 where we went out to the US energy industry and essentially crowd sourced visions for the future so we went out we said if if you had this blank 51st state what would you do with it what would your vision be how would you design things so we gave the industry a few months to develop their visions and put pen to paper and we got about 15 or 16 submissions of what we call cons vision concept papers and they came from a whole variety of perspectives everyone from the trade associations for the municipal utilities and the rural electric co-ops to a former federal regulator to former state regulators to university research centers technology company executives all of these different people thought leaders in the industry with different perspectives all articulated their visions for the future and then we spent six months going around the country convening forums to talk about those variety of visions and really just creating this safe space for people to have what is normally a very contentious and uncomfortable conversation because it was all theoretical we were talking about this theoretical hypothetical 51st state we were not talking about anyone's individual service territory or state so it really created this great environment for people to be comfortable thinking outside the box talking about what could be possible and not getting so focused in on what our current constraints are today so this was the first phase of the initiative and really with the concepts that were submitted we put them into two primary buckets we had a handful that were essentially saying listen today's market there's no one market design in the u.s i'm sure most of you know there are many different designs but people who are saying generally the market designs that we have work we just need to tweak some things in order to be able to optimize der but we don't need this wholesale shift it's just little tweaks to what we've currently got and then we had a whole another set of visions submitted that said no we need a paradigm shift we completely need to have change how we run this industry so it really created this great opportunity to talk about different people's perspectives and and why we had these two very different positions and then so in the fall of 2015 we then launched the second phase and which was also a year-long process so the second phase we went back out to the industry and said we've now spent a year talking about all of these potential visions now let's get more specific and we want people to create road maps for how do we get from where we are today to your vision of the future so similarly it was another crowdsourced effort we had 15 or 16 submissions again of road maps some from people who had submitted visions in the first phase but others were new participants but one of the things that we did that was very critical was creating a framework for the roadmap process because one of the things that we've seen as I as I pointed to in Arizona the conversation has gotten very narrowly focused on rate design and you know our concern is if we're really trying to think long term how this industry is evolving we need to think more holistically about not just rate design but the utility business model how regulation is is handled what IT what IT infrastructure changes are going to be needed what changes need to be made to the retail market to the wholesale market all of these different things need to be taken into consideration holistically and not just narrowly focused in on any one piece of that equation because if you're too focused in on just one piece ultimately you're going to have unintended consequences with those other pieces if you haven't laid them all out again collectively towards your vision so the road mapping process went well similar to the first phase we spent six months following the submission of the road maps going around the country having conversations at various industry forums about the road maps and now we're really to the point of our team spent this summer sort of digesting the past two years of what we've learned what we've heard what we're in the submissions but also what was the dialogue that we've had now with hundreds of thought leaders across the industry in the US and come away with essentially for what we're calling doctrines so we were really looking for the common ground rather than focusing on where people disagree which there's plenty of places people disagree where the places where we can get agreement at a high level that can be served serve as the basis for constructive conversations state by state going forward so for doctrines so the first one is really around market efficiency you know that the primary goal of the market should be to promote efficiencies in the production consumption and investment in energy and related technologies now some of the things that we see or could see happen that support this obviously would be investments in energy efficiency investments in distribution automation a greater focus on distribution system resource planning and that really is becoming a much larger focus in the US just over the past 12 months 12 to 18 months we're now seeing a number of states where either driven by the utility or by policymakers where the expectation is that the distribution utilities need to have a much deeper and sophisticated understanding of the system so whether that's understanding the hosting capacity of every individual feeder in terms of how much distributed energy resources could go on to that feeder sort of without any investments in upgrading the feeder or the system or what what levels would trigger additional investments but really much more sophisticated understanding of the distribution distribution system today we've got about 50% of US households have smart meters but smart so we still have half the country that does not have smart meters but even the half that does we haven't yet fully understood all of the capabilities that advanced metering infrastructure can deliver back to the utility to the entire system and individual customers so we really need to work on continue to work on making sure that we're leveraging those smart meter smart infrastructure assets to deliver value back to both the system level and the end consumer at grid modernization generally is a huge focus in the US right now there's 32 billion dollars in grid modernization investment that's expected by US utilities this year and that is a huge focus of most of the utility or many of the utility filings that are going into commissions this year are requests for investment in grid modernization efforts so the first doctrine really around market efficiency the second is around the the clear definition of roles going forward specifically for utilities but other market players so there is no single agreement on what the utility of the future will look like as we've talked about but we do think that there is agreement amongst stakeholders that that there needs to be an explicit conversation in each state in the United States about what that role will look like the end result may be different in different places but we should be talking about you know in places where the utility in the US is still vertically integrated will it remain vertically integrated or is it going to move to a DSO model a distribution system operator or just a distribution system platform in New York they have a massive proceeding happening called reforming the energy vision rev and that is focused on moving the utilities towards a just a system platform model so essentially they're creating the platform where others can plug and play into the distribution system they also are there's a lot of components to the reforming the energy vision proceeding but but an important piece of it that ties back to this idea of defining the roles is also about defining the business model and the revenue streams for the utility so as part of that they're still working through the details but essentially the utilities in New York will now be able to earn revenue in four different ways one is the traditional cost of service model the second is achievement of alternatives that reduce utility capital spending and return value to customers the third is by the utility creating market facing platforms so creating the platform for those third parties to to engage in the distribution system and then the fourth is moving towards similar to the UK moving towards more outcome based performance measures and so the utility can earn on efficiency investments they can earn on the not quite sure how they're going to do this but the satisfaction of the industry and customers related to interconnection of DER to the system and also they can earn on customer engagement so again I'm not quite sure how they're going to measure this but to really look at customer choice how many customers are engaging in new innovative programs that the utilities are offering so essentially they're really redefining the utility business model and the definition of the role of the utility in New York as one example they are definitely looked at in the United States as on the bleeding edge of all of this transition some states are interest some states and some utilities are interested in following their lead others are maybe not they're looking at them with through a little different lens thinking that they are crazy to be taking on what they're taking but again we'll see how it all plays out over time so the second doctrine was a clear definition of roles the third doctrine is around rate structures and really helping to rethink and this conversation is already happening everywhere in the US everyone is looking to redesign the rate structures but there certainly is not agreement on what the right rate model is in the US the majority of utility rate structures are primarily volumetric at this point and obviously looking to ensure as more and more customers are generating their own power their own electricity ensuring that the rate structures are designed in a way that we can still maintain and upgrade the grid as needed for all customers benefit so a lot of things happening a lot of conversation around our time of use rates the right way to go is it residential demand charges is it fixed charges and most certainly no agreement on that we're seeing some momentum in the US from the UT from utilities going back two years ago most utilities were talking about fixed charges we've seen a little bit of a shift just over the past couple years so more conversation around potentially going to residential demand charges but certainly no no general agreement yet and what direction people are going to go going back to Arizona if you look at Arizona Public Service which is the largest investor on utility in the state they actually it's interesting because they're they're the ones in the middle of this controversy more than anyone um especially around rate design and yet they actually have 120 000 of their customers who for a long time have been on a rate structure that is a combination of time of use and demand so they actually have a significant portion of their customers that before these debates even started happening around clean energy about around rooftop solar particularly or or or storage within residential customers homes um already had customer acceptance of this idea of this three part rate structure that included time of use and a demand charge uh but yet the the solar industry and there's no one solar industry in the US there's many factions that have very different perspectives but the the national solar leasing companies that are focused pretty much exclusively on the solar market uh are very opposed to utilities having residential demand charges um at the same time it's interesting because uh they're locally more of the solar installers are beginning to also offer storage in combination with solar and so that part of the industry is saying no no no we like demand charges this makes storage much more appealing so it's this very interesting dialogue happening uh to try and figure out what is the right rate structure and not just focusing on today's technologies but what are the technologies that are coming so we need to be careful that we're in the US that we're not so focused just on rooftop solar because that's the hot thing right now but we know storage is coming very fast and EVs are coming very fast and other things are coming so when you think about all of those things together what is the optimal rate design in order to make sure that the utility has what it needs but customers are also getting what they need so the rate structure uh conversation is sort of the third piece of that the fourth is really around customer choice um as throughout our two years of conversations on these issues clearly customer education and customer choice has been a loud theme that's come through all the conversations and ensuring that customers have choice both in terms of rate designs so not all customers are the same they don't want the same things but that they have choice in terms of rate designs but also program options and you know part of it is thinking about the changing expectations of customers consumers generally today yeah as we see the younger generations who have their smartphone they expect real-time information on their phone and pull up an app on anything in their life at any point in time and that trans and that they want to be able to make choices about that right from their phone and that translates or will translate into expectations from their electric utilities or their energy provider whoever it might be but not every customer is that way so we need to be thinking about this general changing consumer dynamic but also know that there are always going to be people who don't want to think about their energy at all they just want the basic service they just want the standard option and that needs to be available to them so how do you think how do you begin to segment your customers in a way in which you're creating options across the customer base but for those customers who want choice you're also providing them a lot of choice one thing that's interesting in the US we've talked about customer choice for a long time for decades but historically it's really been around retail choice you know the ability of a customer to be able to choose whether they want their electricity provided by the traditional monopoly utility or by some third party so Texas now has complete retail choice as an example customers can choose who they want to provide their electricity to them so we used to talk about that as customer choice but it we're now shifting I think that's part of the conversation but customers want choice even even if they only have their single monopoly utility option they want choice from that utility and so we've seen with the the JD power surveys in the US that utilities that offer their customers choice have much higher customer satisfaction even if the customers don't actually choose any of those choices they stay with whatever the default is they have much higher satisfaction with their utility if the utilities offering offering choices to them and they know they're available so creating this customer choice is the fourth key piece of all of this so in terms of going forward you know we've been digesting these four doctrines as the wrap-up of phase two we're now headed into the third phase of the 51st state and the third phase so in phase one and two it was all theoretical it was all this fictional 51st state phase three is really where the rubber meets the road and we are actively looking for a real state in the US where the stakeholders want to work through the same process that we've been through with the hypothetical 51st state so we're looking for a state where the governor the energy office the utilities the environmental NGOs the entire community is interested in coming together and having a long-term facilitated conversation first to create a collective vision for the state going forward and then to create a roadmap on how they're going to get there so this is this is the exciting part but our hope would be we've created a framework in which we can begin to replicate this either led by us or led by others begin to replicate this in various states throughout the country to really help create some order out of what for many feels like chaos right now there's so much going on it's hard to keep track of all of the pieces but this really sort of putting it into a framework where it's there's a very clear process that people are working through and it's very stakeholder focused making sure that all of the right stakeholders have a part in the conversation because we believe if everybody works together to define the vision of the future and lay out all of the steps then that wall that big freaking wall becomes much less scary and we can all get there easier together thank you


If any live demo, if anybody saw me at summit, it always starts with this may not work, sorry, and ends with, actually works, this is amazing. Timothy will now be going live through this, and I will let him talk and tell you a little more about what he's doing. Hi. Give me a sec. Very important, I have replaced the beer keg outside. Yes. For those of you not familiar with beer, the one on the left is pure blonde. It's a low carbohydrate lager. For those of you familiar with beer, you'll understand why what I just said was an oxymoron. The one on the right hand side is great white. It's a vice beer and tastes much less bad, so I encourage you all to drink that one instead. Now Timothy has his things ready so I can stop my fluff and go straight over to the demo. By the way, I've noticed that we've had quite a few people voting on the poll on Facebook already. Please do continue to submit your ideas about things you'd like to speak about. So far, upside down, so far IoT is winning. Hopefully once Tim has presented, IoT will lose because you'll be like, wow, that's everything I ever needed to know about IoT and more. Right, Tim? So, hey guys. I'm Alex. I can't pull off the English accent. Louder. Louder. So Alex asked me to replace, which one was it? Honest be. Honest. We'll do a fantastic presentation of the next user group. Right. So my objective was just to jump in and replace, but also try to show you something fun and cool, rather than go through some very complex descriptions of our services and just to show you something fun that I've prepared for the India Summit. So next week I'll be in India for the Mumbai and Bangalore Summit and the teams there asked me to speak on IoT. So I'll be presenting IoT there. They asked me to build a demo because, so I've never been to India. And supposedly in India, you have street lights that work supposedly very well, but they're either on or off at the wrong times. Meaning, oops, this thing's weird. So they asked me if I could just build a demo for this. So I've built a demo. Can you pull out your phones and go to that URL? Don't type demo. Type the tiny dot cc. I've got auto scaling of what? Oh yeah. So what is the India Summit? What is the... Okay, so do you know what a summit is? Okay. So a summit is a big AWS event that we organized. Alex pointed out that we organized three summits last month, end of April. We went to Kuala Lumpur first, Singapore, and then Manila. So these are big AWS events that run for a day. In Sydney it was three days, I think, around the same time. It's a free event where we invite our customers to come and join us, and there's a lot of presentations around our services, new features, some in-depth sort of architecting types of presentations, as well as the developer tracks, which we're very appreciated. So everybody's loaded this? Zero percent. Zero percent. That means it works. Sorry. So I'm going to show you something else while you have that on your phones. For those who are not familiar with Alexa, about six months ago I did a demo using Alexa, and some people are like, ah, I really need to get Alexa. I wish I could get one. It's only available in the US. Well, you don't have to wait to get it from the US. You could download a free app, which is called Roger. It's not from AWS, and they've integrated Alexa. So basically you can use Alexa on your phones, which I will invite you to do so later, after my demo. So I'm going to be using Alexa for my phone, and I can do things like, Alexa, tell the India Summit to turn the light on. It takes a couple seconds, and hopefully if everything works well, if my demo works well. I couldn't find any smart devices on your network. Alexa, tell India Summit to turn the lights on. Hello. My next slide is a blue screen of death. Yes, it worked. Here we go. Woo! So hot. No, okay, here we go, ready? Alexa, tell India to turn the... Oh, sorry, that didn't work. Alexa, tell the India Summit to turn the lights off. I'm not pressing a button. I talked to Alexa. She's going to say she didn't understand. She's going to say, okay. Okay, so my point here is... So this is a demo. I'm not going to go into the details of the IoT service, and this is, if you bring it up as part of something you want to talk about next time, we'll happily sort of go over the service with you guys. The purpose for me tonight is to demo this, but to show you how I actually built this demo very easily, so that you can actually replicate this demo. So what's the architecture behind my demo? Does this have a pointer? On the far left, I've got Alexa or an Echo device. In this case, it's my phone. It could have been an Echo device. And I'm using a couple of services. I'm using Lambda, which will process the code coming from Alexa. I'm using AWS IoT, which is a service that allows to connect to my physical devices. Using three different protocols, which are going to be HTTP, MQTT, very efficient for electronic devices, as well as web sockets. And in this case, for the web developers in the room, you guess I use web sockets because I'm controlling your phones using a web page. And then I'm using Amazon S3, which you're all familiar with, as well as Amazon Cognito, which allows me to do some authentication of my web app. And, of course, a mobile phone. So how does this demo actually work? I'm using Amazon S3 to host a static web page. So for those who are not familiar, you can use S3 to host a static JavaScript HTML and CSS web application, which you don't need a server to run this. That web page gets pulled onto my phone. And then my phone uses Cognito to get an unauthenticated credentials into AWS to connect to AWS IoT using web sockets. So this is highly secure because I'm authenticating using credentials coming from Cognito from my web application. And once I'm connected and authenticated to IoT, I'm publishing and subscribing to topics, same as sort of web socket events that some of you web developers may be familiar with. I'm subscribing to topics that simulate the light bulb on and off state of the light bulb. Then, basically, I've built a skill within Alexa to understand my India Summit demo. So this is a skill that I've created within the developer account of Alexa to understand India Summit. And once I trigger that skill within Alexa, that will call a Lambda function that I've defined within my account. And as Alex pointed out in the introduction, for those who are not familiar with Lambda, Lambda is an event-driven compute functionality where you define functions that get executed on triggers. And you're only built for the time of execution of those functions. So there's no servers that you need to manage. You just define the code. And my code, in this case, just connects whatever I'm telling Alexa to do to AWS IoT. So once I've connected to AWS IoT, I'm basically telling Alexa, tell the India Summit to turn the lights on, and that triggers a modification within AWS IoT of the state of that light bulb, if you wish, that you're all displaying on your web app. And then I'm basically acknowledging the fact that the request was successful with AWS IoT. And I don't know if some of you heard, but basically Alexa replies OK, telling me that she's done it. But I could have had her say something really amazing, but I just couldn't think of anything else and OK. So she just replies OK. But once it hits IoT, it changes the state of my light bulb, basically the thing that I've described within AWS IoT. And then using the WebSawKids, this gets communicated back to my web application to trigger at this time from the client's side the state change of the light bulb image from dark to yellow, which is what you guys all saw. So that was easy, and I thought I'd improve it because they told me in India, OK, so that's cool. You can turn the whole street on and off, but supposedly they turn on and off at the wrong time. So I thought, let's bring a bit more of IoT into the mix. And so for this, IoT allows you to control things in electronics, right? So this is using RSDKs as well as this time a different protocol, which is going to be MQTT, which is very low bandwidth, low footprint, dedicated to connecting low memory, low power devices to the cloud. And in this case, I'm using an Intel Edison. I could have used anything else. This one's battery operated. And if you guys now switch, so I've divided, this is going to be complex. I haven't really planned for this. If the first five rows do summit one, these five rows do summit two, then these do 30 U to get the drift, right? So once you've loaded that, what am I actually doing? What you haven't seen is I'm holding one device and I'm walking around with that device, but I've reprogrammed another Intel Edison here, as well as one on the floor over there.  Those aren't connected to AWS in any way. They're just acting as their generic iBeacons. For those who are familiar with iBeacons, the whole Bluetooth BLE, what's the word? Identification, sort of used for geo-localization internally. For example, Apple came up with these so that when you walked up to the shelf of whatever Apple store product, your phone could know that you're physically close to that location. So if my demo now works, which I really hope, as I sort of walk left and right... This is scary. These guys should light up. Oh, so you guys should light up? No? What do you mean? This is going down. What's the percentage at? It goes down to five. Okay. One, three, twenty-two. Wait a minute. I'll light up, right?  You guys were on, right? So now as I walk this way, right? It's going to take a bit of time.   And as I keep going, you guys are up. So I'm walking on the street. And the lights are following me, right? Now let's solve India's street problem. Street bike problem. Yeah. There's the end of my demo. Too fast. That was good speed walking. I enjoyed it. So thank you very much, Tim. Any questions about IoT for Timothy before he drinks all of his beer? Is there a source code open? We'll find out and let you know. The answer is I can share the code. Because it's really cool. I know. I'm battling with a lot of people making sure that we can actually distribute code. Yes. I'll find a way to communicate it to you guys if you're interested. But it's really simple code. The whole purpose of this demo was to really showcase how easy it was, because this is a simple, very simple static web app. It's just loading two different ones. In the case of me walking around, actually, no, let me rephrase that. If you were to load the India Summit one, as I walk from left to right, basically you mentioned the percentage, right? So I have five images that I focus based on the percentage so the light can actually gradually increase.  But that's sort of a very simple web application using WebSockets, where I'm just changing the state of my images based on the messages that I'm receiving, live, push notified to me using WebSockets. Now, in terms of the device itself, the IntelliDison is a Linux board, so you don't actually need an electronic device. You could simulate this off of a Linux computer or Raspberry Pi. For those who were here six or so months ago, we tried and failed that day. The Tic Tac Toe demo, in that case that used Raspberry Pi. So those are using Linux devices and using our SDKs, but the amount of code necessary for this demo is very limited. But again, long story short, I will find a way to share it with you guys if you're interested. Do you talk about the new skill that you're using? Yes. Is that done on Lambda or is that done on Alexa? So which part would you use Alexa to organize? So let's just take a step back. For those who don't know, so the question is around the Alexa skills for those who didn't hear. So for those who aren't familiar with Alexa, Alexa is really the sort of the voice recognition software that runs on the Echo devices that Amazon.com has built and is distributing in the US for now. But the Alexa, call it voice service, because that's the name, is an API that you can use and you can build skills as well as leverage the voice service by embedding it in Raspberry Pi or other devices, sorry.  You can just build your app. Or I just told you about the Roger app and you can get one for free. But to answer your question as to the skills, so Alexa out of the box answers the generic sort of what is the time or a lot of sort of questions that answers that have been built in by the Alexa team. But you can customize those by creating skills to do what you want. So last time six months ago, we created the tic-tac-toe skill, which is where you tell Alexa, I want to play tic-tac-toe. And she understands that and then passes those messages on to something else. In this case, this is a Lambda function. So in the case of this demo, the trigger is the India Summit. I just didn't have time because Alex told me to do this last minute, but I could have changed it to AWS User Group. So the trigger being AWS User Group. That's what you define as part of the skill. It's sort of the patterns, the word patterns that Alexa is supposed to understand and then trigger events, functions in where you're going to be using Lambda to process those functions and those data. So trying to answer your question in the best possible way, the Alexa skill part is really understanding the words India Summit, turn the lights on, turn the lights off. The speech recognition of that and sort of matching those words and then once it sort of matches those words, passes to whatever function I decided to trigger based on turn the lights on, turn the lights off. And in this case, it's the Lambda function that does the actual modification of the state within the IoT to then trigger the automatic publish-subscribe of your web interface. The mapping between the speech and the Lambda function where is it done? It's going to be at the Alexa side, right? It's at the Alexa side. So Alexa, you don't access through aws.amazon.com You actually build all of this in developer.amazon.com for which this is where it's time we probably move out for the beer because the reason I'm saying this is because Alexa is not an aws product or service, right? It turns out that it is an Amazon.com product and it runs on aws and then it triggers functionality in aws that we support. But all of the sort of the skills-based thing is things that you guys, we're going to try and support you as much as we can because basically it's not one of our products. So this is why I'm saying for the skills aspect of it you go to developer.amazon.com for the voice recognition aspect of it and then what your Lambda function decides to do whether it's sort of right to a database or trigger sending an SMS using Twilio or doing something else that happens on the aws Lambda side. Any more questions? Anyone else? No more questions? Awesome. Right, before I let you guys escape I just want to very quickly cover a couple of things so yet again I'll talk about the three things that you guys should do. There's already been some votes for the next topics for next month, next two months whenever. I think IoT is still winning. Please submit your votes in. People have started saying analytics would be good or other bits. We're still going to use Meetup for organisation because I think it's probably easiest rather than Facebook groups if you're anti-social or hate Facebook or don't want to be my friend, like most of you people. And then finally, if for some reason you didn't want to come and see us face to face, these will be posted on engineers.sg. Please note that the intro won't be posted. The intro won't be posted because I'm quite offensive. So if you want to listen to me for a little bit you have to come along. I'm really not selling this well. Anybody who wants to take a photo of that do so if you haven't just come grab me the URLs. One thing I've been asked to call out is on Friday of this week we have a big data workshop in this office. This big... Tim. This big data workshop will cover off EMR, Kinesis, Redshift, DynamoDB and S3. It's aimed at beginners to intermediate so if you're already a data analyst or a data scientist or a data engineer go drinking, do something else. If you are interested in skills along those lines, come along. Please RSVP or ask for more information from Lily and So, my colleague who is sitting out at the front desk. Her email is solilyatamazon.com She works in our BizDub team here in Singapore so many of you will have known her. She is the person that Wayne mentioned in the very first talk. Again, an hour and a half this Friday. Finally, again, thank you Huirin, Michael Chang and Valentine. Please look at engineers.sg. Finally any more questions grab myself, Timothy or Steve the gentleman in white over here in the corner. Everybody else from Amazon has gone home. Oh, there we go. We have Charles sitting at the front, he's an account manager based in Singapore and we have Veronica sitting over there who has recently joined us covering Indonesia. So please do ask us, otherwise I've replaced the beer taps, go finish the next keg. Thank you very much.


You will learn and make more money if you spend more time focusing on psychology and human behavior than $4,000 on a fricking horn section for a CD. You know what I mean or how much production you put into it or what microphone you use or get to? Nobody cares. Does it connect them? Does it get them right here? Does it emotionally? Do they connect with it emotionally? That's where you're going to win. And that's why some of these work tapes and demos. If Eric Clapton walks in with his guitar, just him and his guitar, he could be wearing cut off jeans and flip flops. But if he sings tears in heaven, I'm connected.


Hei, katsotaan, että tästä on aivan ollut todella hyvää ympäristöryhmässä, mutta koska korona ei olleet jääntänyt, niin tämä on semmoinen asia, mutta hei, meillä on tällaista kolme x plus CEO's täällä, joten meillä on Miikka, joka on nyt tai ei ole x CEO, he are still employed, then we have Andreas, who used to be a CEO, and Marianne, who used to be a CEO, so my first question is really that please tell me which one of you is the best CEO. The best?  Yeah, I would really say the same. Yeah, so hey, Slash has been about to go bankrupt like several times, right? I guess you have even cried. Tell me about what has been the worst situation, and now I want you to be really open, and no boilerplates please, just be really open of your feelings and the event, it can be a smaller Marianne, if you start. Yeah, I can start. I was the CFO 2013 before doing other things and running the conference, and the year I joined, I was 21, I had never done finance and never been CFO, the event was supposed to be 800k, the event was 1.6 million euro budget, and we all thought that yeah, like a lot of ticket sales and sold out, this is going so well, and then during the event and after the event just like invoices started coming in last minute stuff we had to do, we had tents and cable factory, had to buy gasoline with thousands of euros to warm the tents up and everything, and we had moments of zero cash from bank account, and we had partners abroad who just didn't pay their invoices, and I remember days between Christmas and New Year's that we had a limit of I could pay out 8,000 euros a day, so every day I paid 8,000, and that was max I could do it next day, I got again 8,000, that's what I paid, and ultimately we made I think 27,000 euros of profit, but I was not sure if that would have happened, not in control for sure.  I think all of us have gone through that at some point. No, it's that moment was something that actually happened after one of the events, there was a situation where everything had gone super well, but there were some people in the team whose experience wasn't great, and then obviously that colors everything that happens after the event, when you're supposed to be celebrating everything that's gone well, and then it is actually something where you as a leader feel like it's obviously your fault, you've done something wrong for something like this to happen, so then it's that's what happens I think quite often, but another time which is maybe it's not quite as dramatic as Marianne's experience or example, but one thing that was actually one of the most difficult and one of the most teaching experiences for me during the whole slash tenure was actually before I was CEO, I was doing investor operations, and that was the first year when we wanted to get a lot of people over from San Francisco to Helsinki, and there was no direct flight, and obviously you have all these billionaire investors who are used to having their private planes or at least a direct flight in first class, and they wouldn't move their ass anywhere, so somehow someone managed to make a deal with Finner that we can take one of their brand new airplanes, the big Airbus A350 ones that have 300 seats, that we can fly it over to San Francisco to get the speakers over on a charter private flight, but obviously the thing was that we had to sell four legs of flights, so we had to fill the plane with people out of Helsinki to San Francisco for the duration of the conference to be able to cover the finances of doing that, so we just spent several weeks in San Francisco just from meeting to meeting to meeting, literally knocking on people's doors, selling the seats on the plane, and there was one particular call which when I was there with another friend of mine who was also in the team who's now running his own company as well, you called with Nikki who was working with you back at the time and we were just in between some meetings that you asked, well how many seats have you guys sold? We had only gotten a lot of American interest, yeah we'll talk to everyone about it and we're going to do it, but obviously the response was that there was zero and I think the next day there were headlines in one of the main newspapers here that slash flight sold out, which is then we had a little bit of Shustufilm.  Yeah exactly, so I started as a CEO in January 2020 and we cancelled the event in March and I think that's definitely the most toughest experience that I have gone through. Obviously back then if you think about it back in 2020, at that time March, April, many people thought that the pandemic will be over after the summer or during the summer, but we kind of like felt that in the best case we could do the event and it will be okay. In the worst case the downside was that the slush will go bankrupt and obviously when we realized that and when I actually realized what it would mean, it would mean that I have to lay off many of lovely slush team members that was definitely the toughest part and I have to do it and go through it and I think one of the biggest learnings from that experience was that there was many times that I wanted to kind of like hide myself under the mat, but I just realized that it's me eventually who will do the decisions and will push forward this organization. Kind of these men horvits, hard things about hard things, are you actively running towards the pain? I think that's the core learning of the past two years of being a CEO of slush and that's also one of the reasons what makes me so incredibly happy and grateful for seeing all of you here today. So thank you for being here. Yeah, so this is maybe a little bit provocative question, but like if you think about like slush, this is like a great event and this is a really good like a leadership grinder in a way, right? You all are nodding, but when you left slush, so when you left and when you left and when you're leaving right now, do you feel like a pressure that you need to be successful? What if you fail? I mean, what if you found a company and it fails? Don't you feel like a pressure? You are like the star of the ecosystem, right? And then you found a company, you fail. What happens then? Do you feel the pressure? Yeah, it's a good question. I think the wall team hasn't helped this, the pressure thing, but I think it's highly likely that the first thing will fail or the second one as well. But I think how I think about it is that I'm building something on the long term and obviously it involves maybe a few failures, I don't know. Hopefully the first one is successful, but I don't know. I'm not taking a stress about it. What was your experience like? Well, I can say that the first thought, I mean, I guess it's a very human reaction is that, okay, what do others think? Like, where can I go? But I've really learned during the last years that no one cares. I actually, like in Finnish, what I would say, Geta ne ihan oikea stikkii nostamita feit. No one really cares what you do. So do only the things that make you happy where you learn, that kind of give you energy every day. And that's kind of also what I end up doing. I went through a lot of different alternatives, everything from going back to school to finding a company of my own and joining WALT was just the best, felt the best choice. Yeah, hey, that sounds like a really good advice for everybody. Just do things that you enjoy. Everything else is a side product, right? So how about you, Andreas? For me it was clear for a long time that I'll have to do my own thing and I had my own areas of interest that I really wanted to contribute to and my way of contributing to them, I think was probably starting my own organization because I didn't find anything that was directly doing what I wanted to be doing. So it was kind of a self-evident choice, but when it comes to the pressure, that's definitely there. But then again, having had the experience of running slush, you kind of alluded to the fact that it's a leadership training program, not only for the CEO, but for many other people in the team as well. And we've spoken about it with Marianne Ricquam-Mikki as well before, that never again, even if you're building a highly successful company that is growing very fast, takes on a lot of funding and there's a lot of pressure, never again will you feel the same amount of pressure as you do here when organizing this event because you have all the same elements as when you're building a company, but the time pressure is so absolute. It's not like you're launching a new product and you can postpone the launch event, everything has to be ready by that one day and there's just no slack. So when did you realize that everything needs to be ready by one day? Was it like if the event is first of December, is it like during the summertime or first part of the event? When do you realize that the deadlines are real? I mean, I guess these days it sets way in advance. Yeah, but when do you realize that it's coming? It starts feeling after summer vacations and then it just becomes more and more intense. But what typically happens is that a group of team leads, like tens of people joined the team, August 15, somewhere there. And then action starts happening every single day. And then typically, about six to four weeks before the event, we really need to lock stuff so that the production you see around can be produced. So that's like the first deadline that you really can't miss. Yeah, so how do you actually do this? I mean, I've been wondering it like, I mean age is not the critical thing, right? But you are like 20-something and you are like 2-3,000 volunteers. So you're running like a 2-3,000 person company. You had also like 2-3,000. Now because of coronavirus scale down, it's like 1-2,000. It's still a pretty sizeable team, right? So how are you doing that?   You know, you have a beard, so that's great. But that helps, I know. But how do you act like this smart Gandalf who comes to the stage and kind of tells to the troops and sets the spirit and culture and everything that people have been talking about here? I mean, you didn't get any training for that. So how is that possible? Well, not formal training. But my answer would be you just flex the muzzle.  So you just flex the muzzle.  So do you mean that you train it or you flex it? That's so amazing. I've always been wondering that I couldn't do this. You still can, Timo. It's not too late. I couldn't. If somebody would say that Timo, you will run slash, I would run away. No, I think like with anything, it's of course, the way you succeed is by building a good team who does the actual work, obviously. That's such a jargon.  But it's true. It is true. But it's such a jargon. You know, build a good team. So how do you build a good team? You have never hired anybody before this. It's a good question. I mean, I don't know how we did. This thing still exists. Yeah, I know. I was the chairperson when you were the CEO. And you had a good team. I mean, there's like Emma, who is right now COO at Swappy, right? Yes. Great company. There are several other people who are doing great things, right? Filling companies, et cetera. But how is that possible? Are you so charming or? It doesn't start from us. No, no, no, no. So where does it start? Does it mean because of the board is so good that everybody... Definitely. I think it starts from the fact that, at least to me, like why did I join it back in the days? The sheer amount of responsibility you can take, even as a volunteer, and how much, like the amount of action and energy you find is, it doesn't exist anywhere else. And when you see growth stories like, you know, Otto, for example, who was talking in the volunteer's day, who's been here in the ecosystem and now runs a company of its own, you really kind of, you get it. You understand that these are stories where you can get a lot of inspiration and energy for, from being part of it. So that's really a big part of it, understanding the culture and getting, being part of it. And then realizing that I can actually impact. I told earlier about the story of me being 21. I had no idea of finance. I found myself running finances for a conference of 1.6 million euros. Where could I do that elsewhere? So basically the three things that we look when we hire people to this last team is, one is that, do we see that the potential of these people is about to explode when we give enough responsibility? The second thing is kind of this clarity of thought. And also, thirdly, is this person actually a great person? Because we want to find people who are smart, but also good people. And when you have these kind of people that have these three different traits, and you say kind of like what we want to achieve, you don't have to say like how to do it. They will figure it out. And then you just kind of like build kind of like the environment where these people can foster. I think that's how this event gets built. So why have you been doing this? And just for the audience, you know, maybe this is unfair to say because these people are just like outstanding, right?  But in fact, like when you started, you just took it over, right? You just started doing it. When you started, there was nobody else basically, right? It doesn't make you, you know, when you started, it was also in a way that, hey, it's gonna be this guy, right? So why are you doing this? Are you pressured by it?  So then it's very difficult to say no, you know, Ilkapanen comes to you and says that you can't say no. So and I remember you guys were all thinking that should I take this task? What were you thinking in that? Did you really feel that this crown jewel of Finland is now in your hands and you can't break it? You have a duty to do it or was it just like you said that hey, let's do it, right? For me, it was literally, I was sitting in the middle seat of a car, back middle seat of a car, driving back from Lapland. I get a call. Can you do this? I say yes, let's do it. Okay, good. So that's the story. So how about you? Did you feel like that this is something that you wanted to do, something that you were required to do? Is this relevant question? Because I remembered all these talks. Yeah, I think for me it wasn't obvious. Obviously, being the CEO of Slush is kind of like, there is a high tendency that you would go into that role for wrong reasons, for having a chance to speak on this stage or do the opening show or having the privilege to speak in front of all of you in general. But I really have to think about like, what do I have for this organization and am I doing this for the right reasons? And when I realized that, yes, I am. I want to learn to build the company in the future. This is a great sandbox to do it. And also I have been part of Slush as volunteers since 2014. So I really live and breathe the mission, create the help founders to change the world. So that's how I eventually decided. I think it's not entirely untrue that there isn't pressure from these people who have, you have already gotten to know the people who have done it in the past. But then again, obviously it ultimately has to be your decision and there's certainly, for me the reason, it wasn't obvious for me either. My other option would have been to start my own company back then and not do this instead. But then combine with the fact that it's such, it's a learning opportunity that you will just not get anywhere else on that scale at that level of, or with the little life experience that you have. And on the other hand, maybe you think rightly or wrongly that you have some ideas where you think like, okay Slush has this certain kind of a potential, which I think it can fulfill. And if I take on the job, then at least I can only blame myself if it doesn't fulfill that potential that you see in it. So that's maybe one part of it. And then obviously it's just a huge privilege to be surrounded by the kinds of people that you are surrounded by when doing this. That's reasoning of itself. Hey, totally different question. And I know because we have been discussing this with Mika, for example. So now when you are leaving this, you want to find an idea for a company, right? And that's very difficult. So how do you decide what you do? Which industry, which idea? So do you get to the cottage over one month with friends and a lot of beer cans or something or sweatsuits or choking activities or whatever.  What's your methodology? What are you going to do, Mika, in practice? That's a good question. How do you find the idea? I think you sold also one of the ways you sold this position to me was that this is a good time to think for your next company. And how much have you had time to think about it? Well, the pandemic didn't help. But I have some ideas. So after Slush, it's time to sit down. What I have maybe realized from discussing with many entrepreneurs, it's not a thing that just comes to your head at some point and you just have to do it. There are companies that have been built from that way as well, but I think it's an active process. You have to look for problems, look for things that could be done better. But how do you look those? So do you walk the streets and you look around or do you read articles? I mean, what is the way how you look those? Do you discuss the smart people? It's a good question. What about Andreas? You have been kind of like in the midst of process. He would have made a really good politician. Yeah, we were joking ahead of time. That's why, by the way, the biggest risk with Slush active members is that they become politicians. Hasn't happened that much? No, it hasn't, because there's a pressure. Let's see if that changes. Well, I've been in the middle of trying to navigate what the company should do that I'm doing. And we've gone through one fairly large transition already. And I think the way to navigate it is that's, I mean, it's pretty clear that you shouldn't start a company just for the sake of starting a company. No, I don't think that makes any sense. Why not? Because wouldn't it be just good to do something instead of thinking what to do? Sure. You can do that. I wouldn't do it. I would do something else. And then in the meantime, try to think. If I have an idea that could actually be best deployed as a company. Like me, if I have access to it done now. Well, very successfully, yeah. With a lot of spare time. It's a difficult question. Yeah, it's a difficult question. Because I don't know how if I would need to go out right now and say that I want to become an entrepreneur in six months. And we have invested in like 120 companies. And there's always a different story. How you run into the company idea, right? And it's always a different story. But the worst thing is that you try to invent it forcefully because you want to be an entrepreneur. It's very difficult to push through the obstacles. If you are not like 100% committed to doing what you decided to do. Right? Well, yeah. One thing that Slush is great for is finding. Getting access to people that you otherwise would not get access to. Yeah. Which means that if you actually manage to develop relationships with those people and stay friends with some of those people. I have a story where my co-founder is someone who I got to know through Slush over the years. And we stayed in touch. And now we are co-founders. What is your message? And let's start with Mika maybe. I'm hearing a lot. I mean, I haven't heard it lately. But in 2019 as a chairperson, I got a lot of like emails and calls that hey, Slush is totally irrelevant. It's too big. It's too cluttered. It's too old. You need to renew yourself. It's kind of becoming irrelevant. Why is Slush not irrelevant? Yeah, I think... I want sharp answer. Okay, then I have to think. Well, I think it's... The reason is what I also mentioned in the opening show. I think we all have learned to do things remotely. We have learned to raise capital. We have learned to build organizations. Some of the organizations are fully remote. But Slush is not only what happens in the meeting area. Like finding deals, doing transactions. But it's more the community. So meeting other people. Sharing advice. Getting inspiration. And learning. So I think that makes Slush relevant now and the future. So what's your opinion? It still seems like people want to meet each other. In some sort of a focused setting. And that seems to be happening here right now. Yeah. Especially with one gap here. It seems like the people who got the most out of Slush were really missing it. Those people are definitely here. I've seen those people. But it's a good question. I mean everything has to... We were having these discussions already back in 2018 and 2019 as well. So... Yeah. No finished answer. For me, I mean look at the crowd. I don't think anybody is forced to here. Or do I know? You can raise your hand now. Yeah, I trust the evidence and also myself. I was yesterday walking around for... What was supposed to be a 10 minute round around the venue. But it took me two hours. Because I've just met so many people I haven't met in two years. And it was amazing. Like the best part of my Slush. I really hope everyone else has had a similar experience as well. Yeah, there's this serendipity. I think it's great. Hey, now I offer you. I've been on the Slush board probably for too long already. Since 2012 or 2013 or something. I've seen every living Slush CEO. There are no unliving CEOs. Yeah, that's right. Just to be clear. But hey, tell me. And now you can be brutally honest. How the board could have been supported you better. What did we not deliver? As you can tell, we did not get this question ahead of time. And now if you have really hard things. Tell before and I block my ear. So we can still be friends. Yeah, we'll be friends anyway as well. Yeah, you're on the board right now. Yeah, okay, yeah. I'm in a very biased position here. But Andreas or Marianne, if you want to start. Yeah, if I start. I think the role of Slush board has always been rather to be there for the team through tough times. But it's never been really like this decision making where the team would come with like, you know, I need an approval for doing this or this or that. So it's been always a great, great form of feedback. If there's something that I would have done differently going back five years from now, I would have just utilized the board more. Like just nudged people. I don't think it's the board's responsibility to nudge me all the time, but I could have realized that I could have leveraged what the board had a lot more. That is actually before I give you some time to think. That's actually as an investor. What I'm kind of seeing is that the best teams are actually really good at dragging you in. So you are in a way that hey, I have like, imagine 10 companies. So it's not 10% time for everybody, but it's like 40% for somebody who drags you in all the time. It's like the best entrepreneurs are really good at utilizing advisors. When I was an entrepreneur, I was really lousin that. I was also really lousin that as a CEO of Slush. So what about Andreas? I think the trouble is that you have people who have been involved with Slush for such a long time that in a way, if you want to do it your own way, there's a certain barrier for asking for advice because you feel like the old world is going to be reflected in the advice. And there's no renewal in that sense. Now this is maybe a little bit abstract. Don't trust old timers. No, it's not that. Old timers give old-timer advice. Which is fine. You're just a private mover, right? Thank you. That's why my advice never gets implemented in any of our companies. Now I always learn something. No, no, I like seriously speaking. Of course, I agree with Marianne. There's a wealth of experience represented in the board. It's by design. I think it has always been so that the board is not in the way or steps out of the way of the operative team of actually building that company. But it is there when it's needed. And it's definitely up to the CEO or the core team to utilize the board.  And if the board doesn't want to intrude, then maybe you do waste some of the potential that is in there. So what you are saying is that the board is lacking commitment, right? No, I'm not saying that. You're still here. So Mika, you have the most refreshed memory. Yeah, I don't know. I would say I have taken quite active role with the board. With managing the schedule and creating way too long board decks. So sometimes it would have been great if you have just said just use one slide and tell what's essential, not 40. Other than that, what you have done well but what maybe our team and especially me, just calling. Just calling. One day, 10 minutes, how it's going. Is everything all right? That's maybe one thing. But all in all, I think that's it. Maybe we have to do a debriefing in Christmas. Yeah. So that's good. Hey, why do you think that all this Lassan community is happening in Finland? Why not in Denmark? So why is it happening here? Finnsa is not really like networking people. No. But it still all starts with people and I think as with everything it started with people. There was a clear cause changing the culture towards entrepreneurship and everything and people were willing to do that and then timing. We were just a bit lucky as well. So where did that cause emerge? So the beginnings of all this started in 2008, 2009, 2007 and like you said it was because somebody wanted to do more companies, right? More startups, more entrepreneurs. So how did the cause emerge? Very briefly. A few people like Christo, Ovaska and Miki and others. Bunch of people saw what's happening to Finnish economy. Mainly corporates, new companies were not being established. Saw what's happening around the world for example in Silicon Valley and understood that we just don't have this. And becoming an entrepreneur was not something anybody someone graduating from university would even consider doing. We just completely changed. So why here? You have traveled a lot. Yeah, Finns Finns prefer doing to talking. I think that's one reason. I think part of that story is that these students who were initially involved in setting up the Alta Entrepreneurship Society and the whole foundation of the startup ecosystem they wanted to see what's being done in the different entrepreneurial capitals in the States and got back and got the advice from a professor very luckily who told them not to do another report but actually to do something. So they just did something. So normal small people, right? Yeah. I mean they're great entrepreneurs. No Gandalfs. The beard helps. Miikka, why is this here? You have been also traveling a lot. A lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of cities. Yeah, I think it's super simple. So there was actually really national need for for more startups, more companies to be built. So why would you care about national need?  You could move anywhere. Yeah, I think it's a it's a different pitch to ask help for. Whether it's to get one speaker to slush or whatever when it's, if you compare like we have this event that I'm building for profit could you help me to get speaker than it is. So we're doing this event to create and help founders to change the world and also build better ecosystems to help Sinki. We're not profit organization. Can you help? So I think these things that really like in the essence like what slush and these other ecosystem organizations are I think that's the core reason why it's here not in different cities. Let's have applause for these mission driven leaders. I have really been privileged to work with all of them. Although I tried to give hard time but they are all like great human beings. Thanks for everybody.


You need a financial advisor with the freedom to focus on your specific needs. Whatever your goals, Reid Potter can create a game plan tailored to you. Call Reid at 432-0777 at Pikeville, Kentucky to learn more. Due to its impending closure, the Oil Springs Cultural Arts and Recreation Center will be holding an auction on Thursday, September 28th. Our ambition is to make sure it falls into the hands of people who will carry on the tradition. The Oscar Center has been an anchor in the community of Oil Springs for over 20 years, teaching interested artists in the region about various topics ranging from sewing and ceramics to stained glass making and mural painting. However, this is not the end of the services offered at the Oscar Center. So we feel like we're stepping back maybe more than stepping down because we still have an organization. It's a 501C3. It's called the Route 23 Cultural Heritage Network. And that is where this concept we fully intend to carry on. That we will have more performing arts, more artisan classes. Multiple thousands of people have participated and learned something in some way. So we feel like it's been a good run, but it's time for a new chapter. The auction at the Oscar Center will begin at 10 a.m. on Thursday, September 28th. Final bids will be at 5 p.m. For more information or updates on future projects, you can visit the Route 23 Cultural Heritage Network Facebook page. For Mountain Top News, I'm Kelsey Dean.


I'm going straight. Shackle, MCDK. Shackle dead one. Got him. I'll Shackle Garg in a sec, okay? Yeah, that's it. Occasion down. I'm blinking. Rep on me, I'm staying up, okay? Yeah, that's it. Can I go? Yeah, go. Back kick, shipping, okay? Yeah, that's it. Can't see him. Yeah, going. I'll fit both, I'll fit both. Hodger me, sitting. Yeah, that's it. I'm waiting. Nice. DK, trinket. Gonna fair. Shackle DK. Got it. Nice, man, that was so clean. Sitting fellow.  I'm gonna melee him. No, please, mate. Oh, my. If he lost, like, a holy shot crits him.  No, but he gets a melee proc from me, and then holy shot crits him to like 70k, and then... Oh, my God, what a game. I'm gonna go in combat, though. He's winning. Rogue's here. Cheap shot. No, cheap shot. I'm gonna PS early, PS early. This is dance. I got my shield with the PS. Shield of Rogue, maybe? Yeah, yeah, I can... Don't do it, don't do it. Yeah, I won't. Probably gonna step me. You should have sit on a priest, though. Maybe you could have a get double. Yeah, but I wanna throw him away. Maybe, yeah, you're right. Yeah, okay. No, yeah, yeah, I should have stayed. You good? Yeah, I should be okay. No, you're not. Kidding me, kidding me. I still have stone form and trinket, it's okay. So it's before the kill? Before the kill. Nice, yes, man. Tripling three seconds. That's for me, I mean. For me, for me, yeah, yeah, got that. I kick?  No step for me, no step for me. I'm fighting away. Crap. Prep step, prep step. I ship that, I ship that. Maybe I should... I don't, I don't, I don't... Been on me? Yeah, yeah, yeah, he will dance. Trinket, trinket, trinket. Trinket, trinket, trinket. Okay. I stop. PS for next one, okay? Shoulder first. Yeah, okay. Tip the rug again. Just for me. You want to read? Reap poly? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do, do, do, do, do. Oh, he didn't pass through. Fuck. Yeah. Fear? Nice. MC, MC, maybe? I'm far, I'm far. I'm hitting, okay. Big damage on the road. I see, I see, yes, by the way.  I can block, yes. Getting the shield.  Keep going, keep going, keep going. Me? Dodge fit, dodge fit. Catch me. Fear and fire. He's so lucky, bro. Double, double, double. Kill off this. He has cloak and 30. Rogue, trinket. Use trinket, dip him, dip him, dip him. Stone form then for this. Everybody? Yeah. Nova? Don't, don't break it, don't break it. Oh, I broke it, I broke it, sir. It's okay, it's okay, it's okay, maybe? Blast? Finish him? MC, yes? Yeah, I got him, I got him. Nice. I mean, block C, sorry. Uh, yeah, okay. No, no, no, no, no. Fair priest. Crossing away. Watch the sheep. Deathing. I got it. He will fear me. Oh, he shared. Careful. I can fear priest soon if you don't get sheep. Deep on me. They're going me. I got the fear. Oh, fine. Got your sheep. Yeah. Take down. I'll stop again. You were about to get him, but... It's okay. Sheep priest. He has deep. I'm trying to get his fingers off. Okay. He lost your mark for some reasons. Sheep priest, okay. Priest is fed. Nice. I'm coming to help you find him again. Definitely. Nice, I love it. Uh... I'm going up. Man has gone out. Too many dysphoria. Yeah, I did this. Don't have that anymore. Priest is himming. Burning mage. Yeah. Drinking. Priest, I wish it. Drinking, drinking, drinking. Yes, yes. Nice to pinch him. I'll stop mage. I have no points that I go for this, right? Yeah, we just kind of drink. I need to stop the spelling mage and continue to burn him. Yeah. Yeah, it's fine.  Chilled. Getting it. Got it. I'll go for it here. I'm going to push here. One more, one more, one more. With the mage. Getting a barrier. Got it. It says mage. Maybe I can kill him. Maybe I can kill him. I'll keep the priest. With the mage, I have says for priest. Okay, just pressure. Yep. Who says priest? Check priest. Deep mage, drinking. Okay. The spoddy. Bullsheep on mage, Sine. I fast all CDs, bro. Yeah. They're shooting. Shouldn't have drank it. Maybe next year we can win. He's going to try and... No, he didn't have... He has fuel. Got the fuel. I want to fill both. I'm going to just fill his face one. There, priest.  Burn it. Yeah, yeah. He drank it.  He's just low.  You're best. You're best first. I don't have it. I don't have it. I'm C.S. Okay, sure. Okay, okay. Okay, okay. Okay, okay. Okay, okay. I'm trying. He has no ticket, by the way. Next year. I will, I will, I will. Yeah, that's it. That's it. We win. You got it? It's over. I'll see you soon. We can win, we can win. I'll see you, it's okay. I'm just holding C.S. Yeah, lining, lining. C.S. He's going to top in now. Maybe if you... I'm going. Got it. Def sheet. He's trying. Learning next. You should. Well, no.


Hey everybody this is Brian and welcome to the 38th lamp tutorial. Today we're going to be discussing interfaces. So let's just start by cranking out some cold here. Did I say cold or cold? It's been a long day. So interface and let's say person. And actually that's bad form. We should say I person. Now typically you would name an interface starting with an I. That way you know it's an interface. And then we'll just say public function say name. Now what is this? We haven't really seen this before. We got an interface. Got a name. Looks a lot like an abstract class because it's got a function that's not defined. There's no code block. And it's very similar. But the difference between an interface and an abstract class is an interface is not a class. An interface is a contract between objects. And I'm going to explain that here real quick. Let's actually make another interface. We'll call it I employee. Public function say ID because every employee has an ID number. And we're going to actually extend the I person interface. Now this looks an awful lot like a class. In fact it is inheritance. It uses extends. So we're extending the I person interface. So you can create multiple interfaces and can join them into one bigger interface. See we have an I person and then the I employee. Now let's actually make a class. Class manager implements. We'll say I employee. Now you see how we're not extending the I employee. We're implementing the interface. What does that mean? Well these don't exist in memory. And I'm not going to bore you with a long lengthy lecture on how memory works. But you should know that unlike a class these actually don't exist in memory. They're just a blueprint in its most basic sense of the word. It's just a structure. It's an abstract abstract class as you would call it but it's an interface. So an interface is just a contract saying that this object will have these functions. So the manager class we should implement these functions. Now how do you go about implementing them? Well pretty simple actually you just saved it. Let's grab this and then we'll grab this. Now notice how no errors being thrown. We actually can run this without everything it needs. So let's say we made a boo boo. That's the official technical term for it by the way is a boo boo. Notice how it has say name but it doesn't have say ID. Let's actually try and run this and see what happens here. Notice how hmm didn't spit it out. Why? Because there's an error. When you make an interface you have to define everything that you implement. I should say you have to implement everything you've defined. See how we're implementing I employee and we're only defining say name or we're only implementing say name. We also need the say ID. Now suddenly magically it works. Why? Because in the background it's throwing a fatal error. And if you've watched my tutorials on the error handling it's a little bit different when it gets into object-oriented programming but it's there. You can just simply test that by doing that. So an interface is a contract saying that the manager class implements or agrees to implement everything in the I employee interface. The I employee interface has the say ID but it also extends the I person interface through inheritance. So it also must implement the say name function. And there you have it. Now you may be asking yourself why in the world do you need any of this stuff? I remember when I first learned this I'm not going to say how long ago it was because it was a very, very, very, very long time ago. But when I learned all this stuff I remember sitting there going why do you need this? You can just make the functions in your class. You don't need any of this template interface guck. Well actually you do. Think about it this way. If you're writing code for a company, how many different types of employees are in that company?  You've got your HR people. You've got your sales people. You've got your IT folks. Even in IT you've got database people. You've got programmers. You've got web designers. You've got graphic designers. You've got business intelligence on and on and on. Well each one of those has the same basic functions. Each one of them should have an employee ID or a name. So you use an interface to define a minimum level or a contractual obligation that if it's going to be this type of person, a manager, a sales person, a HR drone, they're going to need to implement that interface. That way you can target that interface. You need to know that every type of class, whether it's a manager or a mail clerk, they're going to have the minimum allowed or I should say the minimum required, which would be in this case, name and ID. It takes a while to wrap your new head around that. Trust me, it took me a little while. But once you actually get into interfaces and really into object-oriented programming, they're a real life saver, especially if you start working in a team environment. Because let's say you're working on this massive code base that's going to target different types of employees and you're working on the manager class but someone else is working on, say, the HR class. Well, that's when you need an interface, a standard agreed upon way of doing things. So that's all for this tutorial. I hope you found it educational and entertaining and thank you for watching.