Welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Jean-Marc Lema and joining me today is Seamus Duhn, Managing Director for Interaction Ireland, part of Global Data Center for Digital Realty. Seamus, thanks so much for joining us. How have you been doing over the last 12 months? Well, it's been an interesting 12 months with the lockdown. Here in Ireland, it's been like most of the place since it's been a pretty strict lockdown. So a lot of looking after the staff, but similarly you saw from the quarterly results from some big hyperscalers, business has been strongly strong. So there's been a lot of growth and we've been quite busy. And luckily, we've managed to keep up and running no downtime while we're expanding a lot. So it's been a tough year for everybody, but for us, there's been a lot of growth and we've been extremely busy. And we need a lot more growth coming in the next few months and years. But just to give you a bit of background, tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got involved with the data center world and what does interaction Ireland's? I think most people will know what it does, but it just gives it a beautiful review of the business. Yeah, that's a great question for my point of view. I'm coming up on my second anniversary here with Interaction Digital Realty Company. Prior to this, I was a vice president and general manager based in Houston, Texas for a business in Hewlett Packard Enterprise. So a strong enterprise IT background at a global scale, lived in the United States and no travels did business in 170 countries. The reason I joined this company, specifically Interaction in Europe, was I could see where things were going, not just the transition to cloud computing, but the whole transformation of IT infrastructure and what it meant for business. And co-location data centers with connectivity rich platform with on-ramps to big public cloud service providers and SaaS providers was the future of IT. And I think we're just in the middle, probably at the early stage of a big transition. The cloud has been, transition to the cloud has been a trend in IT, but I think you're going to see a level of digital transformation in the next five to ten years that will rival what we've seen for the previous time. And that's why I joined this company. In Ireland specifically, well, digital reality acquired interaction and it's now one of the biggest data center, co-location and connectivity businesses in the world operating across six continents. And there's been a lot of integration work between digital reality and interaction in Europe, but particularly for us in Ireland, it's been quite, it's really changed for the better, particularly an in-bounds foreign direct investment style economy like we have in Ireland. Being acquired by a US company, which is just strong brand in the United States, has been a bit of a game changer and it's given us also a scale that we didn't have previously. So I spend a lot of time with my colleagues in the United States working on our business here in Ireland and integrating the two organizations. You said a lot of things that I would like to pick up and we will dissect your answer. I mean, starting with the industry itself, what you said is quite interesting that we are kind of in the middle of this transition. Now in the next five to ten years, it's going to be, it's going to transform the way we do things and the way business operates and how much we have to serve the market with. I would say the data center industry in Europe probably really start booming in the early 2010s. So I guess we are halfway the journey now, so the consolidation and now we're going into the expansion phase. But focusing on Ireland, I mean, Ireland is one of the most active markets in Europe. If not probably top three most active at the moment, which makes it one of the most active in the world. How do you describe the current market in Ireland, especially around Dublin, but even just beyond Dublin as well? Because this is the second topic that everyone is talking about. It's Ireland is not just Dublin anymore. There's Galway, there's all the other places. Tell us, I mean, I'm not going to carry on adding your words to my question. OK, well, Ireland is an interesting place. It's obviously relatively small in terms of population. But it's it's a bridge economy like there are some others, you know, like Singapore, perhaps a similarities in Asia, but it's different here. Ireland's a member of the European Union, you know, one of the biggest markets in the world and a very committed member of that. Ireland's the youngest population in Europe, significantly the youngest, very high portions of education and a lot of strong links with the United States. So very much a bridge between Europe and the United States historically. So there's a lot of it's a good and easy place to do business. And it's a strategy that's been worked on by successive administrations here in Ireland to be an easy place to do business and an attractive place to locate location, headquarter, your European base. And that's that's a couple of decades old. So some of the biggest names in, you know, the tech industry, particularly, but also the pharma and med tech industry have located their European HQs in in in in Ireland. And as you mentioned, different different cities around the the country, you know, pharmaceuticals and med tech is very clustered around the south. You know, medical device manufacturing in the West and, you know, a lot of the bigger new tech industries, more in Dublin, but actually Apple, for example, have a big presence in in the south and cork. So quite quite dispersed. So, you know, that's how the economy works. And, you know, with with not just the tech industry, but also the pharma industry has been quite a significant amount of growth from a foreign direct investment to this year. In fact, you'd have seen an article not too long ago in the Wall Street Journal, you know, citing that Ireland, in fact, was one of the few Western economies that actually he grew in the last year. Ironically, even though the local economy suffered like everybody else, you know, with with lockdowns and, you know, the consumer based economy, but the growth in both pharma and med tech and and technology as you've seen from recent quarterly announcements, you know, has created, you know, quite a growth level here. That's driven the economy in Ireland a lot. I mean, sorry, Korean. Yeah, I was going to address you had that specifically translates into, you know, the data center business. As you said, it's quite active. Dublin is is one of perhaps the biggest data center footprints of any metro in Europe, ironically, even though Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris are are huge, you know, the so-called flap. The difference in Ireland probably is there's a lot of hyperscale cloud service provider businesses who actually build their own capacity a lot more than they would do on other locations.  So, you know, they had a lot of competence to build their own capacity. So that's that's probably 70% of the market in Dublin. And that's that's probably the core driver. It's interesting how it's evolving over over the years. You know, the next tier down SAS providers particularly, they're creating a lot of the growth as well. And now more and more, you know, Asian companies, you know, from China, but not just China are entering Europe and creating some of the scale that the US tech companies did, you know, for the last 10 years. So capacity is huge and only expanding. In fact, COVID probably drove growth and accelerated probably more than it would have done if this had never happened. So yeah, that's it's quite dynamic here at the moment. Yeah, I mean, I find Ireland quite fascinating because I've been following that markets, the specific markets quite close over the especially since 2016.  So I mean, I think you guys done amazing in that sense. But one resource that people often talk about as a caveat when it comes to building IT infrastructure is power. People say Ireland doesn't have enough power. We've seen that your national greed and the government are now getting more involved in building more. But what do you have to tell people they still bring up the conversation around power?   In fact, the targets that's been announced by the government and right now the Green Party are part of a coalition in the government. So that's helping to drive and accelerate the commitment is to get to 70% of the grid power to be from renewable energy, particularly wind. You know, there's more wind energy than a country will ever need, but the target is to get to 70%. So there's a lot of infrastructure. What's happening now is a lot of historic power came from heavy fossil fuels, which was oil, peat, coal and those power plants are being decommissioned as we speak. There's been quite a number of announcements here about decommissioning heavy fossil fuel generators, generating stations and there's a transition. But in the transition, there's pressure on the grid. Right at a time and growth is needed across the whole economy, but certainly in the data center business. And the transition is to move towards, you know, gas generation as an interim solution until the grid can be upgraded to take the capacity for the investments in wind energy, both onshore, but more and more offshore. Sure, there's a consultation process going on at the moment from the grid management company, AirGrid. With the government, there's I think six weeks or so left of consultation to make decisions. But the targets get to 70% renewable energy and in the meantime, you know, transition from heavy fossil fuels to gas to bridge that capacity needs. So the growth is still going to happen. It's just in a different way, all driven by, you know, getting to, you know, more renewable energy on the grid. Well, it's just quite an exciting transformation. I'm happening even outside the data center, but then going to come into the data center. And speaking of facilities and correct me if I'm mistaken, you've got six facilities at the moment in service in and out of Dublin. What expansion plans have you got? Are you going to be expanding on your any of these buildings? Are you going to be building data center number seven, eight, nine, ten? Are you going to go out of Dublin? Are we going to see an interaction data center in Cork, for example? I've no announcements to make about, you know, we look at everything as you can imagine. We've actually got 11 data centers, actually 11 data centers right now in Dublin. And we have some pretty significant deployments in them. And we've decided that we're going to, you know, expand that capacity and footprint as well. The demand is there from some of our bigger clients. And then in actual fact, the integration, the acquisition of digital reality, the acquisition from digital reality of interaction has created significantly more demand with our presence in the United States.  So yes, we will. We will be, you know, adding significantly more capacity, you know, to our presence here in Dublin. We've no announcements about, you know, moving outside of Dublin, but we'll always examine us. I one of the key things that's going on is investment in the submarine cable capacity into Ireland. There's been a couple of big announcements with AEC2 landing in the West Coast. You know, we're going to hear some more stuff about investment in capacity from subsea cable networks.  So huge subsea cable networks, particularly between the United States and Ireland and into Europe. And so yeah, I mean, demand is just going to go. The local demand has stagnated, I have to say. You know, so a lot of the growth in the past 12 months has been from, you know, large US HQs, companies in Ireland for European capacity. Local demand has kind of stalled a little bit and enterprise, you know, non-tech demand has paused, let's say, and we're starting to see projects now picking up that we so we expect that market to begin to increase in the second half of this year and into 22. It probably wasn't a bad thing for us. It gave us some breathing space to expect, you know, the multiple segments in the market to begin growing, you know, in the second half of the year and next year. Would you say that its stagnation was sort of, it was a dire impact of the pandemic or just because of them? Yes. Yeah, no devs. A number of projects were put on hold, you know, transformation projects and businesses, you know, you could not be able to travel, you know, the whole switch to remote working, you know, whereas that created some demand, particularly network capacity and cloud services, it also created a pause for, you know, some IT projects that were planned, the transformation project products, expansion product projects, but an actual fact, ironically, even though it created a pause, it also proved the necessity for IT transformation and digital transformation in general, you know, it's more important than ever and that's realized.  So and they'll go faster. I don't think anybody doubts, you know, the need for an understanding that every business is a digital business. There's nobody, there's nobody that doesn't require digital technology to run their business. And then when you take some of the other mega trends around IoT, the implementation of 5G, you know, cloud migration, these things are all just kind of accelerating the need for those projects to happen, you know, even though it's sort of paused for the last 12 months.   Do you consider the speed that loads of businesses, including ours, suddenly switched to remote working and running our businesses in remote ways requiring us to do these interviews. I can remember 18 months ago, you were here in Dublin. We, we, we were at the talk face to face, but look at us now. But the network has passed this test, you know, the huge test and in a way it was an experiment that, you know, was proven you can go faster and you should. Yeah, I mean, the networks is one thing that we have to give that to operators that they've worked out brilliantly over the last year because you haven't really heard any stories of massive voltages and down times or anything. There was the odd one here and then slower speeds, but nothing, there were everything to stand still. So I mean, I can only imagine if this was happening without us having digital, I think you'll see an employment rates and things would have been a lot worse than they are. It would have been devastating. Yeah, it could have been a lot worse. Yeah. So, you know, it's, it's all very well and to be fair to, you know, some of the announcements recently from, you know, Amazon Web Services or Microsoft and Azure and from Apple, the demand has really increased and we, you know, no surprise there, but it's, it's, you know, they've been successful and things have accelerated and it's not slow. Yeah. The other thing to this is like everything that we're living through kind of was going to happen anyway. The petition is going to take us 10 years to get to this stage. We kind of just advanced in the special 12 months. I mean, the network quote, so you can only imagine like, do we really need to wait 10 years to evolve to something else? This, this is it. So, you know, there's no excuse to wait around anymore. The need to do it is there. It's not a risk. It's a risk not to do it. It's a risk to go slow. So, so that's compelling. The other thing I'd say is it, the need for digital transformation is a global need. We're finding that, you know, in our business, having a global presence is most of the big enterprises. When we take a focus on the top 2,000 to 5,000 accounts or businesses in the world, they need global partners for, for most of what they do. You know, you can't do one thing in, in Ireland and a different thing in Germany or the United States or Japan, you know, you need a global platform. That's why we've doubled down and investing in platform digital, for example. And, you know, you get a consistency of not just co-location services, but connectivity and implementing on a platform that's consistent globally. And that that's going to be very well understood a lot more now because of this acceleration.   But just to give us a quick glimpse into expansion plans, not just in Ireland now, but across Europe, what's interaction and digital reality preparing, let's say the next 12 months, because I'm sure you have a lot of construction going on on the back of all this as well. It's very exciting. So let me, I speak with my counterparts in Spain, in Switzerland, in Copenhagen, in Vienna. One of them said in the next three years, he will he will grow and expand more than he did in the previous 10. And and that's what we're seeing with not just the so Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris, that there are huge growth areas, but now spreading more across across Europe. That capacity is being driven from everything we were just saying before. We've also made some acquisitions. So, you know, and growth our presence now is in Croatia and Greece. And you'll see it a lot more also in Africa. And you know, you're going to see a bit more of that. And you know, as they as those locations join the global platform with a lot more growth to be created. It's not just in central locations, but, you know, in most of the cities. The other thing we're seeing is, you know, data traffic is exploding. Obviously the growth of data is exploding. So Marseille, for example, is a huge growth area because it's it's it's where a lot of submarine cable systems are landing from Asia from the Middle East also from Africa. You know, that's similar is happening in Portugal and Spain and the Iberian Peninsula. That's creating growth, you know, as we're also seeing in Ireland and, you know, places like Copenhagen. So that that's data traffic and data gravity actually as we'll talk about if where that data is existing is driving growth in our business and and in the digital economy in general. So it's yeah, it's it's there's a it's not going to slow. Are you going away? So we get ahead.  But Seamus, if people would like to learn more about the business and your next announcements and what's coming and keep up to that with everything, where can our viewers go to and register their interest? Well, in in Europe, we're branded as Interaction, a digital Realty company. So you can go to interaction.com and we put all of our announcements there. It's good to follow us on LinkedIn more and more where you, you know, like everybody else we're using platforms like LinkedIn to to communicate and globally digital reality and platform digital. You can you can access information about about them to digital Realty.com and learn about things like data gravity and, you know, our data gravity index. So what interaction.com for our business in Europe is the place to go. Okay, Seamus. Well, thank you so much for joining me. I thought it was very insightful and there's a lot of stuff there to follow up with me. And thank you all viewers as well for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA broadcasts and don't forget to check out social channels for more content. Until next time. Happy networking.


Waters are currently rising in the East Kentucky area, so much so that schools had to let out early on Friday the 16th. Pike County is now under a flood watch until Saturday the 17th at 6 a.m. Pike County Emergency Management Director Ne Jackson says there is little cause for alarm, but for Pike County residents to remain cautious. We do have a flash flood watch in effect in Pike County. This is in effect until 6 p.m. tomorrow. We have ranged from the northern part of the county, which in Martin County, but in parts of Pike County have received over in the south Williamson Belfrey area has received in the last 24 hours 2.19 inches. Hatfield has received 1.71 inches and 1.4 inches in the. Jackson is insistent about not driving on flooded roads. Rain will continue through most of the overnight hours and driving on wet roads in the dark is a recipe for disaster. As always, turn around, don't drown, don't drive through any flooded roadways. I don't know what the infatuation is with people driving through floodwaters, but those are dangerous situations. You have no idea what roadways look like underneath that water. We're going to catch a little break here for a little while. I don't think we're going to have much, much water here in Pike County. Most of the storm is going to our north. It looks like a lot of it has broken up by the time it gets to us. You know that that's a good thing anytime we can catch gaps in these systems where we catch a little time for water to run off. We don't have any rain going on at this current time. That's always a good thing. Reporting from Mountain Top News, I'm Nick Column.


Welcome everyone to this workshop which is empathetically defined and rigorously measured the customer value you deliver by Deepa and Kavita. Just to give you a brief introduction about Deepa, Deepa is a co-founder and CEO of Panzer Design and Kavita is head of research with Panzer Design. So without further delay, over to you Deepa and Kavita. Hi everyone and thank you Vishal.  We would love for this to be interactive so please do put in your questions, comments, thoughts, we'll incorporate that throughout the talk. So just as a quick introduction and to give you a little more senses to who we are, Panzer Design is a design strategy and an innovation consulting firm. And we actually help our clients largely on rates, small startups to solve their customer problems. That's really what we're all about. And today we're going to be talking about empathetically defined and rigorously measure the value you deliver to your customers. Vishal already quickly introduced us but my name is Deepa Bhashu and I'm the CEO and co-founder of Panzer Design. If you can go to the next slide Kavi. I have a background in engineering, product management, design and I've worked in the industry for about 25 years. Kavi if you can introduce yourself by going back to the introduction slide please. I also wanted to add that what Deepa won't tell you and possibly missed out on telling you was about was the fact that some of her work has previous work has been published as a Harvard business case study and also as an HBR article and more recently as an organization also we've had some of our design thinking work published as a HBR article. So a lot of our work around behavioral science and building products is what Deepa failed to mention but that's also part of her background. And about me I'm the head of research at Panzer Design and what we do again is of course employee behavioral economics principles but also qualitative research as part qualitative and quantitative. So we bring in mixed methods research to be able to get to better outcomes at the end of the day with the companies that we solved for. As a broad introduction to the mindset or design thinking itself. Kavi the slides have seemed like a little bit out of order. Could you go to thank you. Our approach is really anchored in design thinking. We really believe in starting by understanding the customer's needs and values and mindset. So the first stage is discover where if you see in the illustration there's an eye there's a year there's a word thought bubble but it's also a heart and it's really about observing listening and empathizing with the customer. So the first stage which is discover really involves knowing your customer better than they know themselves. The second stage is what we call insight which is about connecting the dots in interesting ways by completely savoring surprises. What did your customer do that completely surprised you? Looking at that connecting the dots and the facts you have whether through quant or qual as Kavi was talking about earlier and articulating our insights insights that really inspired innovation. Dream is the stage where you flex your muscles to go broad and try multiple ideas by building on each other's ideas as a team and narrowing to one that you believe truly solved the customer problem.  Now I did step through it like it was a linear process and really far from the truth. It's a very very iterative process. Sometimes you get dumped in dream and you have to find your way through the other stages. But it's an extremely iterative stage. The first two are ones where you're really falling in love with the problem and the second two are ones where you have fallen in love with the problem. You know what the problem is. You know how customers are going to measure success and then you go about creating a solution that will solve those problems that you're setting out to solve. So as far as trade out services are concerned, we do customer research. We do every type of design there is. But the part that we enjoy the most is when we're able to collaborate with a client and help solve problems together do it with them. What this helps us do is build that level of responsibility and accountability with the employees. We also learn from them the domain and we want to be those consultants that tell them what they already know but consultants that work with them to discover new experiences. So as far as trade out services are concerned, we do customer research, every type of design there is and what we call the culture of innovation. This might look like a brag sheet of clients but really the point I'm trying to make here is maybe there's a little bit of bragging there but the point I'm really trying to make is that design thinking is really agnostic to be to see, be to be enterprise, consumer, you know, finance domain, automotive.  Design thinking is a means to the end. It's a process that helps you solve big knowledge problems or even small ones and it doesn't matter which domain you're working in. The idea as well is that our global learning experiences shape our perspectives and I think having worked across the globe, we also have a clearer view into understanding cultural context. We look at, you know, the onset and Kathi is going to go into it a little more about how you overcome your own unconscious biases and by giving ourselves a global canvas, I believe that we've gotten better and better at really understanding the cultural context and understanding why people do what they do, even if it sounds completely silly that the customer is doing what they are, we have the ability to put our judgment aside and really be thoughtful about deeply thinking into why the customer is doing what they are. Our schedule is like so we're going to spend, you know, I'm already done with the introduction, we're going to focus on empathetically defined and then I'll talk, Kavi will talk us through unconscious biases and then I'll talk to you about rigorously measuring. We'll share a key study with you and then we'll go into actually working on it. As, you know, as experienced professionals, we learn most by doing and we hope that this workshop gives you a chance to do that. Kavi? Yeah. So like people said, what we'll cover today under empathetically defined and rigorously measured are a few things. We want to get into whether how many of you are aware of your unconscious biases, right? And how often have you fallen in love with the solution that that's been built versus really staying with the problem and falling in love with the problem instead? So that's the part that we'll cover today. And under rigorously measured, there'll be two questions that we'll hopefully surface up for you, which is what is the benefit your solution is delivering to your end users. And what is the time really? How quickly are we realizing this value for the customer? So we've right now we're getting into empathetically defined, right? What is empathy or what is it to discover? So time empathy back to discovery. Discovery is really all about understanding customer problems and their underlying unmet needs. It's about truly being curious about what your customers want, what they need, and listening to them and empathizing with them. The way we go about discovering is two ways. It starts with primary research and primary research involves connecting with your customers directly and hearing what they have to say or seeing what they do today. Whereas secondary research, of course, I don't need to explain this in too much detail. You know what that is. That is looking out for trends, looking out for competition who's already doing this, looking for data that kind of backs up some of the challenges that you might have or the topic that you want to research itself. While primary research and secondary research are pretty much the best ways to go about doing, discovering an unmet need or a real problem, it's something that we want you all to be aware of because as an organization that does a lot of qualitative research, here's something that all of us need to keep in mind, right? What does it really to specifically define? First, there are two things. First is the first principles thinking and the reason I'm talking about first principles thinking here is first principles thinking talks about breaking things down to the fundamental truth, right? And then reasoning up from there. It's a very physics way of thinking about the world. So bring everything down to its bare minimum and then see what and how you can reason up from this. So it's about freeing ourselves from every assumption and what does that mean? So often what happens is we run into this habit of just being assuming certain things will work a certain way because we're always very close to the problem, right? As a company, as an industry, when you work in a particular domain or industry, being very close to the problem also clouds our judgment in many ways because assumptions or biases start to creep in. And what happens is we tend to lead with those biases. The first principles thinking kind of forces us to break away from those assumptions or biases. And what really are unconscious, what are these biases that I talk about these unconscious biases are perceptions about customers, perceptions about users that is heavily influenced by what you know and feel, which is being too close to the problem, right? They're often unsupported judgments or opinions. How do you then convert that into conscious understanding? You can convert your unconscious biases to conscious understanding by conducting, like I said, interviews with your customers. And these are not just conversations, but truly understanding the ecosystem in which they function. So it's not just having these questions that you want to answer, but really seeing how they perform, go about performing their daily activities, functions within that ecosystem that they live in. And truly be curious and acquire new and deep knowledge, right? So what is confirmation bias? You know, often a lot of us, even with the best of intention and wanting to understand what the customer wants to say and what truly paints them, confirmation bias tends to creep in. And this is something that can be a very subconscious bias. So it's important to be aware of it. So if you look at the image, it's very clear, you know, there are objective facts and then there's what confirms your belief. And what you see is really your confirmation bias. You already have an assumption and you're only seeing that narrow part of the entire picture. What you can do some ways to avoid the confirmation bias and to truly empathetically define the problem is we ask you to begin live interactions with your customers. What that means is to strike up a conversation, right? It's interesting. So often when you're in a new country and as a tourist, you have this very curious mindset. You're very excited. You're very aware of your surroundings. You want to talk to people. You want to learn new things about your, about the environment that you're in. So we ask you to generally kind of go in with that mindset itself. So strike up a conversation. Don't be afraid to ask questions. In general, people really like talking about themselves. So you will see that even in instances where we've gone out to do research around personal finance management, which is a very sensitive topic. You would think that people wouldn't want to talk about it. And we went prepared into that conversation with tools to be able to do that. However, as simple as kind of building that familiarity with them and then diving into the question, really people didn't have any trouble at all. But to do that, you also need to be curious. Show that you're interested in them. Ask them open-ended questions. Show them that you're truly listening at the end of the day. And how do you do that? Paraphrase what they're saying, which means they know you're listening. They know what your understanding is also in line with what they're saying. But also saver surprises. If there's something surprising that comes up in the conversation, dwell on that a little bit. Ask follow-up questions. And finally, observe. Because, like we said earlier, as much as people have the best intentions, and they'll always talk in the form of intention. But we ask you to back that up by observing actual behaviour, which really then translates to you having to be in their environment to be able to do that. Here's an interesting way of going about it. This is really bringing this back from something that we call the empathy map. The empathy map is a very straightforward matrix. And in the four quadrants, it's almost like a template that you can use when you go out to talk to your customers. Understand what they're saying. This is from the customer perspective. You're listening to what they have to say. But not just that. You're backing that up with observing what they do. And constantly during your conversations and trying to understand your customers, what you also want to do is infer from what you're hearing and seeing. So constantly think about what they are thinking and what they are feeling at the end of the day. What is that emotion that they're connecting with the pain that they have with the activity that they're doing. Because that really helps you then define the problem in the best way possible and make it as actionable at the end of the day. In how you want to solve it. We've covered this. So when we talk about stepping out of your comfort zone and being curious, go to their environment. Because the value you derive from observing them in their environment is very different from just having a bunch of questions that you want to answer. And make sure you're listening. Make sure you're observing for reactions, for behavior. Another example of what and just to kind of summarize what confirmation bias would be. Here's typically what a conversation would look like. You have a great idea and I'm sure a lot of you will resonate with this because at some point in our lives we've done this. We have a great idea and we think it's fabulous. We head to the customer to gather feedback. You ask your customer, have you ever considered doing Action X through App Y and the customer because he's aware that you are looking for a validation of some sort.  And the customer only to be nice would respond saying yes, I would absolutely love to. So what are you getting at the end of the day validation? But that's not true test of behavior.  But ultimately what happens is the product of the service starts to fail. It's not really a great market fit. And that happens often. A great way to avoid this is of course to always look for actual behavior and finally define your problem based on observed behavior and qualitative inputs from conversations. We've seen that experiments have shown people provide tests or questions that are designed to yield yes or yes. If their favorite hypothesis was true, people usually ignore alternative hypotheses that are likely to give the same results, right? Because the tendency is to confirm what you believe. An example here as you see is if you were to search is New York better than San Francisco because that is a leading question on Google. All you will get are sites listing the reasons why New York is better. And if you were to do it the other way around you will only see something that confirms that SF is better because that is essentially what you're trying to confirm. So yeah, I mean to summarize what we were talking about earlier. This is what confirmation bias is about and what you can truly do to avoid any of that is to go with an open mindset, go with a curious mindset, be observe what customers do and take that into consideration when building out your solution and defining your problem. Thanks, Kavi. So, Chandan, you have a question to say if tourists, for example, have a confirmation bias, how do you overcome it or to use Venkat's term, Jemba, what happens if you sort of have Jemba and the confirmation bias. So as Kavi was talking about, even if you have a confirmation bias, but you're truly looking at not only what they say, but what they do. And Kavi, if you can go back to slide 14, please. You know, what they say and what they do is observed behavior. You're actually seeing it or you're hearing them say. But what you incite is on the right-hand side which you believe they think and what you believe they feel. So when you are truly building empathy going through this and asking yourself the question, that's how you overcome the confirmation bias. So you don't, but the example that Kavi was talking about, you don't just go here, you know, are you likely to use this feature or functionality. You give an experiment. You run an experiment to see what they do, what they prefer in real behavior. And that's how you're able to overcome these confirmation biases. And there's another question from Venkat. You also heard about functional fixness as another pitfall. How do you guard yourself against that? Yeah. And I think it's more a statement that whenever you get yourself there, it's good to be asking those open-ended questions. Absolutely, Venkat. Plus one on that. Great. So let's, you know, we've introduced you to the idea of empathetically define and now we want to move towards how do you then rigorously measure. What we'll talk about here is how do you measure a benefit?  And how quickly do you allow your customers to realize that value itself? Now, in my experience of defining these values, they're really three-fold. It either helps the benefits are about time, money, or frequency. Usually it's about saving time. When it's about money, it's either about saving money or making more money. And the third one around frequency is that it increases the frequency of something good happening and reduces the frequency of something bad happening. So really the value can be simply broken up into these three dimensions of time, money, and frequency. So if you wanted to get a closer look, though, here is a larger value pyramid. Next slide, please. And Kavya, you might need to go on presentation mode because it's a little hard to see. Sure, I'll do that. The reason I did that was because it's stuck, which is why I moved into here. Thank you. So here is I'm forgetting what the attribution is. I think this is BCG is my apologies, but I'm sure you'll be able to look at the elements of value and see this is from BCG, one of the large consulting firms, where they talk about the functional elements like I spoke about with time, money, or frequency of good, bad. Then they talk about emotional life changing and then ultimately self-transcendence which is the huge social impact. So if you look at the functional ones, and I know that's really small for you to see, but there are in the dimensions of time, money, and frequency. And even emotional is around the frequency, increasing the chance of something good happening. So you all should certainly take a look at the elements of value and see which ones might be related to what you need. Now Venkat, it's not exactly Maslow's hierarchy, I think more generally yes, but I guess what I'm trying to say here is you want to look at that benefit to really understand how are you delivering that value through your solutions and hence how will you measure it. And it's actually not simple to measure so I'll go into a little bit and give you examples of how to measure it as well. I'm looking at a few questions here. Very interesting metrics to measure value. Would I be making the right conclusion if I say these are very B2C specific? So no Narayan, the value whether it's enterprise or B2C it is really the same we worked with both enterprise as well as consumer companies or even B2B companies and it's just really similar. It's simply those three dimensions. There might be some or a few products perhaps that it doesn't cover but in my experience so far it's usually time, money and frequency. Those are the three elements. Value permit is awesome thank you Chandan we believe so too. The other aspect if you move to slide 20 please really what you want to do is look at what is the gain creator? This is a really simple representation of the product market fit by a really good consulting firm and they talk about ultimately you want to understand the customer pain and gain which is on the right hand side and for each of the pains you want to provide pain relievers for each of the gains you want to create features and functionality that amplify that gain. So they talk about it as what is it that is a gain creator and what is it that you're creating that are pain relievers and we find that even though there's the dimension of value of just time, money and frequency if you look at the pain relievers it's reducing the frequency of something bad happening and if you look at gain creators it's increasing the chance of frequency of something good happening so whether you look at it in those three dimensions that we talked about of time, money and value or in the product market fit you're basically going after the key functionality that helps increase gain or reduce pain for customers so your customer value is not people are able to get to this functionality in three clicks your customer value is not that the registration was simple your customer value is way beyond it it's the reason that your customers choose you to get into this over competition so I'd like to get into a few examples in the next slide please but before we do that I want to do an activity so I'm going to give you a scenario Kavi and I have been talking for about 20 minutes straight and we think it's good for us to get some audience participation in so clear tax engineers this thing is not necessarily a clear tax example but think of it as any tax software now what clear tax does or any tax software does is they help you calculate what you owe to the government at the end of the year or what the government owes you because you've been one of the few people that have paid ahead of maybe even paid more and you need a refund there's a behaviour globally where people actually pay ahead and expect to refund and that's almost their savings they plan for that so it's a way that they're hiding money away from themselves so a lot of people actually focus on either the refund or look at how you can pay minimum right so within legal constraints you're looking at one how do I maximise my refund or two how do I reduce the money that I owe to the government so these tax solutions are simple software that help you answer questions so you can help determine the answers to both the questions that I mentioned so a really smart group of engineers brought in a lot of efficiency so you'll see the number on top in this case it's 6,563 that is the amount of money for example that you owe the government a really smart group of engineers brought in a lot of efficiency and really set up the refund calculation how do you think customers reacted and love to see your responses in the chat session so again it's tax software that big number in the middle is the amount of refund or the amount you owe the government the engineers got together and really set up that number calculation instead of making it slow how do you think customers reacted so we see a couple of people saying pleasantly surprised intrigued maybe depends on what type of persona they are mixed reaction they will try to they'll drill down why they have to pay tax at all if they're looking to save time they will like it interested okay let's hear a few more responses before I tell you a full story depends on other factors how's the usability is it secure Pradeep let me try another app Pradeep it's having experience to do taxes once let alone twice Gokul is talking about the amount of money yeah so what I'd like you to do is think about yourselves right let's simplify this think about yourselves let's say that's at that number is actually the money you owe the government versus refund and the calculation happened really quickly put yourselves in those shoes because we're all people hopefully that pay taxes so put yourself in those shoes and tell me what your reaction would be not about the amount but just this the speed with which that number is calculated Priya says she would recalculate Sonia says she would validate okay we'll amaze and plan better Pradeep says doubt the calculation yeah Narayan taxes are just simply painful no matter how you think about it alright thank you guys for your responses you know taxes it's one thing that nobody likes to do and yet I used to be a part of Intuit and I'm so happy to say that we actually brought the light and joy because we gave people the confidence at Intuit to TurboTax that they were getting the maximum refund or they were paying the minimum amount of money and the speeding up of calculation like some of you said would actually cause you to worry would make you feel like oh my god they're not doing everything they possibly can to give me the best benefit so this is where where is the confirmation bias in the answer I don't know that's Chandan I have to think about that one it's a good question I don't have a pat answer but you know actually I do Chandan so the engineers of course thought the more efficient it can be the more it'll save customers time and so there was a confirmation bias right you ask people hey would you want to do your taxes fast and of course everyone would say yes but the more important benefit was to increase the chance of getting every last deduction so that they have to pay the least amount of money or get the maximum amount of refund whichever the case might be and so the confirmation bias of speed let's do it quickly just really see in thanks Chandan for that question and instead what was important and a bigger value to customers was to maximize the refund right and so the fast calculation actually caused a lot of doubt like Pradeep said or like Sonia said or Priya said that people wanted to recalculate it to just make sure that it took care of every last deduction that they had so this is one where the value of attack software definitely wanted to be fast but the main customer benefit was confidence that you are getting every last deduction that the software is actually working super hard to try to give you every last deduction that you can more recently we were creating a financial management software for early jobbers as well as migrant labor and we were trying to help them save money we tried to speed through the registration process but the customers actually said that they wanted it to take time it needed to be painful because they felt then that they were in safe hands because people really cared about their information and were modeling the application so that it worked just right for them so it's really important while save time is something everybody would want to do it's important to sort of balance that value then with others we might find more important next slide please Kavi okay we are having that problem again every time I put it on presentation mode it no issues so let me a few of you even in the chat asked for additional examples Kavi actually stay on the tax example itself for a second please if you think about Google, the Google search could you please type in the chat what do you think the customer benefit is why do we use Google search breadth of search for information write information at time instant suggestion because we don't like to search and use reliability quick answer for everything crowdsourcing answers access to information appropriate results aggregation wonderful so I'm actually going to share something that we heard Larry and Sergey talk about in a really really old video where they were talking about these custom benefits and Kavi you can go to this slide the main job is to find answers like many of you talked about the result the customer benefit was of course relevancy of the search results if you got you know completely irrelevant Oya Vikram context based answers absolutely if the relevancy of the search was not accurate then people no matter how fast it was wouldn't really use search none of us would the second one was to find answers quickly right so that was also important to find answers quickly but it was only second to getting relevant search results so now how do you measure something like that the measurement was for relevancy of search they really looked at they measured the time between the page display and the click the faster you click it meant the search was more relevant so what they actually measured was that page display to click how quick that was that was an indicator of relevancy and if you think about it that is just such a fabulous metric and such a creative way to measure the relevancy now of course the find answers quickly is a lot easier to measure it's really time to display results right but the relevancy one is a real clever metric to look at time from page display to the first click the faster you click the more relevant the search was so this is Google you guys and these customer benefits still are valuable these measures are actively measured till today let's go to a different example and in the interest of time I'm just going to go ahead and answer these for you all so with eBay it's a double-sided network on one end there's a consumer and on the other end there's a seller what is the job the consumer is employing eBay to do it's purchase things that they might need and from a seller perspective they want to sell things that they don't need and eBay basically connects the two the customer benefit for the consumer is find stuff I'm looking for you know you go to eBay when you're looking for sort of strange or very specific things or things that are not just mass production so the ratio of search to purchase is a really good metric to see if I found what I was looking for find authentic products the metric was really seller authenticity and the rating that they gave on the seller side find buyers for my products so again percentage of inventory sold I put down like 20 things that are really unique how many things do they actually sell from a customer benefit the seller wants to make sure that they don't get ripped off there's a number of genuine buyers on the site that are buying, completing transactions paying for things is a metric that they're looking at so again you see that the metric creation is in fact an art and really really important to think through it works whether you've got you know a platform where it's used by just consumers or it's a platform like eBay and let's go through one more example next slide please with Amazon so I'm sure all of us are consumers of Amazon what are the customer benefits and I realize that the font is really small here you guys my apologies we just can't seem to get out of the presentation mode but Kavi is going to give that a try the job is I bought it on Amazon and from a seller's perspective they want to sell more items so that they can make more money the benefit is that they have the product when they need it the delivery speed is a metric the best price constantly Amazon is doing price comparison to make sure that their platform has the best price reliability and it's the percentage of delivery promises kept so you do know that Amazon actively measures these three things and they've stood the test of time over the 15 years or whatever Amazon has been found we care about getting it when we need it so speed is important price is important and getting it when they said they would deliver it is really important you may have heard that Amazon is already predicting what you're going to buy before you even buy it and that's because they want to make sure that the reliability is there on the seller side they want to increase customer reach so that's an easy metric number of customers reached increase sales they want to look at the number of orders fulfilled as well as the percentage of returns as you know these platforms are doing a lot to help reduce the returns the amount of shipping and handling and the time that's wasted with people looking at things that they didn't understand to be a certain type before they actually touched or saw it is really high so percentage of returns is another metric that they're looking at so you'll see here that whether it's Google, EB or Amazon and these very successful companies the same customer value stood the test of time if you're an active Google user who isn't you'll see now that they are not just giving you a link to the answer but help you get the answer so for example if you're boarding a flight and that's in your Gmail and you search that flight number right away it gives you the status of the flight because you're not looking to go click on a relevant link you're simply looking to find answers so this is something that over a period of time these companies have focused on and have really been on it how do we know what value is the right value to look at consumer might tell you something so this is really not about asking the customer do you value time over money it's about what Kavita said earlier about really seeing what they're doing hear what they're saying or listen to what they're saying but also then connect with their belief system and their emotion that's when you will be able to identify the right value and besides when you can't do that or you haven't done that well the way to do it is to rapidly experiment and you'll find out very very quickly hopefully that answers your question next slide please I have the opportunity of working as I mentioned earlier with Intuit and one of the fabulous financial applications that they created was called Mint and what Mint discovered and Chandan this may help answer your question as well with an example what Mint found was that you know you can use Mint it's a global product you can go put in your transactions and it gives you a sense of where your money is going the biggest question that most customers had was where is my money going and where is my network they had a pie chart that you'll see small images of it they have a pie chart and people spent a lot of time on that pie chart because that answered the question of where the money is going it basically split up the money that they've spent into categories so the team actually actively measured time to pie so basically we can bring customers even new customers to that pie chart so we can actively help them be engaged with the product and answer their question where is my money going so the team would very aggressively defend that if somebody added an extra question so that they could customize the app just right they would make sure that the time to get that value would not be compromised and that's something that the entire mid team actively measured the time to pie chart so one there is identifying the value two then there's measuring it and then three there's the time to that value how many apps do you download and then you don't use and you just quickly uninstall because they simply didn't give you your value in the time that you wanted it to be seen the one thing to be wary off is what I call vanity metrics these are things that make you feel good the number one vanity metric in my biggest pet peeve and anyone who sort of talked to me about their mobile app has heard a mouthful from me is number of downloads that is a vanity metric it's a metric that makes you feel good just because somebody downloaded your app it doesn't mean you're providing value look at DAU, look at MAU whatever it is that yeah think of active users look at daily active monthly active, weekly active whatever makes sense to your app and focus on that now I'm not saying downloading is a number of downloads is not important you want to make sure that there's the right awareness it's probably a good metric for your marketing team it's also probably a good metric to see how many people really care about solving a particular problem but it's not a good metric for value growth comes from your customers using your product download is simply an indicator of interest and hence these vanity metrics are something that you have to be super super careful about and thanks Vikram I love the I love that terminology vanity metrics too not something I coined but something I heavily borrowed you know as product managers if there are any product managers listening today we always talk about you know three-click access to this feature or functionality and then you look at how many clicks it takes to get to that feature or functionality oh my god that is so not important that's not value at all yes you want people to be able to access it right much like I'm saying downloads is important but the value trumps all of the other vanity metrics that you might be measuring it's really important to look at that benefit for the value and then actively measure it I need to ask what's the value from the per session what are the key takeaways all right I'm not sure something's being funny or insulting me but I'll figure it out in a second okay so let's get to the example we want you to work on a particular exercise and see sort of the metrics in use so I'm going to just set it up for you Kavi so you know we've all been a part of redecoration if you're if you're a young it's your parents redecorating your house maybe redecorating your room if you're older you've built a house so you've rented a new place and redecoration whether unwillingly or willingly you've done at some part at some point of time in your life so we've made up this company Cropped Co hopefully it doesn't exist is looking to cater to the needs of consumers wanting to design or redesign their homes now there's a whole host of people that you need to really go through large redesigns you know you have the design itself you know the actual specs architects or interior designers may help you or perhaps consumers step into that role then there are the workers the contractors that actually do the job these are carpenters, blacksmiths polishers, painters and so on and so forth and then there are short sellers the retailers or wholesalers that you buy the material from or your workers buy the material from so we've just simplified it there are people that design there are the workers and then there are the sellers so let's say Cropped Co a made up company is looking to build technology or a marketplace that connects this ecosystem together so that you have a sense of building empathy we'll just talk you through what are some of the challenges on this two-sided network for consumers like you or I we're crippled by choice there's so many designs and so many of us go on Pinterest and we've pinned a bunch of things but we have complete lack of knowledge we don't know when they say first quality teak versus second quality teak man does that even make a difference or should we just go with MDF or whatever else kind of work they might have and it's difficult finding people that they can trust to give them the right answers and so often as consumers for somebody I know redesigned their house let me see if they can recommend their contractor or interior designer or their carpenters and usually you go out to word of mouth on the workers side there's huge issues that they have as a consumer you say hey I'll give you 10% advance or 20% advance but they still have to buy all of the material and they buy that on credit and the longer they wait the more interest sort of racks up so credit to purchase material is really a problem there if you're looking at an online solution or technology that connects consumers and buyers where does that credit come from second people sort of the sellers or the workers sorry the workers are reluctant to buy material that they can't physically verify they don't actively buy things online because they're worried they can't physically verify the authenticity of the product and finally whenever they do a construction they anticipate that they're going to need 50 screws but what they actually need is maybe 30 screws so what do they do with the remaining inventory what if the screws they bought could quality as they start screwing it in it starts to rip apart they need the ability to return so if you were a technology solution and you're trying to pull together consumers who want to redesign their spaces with the workers and you're trying to build a platform that connects the two what would you put in as you know customer benefits that you would measure in the interest of time Kavi I'm thinking do we split right now or do we what would you recommend how much time do we have 15 minutes I think and Vishal can you confirm that we have 30 minutes so what we could do is we can break out into two teams Vishal because there's about 53 people it would be very hard to do it and I hope you are able to complete your activity Kavitha yes I think most people manage to map out the customer benefits does anybody want to share we have a few more minutes five to seven minutes does anybody want to talk about any challenges that came up yeah in our conversation at least I felt that at least I started with certain intuition by observing other I also had to re-thought about my thought I also course corrected myself about the customer benefits what did you learn Chandan what was your before how were you doing it before and how did you have to course correct in my mind in India business everything is it's all about cost but it is not the case it was my first impression from my colleagues they also bring into a new dimension which also could be a customer value so then I realized yeah that could be also we need to look into so even Deepa also explained that apparently at surface level we always think like that but when you grow deeper then some other dimension comes out which also need to be looked into in our proposition so that is something wow moment yeah and while that still translates into business but really it's about solving a need for the end user which means higher uptake resulting in better business I felt value in a conversation and debating and then think different because confirmation bias which is actually taken over my thoughts but while conversation with my fellow colleagues they also influence my thinking then I could able to course correct my thinking which helped that is great and that's it's thank you for sharing it's I know it's not easy to share also but it's I'm sure it's insightful for others when they hear from you I think for me it was a good refresher to think about and articulate customer benefit because what happens is over a period of time we are so engrossed in understanding what the business wants what do we want to achieve what is our goal that even when we want to think from the customer's perspective we kind of think we have the authority to understand what they need so maybe we're talking about customer benefit but we think what benefit should we give them and when we think like that it's it's like so if we look at this example I should think like a designer if I'm writing that down because currently I did not have like end users to interview so even if I have to write on my own I really have to think like a designer and not being like an IT professional okay what can a designer really need so having that distinction in the mind is very important to have that awareness which these kind of exercises kind of polish you through maybe which gets rusted over a period of time when you think about business too much thank you Priya I think really is about putting yourself in the customer's shoes and to be able to do that it's also connecting with your customer right so you really know what what the pain is just to paraphrase what Priya just said I think one is to consciously remain in the problem space and not jump into the solution space right while you're exploring where you're trying to go and then so it's again re-emphasizing outcomes over an output right what really matters you want to measure that rather than any other metric so one is identification of the opportunity which is the capability of your system for the end user and then of course the metric when you come to the metric not look at the metric from an inward view maybe from a view that means something to business like an outcome thank you thank you for saying what you said Benkert and something that we constantly talk about is it's one thing to have the inside out view and that's usually a very narrow perspective typically but also to get compliment that with the out view so really learn about what customers are thinking about you but also understanding those evolving me constantly because the customers need to see and over to remain open to changes also and adapt yes I think there is one more comment from Sonia also got me thinking about customer loyalty that would happen if we are able to deliver emotional value to our customers thanks Sonia thanks everyone and yes it's about unlearning what you have learned and that goes back to our confirmation bias thank you everybody we had a great time interacting with all of you and thank you for being such wonderful participants and for engaging and interacting with us it's always nice when we get responses this was really fun for us too


They're so much involved that, listen guys, Zilla loses money, Redfin loses money, these discount brokerages, they're trying to figure out a way to do it, let them keep swinging but at the end of the day, I think I see where you're going with like digitalizing the experience to buy properties, it's not going to happen, they're so much involved, listen guys, Zilla loses money, Redfin loses money, these discount brokerages, they're trying to figure out a way to do it, let them keep swinging but at the end of the day, people want service. If you go and look at the reviews for some of these companies, it's got awful because they're not paying the people enough money to really care about the actual consumer. They're not paying the people enough money to answer their phone at 8 o'clock at night, they're not paying them enough money to actually handle the entire transaction, they got one person for the listing appointment, one person for the go to MLS, one person for the showings, one person to negotiate the deal, it's like the right hand doesn't know what the left hand's doing and the consumer experience is awful. The lower you go on the money there, the worse the customer experience is. I think that it can get squeezed to a place that is still extremely lucrative for us and that we will rock on and this industry is going to continue to be a rock star. If you could take real estate agents out, it would have already happened. Technology's done nothing but make the world a better place for us. All the things that has been put in place for agents has done nothing but positive things. For me as an agent, it's made my life a million times easier and it's put more money in my pocket. So that's another thing you've got to think about too. If technology gets to that point, are we actually doing more deals now? Because the technology is allowing us to do things a little more streamlined, making a little less, but closing more deals. I know I'm closing more deals because of technology, I know I'm doing a lot more deals. All the steps have been taken out of the whole equation that I ... Listen, when I got in real estate, no Facebook, no Zillow, no DocuSign, no Dialers, no none of this stuff existed. I did it all old school, old school and I still do a lot of stuff old school. Now I'm not convinced, I see them floundering around trying to figure out how to make something work. I don't think they have an in-game, I think they're still trying to figure it out. Everything they do, they lose money on so I'm waiting to see, well let's do Zillow iBuyers and lose $2,000 a house. Good idea, great idea. So I don't know man, I'm sitting here watching a company that the only thing they have going for them is eyeballs to their website and now they're going to start taking our list listings off their website and only put listings that are listed by Zillow. What's that going to do? That's going to take away the consumers that used to go there when they figure out they can't see everything unless they're going to do IDX, unless they're going to keep our listings on there but I don't think that's what they're going to do. I think they're only going to show their listings. So we'll see what happens. I think that they're up against a huge wall and they're just trying to figure out how to dig their way out if you ask me. I've been saying it for years. There's going to be something that comes along, I believe, right? So when I got in real estate, I got five or six percent commission. Okay, the 20 years that I've been agent, my commission hasn't got cut at all, right? And yeah, I do some four and a half, I do some different things. I didn't negotiate, right? I didn't negotiate. I want to create the relationship and I make it work. I don't lose the deal over a little bit. I've always said that and that I believe at some point we're going to be in a place where 4% is like the new norm, just straight up 4%, two and two, 2%, 2%. And you know what? It's still extremely lucrative, extremely lucrative. And the new agents that come into the business once this happens, they're never going to know what five and six felt like. They're going to be tickled to death to get 2% on every deal. I'm not pushing it. Where do listings come from? When you talk to a seller, the most common answer I hear, the most common answer I hear when I ask a seller, where, how do they pick their agent at the end of the deal is I had a friend in the business. I had a friend, that is the most common answer I hear. I don't know about you guys, that's the most common answer I hear. And so it makes me realize, okay, my job, if I want more listings, is that I have to make more friends with property owners, right? That's the name of the game. Our number one job is to make people feel comfortable with us and make as many friends in the market as possible. That is expanding our database, which by the way, I do a weekly email every single week on the same day of the week forever, right? Since 2007, it's the reason why I'm able to continue to sell all these properties while it works for some people, doesn't work for other people and so on and so forth. But I mean, I think the founding principle is that everyone in your market knows who you are, right? They know who you are, what you do, and that you're here to help. So how do we get as many people in our market to know who we are, what we do, and we're here to help? That's really the name of the game. So for me, it's like there should be two buckets, two machines in place here. One that's at a very high frequency, getting you in front of as many people in your market as possible on a one-on-one basis. And then another machine that, once you make that great first impression with them during that first interaction, there's this other machine that after that moment allows them to never forget who you are and build that personal brand. Because like you said, it's all past clients and referrals at this point in my career. Why is that? It's because I built a great personal brand over the years with my clients as they did business with me, right? I took very good care of them and I stayed in touch with them at a very high frequency and they never forgot who I was and they never forgot the service that they got. And so I built a brand around being a very hard-working, honest, dependable, consistent person. And when you do that for as long as I've done it, you create a scenario where now you're in the personal branding business versus just the sales business. Whereas the sales business, you got to go out and do the sell again. You know, you get a sell every day and it never ends. When you build a personal brand, they both look the same in the beginning years. You know, they both look kind of similar. You're just hustling and bustling and talking to people and seeing what you can do to help and adding people to your database. And this is the toughest market I've ever seen, right? The buyers are competing with 18 other buyers. No sellers want to list. No owners are listing because there's nothing to buy. What I see when I look at agents in the market, I'm seeing, okay, because I'm talking to agents every day. And what I'm seeing is effort per deal is at an all-time high. The amount of people you have to talk to to get a listing. The amount of offers you have to write for a buyer.  And then you go deal with another buyer and go through three offers to get one accepted.  You don't know what you're doing. It's like Chinese and there's a lot of pressure and stress. You got to pay your bills. You're not selling anything in your first couple of months. It's tough. So only the strong survive, right? 90% of agents fail. But what I would say is like agents come in and have a goal of say, you know, 10 deals or 15 deals in their first year.  How am I gonna catch up? I was supposed to do one or two deals a month. I'm never gonna be able to catch up. What happens is for all your deals in your first year get lumped into the second half of that first year. Those first six months basically for free. Some people start closing deals sooner than others, whatever, let's just talk about averages here and reality and what expectations should be set. The amount of deals that you close in the second half of your first year is gonna be determined by how much work you put in in the first half for free. That's just the way it is. I've got a new agent, he didn't close anything for six months and he'll end up the year with his first year with around 20 deals. We'll see. His first year's coming up in a couple months. So if you get discouraged with no deals now and you don't build your business for later then you're gonna be in a tough spot and probably either drop out of the business or end up an average agent, you know, doing less than 100,000 a year or something like that. So there's a lot of different avenues. I've got a little link for new agents that I made that has like four little videos. It's 02diamond.com backslash new agent. 02diamond.com backslash new agent. And it's just a little podcast that I think is really helpful for new agents and four or five little videos there. Just my content that I think is geared more towards new agents to kinda help them step up on the right foot and take the pressure off and kinda help them breathe and understand you just need to take it one step at a time, you know? And it's a huge mountain. As far as the technicalities of it, there's so many different directions you can go.  You know, there's a lot of variables, you know? So at the end of the day, we want to figure out how much time we wanna allocate to real estate per week. Best use of that time based around everything that we need to do in terms of meeting new people, growing our database, and educating ourselves on how to write contracts and learn MLS and all these different things. So being a new agent's tough, it just is. And it's something we've all had to go through.  And I promise you, when it gets to the other side, it's an incredible career.


So this is this is a study we did with my friend Benjamin Davis and it's not going to tell you anything about the past.  What we aim to do is we were interested in who are agent-based modelers in archaeology. So we run a survey. We advertise that really badly because we mostly use social media. We run it over for weeks and we got 65 responses most of which in the first week which can make the rest of the time worthless. There are obviously biases to the survey because obviously we advertise on Twitter and send emails so there is probably over representations of members of our professional networks. It is very likely we have way more English speakers than non-English speakers. We are likely to have attracted more younger researchers because they use Twitter and for all sorts of reasons it is more likely that male researchers replied in a higher frequency than female researchers. So those are all the biases that you should keep in mind. There might have been others but those are the main ones we think. So there we go. Let's go. Agent-based modelers in archaeology are in general blobs. There are some women but there are not many of them and we tried to counteract the biases. Very often a guy would take one IBM course and he would reply to the survey because he's an agent-based modeler whereas women are a little bit more shy and they're like well I build a model but can I call myself an agent-based modeler? We did actually email Twitter to attract females to reply as much as we could and that still came up with that result. They're academic age so the number of years since they're obtained a PhD or a master but I don't think they're any one of those shows that they're mostly young so they're either still PhD students or they just graduated and there's a bit of a blip around yeah they're much older which probably indicates the wave of modeling that happened in the 70s and those people happily are not retiring from archaeology. But in general this is a new phenomena and it is for that reason we hope it's dynamic and it's let's hope most of those people will go on in academia. When you break it into gender you can see that most of those young academics are actually female. This is a frequency so this basically tells you that most of females that we asked are actually in the young age academic age category whereas guys are way more kind of equally distributed. And then what are they doing right now? Well good news everyone a lot of them are in permanent academic positions so if you're thinking about what to do with your life this might be a good shot. So there's equal number of or was equal number of people in permanent academic positions at those that are doing PhD at the moment. Obviously it is likely that those that did PhD are not in permanent academic position we just didn't get their answers because they're probably working for Google right? So we just don't know about them. But there's also some other ones. So this is great news except for if you're a woman.  On the other hand those that are doing the PhDs in agent based modeling they're mostly women. Great news right? Right. Who are they? Where are they from? Do they do they come from other disciplines or are they archaeologists that basically learn how to code? It turns out they're mostly from humanities, anthropology and archaeology so Americans and then Europeans. And there's a second most important component is people coming from STEM subjects. So it's mostly homegrown people and there's some people that come from the heavy technical disciplines. The interesting thing is there's not many people that came that had a background first degree in social sciences and that's a little bit weird because we have the same questions we have very often the same theoretical models and the fact we don't have that many social scientists doing it is is kind of weird. And then what is their kind of we call it theoretical heritage we ask them if you were to name one theoretical framework as the one that drives you which one would it be? And there's equal division between complexity science and evolutionary theory. So those will be people that are doing like cultural transmission, social learning this kind of stuff. And some people just say I would be already are talking about I'm using simulation because that's a technique of whatever there's no there's no theory. There is theory but it's not safe. Not many people are coming from archaeological theories. Not many people would say oh yeah, you know, I'm gonna been 40 and or I'm middle range theory or whatever, which is again interesting because we do have archaeological theories that lends themselves very well to ABM and another simulation techniques, yet people don't seem to be coming from that spherical for theoretical angles. And okay, so so now now we know who they are who did they work with? So this is the people we the background of the people we we surveyed. And this is who they worked with. Okay, on those and you can see humanities basically works mostly with life sciences and STEM subjects. And not much with social science again, and not much with other people coming from humanities, which is again surprising because social science has much better developed field of agent based modeling. So, you know, we can just literally pick up their models and push it here and just kind of change the date from 1995 to minus 1995. So this is a very interesting pattern. It looks like. So the all those archaeologists and anthropologists are basically going to people that have technical, technical knowledge for coding, or they can do their data or they have some better math skills and work with them rather than with other social science. And whereas the people with the diverse background, they kind of work with everyone almost equally. Moving on. Everyone uses net logo is the conclusion. So the only legal on that was that there seems to be this pattern that people use net logo to do the simulation. And they analyze the results now. But in general, that log is completely dominating the field. And this is the another point to cry about 75% of agent based molars in archaeology, they actually learned it themselves, which is horrendous when you think about it, because it's highly technical and difficult scale.  Just like me. Just like me. So what type of models do we do we do we work on? We use the we ask people about the type of validation they use, because that's a very good proxy. We're on the theory to data, data driven, a theory driven models, we're on this the spectrum you are. And there's a good mix of both types. There's quite a lot of abstract models that just don't do any validation. Like if you've been here earlier, I was showing the shell model of segregation in cities. And that's like a type of an abstract model. Letters model was pretty abstract. And then, you know, and then you have data data driven models, which you compare against data. So so we're gonna, we're fine. We're, we're well healthy mix. And in terms of scales, it looks like we're going more for the kind of finer, finer scale. So like one agent would be on one individual rather than like one culture. This is great because agent based modeling is done in agent. So you don't want to model a whole country as an agent. And usually the scale of the temporal scale is about longer than a day, but sure they're on a season or a year. I think this is partially driven by agricultural models that kind of have the one year scale. So those are the scales. And the topics that are mostly modeled. There is there's there are the abstract models that are the most common, but they're one category. Those two are both Europe. So it looks like Europe is dominating in terms of being a topic, which is interesting because from my personal experience, quite a lot of Americans do agent based modeling, but they seem to still apply it to to topics related to Europe. And and if you would like to learn to know more about it, there's a paper that will tell you all of that in more details. And more importantly, all of the data and analysis is available on GitHub. And you can just have a look and and learn more about the agent based modelers and in archaeology. The other author could not be with us because he is as far as Andy's horticulturalist. And I think it's a winter day as well. But any questions, ask me or email Ben. Thank you.