What's good Josh boros back again with another video. So we're gonna check out 10 months recycled WWE finishers Hey when it comes to wrestling Lot of things you see it's already been used many many many many times moves storylines, you know Feuds have kind of been repeated from other feuds like wrestling is a revolving door of things that may have happened in the past and The moves are no exception In fact a lot of the moves that used to be finishing moves back in the day They're now set up moves their moves for false kick outs, you know like the superkick how many times everybody uses the superkick It used to be effective now. It's it's literally just a power-up move It's just a move and you know you use for you know dramatic effect So we're gonna check out some of these recycled WWE finishers appreciate all the love and support you guys have shown on the channel, man But there have been some iconic and beloved finishers in WWE from that tombstone pile driver to the curb stomp These finishes were perfect for the wrestler who used the move and eventually over time became synonymous with their character Coming up with new and unique finishers is kind of hard This has resulted in the majority of finishing moves being recycled and passed on to the next generation of WWE Superstars join us now as wrestling here looks at 10 most recycled WWE finishing moves be sure to subscribe and hit that notification bell for daily wrestling videos and follow us on Facebook for Exclusive list also check out our new channel WrestleMania shorts Number 10 the famous As a finishing move the first wrestler was Marty Jeanetti But his version of the move often looked awkward upon execution The wrestler then who pulerized the move during the attitude era was Billy Gunn Performed the move tremendously. This was able to get extensive hide on his leap which always looked great on WWE television Good look at me Finally Dolph Ziggler has adopted the finisher as his move and now uses it as a secondary finishing move often Preferring in the superkick or the zigzag finisher Number nine pay dirt when Shelton Benjamin decided to abandon his popular T-Bone suplex finisher That T-Bone super disappointed. Benjamin could hit the T-Bone out of nowhere There was a perfect fit for his character Benjamin upon the retirement of the T-Bone as his finisher began to use a move known as pay dirt This move sees Benjamin perform a jumping reverse STO The move pales in comparison to the T-Bone suplex and the move relies on the person taking the move to sell it with conviction Yeah, our truth would later adopt the move renaming it as their what's up And then later rebranding the move as the little Jimmy The mandible claw the mandible claw is one of the more unique finishes ever presented in WWE It was popularized by hardcore legend Mick Foley in a fossil wrestler placing his middle and ring finger in the opponent's mouth And then sliding them under the tongue pressing down on the tissue at the bottom of the mouth The palm of the same hand is then placed under the jaw and according to Foley This should lead to the person taking the move to black out The move was perfect for Foley and unique finishing moves are always appreciated This is why it was welcome when the theme began to use the move The fiend would use a move in the majority of his matches And he would even use a move on Foley himself the incredibly memorable segment on raw Foley has had nothing but positive things to say in relation to the fiend using his finishing move And this is what the WWE fall-off aimer had to say during an interview with sporting It's his character I'm really happy to see him use the move and to be shifting gears of that character to make it intriguing and Exciting television number seven.  I'm good clutch Gory Guerrero is a wrestler who is widely regarded as the innovator of the camel clutch finishing move But in WWE it was the iron chic who popularized the move Since the chic use the move numerous wrestlers have recycled the move as their finisher with only a few of them having major Success wrestlers such as Muhammad Hassan and Rusev have all used the move But neither of them has ultimately reached the heights that she did with the submission hold in fact when a wrestler uses the move in modern day WWE it's appreciated if they offer a new take on the traditional move This was seen with fear as his version of the camel clutch Looks incredibly devastating One single arm behind his back before locking in the sinister clutch Number six the master lock upon introducing the master lock in WWE Chris Masters Instantly became a huge deal. The full Nelson finishing move was immensely The master lock challenge segment in a weird turn of events the first wrestler to break the submission I'm being Bobby Lashley would end up using the move as his own finisher years later in WWE This time known as the her lock Lashley has had tremendous success with the move And even won his first ever WWE title with the submission in 2021 Spoken at great length in relation to what he thinks of Lashley using his finishing move This is what he had to say during an interview with Chris Van Vliet Doesn't change the fact that the master lock is the OG and I know a lot of people are gonna bring up Hercules and Ken Paterra But we're talking about in the modern era ladies and gentlemen sure yeah, so I mean I think her lock master lock would still be Kind of interesting, but like you know it only makes sense for Bobby I've never came out on like some dirt sheets and buried Bobby and like here's the thing think about this. I mean From my standpoint Would you rather have Bobby Lashley adopt it or some guy maybe that they push for a month who doesn't even Number five dream street. That's where So I had to stop the video Because I noticed there was some glitching going on and I'm pretty sure you guys have seen it in other videos I'm not sure what's going on with My OBS and my webcam You know, I had to try to figure out something reset it or whatnot. So I'm sorry about that y'all Try to keep make sure it's good. It's not glitching. So let's get back into this video, man At DBL so junior opted to use a cobra clutch slam for his finishing move dream street paid tribute to his father the Million-dollar man and could look great if the wrestler taking the move sold it effectively Years later Jinder Mahal would recycle the move and his version known as the class has received criticism from fans The problem is that Mahal was WWE's resident jobber and when he was propelled into main event scene his finishing move Just wasn't appropriate for a main event level start as Mahal rarely ever won a match with the move Mahal's version often looks awkward as he sometimes struggles to perform it correctly leading to some fans suggesting that Mahal Introduces a brand-new finishing move into his arsenal number four the break down The first-ever WWE undisputed champion Chris Jericho is the king of evolution Over his decorated career Jericho has added several key moves to his arsenal including adding brand-new finishing moves in 2001 Jericho introduced a new finishing move known as the break down This was a full Nelson facebuster and Jericho would even win his first well title with the move when he defeated the rock at 2001's mercy event Down being used as Jericho's finisher would be short-lived as Jericho would soon leave the move behind in favorite moves such as The lion salt and the walls of Jericho For the past 15 years the missus used a version of the break down as his finishing move and his version is known as a Skull crushing finale due to Jericho only using the move for a short period of his career Now associate the move with the miss as the miss continues to use the move on a weekly basis And will likely do so until he retires Number three the pedigree Triple H's pedigree finishing move is one of the most iconic finishing moves in WWE Yeah, when Seth Rollins began to use it as an alternative finisher It made a ton of sense Rollins was involved in a storyline with the game at the time We're making a logical addition to Rollins move set and he continues to use the move as a finisher to this very day No, the thing is it don't finish nobody. That's my only issue with it I don't have a problem that he does it because it makes sense his connection with triple H But it don't finish nobody. It's just it's just like a setup move His actual finisher finishes people but using someone else's old finisher that used to finish people as a setup It's that's just what it is now, you know According to triple H during an interview with Fox Sports He gave Rollins full permission to use the move the game added he came to me and he was like How would you feel about it? But given the storyline and everything else? How would you feel about me using the pedigree? I was like if you think that benefits you please do like I would be honored and you know And it worked for him for a while. So yeah, I was happy for him to do it You know, there's moments in your career where things are like they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery So for me if he felt like it was meaningful to him I was a guy that he could use it and get something out of it That's cool Number two the stunner when Kevin Owens was a stunner as his finishing move fans were curious as to what Stone Cold Steve Austin thought of his beloved finisher being used according to Owens It was Austin himself who gave permission to use his finisher Which was a big endorsement for the former universal champion This was fitting as Austin would come out of time in 2022 to face Owens in the main event of Night One of WrestleMania 38 Austin is often nothing but praised towards Owens and Austin is contempt with Owens carrying on the legacy of his celebrated finishing move Of course And number one the cutter. But Johnny Ace is widely regarded as the innovator of the cutter finishing move But over the past 20 years the cutter has become the most popular finishing moves in WWE thanks to Randy Orton It was initially Diamond Dallas Page who made the popularity of the move skyrocket as he would use the move as a finisher both in WCW and WWE. But when Orton began to use the move in 2003 Everything changed. Orton executed the move perfectly and he was able to hit it out of nowhere Making it one of the most exciting finishers that exist today It was DDP himself who gave Orton permission to use the move as he was getting set to retire and Orton was without a Substantial finisher. Matt Riddle has also recycled a move and now uses an RKO as his finisher This is mainly because he's one half of RKO bro So it'll be interesting to see if Riddle continues to use the move when the duo inevitably breaks up But they have it folks. Ten Yo, I love The cutter I love the RKO. The thing is Randy Orton even though it's you know Just you know another version of the cutter Diamond cutter is it's the way he does it the way he executed the height He gets like some fly times. He get parallel to the ground one of my favorite RKO's is When this is what I think I kicked out of evolution And it was on a Monday night Raw and all the like the baby faces were you know ganging up on Triple H and Everybody lifted up Triple H for Randy Orton to hit him with the meanest RKO Crowds going crazy Everybody's going crazy and he lifted him up and he hit in my opinion one of the greatest Standing RKO's of all time You know the clip. Oh my god, literally he just jumped up Dude was level with Triple H head in the air hit him with a beautiful RKO Oh, one of my favorite endings to a Monday night Raw and one of my favorite standing RKO's From Randy Orton man. So yeah, this was a pretty cool list Comment down below. Let me know. What's your favorite WWE finisher of all time? And let me know down below. I appreciate all the love and support Roan to 150k I am still young to speedy YouTube wrestling champion of the world and in the coach where every champion appreciate y'all kicking me See our next piece


Welcome. This is Melissa Arma with the Stock Swoosh and I wanted to review Facebook. There's a huge lesson to be learned in Facebook for all the people that did this trade. Not only the day trade today but the bigger trade for the week. I guess the play for the put for Facebook because we talked about this in the trading room every single day this week. Because from the day that I called the trade it rallied and I called a put in Facebook. I called the 160 puts and the 155 puts in Facebook and I called it on this day here in the 24th. Yeah that was Monday. And then every day the stock was rallying and people wanted to kill it.   Every single solitary day we reviewed this trade and I got a lot of emails about it from people and I told them that there's nothing wrong with it. Follow your money management rules and lo and behold the stock broke and fell today and you know I mean look at the move that it had. So I'm just going to go over the day trade here for people today and then I'm going to do a longer lecture video if not tonight tomorrow on the chart of Facebook which I think is very important for people to understand and a bigger lesson here too which is really how to reprice action correctly. But just to go over what the day trade was. Let's do that first.  Falling off a planet as I would call it. I'm gonna squish this. Squish it. There look at that beautiful selling action. Look at the volume here coming.  Drop fell broke, stop held. Could have added even more in here. I told people that they could do that as well. Sent the email out and then lo and behold it fell completely off a planet. One more pushed down in here and really went to every single number that I thought it would today and more. So Facebook was a nice plane here today. It was a nice short and you could have added to the put today and improved your cost in it which I did say to the trading room for the options trade and this chart has looked lower to me for quite some time. So there's no way that people didn't have a good exit on this today because I mean this just fell off a planet. Just fell and all the selling action happens so quickly and the nice thing about day trading is that you can have moves like this that happen big and fast and quick and we prefer them to be in the morning. The stock did drop in the morning but the bigger move happened later so if you held it through if you believed in the trade and particularly if you did the ad which I called in the email this afternoon as well it worked. It worked. So Facebook overall if I'm looking here at the chart just want to show everyone the stock gap down here today. So we shorted it and again I have a rating system. I only look at gaps. I'm looking at bullish gaps and bearish gaps but I prefer to look at bearish gaps. So one of the reasons I prefer shorts is because shorting action could happen very quickly. As you can see here the panic came into Facebook today. There was news that came out but that is not the reason that we did the trade. The reason that we did the trade which we entered the trade before the move even happened before the news even occurred. We were in it at an amazing price okay over 167 drop off here in fact the low in the morning here was what are the day 16256 we had a great price on this. We were in this before it even really sold off and the reason is because of the gap. So I can predict where stock is going to go based on my gap rating system and if you'd like to learn that from me you can learn it in my golden gap course. The course is a two-day course that I teach about once every four to six weeks. The next class is October 6 and 7. Don't miss it. Do not miss this class if you want to trade in the trading room for earning season for this quarter for the end of 2018. Do not miss this class. You will want to be in it. You want to learn the system and you must take the class and learn the system to be in the live trading room and you want to get calls like this. There were two trades in this the option this week and the day trade today and they were both fantastic. And hopefully everyone listened to me lectured about it every single solitary day in the trading room. So incredible call and people everybody should have made a lot of money in this today. Some people killed the trade. Some people didn't do it. You got to have conviction and I'm going to talk about that in the next lecture very very soon. Have a great weekend everyone and if you're interested in the class or have any questions email me at Melissathe stockswish.com. If you have an opportunity to learn from me I am teaching the class still myself me and it is a live class and I'm still hands-on with people. There may be a time in the future where I'm not. Learn the information from me now while you can. I'm telling you you know I know what I'm doing people so you gotta you gotta learn it and do it and be in the room and get the calls and take the trades. Talk to you soon.


of us a countdown. Okay. That's how you make an ESOP. Thank you for coming today. We are Lullabot and it's very nice to meet you. And my name is Brian Scowren. I'm Lullabot's president. And today I'm going to be moderating a panel discussion titled rewiring Lullabot a retrospective on the how and why of becoming employee owned. So in case you didn't know back in January of 2021 Lullabot made a transition from being privately owned to being an employee owned company under an ESOP model. ESOP stands for what does it stand for? Employee stock ownership plan. That's right. And so I am joined today by members of Lullabot's leadership team and we're going to talk about the the transition of being employee owned, how everything went down and you know what we learned along the way.  That actually used to be our 404 page on our website but we launched a new website so check it out. So let's start with very quickly in case not everybody knows let's start with who the heck is Lullabot? So this is Lullabot. This is at our most recent company retreat. A lot of people in the Drupal community know Lullabot already. We've been around since 2006 exclusively focused on Drupal. This was by the way our silly picture at our retreat in Palm Springs back in February. We're about 70 people now and as of 2021 all of these people are now employee owners which is pretty cool. So so joining me today is you can see that that jumping person in the back or I don't know are you just standing? And Karen I think is in the front row yeah front row. So let's start with intros. Seth. Hi everyone my name is Seth Brown I'm Lullabot's CEO current CEO. There have been two before me one of whom is also here today Jeff Robbins and so I'm the third CEO. I hail from Carbondale Colorado and my background was an agency background. There was a local agency that I joined as sort of the third person and we sat in a server room in 2003 and and that company grew to be 60 people and so having been through that growth I came to Lullabot and had something to offer as Lullabot started to open up their client services part of the business and transition from being a consulting company. So that was kind of where I fit into Lullabot in 2010 and yeah I'll turn it over to Karen. Yeah I'm Karen Stevenson I'm currently the CEO of Lullabot. I did engineering I did architecture did a lot of step with Drupal, CCK, date, calendar all those kinds of things and joined Lullabot in 2009 but before I was doing all that I was CPA for 20 years which turned out to be really handy when you're doing an ESOP because you need a whole lot of financial stuff which so turned out to be pretty handy. Yeah and so one way to think about Seth and Karen on this panel is Seth is kind of the voice of management and executive leadership and Karen is kind of the voice of tax legal administration and but now Karen is actually chairperson of our board of directors as of this year so she can speak from that perspective as well which is super exciting and yeah and we were gonna close out this panel with a third person who could speak from the HR perspective named Chris Conraddy but unfortunately she got ill right before the Drupal con so she couldn't make it but she's very very much here in spirit and we are collectively going to try to be one Chris and answer HR questions as Chris would and we'll probably not do nearly as well as she would but yeah so to kick this off I want to you know sort of ask the question who's here let's get a sense of the audience so we can know kind of like who we're talking to and and what you all care about so quick show of hands who here owns or manages a digital agency all right who works at a digital agency okay good amount of people who who is with another type of organization okay and lastly who is with Lullabot right oh good amount thanks for filling the bleachers nice well okay let's get started so first question very simply what is an ESOP and how does it work and I'm gonna throw that to Karen okay so as as we mentioned at the beginning ESOP means employee stock ownership plan and the idea is it's a type of organization where the employees own the company you know every company has an owner and traditionally our historically our owners were Matt and Jeff who started the company and we wanted to have a transition to a point where the employees own the company and there's a lot of different ways that you can do that and the ESOP is a very structured very well thought out way of managing it and actually what happens is we create a trust the trust is actually a retirement plan and the retirement plan owns the company and then all the employees are beneficiaries of the retirement plan so it's it's a kind of a funny thing employees are not directly owners of the company they don't get little shares of stock themselves but they participate in this retirement plan and they accumulate value over the years and when they leave they get whatever the current value of the company is and they get to take their part of that when they leave so they transition from you know regular in being regular employees that don't have any stake in the outcome to people that are definitely have a stake yeah and since it's a retirement plan is I is that governed under like for Rissa right it's actually very much like a 401k except it's a plan that just owns the company stock you know in a regular 401k you have lots of different stocks that you have in your 401k this particular one there's nothing but Lullabot stock in there and in fact all the Lullabot stock is in there that's why it's a hundred percent ESOPs are not always 100 percent sometimes they're partial but in our case it's a hundred percent so a hundred percent of the ownership of the company now belongs to the ESOP so that sounds complicated so what so what what's involved in in a transit transaction like that like how do you how does the company go from being privately owned to being yeah an ESOP like how does that go down the first thing obviously is figuring out if that's what you want to do and there was that was a long kind of lengthy process of talking to a lot of people talking to professionals that have organized these kinds of things talking to other companies that have done it figuring out how it worked talking to employees of the other companies have done it to see did it mean anything to them did it was it worth it that kind of thing so it was a really it was a really slow process the ironically we Matt started talking about this several years ago and originally thought we wouldn't be able to do it till maybe 2026 and then the COVID came and everything kind of changed and we started talking about it again and realized we could do it and it was it was kind of kind of surprising to us that we could do it sooner than we thought we could do it but we could and so we we took action at that point and and made it happen ironically the the attorney that guided us through the thing at early early on we said you know how complicated is this how much time is it going to take and what did he tell us he's like oh yeah you'll you know you know what won't have to do much you'll think about it a couple times we'll fill out some docs for you and then you'll be an ESOP and don't believe attorneys don't believe it yeah right yeah it was it was involved it was very involved it was well worth it but it was it was very time-consuming and complicated about how long did it take start you know let's begin doing an ESOP to okay now we are an ESOP I think Matt and I became really engaged with the legal team probably six months before we actually and then Karen got very very involved probably four three or four months out and so was it certainly takes a it exerts a huge time cost on the executive team and so that's something to consider if you're a you know owner thinking about doing this is can you carve out enough time to give this the attention you know away from your other responsibilities and the pandemic was kind of unique in a couple facets for us one business was great for digital agencies after a certain point and then we also received PPP money as part of the payroll protection plan which we were definitely concerned at the time that we put in for that but then we ended up not needing it as the market sort of bounced back after March of 2020 and so we we ended up using that money to help fund this ESOP process which you know cost north of three hundred thousand dollars you know to actually do all the legal work the administrative work at hire the TPA pay the trustee like all those things and that's just the year of zero expense and then there's also ongoing costs of around sixty thousand dollars a year that the company pays but the amazing thing about being an escort ESOP and we can talk a little bit about the the differences but to whatever extent you are an ESOP so you know 10% or a hundred percent like well about you you are forgiven in your taxes your federal taxes on your profits up to that point so for us you know we're a hundred percent ESOP we don't pay federal taxes and that money helps us a lot in terms of paying for all of these expenses that savings as well as built wealth for the employees and helps you to buy out the exited owners we can talk a little bit more about that yeah I was I was gonna ask so you know given it's this multi month process and there's a lot of work involved you know at a high level like really briefly can you kind of talk about what were some of the things that we had to do in that process that we're so time-consuming yeah there I would put it into two or three buckets of things so one bucket of things was understanding ESOP and making do you when you set up an ESOP you have to make a lot of decisions there's a lot of ways that you can implement ESOP and we had a whole lot of we are sort of a recipe of you could do this thing or this thing or this thing and we had to understand what the options were as best we could without actually knowing what we were doing and so you have to make all these decisions you have to understand how the ESOP works and you have to get all that all those decisions in place so that's kind of one bucket of work that took a long time the second thing is you have to get all the stock back from all the existing owners because if you're going to give the stock to the ESOP you have to have it back again and basically what's happening if you I don't know if anybody here has ever been through a purchase or a sale of a company that's effectively what this is so you've got to do all the things that are involved in a purchase or a sale of a company including all the due diligence you know all the records you know all your taxes all your sales you know all your clients you know what how do things look do you have a management team and that was a big one what management team do you have in place in our case our owners were exiting but we had a management team in place that was going to stay and that was critical like if the owners had also been the management team and they were leaving that would that would have been really difficult to make that work but we had a management team in place that was going to stay so that made it something that was doable but you have to go through all the work that basically is involved in a purchase and the idea is one of the very first things you do is you hire the trustee and the trustee is basically looking out for the interests of the employee you know this is a retirement plan there's a lot of rules around all this the retirement plan cannot overpay for the company so they got they need to make sure that it's been priced fairly that they're you know that there's a reasonable price for the company that it makes sense all that kind of thing so you have to get a formal valuation done you have to do all the due diligence work as though you were selling the company to the trustee and at the same time you're buying back the company from the owners so you've got all that work going on so you've got this repurchase of the stock from the original owners and then this deal to sell the stock then to the ESOP and ESOP is going to do all the due diligence on their side of it so that's where all the work comes from and it is a lot of work yeah it's a lot of work a lot of work yeah and that third-party valuation is really interesting because when you're doing this transition as management or owners you're sort of both the buyer and the seller so in that regard you really have to be the seller and give all of this information and disclose but then a price comes back and the DOL and the IRS are very interested in the employees getting a fair price it's I think they call it adequate consideration and it's you know a legal standard that gets bandied about and argued about and fought in case law but overall if you are exiting as an owner to a sale to another company or to you know a private market private equity you're likely to get more for the company than you will selling to an ESOP because of that factor because the DOL and the IRS have exerted their you know considerable influence on making sure that these prices are fair to the employees buying the company so to speak the DOL for those that don't know the department of the labor and IRS internal revenues yeah well yeah and to close out this this sort of what is an ESOP section so we were we were actually just talking before this we had this question what are some well-known ESOPs there are ESOPs everywhere there are tons of ESOPs out there and we sat down and we were like what are some well-known ESOPs and we didn't really know so but I think we brainstormed a few that we you know that are pretty well-known public's is one right public supermarkets King Arthur flower what else new Belgium brewery was one and then they sold but they were employee owned and you can you can go from being an ESOP back to being a private company or to being a public company there's you know it's just another sale of the company Cliff bar is partly an ESOP they have an ESOP a public company can have an ESOP own a certain amount of the shares and Cliff bar is one that does that yeah most of the companies that are ESOPs are private yep which makes sense if employees own it it's by definition a private company it's not a public company so because of that a lot of a lot of these names are probably not necessarily names everyone would recognize but it's really all kinds of industries so there's a lot of grocery stores there's engineering firms there's construction companies almost anything that you can think of there's there's probably an example of someone that's an ESOP yeah manufacturing it's very big in manufacturing especially like if it's in the US because it's a great way to attract and retain labor and that's a big challenge for manufacturing companies in the US one other point I was gonna I was gonna make about we you talked about the idea that the owner wouldn't necessarily get as much money selling to the ESOP as they would to to the broader market you know just selling out to some third party but the other consideration that comes up and the reason that I think the ESOP has really been successful and is a really interesting solution is no it was it was the if you've got a company and you want to maintain the culture of the company and you're worried about what happens because a lot of times if you sell to a third party you know the bets off what's gonna happen after that if somebody spends a lot of money for a company they're gonna come in they're gonna cut costs they're gonna be kind of stringent cultures probably gonna change yeah a lot of things are probably gonna change and if you have built something and you would want to see it live on kind of as the thing that you created an ESOP is really nice and again it all the key to the whole thing is you have to have management that continues through the process so as long as you've taken care of the management piece that works but it really is an interesting solution if you want to do that yeah and you must have known what my next slide was why an ESOP and yeah I mean the you know the the mechanics of an ESOP are at some level pretty complicated and not always exciting depending on your background but you know I think one of the things that is exciting about an ESOP is you know the the motivation around it why an ESOP and I'm gonna throw this one to Seth you know what was that you were there from the genesis of the ESOP idea what what was the why behind it yeah I mean a lot of credit on this front I think goes to to Matt and Jeff they saw that you know at some point they were going to want to transition out of their you know day-to-day roles in Lullabot and wondered how Lullabot could remain a going concern could keep our culture we had been approached over the years with acquisition offers that we declined partly because the the offeror you know was looking to make a talent acquisition and had basically said openly well we're gonna bring in you know these six or seven engineers and then everyone else well but we're gonna let them go you know or something like that and of course we'd be like no we would never want to do that right Elia sorry inside joke I should never do that in front of a large audience but anyway so you know Matt and Jeff really wanted to at some point exit and also have a way to perpetuate what they had built the culture that we had as a company and an ESOP sort of came forward as the best way to do that Matt got really interested in some of the work that Jack Stack had done with the great game of business and staking the outcome and started going to conferences and then he brought us to conferences and we got interested and it was a very vibrant community like if you engage in the ESOP community it feels a lot can feel a lot like Drupal con you know you go and everyone is so excited and passionate about employee ownership we had several Lullabots go this year Nick you were there and I think some others that may be here that were there but it's very inspiring to go to an ESOP conference because you know at one level it's this really nerdy esoteric like you know finance and tax structure but at the other side of the like this is literally the anecdote to everything that's wrong with capitalism right like you're actually sharing ownership and risk against the people who are doing the work and you're also aligning the incentives of the shareholders with the incentives of the employees 100% which is a huge problem for a lot of businesses right like oftentimes what the shareholders want is not at all what the employees want and those things can come into conflict in you know obvious ways so I think I think there's there's some wonderful things about an ESOP and the more you do get involved in the community and start to understand what's really at stake the more exciting it becomes and sort of the less of an esoteric like you know thought exercise it is so now that we've like actually been through it though and now that we are an ESOP and we're seeing the impacts do you feel like it's achieved those original goals that we sort of had in mind these lofty ideals of what it would be yeah I mean I would look to the lullabots probably for some validation here but I feel like it has I mean at one level it's sort of like when you when you're first starting out as an ESOP when you're a baby ESOP you know people kind of look at their first share price when they get their first statement and they have this moment where they're like doing the math thinking huh okay this in four dollars and I could get a Starbucks like thank you and it's a little more than that but it's not significant but the idea is that it's gonna grow literally by you know this year triple percentage our stock price went up 366 percent this year in our first official year of starting to pay down debt and be an ESOP so I think as you grow and the employees start to see that this value is building you know if you think of it as sort of the analogy of a house purchase you know if you were to buy a house with no money down right like you don't have a lot of equity to begin with on that first day especially if your house was valued properly but then as you own the house as you continue to work on it and as the you pay down the mortgage and the house starts to increase in value you know all of a sudden that equity value starts to go up in the house and so our stock price is a derivative of the equity value that we all have in in Lullabot and so we're now that we're starting to see that increase I think that part is getting more concrete and more real but I still feel like at our first retreat Jared made these wonderful shirts for everyone that we used to have a bot camp that we'd go to every year and our first year as an ESOP Jared our creative director our chief creative officer made us shirts that said owners can't and there was just a different feeling at that first retreat as an ESOP where everyone was like holy cow we own this thing this is our company and I felt like the types of questions that I was getting from people which had often been over the years more of along the lines of their professional development or you know suddenly those things flipped around and it was like this great idea for something that I really think could move the chains for Lullabot and I'd like to see if we can that's a football analogy sorry it's probably a wrong audience but you know that like you know this this could have a real impact on the business and that change was really evident and inspiring even at our first retreat and even before this was as tangible as having received our first statements and I think that's continued to grow so yeah I think it really has been successful in that regard and it also accomplished something that is very difficult for privately held companies but is very real which is at some point the owners want to exit and there's just not that many ways to do that in a private company where the stock is not really bought and sold you know you can shut it down you can you know leave it to a child you could try to you know sell it to people that want to buy those shares but then they have tax implications for owning that that stock it's very complicated and so that's why so often in M&A you end up selling to another company and this is a way to not have to do that which is quite magical in fact actually that's another point that I was going to bring up is and you could you could literally sell the company to the employees like give them stock or sell them stock but that actually creates a lot of additional problems if they directly on stock they've got taxes they've got problems to deal with the value of that thing goes up and down it pushes up their personal income does all kinds of complicated things it and it's taxable gonna be gonna be taxable income to them whereas in the ESOP it got effectively the same thing it's not taxed it's not you know it's it's it's a retirement plan it's not taxable income to them until they take it out after they retire and even that even after they retire they can roll it over into another retirement plan because it's retirement money so they can put postpone the time that they would actually have to pay taxes on it you know pre far off into the future which makes a big difference yeah it's a it's a really elegant solution for us as a complicated complicated as it is yeah and you know the follow-up question I had here which I think is an obvious answer but you know in retrospect would you do it again and I think for all of us yeah one question is there were there any other alternative solutions to like achieve the same goals that were considered a longer way or anything is there anything out there that you know achieves employee ownership that is not ESOP I mean you kind of talked a little bit about that Karen but I mean as an escort you can have a hundred shareholders so if you were a you know small medium-sized digital agency you could start having your team buy stock you could gross up their pay in order to allow them to pay the taxes on that stock you know they could file their taxes like we used to have to do as shareholders of low about in nine or ten different states and deal with all of the the challenges that they're in but there's you know again it's there's liability there's tax implications there's all kinds of things that you circumvent by having this trust sit in between the owners or which are the beneficiaries of the trust and the trust itself and the company so you know that yeah there there are alternatives and we we had actually utilized several of them a lot of low abouts who were here before the ESOP had stock options all of those had to be bought out when we made this transition you know all this doc had to be sold back to the company so you know there are ways to do this and I'm sure everyone in this room who owns an agency has thought about them but I just think that the ESOP kind of just solves problems you didn't even realize you were going to have that's the magic of it it's like there's so many years you know since 1974 we've been doing this you know everything sort of been litigated it's a fairly stable accomplished you know space and it's a good way to do this and you can't really anticipate all the challenges that you're gonna have but ESOP law has sort of already done that and it's often built into these plans that are pre-approved by the IRS essentially with within you know certain range of choices that you can make and your law firm sort of helps you navigate all of that yeah so I'm gonna shift gears a little bit now so we've been talking from the perspective of management and ownership you know pride exited ownership let's talk about the impact on employees and you talk a little bit about this in terms of you know the cultural impacts that we saw but I'm kind of curious how much like let's talk about governance a little bit how much control do employees have over the ESOP or the company you know how how does the ESOP health and hiring and retention you know those sorts of things like what's what's been kind of the employee impact I realized that's a weird question with employees sitting right here in front of us but yeah we probably talked to any law about employee afterwards but we are also low about employees we are yeah you know we are employee owners too yeah yeah so I mean I'll do governance and you do retention okay so governance does change in some ways but not in the ways you might expect and so what do I mean by that well when you have a trustee they're gonna want to see a board of directors and they're gonna want that board of directors to be comprised of several independent board members who are not at all connected to you or the you know the ownership of the company right they want independent eyes and and the standard that an ESOP board is held to I think is in many cases is of a prudent expert so you actually are held to a pretty high standard of jurisprudence in terms of your your need to watch over and be aware of what's going on in the company so there were some famous cases where there was nepotism afoot and you know a board of directors would be packed with someone's family and nobody was paying any attention and meanwhile you know the rogue CEO who was you know say the son of the family went off and did something incredibly you know illegal or irresponsible and then the other family members who were holding these passive board seats actually got sued and were helped you know actually liable for not having paid attention and so the standard for ESOP board members is actually fairly high and we so we had to go out and find those independent board members and and get them to join and actually pay them it's a professional role the team knows them now they've come to our retreats and ultimately the board is you know the authority I sit on the board as CEO Karen is chair of the board but then we have three other independent board members who are the majority essentially and they comprise certain key committees like the compensation committee so they look after our pay to make sure that it's fair relative to the rest of Lullabot and the other employees and they do other sorts of things where Karen and I might have a natural conflict of interest as both managers and board members you know those things will go to the independent board to be handled and I as CEO and Karen as COO and Brian as president report directly to the board and if one of us is to leave the board is actually the one that would replace us they would be that you know the board would be in charge with finding the new CEO or now we would definitely have the ability to advise in that process and Karen and I would be involved in the decision and we've always talked about wanting those that to come from inside of Lullabot but it's still those sorts of things become considerations when you're thinking about governance of an ESOP and if you've been you know a single private owner of an agency that could be a big change for you right if you you know because you're essentially a hopefully a benign dictator of your own concern at that point but when you be if you were to become an ESOP you're gonna have to take on an independent board and so that changes things it doesn't change things though in the way that I think some people might expect or think which is well doesn't that mean that we all vote on anything right like the idea that now we're a completely flat organization in a democracy and any decision that the company needs to make should be voted on by all the shareholders and that's not actually the way that the ESOP works and not the way that most companies work and ESOP in in one sense is just a fairly normal company it's got a board of directors it's got a leadership level it makes decisions and there are certain things that shareholders do by law get to vote on and those things are like recapitalization sale of substantially all of the shares of the company those sorts of things so there's a few things which you know and this doesn't even come back to ESOP law this actually goes back to just general corporate law right there's certain rights as shareholders that you have if you're a stock owner in Starbucks you know where you would vote on these things if you were you know a shareholder so the shareholders vote on similar things to you know that you might in a public company but it doesn't you know necessarily translate to the day-to-day or tactical or even strategic operations of the company which are still in the hands of the executive team in the board. Which part am I answering now? Well retention yeah hiring and retention yeah so so the other part of this is the question is do we have we seen any impact on retention and hiring and I would say absolutely a lot of people ask questions we we say pretty prominently in our ads when we hire that we're employee owned and people often ask about it they don't already know about it they they're curious they want to know what that's all about we know it in at least a couple of situations it's been the deciding point between one job and another has been oh this one's employee owned that sounds better the ability to accumulate some stock so it's done that we went through the great resignation when a lot of companies saw a lot of people leave we did not see a lot of people we had a really we really hung on to people and I don't know that that's because of the ESOP but I it may be one of the factors that caused people to say it was definitely correlated yeah I think I think it does help I mean the great recession statistic that Chris had was you know 37% turnover for most companies and we were around 10% I think 11 officially but yeah so it's it's you know and that's been a typical number for us since the ESOP so we've had pretty low turnover and yeah I think it is attractive and interesting I almost think the spirit of it can be as important to some people as the actuality and hopefully the actuality is gonna get more interesting over years as the ESOP continues to grow in value but I think you know there's many lullabots who you know might say something like eat the rich and actually heard that recently and at a retreat and I hope they don't mean me because I promise I'm not but yeah it the spirit of equality is very real and the sense the equity is genuine equity in a financial and sort of stock sense of the word do you want to elaborate on that a little bit like you know one of the questions that we had is does this ESOP factor into our DEI efforts you know is this do we consider this to be part of our diversity inclusion and equity efforts I I think yes probably hopefully being owners of the company is is a part of making everyone equal making putting everyone on the same footing giving everyone the same opportunity to participate and benefit from the things that they're doing I think that's one of the things that's really exciting about the ESOP is that and in terms of like the equity that we're building not to get too in the weeds with it but is it actually does everybody accrue equal equity value or is that like how does that yeah the typical way that ESOPs work and we were kind of stuck with the typical way that ESOPs work because if we veer too far off of that we run the risk of we're gonna have to have sets such example is forking like we've got a standard plan that's been approved by the IRS and if we want to change the plan we'd be forking and then we have to maintain our fork and that gets really complicated and the idea is we want to maintain things that other people are doing that are proven that are approved all that kind of thing and so the typical way that in I as far as I can tell is not even just typical it's like almost the only way that stock is allocated is based on wages fortunately our wages in our company are pretty equal we work pretty hard to not have a huge gap between the wages at the top and the wages at the bottom but the way that it generally works is in our case we have 50,000 shares that we allocate each year and this is not a purchase employees don't have to purchase it they are given so that's benefit number one so they get the stock we take the 50,000 shares we divvy it up pro rata based on wages and the other advantage of doing something like wages is if somebody was working part-time they would get a smaller piece than somebody who's working full-time that kind of thing which does seem reasonable so we allocate the shares based on wages but again in our case that tends to be pretty equal yeah so it would on its own you know allocating equity based on salary is could be very unequal so it really needs to be paired with yep with you know some some good thinking around you know what is your salary equity right so yeah that's an important aspect of it there's legislation to around the 409 I think it's 409 P which has tests to make sure that the ESOP is not being distributed unequally so like let's say you were a normal public company and your CEO to average salary ratio was something like 350 to one or something crazy like that right in that scenario you would actually trip the 409 P clause which which does not allow you to have disqualified persons who hold more than 10% of the stock or families that hold more than 10% so there's all sorts of legal mechanisms that the IRS and the DOL have used to sort of constrain corruption nepotism and the other ways that the ESOP could be misused and it has been misused some people might remember a very notable ESOP named Enron and that you know subsequent to Enron there was a lot more scrutiny on ESOPs and the ways that they could be misused and legislation has kind of caught up to make sure these things don't happen but yeah the other thing about the DOL so one in three baby ESOPs get audited and you don't really want to be audited it's kind of like an IRS like you don't want the attention of the DOL in the IRS so following the standard plan following the standard playbook is a way of sort of not raising your hand and say hey look at us we're special you know because the people that are going to pay attention are not the ones that you really want to have interactions with kind of you mean is it akin to yeah sorry the question is is the 409 P clause like the safe harbor I don't I don't know if it's technically the safe harbor but it is definitely 409 P basically there's only one thing that can happen if you fail the 409 P your your ESOP is gone it doesn't it's gone if there's no work there's no way to fix it you've lost your ESOP so it's pretty stringent yeah well on that note let's talk finances and I are there we talked a little bit we've been you know sort of moving around you mentioned some of the expenses around starting up the ESOP now that we are an operating ESOP what are there any extra expenses or different expenses as compared to the company now as as we said before we don't have to pay income taxes fortunately and that's because the owner of the company is a retirement and retirement plans don't owe income taxes so that's fundamentally what's going on there but on the other hand we we have to have a trustee we don't have to have an external trustee we chose to have an external trustee there are some companies that act as their own trustee but it introduces again the chance that you're going to get yourself in trouble having an external trustee just gives you an old little extra buffer of somebody who isn't you making sure that you're following the rules and that you're being fair to the employees and all those kinds of things so we have an external trustee and they charge us every year we have to get a valuation every year a formal valuation because that's a whole part of the every year we do a valuation and then we issue statements to everybody and say here's what your stock is worth now we're just expecting to get our statements here pretty soon anytime now and then we have to have a third-party administrator and that's third-party administrator is actually does things like manage everybody's individual accounts and figure out how much how much stock gets allocated to who and who has what and how much is bested and they produce the statements and all that kind of stuff so principal is our is our third-party administrator so we have those three professionals we have legal expenses which come and go depends on if you know once we got past the initial legal expenses of the initial creation of the ESOP there's ongoing legal expenses questions come up either the valuation company may have questions the trustee may have questions or we may have questions we pay for the legal expenses no matter who has the questions but so that can come up and then we do have to think about cash because ultimately one of the things we have to worry about is what's called the repurchase obligation it's not an issue yet it will become an issue at some point because the whole point of this thing is that when people leave they can get paid and this is this is actually one of the beautiful things it's it's a problem and something to think about but it's also one of the beautiful things about the ESOP so if we had sold stock individually to employees we'd still have that problem how are we going to you know how are they going to actually get money for their stock ultimately with an ESOP it's all very structured it's all written out we know exactly what it is there's actually formulas that you can run the third party administrator has programs that we can run to anticipate what our what our repurchase obligation is going to be when we need to how much money went you know based on expected dates of you know expectations about turnover and retirement and all those kinds of things they they have all the calculations built in and so as we grow we have to be thinking about a repurchase obligation basically part of our responsibility is make sure that we've got enough cash so that when people do need to get paid out that there'll be something there that they can get paid out which again with a typical individual private company is not something that's in place so um oh there's a question there's a million shares allocated over sorry the question was why 50,000 shares per year oh and the vesting okay yeah we can talk about both of those so first of all the shares are allocated over a period of 20 years there are million shares so 50,000 shares per year which gives you a decent runway most companies statistically will change hands every you know 10 to 15 years so that's sort of building that into the expectation as far as vesting goes so you get your shares each year but you vest over six years and so there is also that that's both a way to retain employees but it's also a way to be able to afford your repurchase obligation it's it's a mechanism to give you enough time to build up the cash that you're going to need to be able to start buying people out it also avoids what you might call the quit and buy a house problem which is like if you started to have a really valuable Sharon and Esau and you could just cash out tomorrow and it would you was sitting there as like this big Easter egg thing I could I could just cash out and have a down payment for that house you know this avoids that problem because sorry this doesn't but there's also another clause here which is that you get bought out over a period of time so you vest over six years and then you also get paid out over five and so the paid out over five is a way to avoid that problem of like you know I'm over 55 I'm gonna go ahead and cash out my Esau right now and one lump sum because I want to go do something buy a house or whatever and so there's a waiting period so and we are we're approaching the end of our time here I believe but I do want to kind of close and say you know all everything that we've talked about is complicated there's an extra layer of complication which is international employees that we we didn't even get to talk about but you know let's sort of end I would love to hear both of your answers around any surprises like what any surprises or delights now that this is done what didn't match your expectations both good and bad and then we'll wrap it up there I talked a little bit about this when I was interviewed for the Talking Drupal podcast but one of the surprising things to consider if you're becoming an ESOP is what impact will it have on innovation in your company and one of the you know one of the reasons that an ESOP is good is because everyone has ownership and wants to see the company grow innovate expand all those other things but at the same time when you're a privately held you know company with a single owner that owner can pretty much pivot the company tomorrow if that's what they feel like doing they can they can decide to invest the company's profits in whatever they want to you know they could decide they want to build apps instead of Drupal websites or something like that and just completely switch and when you're an ESOP you're beholden to your shareholders to your board like there's all of these other layers involved and so I think one way to think of it is you know you're no longer the the cigarette boat that can just pivot on a dime you're a much larger vessel that can turn a little bit more slowly and with a lot more oversight and control so I think that that can cut both ways when it comes to innovation you have you know maybe more inspired a team hopefully but at the same time you know there's a little bit more inherent red tape in being an ESOP and that can in one person's vision doesn't necessarily get to dominate the conversation and what the company is going to do and so that's a different dynamic and I you know I think that's worth considering Karen surprises yeah well one surprise was was the time wasn't really expecting how much time it would take but again still feel like it was 100% worth it and as far as the pivoting and everything the alternate to that would be to say less risk right I mean this is all about kind of reducing the risk a little more steady company a little slower growing a little more carefully thought through then you necessarily were when you had one owner who was only playing with his own money basically you know you're playing with everybody's money so you need you need to be careful but again I I think the biggest surprise to me was I had not really known much about ESOPs and I knew a lot about different ways that people exited companies and things like that but had never really thought about it as boy this is a really nice way to transition a company to the next step to the next stage it's got a lot of a lot of good things going for it awesome well thank you both we'll wrap it up there we are I know there may be questions okay it's a great point yeah growth is way more baked in and people are more accepting and and open to growth as a as a motive motivating factor for our business so we're wrapping up there cuz we're a little bit over time but thank you everyone and thank you for coming we were straight from here we're gonna go to Lullabot's expo hall booths so if you have we didn't have time for Q&A if anybody has questions feel free to grab one of the three of us or any Lullabot employee and talk and then Lullabot has a party tonight at seven o'clock at Coop DeVille and come out thank you very much


Okay, we're back here live here at HP Discover 2012 in Frankfurt, Germany. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. Had a big day here, ending day one here at HP Discover. And really the key themes that we're finding is software-led infrastructure and big data. Those two elements that we've been covering on SiliconANGLE through our publishing group and our research team at wikibon.org is the centerpiece of HP's entire strategy. Everything that HP's touching is native software-led infrastructure and big data. That is the key report that we're finding. And my co-host, Dave Vellante, is joining me here. Dave, totally there with big data and software-led infrastructure. John, I'm thrilled to introduce Sean Kenny. Sean is a longtime CUBE alum. He's been to the wikibon offices. He runs product marketing for, sorry, HP Storage Group, used to be at EMC, which is why I love the action that's going on in the industry. Because Sean's got that DNA. He's not afraid to take off the gloves. Well, I mean, let's face it. HP brought a lot of folks into the storage group. I've said for years, Sean, before you guys joined, HP is sitting on the huge opportunity, but they're a server company that doesn't understand storage. When Donatelle came in, that changed. And he brought in people like yourself, Tom Joyce, Randy Seidel, and on and on and on. And others as well. I know some folks joined from NetApp, but storage DNA, that's what you have. And you're aggressive. You know what it takes.  I love it. And a lot of people put in a lot of work to get to today in engineering, starting in HP Labs, the three-part team. Today is a good day for HP because if you think about it, we change the industry. And if our customers do it right, they change their buying patterns.  We're going to reduce architectures, complexity in their infrastructure. You know, if you think of all the products you have, you have some in the mid-tier, some in the high-end, some out at the edge, some in the data center, all different products, different architectures, it's impossible. Now you think you have what, two or three vendors, but you multiply that and it becomes exponential in terms of the amount of products and architectures you need to manage. HP's message as of today is, hey, one primary storage architecture, one disk-based backup solution, no matter where you are, no matter where you want to perform, de-duplication for backup, and one platform for big data. Okay. Okay, so, and again, back to my earlier diatribe when Donatelli came in, a lot of people expected, okay, instant turnaround. And that didn't happen, obviously. The three-part acquisition was a key move. The store wants organic content, that's been key. So okay, so let's talk about the strategy. One platform for primary, one platform for backup and one platform for archive, right? That's right. Okay, now, so the dissonance in that is, so you've got some older legacy platforms, you're moving those to the primary. Help us understand the positioning of the new three-part. So first of all, let's talk about the new three-part, moving down market, and help us understand the positioning relative to the products from left-hand. Absolutely. The store virtual products. So we'll start with three-part. Customers for years and market research companies have segmented mid-tier architectures and enterprise architectures. Mid-tier architectures, dual controllers, you buy kind of the brains of the operation and then you rack up disk drives. Enterprise architectures, multiple processors, multiple paths in the back end, and that was a clear split. And it was performance and scalability and functionality and yes, price. And so customers always had trade-offs and compromise. What three-part store service has done today is we've basically obliterated and eliminated that boundary in that you get all the enterprise functionality, a four-controller architecture, tier one enterprise data services that are running the most advanced service providers on Earth, you're now getting that at a mid-tier price point. So those traditional market segments, they no longer exist. HP's tagline is storage without boundaries. We've now eliminated the boundary between mid-tier and high-end. Mid-tier price was at 40,000 US, down to 25,000. We're in Europe, so I guess we should be talking in Euro. What's that? 20 and 30,000 Euro respectively. So Dell wrote a blog post today saying that their customers prefer Dell Fluid over HP. How do you respond to that? Because I tried to get Davis got to go beyond EMC and tell them about the competition. So let's talk about the competition. Let's start with Dell. I haven't read it, so I'm a little bit of a disadvantage, but they said storage legacy, which could be meaning a little bit of the old stuff. Let me just add to that. Dell is a great example, I'm glad you brought that up, because Dell, in my opinion, is one of the companies that takes integration seriously. They even say our R&D team is our checkbooks. We bring that in, and then we try to integrate. So I give them high marks, and your strategy is to have commonality across the portfolio, so. I would actually say our other strategy is HP innovation, research and development, investment and engineering. I haven't looked at Dell's storage numbers recently, but I think overall, since the height of the EMC-Clareon-Dell relationship, I think even with the compelling deal, I think they're still going backwards a bit. My response to the Dell comments, again, without having read the article, this is conjecture. Well, fluid data in particular. I think they were trying to make something out of nothing, and they knew this HP announcement was coming, and tried to steal a bit of a little from there. Well, so let's talk about that. So the three-part, mid-market product, block-based storage. So. Block-and-file-based. Block-and-file-based. So who should be shaking in their boots, in your opinion? I think anybody with a traditional dual-controller architecture. Let's go down the list. Starting with HP EVA. I'm looking right at the camera. We are not end-of-life EVA, and we have no plans to do so. We will continue to invest in that platform for our customers. At the same time, I will tell you, we are strongly encouraging our EVA customers now to move to three-part, and we've made it so easy with an online import capability that it's easier to move from EVA to three-part than it is from EVA to EVA. Yeah, but can you guarantee any efficiency improvements if I move? Absolutely. That was a laugh. That was a softball question. Guarantee, whatever, if you don't make that guarantee. No, HP's got good guarantees. That guarantee. You need to find print on all that stuff, and you guys got good ones. You know, the other thing about that guarantee, so we've had it out for a year. We're the only ones that offer anything like it, and this is basically saying we guarantee you can use 50% or less storage when moving from a legacy array to three-part. You know how many claims we've actually paid out? Zero. The guarantee is a great marketing. I'm telling you guys, that's really awesome programming right there. I got to say, my question- By the way, I got to say, I just, props to NetApp too. NetApp's got some decent guarantees out there. They're not as aggressive as you guys are, and it's not as frequent, but their fine print is pretty good too. They'll stand behind what they said. And I'll give them credit. You know, NetApp has, NetApp kind of has that one-size-fits-all model as well. But where they struggle, and I think you've seen this over the past years, is they're still at a dual-controller architecture. You know, that's where they started many years ago. I think they've extended it almost as far as they can, but they can't scale into an enterprise architecture. So I think NetApp, they may be a little nervous. Well, we'll see if clustering changes. Sean, we'll see, yeah. Sean, so you run product markets. I got to ask the marketing question, which is, is it converged storage? Is it software-defined storage? Polymorphous storage? How are you guys, I mean, they got a lot of it to hang around.  You get the hat, the shirt, the sweater, slacks. I mean, you got a lot of meat on the bone with storage right now, with 3-par. So 3-par is changing the game, but I mean, how do you look at the marketing challenge?  Software-defined networking, software-defined servers, that's good positioning. I mean, customers get that. So what do you guys, how are you going to vet this out? What are you leaning to, and where's your head at on that? Sure, our strategy is converged storage. Now our converged storage platforms have three pieces in common. One, they're built on industry-standard servers, which in case you're wondering, HP sells trillions of without ProLiant. Yes, ProLiant, trillions is an exaggeration. I want the IR guys to get in trouble. But not just HP servers, any servers? Well, HP converged storage around HP servers. Then it's scale out, storage software, and common management. Now, if you think about that base, the foundation is industry-standard components. So it's not that far of a logical extension, say, hey, we'll get to a point that we can run software on other stuff, and we do that with left-hand, and we've been doing it actually since 2007. And so when other virtual storage appliances come out, and they talk about all the limitations, we have a fully functional storage platform that can run on anybody's server, and we've distributed 150,000 licenses. So I like to talk about pioneering, because when people pioneer, and if polymorphic becomes a pioneering term, then I'll eat my shorts and shave my head. I look forward to watching that happen.  But talk about left-hand, because David Scott said that they pioneered storage virtualization. And there's not a lot of discussion around that, because left-hand kind of got weaved in and didn't get the fanfare. Could you just unpack the left-hand pioneering milestone, and what's that all about, and what does it mean today? Sure, so Store Virtual, built out of our left-hand product and left-hand acquisition, continues to be our solution for client virtualization, and it's our lead horse in this virtual storage or software-led storage, software-defined storage area. We continue to offer it to our customers, they use it in all sorts of ways. And the best thing about our customers is they deploy it away sometimes we hadn't thought of. Like, oh, did you know we use it for this? We use it out at the edge for really small environments because I have an extra server lying around. And by the way, it can be an IBM server, it can be a Dell server, it doesn't have to be ours. And then I replicate the data or I run it in a metro cluster environment across a campus. The flexibility of software-defined storage is fantastic. And on top of that, if you already have the infrastructure, whether it's extra disk or whether servers, becomes a fantastic proposition. So, obviously cloud is the new infrastructure and it's just a combination of all the enterprise stuff like non-premise, hybrid, probably all that stuff. But one of the sacred cows in, one of the key elements in cloud is virtualization as well as your area. But one of the sacred cows in this area that people talk about is the hypervisor, right? So the commoditization of the hypervisor is a big trend but people are really looking for agnostic approach to the hypervisor. So the fear is, if people treat the hypervisor as their own, you have that lock-in. So I want to move a virtual machine around. So you guys said yesterday that you're hypervisor agnostic. Is that true? And what does that mean going forward? What is the headroom? What kind of headroom does that give the customer? I would describe it as flexibility and options. A customer isn't locked into VMware today and maybe they're looking at Microsoft but that fear of, if I make a decision today, am I locked in for the next five years? A fear is gone. And maybe it's the other way around. Maybe it's Hyper-V first. But you agree, though, that this hypervisor sacred cow thing is going on and people do want to keep it to themselves that the world wants. The hypervisor vendors? Of course they do. The world wants a capability to move virtual machines without being hypervisor agnostic. Okay, I misunderstood. Yes, absolutely. You know, it's competition and competition drives down prices and the classic market economy. So what about NetApp? So on the Q and A yesterday, David Scott got the question about NetApp and he made an off-the-hand comment about they have multiple controls. I didn't really understand that. What does that mean? Sure, so going back to Dave's question about mid-tier architectures with dual controllers, that's NetApp. Okay, got it, okay. And so you started with, hey, who should be a little bit nervous about this response? I started with, you know, what's talking about our EVA customers. Obviously, Dell is sensitive to it, right? Yeah, you know, anybody in that mid-tier architecture. What about the VNX? What about the VNX? How do you think they're going to respond? I think they should be. You know those guys well, I mean. Very well. What's your response is going to be? You know, I don't know. One of the things we do, and my counterparts, all the other companies do, is we try to figure out what's the competition going to say in response, like where are potential of the holes? I don't know. I don't know. All right, now, back to my earlier question about the position, because I'm still a little unclear on the positioning between store virtual and the low-end, new three-par store serve 7,000. 1,000, yeah. Sure. We talked about a single platform, a single architecture, mid-tier to the high-end. That is three-par. And for, if you want software-defined storage, store virtual is there. If you want client virtualization, store virtual is our preferred solution. If you want a pure iSCSI solution, store virtual is our preferred solution. Obviously protocol, well that makes sense. Okay, I understand that. But it's really not one architecture for primary. You're saying it is in that it's three-par. It is. But I mean, left-hand's alive and well. It is. If you're thinking about scaling up into the enterprise, whether today or in the future, that's the three-par answer. If you're in enterprise today, we're going to tell you it's three-par. What's the channel telling you about this? Because you're moving a lot of product through the channel, and now you're offering, now of course you're selling three-par through the channel as well, but there's more of a direct sales presence there. Yeah, I would say we've had a price tag on three-par that put it out of the reach of many channel partners and many channel customers. Right. And we were involved in a huge training effort to get to today. We trust our channel partners. We gave them information ahead of time on a non-disclosure. Yeah, of course. What did they say? Thank you. You know, they're going to make a lot of money with this. Yeah, okay. So they're not concerned about the positioning. They're not sort of asking us, what are they asking you? What are they asking you to do to make their lives easier? How quickly can I get it? Give them more margins. Yeah. Give them more points. How quickly can I get it? And when can I get one in my lab so I can show my customers all great questions around demand? For many of them, this is the first time they've sold three-par. So we actually had two challenges with channel training. The first was teach them how to sell a scale-out architecture, because for many of our EVA customers, it was the traditional scale-up. They had to learn something new, and they had to learn how to sell three-par. So that sort of tool challenges. I think we did a pretty good job, but the first six months are going to tell us. So when can they get it? Today. Easy. We actually took, I can't tell you how many, we took a decent amount of orders already, getting to today. And we haven't talked much about the whole backup space. Maybe we should spend some time there if you've got it. Always. It's like being a rock. So I'll set it up, because I think that many people may or may not know, but so you've got a situation where the market leader EMC acquired Avamar years ago, and then Data Domain blockbuster acquisition, and attained at its peak about 66% of the market. Big, big chunk. Really, you guys weren't there. It was really, nobody else was there. How has that picture changed, and how are you going to unseat that dominance? Sure. They grew by acquisition. Two acquisitions. Two incompatible technologies. Two really different approaches to solve the data protection challenge. And data is scattered everywhere. It's in the data center, it's out at the edge. So they chose to have two different products, one for the data center, one for the edge. Data Domain and Avamar. We took a different approach. And when we launched StoreOnce back in June of 2010, we said, hey, this is a flexible architecture that can be deployed anywhere. The core StoreOnce algorithm, which came out of HP Labs, I don't know if Alistair was here earlier, wasn't tied to the file system, to the operating system, to RAID, to hardware, to anything. What does that mean? It means we can put it in a lot of places. When we came out with the announcement, we said, hey, we have our small and mid-sized products today. This is June of 2010. But we're going to put it in an enterprise scale-out architecture. That was November of 2011. We said, hey, we're going to put this in software with Data Protector, and we're going to be able to put it on a media server. Now that was StoreOnce Catalyst in June of 2012. Now what we're saying is, hey, now you can run it on those StoreOnce Catalysts, on those mid-tier appliances. So really, you have one architecture, one deduplication implementation, and you can perform deduplication on backup data anywhere in your environment. So it's, for a customer, it's a simple choice. Do you want two architectures or one? Because you have data in both places. And on top of that, do you want data protection strategies that match your business requirements, or do you want to have to implement data protection strategies that are driven by technology requirements and limitations of the products themselves? Our customers can now do things that previously were unachievable, whether it's backup or disaster recovery. So I, yeah, give EMC credit, 60 plus percent market share, but we continue to grow, we continue to take market share, and it's a good business for us.  It's hard not to. I was skeptical of that acquisition at the time. They obviously proved me wrong. They kept it out of NetApp's hands. NetApp's had to take a completely different strategy now, which by the way, I like their tack. It's different. It's different. So, we'll see what that all takes on. I like their Amazon move. I mean, their Amazon thing, I thought was pretty interesting. Who NetApp? What's your take on that? I mean, that looked like a good move. I just read the headline today. I have no opinion. It's, I'm sorry. Okay, so my question is on the, you guys did a great job yesterday on the announcement. Thank you.  I know you didn't spend a lot of time on it, but the question for you is, how do you going to bring in the big data? Because big data really has a big storage component. It's under the covers, but it's really important with SSDs around the corner. You guys are doing a lot of work. And you didn't talk about that either. Much about the solid state innovations. I'm sure that's coming. Fun, you can tell us. The store service here today. Yeah, I mean, but it wasn't really talked about yesterday. It was a big announcement. We didn't want to take away from it, but you get solid state and you got big data. Two of the hottest trends on the planet. How are you going to bring in the positioning with big data? Because we're saying it's native within HP now that big data is going to sprinkle from laser jets, storage to services everywhere. So how do you manage that? Sure, let's take the big data question first. I'll get back to SSDs. Big data, and I think I saw a number that by 2015, customers are going to spend $15 billion on big data between server, storage, software. And the lion share of that is going to be the storage. And big data has two fundamental problems. Really almost three. The first is how do you store it? Now, how do you store cost effectively? How do you have an architecture built with petabytes in mind? First problem. Second, is it file-based data or is it object? And do you have two separate products or do you do file an object in one platform? Third, now that I have it, so we solved the storage problem, what do I do with it? How do I deliver competitive advantage? How do I learn more customer insights? How do I back it up? Yeah, exactly. What should I back up, you know? And that's where the integration with autonomy comes in. So Store All, our scale-out platform, that handles the storage piece. And it has all the worm and the constant validation for data immutability, as well as policy-based tierings. That's the storage piece. The second thing is, all right, how do I do anything with it? And that's where autonomy and the integration comes in. We had, we announced something called Store All Express Query, which really allows you to scan, process, and understand data. Some of our tests showed 100,000 times faster. Now, we ran tests of a 500 million file, file system. 42 hours to one second.  I mean, you're integrating into one of the strategic pieces of the business, and I think that's impressive. And I want to ask you, compare and contrast that with IBM, for example.  They're like the storage guys. And they're trying, they have Tivoli out here, and they've got the similar big company's phenomenon. So, how do you guys compare to IBM, both on a product, and then also how they're organized? I can't comment on how they're organized. You can, but he will you. Choose not to. But on a product, typically, you know, I don't think, you know, sometimes when I look at IBM, I see HP of a few years ago, from a storage perspective, you know, they're the UNIX guys, they're the mainframe guys. They kind of grew by acquisition on the storage side. They can't talk about polymorphic simplicity. You know, they can't talk about a single architecture for primary storage, for data protection, for information retention. So, I think they've crafted a decent, a big data story. But on the product side, compared with the storage platform, I don't know. Yeah, they're kind of like, yeah. Yeah. Okay, cool. So, let's summarize this, actually, as we can. I know we're going to break, but so we've got the big guys, you guys reemerging, you know, taking off the gloves, I say, you're very excited. You know, EMC gets more and more complex, but it continues to do well. No question, it's got the VMware thing going on. Oracle's this wild card, and we get that the whole red-stacked piece.  So, you got these Dell is in there in the mix. You got four or five, you know, big in NetApp, big storage companies now, all sort of doing their thing, all with significant resources.  You have these flash startup guys. How do you see that all shaking out?  Do you see that changing, or do you see that continuing? No, I think oligopoly's the right word. Going back to your business school economics class. You know, for the startup SSD guys, I think there will be a shakeout. You know, and customers have a choice. Do they want to buy a pure SSD box really without the advanced storage data services and architecture, or do you want to take the benefit of SSD and plug it into a proven architecture that's been bulletproof tested, you know, run by service providers? That's really the choice they have today. I think, yeah, I think over time, I think probably a couple of the SSD vendors will get picked up, and I think a couple will make it. I'll sit and watch and see who's who. Yeah, but the startups to thrive, the startups got to be 10X better. That's the number, yeah. And how many of those guys are going to be 10X better? Maybe a couple, and it's a lot of times it's hard to pick which ones, they emerge, they do what data domain did, you know, congratulations. Make a bunch of money, yeah. Yeah, it's all good. I think shakeouts are probably the right word. All right, Sean, Sean Kinney from HP, really appreciate you coming on. Absolutely, this was a class. Always a pleasure, good seeing you. Thanks, Dave. Okay, we'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. This is theCUBE, siliconangle.com, exclusive coverage of HP Discover in Europe and Germany.


Hello and welcome. Today we're going to be looking at passing arguments to our shell script. I'm going to show you some basic stuff right now that I've probably shown in the past. But then in next couple videos, we're going to take it a few steps further. There's different ways to pass stuff. We're going to look at piping stuff into a script and having different switches and arguments that you can pass to your scripts. But let's right now just create basic script and show you how you can put information in there. So I'm just going to call it main.sh and here I'm going to say, let's give it a shebang line of bin bash. And what we're going to do is we're going to just say, we'll say hello. Okay, we'll make that executable. And we ran it with dot slash again dot slash just means the script is in the current directory, not the system path, and it prints out hello. But let's say we wanted the user to, from the command line, as it runs a script, give it their name. So we can go into our main script here. And the way we can do that is we can put it right in here, should be able to put it right in here, dollar sign one. So when you pass arguments to a script, each argument that is passed is given a value of a number, dollar sign, whatever. So now if I run main like this, it still says hello. But if I say my name Chris, now it says hello, Chris. Now, what if I say hello, Chris, and John, how about that? It still just says hello, Chris, because it's looking at each one of these as a separate argument. One way around that is I can put this in quotations. And now it's going to see this as one argument. Now we'll say hello, Chris, and John. But let's say you wanted it to print all of that. Well, one way, you can come in here and say dollar sign two, dollar sign three. And if we run it without the quotations, it's going to say hello, Chris, and John. If we do it with quotations, it's still going to print hello, Chris, and John, because it's printing the first one and the other two are blank. But that's kind of a sloppy way to do it because you don't know how many arguments they're going to pass to it. So what you could do is put an asterisk, which means all arguments passed. So now I can say hello, Chris, and John with the quotations. I can say hello, Chris, and John without the quotations. And I can just type more things and it's going to pass all of them to there. So that's one option. But of course, you can write your script if you want to have it. One, echo, hello, dollar sign two. Now I can pass it like this.  I can say, Chris and John will say hello, Chris. Hello, John. But of course, if I give it a fourth name, Bob, it's not going to do that because we're only passing it to two variables. So what you could do is you can make a while loop that loops through each argument. You can also check the number of arguments. So let's say we want to require them to have two arguments. What we can do here is we can add an if statement. So we can say if, and what we can say dollar sign pound, or also known as number sign, also known as a bunch of other things, hashtag. But what we're here is we're saying is dollar sign, of course, is a variable. Here we're saying number. So we're saying that's passed the script. We're checking the number of them. And then we can say dash LT. We're saying if it's less than, and we'll say two, then, and we'll close our if then statement, we can say echo two names needed. And then we can always say echo example. And you might think, okay, dollar sign one, what about dollar sign zero? Well, dollar sign zero, as I mentioned, is the name of your script. So basically, when you type something, this is argument one, argument two, argument three, and this is argument zero. So that makes sense, right? So what you can do here is as an example, you can say dollar sign zero, I've mentioned this in previous videos, will give you the name of your script. And that way, no matter what your script is named. So like, let's say I named my script. Hello's. I wouldn't want to put that in here as that because if someone renamed the script, well, now it's not making sense to the person running the script. But if I do dollar sign zero, it doesn't matter what you name the script, it will print that name there. So dollar sign zero, Chris, John. So now, oh, and then we want to also exit. And that would exit a script. We want to say exit one. So exiting zero will mean that the script was successful. Saying exit one is saying, well, the script failed. And you can check that if you're calling this script in other ways. And if it fails, you can do something. And if it succeeds, it does something else. So now, if I run my main script, I do this, I didn't give it any names. It's going to say, Oh, you need to give it two names. And if I give it one name, Chris, it's still going to tell me you need two names. And so now I can say Chris and John. And if I give more, it's, you know, above, it doesn't matter. But you can also check, you know, if they have more. So if you want them to not have any more than something, you can also do, you know, if it's greater than so if the number is greater than do something. But you can have different options in there for that. So that is one way to do arguments. And that's way for a lot of simple scripts you can do. But sometimes, like I said, you're going to want to pipe information from one program to your script, or you're going to want to also have switches where maybe you, you want different arguments, but not in a certain order. So that's when you have, you know, dash i for input dash o for output. So we're going to look into those options in the coming videos. So I do thank you for watching. Please visit filmsbychris.com. That's Chris the K. There's a link in the description as well as link to my Patreon page. You can also go to filmsbychris.com. Go to the sports section to support me through Patreon or through PayPal. I do appreciate your support. And you also get early access and downloadable videos. So you don't have to wait for the next videos to come out. You get them fairly quickly after I make them. And also go there to search through all my videos from both my channels. I do thank you for watching as always. I hope that you have a great day.


What's up, everyone? It's your girl, Kenty here from Layton Sports Cards, and I'm ripping a couple personal boxes here for Matthew T. We've got a 2022 Tops Tribute Baseball Hobby Box, as well as a 2022 Bowman Baseball Hobby Box. All right, we're going to start with the Bowman here first, Matthew. Again, no base paper, ships out of this, just hints, inserts, air wells, and any numbered paper. Oh, okay, gotcha. Here we go. Austin Martin, Tatees Perez. They're being ripped in the order that they were ordered. We've got Joe Ryan, Ricky Refractor, Frazier. So they're in the same queue as Hobby Boxes or other boxes that are ordered. Invicta Santana. Me for Carol Refractor. They like Cruz, Bernabelle. Armando Cruz, Hi-Fi. Something in the back here. Vibrations Austin Martin. Luziotti and Orange Shimmer first. Jose Rodriguez out of 25. Nice Orange Shimmer there. Congrats on that one, Matthew. Beautiful card. What's up, Bernie? How's it going? Compos, just like Gray Refractor, Guzman, and Atomic of Diego Carriotta. Looks good. You happen any breaks tonight? Are you just chilling tonight? Zala's being... I'm full, unfortunately, Bernie. I am full. Bruvon Rookie Refractor. Yeah, I'm not going to get through everything today. Oh, Bernie, are you the one that hit that Brady Auto? Wow. Luciano Refractor. That's crazy. That was a beautiful card. More personals tomorrow night, though. Yeah, I'm full for deep time. We've got Orange Top 100, Jason Dominguez, 25 of 25 bookends. Another nice Orange. Matthew, two oranges in one box. Yeah, very nice card, Bernie. Absolutely. Venezuela, Veen. Got Benny Montgomery Vibrations. Wayray first. Raffella to $3.99. Nice, Karen. Conez, Mitchell, Agriers. We've got Jack Swinsky on the Purple Paper to $1.50. Fella. Got Julio Rodriguez. Yeah, so I was about to ask, Bradley, if you grade that or keep it in case. Jared Duran. All right, still looking for that auto. Colton Kouser. Got Julio Rodriguez. Paper. This is another Orange, my goodness. Orange, first auto of Adam Makode, 25. Wow, three oranges in one box here for you, Matthew. 16 of 25. We'll mag that. Two packs left here. You may keep it in case. Yeah, you have to look at it a little closer once you get it for sure. Those sticker cards do tend to grade, not as well as, you know, standard cards. Carriotta Vibrations and Last Cut. Noel de Marte, Sosa and Dominguez. All right. That will do it for Bowman. Yeah, no paper-based ships. Time for some tribute. Never a trippy in a while. Tyler Glassna and Buster Posey. First hit up. We've got a Jackson Reets out of 199. Washington Reets. Jordan Alvarez and Jacob de Grom. Next hit up. Stamp of Approval. Orange the 25. Buster Posey. What color match on that orange, too? It's Christian Yelich. We've got Josiah Gray on the rookie. And Meggie Cabrera. Next hit. We've got Graves on 150. Kyle Muller Otto. 125 out of 150. Marcus Semeon and Albert Pujos. We've got a dual patch of Torrey Hunter out of 199. Tigers. Yeah, I really like tribute. They always do a good job on their cards. I break Tuesday. Tuesday and Wednesday, Bernie. I believe Caleb will be ripping tomorrow night. Jose Ebreu and Randy Johnson. Next hit up. What do we have here? Washington, 8 of 10. Rookie Otto, Josiah Gray. Go Matthew, pulling some nice low-numbered cards out of his boxes. 8 of 10. And Last Hack. Tom Glavin and Purple out of 50. Manny Machado, Padres. Caleb's your hero. Oh, Sam's breaking tomorrow. We've got Yankees triple out of 50. Glaver Torres. Glaver Torres out of 50. Yankees. Alrighty, Matthew. That will do it for your two boxes. Thanks again for hopping in and we'll get these right out to you.