Hey everybody, Dr. O here. So what is NEAT? I like to start every story at the beginning. You're going to hear me talk a ton about NEAT, but what actually is it? So NEAT stands for Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis. It's also called NEPA, Non-Exercise Physical Activity. So what is this? Here's a great definition from the number one researcher in the field of NEAT, Dr. James Levine from the Mayo Clinic. Non-exercise Activity Thermogenesis, or NEAT, is the energy expended for everything we do that is not sleeping, eating, or sports-like exercise. It ranges from the energy expended walking to work, typing, performing yard work, undertaking agricultural tasks, and fidgeting. So that's a really good definition. There are arguments about what can truly be classified as NEAT. Some say it has to be subconscious, like if you actively are doing something it defeats the purpose, but I'm more interested in helping you lose weight than battling about definitions. So here's how I'm going to define it. NEAT is every calorie you burn using your muscles when you aren't in the gym. Every calorie you burn using your muscles when you aren't in the gym. This can be fidgeting, standing, walking, carrying things around your house, working in your yard, washing your car, going to the store. The list goes on and on. NEAT is truly the emotion of your life. Alright, so what does it mean to be a NEAT freak? People probably don't like being called the freak, so let me explain myself when I talk about this NEAT freak program. So a freak, another definition, is a person, animal, or plant with an unusual physical abnormality. So I don't mean this as a negative thing at all. This term fits because what we're going to do, we're going to be people who move as much as possible in a world where movement has become optional. We're going to stand out. We're going to be different. We will be freaks because we're going to move while those around us are sitting their way to fatter tummies and an earlier grave. That's what it means to be a NEAT freak and it's 100% positive. So why should you care? Why should I care about NEAT? That's the question that the first half of this course will answer. The answer has to do with how it can burn calories and boost your metabolism along with a lot of other things. So NEAT is an important piece of your metabolism pie.  The only way to boost your metabolism is to boost one of these four slices.  That's determined by genetics and how much lean mass you have. We can control that a little bit by adding lean mass, putting on a pound of muscle here, a pound of muscle there, but we can't change it much day to day.  We have a lot of control over how many calories are burned every day in non-exercise activity. So what's the science say? Non-exercise activity thermogenesis in human energy homeostasis. This is actually one of 183 studies that I reviewed as I designed this program. I spent the last six months just immersed in this data trying to find ways to help people burn more calories to lose more weight. So here's a quote. Available data support the hypothesis that targeting NEAT could be an essential tool for body weight control. That's why we're here. So non-exercise activity thermogenesis or NEAT is unequivocally the most influential part of our overall metabolism when it comes to adaptive thermogenesis. So what that means, and that's a really big part of this, it doesn't mean it's the biggest part of your metabolism, but it's the part of your metabolism that changes the most when you lose weight. So if we can keep it from changing while we lose weight, we will continue to lose weight. So that's why it's the most important piece of the puzzle for preventing weight loss stalls and weight loss plateaus and then also regaining the lost weight. So NEAT can burn a tremendous number of calories outside of the gym, which is why it's a powerful tool to boost your weight loss efforts. This means that a lack of NEAT is probably a huge part of your weight problem and finding ways to burn more calories throughout the day is going to be a huge part of the solution. So if you don't believe me, let's check this next couple studies out. Like again, I'm just, I'm throwing this idea around, but let's actually put some numbers behind it. I think they're going to surprise you. So what does the science say here? Let me take a drink quick. Pardon me. Non-exercise activity thermogenesis liberating the life force. So are you ready for this one? This study found that NEAT varies between two people of similar size by up to 2,000 calories per day because of people's different occupations and leisure time activity. That's 2,000 calories extra without trying, without going to the gym. Right? It's hard to believe, but simply moving around throughout the day can burn up to 2,000 more calories a day. I mean try doing that on the treadmill or the elliptical trainer at the gym. Now 2,000 calories is a huge number. These are going to be someone that has a manual labor job or someone working in agriculture versus someone at a desk. So I'm not saying that you can burn 2,000 calories a day, but we do know it's possible. This program will show you how NEAT could easily help you burn 350 to 700 calories per day when properly incorporated throughout the day. So why do I pick those numbers? You'll see there's actually science behind those numbers. I can honestly tell you that NEAT can help you burn 350 to 700 calories per day because that's what's happening in the studies that I'll show you throughout this course. This increase of 350 to 700 calories per day could lead to almost effortless weight loss without going on a diet or spending hours in the gym. So what are some of the other benefits of NEAT? And I will, I have videos that cover every one of these. You'll burn more calories. We'll talk about that repeatedly. Accelerating weight loss makes sense. Preventing weight loss stalls and plateaus. I just told you it's a big part of preventing that metabolic adaptation or people call the survival mode that occurs during weight loss. Boosting your metabolic rate. So I'll show you how being physically active can actually increase your basal metabolic rate as well by helping you increase lean mass. Building muscle. Those two are connected. Controlling your appetite. You may be surprised to find that out, but by increasing your physical activity, you can actually regulate your appetite and start to eat less and then living a longer, healthier life, which is what I hope you're really here for besides the weight loss. So as you can see, NEAT or non-exercise activity can give you many of the same benefits that you'd get from a structured exercise program. So I'm definitely not saying exercise is bad, but I'll show you evidence that NEAT throughout the day may even lead to more health benefits than just a single exercise session, 30 minutes after work, that kind of thing. So does this all seem too good to be true? Honestly, that's the whole point. I really feel like this could be the difference between weight loss, failure, and success, which is why I've spent so much time researching it and sharing it with you. So what are our key takeaways here? Long story short, NEAT is very NEAT, and I apologize for the puns and the terrible jokes, but NEAT is going to lead to a lot of those. Your NEAT levels will play a huge role in your weight loss success or failure, and the physical activity you do outside of the gym is way more important than you think. So what are our action steps so far? Honestly, right now, just prepare to be amazed at what NEAT can do as I show you more and more of the science, and then reach out to me if you have any questions. So next up, we're going to actually take an honest look and see that we may have been trying to lose weight the wrong way all along. I'll explain more in the next video. Have a wonderful day. Be blessed.


greejings a mwelkom to this month's EHF Live investor session. Edmond Hillary Fellowship, it's a collective of entrepreneurs, scientists, storytellers, creatives and investment change makers who want to make an impact globally from A2 at Oa New Zealand. So, hopefully, these informal investor interviews are planned in a way that when you leave here after the 60 minutes or so, you feel you know the investor fellows on a personal level and understand what their intentions for New Zealand. Now this month you will hear from Ed Baker and EHF Investor fellow as he is interviewed by Mark Pawlowski, founder of NZVC. So it is a Q&A session so firstly there will be Q&A from Mark to Ed and then we will open up the floor and then you can ask questions also. You can either put them in the chat or you can just raise your hand and Mark can ask them. So over to you Mark. Thank you Michelle. Great to have everybody here and I'm pretty excited to be interviewing Ed today so I'll give you a quick intro on Ed and then we can dive in. So Ed studied at Harvard and later Stanford and while in Stanford he actually took the famous BJ Fogg Facebook apps class which was class design solely to creating apps on Facebook right when their API became public and so the idea of the class was to make a viral app. So Ed was one of the lucky few and actually there were quite a few folks who made apps that got over a million users and kind of you can actually read in the New York Times some of these folks got profiled so it was basically he was a student who created a viral app over a million users and eventually that led to him starting his first company which was then acquired by Facebook. Given that his focus had been on growth and viral tactics and marketing he led Facebook's global growth right as they were having kind of one of their biggest growth spurts to date internationally. Then after a few years at Facebook he actually knew Travis Kalmick at Uber and joined Uber right as that company was getting ready to have an exponential growth phase and basically led Uber's international growth. After Uber his dad actually told him that after working so hard at Uber he was working 15-hour days from what I wanted. Yeah, his dad told him he was in the worst shape of his life and so I decided to focus on that as a problem and became a triathlete. He had done some track in college. I had never really done any biking or swimming. He learned biking. He learned how to swim really well and 18 months later won his first triathlon and sort of somewhere in between that he had three kids and actually back in February of 2020 he was one of the first people I think publicly to start saying that COVID was probably already in the US and spreading which was really interesting. His connection to New Zealand he's actually invested in a couple of companies here. He's on the board of Crimson Education and was also an investor on the board of NZDC which is our investment firm here in New Zealand. He's recently got it into crypto investing and Web3 and several of his friends like Jaikara can evolve. Rabakan have also got involved with the fund that's helped. So that's a bit about Ed. Let's just start off by learning more about your childhood. How did you grow up for your parents? What gave you the inspiration to go do all these very interesting things that you've done throughout your career? Sure and thanks for that intro Mark. There are things you said that I haven't even thought about for a while. I'm not sure how you even got all that information but that's awesome. So let's see where do I start? What was it like growing up? I guess I'll just start by saying I was born in Seattle. My family then moved to Taiwan for a couple of years so my first memories are actually from when we were living in Taiwan and apparently I was speaking some Mandarin at the same time I was learning English. We then moved to the Bay Area when I was five and that's where I grew up until the age of 13 at which point we moved to Jacksonville, Florida which was a pretty big change from Palo Alto, California to Jacksonville. Why were you moved when you were young so much? You know my dad just had different jobs and I think the hardest move for me was the one to Florida and I think part of the reason we made that move I didn't really realize it at the time because I was 13 years old but I think my parents just felt like there was so much pressure in Silicon Valley even back then. This was around 1992 and they just felt like we had to get out of there. And so we moved to Jacksonville, Florida where my mom was born and raised and so I think my dad was in the Navy when he was stationed in Jacksonville that's where he met my mom and so for them they had all these good memories of like this is the place where we met and I think it just felt like that would be a fun place to go but for me and my brother who was two years younger than me it was hard to leave all of our friends in California and start a new life in Florida at that age. So let's see I wasn't really I'm kind of talking all over the place right now. Do you think that the moving around do you think that influenced you in a positive or negative way? Good question you know I think ultimately it was positive but it was really hard at the time I mean I remember when I I mean I think it's probably hard at age 13 to no even if you don't move that's a hard age but moving across the country before internet was around to message your friends was especially hard I remember my parents would let me like I could call one friend a month for like five minutes because it was so expensive to do a long-distance phone call you know and I would write letters to some of my friends you know I just did I for the first six months I lived in Florida I cried myself to sleep every night you know I really missed California so it was tough but but now looking back I think it it made me more resilient you know the school I went to in Florida I was I went to a public school in California and in Jacksonville Florida went to a private school and that was a big change you know I had to wear a tie every day and I remember kids making fun of my ties and I just like felt like I didn't really fit in and I was I was also like I think what I had been studying in California we were like a bit ahead of where we were the kids were in Florida so I took some classes with some of the kids that were like a great ahead of me and people are like oh this nerdy guy is taking these more advanced classes and so I just like was not a very popular kid and it was tough I was trying to find my place and didn't really feel like I fit in um did you ever like ever say let's let's move back or did you ever say let's move back um you know I think they again a lot of the stuff I didn't realize until I kind of became an adult but I think um for my dad especially it was um he didn't have great great experience out in the Bay Area and I think it was a difficult time in his life and um so that was never really an option that was on the table and you know when you're a kid you kind of just go along with whatever your parents do I think right or at least at least that's what I did so I didn't even really think of it as an option um so it took me a while to kind of I never fully felt like I fit in at my high school in Florida but I did discover track as kind of an extracurricular activity track in cross-country running and I felt like that more than anything made me feel like okay now I have like a group of friends that and I I started to feel like I found my place a little bit more so um just discovering a sport I found was was really helpful back then nice so what kind of happened after that uh so after that I um well I ended up applying to colleges and decided to go to Harvard and um studied physics and chemistry there uh at Harvard I felt much more I don't know it was it was a refreshing change from from Jacksonville Florida and um I made a lot of friends there I ran on the track and cross country team there and it athletics ended up being a pretty big part of my college experience you know I kind of thought like oh that's just a high school thing in college I'm going to study and not not worry about athletics but I realized that um that I just really enjoyed that and I enjoyed the balance between um kind of um academics and athletics the balance that provided and it was a bit of an escape for me too um because Harvard was a pretty like intense place um and a bit of a pressure cooker at times so it was nice to have a a sport I could do to kind of help me relieve some of that stress um uh let's see so in college I um yeah I made some some some of my closest friends today are still friends from college so it was a pretty um um those those four years were pretty meaningful for me and uh I also started my first company while I was there um I don't know if you could really call it a company actually it was I at the time I thought I was starting a company but it was really just a website um back when websites were kind of this new thing it was called datesite.com and the way it worked was you would put in email addresses of people you had a crush on and they would get an email saying somebody likes you and then it said go to datesite.com to see if there's a match and you'd go there and you'd have to type in email addresses of people you had a crush on and if it matched up it would say hey you guys have a match you should go out and um you know I part of the reason I built it was I was too shy to actually ask anyone out to their face um and so I partially built it for myself although I don't think I ended up getting any matches but you know I tried um but within one week a quarter of all the students at Harvard had signed up for it wow and that just blew my mind this was back in 1999 um wow and people were just starting to use the internet and this was back when like people actually would read an email saying someone has a crush on you and it wouldn't go into your spam folder because their spam folders didn't even really exist back then um so it was a different time back then but I was just blown away by how quickly it grew on its own and um I was you know studying physics at the time so I was really interested in the math behind that viral growth and uh that's when I first started to experiment with this idea of viral growth on the internet and the fact that it can actually be measured and um you can run experiments you know just like you might run a physics experiment you could run an experiment on the internet and say well what if we tweak the email to say this instead of this you know how does that change the conversion rate and what if we change this page to you know say this instead of this and how does that change things and then with all these experiments kind of seeing well does that allow us to grow faster so it was kind of something I just stumbled stumbled upon did you start running those experiments right at that time uh not right away but um I I at first when I first launched it it just happened to be viral from day one although that was at Harvard campus it maybe tells you something about Harvard students the fact that they they all wanted to like put in crushes and not actually tell people it was also viral at MIT right yeah it went viral at MIT as well actually that was our second school um so I did more experimentation um later on uh I so I went out to Stanford for business school and that as you mentioned that's when I took the Facebook class and at that point in time I was starting to do a lot a lot more of those experiments and you were at Harvard before uh Zuck was there right that's right I I graduated I think a year before he started so I think it was five years do you think there was something special at Harvard at the time that that led to well it sounds like you got a lot of really interesting um experiences with viral growth and he later did with Facebook um do you think there was something special at Harvard at the time that led to that being kind of in some ways you know like you know a lot of innovation kind of flourishing there um good question I don't know I think um I think it might just be a coincidence I'm not sure um I'm trying to think if there was anything in particular um I mean well so the reason I I actually built the site was there was this business plan competition and my roommates and I at dinner one night were brainstorming like well what we should apply for this business plan competition if we win we can make some money it'd be cool and we're like what what what would the business idea be and that's when I came up with the idea for date site we ended up writing a business plan submitting it we ended up not winning anything um our idea was not selected but we we liked the idea so much we were like let's build it anyway you know so I I remember going to the the bookstore and buying a book to learn how to code and so I could code the site myself wow I coded it and uh I mean it was not not very pretty it would I code I remember using I think C++ and CGI scripts and you know I was learning all this stuff for the first time wow cool and then you said that's awesome thank you and then you went to Stanford and that's where you sort of really got into the growth yeah that's where you know um when Facebook launched their app platform in 2007 that was a great way to experiment with these growth ideas by building different apps and you know one of the apps I built in that class you mentioned that BJ Fogtaw was it was called Send Hotness and it you'll see a common theme with some of these things I worked on it would let you send hotness points to people you thought friends of yours you thought were hot and that it was just a silly little you probably remember the days of those crazy Facebook apps that all were growing virally so this one grew to five million users in five weeks wow five million users in five weeks yeah Matt can you go on to the question yeah yeah I was going to make a comment to the question that Mark asked earlier about whether there's something unique happening at Harvard I was there before you uh graduate and I hate to admit this actually in the earlier century in in 1978 and even then there was a lot of encouragement to do things and and a lot of things that were probably not a great idea at the time and I was in physics and we were basically even free run of the lab and we did a lot of stuff that was in hindsight probably very dangerous but that was okay and I think later because I was there overlapping with Bill Gates and he and his buddies would just took over the computer center and basically built their whole product on Harvard's system presumably when you built your app it was also probably on Harvard's systems totally in violation of the rules that's right probably between the two of you because it was probably in the late 80s or early nine no it was later than that it would have been the early to mid 90s um we I got pulled into something that was a workshop or a program that I that Harvard was looking at is how do we use technology so they brought a bunch of alumni in and we looked at it and they were actually thinking of suing um Microsoft they thought they you know a few hundred million dollars from Microsoft because he had violated the terms of use and therefore when they built their initial computer and all this and we talked them out of that uh which in hindsight Harvard got a lot more money from both Microsoft and Bill Gates and various other alumni who had been there but it was really I think that was the thing that allowed people like you or Zach or others to do things there was just it was encouraged to try stuff more so than a lot of other that's that's a great point Mark you know now that you say it that resonates with me and I was trying to think though like who how who encouraged people to do so where did that come from and you know like you said it was actually against the university rules to actually to start a company while you were there so it wasn't that the university was actively encouraging students to start companies but I'd say it was almost just like almost from my peers like when my roommates and I were brainstorming over dinner and we're just like let's do this you know there's almost that and I think Harvard believes in in free range students you know they they say they have rules but actually it's free range you do whatever you want and that's the way they treat their academics largely you get out of it when you put it and if you don't put something in they don't come and help you yep yep true oh thanks for that comment that's really interesting work thank you so where were we we were saying you five million uh five weeks five weeks this was spend hotness and standard it was spend hotness yeah and our professor said your grade will be based on how many users your app has so really we uh yeah it was like a minimum that you had to have I I don't know if there was a minimum but I think like because if you have like you know five million and everyone else has a thousand right then all right how do you standardize the rating I know that that that I I got a good grade in the class even though I didn't do the homework guys so so this was this was like almost seven five seven years after your experiment at Harvard right that's right so I kind of skipped over the five years between college and business school where I was in Boston most of that time I worked at bain consulting and bain capital private equity um most of that time in Boston but spent a year in Tokyo as well I guess yeah I understood because it was like it's been five years so like they're like grown pretty fast instead right so did you find that it was the same techniques that worked both kind of before no uh yeah um the it was the same framework but um there were slightly different um I guess same framework in similar tactics but the biggest thing that changed were the actual growth channels so by the time I was out at Stanford email wasn't working anymore um for some of those reasons I mentioned just like spam filters and people just not not reading their emails as much as they used to um so actually when I was at Stanford business school another thing I did before Facebook built that platform was I I built a mobile version of datesite.com and I still had the domain name I just did it with text messaging and that went viral and with that one I did do a lot more of the ab testing and experiments and that kind of thing um and then of course with the Facebook platform those growth channels were things that all existed within the Facebook platform itself so things like sending invites and notifications and things via Facebook um so I'd say that was the biggest thing that changed um and I think that still is like the thing that's constantly changing is the actual growth channels that are most effective change over time but I think the framework stays the same you know and I like to kind of draw out a viral loop anytime I'm trying to make a new product grow in a viral way the first thing I do is just draw out a simple viral loop and think about you know it starts with how does someone who's never heard of this product before um get pulled into it and sign up for it and use it and then ultimately share it with their friends so that their friends get pulled into it and the loop repeats so you can kind of just like draw out the steps that what has to happen between the first user using something and the next person who heard about it from them using it and you can measure every step of that loop to um kind of see what your k-factor is and if that k-factor gets above one that's when you see massive exponential growth and by the way that's that's the main reason you mentioned um the pandemic and I wrote a medium post um a couple of medium posts about it I think yeah as as as Michelle's saying that's the R that's the R not is the same thing as a k-factor and the math is exactly the same and so um I think yeah I may have written my first blog post about it in January I think um before people were people were still saying no it's not going to be in the US but just from all the data I had seen from China and pattern matching that with all these viral experiments I'd run over the last 20 years um it just struck me that this is the exact same pattern and there's no way this thing is going to be contained to China or any other part of the world um and I and the blog post I wrote you applied to EHF right that's right sorry but it'll go yeah the blog post here oh yeah I just made I made all of the um the analogies between like how you calculate a k-factor when you're trying to make something on the internet growing a viral way and the the R not with COVID and um it was it was kind of a a weird exercise for me to go through because I had always been trying to do things and run experiments to increase the k-factor right because you always want to grow faster but then for the first time I was as I was writing these blog posts I was thinking about well how do you effectively reduce that that effective R right and um that's why I also wrote a post a follow-up post about face mask back when the CDC was still saying no one needs to wear face mask I was going to this this is the only thing I can think of that might reduce our our k-factor so there were just a lot of um analogies that that struck me um and that's why I started writing writing about it although by no I'm by no means an epidemiologist or anything like that I just wanted to spare some of my observations yeah and then back to back to back to Facebook so at that time there was a lot of companies that were taking off just based on Facebook it's not like they they you know built inherently the product baked in a bunch of these viral kind of tools right so like Zynga took off and like a bunch of companies kind of became really huge and then when Facebook and the flip side turned those things off right Zynga tanked and a lot of other companies kind of went bust so kind of can you talk a bit about that like period and what was like was being trying to leverage other products to grow and at some point they decided that was that was kind of you know uh they're taking them too much too much space and it's time to close them down and then what was your role kind of because you had a company you got acquired that's right yeah so I I did build I started a company after business school called Friendly um Friend.ly which uh we built on Facebook's platform so we were using all of those those Facebook channels to grow and we were able to grow to over 25 million registered users um doing so but I always felt vulnerable you know I always felt like Facebook could shut these things off at any time and then we would just we wouldn't be able to grow anymore and um and that that is what happened with companies like Zynga you know so I think that that was the biggest risk at the time the same way that you know email used to work and then with spam filters and stuff like people stopped seeing the emails and it's harder to keep that k-factor high um with Facebook I think Facebook kind of it was kind of like the wild west and for a while they were just kind of letting anything go and then um I remember there was one app I built called Zodiac Photo Album um that uh basically it would just look at all of your friends on Facebook and create a photo album for every Zodiac sign and it would show you which of your friends had that um Zodiac sign you know it had one for areas one for etc and then it would tag all those friends and it was like it was actually the most viral thing I had ever built um and when you were at Facebook or outside no this was this was before I was at Facebook this was actually like when I was starting up friendly this was something I built right before that got it it was super viral but within 48 hours we got shut down because we had tagged I think like over 100 million people in photos on Facebook including Mark Zuckerberg um was tagged in some and this was back when they had this highlight section that would show you know popular photos on Facebook from your friends and like all of the highlights were all Zodiac Photo Albums it just kind of broke the site for a day and I later found out that Zuckerberg said to the platform team what is a Zodiac Photo Album thing and why are we allowing this on here you know and they just shut it off even though we hadn't technically broken any of the rules I said why did you guys shut us down and they just said I said did we violate any of your platform policies and it took them a while to get back to me and they finally said well it it violates the spirit of the Facebook platform so um anyways it was the Wild West and but we were always at the mercy of like Facebook's channels and whether or not they wanted to keep those going so um you know I think these days um it's interesting I I feel like a lot of apps are figuring out other ways to grow like I think SMS is still a pretty popular one and especially with smartphones and address the way you can import your address book like clubhouse for example use that and I think we're able to grow really quickly just through doing the address book importer thing pretty well so there's still and those are ways that I think are um safer to grow because you don't have um a company like Facebook that can just turn it off I mean with a lot of things I guess you have Apple to turn it off we talk about some of these tactics right like importing the address book for example I think every single app tries to do that right get some apps succeeded some don't so like when you think about the viral loop how do you think about like sure like I think the tactics are every tactic is available to every company what makes certain companies stand out yeah so yeah the interesting thing about making something kind of hit that tipping point and start growing exponentially is it's all about getting that k-factor above one and even if you're just below one at like point nine you won't have any exponential growth whereas if you're at 1.1 that can just compound so quickly and and grow so much and so sure everyone's trying to do things like add an address book importer and do these different things and that might help you get some virality but unless you're really measuring the the k-factor and iterating on it and running experiments you're probably not going to hit that tipping point so and that's that's a pretty hard thing to do is to hit that tipping point and I think it's only gotten harder over time and at the end of the day it actually takes I think a lot more art than science to get there these days so I don't think you can just kind of experiment your way to getting something to go viral these days I think you have to really be creative and think about what what are the things that are going to make people want to share this product and and want to sign up for this product so that the art I think is um actually like more important in 20 years ago I think you could just take a very scientific approach and almost like brute force it to get going viral but these days I think you it's actually you have to build a better product it's a lot harder to make something go viral that isn't a good product right right so by the way I saw a couple questions might have come in like does it make sense now to look at any of those or um I think we we've addressed uh I think there was one I just briefly saw it um pop up about maybe giving an example of a viral loop it's it's an ask yeah I mean I can read it to you basically and just ask you yeah so I mean uh you know um I had a business that was viral and grew but uh you know when I started in 2011 Facebook it was kind of super easy to do and then with their algorithm changes and also with Google changing their algorithm all the time it gets more and more difficult so um you know with um Uber or even something that you're working on now um or if you're investing in a company are there certain ways um like importing address books some more concrete examples that you know some of the entrepreneurs or investors here could use with their portfolio companies to say hey uh here are some things like a referral program or uh anything that you kind of like map out a viral loop um like how to do kind of get off the ground and get back after up so um referral programs are a very common viral loop and a lot of times there there's more than one viral loop in a product and sometimes you need multiple viral loops all kind of working together to get your overall key factor above one but with Uber the the referral program was and probably still is a big part of their growth and that's that's the give a ride get a ride um when I first joined Uber I think it was give um 20 dollars get 20 dollars and so any you could kind of give a new user you give any of your friends 20 dollars worth of credit on Uber once they signed up and claimed that and took their first ride you'd get 20 dollars of credit to your account we then tested out different versions of that and found that give a ride get a ride was more viral because I think people that received those free rides for whatever reason valued that more or were more likely to sign up when they received it even though the average ride costs less than 20 dollars um so that was a great discovery when we found we can spend less money and grow faster when we switch it from give 20 get 20 to give a ride get a ride um so that was one example of something we did at Uber to increase the virality um that was on the rider side on the driver side we had a driver referral program as well um and we found that we were actually uh more supply constrained than demand constrained at Uber anytime you have a two-sided marketplace usually one side of that marketplace is is where you're constrained and with Uber in most markets it was weird that we were constrained on the supply side so when we realized that and it took us a while to really fully realize that then it became all about how do we get more drivers on the platform that's the key to unlocking growth um so there was the driver referral program where drivers could refer other drivers but we thought there've got to be other ways to get new drivers on the platform and one of the things we did this is a super simple um tweak we made to the app but when I look back at my time both at Facebook and at Uber and at other companies I've worked with there's often like one thing per year we do that moves the needle on growth more than everything else combined and a lot of times it's a pretty simple thing so I'll share with you the example at Uber um we added the ability for riders to sign up and become drivers we just added a little button in the rider app saying hey would you like to become a driver and suddenly that gave us more new drivers signing up than like all of our paid marketing on on the driver's side so and it took a week to just to do that a week of engineering time to add a little button and make the sign up flow work for riders to become drivers we called it R2D rider to driver and that was a huge needle mover for us on uh for the overall company and you know we were we were running dozens of experiments a week and had at that point in time hundreds of people on the growth team and doing all kinds of things looking for one person improvement here or there and then it's like add a button in the rider app asking riders to become drivers and that like one thing we did caused more growth and everything else combined so um I feel like there was maybe one thing like that each year and of course you you didn't always know ahead of time what that one thing would be but it was always interesting when we discovered like wow that one little feature was more important than everything else combined in terms of driving growth uh that year and with with um a lot of these you were early and so for a lot of these with a facebook ruber being early allowed you to you know trial and error things and get to something that worked whereas now a lot of these have been tried and you know one could argue that a lot of these big platforms whether it's google or facebook control and apple control the ecosystem it's as harder to break through right they um may they're taking big tax or they they want that how fast you can grow how do you think about that like do you think we've sort of left like like clubhouse maybe an example something that really broke out last year but I feel like the frequency of those types of companies have become less and less frequent do you feel like that's true do you feel like there's now I mean because you have these sort of monopolies um it's harder for companies to to break out and and if and if so what are some of the new ways that they can try to you know are there any platforms and mediums that will allow them to do so yeah um it's a good question I I don't know I mean on the one hand I I sometimes feel what you're sharing which is like wow all these big companies they almost feel like monopolies now and like is it possible to create your own startup anymore but then you look at like the number of unicorns that are created every year these day like in the last year it's like way more than ever before so there are plenty of companies out there that are growing faster than what we've ever seen before um I do think that kind of the the growth hacking which is kind of what I've some of the stuff I've been talking about with measuring the k-factor and running AB tests and all of that is you know probably less important today than it used to be and I think the more important thing today is is really just building a great product that that people want to use and people want to pay for I mean that's the other thing a lot of the stuff I worked on in the past was it was all free and so you had to grow to millions or tens of millions of users for it to really become a valuable business whereas today I feel like um there's so many more things people are willing to pay for and um I'm I'm involved with a couple of subscription companies subscription-based companies in the health and wellness space um both of whom are are now unicorns and they they got to that milestone with just hundreds of thousands of subscribers so you don't even need a million subscribers to you know when you have people who are actually willing to pay for something so I think that's maybe one of the differences today versus in the past is that it's just like easier to get people to pay for things maybe and therefore it's easier to build businesses that can um you know that that can generate meaningful revenue like more easily. Yeah I think one of those companies is Woop right and I found out about what was because one of the other fellows you are who's on this call he he told me that he was wearing the band right so that was actually an interesting um you know viral transmission uh way of doing it or actually wearable but people ask you about because I asked them what is that he explained it to me right and then and then it became a thing that like other people asked me about. And uh EHF uh cohorts seven member Ryan McIntyre is on their board. Yeah. On Woop's board? Yeah. Ryan McIntyre? What's the name of the company? Woop I'm on Woop's board but yeah I don't think. That's awkward for me because that at least it's recorded that I'm wrong. I mean maybe maybe he's on their advisory board I'm not sure. He's definitely an investor in the company so Foundry Group in Boulder.  And I kind of wanted to maybe two more things before before we sort of you know have people a time lapse. One thing I wanted to talk about was definitely kind of New Zealand, you're interested in New Zealand and how Foundry's here because they can find growth. And the second thing was um Woop 3 right because I think Woop 3 now is turning out to be you know now it has a lot of different growth tactics that Web 2 companies didn't really have. And you know I'm happy to talk about what Woop 3 even is or you can talk about that. Maybe those two things we can kind of cover before for the end of the call whichever way you want to take it. Yeah for sure. So let's see Web 3 and by the way Foundry Group's one of the biggest investors I saw your note but Chris Moody from Foundry is on the board so he must be partner. Yeah he's the partner and I think Ryan led the investment and then Chris took the part too. Okay so I'm not totally wrong. Okay no no you're not. It's somewhat vindicated. Yeah for sure. And by the way just quickly on Woop before we move on to your question Mark. One of the one of the first suggestions I made when I joined the board of Woop was a change to their pricing which ultimately it was basically instead of charging $180 upfront for the strap and getting six months free and then paying $30 a month to just charge $30 a month from day one. And that's just it's a very simple concept but by reducing that friction of not having that huge upfront payment and instead of just doing $30 a month and we we basically make you commit for six months so we know we will get that $180. We saw twice as many people started purchasing Woop just because of that one little change. So a lot of times how did you make them commit they're only paying $30 a month? The same way like a cell phone company will say you know we'll give you an iPhone if you pay this much per month but if you cancel early you've got to pay us the difference. So and that was the main reason Woop hadn't done that was they're like well the hardware's a lot more expensive than $30 so we can't just let you start paying $30 a month but when we added that language around the commitment it ended up working. The position now is you're paying for the service right you're paying for the monitoring the data which exactly and you get free hardware upgrades by just being a member so it really is more about being a member than a hardware sales business. Back to web three I have to say this is not an area where I have any I consider myself to have any expertise so I think my my the extent of my expertise is I was able to connect you Mark to for other friends of mine who do have expertise in that area and I I kind of follow along and invest in some of the things they invest in but I I have to say that's just not something where I can speak with a whole lot of knowledge but it is an area that I that's obviously going to be huge and a place where I would like to learn more and spend some more time. Yeah and maybe I guess just for everyone who is not what web three is just it's the idea of using kind of blockchain technology for a lot of the applications that we use today which are centralized and sort of web two and the reason I asked was because a lot of these projects are going super fast part of the way they're able to do that is to incentivize with uh with actually with payment like they pay their users right so the model instead of paying their third party company to get the users they actually pay the users directly so I'm just curious yeah I've thought about that how they change some of the buyer rules but yeah yeah that's that's fine and we can we can talk about New Zealand now because I think you're also under yeah on the board of Crimson right which is a New Zealand company yeah I'm on I'm on their advisory board and an investor in the company and and yeah so far you know unfortunately since uh we haven't yet had a chance to go there in person everything I've been doing in terms of investing in companies in New Zealand has been through introductions and zoom meetings you know including through you mark um and so I'm excited for the time when I can actually go and meet some of these founders in person um but in terms of like how do I decide on what companies in New Zealand I want to get involved with the first thing I think about is like where can I actually be helpful so if um my background on growth could could you know for example with Crimson it made sense that I felt like there were places I could add value there um and uh and then from there it's I'd say most of what I've done is it tends to be consumer facing so I tend to lean more towards consumer facing companies and I've done a lot of stuff in the health and wellness space you know like Woop and Zwift and and others and being a um kind of endurance athlete myself that's just uh a space that I'm personally passionate about so uh that and ed tech is a space I've also started to get a bit more involved with um so how do you think about this is traditional New Zealand hasn't had a lot of a direct to consumer companies right most the ones at least that that are well known are either deep tech for BWSAS think zero and rocket lab how do you think about and I think I mean my opinion is that part of it is that New Zealand is isn't quite you know quite far away from the consumer markets like the United States um how do you think about founders for building direct to consumer businesses from New Zealand what do you think is there a way to do it from New Zealand or do they have to move to the States I don't think you need to move to the States I think especially these days you can start any company from anywhere in the world I think right so um I mean there there may be certain things where you if your target market is in the States it's easier to start off living if you live in the States but um just trying to think I mean um well I mean crimson education is a great example of a company that uh was able to to build a big successful business from New Zealand a global business and um I don't see any reason why anyone else can't do that are there anything that given your experience with crimson making the you see as especially difficult or especially see being based here are there any advantages and disadvantages to being based here and building I'd say probably this may sound silly but I actually think the biggest um challenge and point of friction is just the time zone difference and you know like the the having calls it has to be you know like right now it's it's evening time for me I'm about to put my kids to bed and it's morning time for those of you who are in New Zealand and um you know my triathlon coach actually lives in New Zealand and it's even hard for us to find times to connect at time so it's just a logistical thing um but I think that does uh his name is Daniel Plews PLEWS um he's awesome so we we still of course find time to chat but a lot of it is done more asynchronously just through you know messages on WhatsApp and that kind of thing I know that if I message him uh in the morning I'll hear back from him by the evening nice um cool that's great anything else and you want to talk about that we didn't cover um I know you had the I mean the presentation I think uh I don't know if you want to it's a question here Mark actually there's actually a few questions in the chat mark that I don't know if you've been oh yeah okay so we have top five we've already kind of covered the k they don't know how can you utilize k-factor to increase the consumer product for example fmcg products or solutions yeah I think I think I think and you were saying the k-factor thing it matters less now right I think so I think these days it's actually more about just building a great product and if you build a great product then there are so many channels that already exist where people can share share that they love that product well for example even take like uh I was going to say on Twitter and stuff but even like on TikTok if you have a great product I think there's some brands that have figured out how to use TikTok to make things go viral yeah um I didn't do a lingo I saw something they've had some things go viral and you'd think like well how does a brand that's like about translating things you know like go viral on TikTok but it just takes like some creativity that kind of stuff there's a question here from Lily I think do you have any solutions in increasing digital capacity upskilling in New Zealand and creating more tech companies hmm um probably hard to say if you haven't been in the country right yeah I I I I hope to have a more informed opinion on this once I do actually get to spend some time there um but I would just say I mean I think what EHF is doing is is hopefully going to be a big part of this um and just continuing to like not not be constricted by the by the borders and to have these networks that almost live more in the cloud these days you know just like we're all on zoom right now um so I think by just almost like making I feel like the pandemic has made location less relevant other than the time zone difference that I mentioned I mean I feel like these days I just have meetings with people all over the place and half the time I don't even know where they are but to me they're all kind of like there's meetings just like every other meeting and so I I feel like physical geography is a lot less important now than it used to be. Thanks for that Ed may I just say something very quickly before I disappear and there's currently an old teotoroat digital strategy um government is working on with um communities and companies throughout New Zealand to try and find a strategy and um perhaps if you'd like um we could send you a link to that to let you understand more what's going on and and how because we're looking for big players who've been from Silicon Valley what have you who have the expertise to help share the expertise also different um investment opportunities um so it might be worthwhile you reading that strategy great thank you there is also a question about uh sustainability and given given like climate change and stuff is there a way to discourage consumption to help save resources which is sort of the opposite like similar to your uh limiting the k-factor with the virus like it's limiting yeah yeah I I I don't I don't know if I'm necessarily have have a great answer to that question um but I I agree it's important and uh so that yeah the question is there a way to create a view creatively used by reality to discourage consumption um hold on let me think just a minute well okay the first thing that that pops in my mind is in addition to making products go viral actually the easiest thing to go viral is an idea and um I think it all comes down to um how you how you can package that idea in a way that it's very easy to share with a lot of other people and where they want to share it with others so if you can package that idea and when I say package that idea what's that mean I don't know it could mean like create a TikTok video that when people see it they want to share it um it could mean um you know it could be a tweet it it could be like any it almost doesn't matter what the format is but if it's something that is a shareable piece of content that gets across the message you want to get across but as importantly when other people see it it makes them want to share it as well I feel like that's that's that's the key anytime I try to make something go viral I feel like they're two they're two key elements one is it's got to be something that the people that use it want to share and it's got to be something that when it's shared those people then want to use it yeah needs both both I mean on that on that note actually there's a lot of ideas now that we probably don't want being shared right like there's a bunch of anti-vax stuff and the stuff around the the capital insurrection and how do you think about that right do you think the platforms today make it easier for the French groups to get mindshare and is that is that a problem or is that just part of it I mean sure I think that's Facebook's been dealing with this I mean all the platforms have been dealing with this and unfortunately um in the past it's just kind of been whatever content goes viral goes viral you know and I don't think the platforms have really I think they've been afraid to like moderate content too much and so as a result and a lot of times the more extreme the content is the more viral it will go and it can go viral within certain pockets so I do think that there's that that's just a hard problem that I know Facebook and other platforms are trying to figure out how to solve and I don't know the answer there but I agree it needs to be solved how do you think about the the metaverse I mean I remember the first time I put on a VR headset just being blown away by how how realistic the thing felt and then you know I reminded myself we're like at the super early days of all of this you know it's like the pong day pong days of gaming right so it's hard to even fathom what this will be like 10 years from now let alone 20 years from now and so I think the metaverse is going to be a thing I think there's debate as to will it be like one single metaverse or will there be multiple kind of universes I saw I think Sam Lesson wrote a piece on that recently in the information again this is an area where I don't have a ton of expertise but I'm fascinated by it and I think it'll be interesting to see how it plays out but by the way that's one more thing that's going to like just like the pandemic almost make physical location less important if people are spending more and more time um in the metaverse I mean it's to some extent just having all these meetings on zoom is a form of the metaverse you know it's just a very kind of um it's just not a not a very like entertaining and fun version of it but it's something the first iteration of it right so so given that you have kids I mean how do you think about your kids like they're going to grow up they might even grow up most of their time inside of a headset right we don't know how do you think about that do you think that's like like on the one like yeah do you try to stop them do you I think you have a good I mean it's I think it's kind of scary and so when the pandemic started I my wife and I decided we would let our kids play roblox because it was the one way for them to socialize with their friends when they weren't allowed to see them in person but now that um they're able to go go to school again wearing mask and all of that um we've said no more ipads ipad usage so no more roblox no more tiktok like we're trying to hold hold off on all of that stuff as long as possible um and they do ask to play VR from time to time but I I don't allow much of that either yeah I mean I mean when you train on switch right that's that's that's an interesting product because it's actually you're physically training on a bike but you have a virtual interface right and I think that probably makes you train harder right yes find that oh yeah no I mean I do almost all of my bike training indoors on swift it's great um and it's you know the most efficient way to train too maybe you can explain about what swift is sure it's it's basically a virtual world you can ride your bike in from home um I was going to show you about my cameras flurry right now but I set up my bike trainer in front of a tv and I just hop on my bike in my home gem and I can see myself biking in this virtual world and I can see other people all over the world that are connected at the same time so it's another example of like a its own little metaverse I guess and um and yeah it's a great way to for me to train and stay in shape and I like that I don't have to go out and ride on the roads and have traffic lights and cars and all of that stuff to worry about so um for me it's a great way to stay in shape and not just have to stare at a wall right right so and that's another subscription based business it's uh can't remember it's like 10 or $15 a month um and again like when you it's when you have a product that people are willing to pay for even if it's only $10 a month the numbers can get big pretty quickly yeah yeah um so so do you think that's kind of the the direction things will go with the whole like I mean because we've talked about the downsides of screens for kids right yeah well yeah so I mean with kids I don't know I honestly don't know um I um I'm going to have to figure this out my oldest daughter is 11 and her sister is nine and then my boys are six and three so uh I don't think they're you know they they they love their iPads but I've been my wife and I've been able to like put them away um but I don't know a few years from now those of you who have teenagers can maybe tell me how it is but I know we won't be able to control their screen usage forever oh that's awesome um I'm assuming there's no last questions we've gone quite over time but I just want to say thank you Ed that was awesome and thanks Mark for your interviewing skills it was very good I hope you all now feel that you know Ed personally enough that you can get in touch with him to talk more I know he's got a lot of more info that he can talk about on growth and what he thinks are his top five tips so if you do want to get in touch with Ed I've put his email address in there and also in the chat I have put his link in so you can connect with him and I have put Mark's email address and also one last thing that I want to share with you is we've got coming up this week some other live sessions that are slightly different one is uh post cop 26 we've got it's going to be a climate session of three hours we've got another one on innovation about what should New Zealand be looking at and how do we get from start up into growth phase with our companies and another one is inter generation on the Rangatahi so how do we get our youth to have higher salaries and greater job opportunities in the Pacifica and Māori populations of New Zealand so thanks Ed and thanks Mark and thank you everyone for showing up and we'll see you soon thanks Mark thanks everyone for joining tonight yeah appreciate it see you guys


Hey friends today is my last day in California My vacation is coming to an end, and I'm a little sad about it But I do want to spend my last day inside Disneyland Riding my favorite rides and eating some of my favorite food and just really embracing what I love about Disneyland Anywho's Let's go do this. I do have to say though. My vacation has been absolutely amazing really a dream vacation And I'm so happy that I got the opportunity to come out here and enjoy the original Disney park In fact, I loved it out here so much that I decided on getting myself a Magic key pass so we will definitely be coming back out to Disneyland Sometime within the next year, and I can't believe that I have a pass now for Disneyland and Disney World Coast-to-coast I never thought in a million years that I would be doing something like this and It is just so amazing literally like I said a dream come true for me One of the things I didn't get to do on this trip yet is ride the Disneyland Railroad Because right now the railroad isn't running in Walt Disney World So I think we're gonna start off our day by going on a scenic trip around Disneyland. I Can't wait to get back home to see my Gracie girl She was staying with her mom while I was on vacation and I missed her a lot And I'm probably gonna add that in at the end of the video. You know what I mean? I think I'm gonna document leaving Disneyland and getting back to Florida So from California to Florida because my flight leaves tonight like I'm gonna leave I'm gonna leave from Disneyland to the airport to Orlando But it looks like we got a train to catch now and look at that I'm excited All right, here we go We'll be stopping at Whirlpool Square, Mickey's Toontown, and Tomorrowland We'll also visit the Grand Canyon and make a trip back in time to the primeval world And the aid of the dinosaurs before returning to Main Street Station It's New Orleans Square Station. I love this so much What do you get there? We need to go to New Orleans to see it or get way in here What do you like about it? I think we're gonna do the full entire trip around the Disneyland park And it's always fun. I like how they have like like jazz music playing when you pull in to New Orleans Square Wow, this is beautiful here. Oh, oh the Columbia just shot a cannon at us I'm really loving this uh, railroad trip. Look at this Hi Look at this we're underneath the monorail. This is so cool. Look at that. We're on a train and that's a monorail I wish the Walt Disney World Railroad had dinosaurs on theirs. That's pretty amazing And now we are back to the Main Street Station That was such a fun trip on the Disneyland Railroad now, I think we're gonna continue on and make our way down Main Street, USA Look at this though as we're making our way down Main Street The marching band is coming down and Mickey and Minnie are leading the way I've seen a lot of cool things, but this right here is definitely one of the coolest things I've ever seen What's she doing in this group? Some was that to see Mickey and Minnie leading the way down Main Street, USA And they were playing Fantasmic and even some of the Haunted Mansion music. I loved it That was probably one of the highlights of this trip for me right there Of course before we start making our way down Main Street We got a stop and stare at Walt's apartment right above the fire station and look the lights on That is so cool. That's a bucket list dream of mine right there to be able to go inside Walt's apartment one day You know, I'm just gonna say it's gonna happen It's gonna happen. I know it Now I'm gonna hop aboard the Disneyland fire department engine number one and be the driver. Look at this Too cool, how cool was that now I get to ring the bell. Oh, just like that Look at that It's so amusing because I come to this gigantic Organic world-renowned theme park and I get so excited over train rides fire trucks and marching bands Like I get so giddy about it, but I love it Every time I make my way down Main Street, USA here in California It just makes me so happy because there's so much you can do like all these stores are real Like you can walk into them. They have the magic shop this Main Street cinema actually plays Mickey Mouse cartoons Like it's all real and in Orlando. They're just facades or just a long emporium But I love that everything is special here Seriously, you could spend a whole entire day Just examining all the cool things that are on Main Street, USA here I love it so much and now that I get a pass and I can come a lot more like not being my first like big vacation out Here I would definitely want to come back out and make a video just on Main Street, USA. I Love the penny arcade here because of the old-time feel it has the candy and the lights look at it in here Isn't it so like special like huh?  Look at all this Oh, is this for the Main Street electrical parade? I love it so much Featured treat of the day is Rocky Road and you can just watch them prepare it right here in front of your eyes I love it. Oh look. There's some finished ones over there Today is the first day for hyperspace mountain here at Disneyland Which is a Star Wars overlay to space mountain? So I definitely want to check that out since it's my last day I'm gonna be leaving and I think we're gonna make our way over to Tomorrowland now and ride it Also, I'm starting to think where I want to come and have lunch I think Plaza Inn is one of the places I'd like to stop. They have a nice fried chicken dinner You get to sit down eat and stare at the castle right here It's right here in the main hub next to Matterhorn. This would be a good spot So maybe we might come back here a little bit later on The more I keep thinking about it the fact that I came this week It was the perfect week to come to Disneyland now We get to ride hyperspace mountain which is a overlay to space mountain. That's normally not here We got to ride the original soren soren over California the Main Street Electrical Parade came back Disneyland forever World of color. It was like fate. It was the perfect week to come. I am so happy So we're gonna head right on in like this is so cool like I really really lucked out this week. I Still just love this space mountain sign. In fact, I just love this space mountain so much We go whoo, there's a little grogu that's coming on hyperspace mountain look at that. Oh boy, here we go I'm not too sure if you could have seen anything because it was really dark, but it was great the blasters It was I looked at my friends Wow, that was so cool. I'm so happy that I got to do it It was so much fun I don't know how much I could put in there because it was a little bit darker and Also, the music was like all like Star Wars music, but it made it so much better But I might keep copyrighted with that, but I loved it It was so cool when you blast into hyperspace and then they had the projections of the different starships on there It was a really cool. It was a really cool ride Now I think we're gonna make our way up and head towards. It's a small world I got a lightning lane for that and I want to ride it because it's the original and it's the way better version I'll never get sick of seeing a monorail just drive through the Disneyland park Isn't that so amazing? I could stop and get excited ever. Oh, it just hogged its horn Like I said in the past, I'm not the biggest fan of it's a small world except when it comes to the Disneyland version I'm sick of Sacramento that want to hear something about this apartment Wow, look at this.  It was so beautiful But now we've made it here it is. It's a small world Look at this. Look at this. Isn't it so cool? And it also looks like it's 345 one of my all-time favorite movie scenes is in Tomorrowland where they drop down and it's a small world from the World's Fair and It's like a secret layer that is like such an iconic scene for me And here we go Look at that moose Also, how cool is it that the ride is outside and indoors? Oh my lord and look at the train We got a wave The happiest cruise that ever sailed Alice in the white rabbit right there little Cinderella with Gus Gus It's the grand fiesta tour Going the vacation Disneyland USA and now we're heading back outside They enjoyed it's a small world so much I love the fact that they have all these different characters from the movies in there I seen Dory I see Nemo. I seen Woody. It was really awesome. Oh, and I think there's a parade coming right now Got a nice little parade and marching band may coming down Stop off and say goodbye to a friend. I gotta come see mr. Toad There's no way I could leave Disneyland without giving a proper farewell to mr. Toad himself Oh I love it so much Love it so much. Thank you mr. Toad Until next time mr. Toad for a little chicken fried Now it's time to get something to eat and like I said I wanted to come to the plaza in and I love this place Look at it. This is a quick service restaurant. It's not sit down, but it looks so fancy, doesn't it? They have a little menu up here. I'll show you guys once we get in there and It looks like it's got some amazing food and I'm all excited about the chicken the fried chicken right here Yeah, three pieces of chicken fried to golden brown with mashed potatoes a buttermilk biscuit Then they got pot roast penne pasta Glazed salmon a pineapple glazed salmon. This is all quick service to right like Disneyland is like killing it When they got a three-piece fried chicken for quick service in Disney World And you just can't beat the location right in front of the castle like how cool is that I? Love it so much here. Holy moly. It is so beautiful Wow Here's the desserts and the salads then they got the different stations the chicken the pasta Okay, you're the chicken oh Look at that Let's get away. Thank you. Oh Lord look at that They even pulled out the fancy silverware look at that I Can't believe I got all of this food for $18 $18 And now we get to just sit down and enjoy with a view look at that mind-blowing right I'm gonna dive right on in I'm gonna grab the drumstick and I can't wait to taste it like I can I can see that It is fried amazingly and they got a little wing on that side, too So it's almost like a four-piece like wow. Okay. Here we go That is so good. Wow. I am so happy about my meal right now Now we're gonna try the mashed potatoes or gravy and look at that gravy. It looks so good This is exactly what I think theme park food would be like in the 1960s like fried chicken mashed potatoes Green beans and a biscuit like that is amazing, right?  I'm here And you see what I'm talking about. There's a wing in there. So it is kind of like a four-piece I kind of wish I knew about this place before because I mean I knew about it But I wish I came here because I would have been and again like either here or the barbecue bangles barbecue Has to be my favorite thing so far like in the park like this is so good You can also get double mashed if you wanted to but I seen these green beans and I was like wow They look too good to actually turn away. So I went with the traditional way And I definitely need to get my greens in like look at those. Oh When it comes to food, it's not just about the taste I mean sometimes things can taste delicious and sometimes things can taste not so good But if you're eating fried chicken in front of Sleeping Beauty's castle like it Enhances the taste it enhances the whole entire meal and even looking at Matterhorn right now and Astro orbiter Like this is what I'm talking about like you can't duplicate this scenario any place in the world except for in Disneyland or in another Disney like theme park and that's why I just love everything Like do you guys know what I mean like give me the worst meal in the world? Let me eat it in front of Cinderella Castle and it's gonna instantly be better like just like that Now that we've gotten a fried chicken dinner in us I think it's time we head back and do the Matterhorn Bob sleds one last time gotta say goodbye to one of my favorite rides here I've already done mr. Toads. So Matterhorn Bob sled you're next Now this time I'm gonna ask to go on the left side because that's the one I haven't done yet. So I'm excited All right, here we go Oh boy, oh that is too good So much fun the left side is way better But definitely a little bit rougher like it really jerks you around a lot, but I loved it I thought it was great a Matterhorn is definitely got to be ranking pretty high there with my favorite like theme park rides But now it's time we need to go we need to leave this magical land Say goodbye to the castle and start walking down Main Street. I Am flying out of LAX So I need to make my way back to the Disneyland hotel and I'm gonna uber from the Disneyland Hotel To LAX and that takes about an hour sometimes an hour and a half with traffic Then I need to be two hours early for my flight So I've got like a good four-hour commute basically to catch my flight later on tonight at 11 p.m And I think I arrived back in Orlando around 6 a.m. So it's gonna be a long night I'm really gonna miss this place, but at least I got the Magic Kingdom to go home to Even though Disneyland is like I said so special and so magical I'm so grateful that I get to go home and my home is Walt Disney World like that's so Amazing to say you know I mean a lot of people get to they have to go home And they have to leave Disney in general, but I'm just going to a different Disney park and it's it's a great feeling So like it's really awesome that I get that I Like I get that opportunity to live this life One last look down Disneyland Main Street Seeing Sleeping Beauty Castle and pretty soon. We're gonna be seeing Cinderella Castle Hey, how are ya? Looks like my uber is here and it's time to say goodbye to the Disneyland Hotel and the teacup couches One day, I hope to be able to own a teacup couch Fifi, yes, yes, you're with just like that. I am back home with Gracie girl. Did you miss me? Thank you. I Had such an amazing vacation Seriously, California was wonderful. I have an annual pass again Well, I have an annual pass now for Disneyland and Disney World and I can't wait to go back like we're definitely going back. I hope you guys enjoyed the videos It's so cool to be able to have these videos to be able to look back on them like myself especially when it comes to so many things that I did for the first time and I just love being able to share that with you. You know what I mean and Disney World videos will start up soon again doing some more food reviews and all that good stuff. Look at her Anyways, I hope you guys enjoyed the videos. I enjoyed making them. I had a great vacation and We'll see you next time. What was that? Bye


Hello everyone, my name is Mac. Welcome to the Computex 2023. I'm from SROC-BRAD. We are specialized for the server-related products. What's this guy? This guy is our company roles. Is he your boss? Is he your CEO? No. Oh, okay. It's your mascot. Yes. Alright. And your mascot has been busy? Yeah. It's quite busy. So what I'm looking at here? Yes. So what is this? This is our first board in Empire Solution. And it's in deep micro-attacks and supports the Empire Ultra Max. It can support PCIe Gen4-8 516 for 4 slots. Is it ready for mass production? It's still in DVD and we are welcome all the clients who are requiring for sampling. So, can you say anything else about what's special about it? Is it for industrial, professional use? Is it for consumers? It's for the data center. So the Empire Solution is specialized for the lower TDP compared to Intel Solution and MD. So they can provide lower cost in the data center. Is it possible I can buy one? Sure. Is it for everybody? Yeah, it's for everybody. Does it fit in a box like this? Is it going to fit something like this? Well, we need to fit, because this is our first board in our parallel lines. So all of our team is now designing the related chassis for now. So there could be server chassis, could be desktop chassis. We don't know. We will be the server chassis. Server chassis? Yes. I see four potential PCIe slots, right? Yes. So it could be GPU? Yes. It can support up to two double width GPUs. And a lot of RAM. Yeah. It can support up to eight RAMs in our MicroEllix motherboard. And it can support the previous and the next MPR maybe. It will be current Ultra Max and Ultra. All right. Can you show a little bit what you show here at the show? So what do you have? You have a lot of servers? Yes. Workstations? Yes. So SROC REC is specialized making server and workstation motherboard and bare bones. So from here, we are starting from the Intel. So there's Intel? Yeah. We have all the Intel solution here, demo here. This is the latest generation in the Intel solution. For overclocking options, we also have the W790 and Z690 series available in our product line. That's the latest. Yeah. This is the latest. So all of our motherboard is covered for range from the AMD ITX to the ATX, MicroEllix, CBEB and the hardware for all the server related. And then you have AMD? That's correct. We are having the AMD solution in our product line too. AMD also covered from the motherboard to the bare bones from the MiniATX, Deep MiniATX, ATX, MicroATX, everything. We covered everything in our product line. Dual socket? Dual socket, yes. We also have our hottest model in N5 and N4. This one is our hottest model in our AMD solutions. Nice. And if you look behind here, it looks like nice servers. Yes. This is our 4U anti-nodes server. It has 8 from front, 10 from rear. Each slice is a node and it's suitable for the web hosting applications. Do you have some for the GPU? The GPU will never be there. It's over there? Yeah. So these are good for web hosting here? Yes. For the small web hosting, for the medium, this one, we have lots of web hosting customers really like these bare bones. No matter the N4 solution generation or from the N5, we have the highest selling in our market. You just fill it up with hard disks? Yes. Or SSDs? Yes. You can support 3.5, 2.5 SSD in these chassis. We also offer the 1U of flash, 2U of flash storage server in our product line. This is our 2U 4G GPU system. All you see the bare bones here, we offer both Intel and AMD solutions to fit all of our customer needs. What is this? This is NVIDIA H100 and this is a code demo with NVIDIA in our booth. So how many of these you can put in there? So for this one, at 100, we need to still invalidation. But for this one, this is our 2U 4G, it can support up to 4 GPUs. For this one, this giant here is called 4U-AG. It can support up to 8 GPUs. But we also have the 10 GPU options called 4U-10Gs in our product lines. Is this very popular right now? Yes. We have some of the customers using AI machine learning or lab researching demands. They are really like this one. Is there a chance that because this is the first one you do with MPR, maybe you will do many different options later? Yes. We are still in designing fast. Maybe you will do some for 10 GPU also? Or maybe you will do some for web hosting and depends? Yes. All right. Do you want to show a little bit more at your booth? What's happening? You know everything? What is this guy doing? This guy is cooling some server. It's a cooling system in our mother company called ASRock. And this is also a flying cooler? Yes. Superman? Yes. In there? Our gaming board is available for a little cool solution. Can I buy this one? Not for sale? No. Here we have some little desk mini. Yes. So this is our mother company called ASRock who is specialized in gaming, desktop, motherboard and systems. So here's all boards, systems, monitor and GPUs. All right.  Yes. And let's go around here. What is that? This is our latest monitor in our mother company called ASRock. It's available in the market for now. Nice. This is our GPUs. Yes. This is our GPUs. It's really fancy. It's including the ROG settings for now. So you have a mother company and... Divisions for the company I'm from called ASRock. We're only focusing on the server category. And what is your new category? I'm in the server category. So thank you so much. So right here we have the Riptide series. That's some cool setup. Do you have one of these at home? I hope one day I have. Yeah? Yeah. Every employee at ASRock has one, right? We should be. Every time at the office you want to have a break, you just go in this? This is only for them, for now. And here? Here is another division called ASRock Industrial, which is focusing on the IPC category. And their main business is also from the motherboard and then to the bare bones, I mean the systems, great. It's suitable, yeah. Intel. IPC is still focusing on Intel solution for now. And this is their... Industrial. Industrial products. They have all these little industrial... What's behind you there? It looks like a charger. Yeah. So maybe it's in a partnership with this company called ASJade. ASJade actually is one of another latest division from our ASRock. All right. So thank you very much for showing. Thank you. It's great Computex is back. Yes. This is our first physical Computex comeback in 2023. So welcome to the Computex and hope you see you in next week and next year. This is the first Computex of this decade? No. Before, after the COVID-19. Okay. Thank you so much. Thank you. Hello. I'm Mr. Beast. No, I'm not Mr. Beast actually. But if I was Mr. Beast and if I was sending you a bunch of money, I would use Wise.  Tiny little fees. I have a seven minute video where I try to explain some more. It works in hundreds of countries.  If you have some customers in different countries, they can send you money to local bank accounts in the US and Europe. All over the world, you can get local bank account details.  Don't use PayPal anymore. Don't use Western Union. Don't use your bank to send money because it's surprising, but you wouldn't know maybe, but they take fees that are gigantic, that are pretty big. Just use the Wise. It's smart.


Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCube at IBM Interconnect 2015. Brought to you by headline sponsor, IBM. Okay, welcome back everyone. We here live in Las Vegas for IBM Interconnect. This is theCube, our flagship program. Go out to the events and extract a signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante and with wikibond.org. Our next guest is Adam Archer. DevOps core services lead at IBM. Welcome to theCube. Thank you, great to see you. So, Bluemix is trending this morning on Twitter. Obviously, a lot of developer focus. We set it up in a row with Bluemix is really moving fast. I mean, almost to the fast way, like you can't pass faster. I get to make it up, get ready to talk for a lot of cool stuff coming in. Modern agile, cool stuff in the cloud. Obviously, DevOps is awesome. We're pretty fast. What are you working on here? What's your story? What's going on with the labs? What's some of the sound bites on the floor? What are you seeing? What's the vibe? People deer in the headlights. They engage or give us the scoop? What's going on? Sorry. What I'm working on is what's called Bluemix DevOps services. So, what we're really trying to do is improve the way that developers can actually work with the Bluemix platform. So, like you said, that's really cool. People can join it or really, really engage with it. But one of the sort of gaps that we're seeing in Bluemix, really trying to close, is that it helps you really figure out how to develop for the platform. It does a great job of running your application and a great job of really helping you. For the Bluemix platform. I didn't ask the general. For the Bluemix platform, right? So, what we're trying to do is bring the DevOps workflows and DevOps capabilities to developers trying to develop for the Bluemix platform to really help facilitate how they manage their applications and how they manage their development. And you do this through a set of cloud services that you're responsible for. Exactly, yeah. What's more about that? So, the history of the offering actually is, we started setting out to bring a cloud offering of one of our flagship, our flagship task tracking and project management tool, that was the, originally what we know of today as Bluemix DevOps Services was, that's where it came from. It was the SaaS offering of our SaaS product line. And what we really realized is, as it evolved and cloud really became the industry standard and if you couldn't host people's applications, development tool in and tracking, you really didn't have anything with just those capabilities, right? So, really the sort of perfect pairing between Bluemix and DevOps Services to allow us to be able to really improve greatly how people with our tool also facilitate how people can develop for the Bluemix. Robert, this morning in his keynote gave some stats on the percentage of large organizations that are doing agile and DevOps. It was like 75%, who's not doing it, right? Yeah. And we were talking off camera, one of the challenges that you guys attracting in young people, young developers, we had some VCs on and they all talk about how everybody develops in the public cloud. You guys relate to that game. Talk about what you're doing there to attract those young people. Yeah, yeah, so that's it. And the reality is, and one of the realities that we've really been realizing is that the history of IBM and how we've delivered Bluemix really has historically been focused on the big enterprise and the big business and on really helping foster hundreds or even thousands of developers to work together. And what you miss there is that when you get a young college graduate or even a developer that is in an enterprise situation, but is trying to figure out what tools they want to use on their own, you can't have that same, they're coming in with a whole different set of expectations. They want to be successful in seconds or minutes or not have a whole bunch of setup time and a big roadmap to their project setup before they're successful. So what we're really focusing on DevOps, as much as we're trying to support some of those large collaboration flows, we're also really heavily focusing on making a single developer or a small team of developers productive as quickly as possible. And our goal is to get people to be able to come to our site and with no prior knowledge be developing their application on the Bluemix platform. And so how do you do that? How do you compress that cycle, Adam? It's the product itself and the services around that? Can you describe that in a little bit? Yeah, so the way that we're really impressed that is by essentially taking some of the barriers down to the setup of the environment, with cloud have the advantage of being able to avoid a huge local development environment setup for our users by facilitating them actually being able to develop right on the platform rather than locally. They're able to immediately start working without having to configure everything. It also means that when they're developing an environment, when they're developing for the platform where they're actually going to run the thing, it avoids that sort of leap between the local develop and the gap between that local development setup and what you're actually going to be doing with the tool once you're, with your application once you're looking to go further with it. So by giving them samples to start with, getting them straight from creating their first project or creating their app straight into, we got a Web IDE that they can edit their codes. They can use whatever local they want, but within this Web IDE, it allows us to get into the code, meet their making changes, and immediately see those changes run in live. Talk about the old new ways. You guys are really talking about, this is the new developer model, right? I mean, obviously the cloud is where local hosts to the cloud, and then obviously the data center is a big part of IBM's existence.  It's not about ripping replays. Talk about how you guys are bridging that. And what is the developer mindset? I'm old enough to know that 15, 20 years of development, very in-house oriented. We used to do code days, right? Slow workflows, stable operations. Is DevOps selling in the enterprise, or is it just cloud ops? I mean, what's the market enterprise like? I mean, it's a mix. I see it as an evolution, right? I think there are still a lot of enterprises that aren't embracing it, and I think that that's, I think it's a mistake, quite frankly. I know too, totally. So the reality is, like the historical means of delivering software was, at the end of the day, what you're shipping is, that's great, you've got... So I got to ask you, I got to ask you, if I'm your best friend, I'm a CIO, and I got this big enterprise, and I say, Adam, bottom line me. What should I do with DevOps? What's your advice? How would you see the straight, like the head-out, bigger pitch for DevOps? Yeah, just like hard... It's about user feedback. It's about user feedback and shortening the different cycles, right? So what I was about to just get into is the true means of delivering software is you've got your golden master disk at the end of your release cycle, right? And that goes out, and your next isn't coming out for a year, for however long. So you can't deliver fixes to your users. You can't actually rev that product. Naturally, the development cycles that you would use to develop in that environment were tailored around making sure that that thing you get to, it's got to be perfect, right? It's got to be the end goal. And it means that your feedback loops with your customers are... You spend 12, 18 months developing that thing, and you have to actually go and work really hard to get feedback and make sure you're in the right way. With the DevOps, what you can do is you're pushing features out. You can dark launch things. You can invite close friends and allies, or people who are just interested in helping you evolve, and get things out quickly and then rev them. That's agile, right? That's kind of the model. That's what you're saying. The new model is focus on the business problem. So it's a business model problem, and a mindset, cultural mindset, and then development life cycle. Okay, cool. Now let's go into the hood. So BlueMix, I've heard in the hallways here, is really making progress on this auto update. So when you have a code update, integrated stacks, it's not that trivial. So the gold disk assumes a waterfall. It's all about the life cycle. But now in your life, I might have other code bases. So auto configuration, the provision, the orchestration, the versioning control. Talk about what's going on with that with DevOps. Is there new stuff that you could talk about that? Like with the... Sorry, I'm having trouble following that. If I update code, BlueMix code, it's going to have side effects in other parts of the stack. In other parts of my application. Other code bases, other tools. Right. So I mean, one of the principles of DevOps is baking test automation right into your process, right? Like if you're using a delivery pipeline where developer commits are going straight out to your application, if you don't have automated tests around that, you're flying blind, right? Yeah. When a developer commits, and you don't have an event that you're not regressing yourself or your stakeholders that your API layer isn't regressing, then it's chaos, right? So that's one of the fundamental tenants of DevOps is that that test automation and that process is baked right in. So... That's fundamental because you're on a feedback cycle, you're listening to customers, you got a feedback cycle that's shorter, so that automation is critical, right? That automation is critical, yeah, absolutely. And the other thing about it is that test automation is great, but test automation doesn't catch everything, right? So one of the things that you have to get used to, and I think this is one of the things that Enterprise is really struggling with is that with DevOps practices, when you're rolling out the latest features on a daily, hourly basis, you're going to see problems, right? Things are going to get by and things are, you're going to have regressions and you're going to have break. The thing that I like to talk about is that the metric that really matters when you really are developing with DevOps principles, it's not mean time to failure, right? Like that's the way of thinking, right? You know, uptime of 300 days without a second of death, like that's... We did good, yeah, you know. And you know, that's... So the metrics are changing. That's still important, but what's really important now is not failure, it's mean time to worry, right? If I introduce a problem to my site, you know, that sucks, but if I can fix that problem in two minutes, you know, how much trouble has really been caused. So if a percent of organizations are doing DevOps and Agile, what percent in your opinion are doing it well? And what... Do it... You know, I actually think that the entire industry is still figuring out what doing it well means, right? So, what percentage are doing it well? I think that number is close to zero. Well, how should we think about doing it well? What does that mean? And you know, what's your vision as to how to get people there? I mean, the way to do it well is to really embrace what I was... It's really to embrace those shorter feedback loops and to not be afraid to test on your users, right? That's the whole value of the thing, right? You know how of an immediate line to your users. You're connected to them constantly. And if you're not leveraging that feedback loop and if you're not, you know, properly instrumenting your apps to see what you behave when you roll out the new feature and if that actually did improve the experience and improve the metrics you're trying to improve, right? You know, when I roll out this new feature, are people using it?  Do they love it, right? Is it immediately successful? You need to be able to tell that stuff immediately and you need to be able to react to that because with the power of a DevOps pipeline, if I do see that, you know, the outcome of the change that I delivered is not what I wanted, it is not what I expected. I need to be able to, with a push of a button, just turn that off, right? And maybe we go back to the drawing board, we figure out what was wrong and what we can do better and if our apps are properly instrumented, even with having that out there for a short period of time or with having that out there and released to only, you know, 1% of our user base or something, we have a wealth to figure out how to get it right next time.  I really appreciate you coming on theCUBE. I want you to just end the segment by just sharing the perspective of the vibe at the show and what you got going on in this lab later today. So if someone's watching, what's the vibe, what's it like here? So the vibe, everyone's really, really excited about cloud. I mean, everyone's talking about Bluemix, everyone's talking about how they can embrace some of these DevOps principles, embrace the cloud. Hybrid cloud is a really hot topic, how enterprises can, you know, keep their conform to the requirements that they have either from their business or even from their country or their business sector, keep their data local, but really still be able to leverage things like containers and DevOps principles to hit that those tight feedback loops and get, you know, make quick rapid progress but without compromising stuff. So the vibe is just really about embracing change and modernizing. It's so great on us, this is awesome. I really like it. I mean, I just love the vibe. The big data event has that too. The big data force is like, it's very intoxicating. It's like, it's got something from a geek standpoint but also the outcomes on the business side are significant. We'll be coming back live in Las Vegas. We'll be right back with our next segment after this short break.


to the 2016 Lucasoil NCHA Superstakes. We've just had the amateur final and that was co-won by Reagan Plendall on MK Kennelly with a score of 217, congratulations. Thank you. Tell us about your run today. Well, we just tried to be smooth and slow down. We wanted to make sure we get up and have clean cuts. And you managed to come in first with a co-winner, Michael Townsend. What was your game plan coming out, knowing that he was the one to beat? Well, I just tried to be as soft as I could on those cows as I just as possible. So how'd you find the cows? Well, they told me just to cut it. I cut a red cow and that was the last cow and that was like my money cow. Okay, and tell us about your horse. Kennelly. She was named after Kennelly Marvin and she's got a big heart. How long have you been cutting on her? About a year. So you know each other pretty well. Now, you've amassed $88,000 in earnings so we shall be bumped up a bit higher after today. How long have you been cutting and what is it about cutting that you really enjoy doing? Well, I like how it humbles everybody and it's just amazing, all the people. Now, today you were actually competing against your twin sister. Tell us about that. What's that like? Well, we always hope for each other to do good and hope for the best for each other. So does it even out, you win some, she wins some? Yeah, of course. All right, well congratulations and thanks for joining us today. Yeah, thank you.