Okay, we're back live here at VMworld 2013. This is Silicon Angles, the cube, our flagship program. We go out to the advance, extract the signal from the noise. This is day two live in San Francisco, Musconi, lobby, south. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angles. I'm joined by my co-host Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org. Hi, everybody. Jim McBride is here. He's the chief cloud architect at Express Scripts. Express Scripts is a very interesting company. We're talking about billions of prescriptions, millions of customers. A company that's growing, large market cap, made some big moves and acquisitions. Jim, welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, so the Express Scripts model is pretty interesting, and you obviously have built the cloud to support the growth of the business. But talk about the company. It's interesting. You've got a holding company. You've made some acquisitions. Talk about the organization. Ultimately, Express Scripts is a pharmacy benefit manager. We're about making the use of prescription drugs safer and more affordable for over 100 million Americans. As you said earlier, last year alone, we managed over 1.4 billion scripts. So under the hood, we're an IT company, and we're using data to drive decisions that ultimately provide the most optimal and cost-effective health outcomes. Yeah, and the business is growing very rapidly, right? You've made some big acquisitions, some other tuck-ins as well, which obviously always adds to the complexity of your infrastructure. So talk a little bit about that infrastructure and how you service a billion-plus prescriptions. It's a rapidly moving and changing target, and as the business demand comes in for whatever the needs of the day are, we have to be able to rapidly respond to that, and we have to be able to rapidly respond to that in a very consistent, stable, scalable and secure manner. So for us, our journey to cloud was about providing that capability rapidly and being able to reduce time to market at the same time. So you've got integrations happening, we've got new product rollouts, and being able to consistently deliver that infrastructure at speed and quality was our challenge, and that's what we're doing today. Jim, people are always talking about the cloud for decades, and we've got cloud washing back in the day, but there are a lot of people who did do a lot of cloud architecting, and I was going to look at Facebook and then look at these modern apps, and they say, oh, apps, new modern app scale, cloud-style. Modern-style meaning, you know, on demand, all this lot of nature, and legacy apps don't scale cloud-style. So what does that mean to you? I mean, as a cloud architect, you had to look at the infrastructure and deal with legacy, look at kind of a clean sheet of paper on one end, but you had to look back at pre-existing conditions of the enterprise. What does cloud-style mean to you as a cloud architect, and what are you trying to accomplish to get apps to scale cloud-style? I think it's being able to scale at will horizontally at the different tiers, and your point, for legacy applications, you have to provide a bridge to the future. It's easy to do green field design. It's hard to provide a bridge for your legacy applications to get to that horizontal scale capability, so it's about looking for wins in the infrastructure, working with your application development partners, figure out where you can leverage those technologies and build those into the roadmaps and get those incremental wins towards your ultimate goal. How hard is it?  How painful is it, both in terms of pulling it off with the tech, the personnel, and also selling the vision to management? I think the good news is the technology is good, right? It's not typically a technology problem. It's typically a people-in-process problem, and getting people to buy in and understand the vision and where you're going and what's possible, and for them to kind of get on board with that. So from a technology standpoint, it's not super difficult. From a people-in-process standpoint, it can be very challenging. You've got to have that executive sponsorship early, and you've got to find your partners in the enterprise that you can work with to deliver that value. Practitioners, like yourself, always say that technology comes and it goes. That's the easy part, and it's really not that easy. But relative to the people-in-process, those are much harder. So let's talk a little bit about, everybody talks about IT transformation. You guys have clearly transformed. So did you go through a sort of formal, was your CIO, hey, we have this transformation project, did it just happen? Talk about that, because CIOs today, the discourse is transformation. Did you guys explicitly and deliberately talk about that and transform, or was it just part of your strategic plan? We talk about transformation often in Express Scripts, and I think it's kind of a corridor of culture. What we were trying to do is what I think most organizations are doing, which is more with less, and being able to scale efficiently. So it wasn't an outright goal to transform. It was a goal that we have to be more efficient with the resources that we do have. So for us, Cloud was about looking at the upcoming business demands and the capabilities that we're going to have to bring forth as IT, and figuring out how are we going to do that in a consistent, scalable, secure manner, and Cloud's how we got there. So what does your Cloud look like?  At its base, it's a VMware ESX hypervisor running on top of Cisco UCS hardware and a EMC storage back in. So it's pretty classic Cloud, what people would expect Cloud as an infrastructure today. And then we've wrapped our custom development around it that provides our elastic scale and the ability to deploy our development patterns that are specific to ESI on top of that hardware stack. So you kind of build your own little reference architecture there. It's not a converged out-of-the-box, single skew type of deal. You went with sort of a roll your own approach, right? We went to the market at the time and came back and kind of used the best of what was available and mixed that with the things that allow us to use our proprietary technology to its fullest extent. So when you set out on this, I mean, obviously you're in an industry that's going to be careful, sensitive, you've got HIPAA, and so forth. So how did you architect, you know, the Cloud architect, how did you architect, what were the elements of the architecture and how did you architect security and other governance factors in? You have to start from the very beginning, right? And we have very strict controls in place today. So it was about figuring out how to model what we do today inside that cloud architecture. And it's not terribly different from what we do today. It's just a lot faster and a lot more consistent as we remove humans from the process. Okay. Now, so did you kind of do this yourself? Did you enlist outside services? Talk about that a little bit. So we did a lot of it ourselves. We also partner heavily with different technology partners, including EMC from a consulting standpoint, to help us understand how to best maximize the investment we have in their equipment. Okay, so their role was really to help you figure out how to best deploy their hardware and software. To meet our needs in our cloud structure. And then did you use other consultants to, you know? We certainly augment our core competencies with different, you know, skill providers, but by and large it was an ESI-driven effort. Yeah, okay. Jim, what about automation? I love, first of all, I just tweeted it. I couldn't resist tweeting your comments. Scaling at will horizontally is really cloud style. I totally agree. Automation is another one, right? Well, API-centric data center is one, but automation is really important. Can you talk about how you look at that and how you tackle that problem? Yeah, for us, you know, you can't automate it if you can't document the process. So for us, getting the organization to go through the rigor of defining the process of what they're trying to do today, so we can talk about that commonly, and then automating it with the goal of reducing the handoffs and reducing the human interaction. That's where we find the most value. So, you know, there's a lot of non-glamorous work to go through and understand the legacy processes as they exist today, analyzing those processes and figuring out how to best automate those for the best result. And it's different by company, so it's really challenging, right? It's like, you can't just boil a plate process and say this is the automation software. That's right. Got the agile. And iterative, right? So we don't try to bite off too much at once, and you do come at it from an iterative process constantly refining and working with those stakeholders to make sure things are relevant.  You do stuff that's really cool and hard and interesting. So I want to ask you, a lot of folks are going through this process for the first time. What makes a winner in this area? Because a lot of people are coming in and being forced in, top-line growth pressure, and re-architecting their architectures for cloud style and mobile style and big data style, security style, kind of a new way. What's a winner look like in your mind? What's a winning approach? What's a winning personality? What's a winning persona? I think that winning persona is about taking the best of what's available from the technology in the market and figuring out how to make it relevant and consumable inside of your enterprise. Cloud is a big step, it's a big journey, and it's not something that you can enter in too lightly, and it's also not something to your point earlier that boilerplate always works. You've got to figure out how to customize it for what you do in your industry, your vertical, and then more specifically for your culture and how you can adopt that method of work. When vendors come in and knock on your door, say, hey, I got some stuff to sell you because that's what they do, right?  What's the wrap that gets your attention? Transparency, open, the ability to orchestrate their capabilities via a coherent set of APIs that allow us to put it to work for us versus how they're typically trying to sell it on. Do you guys, I mean, in the old days, remember old days, 10, 15 years ago, startups usually couldn't get that enterprise customer because they didn't have a track record. Now startups can bolt on cloud. A lot of enterprise startups, we were just talking the other day, young kids under 30, starting up cloud-based services companies and tech companies. Do you look at startups and how do you evaluate a startup? If you look at startups, do you buy from startups? Do you look at startups or is there a threshold hurdle? We certainly don't rule them out. I think we're very interested in the leading technology, what's the best solution? Who's got the better mousetrap? There's certainly concerns at enterprise of our size that have stability and the ability for them to be around when we call and do need some help. But we certainly will include them in the survey when we're looking for a technology solution. So what do you think of the whole VMware transformation here, speaking of transformation here, you got a company that really changed the way in which IT infrastructure is managed and now it's going after the cloud, the hybrid cloud. What does that mean for you guys? Is that an imperative for you to get to hybrid cloud? And I want to ask about end user computing as well. Yeah, I think so, hybrid cloud and having choice, and the ability to deploy your business patterns on top of a variety of topology providers or cloud providers and being able to figure out what the best fit is for your use case, whether that's based strictly on price or capability, government certification, physical distance. There's a lot of different things that you would use to describe who the optimal provider might be. And VMware providing the tools to help companies and enable enterprises to make that choice and leverage those providers I think is an important move. Okay, so is hybrid cloud in your future or is it in your present? And it's definitely on our roadmap. We're doing POC work right now with a number of different providers to kind of create a normalized set of patterns that we can deploy on top of multiple different topology providers. What's the driver there, Jenny? It's about flexibility, agility, again, further reducing time to market, not having to deal with the replenishment cycle that we talked about. There's been a lot of talk about here at VMworld. That true horizontal scale at will includes the ability to have the infrastructure present to service that demand and having the ability to choose from several different providers gives you the optimal cost point. Okay, so you've got your core apps running in your cloud, that's stable. So you're going to use the hybrid cloud for additional growth, new projects, new test and dev stuff. All of the above, and we're currently evaluating what is the best fit and what that specific roadmap looks like. Right now we're baking up the technology. So there's this vision that you guys like VMware, obviously EMC putting forth as well, that I'm going to have common governance policies, compliance, GRC, et cetera, and essentially be able to move apps and maybe even move data from my on-premise to off-premise. How real is that? Particularly the data piece. You don't really want to move data around. And I just want to get a practitioner's viewpoint on that. It's very challenging, right? For the very reasons you laid out, the laws of physics that dictate how fast we can move those large data sets between those sites. I think it can be real. I don't know that there is a wrap solution that's ready today. We're certainly interested in that, and that would be a key part of our future hybrid strategy. But until you're able to effectively move large data sets into a provider, and I don't think it's real yet. And how appealing is that sort of homogeneity, if you will, of the hypervisor and the surrounding management tools, versus, say, the simplicity and the flexibility of swiping a credit card on Amazon. I think for us, it's extremely interesting. For me, I want us to get up the stack. I want the industry to get up the stack and normalize out the infrastructure. The machines aren't important, right? What's important is the business value that's being delivered. And the more, if you will, opaque, we can make that solution so that we stop caring about the individual piece parts that create the support and infrastructure. The more we're focusing on delivering the business value, the better off we all are. And of course, you hear a lot about virtualizing the network, virtualizing storage. It's non-trivial. I mean, compute wasn't trivial. Storage and networking are much harder. So again, from a practitioner's perspective, you hear the messaging. Obviously, it resonates. What are your thoughts in terms of when you expect to be able to implement something like that? Certainly things that we're looking at now. And it'll follow a similar curve, I would imagine, to what we did in server virtualization. It will take us a couple years to get really comfortable with that at a generalized enterprise level. But I'm expecting for that to become much more mainstream in the next 12 months. John was asking about startups before. And one of the things that's hard for startups is the services piece. Sure. Talk about services and the role it plays in your sort of decision-making. It can be critical. It depends on what you determine your core competencies are and the ability to go to the market and get effective partners that can help you deliver on that cloud strategy is really critical. Awesome. All right, Jim, well, listen, I really appreciate you coming on theCUBE, John. Thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it. I'd like to hear you in the trenches and the practitioner view. We hear from the folks that are building the technology. It's always great to hear from the folks who are implementing cloud. This is theCUBE, day two live in San Francisco for VMworld 2013. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE, Wikibon. I'm John Furrier with Dave Laundrie. Right back with Chuck Hollis from VMware. Chief strategist, not EMC, although that's what it says on his badge. We're going to talk to Chuck. Always a great guest. I'm going to hear his angle on what's going on in VMware and in the ecosystem right after the short break.


He talked about the anxiety people have of public speaking and I'm looking at my eye watch and my heartbeat is going up and up and up and I think I should have floated earlier this morning but it's surreal to be here today because three years ago 2015 I was here thinking wow I want to start a float center and to be up here talking about it is really just just amazing so I wanted to thank Ashconn and Graham for inviting me my talk is completely different than Justin's and it's all about the business side of the house and just that I understand who in here has already started their float center okay and who is starting a float center okay great so it very balanced in the room it definitely is an art in science right and when I talk about science I'm not talking about Justin science I mean he's he's definitely one up to me here following him is tough when you start talking about science but I'm talking about the math behind running a business so just to kind of level set for those of you that aren't familiar with float 60 we are based in downtown Chicago our first center was floats 60 River North we've been open about two and a half years we have five tanks we have a meditation room and we also do VR we open February 2016 so that was about nine months from the first time I ever floated and that's how profound floating was on my life very fast the second location we just opened about four months ago and that's float 60 Northwest Indiana and for those of you that don't know Chicago geography it's very close to Chicago even though we are treated like foreign citizens from Chicago people it's about 45 minutes south of my first location four tanks there cryotherapy retail and like I said we just open in March the last one here also definitely jumps my heart rate up I've been working on this one for two years and that's the one that's about to open in five weeks or so and that's float 60 South Loop which is also in downtown Chicago six tanks meditation VR studio infrared sauna cryo and retail so that gives you kind of a little bit of an understanding about how we we go to market we've got a little bit of a combination of different modalities so my team is very significant in my operation and I know a lot of us here run our own float centers and actually do every single job that needs to be done in the float center which is amazing and very admirable but my approach from the beginning as I did have a different profession up until about four months ago I have this amazing team and right in the middle here is my family in fact my husband and my son are here where are you anyway oh good they are here actually and then my son is actually working for float 60 he is he just finished the internship program and then I have the beautiful woman on the right there Lisa Martin Lisa right here down here she is the glue that holds float 60 together would not be able to do what we do without her so from the beginning I took the approach that I needed to have key people in place from the from the start so that I could continue to do things and continue to be very strategic in the business and then you could see all of our our other folks we have about nine people at the Indiana location we have about 10 or 11 people at the Chicago location and the idea is to kind of pull those people over all three locations eventually and then if you see that the dog in the middle that is Lola she is a free resource for marketing she's a great resource for marketing she comes to all of our events so as you can see the point is these people are artists and science scientists in the sense that you have to have an art about you to work in a float center you're dealing with very volatile situations very sensitive people so you really have to understand how to adapt your personalities to accommodate these different guests from a science perspective water calculations tank chemistry we are chemists we are actually doing things very strategically very methodically to make sure everything sanitized and in perfect for every guest that comes in so very big part of the business so what I'm gonna do is kind of walk you through the business plan these were our kind of startup projections and for those of you that have not invested in the float tank solution business plan and again they do not pay me I say this all the time but they really provide great resources my business plan and my startup costs were definitely put together through resources and some other things related to the business plan from float tank solutions so first location I have a hybrid of different tanks I do nothing easy I have all different manufacturers that I work with we have three wave rooms a float pod and a Samadhi tank and the reason why I picked a Samadhi tank it is my personal favorite and people in Chicago have that have ever floated or if anybody has visited Chicago and has gone to space time tanks that's what they're used to floating in so from a budget perspective I allocated about 25k per per unit a little bit less for the Samadhi for the build out I said okay based on everything I learned from my apprentice program I'm gonna budget about 50k per room and that should cover other things including the lobby and whatnot so those numbers are never right so whoever's in this stage right now add 20% like no joke okay because everything will go wrong it's it's true but if you if you kind of look at this overall I added some contingency working capital is very important especially if you're going to a bank for a loan do not shortchange and you know just skim yourself so tight that you can't operate so five tank float center in Chicago I said 450k okay that should give you a good guideline now the most important part is the revenue projections so when you're building your float center you have to have a plan and I know everybody in here does we're all very very smart people that you know expect that this is a business and not just a hobby and if it is a hobby that's great but if it is going to be treated like a business there are some you know strict guidelines that I would say I followed in my methodology so I looked at capacity how many tanks do I have how many floats can I do a day a week a month okay so capacity is the maximum we can do with that floating modality so that was about 980 a month or 35 floats a day from a revenue perspective we charge about six we look to get about $60 per float that that makes us comfortable in terms of our business plan so the maximum we could make with floating alone based on that capacity was about 20 hundred $2100 a day 40 14,000 a week or about 58,000 a month so then the reality comes in okay that's your capacity the occupancy is you know whatever you think you can do to fill those tanks and to what level so I picked the number 66 percent I felt that that would be a good start you know we have a big pool of people in Chicago so I anticipated about 23 floats a day and about a hundred and sixteen weeks 647 you get you get the idea so in terms of revenue that comes out to be about thirty eight thousand dollars a month 39 and then I also have retail I factored in about a buck or two per person for retail knowing that most people won't buy anything but if they do you might spend you know 30 or 40 bucks a ticket selling various things from salts on it products whatever whatever you choose so overall with that 450k investment the overall capital or the overall revenue that you could anticipate is about a half a million dollars added in some gift cards too okay so this is where the big reality check is for me and again this is our plan okay none of this is our actuals so this is what I went with in terms of just studying business knowing business over the years there's three major things especially if you're not going to run the float center yourself your labor your rent and your marketing I don't know about you but any of these numbers scare you a little bit or do they look right to you me or did they seem high does it anybody startled by those numbers hi what's that make more for labor okay yeah I mean it's it's definitely the three dynamics that for us are the biggest investment and I I find just in consulting and working with folks that you know maybe the marketing is something you add on later but let's just take a look at it a healthy business service business over you know multiple industries they say about 30% should be allocated towards labor rent Chicago's a different dynamic I envy those of you that are not in big cities you can get so much real estate it's so awesome but we have a you know pretty high so about 12% of that 500k or you know 60 grand a year and for marketing this this number and I'm a marketer so I I definitely lean on spending money towards marketing but when you're a startup they say that you should spend anywhere between 10 and 12% of your top line revenue towards marketing I don't know many people who do this I basically do a lot of the marketing myself so I save a little bit here but I've compensated in other areas that we'll talk about so when you look at that and you look at that monthly number that should give you some kind of perspective as to what normal businesses that sustain over time would actually pan out to be so going back to that marketing number what I wanted to do today is kind of break things down there's definitely an art and science to kind of knowing how to spend those dollars as you think about your monthly spend and so I broke it down into five categories advertising and promotions experience the actual experience inside your float center so that's an investment that's a marketing expense to social relationships partnerships and community and then my something that's near and dear to my heart coming from data and analytics is data and management so just to break these down and by the way thank you Justin for mentioning the Cubs we love the Cubs that that was our ad in the I think it was the day they announced David Ross's retirement we had an ad there you could see it very proud of my Cubs so advertising and promotions definitely an art and science art being you have to have good content right public relations and comprehensive branding something we really invested in that I kind of lump into that category then we've got the experience and content so definitely more art here your guests this picture here that I'm showing your guests actually provide great content in terms of arts and you know sharing experiences whether it's through storytelling testimonials I definitely lump that into the art category the other thing that we invest in is something we called service recovery so when we have a situation inside our studio where something isn't quite perfect or we feel that the float could have been a little bit better whether it was really our fault or theirs we'll go ahead and comp somebody's flow so there's there's an art to kind of understanding when and how to to do that to make sure the customer leaves wanting to come back and certainly refer other people then you've got social and relationships I find just working with different businesses that a lot of people take would take this $5,000 right that we're talking about a month and lump it right into this category so many people are spending significant dollars on Facebook ads which is very effective wildly successful but there are other things that you know you want to kind of spread your dollars across so social media of course all channels I'm talking about here influencer marketing is something that we're recently investing in that's more of a manual process we're not looking at tools or technologies for that yet but they're definitely some out there and then we invest very heavily into the referral programs so we have a different referral program for our members then we do regular customers and we really feel that most of you know this once a customer tries your experience and they love it they share right so putting a system in a process behind making that automated is very very powerful some of the tools that we use we use tell them there's a very easy way to actually do this within the software you use already so very important in terms of social and relationships that's probably where most of the budget goes when I look at it across the board this fourth category I talked about this yesterday in the marketing forum we were talking about them the membership drives we invest a significant amount of resources in partnerships and community building so we actually have brand ambassadors that are part of that labor number that 30% you know this is including this position these people that go out in the community and go from door-to-door I mean we're talking feet on the street people going business to business and building relationships and we kind of formalize that with offering our members offers to their businesses and we have reciprocity there so we invest in that through resources in people that's big part of our labor and then finally I said this was near and dear to my heart data and management the science behind managing your database so for those of you that haven't started your float center yet are you already collecting emails somehow through like a landing page or something like that can I see a show hands that's not enough people definitely need to do this the sooner you can get ahead of collecting customer data the better off you're gonna be over the last two and a half years we've been super aggressive to this I drive Lisa crazy with this every event we go to we really try to collect emails in fact at the end of this presentation I'm gonna give you a chance to give me have you give me your email to I'm sure you're excited about that we have a little giveaway but what we want to do with that is nurture your existing customer base so much of our activities that I see are around customer acquisition and not necessarily reinvesting your efforts into your existing customer base we kind of think okay they've been here they love us they'll come back but there's a huge opportunity to kind of drive that one incremental visit by doing more effort around retaining the existing customers you have so when I say database that could be an Excel spreadsheet it could be you know float helm mind body whatever you're using some are much better than others you want to have complete control over that data there's a lot of third-party companies out there be very careful about letting other people control your email your database that is your intellectual property that you definitely want to keep control over right from the beginning CRM relates to customer relationship management so that can be done in terms of a tool this is where the technology comes in we really don't need to invest in really robust CRM systems here we really can keep it pretty simple I mean even using MailChimp or constant contact yes that's an email tool but it's a CRM tool so you want to have something that's allowing you to manage the different customers you have and allow you to target them differently so that's what I refer to there and that's really what the last piece is segmentation personalization we have an intake form that we use it's kind of like a waiver intake form we ask a bunch of questions like what do you want to get out of floating sleep improvement anxiety reduction you know just the laundry list of things we ask we don't do a good job of then segmenting our content around those questions these people have shared all this information with us and I believe most of them are hoping that somebody's looking at it at some point but we don't so I'm looking at myself going out you know I've been working in marketing for 20 some years working in data and I don't even do this so I'm embarrassed by that right so this is kind of a 2.0 float 60 effort Lisa you're taking notes on this right this is this is our next thing right we really want to focus on segmenting this database if you have 20,000 people in your database there should be different buckets that they fall in and then you can personalize not not to the person but to at least their interest of why they're there to float and then this content that we have like this this information from Justin I'm sitting over here in the back just in addition to watching my heart rate go up I'm thinking oh my gosh this is so powerful in terms of content right if we could kind of segment our database by people who do have anxiety and share one or two of these a month it's just it's just so it's such a powerful thing that's so much more than doing a social media ad right so that's that's going to be a big focus for us so the last point on this slide is customer acquisition versus customer retention and I've talked about this on a couple podcasts so forgive me if you've already heard me say this but we have two different types of float centers at float 60 we have an urban footprint right in the city that the two locations in the city and then we have a suburban right the Indiana location is much more of a bedroom community is what they refer to it as and the way we're having to market is much different so in the city of Chicago or New York City or wherever your center is in a big city you have such a pool of new blood coming to your float center all the time right so focusing on customers acquisition often and regularly makes total sense you should do it anyway but what I'm saying is focusing more on customer acquisition makes sense in a suburban location focusing on customer retention I think is tenfold even more important it doesn't mean the other one goes away right we never want to not do customer acquisition but nurturing the people have that have already come in becomes much more important because you only have so many people to pull from so these retention strategies the segmentation and personalization I believe becomes much more impactful and critical to sustain your business over time you know unfortunately the reality of you know growing businesses is there's going to be a lot of growth at one time and then over time people will kind of drop off just because they might not be religiously staying disciplined in these these different things or they might be burned out if they're doing everything themselves so this to me is it is a key thing if you think about your float center right now are you in a fixed geographical area where there's only so many people to pull from or are you in a place where you're constantly going to get fresh blood like Chicago and you have to kind of modify your strategies accordingly so I'm not sure how much time I think I'm close but as far as acquisition and retention I just wanted to touch on this one more time from a membership perspective the retention part I believe is membership right because you're you're trying to get a customer to convert and commit to you to be loyal and so our membership strategy has been very significant to us over the last couple of years we are now laser focused on building value for our members that goes beyond a discounted float price we try to do things like upgrade to 90 minutes in you know in Chicago I know this is a big debate in the industry but we are float 60 because people float for 60 minutes in Chicago normally we'd love for them to float for 90 but people are resistant so 90 minute floats for members are free right there's so it's a value add for our memberships we give a free birthday float that's pretty normal we also have prioritized scheduling so coming from the hotel industry we had so many hotel rooms and we had to block some rooms for VIPs and I take the same approach with managing the capacity of my float center we'll block off a couple floats here and there because we do fill up on the weekends so we call them VIP blocks that way a member can always call and usually find a space and then usually the day of will will release them so that we can you know make sure we're full all the time we also do favored nation pricing for members meaning that the member will always get the best deal better than any package or promotion so that's included in it but the real significant thing here and it goes back to the partnerships and community art and science is those brand ambassadors I talked about this map here represents kind of a cross section of the partnerships we've developed in Chicago this is a very labor intensive exercise it looks easy that we you know we built this map but each one of these little pots is one of our partners that we've actually built a relationship with we have our brand ambassador to set up a program where we give their their members benefits at float 60 or maybe they give us benefits so it's a really great reciprocal beneficial it's like it's a three-way mutually beneficial relationship so I really encourage people to do this because I think it's goodwill for the community and it's just it's great all all around so this is something that we're really going to be focusing on more and more okay I promised in the bio or the talk overview that I talk about my favorite tools so I am like a I don't know how many apps I have on my phone I know I have 83,000 emails but I have more apps I guarantee than anybody in this room and it's a sickness really it is I have that shiny toy addiction so I'm always trying different apps that's just my in my blood again I drive Lisa crazy because I she's not a technologist and I'm always imposing this on her you have to be careful but these are the favorite tools for those of you that are just starting I know there's a couple of my consulting clients in here where I've stressed you get quick books or whatever accounting system you want to get get it now I don't care if you're just starting like five minutes ago get it now because you need to put this conference in your quick books you need to put the travel in your quick books and they make it so easy it's right on your phone you can integrate it to your bank account you can do your accounting right from your mobile phone by the way most of my business is run right from my iPhone and that's why these tools are really important so Sprout social is kind of a listening social media app where you can in one place pay a subscription to monitor all of your channels to see if people are mentioning you so you're not hunting and pecking like I've been doing the last three years this is a very good tool to you know really just optimize your your work Mailchimp I think we all know what that is Google Drive duh right I mean if we're not using Dropbox or Google Drive to share documents with our accountants or partners I mean it's just like a no-brainer Google Analytics so much power in analyzing the website traffic that you have and I could talk another hour about website but we're not going to do that today definitely just use the tools you don't have to be a data scientist these days they make it pretty easy to have you like get a handle on your numbers really comfortably I'm going to mention Grasshopper on the side I was talking to somebody at the bar last night and my phone was ringing it was an overflow call that went to the studios that then comes to my phone so anywhere I am I'm able to answer the phone from any three of my locations because of this Grasshopper app and there's other ones out there but this is the one we use it basically rings at the physical location that you have and then overflows to whoever's on call which is you know usually me LinkedIn I'm mentioning this because this is how you develop your community relationships go out reach out to the businesses find out who's managing what find the right resources and make connections with those people it's very very powerful for us and then slack who uses slack in here yeah see I told you so slack in again I love float helm but the float helm with multiple locations there's just a couple limitations that I'm sure Ian and the magic wizards will eventually add to their to their functionality but slack is great for when you have multiple locations or you're working with partners to have communications kind of in an organized way so it gives you different channels if you will that are topics you can have a marketing channel you can have a manufacturer channel and it's just a great way for us to kind of keep track of things most importantly my vision for using slack is to make all of our employees feel as there's 29 of them now want them to feel like they're part of one team and slack really enables us to do that so I'm happy to go in I'd love to show you my phone upstairs you really will freak out you see how many I have there's there's a lot of great tools out there that I'm happy to talk about and with that okay this is the last one I told you everywhere we go we collect people's information I promise in here you're not going to get an email we're literally giving away a gift card and I'm doing this just so that you understand how we do it with our customers alright so I have a hundred dollar gift card and I'm going to give it away upstairs I just want you to go to this website it's our way of building traffic float 60.com slash promo just fill out that little form and imagine you're a you're a prospect for your float center okay put your mind around this being your float center you're at an event or you're out at a bar or you're at a restaurant and somebody asks you about what you do you just click on this home page from your phone and hand them your phone they'll put their information in now you have captured their information from wherever you are it does not have to be fancy it's like four fields on the back end I'm collecting emails left and right so when we go out and do these wellness fairs or these you know different community events I'm now monitoring in the back end okay we collected 50 emails here we collected 60 we collected zero so this is this is how we build our business and you know probably we're at like 24,000 people in our database over two years that's to me a very exciting metric so go ahead and get your phone out I know sounds crazy right all of you get your phone out no only if you want to while you're doing that in the background I want to show you does anybody have you seen the slide before this logo slide you're supposed to not see it the point of this slide is this is called a MarTech slide this is a 2018 MarTech marketing technology slide representing marketing companies that are hot right now not all of them these are just the ones that are recognized by this company they're they're categorized by advertising and promotion content and experience social memberships e-commerce and sales data and then management anybody who tells you they're a marketing expert they're full of it nobody can be a marketing expert in today's world so the point of this is you're gonna need help understanding what's out there we keep it simple don't try to do it all yourself hire people who are subject matter experts in each of these categories versus just generalists because there's a there's a lot out there so yeah you went ahead and signed up we will be answering questions upstairs and I think I'm out of time so thank you very much


Electronic waste, e-waste, has been linked to several adverse health outcomes, including increased risk of thyroid dysfunction, decreased lung function, and increased rates of miscarriage, still births, and premature births. Additionally, exposure to e-waste has been associated with decreases in birth weight and length, and DNA damage. This article was authored by Kristen Grant, M.I.P.H., Fiona C. Goldison, B.A., Professor Peter D. Sly, M.D., and others.


Welcome to the fourth lecture in the course on engineering electromagnetic. We saw in the last lecture that in practice a transmission line would be terminated and therefore a wave propagating on the transmission line when it reaches the termination in general would partly be reflected and partly be transmitted. We saw the reflection coefficient, transmission coefficient, etcetera. And then we went on to consider some simple traveling wave situations. We continue these simple situations further and today what we consider first is a charged line connected to a resistor. The situation looks like this. We have a charged line and here we have connected a resistance R. The transmission line has a characteristic impedance Z naught. The line is lossless and is charged to a voltage V naught. So, that we may write here that the line is charged to a voltage V naught. How would the line be charged? Perhaps by connecting a voltage source V naught at one end in a situation similar to what we considered last time. Let the line length be L and let the line be open circuited at the end away from the end where the resistor R is connected. And then we say that at t equal to 0 R is connected let us say through a switch like this. What do we expect when the switch is put on? We expect that this voltage to which the line is charged V naught will act as a voltage source and this voltage will be shared between the resistance R and the characteristic impedance Z naught. As a result of which we may say that a voltage V R will develop here and a corresponding current through the resistance which may call I R will start flowing. Now, since the initial charged voltage V naught is going to be shared the voltage across the transmission line should drop. What will be the mechanism causing this drop? That mechanism will be a wave travelling to the on the transmission line away from the end at which the resistor is connected. And therefore, we say that a wave with associated voltage V plus and current I plus notionally indicated like this will start flowing at t equal to 0. Now, therefore to find out the values of V plus and V R what considerations are we going to make? See the line is charged to a voltage V naught we can consider it like a voltage source of voltage V naught at t equal to 0 this will be connected to two entities. What will be those two entities? The resistance R and the transmission line and depending on their relative values this voltage source will supply or share its voltage across these two entities. And therefore, we say that V R is going to be equal to V naught plus V plus when we write the relations you will find that we are consistent. This is the way we indicate the current in a wave travelling in this direction notionally. The actual direction will come from the actual magnitude and direction alright. Here also you would notice that we have written V R equal to V naught plus V plus knowing fully well that V R will have an overall voltage which is less than V naught which means that V plus will come out with a negative value. So, we should write a V naught equal to V R plus V plus. But this is quite consistent with the way we have been writing the total voltage for example across a load. We said V L is equal to V plus plus V minus. Similarly, this is the load in this instance and the total voltage across the load is equal to whatever was there earlier and whatever starts off at t equal to 0. It is a matter of notation we are being consistent with our notation. What will be the relation between I R and I plus? For the directions shown I R will be minus I plus. As long as these relations are written correctly consistently we will not be making a mistake. Now of course I R and I plus are not independent of V R and V plus. They are related through the resistance and the characteristic impedance. And therefore we can write I R is V R by R which should be equal to minus V plus by Z naught. Now we may number these equations 1, 2 and 3 and equations 1 and 3 involve two unknowns V R and V plus other quantities being known and therefore they can be solved. Very simple equations and when we do that what we get is V R is equal to V naught into R upon R plus Z naught and V plus is equal to minus V naught into Z naught upon R plus Z naught. Quite as expected V plus has come out negative assuming that V naught has a positive value. And you find that V plus and V R in the ratio of R and Z naught and they are sharing this notionally source voltage V naught in that ratio. When we have got these voltages we can also write the associated currents. Now instead of keeping things general for the sake of simplification we assume a particular value of R. We choose a particular simple value of R. Normally things will not be that simple but for illustration let us say that R is equal to Z naught. We will have V R equal to V naught by 2 and V plus equal to minus V naught by 2. So in a way such a voltage starts getting subtracted from the initial voltage on the transmission line as this wave starts travelling away from the end at which the resistor is connected. Effectively discharging the transmission line by half the amount. The corresponding currents can also be written now. I R is V R by R so that it is V naught by 2 R and I plus which is V plus by Z naught is equal to minus V naught by 2 Z naught. And when you consider the value of I plus with this sign you find that there is a current which is flowing in the counter clockwise direction. So this is what happens at T equal to 0 and at T greater than 0 this voltage wave starts propagating away from the resistor end and brings the charge, the voltage charge on the transmission line to half its value. Let us say that it will reach the other end at a time which is related to the velocity of the wave propagation on this transmission line. And we say that let V be equal to 1 by square root of L c so that the time taken in travelling from the resistor end to the other end is L by V which may write as capital T. Now let us see what happens at T equal to capital T when this wave that was initiated at T equal to 0 which is the other end which we have kept as an open circuit. At the open circuit no current can flow therefore the open circuit enforces a condition such that I minus plus I plus is equal to 0. And immediately we realize what is the origin of I minus I minus will correspond to a reflected wave. And in an attempt to satisfy the conditions along itself the open circuit will initiate a reflected wave with what V minus and I minus constituents they will be I minus equal to minus I plus and I plus is available to us so that I minus will have a value which is V naught by 2 z naught. How can we find the corresponding V minus for the reflected wave? We go using the relation V minus upon I minus equal to minus z naught. It is useful to start this way in a simple manner so that we do not go wrong. And therefore V minus is minus I minus z naught so that this also comes out to be minus V naught by 2. And therefore at T equal to T and greater instance of time there is a reflected wave with V minus equal to minus V naught by 2 and I minus equal to V naught by 2 z naught. With this value of I minus there is no current through the open circuit and with this value of V minus what happens? There is a reflected wave travelling from the open circuit end towards the resistor end and it wipes out the remaining charge on the transmission line. The total current on the transmission line will now be I plus plus I minus which of course will be 0. And the total voltage can be found out as in the following manner. We will do that in a short while. Now this kind of wave reaches the resistor end at T equal to 2T. Now at the resistor what is the voltage now? The total voltage using the same notation as we have been writing will be V naught plus V plus plus now V minus is also available. Knowing their values we see that this is equal to 0. And now this does not violate any condition in particular because it is not a source it is not a voltage source or a short circuit or an open circuit. And therefore the current which is V r by r is also equal to 0 and that is where the matter ends. Alternatively one could also look at it from this point of view that there is a voltage wave which hits this end. Now since r is equal to z naught it gets completely absorbed and there is no further reflection. So either way this is where the current and voltage will stop changing any further. And if we want to consider the current that has flown through the resistor as a function of time I r it is going to be of value V naught by 2 r at T equal to 0. And it continues to flow till time T equal to T. So such a current pulse of duration twice capital T seconds flows through the resistor in this case where a charged transmission line is connected to a resistor. Of course things are fairly simple in this case because of our choice of r equal to z naught otherwise you can see in a straight forward manner that this is not where the phenomena will stop. The charge on the transmission line would not be wiped out completely by the reflected wave and there will be some reflected wave which will start at T equal to twice capital T and so on. But applying similar considerations in a systematic manner one can find out what is the behavior for example for r less than z naught or r greater than z naught. So these were some very simple situations involving transmission lines. The next go on to consider a specific kind of time variation. What is that specific kind of time variation sinusoidal time variation that is the kind of signals that we utilize maximum in practice. Even if a signal is not exactly sinusoidal you know that through Fourier analysis it is possible to express it in terms of sinusoids of different frequencies and therefore the case of sinusoidal time variation is of great practical importance that is what we consider next. We go on to consider case of sinusoidal time variation that is we consider signals say a voltage signal which is a function of time and we put a curly bar over it to show that it is a sinusoidal time varying signals. So for example it could be V cosine of omega t omega being the radiant frequency and then it can be written as real of V times e to the power j omega t and then using phasor notation we may represent the actual time varying signal V in terms of simply a symbol V which in general could be complex and therefore would have a magnitude V naught and a phase. The origin of this phasor notation can be seen on the OHP and we say that this is the phasor V and when it is multiplied by the factor e to the power j omega t the tip of the phasor rotates on the circumference of a circle and when we consider the projection of this phasor with its tip at various points on the circumference on the real axis then the projection along the real axis has a sinusoidal or a cosine sinusoidal behavior. So that is very simply the basis of the phasor notation going back to the board therefore we can say that in phasor notation the actual time varying signal can be written as V naught magnitude e to the power j phi e to the power j omega t and we consider its real part. If we have a phasor how will we reconstruct the actual time varying signal that is what we are trying to show now and this is exactly V naught and then cosine of omega t plus phi the original time varying signal that we started. Therefore, whenever we have a phasor quantity if you want to recover the actual time varying quantity from this we will multiply by e to the power j omega t and take the real part at a working level that is the formula we could use. In phasor notation there is one great advantage the time derivative or the integral with respect to time has a very simple form that can be seen here in the following manner. We consider the time derivative of this quantity del by d t del by del t of V t the actual time varying quantity that is going to be minus omega V naught sin of omega t plus phi which we could cast in this form by rewriting it as real of j omega V e to the power j omega t. We are just rewriting it in a different form and therefore, we can generalize that the time derivative of a sinusoidal time varying quantity in terms of the phasor V is simply j omega V. Many times the phasor quantities are represented say in text books in different type phase to make it very clear that it is a phasor quantity that facility we do not have here, but from the context it will usually be clear that we have a phasor quantity in mind yes please if you have a question the time derivative of the sinusoidal time varying quantity V t and through this very simple consideration we have seen that the two are equivalent of this phasor if you want to recover out of this phasor if you want to recover the actual time varying quantity that will be simply its time derivative. Now a phasor is a complex quantity and actual time varying quantity is not a complex quantity but this complex notation makes representation mathematically very simple and therefore we use it. In particular the time derivative in a similar manner the time integral they have a very simple form in phasor notation. So using this phasor notation we now consider the behavior of voltage and current on a transmission line. We have seen that on a transmission line the voltage and current satisfy an equation which we named as wave equation and then replacing the general voltage and current in this by the sinusoidal time varying voltage and current if we rewrite the wave equation we will have del 2 V by del z square equal to l c and then del 2 V by del t square. Earlier the wave equation that we derived was a general one applicable to all kinds of time variations since we did not consider any particular time variation and therefore it should be applicable to sinusoidal time varying signals as well and making that substitution this is the form that we will get for the wave equation. Now we use the fact that in phasor notation the time derivative is equivalent to a factor j omega and therefore we rewrite this wave equation phasor notation in which case it will become del 2 V by del z square equal to minus omega square l c times V since each del by del t factor is equivalent to a factor j omega as we have seen in phasor notation. The lower equation now is using phasor notation V is a phasor quantity and in that the time derivatives can be replaced simply by the factor j omega. We may write this as minus beta squared times V where beta is omega times square root of l c. Beta is an important quantity we will identify its nature in a short while. Written in this form one can write the solutions for V the general solution without much difficulty it will be V naught plus e to the power minus j beta z that will be one kind of solution when we substitute this back we find that the equation is satisfied and equally well the other kind of solution would be V naught minus e to the power plus j beta z. Now from our experience with voltage and current on a transmission line we expect that these two terms in the general solution should be representing waves propagating in opposite directions. This one should be representing wave propagating in the positive z direction and the other term a wave propagating in the negative z direction. However it is not obvious from this form the kind of functions the kind of arguments that we identified for the functions which could be solutions of wave equations. Apparently that kind of form is not here what I want to bring to your attention is that that form is there it is implicit in this it is not obvious because we are using the phasor notation. Sir why we are used V naught plus e minus j beta z why not V naught minus e minus j beta z. Because from our experience we are anticipating that this term would represent waves propagating in the positive z direction. So its amplitude we have kept as V naught plus we have used some knowledge. Now let us justify this assumption that the first term would represent a wave propagating in the positive z direction and similarly the second term how can we do that all we have to do is to rewrite this in a form in which the time variation is explicitly there that is we need to write this as V which is now a function of both z and t it is certainly a function of z it is also a function of time but in phasor notation that time variation is implicit. Now we want to bring it out explicitly to clarify this what do we do the formula that we stated we multiply the phasor of interest by e to the power j omega t and take the real part. So we do that we consider the real part of V naught plus e to the power j omega t minus beta z plus V naught minus e to the power j omega t plus beta z the operation is very straight forward that will give us V naught plus cosine of omega t minus beta z plus V naught minus cosine of omega t plus beta z and we manipulate this in a very simple manner we write this as V naught plus and then cosine of we take out minus beta as common. So that it is z minus omega by beta t and similarly the second term V naught minus cosine of beta into z plus omega by beta into t and now I am sure you can recognize the kind of argument that is associated with propagating waves they are here this is simply of the form z minus V t and this is simply of the form z plus V t and immediately we can say that the velocity of wave propagation here is omega by beta and using the expression for beta it is simply 1 by square root of L c quite consistent quite the same as we saw for signals where no particular time variation was specified. We have already made out the behavior of functions of this kind of arguments this a function of this kind of argument represents a wave propagating in the positive z direction and therefore anticipating this we had written the amplitude factor in front of this as V naught plus and the amplitude factor in front of this as V naught minus. Coming back to this form we say that beta z is the phase shift in sinusoidally time varying signals phase is clearly defined. So now we can identify that beta z is the phase shift and therefore beta is the phase shift per unit length or simply beta is called the phase shift constant with units of radians per meter one can also introduce the concept of wave length here wave length represented by lambda is the distance over which the phase change is by 2 pi radians. So that lambda times beta or beta times lambda is equal to 2 pi and it gives us lambda which is the wave length equal to 2 pi by beta or alternatively beta is 2 pi by lambda where lambda is the wave length of course in meters. I can show on the OHP the wave propagation for a single sinusoid and see its behavior this is the single sinusoid that is the kind of excitation we have considered and we consider its plot at different values of z and this is the way the plot will appear it will appear to have moved forward progressively on the time axis alternatively we could consider these snapshots of the same single sinusoid at different time instants and once again it would appear to have moved at different values of z it will have progressed along the z direction. So in a simple manner that is the way a single sinusoid would behave and as we have also demonstrated in the laboratory for a sinusoidal time varying signal the spatial variation and the temporal variation they are both sinusoidal which is what has come out nicely in this picture. If you have any questions up to this point we could try out those the question is that why have we written beta lambda equal to 2 pi actually we are trying to introduce the concept of wave length and we say that wavelength is the distance over which a wave changes in phase by 2 pi radians overall phase change is beta times a distance travel the distance travel for a wavelength is 1 wavelength so beta lambda equal to 2 pi that kind of distance will be wavelength by our definition so that is all what that we are doing. Any other questions okay then we go on to the next topic which also is of a very interesting nature first we make some space here we are familiar with low frequency circuits and we have no difficulty in saying or finding out the impedance that is connected in a low frequency circuit alright now what kind of impedance behavior do we expect on our transmission lines so for that purpose we take a typical transmission line the way we have been drawing these a transmission line with a load impedance ZL connected at Z equal to 0 let it be a transmission line of characteristic impedance Z0 and length small n the question that we pose for ourselves is at a plane which is at Z equal to minus L what is the input impedance C if we just extend our low frequency concepts there is really no problem the input impedance should be just the load impedance and these are just connecting wires but on a transmission line where time delay effects are present and have been incorporated into analysis it will be very interesting to see what is the input impedance at a distance L from the load impedance yes yes no at low frequencies you do not have the concept of Z0 so you just treat these as connecting wires and no matter how long they are as long as our low frequency approximations are satisfied the impedance here is the impedance C input impedance C here so this takes us to what we call the concept of impedance transformation and we find out this impedance in terms of the ratio of voltage and current at the plane of interest the procedure is going to be fairly simple we write V as V0 plus e to the power minus j beta Z plus V0 minus e to the power plus j beta Z according to the general solution that we just wrote down similarly the current can be written as I0 plus e to the power minus j beta Z plus I0 minus e to the power j beta Z. Where we consider that this wave is travelling in the positive direction usually we call this as the incident wave and depending on the termination there will be some reflected wave which will be initiated travelling in the negative z direction that is the usual framework that we have been considering. Now I0 plus and I0 minus are related to V0 plus and V0 minus and using that relation we see that it is 1 by Z0 V0 plus e to the power minus j beta Z minus V0 minus e to the power plus j beta Z. Now what is the input impedance it is going to be the total voltage divided by the total current at the plane of interest. So the total voltage and total current at different values of Z are already available we just evaluate these at Z equal to minus L and take the ratio that will be the quantity of interest and that becomes Z0 times V0 plus e to the power j beta L plus V0 minus e to the power minus j beta L since we are substituting Z equal to minus L and in the denominator we get V0 plus e to the power j beta L minus V0 minus e to the power minus j beta L which we process or manipulate so that it comes out in a nice interesting form. We can divide by V0 plus throughout and recognizing that V0 minus upon V0 plus is equal to rho the ratio of the reflected wave amplitude to the incident wave amplitude at the load that is precisely what V0 minus and V0 plus are. So using this you see that Zn is equal to Z0 and then we have here e to the power j beta L plus rho e to the power minus j beta L upon e to the power j beta L minus rho times e to the power minus j beta L since we are running out of time today we shall continue this consideration next time. Yes of course. See we have seen that these solutions arise out of the wave equation which holds good for the sinusoidal signal. I think we will stop here today and consider this either in the tutorial or in the next video. Thank you. Bye. Bye.