Are you filming? There's light. There's light. You go first and hide in the I'll just go right behind you. A bird just flew. She's right there, okay Sniffers and welcome newbies. Okay, Nellie clearly has a lot to say to you guys today For those of you who are new here really really I want to welcome you. I'm so happy to have you here today We're about to have some fun. Oh my god The fun's about to start right now because I see Chris getting out of his car and walking up here. Okay, that just means I'm gonna have to go get the door Okay, so here's what this video is about as you can see from my room It's kind of turned into like a merchandiseing house literally packages going out every day and I thought it would be funny to Personally Okay, there's the door I can't tell you you got to wait and find out now as soon as I open the door I'm gonna tell you Sandy loves Chris Okay, okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay light like that. I Hold them yet. What we're gonna do today Because I waited for you to get here So stand into the light Chris here's what we're gonna do today guys Somebody ordered a package of three of my shirts and they live pretty close by within the vicinity So I thought it would be funny to drop it off myself kind of like a prank kind of like I don't know I'm nervous but I wasn't as nervous until Chris got nervous and now Chris made me nervous and now we're both nervous So we don't know if this is a good idea or really bad idea, but either way I think it's going to be fun. So Chris brought over. Did you bring UPS clothes? Okay, okay, I'm sure that heads of 19 We have to come up with a plan B. I think you just dressed like normal. I'm so obvious I'm like wearing a sniffer shirt.  Okay.  I don't know how much more disguise were you gonna put on? I don't know.  Yeah, I could be an Amazon person We see people get tripped out You could we could still call and pretend for UPS and need sign delivery and then like they show up in on Amazon Yeah, I mean anything that's sort of brown ish, too. That's brown ish or white ish is FedEx, you know FedEx, okay. I think I'll just wear this Yellow is what's it called? You're naming a lot of colors. I don't have to see my favorite colors black Are you laughing? No, he's laughing. Okay, so I'm gonna shut the door and then we're gonna come up with plan B Okay, so I want to give you guys some full disclosure on how I'm doing this Drizzy's in the middle of us. I'm trying to get Chris in the frame What happened? Are you excited? Do you think that we should go and surprise her? Yeah, I'm excited. Chris is behind the scenes. Yeah, a jersey shirt Yeah Do you want to tell her thank you for getting a jersey shirt? You know what else you got? A sniffer shirt Isn't that disclosure guys? This is what we're up to. If you didn't understand already I'm gonna drop off these three shirts at a fan's house and hopefully they're gonna answer the door Here is how I have the address and stuff Obviously when you guys buy shirts and they need to be shipped out I get the address. So that's one thing How do I have her phone number? Okay? So I emailed her because one of the shirts wasn't in stock and I also kind of wanted to test the water See how big of a fan she is and she wrote back and then I wrote back and she wrote back So like just trying to gauge like if maybe she would actually enjoy me coming to the house Or if I'm a creeper and if it doesn't work, I blame George because it's all his fault This was his idea. Okay, we're gonna call her now and pretend that Amazon's attempting delivery But it needs to be signed for someone's Should we call them be like Sniffer society is attempting delivery at your house now, well then she definitely would okay I mean, we can still say we're UPS. Let's say we're UPS and in the bottom of her email I got her phone number. So that's how you know, this is all working. Okay. So are you nervous? So you're gonna have to call and say we attempted delivery earlier and nobody was home UPS would like to know would you like Re-delivery will someone be home to sign for the package. Yeah, or should we drop it off at our facility? What if they say drop it off at your facility? No, we'll just be pretty insistent that world. You know how to do this Do you got it? Are you good? I'm gonna use my Ryan's roses techniques. Okay. Yeah, you have Ryan's roses That's like that that I think was copied by like Goomba Johnny or something in New York, but Jersey. Are you ready for this? Okay, I'm gonna get your phone number. I'm gonna set up the camera and we're gonna do this. What if she says um I'm at the house right now. When did you know we say we attempted earlier? Okay ready? This is the cell phone number Okay, okay dial it Her name is Hi, may I please speak to Tina? Yes, we attempted delivery today You have a package from Parrot station. Yeah, and you put it on speaker so we get here and then say The package needs to be signed for are you at home? when Yeah Oh, let's just say that the package we won't even say that they've attempted delivery We'll just say what happens to me sign needs to be signed for we just were calling to verify You'll be home later today Is that normal? No, this is normal I think it'll be fine. Okay.  That sounds so far out. Is that even California? It's Pasadena. Oh, okay She knows all about money don't forget to do speaker All right Just say hi Tina. This is Hi Tina, I am attempting to deliver a package to your residence and It needs to be signed for so I'm just trying to verify if When you'll be home later today Yeah, I've got this I have a package from Parrot station Perfect. Yeah, that'll they'll put me right around that area. Okay, wonderful. I will see you soon Thank you. Bye-bye. I'm interested. She's excited to hear if it's for parents Do you think though or is she like oh what the heck she has to get it signed for? Oh, that is a special delivery. I Think she's I think she's all game.  Well, I was I Don't know what a deal is but she sounded very I think when once we said that's why I wanted to make sure I said parents taste because I was gonna be the tell either she was gonna be like. Oh, yeah, okay She was like Do you get Starbucks before or after do we take Jersey? No, she'll throw up the whole car ride I would have loved to take you but you would throw up the whole ride. Do you think her kids there? Yeah, if she's gonna be there, I can't imagine her kids not there. How old was you know, 11? It's still too young to be doing like volleyball after school, right in the pen. I don't know. It's what's so ever I actually failed at a gym class and dad had to go talk to the teacher in high school Have a word with her that work. How did you fail? I didn't really want to wear sneakers So I only wore heels to school and then I couldn't participate You really were like at least you're so close. Yeah, I was when my mom saw it She started worrying about me.  You're laughing. We're gonna reconvene here. Okay guys real good investigators prepare themselves I found her house on Google Maps and I have found the bush that Chris is gonna hide in right Chris With the camera cuz I obviously can't and then Chris you have to go from here Chris you need to go from round behind this tree and then sneak over and hide right behind this door got it Yes Okay, so um this house is probably like less than 10 miles away or whatever But because of Los Angeles traffic It's gonna take us maybe 40 minutes to get there So we have to get ready and be on our way and I don't know if I should get a Starbucks before or after like job Well done. You deserve a Starbucks. So I'll decide how cute is her spot She loves it there. She has direct access to the stairs Chris, why don't you show me what your plans are show me you said I could do do one of Move one keep your head down wait for it open the door.  Okay crowd He's uh, oh yeah, cool I should have planned this out better because I gotta get the birds ready and they're not doing like they're going Nowhere. Yes got my hat on ready to go Perth what else am I forgetting? Oh, yeah, almost forgot the actual package these packages I got a drop-off for delivery and this is her actual package. So here we go. Okay That's the cry of I want to come with you and it also means that I have to leave the house right away Don't want to leave her Sometimes you have to leave the house when you have a bird and that's sometimes what they do and I'd love to bring her But she gets so car sick. Okay. Here we go. Are you ready Chris? Okay, good time to go What are you doing the way I asked Charlie if he wants a baby con here Okay, it's a cute one we're going to do that thing that prank with the shirts someone's behind you Okay, I Can't I'm literally so nervous. Okay. We just drove by the house and spotted it We know what it looks like from Google or whatever, but it's dark. So did you see any lights there? I saw lights inside. We'll see we'll see what I saw ahead in the window and anyone that watches my show Recognizes my mini Cooper. You have the package, right? That's right here. Okay, and my hat sounds so nervous Okay, there's no light. So we're gonna have to use like a flashlight or something. I swear wasn't I wearing a hat? I like took it off to drive Okay, okay, okay, okay. Okay. Do I look at the skies? Sort of okay, so this is a problem. We drove past it this way We need to be on the other side, right so that you can hide in that bush They won't they won't be able to recognize this walking on the sidewalk. Okay. Okay. I think we'll be all right. All right Where's the package? I can't do that. Are you filming? Okay? It's the one with the snowman. What if she's just like, oh, thank you. Bye. No, it can't be right. I swear That's what I thought I saw in the window, but it's a chair, right? Chris, where are you gonna hide?  That's what I thought. Are you still filming? I'm still filming. Okay. I'll just get there's light There's light. I'll go up first. You go first and hide in the hide right near the name the number of the house Yeah, that's right. I'll just go right behind you. Go No, she'll see me though. She'll see you a Bird just flew! She's right there. It's looking She's gonna bite me because Casper is my African ring. She's been kind of She's been kind of biting lately Hi, cutie! I think it's not the end of the world. You'll live. Yeah Did you know it was me when I What made you and I thought it was really weird that she opened the door and then just shut it But the best was the phone call Having me sign off for them. I'm like there's a t-shirt on the number. I was like make sure you Shouldn't so like we can gauge like if this is gonna be weird Like he called me and he's like, are you sure? Are you sure about this? I don't think so. I'm like listen like, you know, I think it'll be fun worst case.  It's easier because I knew you were having issues like shipping stuff And then I thought are we not gonna for Christmas? Oh my god Yeah, do you want to see that? Oh no, oh it's a surprise No, no, no I didn't tell her that I got it but it's okay. This is fake. Look at the ball, come here.  Birds as it is. I have six total. You have six? Yeah, can you see that? Yeah, one is over here Birds of good sniff.  Who's your favorite bird? I'll bring the other two. Oh my god. See it all works out Chris And now I'm getting the sniffs from like the best sniff ever This is Casper so Casper Romeo pesto She's a red factor sometimes. Oh my god. This is so cute This is the cutest ponder. Can you see this bird really clearly? Look how special. Yeah. All your birds are so nice with strangers She prefers men She does yeah, because her original owner was a guy But she loves my 16-year-old son always flirts with men if we're walking on the street She whistles at men. You have such cute birds. Thanks. So you have six birds Yeah, I have two other con years. Oh my god Casper. You're so handsome. Oh my god I did your you know, I've been doing your time fours Yeah with her and I have the funniest story because I do time for Apple because I'm home And so every day at 12 o'clock, I'll bring her downstairs time for lunch And then I'll take her the apples and I'll say time for Apple and then one day had to be at work all day We do surgeries and I was there and my mom was home and I got home She said 12 o'clock. She said Apple for an hour and she said I just gave up and I took her an apple Where did you get your birds? So he's someone who just bring home. Yeah her I should say these two came from Chicago Wow now I go to the bird store where you always go first plus. Yeah, and I'm not allowed to buy birds anymore because My boyfriend said that we're moving out like in a month to a new house And he said we need to talk if you get more birds before you get a new bird. Yeah So but he loves him. She loves him He's her favorite son. That's good. Yeah, he's really good with him. Oh, and I have a bird room.  I have a window and they're gonna have their it's right on the kitchen So I came so it's amazing. So hopefully an atrium You know what I mean?   Well, I love that you have them all out and everything I have five kids your five kids. Yeah, this just to have three others older little older I have an 18 year old 16 year old and the 13 year old so they rotate with the bird So everybody gets a bird and do they all love birds. Mm-hmm. So I need kids. Yeah, you do actually there is a Reason I've had quite a few birds in my lifetime Perikings. I love it.  He's too sweet. He's really sweet, too But this is a really beautiful conure. Yeah, I don't think okay Where do you want to go? Who is your who's your person? Are you all their person except for the great because I work from home? Yeah, I've turned her around She was in love with my son when I first got her but she's with me all day We have a pair of bird parties in the morning. That's the routine. That's my routine Yeah, I wake up. I take my son to school I go to the gym and then I could take my son to school when I come back It's time to back you and then they all sit on their little purchase and then I turn on the music and recently I've been doing Christmas tunes for them. Yeah, mine is Mariah Carey all I want for Christmas I put on jerseys like this and they're all like this I do it in the morning one before they eat and then they eat together and then at night before they go to bed It's dance party.  With the birds Wow And then at 12 o'clock because I pick up my son from kindergarten when I come back it's time for lunch Then it's time for apples. Do you love birds? I'm not mad at me. You do. I love that The Amazon was all because of Leo Because I sat there going and then I had it at that point. I was talking my boyfriend. I said, I'm down I'm not getting any more birds. I promise I'm not and then I started researching Amazons And he said why are you researching Amazon? I just it just want to look it just want to look and then I found her and I said I knew we were done when you started looking at So he loves birds. Yeah, he loves them. See you guys you can find somebody that loves birds Like I mean all these women that are like well, I have so many birds. I can't find someone. I'm like, what transfer the love, man Special shirts so they can stand on in my son Conner. Absolutely loves him. Oh my god So he has a he wore special shirts.  What what like you knew I was coming I Because I know that you like more are you filming this because I know you you're always cold And I know your favorite color is red and oh my god. Tell me the reasoning The reasoning is because I watch you in the gym Which is I wonder what people are thinking behind me when I'm doing the stuff and there you are and all these parents And I was at the gym and I watched you talk about your gluten issues Yeah, and I was sitting at the gym and all of a sudden you talk about your birthday when you went to your birthday You ate something wrong and you got the stabbing knife. Yeah, and I thought oh my gosh So my boyfriend was working out said come over here. You gotta listen to this I said I have been complaining about this for I would say I'm 44. So 30 years. I've been complaining about yeah So I said I think that's my issue because I had other autoimmune issues Pregnant and so I cut it all out. I said I'm going gluten free I'm gonna cut it all out. I'm gonna try it and honestly. I've never felt better in my life I've never had I don't have stabbing pains anymore, right? I don't feel like Yes, and he's like you need to go to the doctor get that checked out. I'm like, well, I'm not dead It's fine. He'll pass I'll get better and then I got really sick after having because I wouldn't eat sushi I never had sushi and then I started eating sushi and there's tons of gluten and soy sauce to the point where I almost had To go to the hospital. I was almost had to go to the eel the doctor I work with doctors and so the doctor said take a bandage drill and he said maybe you have some sort of bacterial thing with the Sushi, and I never figured it out until I was watching your video Stop. So I've never honestly. I've never felt better. So I was so happy. I keep telling my boyfriend I've never felt better, right? I've never spent my life with stabbing pains. Yes, I'd be double over at the movie theater I'd be like, oh my gosh, I gotta go home because I can't watch the movie because it started I used to think I thought it was coffee. I thought it was yeast I went through everything. I've cut everything out. I said, I'm not I'm lactose intolerant I went through everything and I never figured it out. And then when you talk about the stabbing pains I'm like, I told you that feels like knives are going.  Yes Yeah, it'll happen out of nowhere and I sit there and I do a diary of everything I eat And then I never did across my mind that it would be gluten absolutely never until you mentioned it And I thought this is crazy. And I was telling my doctor recently. How did you figure that out? I said, watch this parrot thing at YouTube station And the youtuber has the issue Hence I got you a little gift Thank you so much. They never would have seen us coming. We did good Yeah, okay, so my parents are coming in January. Okay, so I'm gonna do a whole bunch of videos with them. Come here. Oh No, no, no, it's okay. Oh, this is the cutest bird See I told you Chris I was meant to come over here. She knew I was cutting Usually if I email someone they're excited that I emailed and I'm like I'll test the waters and see like if it would Completely abnormal when he responded and we had a thing. I was like Chris. We had some email exchanges This is gonna be okay. Well, you mentioned in one of your videos that you're thinking about Oh, there's hope I was in deliver t-shirts Then I thought I said 515 and I'm looking at the thing I'm saying. Well, it's a delivery guy And he's not here at 515. I thought but Marlene is only late. This bird just keeps playing with toys Yeah, she's really engaged with like being but she's really good I'm dying.  It's like they all scream when I come home And then it's pandemonium and my neighbor text me What is going on? I'm dying super bright red. Let me give you a hug. Thank you so much for coming my my sniffers Know me way too. Well, I can't even pull one. You know faking it like pretending I didn't know what I'm getting in the morning. I'm getting it this day. I love you so much. Oh You have a feather on your leg. I do that's where I like them. Oh My god, okay. I'll stop harassing you now. Okay Okay, so I knew she might know and Chris these people when they went made when they they follow they follow They are hard car that was amazing because she wasn't just like someone that like she knew everything like I cured her Mom dad see you wanted me to be a doctor, but like I'm curing people. This was absolutely amazing I love you guys so much. You never know. I might come to you Maybe we'll make this thing maybe but if I come you got to be as cool as Tina I love you guys so much. Don't forget engage not cage Check if you're gluten intolerant. Please subscribe. I love you so much Tina this is absolutely amazing. I'm gonna wear it every day Oh and by the way George now thinks he saved your life because he suggested that maybe I have a problem with gluten I was the one that diagnosed the whole situation with you and gluten so I'm the one that saved your life You also try to kill me twice. Yeah, but that didn't work


Lights. Magic. Thank you all for attending. This is the last session of the last day. And I'm feeling a little, I'm feeling, I'm feeling good. You guys feeling good? How many people here actually, how many people work in an agency show of hands? Yes. Oh, most, most. Okay. You guys in the, in the rear in the last row, you guys work together? Everyone in this row? Yeah. What agency do you work with? It's called Django. Django. Django? Okay. Yeah. And gentlemen, gentlemen in blue? Yeah. Same? No. No. Yourself? All right. Right? Accelerant. Accelerant? Yeah. I've worked four agencies up now. You don't know, but they don't? How other know? You don't know? Well, I didn't get an increase. You work, you're, the name of your agency? Sir? The name of the agency that you work with? I could. And yourself, sir? I, uh, I'm interested here. Okay. Um, it's good to know you guys have heard of, you have some notion of agency, agency life, your own agency lives, most of you. Uh, some of what I'm going to talk about today may feel familiar or sound familiar. Some of it may be a little bit different. Um, my name is Andrew Malus. I'm the CEO and co-founder of CalMUNA. Uh, CalMUNA is an agency that works with mission-driven organizations. We are, uh, committed to making, uh, the world and the internet a better place. It is with, uh, the help of the community here that we are able to do that. We work a lot in Drupal. We also provide design consulting services, strategy, et cetera. Our home base is in Oakland, California. Uh, on the other side of the country, I am, uh, native of Toronto, Canada. Uh, and we have a few of our members in our primarily distributed team at this point. We'll talk a bit more about the challenges of working in a distributed virtual environment, the nature of the changing scope of work, the nature of work towards the end of the talk. Um, but that is where we are based. We're a U.S.-based company. We'll talk a little bit about the differences between U.S. and Canadian law. We have learned so much, uh, since moving to the U.S. eight years ago now. These are some of our clients to give you an idea of the breadth and scope and scale, uh, which we operate. Um, this year, we, uh, we worked with the City of San Francisco, uh, just across the bay from Oakland. Uh, doing a little bit of, a little bit more work in the, in the government spaces. Uh, we work a lot in nonprofits, uh, Fair Trade USA. It was a big project for us, uh, this year in Jubilee.  Uh, always, um, tricky, uh, political, uh, variable. Uh, and, uh, we thrive in, in those types of environments, uh, because our, our membership embraces, uh, diversity and, uh, a very, uh, humanist approach to problem solving, which in these types of institutions is, is really key. Uh, to meet with success. Uh, these are some of the ways that you can contact me. I use my real name for things. Uh, not too many other people have, uh, my name so you can use the standard search tools. I'm on, uh, Drupal.org and have been for some time, 11 plus years now. And, uh, you can tweet at or with me, email me. Uh, I am accessible. Uh, I don't tell you a little bit about myself. Uh, I don't usually do this, but I thought it would be relevant because I started an agency. Um, and it's not something that many people do, but I think before I was in one, I thought about doing it. I'm like, well, who am I? Am I the type of person who could do this kind of thing or not? Are you the type of people who could do this kind of thing or not? What is involved? How does it change your life? And, uh, how, uh, have we been successful a little bit? Um, maybe, you know, might shed some light on things. So I, uh, I studied art at the Ontario College of Art and Design. Um, that's actually what ended up bringing us to California eventually. Uh, my wife, uh, went to pursue her, her MFA, uh, there. And so we moved, we moved out there, uh, to Menlo Park while she was going to Stanford. And I got involved with the Drupal community there. I met some other people. We'll, we'll get to that. Back to the art though. Uh, big picture stuff always been interested in, you know, topologies and, and thinking about like the macro and the micro, uh, really, really looking at how to, um, how to, how to, how to narrow in, how to narrow in on something, use some photographs, aerial photographs that I've taken, uh, some time back in, uh, in Nevada here. Um, but, you know, I was looking for, I was looking for something new. I was looking to start something new. Um, and I've always been interested in art and computers and how those two things come together. How I could use technology in my art practice, which had a bit more of a traditionalist background. And, uh, how I could blend that potentially with a history of, uh, social activism. I was very interested in how we perceive technology, how we interact with that and mixing media. Some of that thinking has kind of informed the way that I've sought to I've sought to brought, build business. And, uh, before, just before starting, uh, starting Calamuna, I, I was a contractor, a freelancer. I had a bit of a Robin Hood mentality. I would take clients I didn't really want to work with. I would charge them more. And then I would give big, deep discounts to the work I really wanted to do. And then the world was on fire. Occupy started. I moved to New York City. I, uh, lived there for a few months. I helped to run much of the digital infrastructure that powered the movement, including making this website, the Occupy Directory, which was a, a global directory and a very big data project that sought to shed light on where the conversation spaces were happening. It was built in Drupal. Um, it was a collaborative effort. It was all open source, free, everything free. And, uh, you know, we garnered some attention, the work that we were doing and the, and the media and other spaces, and there was a real impact. And, uh, when Occupy eventually fizzled out, um, I didn't have the patience for the types of clients that I didn't want to work with anymore. And I thought maybe there's a better way. Maybe I don't need to bend over backwards. Maybe, um, I can stick to my beliefs and, um, not compromise as much. So, um, my outlook changed and suddenly I started making more money when I was not interested in making money. It was, it's, it's like when you lose something, you know, you've lost your keys and you find them as soon as you stop looking for them. It's like magic. Um, and so in the Bay, you know, I was looking for some other opportunities. I was looking maybe for some other people to collaborate with along these lines. Uh, there was a few, a few, a few dudes, a lot of dudes in tech. Uh, we're trying to, uh, fix some of that, uh, in our agency. Um, a small shop called East Bay Development, which eventually would become Kalimuna. We got together at this place called the Revolution Cafe, where there was a bit of a burgeoning, uh, you know, culture of hacker-nish, or a hackish-nish around, around Drupal. And, uh, eventually, you know, we got an office, uh, with some, some rafters and a nice old building that was a converted bank. I like to refer to it as the bank of the proletariat. Uh, on the front, there's a beautiful facade, some Art Deco motif. And, um, you know, we started to, to pick some, pick some things up, pick some projects up. And eventually, uh, grow. Uh, this was DrupalCon in Portland. We built a little, uh, slideshow. Um, everyone loves slideshows on their websites. And, in their promotional materials. Uh, but, uh, we got, uh, an actual slide projector, uh, printed some slides digitally. And, uh, I have an amazing, adventurous tale that involves, um, uh, the Hell's Angels to tell you if you're interested after this as to how I found the, uh, lenses that we were going to project, uh, our, our slideshow. Uh, Oakland is a fabulous place. So, um, you know, we continued to grow some more. This was our website back in the day. We're very, uh, you know, forthcoming with our, our value proposition. Eventually, that, uh, shifted a little bit more. Um, we matured a bit more as a brand. And, uh, we, well, maybe not that mature. This website was launched from this hot tub in San Diego. Um, thanks to Pantheon. In one button, uh, with one button, we were able to push from, from tests to live, um, without needing to leave the tub. So, uh, our, our website doesn't quite look like this anymore on the front page, but, um, our company has grown, matured a little bit more. And, uh, it's been, it's been an interesting journey. What, what I want to talk, um, with you, uh, about today is, is a bit of the lessons that I've learned in terms of how to run a business and, uh, what that means behind the scenes. Uh, before doing this, I didn't appreciate what was all involved. I did some because, you know, I was a consultant. I ran my own business, but once you scale up and continue to scale, uh, things do change and your preoccupation changes. Uh, our organization is maturing. I'm, uh, attempting to mature with it. And my role previously was to, you know, serve clients. Uh, things have changed a little bit. Um, my client, uh, is now the team. And, and so I, I work, uh, for them. Uh, I want to show you a little bit behind the scenes of what, uh, goes on in an agency, how we're built, how we're constituted, and, uh, wrong behind the scenes. Uh, another photograph that I took, um, in Chicago some years ago. Um, but one thing that we really do in terms of deciding the direction of the company is engage everyone in that process. Um, we value, uh, a high degree of transparency, a radical transparency, sometimes too much truth. Um, but that's good. I think it's important to be able to, uh, be honest. And, uh, it is how we, how we grow. So, uh, this was in, in Baltimore, uh, around these conference times in Bad Camp and also DrupalCon. We bring the whole team together. I mentioned before we were primarily distributed. We'll talk some more about those challenges, but, uh, preceding those conferences, uh, a day or two, this was a two-day thing. We just kind of re-envisioned where we wanted to go. A lot of sticky note exercises, some thinking, different ideas, some structure to that, some engagement from individuals, remote and physically present, um, and setting forth, you know, some of their, some of their thinking. And so I designed some exercises that are, that are made to, you know, maybe they're not obvious initially, but it's a bit of a pasty should all come together in some interesting and meaningful way. How many people are you at this point? Um, we are about 15 people. Perhaps 20. It depends on, uh, how you, uh, calculate things. But we are, uh, in our core 15, there are some, uh, contractors with whom we work regularly and others irregularly. So, um, I guess it's a bit of a, uh, probability cloud, you know, if you want to look at it that way. There's the core, the core is, uh, is not moving so much. We host events as well. I think this is really important, uh, in our, our space in particular. We are here at a conference, um, to exchange ideas. And we want to facilitate, and in some cases lubricate the exchange of those ideas with, uh, animated dancing robots and, uh, funny hats. And, uh, pardon? I know. I know. Yeah. Uh, that's the, the subtext of lubrication. And, uh, and so we, we bring, we bring people together to have those conversations to, um, you know, perpetuate the magic. Uh, this was at, uh, at Bad, at Bad Camp. And, uh, we sponsor events. We sponsored this event. We sponsored other events. Because it's important, you know, unless we talk, unless we get together, we, uh, we're not, we're not really going to make, make a dent in things. You can't, you can't plan it all out. We need to leave room for the informal. We need to leave, uh, space for water cooler talk. And more formal talk. So we'll host panels, uh, organizing and working on, uh, higher education summit at Bad Camp to bring the voices together from different universities. Um, and we did something kind of interesting in, uh, New Orleans. We organized a funeral for Drupal 6. Uh, given that it was end of life. Uh, and engaged a traditional, uh, funeral procession and marching band which we took to the streets. Um, we had a coffin, uh, for, for it filled, filled with, uh, cupcakes. But, um, uh, it was quite, uh, it was quite moving. You know, in our community, we work tirelessly sometimes for many years on a project. And Drupal 6 is no exception. Uh, Drupal 9 may, may be the exception. But, uh, some people had worked for, you know, six years, uh, in, in Drupal 6, uh, or more. And, uh, it was kind of cathartic, uh, to let it, to let it go. And, uh, so we did that ceremoniously and with great fun. Um, that's a little bit, kind of about us. I don't know, gives you perhaps a little bit of a sense that we are, uh, playful, uh, earnest. We care about each other and, uh, about, about the community. Um, do you guys have any thoughts or questions before I jump into some more pie charts and things? I'm, I'm planning to show you a little bit, a little bit of that under the hood. Are you planning on staying about the same time? Planning on growing? Um, that's an, that's an interesting question. We are hiring. So, uh, so we are, we are looking to grow a little bit. Um, one of the reasons we're looking to grow is, uh, because um, the team, we're interested in building a high-performance team. Everyone wants to do their best work. And in order to do that and be solvent, um, we have to fix some concurrency issues that we have. Working with large institutions, feedback cycles can be long. And so we must be working on, you know, a lot of things at once. And that can spread the team across too many things. So we're, we're looking a little bit to have, um, more redundancy and, and increase a little bit of the volume of work that we're taking on so that we can achieve those, those goals, um, in our practice. And that's, that's our primary reason to grow, uh, right now. Um, there is no long-term plan after that. Um, we will see then what the next move, what next move makes sense. There are some other areas where we may want to you know, dive deeper into. Um, but it really depends that, in a company of our size, it really depends on, on the people. You know, it's not as much about the positions. And when we're talking about growth, it'd be like, hey, yeah, we should start doing more SEO, right? Like, unless you really have someone who's going to make that happen in the right context. Um, you can find that person and find a role, but we're, we're just so, at a certain size where it, we really want to play to everyone's strengths and grow organically. I can just offer, I co-founded a lot of Canada's first, uh, triple shops and went from like two people and thirty-five people. And in fact, if there's a lesson I took out of it is we probably should have planned for the growth instead of just wouldn't have an organically. Because at some point, we're too big to have discussions of the way we used to have them. Yeah. I don't want to make it seem like there is no growth strategy at all. I'm very aware of the caps that happen. In an organization, there are certain humps in growth. And I've learned this, or this has been reinforced in talking with other agency owners, multiple agency owners. I've been privileged to be part of some networks and conferences and other spaces where we talk very frankly and openly about these things. When you get past twenty people, there's a bit of a shift. You incur more administrative overhead and that's not only from a cost perspective, but also from a human perspective. HR becomes a lot less of a thing you can do on the fly. There's just a kind of, and then that cost increase pushes a need for revenue to offset it. And so it can very quickly start to become a race to catch up to that financial picture and within, you know, there's a pressure to go from like twenty to thirty to fifty. And some people are on that track. And then once you get past like thirty, then there's a sort of aesthetic where, and increasingly in our space, I'm jumping ahead a little bit, but you may have noticed a lot of agencies have been sold in the last few years. It's not new. We'll come back around to that. But once you get past thirty, then there's other pressures that start to happen and other, you get on the radar of other agencies that can see you as more of a threat and that competition becomes fiercer. So we're currently still a bit scrappy. That lets us move nimbly and we're a bit more like a frigate, you know, at this point, if you want to use a naval metaphor. This is how we're structured. This is a new construct that I put together this year to try and express, despite our small size, areas of concern and responsibility because when you are, you know, fifteen, twenty people, it's a lot of different hats are being worn. But there has to at some point be stewardship in some key areas of the organization. These are the ones that we've identified as most important to us and each of these spaces needs decided leadership. It may not be the purview of only one person to act in that capacity. In marketing we formed a committee in order to move that forward. We didn't have a single person who was going to be able to achieve that mandate. And, you know, technology is also a joint effort. We have many leaders in the technology space because we are heavily invested in a lot of research and development and community contributions. So that follows a little bit more of a consensus model. In support we have a director of support that has more, that's more of a straight arrow. But all of these things combine and they're supported by a base which is operations which includes, you know, HR, legal financial, all these kinds of runnings of things and time management. We're all moving upwards. This is how we think about marketing. Marketing is communications. It's marketing and communications. And so for anything that we take on, we want to evaluate its relevance. You know, we can do a lot of things and any action that we take might impact many parts of this. When we were thinking about, you know, sponsoring this event, thinking, what is it, we give, you know, a thousand dollars to the event, like what do we get in return? Well, in some ways we don't really care that much. It's intangible. But we also think, well, you know, maybe there's a possibility for us to increase our reaching reputation. That's important to us. We want to attract talent. That's also important to us. So we're working kind of in these spaces. I don't know how much of this spirit, the internal spirit, like, I mean, it's Josh and I, I think we're bonding, right, Josh? We drank some good beers while we're here. So there's a little bit of that that's going on. Our network loyalty and retention, not so strong. We don't have any Canadian clients. We can't compete in this marketplace because we have American employees that we need to pay in US dollars. And the exchange rate is not favorable for an organization like ours currently to do business in Canada. That may change. You know, we may find other ways to make that work, but that's just the economy right now. And so client acquisitions, even though it's really very important to us, not something that we are expecting to do here. So we're here for spirit. We're here for the spirit and the community. And also to, you know, practice some of these talks, which we'll hopefully be giving in other times and spaces. Time. Time is money. It's time. You know, we're spending time on stuff and we'll get more into how we do that. But I want to share with you a little bit about where our money comes from when we do make money. This is a slide from a report that I haven't given yet to the team. It's a few more slides I need to do and we're traveling and things. But every quarter I talk about our financial picture. I share our numbers. Everyone is aware of what our profit margins are, of where our expenses are going, of how well we're doing. It's really important in an organization of our size for everyone to have agency, right? To be able to be an independent agent that acts responsibly in relationship to a context. It's not just a job. We want to do well. We want to enjoy the work we do. We want to feel like it has meaning. And unless we understand that context, it's difficult to get passionate about that. And it's difficult to do our best work. It's difficult to go beyond and not feel like it's for a good reason. It's taking something away potentially rather than adding. We're very conscious as well of making sure that people aren't working too much and we monitor all these kinds of things. But as I said earlier, we do a lot of work in the higher education sector. It has in 40% more or less. This year it's displaced some in dollars. It's probably similar. But because we've done more work in government, that slice of the pie is displaced in higher ed a little bit. And it was interesting for us to look in previous years at this startup category. We have some mixed results working with startups. They expect a lot. They think they know everything and they think they need you because they don't have time and maybe it's for convenience. That's not really the kind of relationship we want to engage with. We want a respectful, mutual conversation. We want to be partners with our clients. So we thought to divest ourselves working with startups that's reflected moving forward. But unless we can expose this data and share it with the team and have a conversation around it, you're just left scratching your head what should we do and this and that and then we have a conversation we talk frankly about it. It becomes really clear. And then as leadership startups approach us I say good luck. I've blanked out some of the numbers in the names of our clients here because there's some clients that we say we're working with yet it's in contracts. As you grow as an agency clients get bigger you have to sign all these things and they say hey you can't tell people you're working with us and then later you put in writing you ask them hey can we take it now and then they say yes and you can put their logo on and then maybe they'll come back to you later and say oh you gotta take your logo off we changed our whatever standards or whatever this. Anyhow what I'm trying to say is a long tail of income a few clients that give us more money a lot of clients give us a little bit of money we operate a support program so that's where a lot of that long tail is but some of it in the year might just be like a big project that just ended in January either way what's really important here is to find a good mix this was skewed differently in previous years we had the team wanted to work on less projects at a time so we needed to endeavor to change the shape of this graph because we needed we needed fewer larger clients so that we would be doing less at a time so that we worked on that things have shifted things shifted that makes a big clients that might be about like two big projects at the same time and some other little things and that's kind of like the character of like what work and revenue looks like onto time this is this year so far but this is about how many hours we put in every month as a team and track, we used harvest to track our time and to build we also used this forecast tool that they have I don't really like it that much but it's what we have right now anyhow when all of a sudden done we're tracking over a thousand hours as a team per month and you can see that some of it is for administrative time some of it is for available hours for R&D and for the most part we are getting close to our goals our goals are a function of revenue that revenue is to meet demands of salary needs and growth needs and so we kind of retrofit those projections monitor them we look at utilization when I say we it's mostly like me and accountants and then presenting that information to others and getting feedback and then reworking stuff improving the way that we track formulas we use so we're trying to keep people billable at a certain rate different people maybe in different percentages but overall as a company as a whole we look at that holistically what we're kind of our targets are we on, are we off of it we compare that a little bit to revenue we get a sense of where things should be we know when there's slow months we know when there's heavy months we can start to develop more of an accurate sense and in the patterns of work we know for example that during Drupal Con our billables take a bit of a nose dive because the entire team is there conferencing that can't as well and so we need to plan for that when we aren't billing we're doing work internally we track that as well, we track everything there's some overhead to it it's annoying, I don't like to do it I don't think anyone really likes to do it but there's just some things we have to do or else we wouldn't be prosperous and we wouldn't have clarity there's a lot of administrative time there's a lot of development time this is actually all time, not just internal time so as an organization we're doing a lot of development that's in state relief sites there's R&D that we're doing and project management and those slivers are so when we look at these charts we're like are we really tracking things appropriately I thought we should be doing more of this or less of that so we can go back and take a look make sure we have time forecasted to accomplish our goals in those spaces and then when we're not billing we'll be working on different things people might be doing some training we have some internal projects we're working on and that's so we restructured things a little bit, you'll see 2016 we've moved R&D to more internal stuff anyways this is just more to give you an idea I think it'll take too long to dive too deeply into that but ultimately what I'm talking about here is transparency transparency is something that not only internally I think is important but externally to our clients it's really important we don't round hours we don't want to inundate people with too much information but we provide them if they want it, complete transparency into all of our time in what we're doing for them because we are responsible we want to demonstrate that value that we're providing and we want to be held accountable as we should be for the dollars that we're charging them and the work that we're doing and that's I think the right thing to do this was a bit of a workshop trust exercise that we did in the office in a previous iteration of these workshops this is a spreadsheet that I use it has some fictional numbers in it but I thought I'd share it with you because I've shared it with a number of other CEOs and financial people and so far it's fairly unique as far as I can tell in terms of how to look at compensation difficult conversations to have particularly when you're hiring someone difficult conversations to maintain after someone has been employed everyone is valuable and it's hard to put a number on things everyone has aspirational goals one of the interview questions that we ask is what would you do if you won a million dollars in the lottery and the follow-up question that is what would you do if you won a hundred million dollars in the lottery starts to abstract that question of money and speak more to values and that's what's really important but we can't lose sight of the real financial realities people have different goals they have families they have different needs and they're various some people want to work 40 hours a week some people want to work less we want to be accommodating for that before we have people in Canada we have people in the US we have payroll we're not a big company yet we don't run payroll across the border so we healthcare exists in Canada it's called health insurance in the United States and that comes at a cost but it's a benefit that we pay for and deliver to our American employees but how do we look at that scale across that and do that fairly how do I compare compensation for different roles and different positions I don't think it should be an arbitrary thing I don't think it should be like how little can I pay you versus how much do you want we need to have a contextual conversation around that I can flip over the spreadsheet maybe if this is too small but I just want to walk you through a few points here so first often people come to us and they're like well I'm making this much money right now you know but I hate my job I want to work with clients that I care about it's fantastic you're the type of person that we want to work with but we're also the type of company that's going to provide that kind of opportunity if we didn't care for people to be super super billable we'd be working with clients and gouging them and yeah we could pay you more and you would be working all the time and you'd probably be working on the weekends because we're going to make some unrealistic promises that we need to keep because we need to pay we need to make the cash but we don't want to operate in that way and that comes at a little bit of a payoff people who may be 75% billable in their old job to a less billable state because they're going to be doing more R&D more community involvement more of those things that they care about and that comes as well at a cost for us as an organization so we want to demonstrate that and again it's a transparency when you're working you're making money for the organization that you're working with every hour that you work you know what they're charging clients and that's a real thing we're charging these clients $175 an hour I could be making I could do this I could charge $100 an hour and I'm working here and I'm making $50 an hour it can start to breed some kind of resentment I think it's really important to have that conversation upfront and contextualize it because there is a context for that there isn't a mountain of gold somewhere we're accumulating all this money goes to different places 80%, 85% of our money goes to our people directly so that's what this is about we have a whole bunch of benefits benefits add up to total compensation then we pay taxes on that we're talking to contractors those contractors think well if I'm a contractor I'm charging $125 an hour but then they're going to get dinged on their their taxes as an independent contractor later they don't necessarily do the math on that so our company is also in addition there's money that we pay in income tax on top of that so we want to be transiting around that but here's the staff that cost for us we're salary and that's how much it equates to per hour if you do the math this is not a good column to have it's not really that advantageous for when I have this conversation to show that number but it's honest it's the truth if I don't show it people are going to do that math at least and then afterwards there's the income if someone is making let's say in scenario A they're making 80K after the total compensation and they've got all the benefits comes out to be like 93K plus afterwards our taxes that's like 100K so it's like they started at 80K but it's really costing us $100,000 so there's some context to begin with and then in scenario A there's some time off and then they're working 40 hours there's 239 workdays in a year that's 1,934 hours they're at 67% billable that's 1,276 billable hours they're working if the average billable rate that they're working is $150 an hour hypothetically they're generating 100 and $91,000 in income for the company their staffing costs $100,000 there's $90,000 that they've generated towards the company's financial success and this works to balance out other roles that are non-billable that recognizes being important in marketing and administration and HR and other things some people are more billable than others so that you know what that works out to how are we going to what margins are how are we going to express that and express the value of a workday taking time off of what does that mean is a revenue revenue that the company wouldn't be making if someone were working otherwise known as opportunity costs and we can play with those numbers some people have young have young families or they have another passion they want to pursue and they want to work less time so how do we do that? we can calculate how many PTOAs people want to get a time off that salary is adjustable so there's some play that you can have with that and we've had people that have shifted they've moved that around I think we had an employee a team member who was at 40 hours a week and they wanted to go to London in order to pursue a course of passion that they had dropped down to 32 hours and so we were able to quickly just change that up it was an easy conversation change the numbers everything's proportionate and where we can examine those scenarios as well and this is important because we want people to do their best work and their best work is going to be done if they're happy and if we're accommodating and if we're not pushing people beyond where they need to go and we're also giving them the space to do what they need to do and we can express in this case there's some scenarios where we want to drop 40 hours to 32 hours a week there's some math I think but anyways this should be lower and then one more PTO day and this is kind of how we have these conversations early and later how do you treat lunch? pardon? how do you treat lunch? so that's a good question we look at 40 hours as 40 hours that are tracked it's not shift work people work in different rhythms and it's not quite the same as like 15 minute breaks and half hour for lunch it's a slightly different economy this is the norm in our industry as I can tell from talking to most other agencies I have contemplated moving it down to 37 and a half hours to make some of those accommodations our numbers don't currently support that right now we would have to shift drastically across the board to make that a reality but it's something that we can figure out and yeah that's how we do that people work across multiple time zones and for the first part we have overlap spend diagram time we're doing stand ups and we have someone who's in Europe so they stay up late because we value collaboration we want to pair programming we want to work together this is the value it's our strength but we want to be flexible the work's got to get done so what I've learned is that and this is not new to me when I was at school when I was at OCAD I ran the student union for a couple years I started a school newspaper which I ran for a few years and running an agency is like is like creating a little government we have to take care of people in the US it's that way more and more it's not Canada I learned some very interesting lessons if someone gets injured on the job or not on the job and you bust your hand you can't type in the US you're pretty much SOL the government does not do anything for you that is the responsibility of the company the company is responsible for buying insurance to cover that or not they don't have to do anything really you can't work long term disability is a different situation but here you can't really claim unemployment insurance you can't climb on employment insurance for a short term you can't do that in Canada health care costs are super super high you're looking at somewhere around like 300 to 2000 dollars a month health insurance costs depending on your plan and how many people are members of your family and at what level of coverage you know you need to have that's pretty significant and as a company as a Canadian I feel like there's a lot of pressure on us as a company to do things that I think should be the role of government but it's not the reality you know in the US and that's a tricky tricky thing especially in an organization where we have people across the border on both sides I learned some interesting things about the state of New York so I was talking earlier about like employment insurance right so we have an employee who is in Brooklyn team members in Brooklyn and employment tax is something that we've been you know deducting from their paycheck and remitting and we have insurance as well to cover to cover that portion because if someone claims the unemployment insurance the company pays for some of it and the government pays for some of it so that is shared but New York requires you even if you have that insurance specific plan in the state of New York in addition to that so they decided they wanted to find us $12,000 so we've been fighting them taking them to court it's not fun things you learn things we have to take care of all this stuff, all this insurance, oh my god employee health, short term disability, errors and omissions cybersecurity commercial general liability an umbrella liability clause companies want you to extend your coverage for whatever arbitrary number they have you need more coverage for whatever else they want you to be insured for vehicles because they have some overriding policy like you're not even physically there in the space you're not a delivery truck or anything there's all kinds of crazy complications that we end up isolating our team members from but the things that I've learned are important things I need to do I don't know if someone had made a list of all these things that I was going to have to do if I would have started this so please don't let me scare you off if you're thinking about starting your own company there's lessons that you'll learn along the way but it's good to be aware that there are things that you'll need to figure out taxes okay here's another difference with the U.S. in Canada this is crazy and I learned this too about the U.S. there's the Republicans and there's the Democrats and there's the conservatives and there's the Liberals it's not the same thing at all at all they're not just more extreme Republicans think about the country in terms of a republic like an actual republic where they really just don't give a crap about the federal government and they want to do their own thing that's why you have all these militias that's why you have all of these enclosed states and each of those states legislate their own way how they're going to deal with taxation for an employee payroll which means every employee that we add to payroll we need to levy specific kinds of taxes even certain cities have other taxes so in order to run a distributed company and find the best talent and work in this way we need to do all this huge paperwork for every single state for every single person for every single unique situation and it's confusing in New York they have some weird thing every state's got some weird thing and there's all these things we need to levy and do kind of stuff in software and all that and you don't have to think about it for the most part but it's a thing it's a thing to wrap your head around it's a lot of other stuff we just want to make some websites we're just trying to make some websites do some pull requests but yeah tax situations different all over the place so time check almost done we are distributed as I mentioned we use tools these are familiar to you I'm sure you guys are part of Slack there's been some talks about it Trello github it's a new era of collaboration collaboration tools are maturing more and more interesting collisions here it's not a lot of great open source alternatives there are open source alternatives all of this and we use them in Occupy and we use our own as well to be fervent about it but as an organization we can't afford downtime we can't be like oh no our custom project management tool has crashed and now we have to stop everything we're doing and take two days to fix it that is a lot that's a huge cost to our project schedules and everything so we incur a lot more costs we pay like over $35,000 just for all these different licenses it's only $5 a month per person something else that we do every Friday we have an all hands meeting everyone dials in we make a slide up and talk about our week how things were going for us personally this was my slide this week I was here with my parents digging through the old photo albums this was my son it was a baby picture I was like Florida it was like it was a little me it was amazing and I also discovered something else that was really new I didn't know why this image we had on our website resonated so much with me but I was digging through the thing in our albums and I found these pictures myself playing in the playground when I was in this picture it was amazing so I shared that with my team and everyone's got a slide like this amazing incredible events in everyday lives someone's best friend was murdered this week in Texas, shot in this apartment other people are going through tremendous journeys of recovery you know it's all life and death and it's important to stay connected and it's actually kind of incredible when you are when you aren't just kind of seeing each other all the time sometimes the engagements can be stronger when they're micro engagements yeah so we try to keep in touch we try and stay we try and stay but to this other question of you know the future and staying relevant as an agency I'll give you some thoughts on that I know we're running a little bit close to the wire here I got 5 more minutes on the timer 2 more minutes on the timer so we've done a lot of interagency collaboration this year working with others on larger projects that's another way that we can remain relevant we had a little bit of a problem with project management and some hires that didn't work out so lined up some collaborations to augment some of our capabilities of others and round out our offerings other things that we're dealing with you know Drupal 8 has decided to be an enterprise solution it's hard to build small websites in Drupal 8 it's hard to build small websites in Drupal generally but there's ways to do it there's lots of great distributions there's ways that you can streamline your business like I want to make restaurant websites and find some economies there but in large complex ecosystems we're finding that's the case but that means that we're you know we're moving up market to make those projects worthwhile we need those 100, 200, 300 K plus projects to make those margins work and a lot of other people do too and the mid-market is getting crowded and that 100 K plus that's mid-market now I was building my first website as a freelancer it's charged I'll pay you a website for $5,000 you know that's no problem yeah but what does that mean you know how are these other agencies that we're going against being competitive while they're doing a lot of different things to acquire talent in order to be able to deliver those services they're driving prices they're driving their costs down by offshore development they are also sometimes trying to price you out and doing work to get their foot in the door and underbid in there's a lot more competition our biggest competition right now in the jobs that we've lost that hurt the most are the ones that we've lost to design firms that don't have strong technical capabilities and they've won important mission critical technology programs in Drupal because they had flashy presentations and and we know and this has happened time and time again we have these clients come back to us afterwards in support and we fix the problems and we make it work and we save the day but it's tough it's tough out there and it's getting harder it's getting a lot harder so we have to think about what we can do on that lower end of the spectrum it shouldn't be that unreasonable to build a website for $50,000 we're having more and more trouble doing that so is Drupal the answer? maybe not, we're diversifying we're doing more static sites we're doing some other stuff and that's important we have these mission driven orgs we work with they need to succeed and as these changes occur as technology changes which it will continue to always 10 years ago 10 years from now our value proposition ultimately isn't Drupal it isn't technology even though that is a strength and a differentiator our real value is people it's our people and our process what we're able to do together and how we're able to grow together and that's what we really need to invest in and if you're thinking about the agency that you work with for look around at the people they're why you come to work every day and it's important that those relationships are maintained and that's changing the nature of work is changing there's a lot more remote work going on and we are adapting I'd love to dive deeper into that question my friend who's an economist was probing me on new matters we've got a really interesting exchange on that topic about whether or not some economists think everything's becoming so with technology people will work less you guys work in technology you work less every day, every week you start your day on Monday and you're just like alright I have a difficult problem I solved it on Monday I'm gonna take the rest of the week off that's it I'm done, because that was easy look what I did, I did something and it took me a day it took me a week or a month to accomplish this but I installed the library and it works great, you don't walk away there's a drive clients are expecting more and more they want it to be intuitive and clean they want it to behave like billion dollar websites like Google we're facing these upward pressures and we're fighting we're fighting to meet those expectations and exceed them anyways we could dive deeper into that but we're out of time I want to thank you for listening to me for so long on this last session I'm gonna be here see you next year yes questions so how many which market which market which market more and more well I mean some market verticals have become nearly saturated there's still some increases higher education has been a strong proponent of Drupal for many many years about 40% of higher education is there I'd say at this point it's hard to get exact statistics because many universities don't even know how many websites they have there's just so many out there and the non-profit spaces are in my view shrinking in Drupal market adoption a lot of them are moving to WordPress and then there's Enterprise Enterprise is just adopting Drupal like Gangbusters, Aquias doing a lot of pushing there and so they've really made some inroads into those spaces and then there's a lot of unknown about a lot of things so I don't know if that's my two cents and government I'm happy to stick around and chat if anyone wants but I don't want to keep others have things to do, places to be


Hi friends and subscribers, welcome back to my YouTube channel, this is Daniel Rosil. Today I thought it would be worthwhile to take a look at the incidence of smoking in Israel. A report came out today showing that Israelis are consuming more alcohol, smoking more, working out less, and using more prescription sleeping aids, all as a result of increased levels of stress since the October 7th massacre and the ensuing war with Gaza. Rewater rates of tobacco use like in Israel generally speaking, and how do Israeli laws designed to prevent second hand smoking look like compared to the rest of the world? According to data from 2014, 19.8% of Israelis aged 21 and over are smokers, 27.3% of Israeli men smoke and 12.6% of women.  Less detailed figures from a 2020 survey show that the incidence of smoking in the population at large remained at about 20%. This level remains above the OECD average. Unfortunately, the use of electronic cigarettes and flavored tobacco has led to a spike in the incidence of smoking in Israel. In total 8,000 Israelis die from tobacco related illnesses every year. The Israeli Cancer Association, or ICA, is one of the main advocates for tighter access control to tobacco products in Israel. It helps promotion specialist Dana Frost told the Times of Israel that underage users were managing to access tobacco products despite it being illegal and that the bright coloring and flavor of smokeless tobacco products were particularly attractive for this demographic. The association said that much better enforcement is required. Another area in which Israeli tobacco controls falter behind international standards are in regard to second hand smoke exposure. Despite it being illegal, where I live in Jerusalem, there are quite a number of bars in which bartenders and patrons can routinely be seen lighting up in shared indoor spaces. Israeli second hand smoke legislation permits the operation of indoor smoking rooms despite the fact that these designated smoking locations are rarely, if ever, hermetically sealed from other spaces. And here's one more shocking statistic. Israel is a densely populated country and most Israelis live in apartments rather than detached dwellings. According to a 2023 study, every second household in Israel suffers from second hand smoke exposure due to their neighbor's smoking habits, and I'm included in that figure. The research also showed however that only a quarter of those affected households complained about unwanted exposure to their smoking neighbors or housing committees. Following the report, a petition was submitted to the Supreme Court against government ministries for not taking action to prevent public harm from the infiltration of passive smoke from neighbors who smoke on balconies, windows, inside homes, and residential yards. The bigger news about smoking in Israel however is probably this. With levels of smoking on the decline in many developed countries throughout the world, Israel seemed doomed to stubbornly hover around the 20% level. Anti-tobacco advocates say their greater efforts on multiple fronts are needed to get this number into decline. Thanks for watching today's video, and for more videos about life in Israel and Jerusalem, please subscribe to this YouTube channel.


Bonecutter, who is a partner at Accenture. He runs alliances at Accenture. Rocky, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, thanks. So Rocky and I are going to talk about technology. But before we do, Rocky, you got a great name, Rocky Bonecutter. Rockwell Bonecutter, some people call you the Rock. But so what's the heritage of the name? What's the background? Well, Rocky Bonecutter is a good name when you're 40. It's not a good name when you're a 12-year-old schoolboy. But nonetheless, the heritage of the name is actually Hessian. So when King George III went to fight the revolutionaries in North America, he actually outsourced a lot of that fighting to German principalities. So my grandfather, seven generations back, his name was Nachenhauer, which is German, for I think bone cleaver or neck chopper or something, right? But it comes from a long line of butchers. So he ended up coming over here, got captured twice. The Bonecutters are not a very elusive bunch. And then once the war was over, he just kind of deserted and figured he'd make his hat in Ohio, so we've been in Ohio ever since, for seven generations. Oh, thanks for sharing that with us. So now you were telling me off camera that you compete unbeknownst to you in the Bracketology of Names. Yeah, I wish I could give these guys a plug, right? But I found out two weeks ago that I'm in the name of the year contest, which they essentially start out like those college basketball brackets, and I'm a number nine seed in those brackets. I guess the contest started two weeks ago, but you can go online and vote for Rockwell Bonecutter. Google best name brackets or something, that is fantastic. Well, so we're here at EMC World, and maybe not as, it's quite as interesting as that background, but it's pretty interesting. A lot of business going on here, a lot of partnership themes today. Of course, cloud meets big data, that's the big marketing theme of the event. And the first part of that cloud is really evolved from last year's event, EMC World 2010 in Boston, where you're the journey to the private cloud. Customers really started to hop on that journey this year, and of course Accenture always is a company that's been on the hot trends, whether it was client server, SAP implementations, and I'm sure cloud is a big theme for your CIO customers. So I want to talk about that, talk about what your relationship is with EMC, and how that all goes to market, but start with the cloud. What are CIOs telling you about the cloud? Where are they in that journey? Well, I think that a lot of folks are still kind of asking the question as to what is the cloud still, right? I mean, that means a lot of different things to a lot of different folks. I think that the main thing I've seen come up as part of the cloud, both private cloud and external cloud, is just the buying habits of our clients. So CIOs, VPs of infrastructure, they want to buy business outcomes now, and they're a lot less interested in necessarily all of the underlying technology, but they just want it to work, and they want to be able to buy it by the drink, they want to be able to buy capacity as they need it. And that's been the real driver from a buyer habit perspective, and that's why I think that some of the products that have been introduced recently around Vblock with EMC and Cisco and VMware's partnership, I think that product is gonna really be a game changer in that space to where clients can now not have to necessarily think a lot about the testing, a lot about the integration, a lot about all of the complexity in their environments. They can be able to take this in and kind of turn key, be able to put in solutions that are kind of pre-tested, the Vblock SAP solution, the exchange solution, these are all products that have been kind of already put through the ringer and we're able to provide to our clients from a systems integrators perspective with a lot less drama than what probably we had to do 10 years ago, right? So let's talk about some of those business outcomes in more detail. So drama less, I'm kidding, I heard simplified. Now what's the CIO want from that business outcome that you guys can deliver? Well, I think a lot of things come from that, right? I mean, one, in this terminology, it's gonna get so overused a bit, but from a technology perspective, it kind of gives you a single throat to choke, doesn't it? I mean, it enables you to implement a solution that, again, has been pre-tested, predefined, run through the ringer again. And if there's an issue or if there's integration burp, which from time to time is always gonna happen, you've got a single group with Vblock that you can go to in order to resolve it, in order to get attention to it. And for a systems integrator like Accenture, it just makes our job a lot easier, right? We can focus less on the underlying complexity of the interdependent infrastructure pieces and really get down to the job of looking at the application and the business outcomes of those applications and focus on that. So, Rocky, in that single throat to choke metaphor, you're the choker and VCE is the chokey? Well, it can be in some cases, right? In some cases, we can be running an environment as an outsourcer that is operating on Vblock technology to where that single throat to choke for the client. And in other cases, when the client buys it and implements it as part of the coalition, then the coalition's a single throat to choke. So, yeah, both ways. So, how is that concept of Vblock, for those of you who don't know, Vblock is a single logical block of infrastructure, compute, storage, networking, you put it in and it services applications across the application portfolio. How is that changing organizations and roles within the organization or is it? I think it is to a certain extent. I mean, the biggest thing that I think that it does is it accelerates the take up of virtualization across the infrastructure, whether that be virtualization in the storage space, virtualization in the server space. It enables companies to kind of onboard virtualization programs with a lot faster pace than what they've been able to do in the past. I think that's what's going to be one of the main, one of the key results of the Vblock technology. So, talk about virtualization and Vblock, talk about virtualizing mission critical or maybe even business critical apps. Say SAP and Oracle, some Oracle. We've, at Wikibon, we've just done a study. We said that the vast, but the preponderance of Oracle applications specifically by 2015 will be virtualized despite Oracle's less than sometimes supportive goal of virtualizing applications with VMware. Of course, Oracle VM, they would love to virtualize those but it's not as a robust platform. Our users have told us that time and time again but despite that, the vast majority of applications will be virtualized. But there are those pieces that won't be. Where are we today in that journey and what are the drivers and what are the barriers to that adoption? I think it's actually surprising. I think that if you would have asked me five years ago how quickly the uptake of virtualization would be, I would say it would have been a lot further along by now than what it really is. I actually think that there's a lot of organizations that have virtualization programs that have been underway for two, three, four years and they've probably got really 30 or 40% of the value out of it. Accenture's done some research as well in this space and one of the things that we found is that if you look at the total value that organizations have gotten out of virtualization relative to what the ROI was supposed to be, in most cases it's not even measured. And then when you can get underneath the underlying data to understand what the cost takeout's been, it gets kind of spotty, but we're showing around 30, 40% recovery of the investment. So a lot of the low hanging fruit for virtualization I think was taken up pretty quickly on initial employment, but that hard stuff around the applications like SAP, like Exchange, those are the ones that presented a lot of challenges. And that's what I think is so great about the Vblock concept and the technology is that that product's already been tested with Exchange, with SAP, and we're able to deploy it very quickly and get the results that in a lot of cases our clients have spent one, two, three years trying to achieve and still struggling to do it. We're going to be at SAP Sapphire next week and we were there last year, we had a couple of customers on that were virtualizing SAP, but the big thing there is different than what you get from Oracle is SAP was totally behind it and a key part of their marketing strategy. You heard a lot of support there and the CIOs told us that that's really important for them to make sure that the ISV is behind it. With this inevitability, hopefully more ISVs, I mean most ISVs are, I think Oracle ultimately is quietly sort of tacitly supporting it. But what are some of the barriers? Is it the ROI? I mean, you're saying people don't measure it, I mean the ROI of virtualization is enormous but that's infrastructure virtualization, right? Now you're talking about the applications. That's right. And I think that the reason that the low hanging fruit's been the easy one is because when you think about the applications that the CIOs are most concerned about and nine times that attend their next on the line around is gonna be around email and it's gonna be around their ERP implementations, right? So those are the ones that are the most risk intense I guess for lack of a better way of saying it. And I think that's why it's been slow to, I think it's been slow take up to get virtualization into those production environments. I mean, now we're at a place I think where virtualization is pretty common in most environments in one form or another. There's a lot more comfort today in virtualizing some of those mission critical applications than what there ever would have been, again, even 24 months ago, 36 months ago. And to kind of bring it full circle, I think with Vblock technology, I think that one of the key selling points of it is the fact that there's a lot less complexity to it. It's a lot more turnkey and it's already been tested. You know, it's interesting to hear you talk about specifically about Vblock. I mean, I think of Accenture as a company that is technology agnostic, right?  You're not the only service provider that's talking about Vblock. What's changed there? Why sort of the affinity to a particular technology where historically you wouldn't have had that necessarily? Well, I mean, I think that the thing from an Accenture perspective is that, we can certainly be agnostic, but we are paid in many cases to have a point of view and in certain instances, in certain situations, we believe that the Vblock is the right solution for our clients. There's other solutions, there's other scenarios where maybe it's not a complete Vblock technology, maybe it's other technologies that come into play as well. It just depends on what the business drivers are and what our clients are trying to achieve. I think from an Accenture perspective, being agnostic is certainly a selling point in certain consulting engagements, but in other engagements, this kind of goes back to the buying habits of our CIOs and the VPs that we deal with in the application and the infrastructure space and even on the business side, they want to buy solutions. They want to buy a business outcome. In some cases, they're less interested in a high-falutin, strategic kind of perspective as to the pros and cons. They just want something to buy that will work that they can turn on and they know it's going to be integrated, they know it's going to operate, and going to give them the results that they want. And in those situations, Accenture will step up with a point of view. And in many cases, Vblock is one of the products that we have an affinity towards in certain client situations. Well, I think there aren't a lot of choices. I mean, I've gone on record saying there's really a two-horse race here between EMC and HP as guys going after that sort of single logical block of infrastructure. I mean, IBM can do it, certainly Oracle if you want to buy the entire stack and they've got their solutions. But as a concept of bringing together compute and networking and storage, really those two companies and the combination of VMware, Cisco, and EMC obviously very powerful. But it was just sort of worth noting that there's been a lot of affinity toward Vblock block and we know about the renowned pipeline and so forth. So I think that's a real change that we're seeing in the industry. And I just think it has a lot of legs. I don't think it's a flash in the pan. I think that's right. And the other thing that I would say is that if you look at all of the industry consolidation that's taken place over the last five, six years, really longer than that last decade, to your point, there's a lot of kind of, it's really gotten cut in a lot fewer as to where you're going to go in and be able to provide a turnkey capability. And I think to a certain extent, that works fine depending on, again, what situation you're walking into and what business problem you're trying to solve. But in a lot of cases, and I would even go so far as say in most cases, our clients are more interested in what the best of breed solutions are and how do you knit those best of breed solutions together as opposed to having to select a single vendor with one key to turn and accept the fact that you've got a couple of best of breeds, you've got a couple of middle of the roads, and you've got a couple of emerging technologies that are all knitted together and you're trying to make best out of it. Sometimes there's less risk in that, but in a lot of cases you get less quality. Maybe you get less ability to be able to dynamically provision or to, you know, change, you know, a specific architecture.  In a lot of cases, those turnkey solutions don't offer or afford you the ability to do that. So companies like ours, and Accenture specifically, you know, we like to look at what are the best of breed solutions, how do we as an SI knit those best of breed solutions together, and I think that's what drives us to, you know, kind of select from an alliance's perspective who are the vendors that we're going to place bets on that support what we're trying to do for our clients. This is interesting, this concept of best of breed comes up a lot, and you know, the best of breed is in the eye of the beholder. I'd be interested in, from a company that I do consider technology agnostic, well how do you evaluate best of breed? Right, because the startup is going to say, well my technology is, my widget's better than EMC's, it's new and it's hot, it doesn't have all that, you know, legacy infrastructure around it, but you know, financially they might not be as strong or the service might not be as good or the ecosystem might not be as strong, so what are the dimensions of best of breed that you guys consider? Well I think that, to your point right, best of breed depends on the given situation that you're trying to solve, there's no real kind of one key, you know, fits all locks, but what I would say is that, from our perspective, we look at alliance relationships in a short, medium and a long term kind of window, and you've got to weigh a lot of different factors to determine if something is, you know, use the industry definition of best of breed, right? What's the scalability of it? How proven is it in the marketplace? How quick can you get ROI out of it? How well does it integrate with your legacy systems and the like? What is the footprint that's out there today?  And so we look at it from those different angles, and then, you know, it's kind of a growing, you know, every six months, my team's revisiting the technology that's out there, whether it be in the infrastructure space, the application space, or the productivity space, to kind of sort through, you know, where do we want to place our bets, and what are some of those new disruptive technologies that are coming down the pike that we're gonna kind of keep on our radar? And in some cases, you know, helped, you know, as an SI and being a big SI, you know, in a lot of cases, we've got the ability to help some of those game-changing technologies really make an impact in the marketplace very quickly.  You don't want to have to refresh your portfolio every four months, right? It's just too unproductive from the beginning. It's impossible. To me, folks trained, you build delivery assets, all of the quality material, I mean, a lot goes into, you know, delivery methodology that, you know, you just can't continue to switch products every three or four months because new bell or whistles come out. So, just trying to balancing that with making sure that we don't get behind the, you know, as our chairman likes to say, you know, you kind of keep one foot in today and one foot in tomorrow, and that's that balance is what's kind of difficult sometimes, but what we struggle to do. So, strive anyway. So, VBlock is on your short list of best of breed, right? That's clear from the statements that you're making. Is that right? Yeah. And so, and if a customer says, well, but I don't want this piece of VBlock, can I have this piece? You can't crack open the VBlock and put that piece in. So, you'll just integrate, you know, somebody else's solution in that case or how's that all work? Well, I mean, it just depends on the given situation, right?  There's other products that are out there today. There's other products that are emerging that are gonna give, you know, flexibility to what that architecture, I think, will be able to do and how it'll be able to be implemented. But in the short term, I mean, from a VBlock perspective, we look at EMC, Cisco and VMware as, you know, kind of the cornerstone of that technology. Well, you gotta be impressed with the investment that EMC has made. Tucci talks about, you know, the, let's see. I guess he said 24 billion over the last eight years in R&D and acquisitions. That's a pretty big number and 900 employees at VCE. I mean, clearly EMC has seen this opportunity of convergence and said, we're going for it. We want to be a leader there. Like I said, I think personally right now it's a two horse race. We'll see if others jump in. But I think it's a multi-billion dollar business that these guys have hopped on. And actually worked incredibly fast given the three company, the three headed monster, you know, throwing even Intel into the mix.  So, you know, we'll see where it goes from here. But I would predict that EMC is going to maintain the lead as long as it continues to invest and innovate there, which is, you know, good news for you guys and your customers. Yep, I think that's right.  We're going to be here, let's say, let's keep it short. We're going to be here, let's say next year, EMC, is EMC World 2012. What's it going to look like? I don't know, I've learned not to forecast the future. I always end up looking that kind of side. Who would have thought big data would have been a theme here last year, right? Yeah, I mean, I definitely think that mobility is going to be, you know, going to be top of mind for the next year or two, if not further out. I mean, the ability just to move seamlessly with one device and walk into a room and another device have it and walk into a room and another device have it and walk into a different country and it have it. I mean, I think that that's going to be kind of where the next kind of corporate initiative is going to be focused on, is just getting into the mobility side of it after they get the data concerns and privacy concerns, security concerns kind of washed her, but that's just, that's one fellow's opinion. Well, I think you're right. The end user device is changing everything, changing the dynamic, the way in which we interact with IT infrastructure. So excellent, Rocky Bonecutter, Accenture, appreciate you coming on theCUBE and sharing with us your perspectives. No worries, thank you. All right.


The question of whether incitement to riot is an impeachable offense is pretty easy, clearly yes. From the beginning of this not normal presidency, we've had a lot of talk about both impeachment and the 25th Amendment. In most ordinary circumstances, if you can use that phrase in this context, the 25th Amendment is really a poor tool for removing a president. It was really designed for presidents that were nearly completely incapacitated. Woodrow Wilson after the stroke, James Garfield dying of blood poisoning after the assassination attempt. It wasn't supposed to get rid of bad presidents. We will stop the steal. All along during the Trump presidency, when this solution has been proposed, I thought it was pretty unrealistic for a couple of reasons. The framers of the 25th Amendment deliberately made it harder to do than impeachment. Impeachment only requires a supermajority in the Senate for conviction, a majority in the House. In order for the switch under the 25th Amendment to stick, it has to be ratified by Congress and that requires a supermajority in both houses. If you do have a supermajority in both houses, then you could just impeach him. And that's really the remedy. I think we may be in a different situation here, though. One of the main advantages, perhaps the only advantage that the 25th Amendment offers over impeachment is speed. If Mike Pence was willing to do this and he had a majority of the cabinet behind him, it could do it in the next 20 minutes and it takes effect immediately. In the past, I've thought that one scenario where you might favor this is if the president were to give the order to launch an unprovoked nuclear strike. I certainly hope we're not in that sort of situation here, but you can understand why people would worry about it. The argument for a 25th Amendment solution here would be, well, how lucky do you feel? Are we sure that what happened at the Capitol after Trump's riot rally speech? Are we sure that that was Pete Trump? In the remaining few days of his presidency, that's the worst we're gonna see. Maybe it is. You wanna think about how much you're willing to stake on that proposition. The argument for a last-minute impeachment is a little different. What impeachment does is it puts an additional black mark on a presidency, an additional mark of disgrace and shame, and it's a signal to the presidents that are gonna follow that this black mark can be put on you even at the last moments of your presidency if your behavior has been egregious enough. Making Donald Trump the only president to have been impeached twice would really underscore that point. I've long thought that America should impeach presidents more often and perhaps this president more often. Impeachment is a broad remedy. High crimes and misdemeanors is a term of art that was designed to reach and historically has reached a wide variety of offenses that go to the person's fitness for high office. Hamilton talked about impeachment in terms of the misconduct of public men and said that it could not be limited in the way that criminal offenses were limited. Madison said the impeachment was the indispensable remedy for incapacity, negligence, or perfidy in the chief magistrate. It was not viewed as it too often is today as itself an agent of constitutional crisis. Impeachment was viewed as the solution to a constitutional crisis. If anything, I think they would be surprised that we've resorted to it so infrequently. One thing that has always troubled me is this argument that, well, impeachment, it's like a coup. It's terribly anti-democratic. It's disruptive. When you look at the events of the last week or so, I don't ever want to hear again that it's impeachment that's a constitutional crisis, that it's impeachment that's disruptive and anti-democratic. I think that argument deserves to be laughed at a court given what we've experienced over the last few days.