This is Startup Storefront. Hollywood does not treat all filmmakers equally. Despite being a critically acclaimed director, Fanny Grande funded extremely difficult to find funding for her new movies. The major studios saw Latino movies as a niche market with very little broad appeal. That's why Fanny and her husband, Nelson Grande, founded Avenida Productions, a movie studio in the heart of LA. They're providing equal opportunity to filmmakers to fund, film and distribute their next big hit. In this episode, we spoke with both Nelson and Fanny Grande about why crowdfunding campaigns fail. Why Fanny is the top crowdfunding coach for creatives across the country and why they created their own streaming service. And thank you to Catfootware for sponsoring this episode. They're a premier shoe company that empowers builders and doers to reframe the world to create something more meaningful. And on that note, grab your popcorn and please take a seat. The movie will begin shortly. All right, welcome to the podcast on today's show. We're talking to the founders of Avenida Productions. Thank you guys for joining. Either one of you can take this, explain a little bit about the company. What do you guys do? Yeah, thanks. We are a non-traditional movie studio and our mission is to democratize access to Hollywood specifically for underrepresented communities. And the way that we do that is by providing solutions for funding, production and distribution. What made you aware of the problem that you're trying to solve? Were you guys in Hollywood? Were you trying to become actors yourselves? What was the thing where you were like, okay, this is a real problem? Well, both Nelson and I are actors. We started acting. I actually grew up in Venezuela. I've been acting my whole life. Were you born in Venezuela? I was born in the U.S., but I grew up in Venezuela. Okay. I'm from Peru. I was born in Peru. Oh, yay! South America! So when I moved to the U.S., you know, the situation in Venezuela was getting really bad. So my parents are like, we're out of here. So we went to the U.S. and I was so excited because it was gonna be closer to Hollywood. You know? Did you come right to California? I moved to Denver, Colorado to go to university. So closer to Hollywood, but not quite. Yeah, well to me it was like the same country. I didn't realize how big it was. We moved to Massachusetts and I still don't know why. Yes. So we ended up in Denver, which by itself was a huge culture shock from the Caribbean to there. But when I was in college, I wouldn't get cast in any of the college plays and I'd be like, why? I don't understand. Even like the local stuff. Yeah. So the dean of the college pretty much said, well, you know, people are not gonna, she literally said, people are not gonna believe you can play these roles because I'm a Latina. You should go to the Latino theater company in town.  I'm so backwards. It's backwards. So, you know, I did join the Latino theater company in town and I met a community of people that, you know, felt excluded. I did have one professor in college that said, listen, you have to just write your own stuff. So when I was in college, I started writing plays and then I wrote my first short film. Well, as soon as I graduated, I moved to LA and obviously the issues that I was facing in LA were a lot bigger here. Right? Every Latino actor and creator that I met, writers, directors, we're facing discrimination when it came to Hollywood. And the few roles that were available or are still available are usually negative stereotypes, you know? And I'm like, I don't want my community represented this way, especially because I come from Latin America, like we have lawyers and teachers and, you know, we're all Latino. You mean you don't import them from the U.S.? I don't have them. So I was like, wait, I'm pretty sure we have them in this country too. And obviously we do, right? Yeah, it's not like California's view of a Latina. There's a lot of diversity in what that means. Exactly, but not in media. And it's, you know, to this day, if you turn on the TV, we're usually the criminals or something like that, or the props. So I decided to keep creating films and to cast my friends, actually I cast Nelson in one of them. Yeah, nice. One of the first films we got, 15, 16 years ago. More like 20, but sure. All right. So that's how we met. Yeah. And, you know, I kept making these short films and winning awards and like major festivals like South by Southwest, but I still could not get a representation as a filmmaker or as a filmmaker. So you won South by Southwest? Yes. And I still could not. And no one was still, No! I mean, people should be lining up to... That's what I'm saying. When you wonder why or when you ask them why, are they honest with you or are they kind of like, look, you're, I don't even, the way I don't even know if they're like, maybe you're just a niche product, niche market, and it's just not big enough. That's what they think of it. We're niche, we only speak Spanish. You know, we're 20% of the population. Like we've been here forever. We're not just new immigrants and even new immigrants, eventually you wanna see themselves represented, you know? So a lot of people say, well, it's cause you gotta, you have to film your first feature length film. That's why you're not getting ahead. I was like, oh my gosh. Okay. The time I was a single model too. So the solution is make a movie? Yeah. Like a full... Yeah, I'm like, how am I gonna... There's always one more step. Yeah, there's always one more step. Oh, that's what they would say. So I'm like, okay. Okay, so I wrote a feature film and then I started pitching it to studios, production companies, et cetera, et cetera, with my resume of all these awards. And they're like, well, why is it in English? Why is it not said in East LA?   I was like, we're speaking English right now. Like we're a huge portion of the population. We don't all fit in East LA. Like I wanna tell a story about an American family that just happens to be a Latino family, you know? So I just could not get a green lit. So I heard of something called crowdfunding. I didn't know what that was at the time. This was 10 years ago. So I went to the community and I said, okay, everybody, I'm gonna make a movie that's gonna represent us in a positive light. No stereotypes, right? So a lot of people from across the country gave me a little bit of money. And it was awesome because I raised enough money to make a film. How much did you raise? It wasn't that much. It was about 50K, right? To make a feature film. A feature because that's like. She was doing budget. Oh yeah. That is, yeah. Well, I had to have more fundraisers after that. But the beautiful thing about this process was that I actually filmed it in Texas in a border town. And people had seen the crowdfunding campaign on Facebook and social media. So a lot of people showed up. So I didn't have to pay for one extra. I didn't have to pay for any locations. That helps a lot. My picture cards. So that money went really, somebody even said, hey, I have a crop duster. This is before drones. So they showed up on set with their crop duster and your camera man in the back of their truck. That's literally what happened. And my DP was like, okay. So he flew and I had aerial shots in my first feature, which was unheard of back then, you know? And the movie came out really beautiful because he was a labor of love. What's the name of the movie? It's called Homebound. Homebound. You can still watch it. Yeah. But then nobody would buy it. Like there's no distribution. They were like, well, there's no celebrities. I'm like, okay, I can't afford, we have two JLo and Sofia Bergara. They're not gonna do my movie. I'm trying to make celebrities. So I went back to the community because by this time, some of many people were invested in this movie, right? I went back to the community and I said, okay, this is the situation. So people started requesting the film at their local movie theater. Now it was really beautiful. Really nice grassroots movie. Yes, so I toured the whole country and that's how I finally sold the film. I sold it to two companies actually and it's still going strong. Like the movie's still going eight years later. And, you know, other filmmakers started seeing what I was doing and they're like, how'd you do that? You know, especially Latino filmmakers, right? So I started sort of like, at the time I was part of the board for Nosotros, which is the oldest nonprofit for Latino Hollywood. And it was founded by Ricardo Montalban. So I had access to so many filmmakers and so I started helping them with their projects as a hobby kind of because I had, you know, had to work, I had two kids that was doing my own thing. And at the time, Nelson and I, even though we've known each other for a very long time, he saw me coaching people and helping raise all this money. And he was like, babe, what are you doing? This is a business. Yeah, I saw how she was hustling. And I said, wait a minute, wait a minute. You know, there's a lot of money moving through this here. I was like, we need to capture this. And it's, you know, it's a combination of a perfect business, but on top of that, doing something that's helpful and aligned with the passion of what she's been doing for several years.  And he came from business. So I was like, no, I don't want to do this. I don't want to charge people because this is like a social service I'm doing. And he's like, you don't understand, you can have it both. You don't have to have five jobs and do that. You can actually have a business with a social cause. And you know, because that's where he comes from. So he brought all that. And because I trusted his experience, I was like, okay, let's do it. Yeah, I mean, it was great because we started off and within a month, I had already quit my job. Okay, what were you doing before this? So we were both actually... I mean, we have many, many different jobs. Primary jobs, you know, as an artist, you know, you have a million different jobs. But we were actually both working for a mutual friend and colleague as directors reps for directors for commercials. So that's actually where we learned that we work well together. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that was actually pretty vital in our relationship overall. And then once you realize like you could monetize, like what is the first step in doing that? And so is it just setting up entity and then like taking a fee? Yeah, so what we started off with was because, you know, the biggest need is funding. You know, there are a million, million, million great amazing stories and projects out there on paper. But without the funding, none of it goes anywhere. So crowdfunding was our biggest first service. To date, we've raised millions and millions of dollars for how many hundreds of projects now. And then is it on Kickstarter? Like, what do you... Yeah. We started using other people's platforms, but as of February, we launched our own. Oh, nice. Congratulations, what's it called? At South by Southwest, we launched it. It's called Support Our Story. And is it just Latinos or have you guys branched out? It's for anybody, but I will say most people that use it are members of underrepresented communities. We're all about diversity and inclusion. That is our niche, that's our fight. That's what we thrive. And we're very proud of this platform because we just launched, we already raised close to half a million dollars for projects. The success rate is 96% compared to the other platforms. And what we did was, you know, because I was coaching people how to crowdfund, we sort of took that knowledge and we put it into the platform.  On their crowdfunding. Yeah, on their actual crowdfunding platform. Because it's a real hustle. Well, a lot of people don't realize it. It's not just like, put it out there and let the social media do the work. It's like, you need to be front and center. You actually have to campaign. That's why it's called campaign. And that's the thing behind it. The number one reason crowdfunding campaigns fail is because of lack of information and guidance. On top of that, there's an abundance of information online because there's different several types of crowdfunding. You have equity crowdfunding and then you have product crowdfunding and then medical bills and all of these other things. But what we do is we focus specifically on artists. And artists crowdfunding, which is for reward space crowdfunding, you know, you don't get equity, you just get incentives, is very, very different than any of the other types of campaigning. So when we focus specifically on the creators and we provide them with this coaching, it's a game changer. We're raising what, four times the amount of the competing platforms. And you think that's why? Because you've sort of used solely for the failure. Oh, yeah, yeah. We're looking at the data. We're looking at the data again this morning. We're always on top of it, looking at what's actually the driving force behind it. And it is the information. And we have anonymous feedback from our campaigning clients. And it's all about the coaching. And the information. So what's the playbook that you've set up? Because like we've talked to a lot of founders who have maybe done a one-off crowdfunding and like that takes a lot of effort. But for you both, having done this so many times and specifically for artists, is there like a set playbook that you go by and that you coach them through? Like, okay, you've got to feature this in your video. You've got to do this amount of posts about it. Like, you know, talk us through that. You know, I'm the top crowdfunding coach for creatives in the country. So I sort of just took everything. Legend. Yes. Let's go. Kind of out of necessity, right? I didn't know this was going to be a skill. Yeah, sure. We've just gotten funded in the beginning. None of this would have been necessary. But things don't work out so that you can figure stuff out. So I did notice that certain things worked for everybody. Those are the things that we added to the platform. But that being said, we do have a lot of coaching in the platform that not everybody gets. So you're not going to get the same coaching as you are. Why not? Because it's triggered by where you are in your campaign process. So some people are like, oh, they really planned it well and they raised, you know, 50% of their goal on the first day and then that's it, it stops, right? So the coaching for them is different than somebody who's doing it steadily and, you know, wins at the end. So we have the technology that we created triggers depending on where you are, depending on your... So every step. Yeah, there's several points of recognition. Do you have to do with the, you know, ton of different types of metrics? We also have live coaches. So a lot of times when people get stuck or they just want to talk to somebody, they can actually talk to somebody for an hour, 30 minutes. It makes a huge difference on their campaign. The best one I've ever seen and, you know, just a small data point is this person kept raising, raising, raising and they were like, if I get to within 10% of my goal all we're like a bear costume. Yeah, we do a lot of that. And so somebody, you know, and this was years ago. We have to paint their hair, their face. Some people shave their heads. Not women, they had like, we had a client that had shaved his beard for years. So it's like, I promise you, if you post it, you're gonna shave. Once you get to $20,000, people are gonna give, especially your family. Boom, he got it. It's amazing that kind of spectacle works. We're gonna do that with Nick. We're gonna shave his head. But you gotta be like, you gotta be, you gotta be game. You gotta be like, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna have fun, because people- It's the conviction that people respond to. Exactly, and the mission of your project. Okay, what are you doing with this project that's gonna transform the way your community is portrayed? At the end of the day, that's really what fuels people. So then once they have the money, that's how they meet the goal and then they're out to like make the movie what happens then, how are you guys involved? Phase two of the pipeline here. A lot of our clients are like, I have all this money, I can't afford any place. Yeah, so that's why we've created our studio. That's why you have your own studio. We have our studio, standing sets. And it's close by, right? Yeah, it's just south of Echo Park. It's called Filipino town, so it's under Beverly. I tell people it's next to the, it's close to the Tommy's out there, the original one. That's usually a landmark most people recognize. Yeah, they're from LA, absolutely. Because again, most of these communities and creators don't have access to these type of facilities, we wanted to incentivize and give them access to the place. So we put this place together and the cool thing about it is that we thought of all the amenities. We have, you know, hair and makeup room, changing rooms, makeup stations, production office. We just had a dedicated fire line brought in for remote directing if needed. Just, we pretty much put together everything we wished we had. Yeah, you put it in there. We put it in there for creators. With standing sets, we have equipment.  You have a chapel, too, right? Yeah, yeah, a chapel. And a jail cell. People tell us, oh man, I could do my whole thing. Right, yeah. People start adjusting their stories around, like, what's everything that's there, it's great. It's cool because we've seen it dressed up in so many different ways already and people bringing their own creative looks to it. It's really cool. And it's just fun to see the different looks that the sets have. I'll say people walk into it and cry because they don't think they have access to a place like that.  Like, it's really like, wow, okay, so our passion really is helping people's dreams come true and we're just doing what we can. Okay, two things here, right? So I'm a real estate developer. In doing that, I meet with entrepreneurs and to some extent, I'm like literally building their dreams. Yeah, exactly. There's a lot of pressure to doing that. It's a lot.  It's a yes and no, right? It is, it's a yes and no because listen. You're comfortable with it. Business, yeah, business. We signed up for this. Listen, Hollywood's a tough industry.  And top of that, you know, being an entrepreneur in that industry is another thing. But I think that the reward has been just so astronomically fulfilling. People have come to us and said like, I've been trying to make this movie for 10 years and within one year of contacting you guys. My movies on Netflix or whatever, you know? Yeah, that's powerful. So do you guys help them with that too? So you get- If they want, yeah. Okay, explain that part to me. So once we have it made and we want to get it into distribution. So you know how I told you like at the beginning, people started requesting my film at the local movie theater? Well, that platform that I used is no longer around so we launched our own. Which is like, you need the solution? We got it. So we have partnerships with movie theaters and filmmakers can do one-off screenings as long as they pre-sell enough tickets to cover the cost of the screening. Okay. And then- How much is that? How much is the screening typically? Depending on the theater. Sometimes a matter of selling, you know, 60 tickets, 70 tickets, we'll cover the fee. And then on top of that what we just- Is that like two grand? Like- It depends on the region or our nation. Yeah, if you're going downtown L.A. or outside of L.A. or depending whatever, you know, city we're in- The whole market is 500 bucks, you know. But some- But here's obviously 3,000. So it'll be like 500 to 5,000. 500 to a couple of grand, it's more common. But it doesn't cost the filmmaker anything. They're just using their social media and the coaching we give them. And then by the end of the year we're launching Avenida TV. She's going to be- By the end of this year. By the end of this year. Wow. Let's go, what is it? American Latino platform? American Latino network, yeah. Nice. Congratulations. And why? Is that a fast channel? Or what do they call those? Is that what that is? It's a streaming like- Okay. Like one of those. So we're already approved on Apple TV, Amazon Fire, Roku, iOS devices in Android. And people listening, it's like an app they can just download. Yeah, no, yeah. Smart TV, boom. Yes. Okay. You can be on your smart TV or on your computer. It will be. It will be. How long has that been in the works? For a long time. I can imagine. Because all these projects that have been created over the six years, many of them have not been able to be so old, the same experience that I had. Because all the times, oh, where are your celebrities? Like you can't afford a celebrity at this level. Or- Do you ever talk to these celebrities and are they willing to have a conversation and just say like, look, play ball. Just we don't have the money, but like- Oh yeah. Like John Leguzan was that client of ours. He's done two crowdfunding campaigns. So the celebrities we do work with are the ones who want to tell their stories their own way. They want to like- Right, they want to E.P.A. Well, it's like the Latin history for morons. I mean, that was his story in a very unique way. Yeah, and he did that. I don't know if you saw the campaign. Phenomics. It's like a comic book. And that got picked up by a huge publisher. And I think his goal is to turn that into like, he wants like Latino superheroes out there, you know? Yeah. The thing is Latinos buy one in four movie tickets. We consume the most media. We are almost 20% of the population. We only get about 5% of roles and they're mostly negative stereotypes. Behind the scenes, we get about 2% of roles. And what if we were the seventh largest economy? Yeah, if we were our own country, we'd be the seventh largest economy in the world. So what we're doing is smart because there's a whole community that doesn't have representation and we're going to fill that gap. And that's what we're doing, you know? Even with beer, I remember like just in the small way, right? So it's like we're bringing this Latino brewery to a 98% Latino community in Bell. And here's the coolest part for me. So it's like, that's cool enough. But the coolest part was then there was a kid who ended up working there as like a beer tender. Latino kid, all of a sudden he's like, oh, like they're gonna teach me how to make beer. I'd never even thought of that. And now he's literally, he works for George Lopez at his brewery as the master brewer. And it's like, you asked that kid five years before that brewery was there. If he'd ever been in beer or ever been working at a bar, he'd been like, maybe I'll work at a bar as like a bar back, but never like a master brewer, you know? And it changes life, changes kids' life. Creating opportunities in your community and showing them what's possible. It's just the exposure. It's just the exposure. We have a lot of interns. So we have internship programs where we partner with local high schools and colleges. And we've had kids come through and one of them decided, cause you know, we just build our sets and he was helping us with the props, like removing the labels and designing the labels and stuff because you can't show brands.  Oh my gosh, wants to make, I want to cry. You know, for somebody to be like, this is it? This is it for me. And why shouldn't we? Like it's such a large industry that we should participate in. Especially here in LA when there's so many Latinos here. With the majority. You gotta try to keep us out to keep us out. It's gonna be a conscious decision. And so then from your perspective, just in terms of like getting the distribution, what's the hard part with the networks? What are they, you know, not understanding? What is the fight that you guys are always fighting? You know, number one, I feel like they just don't value us number one because we're consuming so much already. I feel like the mentality is like, if it's not broke, why fix it? What is it? What did they say it right? So in a perfect world, you view it like the Latino should vote with their eyeballs and by doing that, they should only watch or they should really like be more aware, I guess of what they watch. More discerning, yeah. That's interesting. Does it help if every Latino TV or the majority of Latino TVs is portrayed as a criminal? Like that's gonna affect how we're perceived as a community. To me, most importantly is our kids, right? If all you see on TV or the movies is somebody that looks like you who's always committing a crime or something, you know, or who's not from this American, like we're American too, you know? We're always the other, we're always portrayed as the other. So that is what we want to transform. That's what we're working to change because it affects how our kids, what you just said. If you see it, you can be it, right? It's a huge impact. And I'll give you a very vulnerable share from myself. I grew up wanting and trying as a kid to be white. Like to me, even within the culture, the Latino culture, a lot of it, it's like be like the white people or things like that, things that are said. So for a kid to feel like he isn't, to be aware that he isn't enough and he's considered an other is, I mean, it's traumatizing. I didn't get to actually understand the impact of it. I'm gonna say to like my late 20s, you know? This is something that I've actually had to like undo in myself and realize that I had self-worth and that I was capable of doing things. And so to be able to give kids a different, a different, you know, just a different experience. And it's already happening. Listen, it's starting to happen. I agree with that. I mean, same thing. I grew up, so we moved from Peru to Massachusetts and we moved into this neighborhood that was like a third of third of third. It was like the most diverse place on the planet. It was crazy. The difference was all the Latinos, they were Puerto Rican.  And I was like, oh. Like in LA, we're all Mexican. You're all Mexican. I'm a Mexican. I don't care. What part of Mexico is that? I bring them over to the globe because there's no Google. So I go to the globe and I'd be like, I'm from right here, Peru. And they're like, oh, how'd you get here? You know, they're like blown away. And I'm like, Puerto Rico. I was like, Puerto Rico's over here. Do you see how these things aren't the same? But they didn't get it. And so I just got bucketed into this thing. But I think the media has a lot to do with that. Oh, 100%.  People fall into stereotypes. And so for me, it was like, oh, he's Puerto Rican. And then I wouldn't dress Puerto Rican.   I know white kids that are dressing like grunge and punk rock. So like, what are they dressing like if I'm dressing like a white kid?  And I'm like, I just wear what I wear. And then I'd have to do this thing where, what was weird to me is it was always like, I never took it personal. I was always like, oh, that's interesting. Like it was almost like an anthropological. Like a third person. Yeah, yeah. And so I was like, I'd ask them. It made me curious. So I'd be like, oh, so how should I dress?  And I'm like, oh, okay. But like, but then why? I was like, have you ever met a Peruvian? They're like, no. And I'm like, do you know how Peruvians dress? They're like, no. And I was like, they dress like me. Do you see the difference? And they're like, oh yeah. And I was like, yeah.   You're all like learning on the fly. But it was like, it was this weird thing. And I went to high school and then it was like, it was even more on display, you know? Cause in high school, everyone's finding their personality and all this stuff. And so now you're wearing like different sneakers and you're really like experimenting. And it was just, I just remember it being like, man, it's hard to fit in, right? It's hard to like, who are you really? Down to being told that we're not American. I don't know about you. If you grew up in Peru, right? To us, America is the continent. Like why are North Americans more Americans than South Americans? So I'm always like, wait, I don't understand. You know, if you look at the history, like America of Espooja never even made it to North America, you know? Like, is he not big? But it's cultural, it's all cultural. And every- You get to see the programming though. It's really the programming of like TV. We talk about this like even with food, right? It's like, I've never seen fruit roll-ups and gushers in my life until I went to first grade and I'm sitting with all these five-year-olds around me and everyone's opening their lunchbox and I have like real food and they have not real food. And I'm like, where is this coming from?  Saturday morning cartoons. Oh, look at all the programming. And then you're asking your mom, can I have those things? They were like, crack. I'm like, these things are delicious. But at the same time- Oh, you have full of sugar. Right, totally, yeah. But you realize the programming. That's what I became very aware of. And I was like, oh, it's what they're watching means what's in their lunchbox. Interesting. And then you realize brands on everything. Or like if you own the eyeballs, you own... People think they have free will, but no, not so much. Well, we're just influenced. You're influenced. And also it's cultural constructs, right?  This is who... And we all do it. We do it too. Everybody does it.  And they're like, it's the same people. They're just different colors. And it's like, it doesn't make any sense. I think it comes down to just... Culture, right? Culture, and I also put some of it on human nature. Listen, everyone wants to feel validated and special. And what we do is we all clan up. We find ourselves groups. And you try to find how your group is better than another group. And I think that all stems down to insecurities. Secure person really just doesn't care about that stuff. It's the ego you got to get rid of. Yeah. For you guys, do you think anything's changing on the distribution side at all? We're getting two seasons of stuff. I think what's happening is the conversation is changing. The conversation is changing. Is the boardroom changing more women? No, so there's not enough of us in power, right? Yeah, the decision makers. Yeah, so there's still this... We're the other. That's still very prevalent. This is why we're doing what we're doing because our goal is that people understand, like, hey, we're just American as you are. We just have different... And we're not a monolith, obviously. We're so different within our own community. So the issue is that there's so little content being created for the community that one thing comes out. We expect it to represent everybody. Like you just mentioned a show and you're like, oh, I don't know. It's not my cup of tea. I completely get it. Or gentrification. What was it called? Hentification. It's not meant for every Latino in this country to identify with it. There's a lot of people that were like, oh my God, this is the first time I ever saw myself. For me, when I saw one day at a time, the remake, to me, I was like, oh, this is like me. This is how we talk, because they're Caribbean, you know? That's funny. But because there's only one at a time, it's not gonna... Like Mayans, for example. That's obviously not my culture at all. Right, right. But people love the show and it's only fifth season, thank God. For me, my philosophy is like as Latinos, we just gotta watch anything Latino just so that we can send us a strong signal to Hollywood. Hey, we want... And then there'll be more options because right now what's happening is like, we get two shows, then I'll get marketed properly. And after the first season, maybe the second if we fight hard enough and they'll give us a second one and then it gets canceled. But also as an audience, as audiences, we have to support these creatives. The fact that Hentify got made is a freaking miracle because I talked to the creator a couple of weeks ago and she was telling me, I was like, oh my goodness, a miracle that he even got made. So but when he comes out, we're like, oh, that doesn't represent me, I'm not gonna watch it. Oh yeah, but you... What did you say? But Nelson's like, oh, it doesn't represent you, but you watch Star Wars?  You're like... So while you were talking about this, I'm like, everyone will tell you, I don't watch television or watch movies at all. I've never watched a Star Wars. I've never watched any major movie. And I joined this tennis club where everyone there is like this Hollywood producer that makes everything on TV and I'll like freely talk about my opinions on their shitty show. Like I'm like, yeah, I saw like five minutes and then they're like, oh, I wrote that. And I'm like, yeah, it could have been better, I think. Spend more time next time. At that point, you have to just own the joke. But this is the thing, like I don't watch any of this and I'm maybe starting to consider maybe this is why, maybe because when I watch these things, I don't need people in these Stormtrooper outfits. What's the point of that? Like I'm not high, I'm not on acid. I don't understand. It's called entertainment. I know. The fantasy of it all. For me, it's like I love documentaries, love those. And that's probably why we have this podcast where we talk to real people about real things. Well, if it is a truly a volume game and I would imagine that you are somewhat constrained by how fast you can crowdfund and crowdfunding probably has a limit. You're probably not gonna raise $200 million in crowdfunding. So have you either considered doing an outside capital raise like a Series A or something like that for Avenida to you're coming out with this new app platform. Are you looking to expand the volume of shows that you can put out to be competitive with like a Netflix or other streaming service? Oh, absolutely. So, we're never gonna try to go after the same general market as Netflix is because we are gonna be producing a lot of our in-house studio productions. We also have partnerships with other creators who have shows existing on other platforms who are excited to come over to Avenida TV and have exclusivity there because it's more fitting. And on top of that, you know, we're working out deals with them. So, yeah, we are gonna have original, Avenida TV original programming on top of licensing a bunch of other. But when you're talking about capital raise so Latinos only get 1% of VC funding. And I've been telling everyone we're part of the 1% just to throw them off. But yeah, but not that 1%. We're part of the 1% of the Latinos that receive funding. So even in that space, because you know, we have a business, we are to start up with the tech component. And this is a whole new bowl game for us. We have, so we are in the middle of racing the seat round. So thank you for asking. If anybody's listening. How much are you raising? How much are you raising? Why not? We're doing, on our seat round, we have a million left. We already have 600 that we raised. Who right now is like investing? Like who are your capital partners? Are they mostly just like angels or Latinos? Latitude Ventures, Latitude Ventures. They are amazing. Latitude Ventures. They are Latino VC. Yeah, yeah. They've just been the most amazing partners. They get us, they understand the need and they know the market. You know, they have partners that are funding that fund. And they took a risk on us. They're very happy with where we are. And because media is something that impacts every industry. It really is, believe it or not. I feel like Silicon Valley is a little bit more open to what we're doing because we're disrupting an industry and the people in that industry generally don't want to invest in what we're doing because it's... I can say that. You know? But people in tech do see the value of it, you know? So that's kind of like the people we're talking to. And individuals. Individuals who are believing what we're doing. So are you raising as a platform? We're all the full ecosystem, yeah. And that's one of the questions most people ask. They said, oh well... That's the hard part. Because they want to know what they're investing in and they want that to be simple. The whole ecosystem. So at the end of the day, you're not investing in one movie because that's really risky. You're investing in this platform that allows people to tell a story. It's like an index fund of sorts. It's almost like an incubator, right? But you're actually investing in a movie studio, right? So you have ownership of a little bit of ownership of the whole system but also like the content that's getting created. And that's what's exciting for investors. And it's very unique what we're doing. Oh yeah, all of it. It's very unique. Is there a valuation? Or is there's no valuation? Yes. We're not going to tell you right here, but do you want to invest? Because I'll give you my deck and everything. This is how I invested in this strength apartment. It happened real time, live. What has been the hardest part when you go raise capital today? I think it's very similar to what's happening in Hollywood. Is it a cultural disconnect? Not understanding like, well, we tried that before and it hasn't worked. Get to Latinas, I'm like, yeah, but who? You try it? You don't have the relationships that we have. It's also not the understanding and the sensitivity to it. There's a huge disconnect. And even in the projects, people will throw projects our way. They're like, hey, well, there's this movie. And I'm like, well, there's a lot of just mismatch in the movie. And I'll give you a quick example. Say, well, we tried this movie out and it didn't work out. It's like, they don't understand that we come from different countries.  It's like, wait, that's Spain and that's Mexico.  And it's like, y'all just kind of crossed over three different countries, don't understand. Don't really understand why Latinos are getting behind it. The protagonist is from Michigan. Like, why? With a Cuban accent. Yeah, it was big English, like maybe a little Spanish but let me tell you something. People do see the opportunity. It's there because we're a huge buying power. It's just a matter of, like, educating. So in my head, I'm always like, okay, cool. How do you give people, like, cookie crumbs to the big picture, right? And so do you think it starts, maybe you've already tried this, but do you think it starts small where you're just kind of like, hey, like I can imagine maybe they're using a cooking show, let's say.   Don't worry about it, just use the quinoa. And then all of a sudden, like, no, where's it from? Oh, it's from Peru. And then it's like, oh, maybe we feature like a farmer from Peru. And then all of a sudden it's like, but it's their idea. And so even with, if there's a show, you just kind of go like, oh, maybe like the coffee and they talk about the coffee in a way that's like, from Cuba or something simple in that way that kind of gives them the idea that they can build over time of like, oh, maybe there's something here and maybe there's a partnership collaboration that I had to consider. Who's day? The makers of these things today. Oh, the studio system? The studio system today. Oh, no. Yeah, there's zero. You know, the instant response is still goes back to what's been attempted and didn't work. That's why a billion remakes. There's no original stories, but there is. There's a lot of talent in this town, in the whole country, there's a lot of talent. I remember when we were talking to H, my wife was on HGTV on like a show and they wanted us to do a show, my wife and I. And so as we're doing, because they wanted to get more diverse, more fun, as I'm talking to them about doing the show, which is like no money, by the way. I make way more money doing what I do for a living. Why would I do your show? And then we're going down this road and they're like, you guys sound too hip. And then I'm like, I sound too hip. And they're like, we don't like what you wear. And I'm like, I'm wearing neutrals. Like I am right now, as a matter of fact. This is a neutral thing. I don't understand why you think I'm like too hip with my clothing. And then I started that wonder. And so I was like, who's your viewer? Who's your viewer?  Like, sir, can you be less brown, sir?  And like middle America, I imagine. And then if you watch the commercials in H-E-T-V, you actually pick this up because it's like life alert, adult diaper. Stair climber device.  Right? But then I realized what the networks are solving for is like, they don't want to take any risks, zero risks. They just want the rinse and repeat of what's working. We'll just do that. And it's a bummer for creatives. But I get it. I get the CEO doesn't want to be fired. They're playing it safe. They don't want to be fired. But there's an opportunity in that. Their return. For any new network. I mean, to own that. One of our movies has to make to get on the green is so little compared to one of these Marvel movies. That's why they make a billion of them.  I've been, just to remind you, I've been advocating for 20 years. I started in a nonprofit where we advocated. That was the plan. Let's, you know, I would go to meetings with studios every year and they would give us the numbers. And every year our numbers go down. I don't know how, because they weren't even there to begin with. All we would ask is like, okay, can you cast two people, two Latinos? I wanna hear shows.  When you think about your entire journey, like what has been like if there's one story that just really captivates all of it or like the hardest part where it was about to be over? And then- Oh man, how many times does that happen as in the business, in the life of an entrepreneur?  How are we gonna do this? How do we make payroll? How do we make payroll? It's happened in the past. It's like, how do we do this? We have a couple of key things, integrity. Do work with integrity because people can sniff that a mile away. If you do good work and you have integrity, there are good people around here who will understand what you're going through and they will, you know, it'll come through. And for us, it's just, there's just no other option. This isn't a side hustle. This isn't a hobby. For us, this is more than just a business. This is a lifestyle. So one of the hardest parts I think I can share is that getting the attention of potential investors and partners because those generally are outside of our community. So that has been the biggest challenge when we don't have as many at bats as anyone else, we have to be tighter and more spot on every time we go up to the plate. I do think also like during the pandemic, it was very difficult for us because we weren't allowed to be at our space. We had a smaller space actually. And we tried doing the business. Everybody from their home, you know, it just wasn't working out. It was very tough for us. But crowdfunding, it's online. So I figure out a way, like we were like, we had no money in the bank, but like we're gonna close our doors. But we figure out, wait, crowdfunding is online. People are, we have a captive audience. Right? So I called, so we called all these clients that had paused their campaigns because they're like, I don't want to ask people for money during that freaking world pandemic, but we figure out a way to still crowdfund successfully, not from ego, like, okay, how do you say that your project is actually gonna help this industry? And you know, at the end of the day, crowdfunding is perfect because you're asking for $5, $10 at a time. Yeah, they're not spending it at their local establishments in their neighborhood anymore, so they have it. So we pivot it and we figure out a way and every single one of our campaigns was successful. Throughout the entire pandemic. And we're talking through March of 2019, all the way through the years and every single campaign was successful. That's when we started building our... To moving to our studio space during the project. We're a little crazy, but you have to be, right? You have to. We just talk to the guys, we're like, how are we out of this workout? We're like, well, there's no one to tell us no. And somehow that just works. We just believe like, all right, let's jump and God's got us, man. I will figure it out. We got a lot of faith and we definitely have a lot of faith. We're like, I feel like when you have integrity and you have good intentions and you have a good idea, like you just sometimes have to signal to the universe, all right, here we go. Yeah, we also rock. We hold each other accountable a lot. Like we hold each other accountable, like business partners. You know, we're married to each other, but if there's something that needs to get done or something that is area on a little side on the gray area, we're like, no, no, no. Let's get this right. This is how we've always operated and we keep each other in check. And at the end of the day, it's almost clear as day on how important it was to stay straight and keep that integrity. I'm rooting for you guys. I'm a big fan. Thank you. Thank you guys. Appreciate it. Appreciate it. Thanks for this water. This is great. If you made it this far, I bet you loved the episode. So you should join our YouTube channel membership for only $2.99 a month. This gets you access to one, the whole unabridged conversation. Two, you get the episodes on Monday, one day earlier. Three, you get two additional entries to our giveaways. Check out our Instagram to see what we've given away. And four, you get access to seasons one through three. That's over 100 episodes of wisdom and life-changing advice. What are you waiting for? Join.


What is up everybody? This is Chris from the Rewired Soul where we talk about the problem, but focus on the solution. And I am so excited. I am so excited today. I am bringing to you another guest. And today my guest is Dr. Alex Avery. His channel is right there. It's called Our Pets Health. So Dr. Alex Avery, he's actually a vet. And I met him, I came across his channel and I absolutely love what he's doing. So I will provide links to his channel at the end. But anyways, I was talking to him and we were trying to figure out a way that we could collaborate. And he came up with this topic about imposter syndrome. And he'll dive a little bit more about that into a second. But when he came up with it, he talked to me. I'm like, yes, absolutely. Like this is something that I know that when my depression kicks in is something that I've struggled with in my career working at a drug and alcohol rehab, even making these YouTube videos. And some of you out there who struggle with depression you might be able to relate to this. And Dr. Alex has some great tips for how he gets out of this imposter syndrome bunk. So I'll quit rambling now and I will pass it along to Dr. Alex Avery. Hi, so I'm Dr. Alex. And I have a YouTube channel here called Our Pets Health where my aim is to help pet owners and their cats and dogs to live a healthier, happier life. And I'd really like to thank Chris for inviting me onto the Rewired Soul to talk to you guys today about something called imposter syndrome. But before we get into that, I need to tell you a little bit about my background and why I want to talk about that to you today. So I graduated as a vet from university in 2006 and initially kind of went out very confident, very comfortable to be trying new things to be getting stuck in and just taking all of the opportunities that came along to me.  It's the first time that you've done these things without supervision. And so you quickly can become quite comfortable with just trying new things. The problem can come as you learn more and as you get more experience, you potentially become more aware of where the gaps in your knowledge are. So I think it's something we're all guilty of when we're really young is, you think you know everything. But as you age, you start to realize, there's a lot about this that I don't know or I thought I had this understood but now the more that I read into it, the more that I find out about it, actually rather than getting answers, I'm throwing up more questions. And for me, this led to certainly a case of imposter syndrome, although at the time when this first started it's not something that I was aware was a syndrome or what it was. So what is imposter syndrome? Well, it's a condition where people are there unable to kind of internalize their success and they feel kind of a fraud. They feel like maybe they're conning people into thinking they're more successful than they are. And there's, I wouldn't say a constant fear of being found out, although that may be the case for some people but there's a fear of being found out and the real you being exposed if you like. So you might have achieved a lot of success. You might have really clear things that have been achieved and that you've done and that you're responsible for. You might have delivered amazing results on a project. You might have helped a client unbelievably. You know, in my case, you might have obviously saved an animal's life but what can happen is that you pass off that success as maybe as luck. You know, this time I was lucky few, thank goodness or you pass it off as actually, you know, other people maybe contributed much more than me. And so, you know, they're the real, the real, should be the real benefactors of any praise and any evidence of success was down to them rather than yourself. And so this imposter syndrome, it can take a lot of different forms. So you might end up just overworking just putting in the hour after hour after hour, just really overachieving being an absolute perfectionist just because of the sheer fear of being found out and being called an imposter. You might undermine your own achievements.  Oh, you know, anyone could have done it. You might not recognize the achievements for what they actually are. You might recognize it as an achievement but you might think, you know, it actually wasn't too much, anyone could have done it. Or you might recognize it as an achievement and always be crediting other people in the team rather than taking that praise yourself. And behind this to a greater or lesser degree, there may be just a constant fear of failure that if something goes wrong, then that's when everyone will realize just what you are and just what you're capable of or what you're not capable of. So it's clear from this that imposter syndrome, it can develop anxiety, you can develop stress and it can lead to depression. So it's something that is potentially very serious and can lead to a further degradation in mental health. So, you know, I'm not sure I experienced all of those things personally and you know, I've only got my own experience to gauge how badly it has affected me. I'd certainly say it's something that it never kind of crippled me. I do remember just kind of starting jobs though and being absolutely petrified. And I think a lot of that was due to questioning my own ability even though I had a very clear experience base behind me. With the realization that there was something like this going on has led me to several different strategies to try and mitigate this effect and to try and I wouldn't say eliminate it because it's potentially, well, I wouldn't say it's always in the back of my mind but it's something that, you know, that I'm aware could come back. And so a few of the strategies that I used to help myself was I always keep letters that clients have given me and it's always good to read back to those to remind yourself, you know, what you have done, remind yourself what your achievements are. You know, keeping letters, grateful letters from clients. It's really good at boosting kind of self-confidence and just reminding yourselves of, you know, sometimes there are only small successes but reminding yourself of the difference that I've made to pets' lives and to their owners' lives. I did go through a stage of reviewing cases it's quite a long time after, kind of I'd seen the patient just to see, you know, what had happened had they had to come back, had something major happened that needed remedying after, I'd maybe seen them and dismissed them. And that, again, gives or gave me a great confidence that, you know, note, the vast majority of my patients they're improving or they're developing as I would expect them to. And so there's nothing to be found out about if you like. Communicating with colleagues is a big one. So mental health in the veterinary profession it's a really big issue at the moment. So I think for a long time it used to be maybe ignored. It was a bit of a taboo subject. And I guess in a lot of areas mental health is a taboo subject but something you might not be aware of is the veterinary profession has a suicide rate of four times higher than the general population. It's higher than doctors, it's higher than dentists. You know, so mental health is a real issue burnout. It's a real concern and a real threat to a lot of vets and compassion fatigue. There's lots of, you know, there's lots of different issues and I think the profession as a whole has become much better at addressing these issues and putting in place different strategies and different initiatives to try and help improve the mental health of a profession as a whole. So having that discussion kind of going on around you even if you're not directly participating in it I think it helps make you more aware of your own mental health. And so something else that I've tried to do is kind of from looking into this and from coming across imposter syndrome it's helped kind of puts a name to a condition and it's helped me be aware that actually, you know, this is something that is actually quite normal. So up to 70% of the population will at one time suffer from this. So the chances are it's something that if you don't suffer from it or haven't that you may very well in the future. So just being aware myself that has made a big difference. So knowing that these feelings can be explained maybe accepting them, accepting that they're there and then helping me kind of dismiss them from my thoughts. And I think as I've grown older and been in the job longer just accepting as well that no one can be perfect that mistakes will happen. We're only human and I think being kind to yourself and forgiving yourself and then going back to your past successes can just help get over those feelings of being a fraud or the fear of being found out. Okay, so a big thanks to Chris for inviting me onto the Rewired Soul. You know, it's been a really interesting opportunity for me to take not something that I would normally talk about on my channel. Obviously, if you have a pet, if you have a dog or a cat and you want to learn about how to help them have a healthier, happier life and optimize their health then join me on my channel, Our Pets Health. But until next time, take care. All right, so first and foremost, thank you so much, Dr. Alice for coming over and doing such an awesome video. Like when we were talking about collaborating and like he sent me this video idea, I'm like, dude, why didn't I think about that? Because this is such a real topic. Like for example, like I mentioned when I work in my drug and alcohol rehab like some of you have heard about relapse rates and things like that.  Am I even helping these people? Why am I doing this? When I'm making these videos on YouTube I'm like, am I even making a difference?  Am I giving them good advice? Am I giving them good tips and things like that? But what I loved about what Dr. Alex did he gave some solutions and these are very, very good solutions. Like when you guys leave comments, right? Like it's like what Dr. Alex said your guys comments and giving me feedback and saying, hey, this helped me out or I can relate to that. Thank you so much. Like that helps me get out of that imposter syndrome, right?   I know a lot of parents out there we get that kind of imposter syndrome and like am I even really good at this thing? What am I doing and all this other stuff? So make sure that you take some of those tips that Dr. Alex gave us, all right? But anyways, anyways, anyways, please go make sure if you are a pet owner or you just like pets, right? Like go check out Dr. Alex's channel, Our Pets Health. I stumbled across his channel and I'm like, dude, why do you not have like a million subscribers? Like the guy is very smart. He's great at what he does. He has some great topics. I own a little cat named Maya. So I check out his videos, they're very helpful.  All right, but if you're somebody who struggles with imposter syndrome, make sure you leave a comment down below. I wanna kinda hear what your experience is about it. And yeah, let's have a conversation, okay? But anyways, as always, if you liked this video please give it a thumbs up. And if you are new here, make sure you click that little round subscribe button.  And right there, there is a link to Dr. Alex's channel, Our Pets Health. Make sure you go over there, hit that subscribe button, check out all of his awesome videos, okay? But as always, thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time.


There's a database manager for Drexel University, and I'm excited to be your host panelist for today's file makers, sorry excuse me, file maker, inside a higher education web seminar, where we will explore real world uses for the file maker platform in higher education as well as share some best practices. We're also joined today by Rosemary Teege, a consulting engineer at FileMaker who will be doing today's live demonstration. Before we get started, I have some brief housekeeping notes. For the best experience, we strongly recommend that you participate in this web seminar with at least a broadband connection. If you have any problems or require online assistance at any time, please contact Citrix Technical Support at<PHONE_NUMBER>. That number again just encases<PHONE_NUMBER>. During today's presentation, you're going to have the opportunity to type in some questions. Let's talk briefly about how to enter a question. Go to the control panel, click on the question section, enter your question, and send. We're going to cover as many questions as time allows at the end of our presentation. And with that, I will hand the presentation over to Rosemary. Rosemary, can you please unmute your microphone? Ah, sorry about that everyone. Thanks Kevin for that introduction and for inviting me to present at the kickoff seminar for the FM head group. Previous to my journey at FileMaker, I was an IT manager and database manager at the Harvard University Press. So throughout my career, I've been passionate about both FileMaker and more specifically FileMaker in higher education. So today I'm going to cover a few topics. First I'm going to show some FileMaker solutions that are in use right now in higher education and just give a broad overview of how FileMaker is used in our higher ed customers. And then I'm going to talk a little bit about how to go about moving from that island of what being the single FileMaker champion at your institution to building broader institutional support for the platform. And we'll talk a lot about building a FileMaker community, both the steps that you can take right now and then also I'll bring Kevin back at the end to talk about where their vision is with the FM head virtual user group. So with that, let me get started showing some solutions. One of the most common uses we see for FileMaker in higher education is systems or solutions that extend the existing enterprise student information systems. Most universities have a system in place like PeopleSoft or another banner or another SIS. And those systems are used extensively for registration and grades, bill collection and other things. But there's also a lot of things that those systems do not do that people in departments around universities need to augment those systems to get their jobs done. So with that, I'm going to show a few examples from around the country for things like degree auditing, tracking lecture attendance, student advising, internship applications and scholarship applications. So first, the degree auditing electronic record keeping system. And this is from a state school in the northeast and was built by someone who works in the registrar's office. And the system is updated nightly with student record information of students who applied for degrees. The system imports data nightly from the university's data warehouse. And then newer modified records are flagged for the staff to review the next day. The system facilitates the keeping of progress notes, the overall degree auditing workflow, and then communication with the students to confirm that they are on track to receive their degree on the date they expect it. It streamlined a manual paper process by pulling together that student data, the degree application from the data warehouse together with the degree requirements in a single screen or a single system so that the staff could go to one place, do all their work and make sure that students would graduate on time with all their requirements met. A second system from that registrar's office is a proactive student notification system. In this solution, they automatically send notifications to students when they're in danger for some reason. Sounds like they're academic standing changes because of a grade change and that could lead to a problem at the end of a term. A warning that incomplete grades may lapse into a failed grade in the future if they don't take the steps they need to to complete their incompletes. And the credit restriction problems that could arise if they don't change a registration status during the ad drop period. And again, this improved communication from the registrar's office with students automated and previously manual process and reduced a lot of end of term problems and surprises to students. This next two solutions I'm going to share come from Kevin at Drexel. The first is a lecture attendance tracking system. This is a client server system where the clients are iPads running FileMaker Go and they have a central FileMaker server. In a data center. And this system is used to take attendance in classrooms. It was originally designed for large lecture hall classes and it allows a staff member or TA to stand at the entrance to the room and quickly take attendance as the student walks in by scanning an RFID card in the student's college ID. And with this solution, they're able to process 350 students entering a lecture hall in under seven minutes. And that's a key metric for this solution because that's the amount of time that students have to get from room to room between class periods on campus. This next solution has a name called DAGDA or the Drexel Academic Guidance and Documentation application. And this started as a system to track interaction between academic advisors and the students that they meet with and all the time grew into a lightweight CRM tool that tracks not only advisor interactions, but also serves as a dashboard for basic student demographic data, FERPA authorizations, pre-college test scores, academic transcripts, and an email interaction log. And this solution is a great example of a department adopting a file maker and then building a solution that really automated and streamlined their departmental work that then grew across the campus and is now used in several different schools and not just the engineering school where it started. This solution assists staff with tracking undergraduate intern applications about five to eight hundred per year and grant applications about a hundred a year, half of which come in by paper and half come in online, for both undergraduate and graduate student programs. You know, overall the file maker solution assists receiving in that application from the online system. And that online system is built using MySQL and PHP and then the file maker solution connects to it using external SQL sources. And that's why in the screenshot you can see that there's server data on one side and the application detail data that says local only in file maker on the right side. The applicatisist tracked through this solution throughout the process of applying and reviewing applications. It generates emails that are sent to participants and applicants. And it reports back and gives the depress ability to analyze to determine what programs are successful and track year over year growth in all of their programs. My last example I'm really, I like because it's using the file maker web direct new in file maker 13. And it's the scholarship application solution where students complete the scholarship application on the web via a web direct solution. And then the awards committee uses file maker pro on their desktops to review the applications and award the scholarships. This database creates acceptance letters, urges the information together from the student and scholarship tables. And then alerts students via email and this allows the staff to be able to print out and mail the official acceptance letters. I just want to thank everybody who sent me screenshots and stories to share. And as I just showed, you know, these areas that colleges and universities use file maker to extend or build solution on their student information systems are very important. In most of these examples, the file maker solutions placed paper processes. And in all the cases, the systems improve departmental efficiency and allow staff to focus much more deliberately and closely on their student facing responsibilities. Across the board, you know, almost every single university in the United States uses file maker somewhere. And in many cases they don't use it for anything that requires student solutions or they use it for those student facing solutions. And then also areas or applications that match up to what we see our business customers doing as well, you know, use in the communications and marketing department, various contact management or CRM type solutions. Tactical data collection, events management are some of those examples. You know, another kind of business slash university example is in publishing. I worked at a university press where we use file maker for title management and also in my career file maker have met with many other university presses and alumni magazines around the country and talk to them about how they can use file maker to help streamline their publication and management processes. So some of the other areas, you know, as you can see from the press list, the file maker uses are more specific to universities. Things like visiting scholar application or tracking the contacts of people who have been visiting those at the university. And there are hundreds of universities that use file maker in their research missions. Uses from replacing paper lab notebooks to managing the lab equipment inventory and procurement processes or even managing experiment locations. We have several research labs that put little tiny bar codes on experiments that then get refrigerated or stored in various places. And they can use file maker and the bar codes to keep track of where each thing is in their lab.  Two of the stories you can explore on our website come from the Boston area. First the Berkeley College of Music and also Boston University. Berkeley uses file maker go on the iPad to streamline their interview and audition process. Recruiters and admissions counselors travel the world and meet with 7,200 applicants every year and listen to auditions and interview them and keep track of all of that workflow with file maker go on their iPads. And that replaces the system that they've been using file maker pro on laptop computers for several years before that. Boston University uses a file maker solution running on iPads to manage the document collection and management for their incoming international students every fall. And again the file maker solution with file maker go and the ability to take photos of the documents, streamline that process from something that was a big nightmare for both the staff and the incoming students to a process that end to end takes the student just a few minutes. And then another file maker go use that we're starting to see is housing and I met a young man at DevCon this year who works in the housing office at a university and in addition to using file maker for building maintenance types of things, he's hooked up a lot of other in building sensors like thermostats and water flow meters and all kinds of things and he's starting to integrate that building sensor data into file maker go and file maker pro and really starting to play around with the modern internet of things kinds of sensors. And I was hoping I could get some screenshots from his solution but we ran out of time this week. So with that I hope you can see that there are many different options and places where file maker is used across many universities and having worked at university that doesn't really support file maker across the board, I know how challenging it can be you know to just buy and manage departmental licenses let alone get help from university IT to resolve your more sticky challenges. So if you feel like you're on an island as a file maker champion, please recognize and know that you're not alone. And there are probably other file maker users or as we're starting to call them citizen developers at your institution who feel very much the same way. In fact at the FM Head event at DevCon I heard a story of two people who work at the same university and even know each other but didn't realize that they were both file maker developers on campus and they informed that instant connection at DevCon this past summer. So what can you do to start building that institutional support? The first thing you can do and I think Kevin did a great job of this at Drexel is start a campaign to document your success. You know share with your supervisors or your department chair how much time or money your file maker solution saves every month or every year or every application cycle depending on specifically what you're doing. Start to list out what are the things that you and your team can do that you couldn't have done before you started using file maker. And really start to think about and propose what other things could you do. You know any time that you're showing support and skill and that you're doing vast important things with very few resources you'll get the attention of management IT and others at your institution. And at that point you may want to talk to your local file maker sales team that would be me or Ronnie from our solutions consulting organization and then also your regional business account manager to make a presentation at the university about building broader support. And frequently if you get in touch with us we'll know other users and departments on campus that are using file maker and we can facilitate introductions between you and those other file maker champions. You know and if the interest is there you know we also be happy to come and talk with you about a broader concept to build more capacity at the university that we're calling the file maker center of excellence. You know so first of all a center of excellence is a broad concept that refers to a team or an entity in an organization that provides leadership evangelism best practices research support and or training for some focus area. I mean in this case the focus area is file maker but the center of excellence concept is something that's really well understood in both academia and in business. And you know we're starting to really advocate for a file maker center of excellence where it's appropriate. You know so how do you know if the center of excellence might be a good opportunity for your university or campus. So start to think about you know some of these things we're seeing you know importance where there's a large number of users who use a single file maker solution or if there's a big scale of dozens or hundreds of scattered file maker applications throughout an organization. You know are those applications being developed at the work group level by citizen developers or are they being supported by a collection of file maker business alliance members. If you need any sort of IT or IS engagement if you're integrating with existing systems if compliance or information security are important. You know those are all places where coming together and building the center of excellence concept can be very beneficial because it helps you talk to IT and get away from that you know crossed arm IT wants absolutely nothing to do with file maker to helping IT understand that file maker can be a good citizen in the environment and take some of the load off of them. You know so there are some consistent roles that we see in any file maker center of excellence. So this isn't really a cookie cutter approach but this is what we're seeing consistently across our successful customers. A couple of areas that really pop out one is the data analyst role. Most organizations now have somebody who really understands their data and this can be at the university overarching university umbrella level or it would be at the departmental level where you're solving specific problems. You know it also is really important to have some sort of management or executive buy-in and that's that line of business or departmental sponsor. Another key role is the project management or project management organization and then also the development team who's doing that work and then finally you need some sort of liaison going back and forth with the overarching IT department. You know so in a lot of cases you know the roles are important but they may be filled by fewer than four people you know in a lot of cases you know that you know development team and data analyst might be the same person for a departmental solution but you'll still want to have that business sponsor and someone who's talking to IT if you need to do integration or make sure you're complying with various requirements like FERPA or HIPAA in a medical school type of environment. You know so you know think of this really as a circle and there's all of these roles are important and all of the tasks that the roles handle are important. So what does a center of excellence really look like? You know this is a generic functional model that describes how you might structure that organization or working group. You know at the top you know there's some sort of IT governance this is the people who set the policies and say you can use this kind of data in this way or that you know the system of record here is our student information system. So if you're using data from that system it always needs to get reported back into the student information system. It can't be resident in any other system like FileMaker. And then over on the left you see you know you've got the business sponsor, the infrastructure, integration, IT team, the project management and those all roll up into the FileMaker Center of Excellence that sits over the departments or work groups who are using FileMaker and then can advise them on licensing policies, recommended development policies and procedures, what are the rules and requirements for integrating with the existing enterprise systems. And you know also perhaps providing training resources or recommending development partners if that's part of their charter. You know so I just wanted to pull out one example of a center of excellence we've already recognized amongst our higher education customers. I mean this is a university that has about 14,000 students, faculty and staff. And their model is that the center of excellence really provides deployment and support for the FileMaker platform. They do very little along the way of development services, but they do a lot in terms of supporting the FileMaker users and FileMaker community on campus. They provide and provision the software installers. They manage all the contracts and licensing with FileMaker. They define what versions are supported on campus and advise their staff across the university when it's safe to move up to the newest versions of FileMaker and also what versions are no longer supported or no longer going to be supported. And this helps keep everybody on campus within a tighter range of FileMaker versions. They provide on campus training and training resources. They do some hosting of applications. And when they were setting up their hosting environment, actually we worked with them extensively to train the data center administrators on best practices for hosting FileMaker server. And that's something we're happy to do for any of our larger customers. They set the security policies and guidelines for interacting with university data. And they also have guidelines for when does it make sense to use FileMaker and when does it make sense to use some other technology suite. And in fact, they have some specific rules around that that they have foot in place. Finally, since they don't do a lot of development services themselves, they have relationships on campus with several area FileMaker developers. And they will refer departments who need development services to those FBA partners. And finally, they manage the entire FileMaker platform approval process on campus. But what this has enabled them to do is to have a very vibrant FileMaker community on campus and great success in using the FileMaker platform. And this support also leads to, has pretty much led to tremendous growth on campus of the platform. And finally, it means that FileMaker and the FileMaker community developers and users never really feel like they're under threat. They never have to keep their head down. And that's part of what we're advocating really with the Center of Excellence, is it's a mechanism to help really build institutional support and knowledge for the FileMaker platform across an entire university or business. So finally, if you can't get that far, if that's a big stretch right now, and you still don't want to be that island of FileMaker advocacy on campus, I recommend that you start to really look to build a community where you are. So you can do that, as I said before, find the other FileMaker citizen developers on campus or in your area and start to share ideas with them. One place that is a good place to start might be the campus Macintosh user group, if you don't know any other FileMaker developers in your area. And encourage your colleagues that you meet with to do that same kind of documentation of successes as well to help slowly, department by department, build the groundswell of support for the FileMaker platform. And then if you can, find a meeting room on campus or sponsor a meeting in your department periodically. And a lot of university user groups only meet once a quarter or once a semester. But get together periodically to share your successes and solve problems together as a group. When I was working at Harvard, I was one of the founding chairs of Harvard's FileMaker user group. And we grew out of a working group in the ABCD at Harvard, which is a loose association of technology professionals from around the university. It's completely separate from IT. In some cases, it's sponsored by some of the IT departments. But overall, it was just interested technologists from around the community at Harvard who got together once a month to meet and share lunch and share stories. And then that organization had several working groups. There was one for Macintosh. There was one for Windows. There was one back in the day when I first started for Novell and one for Oracle. And out of the Macintosh user group, we ended up talking about FileMaker. It seemed quite a lot. And so we decided to start a FileMaker group as a subset of this broader organization. And I'm happy to hear that it's still going strong. And in fact, I still get meeting announcements and found out that they're meeting sometime in the next couple of weeks. And if there's not enough interest on your local campus, on your media campus, if there's many universities in the area, you might be able to share meetings with them and rotate. And the other thing is check for local or regional FileMaker user groups. Those can be another resource to find a more broad FileMaker community in your area. So with that, that was all the landscape survey I had prepared. So I'm going to turn it over to Ronnie for questions and answers. Very good. Thank you so much, Rosemary. That was really amazing. Yes, we've got several questions over here for you, so let's get right to it. This one's actually, there's two questions that are very related to each other, so I'll ask both of them together. First is, can FileMaker integrate with other systems like Banner? And then the follow-up question is, do you have any recommendation on how to approach IT on requesting access to larger systems installed like people saw off in Banner? So the first is FileMaker will integrate with pretty much any ODBC-based database system. And you can do a live connection to anything that's running on Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, or MySQL. And as far as approaching IT to share data, there's a few things you can do. One is, if you're doing any sort of reporting now where you're making a query using Excel, doing this with FileMaker is really no different than making that connection via Excel. So you may be even able to, if you've already got the log into that system to do data extracts, in other ways, it might be possible to just take the ODBC configuration you're using to get data into Excel and bring that into FileMaker and start using it. Another option is to go to IT and say, I'd really like to do this integration. This is what we're trying to accomplish. This is what I cannot do in the system that you've provided. I want to build on top of it. Would it be possible for me to point to the data warehouse or point to a read-only view to access that data and integrate it into my FileMaker solution or FileMaker application? And once you have that, you can also reassure the IT department that anybody coming in through this mechanism is only going to have the level of access their credentials into that system give them. FileMaker is not going to trump or give elevated privileges to anybody who should have read-only access in that system. Or anybody whose credentials in that system only allow them to see certain data. So really it's about really identifying what data it is that you need or want to have access to. And then asking for permission. If you start with that lowest level of, I just want to read-only view, I don't see how this is any different from pulling a report and dumping it into Excel. In fact, it's safer than pulling a report and dumping it into Excel because the data is never transferred down to my desktop. I'm viewing it live through ODBC rather than making a copy and bringing it down locally. And using that strategy will frequently help you get over that first hurdle. Thanks. Let's see. Next question is, in the examples shown today, were there any concerns with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of FERPA? I'm guessing that that means in the development of those solutions. You will notice that in all of those solutions, the data that I showed had either, I think, demo mixed student as the student or student information was great out. So the people who kindly shared with me were very aware of FERPA. And secondly, I think in all of these systems, there was recognition that you're dealing with FERPA protected data. So you need to build your system to be compliant with that by using file makers rich access privileges and then also restricting who can view what records based on that need to know basis. I guess, Kevin, do you want to add anything since you built two of these systems? Sure. I'm going to kind of echo what Rosemary said in the demo stuff there. One of them was demo mixed student who I created.  The address was my address growing up when I was in high school, so I felt fine sharing that. And then the attendance one was just my information. That is my actual Maxwell University ID number that's on there. If anyone really, really wants to know it, but you can't really do anything with that. In terms of development, we did go through the FERPA authorization both for the users as well as building that into the system for the users to be able to see who else was authorized. So we did have FERPA authorization. We make sure that anyone who gets access to that system is an academic advisor who has already gone through the required clearances by the university to see all of that data. So like Rosemary said before, they're not seeing any information they don't already have access to. I'm just collating it all into one spot. And then we also built in the FERPA authorization portion of the screen so that the advisors, when they're there, they get contacted by someone can see who is authorized via FERPA to give that student information out to, whether it's parents or older brothers, guardians, et cetera. So hopefully that answers that question. Perfect. See, next question we have over here. Is it possible to restrict FileMaker Go access to devices while they're in a campus building? So with FileMaker Go, much of the restriction based on location may be possible. That's a good question. I haven't actually thought about it before. But I suspect using the location services functions in FileMaker, you could probably restrict access based on the location functions if you can use getLocation and then figure out an appropriate range to that building. The other thing to think about with that is looking at the mobile device management systems. Because a lot of MDMs have geolocation disabling built into them. So depending on the use case, I want the iPad to turn into a brick if it walks out of this building. For that, you'd want to use the MDM. But then if you want to say you can only access this FileMaker solution hosted on the server when the device is physically in this building, you may be able to do something there with location services. The one risk there is that in order to do that test and run the script, you would first have to connect to a FileMaker server and authenticate. So it's not a full-blown. I wouldn't recommend using it as a full-blown security mechanism because you're still going to be authenticating. But you should be able to, as part of that, launch script in FileMaker, check the location, compare it to where you want the solution to be used. And if you're too far away, disable access or immediately log the user out. Ronnie, do you have any other thoughts on how you might handle that? Yeah, there's several built-in tools like Rosemary said. You can ask for IP, you can ask for the network interface card address as well and figure out whether or not they're still in the building and using the local network and apply security that way. So there's a couple of ways of doing that. Just to weigh in on this as well, depending on how the network is set up at your university, you may be able to just forget the mobile aspect of it and just do IP restrictions based on your wireless networks or even your wired network. So that even if they have to be VPNed in, at the very least. So they'd have to either be on campus or VPNed in to be able to get access to stuff. Thanks, Kevin. Next question, it's a question about external authentication. What do I need to ask for from the Active Directory administrator in order to use external authentication to use the AD directory server? All right, so for external authentication, you have two things you need to do. First of all, your file maker server needs to be a member of the domain. And usually that's pretty easy and is frequently a requirement for any device on the network. And the second is you'll need to have a security group in Active Directory that you can match up to for your file maker solutions. So you'll need one security group for each privilege set or level of access you have in your solution. And it may be that you have just the full access account that you're using locally in the database for development. And then you have a departmental security group that is the general use in that file maker database. So what you need to know is what's the exact name of the security group. And if you've already got a departmental security group and everybody's going to have the same level of access, you probably don't need to have additional groups created. But if you do need to create additional groups, you'll just need to identify and tell them, these are the groups I need, and then these are the users who should be members of each of those groups. I just want to add that overall in most universities and most businesses as well, that's a question that IT loves to hear because it means that you're using their existing account and authorization identity services and thus reducing the risk of people having too many accounts and passwords to remember. And also reducing the risk of if someone leaves the university and their AD account is disabled, their file maker or solution access is also going to be disabled at the same time rather than someone else having to remember to go in and remove that account or disable that account specifically in FileMaker. And the other thing on external authentication is if you're a TechNet member on the TechNet site, there are two documents. One is the general FileMaker security guide and the other is the external authentication guide that will give you a lot more detail on exactly what you need to do and also exactly what's happening under the hood in FileMaker to help the AD administrators feel comfortable with allowing that access from FileMaker. Excellent. Next question here. If I think a center of excellence is a possibility at our university, what should our next steps be? So for that next steps, I would say get in touch with the business account manager for FileMaker for your region. And if you're not sure who that is, you can either shoot me an email or shoot Ronnie an email or just call into the 800 number and talk to your in-house, the FileMaker internal tele-sales representative. But if you get in touch with any of us any of that way, what we can do is we can set up a meeting where we'll do the full center of excellence presentation and really just start having the conversation and try to point you toward the resources down the path. Frequently what we're finding is the customers that are coming to us right away with, we think this might be a good match for us. A lot of you are already 60, 70, 80% of the way there. And you just need to do a little bit more, some work around the edges to really formalize and document the center of excellence. I think we've got several people have asked the same question in one shape or another show. And I think it's a great segue for Kevin. And the question is, I'd love to speak with my counterparts at other universities who are using FileMaker. How can I contact them? That is a great segue. That is phenomenal. That seems like a planted question. But I will ignore that fact. So the answer to that question then is hopefully what we've actually started this group for. So before I get into that, I really quickly just want to thank Ronnie and Rosemary and Jeanine Campbell and Eric Frazier from FileMaker 4, helping us kind of put this together and helping us pull it off. So quick background. FM Head is something that came out of discussions between Jody McLeese from the University of Pennsylvania and myself. We wanted to kind of create a space for us and others to talk FileMaker, but to do it in the context of higher education. So we wanted to be able to reach out to other people in higher education and to talk using the language of higher education. If you're on this call, I'm pretty sure that you know that we're a little different in higher education. There's nothing quite like it. K-12 isn't quite the same thing because their students are generally required to be there. We want to track how many of our students stay in higher education. That's something that no one else has a problem doing. So we created FM Head as somewhere to kind of be a beacon, hopefully. We're trying to get as many people just to kind of join the mailing list as we can right now so that we can try to start those conversations. If you haven't already, I recommend that you go check out the website fmhed.com and just kind of poke around there. One of the sites that's on there is an institution site. And on that site is a list of the institutions, names, and email addresses for right now the people who were at the initial conversation that we had at DevCon. And I've had several more people sign up for the mailing list in the last week or two. And the institution page will be updated shortly with all the rest of those names and email addresses. So if you are looking to get in touch with someone at another university who uses FileMaker, just hop on the site, go to that institutions page, and there's a list of what is right now, I think, like 38 people on there. And that'll quickly almost double. I've got another 30 or 35 to put up on that site. So other than that, I just kind of wanted to do a brief overview of the future plans for fmhed. When we created fmhed, we wanted to do something that as many people around the country, at least the country if not the world, could be a part of. So that's why we took the webinar approach to this. So this was our initial kickoff webinar. And hopefully, you've seen some ideas of how FileMaker could be used that you may not be thinking about. And starting next month, we are going to do a second webinar, something kind of similar like this, hopefully a little bit more interactive, just because we want to change it up a little bit from month to month. And then starting in December, we will again be doing a webinar, but we're going to do something a little different as well. And we will be hosting a gathering in, probably in Philadelphia, and you're afraid that's definitely in Philadelphia, probably either at the University of Pennsylvania or at Drexel for anyone within local driving distance. Obviously, we can't expect people to fly into Philadelphia just to attend this meeting. Although, Reggie, I believe you're on this, if you want to fly in from Hawaii just to come to Philly to attend this, you're more than welcome to. But we are not going to expect you to come. So we're going to kind of take that approach and do kind of a cycle of three webinars where the first two are just kind of online meetings for everyone to attend. And then the third one, which will be, again, a webinar that everyone around the country can attend. But we'll also be hosting a meet and greet kind of thing to try to create those personal relationships and to maybe just let people spit ball and talk about whatever they want. And it doesn't actually have to be about FileMaker. So I guess kind of in closing, if you are interested in being part of the group, please join the mailing list on the site if you haven't already. We will be sending a survey out in the next couple of days to members of the mailing list to kind of just ask for direction on where you want this to go. We don't have anything definite, anything set in stone for how we want to do this. We just wanted to create something and then to kind of let it organically be led by the group. Also, there's going to be a recording of today's webinar that will be available up on FileMaker's site as well as a link to it off of the FM head site within a few days. And thank you all very much for coming. And again, thank you, FileMaker, for helping us put this together for all of your help with this. And thank you, Rosemary, for presenting. And that is all we have. Thank you all very much. I think we have a couple of questions that weren't quite gotten to. We're going to collect those, and I will put them up on a blog post on FM head as well to give you answers to those questions. Thank you all very much. Have a good day.