Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to Entrepreneur India's Resilience Series. The ongoing pandemic has forced everyone, humans, businesses, to change the way one was operating at the start of 2020. It is human nature to adapt and move on. And that is what startups have also done. We are today going to look at how and why businesses pivoted and what that meant for them. I'm Saurav Kumar, editor of Special Projects Entrepreneur India, the moderator for this session. I will quickly lay down the rules for our attendees. The discussion will go on for 30 minutes and followed by a 15-minute Q&A session. If you have any questions during the course of the discussion, you can post them on our Facebook, through comments on Facebook and we'll take it up at the end of the session. Do mention if it's directed to any specific panelists. Let me now introduce our panelists for the day. We have with us today Mr. Amit Agarwal, co-founder and CEO of Broker.com. Mr. Amit Ramani, founder and CEO of Office. Mr. Avinash Pr, co-founder of Global Ventures. Welcome everyone. So to start with, let me come to each of you and ask that, you know, to tell the audience very briefly, what changes did you make to survive a period of say zero revenue maybe and what outcomes did you, did you achieve? So Mr. Agarwal, if I can come to you first please. So in our business, which is a real estate business, not having customers not being able to go on the ground and see properties is a big, big setback, right? Because the entire real estate is about going, seeing properties, renting them out or buying them. And for us, that was a big shock. In fact, when it happened in March, we, like everybody else, we thought it was a one month affair, a two month affair, but it kept on going on and on. And of course in the month of April and May, our revenues took a dip of 50%. Our customers went down by 50%. We took so less from the fact that at least it is not 90% down, it's 50% down. And I think just like every other entrepreneur in this panel, we also thought as to how we can innovate. And the team basically found ways in which we can organize meetings with customers over video call. Many of the owners started giving us the videos of the properties because when we're talking about rental, it's not a very large decision. And hence, if it's an apartment society and the video is good, you can make a decision and people started making a decision. So I think that was some innovation that we did. This summer is typically a peak season for us. So it got shifted. That was a setback. But thankfully, the way in which it went down, it also improved drastically. In July, our biggest city, Bangalore, was in lockdown. And in August, everything jumped back beautifully. We did our highest revenue, higher customer base in the month of August. And the thing which was harming us in the month of April, because we kept on giving it a fight, started benefiting us because customers said that instead of visiting a physical broker, going to his office, or spending more on brokerage, let's try to save some money and do some internet search. So in our way, the situation has changed. So we had a V-shaped recovery and we're hoping for better days. Okay. Good that you've seen a V-shaped recovery. A lot of people really want to see that. And for the entire economy, Mr. Raman, if I can come to you with the same question. So sort of firstly, thank you for inviting me. And thank you to the entrepreneurial team as well. Glad to be here. I think clearly, some of the things, I think so the way we approached it was, our core business essentially is a mix of our co-working and our enterprise clients. And obviously, it ranges between B2B clients, which are more stable and non-term, to B2C clients, which are more startups and freelancers and smaller SMEs. So clearly we saw some, really in terms of the smaller cohorts, which were our SME base and our startups, we saw exits happening. So as of April, we started seeing a trend and then obviously it started getting larger and larger as we went ahead. But what really worked for us, I think, is two of the things in the core business. One, we had enterprise clients which were long-term customers with us and they continued to use our spaces to host their server spaces, use our platform, use it for meeting rooms, whatever. Reasons the enterprise customers continued and that was 75% of our base. So that gave us some level of support as we went ahead. Second, our landlords and our partners. And we were in a model where almost 60% of our space was in partnership with the landlord. So there was no fixed rent. And as a result of that strategy which we had instituted in 2016, it helped us because when our partners made money in the good times, they also were able to support us in some of the challenging times. So I think that, in terms of foresight, really helped. And third, we raised capital in September of 2019, which was primarily luck as I would call it. And we were well-capitalized for the business. And we were profitable since November of 2018. All of these things which were irrelevant pre-COVID and which were very relevant kind of helped us manage the business really well. And I think we are now seeing the business become stable. So instead of more exits, I mean, we're adding more seats. In fact, the last five months, our sales have been 80-85% of our pre-COVID levels. So clearly we see a recovery. It's not, I don't think it's we as yet, but it's certainly a switch. It's recovering, but it's recovering well. Second, what we did was we went in and looked at what was going to change in terms of customer behavior. Customer were earlier all required to come to a central location. And we saw that completely changing. So what we did was we looked at the behavior of the customer and what was in real estate, location, location, location. Now we came location choice and time. So customers changed and customers employee base changed. So people were not willing to travel to come to a center and they were willing to work from home or work from a nearest center. So because we had a distributed network of almost 70 centers across India, we were able to offer work near home solutions. We also pivoted and launched what we call as office at home, which is a basically subscription based desk and chair at home gives you all the amenities at home. So that was the first pivot we did. The second was we understood really well that in terms of people managing their own spaces, earlier most of the facility management in spaces was being done by unorganized players. 90% of the market was that way. So we launched office care, which basically helped us manage spaces for other customers and which allowed people to have a sense of safety and security coming into a branded environment being managed by a branded player. The third was office transform. People were exiting their spaces, reducing their footprint. So we worked with enterprise customers to reduce their footprint and the excess real estate, we were able to take on board and offer it to other customers that were looking at on a just in time basis. And the final solution was powered by office. A lot of players were in the market, co-working players, hotel players, mall players, which were trying to do something similar. So we have won in and now started managing those single one, two, three locations. That's having the network of across India allowed us to be able to manage those solutions for people who are trying to do these one, two, three locations on their own. So all of this, I mean, the core business got protected, we pivoted and managed that really well by managing our landlords and our customers really well. On the other side, we launched these new services. The new services in the last four months is almost 15% of our revenue right now. So I mean, those are the things that we did to kind of keep the business going and kind of get into a recovery mode. Before I go to Mr. Raminash, I'll stay with you Mr. Ramanee and I'll request everyone gentlemen in case you have, you want to chip in anywhere in between the discussion, please feel free to do so. I'll keep on shifting questions here and there. Mr. Ramanee, so you talked about that, you've reached 80-85% of your pre-COVID. So is there a change in terms of the quality of the purchase that you're witnessing or in terms of type of businesses that are coming in to for buy or maybe the ticket size? Is there a change that you've seen pre-COVID? So Saurav, I think pre-COVID, the life was 90-95% of people went for conventional space, right? Co-working space or flex space was only a small portion of their portfolio. I think clearly what is visible right now is that people are giving up their conventional offices wherever the lease is coming up for renewal, lock, stock and barrel. The market which was 60 million square feet in 2019 will at best do about 20 million square feet this year, right? And co-working which was about almost 25 million square feet is projected to grow in the next two to three years to 125 million square feet, right? So clearly the shift in the customer behavior is moving into flex because uncertainty and moving from a capital-intensive conventional space to an operating expense-oriented flex space is a clear trend we are seeing. And it is going to be here forever. It's the demonetization moment for fintech companies. That's exactly what's happening in real estate for co-working companies right now. We'll come back to that discussion. I'll go to Mr. Ravinesh now. Mr. Ravinesh, going back to our first question that what were the changes that you did during this entire pandemic period to stay relevant, to stay focused, to stay in the business and to thrive whenever the situation comes back to normal? Yeah, I think so given that we are in the perishable fresh produced space, ours is a business that actually involves physical movement of goods, right? So from the farm, the freshly harvested fruits and vegetables have to come to our warehouse. It has to get graded back and then lead to the customer, right? So the biggest challenge that we saw was actually maybe a step back. Ironically, the first impact of COVID, so to speak, was a non-linear increase in demand, right? Because people were living with this heightened sense of awareness as to where they are buying their fruits and vegetables from, right? The larger format stores where some of them were shut. So Kirana Stores, which is one of our channels, saw a high footfall. So ironically, the first impact of COVID was a non-linear increase in demand for us, unfulfilled demand to be honest. But then we went through the same challenges as most of the others where there was heavy uncertainty in terms of whether we'll be able to operate, whether people will be able to reach their workplaces, especially warehouses, whether the vehicles would be able to operate in all of the areas, villages that we are going to. So we went through a whole lot of uncertainties. So three things, possibly, that we did is one is obviously we had to rig the roles in the corporate office for different people to start doing different roles, given that you're not able to step out, right? So we had completely, people who were not involved in operations start looking into operations to let a helping hand. So a lot of people started turning different hats, I would say. Secondly, from an infrastructure point of view, because again, warehouses is where a lot of people work. So we had to sort of de-risk and ensure that there's absolutely no risk to any of the stakeholders internal or external in terms of any of the risks. So we had two different warehouses. So we had to clearly bifurcate operations, ensure that the two warehouses, there's no people or material movement happening between the two warehouses. So sort of really operate them as silos, right? And on the demand side and consumer side, we've always prided on the fact that the material produce that we grow is grown in a clean environment and handled hygienically. So not much of tinkering needed to change on the output of the delivery side, but especially on the farm side, especially on the warehouse side and especially on the corporate office side, right? In terms of people process is what we actually had to really rejig and think for the COVID environment as opposed to the operational efficiency environment, if you will. So those are some of the things that we did during COVID. And yeah, I think I mean, post the two months of uncertainty, some sort of semblance and balance started to coming in. And I think we've grown by about six times to eight times at the peak of COVID, I think our volumes that we were handling came down by more than 50%. But then from the baseline, if February was the baseline to now, I think we've grown by over six times to eight times. We are present in Bangalore and Hyderabad. Hyderabad was operationally much more constrained than Bangalore because we had just taken up a warehouse space, but we were unable to occupy and start sort of operating out of that. So all of those challenges have sort of gone away as time has passed. I'm glad to hear that you've grown six to eight times from your baseline in February. That's a really good sign for the economy. So before we're going to the next question, I'll again request our Facebook audience to keep the questions coming. We'll take them up after the panel discussion. So Mr. Nachal, Steve with you, another question that we were discussing earlier also that was this pivot in the pipeline already and was fast track due to the pandemic or was it necessary just to remain relevant during this period? Yeah. So I think we started off primarily as a B2B company offering our perishable produce to the likes of internet kitchens, fine dining outlets, modern trade and general trade. But the way we were building the supply chain capability, which is traceable, first principle-based, clean, minimal use of chemicals, pesticides. We knew that we would serve the end consumer market, the B2C market, if you will, sometime down the line. And for us, that was about 12 to 15 months down the line. But when COVID happened, again, serendipitously, our first thought was not that we will pivot immediately, but the first thought was how do we ensure that we keep the show running given all of the obstacles. But then naturally, we started getting requests from societies, from friends and families who are living in apartment complexes telling, hey, given that the last mile delivery is not allowed till doorstep, is there a provision for you guys to come and serve our apartments or societies with your produce? So again, it sort of began from a very outside in way. And over about 30 to 45 days, which I would say was the March April time period is when we started realizing, hey, the core of the business, the core of the supply chain, the core of the capabilities is already built, so to speak. I mean, we have our farms, the produce is already grown in a clean way. It's not that we have to learn something new on that side. We were always handling the produce in a clean environment in the warehouse. It was always packed diligently. So even there, it didn't require any change. The only change it required was in the last mile, instead of serving B2B, we had to serve B2C. So once the initial request started coming in, that's when we went back to the drawing board and said, maybe we have to view this as an opportunity given the core or the foundation is not being changed. All the core capabilities exist, but the pace of the end customer, if you will, will change from business to an end consumer. So what does it entail for us? What are the changes that we had to make is what we went back to the drawing board to sort of, as I said, reaching the process, the front end delivery mechanisms, and few of the other integrities. Therefore, to your question, for us serving end consumers was always in the plan. What COVID helped us was sort of accelerate the plan. And I would say sort of also in some way help us answer the traditional product market fit, if you will, in this environment. So I think it was certainly not a short term trigger that we had to maximize the situation of COVID to our benefit, but it was always in the plan and we had to accelerate it given the constraints that were there. Mr. Garal, I'll come to you in your kind of business. I'm sure that even if I am as a customer, I would want to travel to that location, see how that travel itself, how much time does it take? What kind of road is it? What kind of traffic is it? And then I'll finally obviously see the property take a tour and see how the fittings are, how the electricals are and everything. So for you, was it the same as Mr. Vinash mentioned or it's something that has been necessitated and you have adapted it well? So there have been both the cases. I would basically split this entire lockdown period or unlockdown period into two phases. One is when one is basically the period between March and say May, June and one is post that. So in the first period where the strict lockdown was applied, in that case, the new deals stopped happening for buy and sell. But yes, the deals which were in pipeline, in which the cases the customer had already seen a house, but he was not able to decide whether I should buy it or not. In these times, those deals did happen and we chase those deals to make sure that happens. Owner also to some extent wanted to now get some cash and basically compute those deals. So he became also a little bit flexible in terms of the price that he was willing to negotiate. In terms of rentals, I am the past six years since I have been running this business, I have never seen any deal happening without a person visiting a house. This is the first time that even I am surprised that people in this period did finalize deals by seeing property videos. It's a big revelation to me also that customers also adapt. It's not that we entrepreneurs adapt, but even the customers adapt to the new situation. So they did adapt. As soon as the lockdown opened up, the demand, we also do packers and movers, we do painting cleaning, we do furniture, home loan, insurance. I think these were additions during the COVID period. Some of these additions were during the COVID period. Many of them were basically before. Some of them were during the COVID period and we were surprised that the moment lockdown opened up, the demand for packers and movers was such that the entire system just buckled. We couldn't handle the demand because a lot of people are waiting for these lockdown months. The moment it opened, they just pounced and we thought that people would still not want to shift houses. But they were. Yes, many of the people did pack and went to their hometowns. But contrary to popular belief, a lot of people did shift houses within cities, across cities. So we were pleasantly surprised by that. Many of the home interiors, many of the people who had bought the house, but because of lockdown could not shift, wanted to shift, wanted to stop paying, rent. I wanted to handle the AMIs better and they requested us for quick home interiors, which we did. So I think post lockdown, post July, we saw a huge surge in demand because a lot of demand was suppressed. So it came back. And now if you talk about today, the buy and sell market is very, very vibrant because almost every newspaper in the country have printed that real estate is in mess. So this has basically made every buyer excited. So people who over years thought, yes, one day we'll research on what home you want to buy. Now I have more time at their home, internet in front of them and they are researching, which we can see in terms of traffic. And the seller wants to basically liquidate, the buyer wants to buy. So suddenly there's a splurge surge in terms of buyer seller transactions, which personally I could never foresee will happen. Rentals has come to the normal level. But I would still like to believe that overall rental transactions in the market would have reduced. That's my intuition. I will be really surprised if it has increased. So I would like to deduce that perhaps our market share has increased. But so that's what I'm seeing with the customer behavior. So you said that sellers of properties were ready to negotiate more to get some cash on hand. And you said that a lot of people actually moved houses. Obviously, there was a chunk which went back to their own house. Obviously, so did you see a change where a person who was say residing in a 40,000 flat has actually moved to a 30K house because he wants to save some money because obviously there have been job losses, there have been salary cuts and everything. Is that something that you have seen or any kind of trend that you have noticed in terms of the ticket sizes? See, we did notice this trend change when things were much more uncertain. So in the month of May, June, July, the typical transactions did go down, the rent amount went down by three to eight percentage. But the moment I think people have started realizing that this is going to continue for long and whatever job losses had to happen have happened and the rest of the companies have adapted to the new situation. Now for rentals, owners are not willing to take a cut. So there was a period when they were willing to take a cut, but now that period has majorly gone and now it is again happening at the fairer price. I think if, God forbid, if basically new job losses start to happen, then perhaps trend may change. But right now the rentals have come back to what they were earlier. Okay. That's sad news for people who want affordable housing.  So are these obviously as Mr. Agnash said that now that he has turned from B2B to B2C, I'm sure that he will want to continue with it. All Mr. Agarwal said that new videos, taking that tour of the property through videos and then making it. So do you think these are permanent changes or these are just changes till the time we find a vaccine or coronavirus decides to leave us alone in peace? What do you think? Are these permanent changes or these are going to be back to again the way we were in terms of behavior? So sort of at least the way we look at it, and obviously there is about seven months of data. I think at least when it comes to what I would call as the real estate arena, the customer behavior has changed forever. So clearly companies are now going to look at real estate as a flexible option. So the developer community and the landlord community will have to change and adapt because the six year, nine year leases, people are so uncertain. And obviously this pandemic is happening right now. We are still not out of it. We don't know how long this is going to go. Is it going to go down in terms of number of cases? Is there going to be again a spike, etc.? So a lot of unknowns are there and unknowns bring uncertainty and uncertainty can be managed by flexibility. So I think flexibility is going to be at the core of how companies look at real estate. From a consumer standpoint, we were forcing people to travel two and a half every hours, every day to come to a central location. And what has proven in the last seven months is most companies, I can't say for all, most companies have been as productive as they were when they were bringing people into that central location. So the central location idea will continue, but it will continue for a smaller number of people that are required to come for various reasons. It could be data security. It could be internet speed. It could be processes. It could also be things like innovation, which happens through face to face, brainstorming, etc., right? But a large portion, our sense is 30% of their workforce is never going to come back to that central location. They're going to work near home or work from home as and when we come back. And we are seeing that trend in every single company today where they're giving up real estate and nobody's going back to the same amount of square footage. They're going back to at least a 25 to 30% reduction in real estate. So I think some of this is going to continue the behavior, little changes that have come in. I don't think the office space is going to go away. I don't think homes are structured forever for everybody, all the household members to be together 24 by 7. I don't think it was built. Societies were never built in that manner. So there will be that disconnect where people want to go away for whatever eight, 10 hours. It could be work near home. It could be at a different location. It could be at a central location. But ultimately, office space will come back because we are not structured to live together 24 by 7 at home between husband, wife and kids and family. Would you say that your solution to provide office kind of a space at home is a temporary solution and you will not be like this is not a long-term solution that you will be offering? So sort of, I think what is very, very interesting and when we launched the work from home product, we thought companies will provide this solution to the employees. Unfortunately, companies gave them an allowance. So what was basically a B2B product launch that we did became a D2C product market. So direct to consumer. So the sale of our desk and chair and the subscriptions has gone up, but it's direct to consumer. So clearly what will happen, at least our perspective is people will have a space where you can basically have concentrated work at home. It could be an extra study room and I'll allude to Amit who probably has more data on home sales. But clearly there seems to be a trend where a study room or a Pooja room gets converted at work from home kind of a solution. Clearly people will have that solution going forward. It was not going to be a dining table, use a dining table for a one-hour kind of a solution. People will have that dedicated solution, whatever that environment works out for people as they go forward. I would basically like to add a little bit if I can. Yes, please go ahead. So just basically continuing to what Mr. Ramanee was saying, see what we are observing is you observe it from the from employee's perspective also. So what I have basically noticed is that there are two types of broad people in every company, one who are slightly naughty, who basically want to take advantage of work from home, want to chill a bit more. And second who are passionate, who want to basically give all that they can broadly to that. Now, what is happening is that people who are slightly naughty, for them companies are becoming more and more draconian to measure the time that they are spending on work. And there are times of things which you can do with the help of technology much, much better. So many of these people who earlier felt that working from home is going to be fun are of course enjoying the commute time which is saved. And hence perhaps in the future there would be solutions in which they would come and they would want to still save the commute time. But now they are bored of it. They are bored of being constantly monitored, constantly questioned.  On the second hand, the people who are very passionate about work, their work life balance is totally screwed. They are working from morning to night. They are taking calls at all odd hours. They have no differentiation between office and life. So I would say that yes in many companies perhaps they will continue to work from home. But largely people would still want to go to office because it does provide work life balance to people who are passionate and does give a better overall scenario to people who are slightly not here. I'm sure there are not here people. So Mr. Avinash, I'll come to you. Are you working from home or you're going to office? We started working from office quite some time back. So my question to you would be, as Mr. Ramani was pointing out that the change in behavior which is happening, so some of it will get retained. Some of it will again go back to the normal. So for you Mr. Avinash, like you said that the produce coming to my doorstep at my house, obviously it's a great benefit. But still we are in that, we have that thinking that we'll go to a market where we'll see two, three options that we are available, bargain for one particular capsicum or anything and then by the best that we would want. We would see and take a look and feel of two, three and then we'll pick it up. So do you think that's going to change for your business or do you think that the convenience and the quality that you have provided is going to stick with the customers for a long time? I think the data is structurally showing that the e-commerce sales of hip and V and groceries has gone up during the period. So that's certainly a trend which shows that structurally the market is going to move towards e-commerce. Obviously FNV as a category is still a largely touch and feel category. More than 85 or 88% of retail actually happens in the offline environment but yes I think what we have begun to see is especially we speak to a lot of senior citizens and they have become much more comfortable today, downloading an app, ordering fruits and vegetables which is not their most common behavior. So there are elements in consumer behavior in terms of the choices that they are making that points towards a structural change but given the space at least in which we are operating, it will not be a momentous shift just over a two month, three month time frame but over years I think it will head to what we are seeing in terms of the e-commerce penetration in the other markets. If I can spend one minute, I think where we are actually seeing true structural changes is on the farmer side. So farmers were dealing with a lot of intermediaries, aggregators, traders, middlemen, all of whom actually disappeared, dissipated overnight. So this strong thought in a farmer's mind of always wanting to have a structural access to the market for their produce, I think that is a huge structural change. I mean we have seen a lot of farmers, small land holding, large land holding, greenhouses, no greenhouses, all of them actually coming to companies, I would say like us, October is not the only one by the way. So companies like us wanting to figure out how to work on a long-term structural arrangement for marketing their produce, which is a structural change. Many of these intermediaries, middlemen may never come back. So we have seen farmers sort of starting to head towards that. Obviously overlaying that is the fact that the government has actually brought in a lot of regulatory changes. Obviously there's viewpoints on both sides of that regulation change but I think those are actually the structural changes which will enable farmers to make better remunerative choices for them. So on the supply side, we have seen changes which are actually going to be structural and long-lasting on the demand side or on the consumer side. Yes, I think we are beginning to see semblance of some changes in terms of the consumer behavior. Also I would you agree that once brands kind of get established and people gain faith of them over a period of time through repetitive orders or maybe branded products, I just said that e-commerce mostly 85% is offline right now. But maybe once we start especially the home makers and elderly people who if they start getting trust, having trust over brands, more and more people are going to stick to this kind of an arrangement in the mountains. I think yes and no. It also depends on what a brand actually truly stands for, its purpose, its vision. So what at least we have seen in this space is a lot of what I would call as fly by night operators who have realized that fruits and vegetables at some point in time seem to be the only way to be in business. So we have seen a lot of big companies try to enter groceries and fruits and vegetables and they've stopped actually already. I know of a large company which has actually stopped. So we are seeing a lot of activity in this space. Many of them I truly believe are short-term operators who are in it to sort of maximize the current situation. What will emerge at the tailwind of end of COVID will be only those players who are going to be truly in it for the long run. Today a consumer may have lot of choices in terms of brands or companies who are claiming certain promises, value propositions. Not all of those companies I'm sure will remain towards the tailwind of COVID. At that point in time, it truly depends on what the company is in it for, what is the brand standing for, what is the promise, is it consumer friendly, farmer friendly, is it equitable balance between the two, is it organic produce, non-organic produce? Because all of these terms are being today used by everybody just to catch the consumer attention. I think only people who are in it truly in it for the long run will survive. Until then, yes, there will be some sort of chaos in the system. We will take up the questions in a bit, but this one last question before we move to questions that we have got on Facebook. So Mr. Raghurwal, I'll come to you. So did all this period and given that our audience consists of people from the startup community, how has the funders reacted to these kind of favorites that companies have made? Because obviously when they made the investment decision, they saw one vision which was there and then now suddenly it has to move, the goalpost has to move is because of the situation. So and obviously none of the founders would have shown a zero revenue period or a COVID happening in their spreadsheets that would have presented to them. So how have the funders reacted? Have you got calls about that, whether the change that you need are aligned with their vision or something like that? I think as far as the existing investors are concerned, because they were seeing the same trend, same struggle across all companies, so I think they have been very, very patient and customers have devoted them in us by coming back with equal enthusiasm. I would also take this question as a fact that many of the audience who are either running a startup or who want to start something and perhaps raise funding, I would basically translate this question into the fact that whether it's a good time to raise funds, should we start something of your own or not? In terms of the funding environment, what we have been seeing is that when there was a period of uncertainty in the previous quarter, mainly up until June, then the environment did dry up. But now I think because the uncertainty is to some extent over and people have assumed that this is going to continue slowly for some time to come. Now the deals are happening, investors are looking at prospective deals, they are transacting. So yes, as long as you are fully prepared with your genuine approach towards how your business will navigate through this time or perhaps even take advantage of these times, I think it's a good time to basically start chatting with the potential investors. Okay, Mr. Ramanu. To sort of, I think clearly what's become very visible right now is that companies that have a first principles approach, if you had a path to profitability or are already profitable, are able to scale up, are able to mitigate the risks that come out of such crises. I think there is a very large pool of capital chasing such companies. I mean clearly, I think capital is both VC and PE funds are flush with capital because of the US liquidity that's been thrown into the whole ecosystem. So clearly funds are available, but the kind of companies that are getting funded have changed in my opinion. I think clearly just on paper ideas, it's very hard to raise funds in this environment because a lot of that is about the founding team and a touch and feel of understanding, meeting people and that's become a bit of a challenge right now because of the travel and such. But large companies that are well sorted business models, capital is chasing those companies, specifically in areas such as where e-commerce, edtech, fintech, etc., where technology is at the core of it. Clearly, there's a lot of capital available right now. As far as your question on starting a business, I think crisis is the best opportunity to start a business because what were seemingly challenges that you potentially were trying to solve are now in front of everybody. I mean, I've been asked, talked about how they turned into a completely a B2C kind of a business. I think it's a great time to start a new business. Good businesses will get funded and I think there's never been a better time to start new businesses than now. We have just a couple of minutes before we take up your questions, but on the same question, Mr. Arunach, I'll come to you. Obviously, we hear that there's a lot of money chasing businesses, and everyone in this panel said that businesses have recovered 85%, 60%. But the GDP numbers or the growth numbers of the economy does not really reflect those numbers. So do you think still funds will chase new businesses? You already had the farmer's side, your procurement side was sorted and that's why it was easier for you to go from B2B to B2C, but someone's starting out right now. Will that be that easy? I think I'll echo partially what Amit said in the sense, I think so obviously existing investors are supportive and accommodative of the times that we are living in and the transitions that are happening and should happen, not just for short-term survival, but also for the long-term sustainability. But speaking very specific to agri tech, I think in general after the last set of wave of investments in food tech and fintech, I think generally sectorally money had started coming towards agri tech. So and thanks to COVID and thanks to the abundant set of activities that are happening regularly with private participants in the agri space, the spotlight is clearly on agri tech. But as Amit said, I think yes, there's a lot of interest, a lot of startups coming up, a lot of existing players now looking at their next level of scale trying to raise capital, but I think the investor lens will never change in terms of viewing all of these investments with a first principle-based approach as Amit said. I mean that will never change irrespective of what times it is. As I said, a lot of fly-by-night operators are there in the guise of wanting to raise quick capital here, trying to make use of the opportunity. I'm sure a lot of such players will not get punted by investors even though they are out there in the market. So from whether it is a VC or a PE, I think the founding team, the opportunity that they are going behind, the first principle-based approach, the path to profitability are the factors that will continue to remain. The good thing that has happened during COVID is, yes, I think it is agri tech's time to come into the spotlight, which is great because the opportunity is huge, the high risk country, multiple problem statements across the length of the supply chain. So more the spotlight on the sector, the better it is, and truly people who are actually building strong businesses based on strong foundation, I think will be able to raise capital, will be able to raise their game or scale even during these times. So we have one question for agri tech's I'll stay with you here Mr. Vinash's. Obviously, we have all seen agri tech gaining ground. So at this point in time, how is the whole storage business would look like Govindyagi wants to know starting a course. Obviously, I know that there are problems in the whole storage chain in the country. Obviously, some solutions have come up. Yeah, I think so we are seeing quite a lot of activity to be honest, both in terms of, I would say, the fixed cold storage infrastructure as well as mobile cold storage infrastructure which is for transportation of goods. I think generally, there has been a lot of activity in the past in terms of the agri infrastructure space itself in terms of investments. I think the government is also supportive of the fact that the country requires extensive cold storage network for a subset of the produce that can be transported and stored and used over time. I think that the government has also subsidy mechanisms for people putting up fixed cold storage infrastructure. So yes, I think within the sector itself cold storage is seeing a lot of activity. So we've just run out of time, but I'll take one more question. This is for you Mr. Ramani. Do you think there will be a pent up demand among freelancers and employees who would like to go to co-working workplaces? So sort of I being a eternal optimist would like to believe so. I think the clear way that at least I look at it is that because we were swimming between B2B and B2C, being a hybrid co-working player, servicing enterprises as well as startups and freelancers, the startups in the freelancer and the smaller companies were the first ones to walk away because they had smaller code size and shorter tenures with us. So it's no different than the demand that comes from in an airline industry from people who are just in time flyers. So it's the same logic. I mean when pent up demand comes back and Amit Agarwal mentioned earlier that people are frustrated working sitting at home. They want to come back and do some setting which is other than a home setting. So clearly the entrepreneurs, the freelancers, as they think about working anywhere other than their home, they will come into a co-working space or a distributed network environment or a flex space because what else is the option? Because clearly the hotel lobby and the Starbucks are not the solution. You still have people that are unknown, are strange and you're going into a public environment versus a co-working where there's a lot more hygiene, a lot more regular in terms of who comes in and they're all tracked.  I haven't seen that fully as yet but I think post Diwali that is going to take off. Gentlemen, we have run out of time so we'll have to wrap up. Obviously we have a lot of questions. We'll try to get them answered through you post this section. But thank you so much. It really is good to my ears to hear that the sales levels are reaching baseline levels of February because that gives us everyone hope and to our audience also who are in the startup ecosystem and which that recovery we shift for every sector and economy as well. I will thank you once again everyone to be here today. I would like to see you again in the future. Thank you so much. All right. Thank you Saurabh. Thank you the entrepreneur.


Welcome back to the third day of the 6th EasyBuild user meeting. This afternoon we're starting with a site presentation from the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre. This will be from Luca Marsella. Over to you Luca. Thank you Simon. So, welcome everybody to the EasyBuild CSS site update. I will go directly to the outline. Now, I will talk briefly about the EasyBuild timeline at CSS over the past years with an overview of CSS HPC systems, in particular the Metro Swiss, the production system pitstint and the Alps system. And then I will mention how to customize the user builds with EasyBuild at CSS. And I will dedicate most of the presentation to the Jenkins, the use of the Jenkins interface that we integrate with EasyBuild, and in particular the Jenkins pipelines that we have adopted at CSS. Concluding with some final remarks for possible developments in the future. Now, the EasyBuild timeline at CSS began more than five years ago and it was, let's say, starting with an experimental trace support developed by Kenneth with Peter Forai and Guilleme Peretti-Petzi that ended with a stable support for trace systems with the 11th EasyBuild hackathon back at the end of 2015. And in the meanwhile we adopted EasyBuild also on the first Metro Swiss system that had a software stack that was completely built with the EasyBuild recipes. In 2016, EasyBuild was also integrated with Jenkins and GitHub with the major pitstint upgrade, the flagship system at CSS in December 2016. And following in 2018, thanks to our colleague Theophilus, Jenkins with pipelines was integrated in our software stack release process. So we now, in production, we always use the pipelines now, which are available on our GitHub production repository and can be checked quickly by all users.  I didn't have space here but there is also this latest update of pitstint. In the meanwhile, we have a new Metro Swiss system in production and we have now a Cray EX supercomputing system available for early user access selected users only that also uses EasyBuild at the moment. So I will go now to describe the main HPC systems where we employ EasyBuild to deploy the software stack. In this slide, I show you the main features of the system like I already mentioned pitstint, which is dedicated to the CSS user lab and it's the flagship system and it features most of the nodes with a single GPU per node, a P100 NVIDIA Tesla GPU with an Intel household processor on the so-called Cray XC50 partition and we have also a Cray XC40 partition with Intel Broadwell processors and node GPUs. The ALP system is a new system available only to early users and it features nodes with CPUs only. It's a Cray EX supercomputing system featuring AMD ROM processors and then the new production Metus Swiss system which is called Arolla and Tsa, the development partition features eight GPUs per node which are NVIDIA Tesla V100 with an Intel Skylight processor. The Metus Swiss system is actually as I mentioned composed by two partitions, one development called Tsa and one production called Arolla. Both features the Intel Skylight processors and Tesla V100 that I just mentioned and the EasyBuild software stack here is in production since January 20th. The machine was in pre-production at the time, now it's in full production. The modules here, we employed a lower case naming system, naming framework, sorry, naming scheme with few exceptions and the exceptions are listed below the EasyBuild custom module file that we use at CSS for let's say a custom environment to build the recipes and then these two modules that are metamodules called program GNU and program PGI that emulates the modules that you find on a Cray environment and they provide a modules environment in a hierarchical fashion so only after loading one of these modules then you unroll the underlying modules. So this is done in a sort of emulation of L-mod because this system does not feature L-mod but the environment modules. The new system is called Alps and the production partition of the system is called is named Iger. This is an HP Cray EX supercomputing system. As I said, at the moment it's open only to select users for early testing. The compute nodes of this system feature two sockets with NAMD epic processor like the ROM processor in the standard naming, commercial naming and they interface each other, each nodes with a high speed HP slingshot interconnect. Now, we also provided here a software stack with EasyBuild. We have created some custom tool chains to address the new Cray environment which is called now CPE so Cray programming environment instead of standard naming convention on the current on the flagship system and these new tool chains are we have called them CPE CC for Cray compiled environment and CPE GNU for the GNU compiled environment. The modules versions in these tool chains in this Cray PE are pinned to avoid the use of collections because starting with this CPE environment Cray started using modules collections instead of the standard module files for programming environments. The system features L-mod. It is supported officially by Cray as of the Cray PE of October 2020 and the modules are based on Lua A31. We have some scientific applications that have been built successfully there and tested with EasyBuild and I list a few of them here in the slide which includes some popular codes like Gromax, LAMS, NAMD, Quantum Espresso. Now, PITS-Dyne to the flagship system as I mentioned it is a Cray XC system with two partition 50 and 40 with Intel Puzzwell and Broadway respectively and the 50 partition also holds a GPU per node, a Pascal GPU per node. Now, as I mentioned the EasyBuild software stack is in production on the system since 2016 and it has gone through several operating system updates and the most recent one was in November 2020 to the Cray Linux environment 7.0 Apple II. We have also now in place an automated update of EasyConfig files and I come to that in a while. Here is a short list of some scientific applications that we built with EasyBuild and PITS-Dyne on the left side you see the GPU enabled one with a label version suffix dash CUDA on the right side the ones that are available on the multi-core partition without GPUs and also here we feature popular scientific codes like Gromax, NAMD and Vasp for instance. Now about EasyBuild for CSES users. So users are given EasyBuild recipes when they request software in general except if this software is a community code that we already provide. So this is less error prone than the manual steps of course and also for users they can keep some installations for their own groups without having their whole HPC center to maintain this installation. We have on the CSES user portal at user.css.ch instructions to load the EasyBuild framework at CSES with some custom module file EasyBuild dash custom one that creates a specific environment and user can adopt this framework to build their custom builds. They can clone the CSES production project on GitHub at the address in the slide. They can customize also their own recipes with the custom repository environment variable and they of course can use the standard EasyBuild environment variables to have their own prefix and so on and so forth. Now let's go to the EasyBuild integration with Jenkins at CSES. So we use Jenkins as a service for continuous integration to deploy the software packages on the systems in production and test new EasyConfig files that can be submitted by staff and also by users. We also check regularly regressions of EasyConfig that are listed in our production files and we now also update the production recipes in view of systems upgrades. The project names in Jenkins that run with EasyBuild are the following ProductionEB is the one that builds the EasyConfig files once they are in our production repository. Testing EB is triggered when there is a new request appearing on GitHub. Then we have the new rebuild EB that actually rebuilds in fact staff but from scratch also checking for instance the download for broken links and so on and so forth to ensure reproducibility. And then we have now the update EB project that runs EasyBuild to update recipes in view of a CrayPE update on the system. So creating new tool chains and using the tool chain the tri-tool chain version in order to update the recipes. So the Jenkins projects defined by the pipelines provide a names fix and names flexibility and also is version control that is important and runs in parallel on different systems so it optimizes the available resources. We have as I mentioned a CSES EasyBuild production repository on GitHub you can also as a user submit a pull request you can add the EasyBuild configuration files to a new branch in your fork and then your pull request must include the dependencies in order to create the pull request we have some policies let's say the title of the request must match one of the supported systems so that it can be tested. If you work in progress then you need to put the WIP text in the subject and then you can test multiple architectures or single architectures at the same time on some systems like explain here GPU or NC for multi-core systems. And once you submit a pull request the CSES Jenkins project testing EB will test the build of new EasyBuild recipes and the Jenkins pipeline script of this is available at the link in the slide. Now this is an example of the production EB pipeline where you see the multiple systems Dient, DOM and Iger listed and green sometimes it's happening it means everything was fine before the pipeline production EB goes on there is a testing EB pipeline on the left side you see a pull request omitting on GitHub in the subject you see the name of the systems in this case DOM, Dient, Iger and SAP on the right side there is the blue ocean interface of Jenkins showing the pipeline triggered in different systems so the systems that you see listed in the vertical order and green here also luckily now I also mentioned the rebuild EB pipeline so something that rebuilds the easy config files in parallel downloading everything from scratch and we added a step with the Atlassian Jira integration of Jenkins in order to create automatically issues on issues on Jira when there are failures so you see here there is a rebuild stage red here because something failed and then there is the Jira stage that created the corresponding Jira issues and then last but not least the update EB pipeline that actually creates new easy config files for the updates so the additional step here with respect to rebuild EB is the GitHub stage so after the successful recipes have been created and updated they are submitted automatically to our GitHub production repository and done then the final remarks so as usual moving HPC software stack to easy build takes some time there is a learning curve in the users and resistance to change but of course there are a lot of advantages reusable let's say recipes for users as well and then our perspective of easy configs versus easy blocks we prefer to use easy configs more because they are self contained although we have also some custom easy blocks but not too many and then just to give you the highlights so we could then deploy the new software stack with a new CrayEx system with some custom tool chains and especially we can use the automated easy config updates now on our programming environment so if you have a Cray installation then it's also worth going through our Jenkins pipeline scripts in order to see how we do the integration with Jira automatic submission of the GitHub PR on our repository and work in progress updating hopefully also the versions and dependencies and replacing current production with update and in the future use reframe stack in order to check the recipes once before going production so I put here a slide with the useful links and I thank you for your kind attention thank you for the talk Luca if there are any questions then if you're in the Zoom meeting can you use the reactions to raise your hand and we'll unmute you and if you're watching the live stream then ask in the easy build Slack Kenneth do you have a question? Yes I do so I was wondering Luca if there are any things in easy build that you're currently not happy with from a CSCS perspective so things that are not working as you would hope or that could be improved so as you showed on the timeline easy build has been used for over five years at CSCS now mainly on or at least initially on Bitsteins but also on other systems and I think you're one of the main users of the Cray integration we have so the integration with the Cray programming environment and leveraging all the modules they provide and building stuff on top of that are there things missing there are there things that are not working that we could improve? I think we are overall satisfied in the sense you've been interacting with us as you said more than five years now so we have been managing to integrate easy build very successfully with our software stack deployment with minor corrections and minor integrations or let's say contributions occasionally like so Victor and Irini did in the recent past we might have let's say new contributions I mentioned this new system this Cray EX super computing system these Cray machines names are always a bit difficult to pronounce we went from XC now EX and so here as I mentioned the problem at the moment is still under test but I created two custom easy build tool chains because the current Cray tool chains are using programming environments as modules and unfortunately now Cray moved to module collections instead which made things a bit more difficult and also at the moment in general Cray in the environment which is not always user friendly they provide a kind of meta module to be able to switch for different programming environment releases because they deploy every month and you release like you don't want to mix them up but unfortunately in this new system we don't have it yet so that's why I mentioned that now in this new custom tool chains we have to pin the versions of the module files because otherwise in general you rely on the defaults but then we'll mix things up in this situation we are very happy though that we have Lmod finally officially supported by Cray so that's really helpful I'm not sure if the Lmod installation provided by Cray is error free in the sense I had to revert back for the tool chains to use the TCL syntax of modules because the local Lmod installation was complaining about the module swap but this is something that I think it's a problem in the Cray side but anyway nothing particularly relevant and for the moment as I said this is still in test so this is probably something to be let's say we need to contribute that maybe in the next months to the main EasyBuilders Github but as usual anyway I put here in the links the fact that although we have a custom set of easy configs and well not so many easy blocks we always mirror our repository under the EasyBuilders official repository so you have the link at the bottom under EasyBuilders there is a CSS space where you can find all the recipes that we use on the Cray mainly although we have also a MeteorSuite system where we use the standard FOSS tool chain is that the Shasta stuff where things have changed? Yeah, it used to have the Shasta name now they call it EX super computing system anyway yes that's that one with this system they connect and mainly AMD processors And do you know the motivation why they switched to module collections for their No, they're not providing a reason for that and actually we asked to have let's say as quickly as possible kind of module file to let's say meta module like the programming environment that we use to in order to manage the different programming environments but also the different releases and they're taking some time because the system is not really production ready so they replied that probably by March they might get back to us as usual with Cray it's always a matter of pushing and because they have of course more I don't know many customers that say so many different needs from different sites Would it be helpful at all if easy build that support for loading collections as it is as it now does loading modules for tool chains or dependencies because I think that would be a fairly easy thing What is it called module restore? Would that be helpful or it would be helpful probably I think also in general for maybe other in other cases might be I'm not aware of other situations now but it could be needed the only issue with the module collections is now that the pinning of the versions because until the module collections are just loading new files I think it's still not ideal to use them but instead pin the versions because otherwise you are mixing up the environment with newer compilers or libraries and that can bring conflicts and full control that makes sense I see Victor raised his hand as well So I just wanted to compliment what Luca said for the reply what we need for an easy build canad we need the easy stack to be implemented with all these open issues related to add more options so that this entire framework that Luca said about testing testing production could be simplified we have this production dataset script that could be easily replaced by this easy stack but we really require that you guys get all those open issues for the easy stack to move on another thing is that we would like also that if you guys could test the minus minus package because first it doesn't work very well if we set default flags so if you do eb minus minus package and set default you just get the modules but you don't get the versions so the feature we have for creating rpms you are also using that or? we are investigating this to use in the future but it requires the set default to be working but you also need the set default to be working the easy stack so all these are open issues but it would be nice if this could be addressed so one of the related to your talk about having main power and addressing book fixes and I guess also maybe setting priorities a bit better so I wasn't actually aware that you were looking so closely at the easy stack files for example we now see it as a nice to have also for the easy project it's definitely on the top of our list but if other sites are also interested in picking up on it and waiting until the missing features get implemented then maybe we should push a bit more because everything gets really really simplified sounds good we'll have to draw a halt there so we can prepare for the next talk thank you to Luca for the talk and Victor and others for questions we can jump into the breakout room if needed so if anyone has questions maybe join there


Hey, everyone. About two years ago, I had an experience that changed my life forever. I was walking down the street in San Francisco on a really cold night, and I saw a woman sleeping on the sidewalk. And I asked myself, why, in a city with so much incredible innovation and big thinking, why we still have people who are sleeping on our streets at night? And of course, if you've been to San Francisco, you know that this isn't an isolated incident. About 7,000 people are homeless here in our city. And it's not because they want to be. The shelters and supportive housing programs in San Francisco are totally full. And after seeing this that night, I decided that I was going to do one thing to help and to use technology, my background, to make an impact. And so about two years ago, I launched handup.org Through our website, you can read stories of specific people who are experiencing homelessness. You can donate money to them towards specific goals, like housing, medical care, food. And you can send them messages of support through our system. We've helped over 1,000 people and have raised nearly $1 million through our platform in that time. We've helped people like Marvin, who was homeless here in San Francisco. He was a veteran, and he was also a chess master. And when San Francisco shut down the chess games, his high school class found out about him. They were organizing their 40th anniversary reunion. And when they found out their friend was homeless, they wanted to do something. And they came to the mayor's office. And the mayor's office had just heard about us. And they referred them to handup. And so we helped sign Marvin up for a handup profile. And his high school class circulated around, read his story. And in the first week, they raised about $5,000 for him. The support that he got, not just the money, but the encouragement and the hope in the messages his high school class sent, helped him and his case manager get him into temporary housing. And it also helped him get connected with other services that he qualified for. But that's just one story. We know that homelessness is so much bigger. 3 and 1 half million Americans experience homelessness every year. And 50 million Americans are living below the poverty line. This is such a huge problem. And something that government, of course, needs to interact with. And I ask myself, what is government doing about this problem of poverty? And Jen is going to take on that very big question. Great, thanks. So you might think with 50 million people in poverty that we are spending less as a nation on the social safety net. We actually spend about 19% of GDP. The average for what they call advanced nations is about 21. We're totally in the ballpark. But with that trillion dollars, and that doesn't even include Medicare and Medicaid, so it's actually much bigger, we still have so many people in poverty. Why? I think it's partly because of the way we administer these programs. I want to share a couple of examples with you. This is how you would apply for CalFresh, which is our state's nutrition assistance program online. It's over 50 screens. It's several hundred questions, many of them confusing and intimidating. This is a system built by a large government contractor at the cost of many hundreds of millions of dollars. And we spend about $90 million a year just to maintain the system. Now we started with the Code for America team. These are developers and designers professionals that take a year off. They worked with HSA in San Francisco last year. They built an alternative that works on a mobile phone or a tablet, a couple simple, clear questions. You sign with your finger, and you have applied. And now this costs orders of magnitude less to maintain. And it's much simpler and better for the user. It doesn't have to be that way. And we'll have to slide in a second, apologies. There we go. Now once you're on the program, if you get your mail, we'll start to get snail mail messages like this one. And I'm gonna read to you from it. Your benefits may end this quarter because they did not change as a result of the documents and information we received because it would have not resulted in a change in benefits. They say this three times in the letter. I don't know what this means. I've read the letters, but if you get this and if you're lucky enough to get your snail mail, you will not understand that what they're asking for is further documentation. And if you don't know that, what they're actually saying is your CalFresh benefits may stop at the end of this quarter. Please call the office. The fellows built a very simple text messaging system that sends you this text. And in the pilot, 40% fewer people fell off the rolls because of it. Now why did they start with this very small intervention in a large, large system? It's because the Code for America fellows interviewed hundreds of people who were on food stamps. And one of the things they found is that moment when you're at the front of the line at the checkout counter and you slide your EBT card ready to take your groceries home and the EBT card doesn't work, isn't just a moment where you're not bringing food home for your family. It's also a moment that's deeply humiliating. And they wanted to change that. Not only can these systems be less expensive, but they can show respect for their user because respect costs less. That's, it's so bad hearing that and seeing that. But I will say there is some hope. Government isn't all bad, of course. And especially at the city level, we're seeing Mayor's Office is being very supportive of new innovation and encouraging technologies and new solutions in their communities. This is my team with the Mayor's Office here in San Francisco and they supported us right from our start. But I think we're gonna need more than that to build new innovation and create new solutions. Like the traditional tech community has a whole ecosystem and pipeline. We're just starting to see an ecosystem and pipeline form around this kind of innovation. Incubators like TUML and funders like the Impact America Fund that believes in using powerful business models to also impact low income Americans. And I'm really excited to announce today that HANDUP just received funding from the Impact America Fund. Yay. And this support will help us continue to grow and iterate very quickly and test out new solutions unencumbered by the bureaucracy of government. One example of that, something we just launched is gift cards which citizens can give directly to a person experiencing homelessness in their community. Those cards can then be used for all kinds of basic needs like paying for different bills or getting food or clothing. So what we're seeing is that our site and our gift cards are able to help engage the community and fill in where there are resource gaps. So like for Marvin, HANDUP helped bring him in and connect him with other systems. I'll be the first to say that he has now been in government supportive housing for the last couple years and Marvin actually just got a job. And this is after he had been homeless on the streets for 25 years. So I don't think there is a dichotomy of we have to innovate on the outside or innovate on the inside. The point that I'm trying to make here is that the way that we're thinking big about the future of technology and this is the future by the way, thinking big about self-driving cars and artificial intelligence, we need to apply that same kind of thinking, the same powerful tools of innovation of business models and technology to create new solutions in poverty. And so we can't sit back and wait for the government to solve all these problems for us. I always give the advice of you need to start small in anything that you need to do, but I think when it comes to poverty, we need to start thinking a lot bigger and taking big ideas seriously and looking at reinventing our social safety nets and all of the billions of dollars that we're spending on charitable solutions as well. We need to think bigger about fixing government too. So think about healthcare.gov. This was the president's signature policy initiative and we almost lost it because we couldn't put up a website that works. Now who fixed that website? It was a bunch of people who don't know anything about government, but they know about systems that meet user needs, not government needs. And these folks, some of them were pictured in the cover of time. They are really true heroes. Some of them worked a hundred days straight, 20 hours a day to fix the site. There's a bunch more people like them now, people who've stayed on at the United States Digital Service and 18F, which I am proud to help found at the White House. Public, private sector entrepreneurs like Yasha Franklin Hodge, who founded Blue State Digital and is now serving as the CIO of the city of Boston. There are 34,000 volunteers in the Code for America Brigade Network, who are doing nights and weekends to help their local government do technology better.  Some of them were the folks that went to Atlanta last year. And what they found there is that if you get a minor traffic violation, you will stand in line to clear that ticket for an average of six hours, which sounds inconvenient, but if it means that you have to take a day off work and you may lose your job, it's much more than inconvenient. And when you don't clear a ticket like that, a minor traffic violation can over time become a serious offense and you will end up in jail. There are thousands of people around the country who are incarcerated for ridiculous reasons. So now in Atlanta, you will get this when you get your traffic violation. It allows you to text your citation number and get help in resolving this without coming into the office or by making an appointment and being reminded when your appointment or your court date is, again, by text message. So we know some of our friends at the Arnold Foundation tell us that if we can reduce the number of people who fail to appear for a court date, we reduce the number of people who are needlessly caught up in our criminal justice system and think about how important that could be. People think of us as taking, applying technology to these hard problems. Actually, a lot of the time we're removing technology. We're doing less. Think about the system that is currently running the child welfare process in California right now. We think we're taking this out to bid again as taxpayers and the estimate is $1 billion. But we know that we can do better if we apply a different approach. One that is data-driven is user-centered and is most importantly iterative. We can get a better outcome and save money, but most importantly, those social workers can spend those time with kids instead of doing data entry. So Rose and I I think are talking about somewhat different approaches inside government and outside government. But I think we share two things in common. And one is that we don't have a resource problem in this country. We have a resource allocation problem. Sorry, I don't know who to attribute that quote to, but I think it's very wise. And the other thing is that we're not gonna solve either of these problems if we don't all come together and help. Thanks very much. Thank you.


Hey there friends, thanks for checking in. Today we're looking at the new Mossberg MC2 subcompact double-stack mag 9mm pistol that has become so popular. A lot of people love those and Mossberg jumped into that game with this model And I think they did a very nice job comes with a 14 and an 11 round magazine MSRP 556 they introduced it October 25th 2021 and I think it's going to be a very popular model from Mossberg You know when they came out with the MC1 subcompact it it was like lit the world on fire people were like What the heck is this since then they came out with the MC2 compact with a 3.9 inch barrel and now the MC2 subcompact I like the Stippling patches throughout the grip all around a little bit different, but it does feel nice You put this 14 round mag in here and it has a very nice ergonomic feel to it And of course the 11 round mag offers two finger contact But it does carry a little bit shorter for those who want want that that type of style We'll go ahead and show clear this is loaded because I'll be throwing it on the scale shortly But I did mention 3.4 inch barrel. I like the way the mag release is Flush with the frame it does have that piece there just kind of slide up there real nice deployment with the mags front serrations Rear serrations with the angled line through it. That's pretty cool optic ready three dot sights metal three dot sights that are drift adjustable and A trigger that is a flat trigger breaks at five and a half pounds We'll show that I Always like to trigger on the MC1 subcompact and it doesn't seem like they changed it at all Which is a good thing right there Tactical reset you can hear it That is that is actually very important to a lot of people They they want to hear that reset and so you will with with this handgun the Disassemble is a bit different the same as the MC1 subcompact.  No question about that.  Oh By the way, if you go with this Comes in this cardboard case with the two mags a lock Mossberg gives you this Rubber piece wraps around the grip right so some people actually shoot with that they consider it Kind of nice on the hand when shooting and it kind of comes gift-wrapped in under here under this plastic here interesting look there and I haven't haven't seen that before but Pretty cool No downside to it. We'll throw the scale get the scale going here the 14 round mag unloaded You're looking at one pound four and seven eight ounces Just ounces 20 and three quarters, but if we go with the 11 round loaded mag we will see 24 and three quarters and yet throw that carry around in 25 and a quarter ounces, so it's right there with many of its competitors in the double-stack nine millimeter Handgun market, you know right in the mid 20 ounces is Pretty much where they are Aligning on the scale. Let's go ahead. We'll throw the 11 round mag here and compare it with the Springfield Armory Hellcat. All right a little bit of a shorter barrel We'll see that here when we look at the slide length the MC2 SC goes a little bit longer about three quarters of an inch which makes sense, but the Grip length and width is Approximately the same All right, so if you're familiar with the Hellcat You'll enjoy the grip with the MC2 Subcompact in the 14 round mag. It's pretty nice. I think I think Mosberg priced it right 556 MSRP If you like the safety model you can have the safety right there This is the non-safety model. It does have the trigger bar safety in there, but no lever there that you would push forward to Release that safety the magazine release there. He mentioned sits flush nice deployment there It is reversible making it left-handed friendly some people well lefties would like that But overall I think it's a good-looking gun. I think the well. I know the Mosberg MC1 subcompact shot really nice, you know, I remember I had you know I ran a lot of loads through that every kind steel cases and hollow points and 124 NATO loads and everything else and it worked really well I expect no different from this the 14 round mag sure does feel nice 15 round capacity The 3.4 inch barrel is pretty attractive to a lot of guys or just use it as a spag spare mag the user will decide But this will be another one on the market very soon hopefully right around 500 bucks. I think that would be a nice deal for a quality mag quality made handgun made by a very reputable company called Mosberg if you like videos like this, please subscribe and share I always appreciate thumbs up button Thanks for watching and you guys be safe


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Hey what is up my name is Rebedium. Today we're looking at shooting outside in full sun with just diffusion. No lights involved. So I did a studio lighting tutorial a couple of months ago now. It's proved really popular. A lot of people asked me if I could do something for daytime exterior work. I didn't I don't have that many big strong lights to overpower the sun but I definitely have a 4x4 frame which I put up here with some diffusion on it some full grid and I have a reflective I have a like a DIY Home Depot reflector behind me on a lighting stand and it works out pretty well. There are much better ways to do this. There are more professional ways to do this. This is quick, it's easy, it's reasonably safe. Shooting outside in the sunlight especially outside of Magic Hour. I'm watching this light stand which is threatening to come down crashing down on me which we'll get to soon. Shooting outside in daylight in the sun is a really tough thing to do. It's much better to be in closed shade under trees under a building and then add light back in but if you have to shoot outside this is probably the way to do it. You're not going to get a stronger source than the sun. It's you know 70,000 lux at daytime. You're really pushing up against not so much what you can diffuse but what your actors can be in. The heat it's about four o'clock now. I tried this at 2 p.m. and I was only to be in the direct sun for a couple of minutes. I couldn't get through the whole tutorial so I put it off into later in the afternoon. Still we're about four hours from sunset so it's certainly not Magic Hour. You could tell that I'm squinting a little bit which I don't think is a bad thing. I think it's weird when you see daytime interiors where the person just looks like they're inside with studio lighting but it's not nearly as crazy as it would be if this diffusion wasn't here. I'll swing the diffusion away and you can actually I'll probably have to go up a few more NDs and you can see what that level looks like. So this is full sun obviously facing the sun and it's not just too bright to sort of shoot in but it's pretty much too bright to be interviewed in to act in to speak in. So I want to use I want to swing the the diffusion back in and you see what's I'll show you how exactly we construct this. The diffusion itself is stretched to come not very professionally I might add stretched on a 4x4 metal frame and rather than a t-bar which I've used before on this channel the metal frame allows you to come at an angle come at an incline and diffuse the sun on a much wider area. It now becomes the key and the ambient light bouncing off everything else in the backyard becomes the fill and then to accentuate that I have this I have this piece of foam insulation with silver on it on a clap clap clamp on the top of another lighting stand. Everything sandbagged and you can probably tell by the the leaves moving behind me that it's not a windy day but there are there is a gentle breeze there is quite a few gusts coming through and that tragedy of shooting outside in the wind is that this is just how things work you have to be very very vigilant you have to over prepare you have to put way more weight on things than you think they need because all it takes is one strong gust and something like a 4x4 essentially it's a sail so if you don't have enough protection for it it's going to be blown right over into your camera into your talent and to you just over on the side of safety put a lot as much weight as you have on these things when you're using them outdoors. You might notice behind me is nice and shady and I chose that for a reason in fact I probably should have gone a little bit more side on with my key but it's too bright over there because I've exposed for this diffused sunlight if I have pure sunlight behind me it's going to blow out kind of give that that white hot look that I didn't really want so that's a quick little tutorial about shooting in daylight sun diffusing it through a 4x4 and basically you know getting a nice usable appropriate image for being outside in daytime this is actually I've got the full grid but the old version they make a new one now that's soundless so you don't get that flapping in the wind you could put an ultra bounce here they cost a lot more money but they're a lot more angle-able meaning that you can kind of really focus the sun where you want to get it and get this nice hard edge on the talent side of the talent's head. If you wanted to do this with two people right you wanted to have me here and a second person here a 4x4 is just big enough some of the time but most of the time you're going to need something bigger like a 6x6 which creates a whole new batch of problems because it's a much bigger area you need two C stands you need more weight it's far it's at far more risk of being blown over and sometimes you just you know you go out to I've done that where I've gone out to shoot something it's just been too windy and meaning it doesn't need to be windy at all to be too windy but it just wasn't safe to set up the gear and put people underneath it for for for minutes at a time. Just for the sake of completeness I thought I would spin around 180 and show the other way that outdoor exteriors get lit this is a lot easier in my eyes I'm able to open up and look at things because I'm not I no longer looking into the sun I'm using the sun to give myself a rim light through the 4x4 which is above me and I'm using what used to be my bounce now as a reflector to become my key and ambient again for the fill. It looks pretty good you may notice that the the light stand is in frame now which isn't very professional if you wanted to do this you would probably get a a cutter or something else that is longer and put on a C stand but the principle would be the same I would just be able to get this back a little bit this paradoxically is easy to do in the middle of the day when the sun is high and I don't have to don't have to compensate for such an acute angle maybe not as dynamic a frame certainly not as high noon a frame but a lot easier on the actor and their eyes to be able to look off-camera and not have the blinding sun in their eye line I did bring out the matte box and had to put the eyebrow on to keep the sun out of the camera lens so if you watch my video on matte boxes you'll know all about that that's my daytime exterior lighting setup shooting raw you'll have to be able to craft this more in post much more than I would if I was in the studio I'd be doing a lot of that with lights because I'm using such kind of comparatively crude tools here outside I'm going to be able to do a lot more of that in post but thanks very much for watching hopefully that helped someone out there I know it helped me think about it I will see you next time