Good afternoon everyone and thank you for being here in my state of the state last week I talked about the challenging housing shortage we face and our urgent need to make it faster Easier and less expensive to build and rehab the units we need This isn't new. We've been talking about it for a long time And as you know, we've spent a half a billion dollars in the past few years to expand our housing stock It's helping and having an impact but not as much as it could Based on the speed and cost. We're currently building It's clear we must address the other side of the equation if we're truly going to improve our housing stock Right now do in part to our antiquated regulatory system Takes far too long and costs far too much to build That means we're not getting the bang for the half a million bucks We put in Sector and everyday Vermonters who are looking for small investment opportunities Like the incentives they need to further invest This isn't a partisan issue And this isn't this perspective isn't a part of the problem We hear from people from all political backgrounds about the needs to make it easier to build While upholding what's great about our state Which is why I'm proud to stand here with you today with a tripartisan group of lawmakers who in partnership with my team Have worked on packages that could really make a difference Mr. Farrell and members of the House and Senate will talk about the proposals in a few minutes And we'll also hear from Wei Wei Wang the executive director of the Vermont professionals of color network and Mike del Treco the president and CEO the Vermont Association of hospitals and health systems Because housing is about more than just housing It's about community revitalization workforce affordability equity health safety and much much more This session with the broad support you see today. I'm more confident than ever We can put politics aside and do with a vast majority of our Montage No needs to get done to create and restore the housing We so desperately need right now. So with that, I'll turn it over to Commissioner Farrell Thank You governor So first I want to thank representatives Bartley, Hango, Sims and Small for their leadership on this I also want to thank the many other legislators and stakeholders many of whom are in the room today For the work that they've done to contribute to the bill that we have today age 719 Through this collaboration, we've developed a set of reforms that can be supported by folks in rural Vermont and urban areas Supported by employers as well as homeless advocates and from folks across the entire political spectrum as you can see here today While I'm going to summarize some elements of the bill here today We're going to be holding a webinar tomorrow from 11 a.m.. To 12 p.m In which myself and some others will walk through some of the mechanics and details of the bill In November governor Scott and I shared the administration's analysis of the current housing deficit Including where we're coming up short county by county and it proved two things that we already knew to be true one that we need to reinvest in our regional economic centers and Second that we need to drastically increase the number of homes in every corner of the state to give renters and homebuyers More opportunities and more affordable options This bill aims to achieve those two main priorities by realigning incentives to steer investment and revitalization The existing housing stock into communities and neighborhoods that have been neglected and Encouraging the creation of new homes in the areas where we have the infrastructure to support it and thus continuing to protect the green space outside of our compact settlement areas To do this the houses bill proposes the following firstly changes to act 250 jurisdiction to encourage more homes where we have the infrastructure and Provide the incentives to grow while continuing to protect the green space outside of those areas secondly Appeals reform for housing development to make it easier to construct housing for all populations and income levels and to curb one of The biggest tools used to prevent fair housing creation in the state of Vermont Third Adjustments to municipal zoning practices that currently inhibit unit generation these reforms will focus on missing middle and infill development fourth adjustments to state and local permitting jurisdictions to Allow for and encourage the conversion of hotels and motels into permanent housing units and fifth tax incentives to encourage the investment of blighted structures in neglected neighborhoods and communities With the aim of revitalizing our economic centers and bringing housing units to them This will be achieved through targeted tax exemptions largely for mom and pop investors and For the rehabilitation of blighted structures in the areas of greatest need So while a number of programmatic investments are contemplated in this bill the budget development is still underway And we can't get ahead of that process But regardless the regulatory reforms in this bill will make any investment including the half a billion dollars We've already spent over the last few years go much further than they have gone in our current system This allows us to make better use of both public and private investment again, I'm grateful to this group of legislators and For those that want to hear more in-depth We will be having our webinar again tomorrow From 11 a.m. To 12 p.m. To hear more details about the bill You can find a link to that posted to a ccd dot Vermont dot gov And now I am happy to hand it over to senator Keisha Rom-Hinsdale Thank You commissioner Farrell and Big thanks to governor Scott as well I'm participating remotely today because I have COVID so if you see me drink a bottle of small a small bottle of brown liquid It is elderberry syrup. I just want everyone to know I From where I fit I can think of nothing more important to do right now than to set politics aside and Tell Vermonters we hear them and we are working together to provide them with relief from the dual climate and housing crises we face Today's proceedings come right on the heels of another major climate event last night Even if there is not significant physical damage to be accounted for we are hearing from every flood impacted individual and community But they experience a deep and growing fear every time it rains We are hearing that any homeowner who takes a meager FEMA buyout for their destroyed home Has to look out of state for something they can afford We are hearing that renters are living in unsafe conditions But don't want their buildings condemned because they would have nowhere else to live We are hearing about Vermonters battling mold respiratory illness faulty eating depression and Untold financial and personal costs and that they are hanging on by a single thread We want you to hear from us that we are extending our hands and we will not let you go We hear you and help is on the way Our top priority is to ensure every Vermonter has choice Dignity and safety where they live where they build a family and where they call home Gratefully because of the tripartisan work we did last session in the home act We are beginning to see modest growth and new housing units come online It is now a climate imperative that we bring everyone home With our work this session bring Vermonters displaced by flooding back home Bring young people who want to come back to Vermont home bring seniors who want to live near their family's home The bringing everyone home bill or be home bill will incorporate the proposals discussed today The good work of many housing and environmental stakeholders and the best ideas from Vermonters reaching out to improve their neighborhoods and towns Vermonters Rest assured we hope to vote the bill out of our committee by early February as we know it will have a one-way to go to passage And we have much work to do to build support among our colleagues To that end while Act 250 has served us well for 50 years I am looking forward to working with my colleagues to adapt Act 250 to meet the realities of the next 50 years We need an Act 250 that gets communities out of flood paths and mud slide zones We need an Act 250 that gives towns the tools to create a climate resilient vision for their communities And then let them act with the speed and flexibility needed to achieve it We need an Act 250 that creates a diverse set of first-generation homeowners and Main Street entrepreneurs To build the collective wealth of their communities We must stop saying that this is the way it's always been and work toward the Vermont that must be Inaction is simply not an option our economy will falter without the next generation having the economic foundation needed To join the workforce and forge Vermont's future to meet our other policy goals that build a brighter Vermont from Weatherizing homes to improving health outcomes to giving our kids a world-class education We must recruit and retain the workers of the future But people who want to remain here or move to our people state are already turned away because of our lack of housing Our rural communities and our cozy village centers that Vermont is known for are going to hollow out if we do not lead an act So for those who have held on and cannot hold on any longer help is on the way We will build on the work of the home act with another major push for housing that puts politics aside To meet the very real needs of our neighbors It is time to do the hard work that Vermont has have elected us to do so together Let's bring everyone home Thank you. Thank you, Senator Romhansdale. We all wish you a very speedy recovery Let me first start by thinking not only my co-leads But also all other members of the House of Representatives who sponsored H7 19 Committing to finding solutions for Vermont's housing crisis Representative Sims small and Hango and I all recognize the need for a holistic solution to our housing crisis after countless emails phone calls Text exchange and zoom calls H7 19 was drafted to be introduced on the floor later this afternoon The overarching and primary objective of this legislation is to create more housing units and to reinvest in neglected neighborhoods plainly stated housing and community redevelopment the bill addresses act 250 in a way that promotes smart growth and Revitalizes our communities in a substantial way for generations to come for too long the solution to the housing crisis has been siloed The crisis impact spans across every facet of our community Transcending political affiliations and economic divides Regardless of income level be it lower middle or tied to generational wealth each for Monter has felt the weight of this crisis I am incredibly proud of the collaborative work of my colleagues Making a good bill even better while taking into consideration the needs of different communities Different constituent viewpoints stakeholders. We've ensured that housing development can happen through Vermont throughout Vermont Not just a minute portion of the state Yet this bill goes beyond housing through the expansion and restoration of our housing We can foster affordability for Vermont families Provide shelter for Vermonters who are experiencing homelessness Entice workers to fill vital positions in our workforce that is desperately needed And offer of course necessary services to our communities This concerted effort not only ensures housing stability and opportunities But also plays a vital role in reducing crime addressing substance abuse And and breathing new life into long neglected neighborhoods H719 is just the beginning and we have a long way to go So whether you're a representative a senator a stakeholder or a community member Come grab your seat at the table. The time to act is now Housing can no longer be just a goal. It must be made a reality for all Vermonters And I am going to send bring up senator Oh So I have as others have already said today and I think as we all know We need more housing across the state and for families of all sizes income levels and service needs I am so glad to be here together with the governor and all of the co-sponsors of this bill And our key partners to talk about the work that we're going to do this session to address this issue H719 builds on the great work that we did last year with the home act Working with a broad coalition from developers to local officials from environmental groups to human service organizations We made historic housing investments to support new construction To fix up vacant units and to expand shelter capacity While also making meaningful changes to our land use regulations And those changes are already making a difference in my community St. Johnsbury now has a long overdue warming shelter Rental units are being brought back online in hard wick and the sacred heart property in newport is scheduled for redevelopment And yet it has not been enough. We must continue to confront this challenge head on This bill H719 continues to make investments in the housing programs that we know are working Like the Vermont housing improvement program the manufactured home repair program and the missing middle home ownership program This bill also recognizes that we can't buy our way out of this housing deficit We must continue to remove obstacles that have limited housing for decades by modernizing our land use regulations Vermont's landmark act 250 law has been instrumental in sustaining the Vermont we love Balancing the preservation of our unique landscape with the economic and development needs of our communities I don't think any of us want to see more sprawl We don't want houses in the middle of farm fields or huge single family homes on top of mountains We also know that we haven't been building housing at the rate that we need to keep up with demand And so if we want more housing in the right places Rehabbing existing buildings and building new infill development in our walkable downtowns and villages That are served by water and sewer We need a balanced approach to land use regulation while we protect some places We also need to make it easier to develop in others and this is exactly what this bill does And as others have already mentioned H17 has been a truly collaborative effort And we know that the bill has a long way to go before it's across any finish line But we are all standing here together to say to vermoners. We hear you We understand the magnitude of this crisis And we are working together across geography across sectors across party lines to tackle this issue And we invite you to be a part of that conversation so that together we can create healthy local housing markets for all of our communities And now from the kingdom representatives Good afternoon everyone As a member from wanuski I truly understand the responsibility that I have representing the most densely populated and most diverse city in our state And I highlight those two things to underscore the piece of how we as a city live into our values of being a welcoming state for our new american and refugee populations And that our city has done everything that it can in its responsibility as leaders To build as much as possible to make sure that the folks who need the services of wanuski are able to attain them And yet year after year our city leadership has asked for municipal delegation And to withdraw themselves from this duplicative process with the act 250 And now I finally see a path forward with this tripartisan effort to make that contribution This legislation not only expands opportunities to build more units And development, but it does so in a way that protects our environment and protects our rental market I have been so appreciative of the collaborative effort that has happened along the way especially in understanding where we see the draw into our homelessness crisis and we Put in and uh said that we are going to protect tenants making sure that they can be in units that are going to be safe And affordable while also ensuring that they are not being pushed out of units Just to make sure that they are able to get up to those standards i'm grateful to the governor and his staff for bringing us into this conversation And uh looking forward to providing pathways for both landlords and tenants And building the vermont that we are looking for I will now pass it on to our colleague in the senate senator randy brach Thank you representative small You've already heard uh today that the time for action is now Vermont's housing crisis is acute and we can't simply afford to nibble around the edges In order to solve almost every problem We have whether to be health care costs education vermont's tax burden and more We need to attract and retain more working vermonters And that will not be possible until we restore a healthy housing Balance and a housing market with more units and at reasonable prices And the only way we can do that as the governor mentioned is to make it easier faster and cheaper to build the housing that we need Last year we made progress with regulatory reform with act 100 Into which my committee put substantial work Even though those steps were welcomed many of my colleagues in our and I argued that it wasn't enough And then more needed to be done And that's why we're here today Chair ram hinsdale and the rest of the senate economic development committee Have committed to working with our counterparts in the house To focus on these very issues Action can't wait and bold regulatory reform is needed now more than ever I'll now turn it over to representative hango Thank you senator brach. Good afternoon As co-lead sponsor of this legislation I want to thank my partners for putting together a package that has something for everyone We put aside our political party ideology and each of us brought something unique to the table This bill makes strategic investments in our communities As we work to revitalize our landscape each ask was thoughtfully and respectfully considered And we worked with what we all could agree on rather than focusing on the dealbreakers that would shatter this coalition This legislation is a conversation starter It touches on something that is important to each of our constituencies permitting reform emergency housing Creating new units and providing opportunity for all vermonters to have access to housing across all regions of our state As it moves through the committee process We welcome input from all stakeholders and know that it will be a better bill for the process Thank you governor and your administration and representatives Bartley sims and small for your perseverance for your constituencies and for your spirit of collaboration I'll now turn this over to wei wei wang who is the executive director of the vermont professionals of color network Thank you. Thank you representative Thank you so much for having me here today. My name is wei wei wang I am the co-executive director for the vermont professionals of color network We are a non-profit statewide nonprofit whose mission is to advance prosperity for black indigenous and people of color across the state The issue of housing affects the fabrics fabric of our beautiful state and shapes the very future of our diverse and growing community vermont faces challenges that demand our collective attention Our state has the third oldest population But also the second smallest population and we are facing currently a shrinking workforce Even if all working age vermonters became gainfully employed, we would still have over 12 000 unfilled jobs It's critical that we retain and attract the community here That we have here and also from elsewhere, especially people of color vermont boasts one of the highest growths per capita when it comes to the community of color In this state the black indigenous and people of color community surged by astonishing 112 percent between 2010 and 2020 Not just in chinning county This community is a future workforce of the state We also contribute over one billion dollars in economic impact annually to the state In fact, we recently dropped to third white estate in the nation. So thank you west virginia for taking on note number two Um, while our racial demographics are shifting to the positive wealth disparities in the community of color still exists People of color are less likely to have generational and accumulated wealth An asset that is critical in home ownership, which is critical in building wealth Here in vermont only 20 percent of black home households own a home compared to 72 of white households Our housing challenges were steep even prior to the inflated home prices that began in late 2020 And before the july floods the december floods and last night swept many residential structures away so this Information paints kind of and what everyone has presented today paints a pretty bleak picture for our state And through the vermont professionals of color. We are currently hearing stories from bipoc community members new residents relay the shock of arriving in the state and being unable to find housing speak speaking nothing of affordable housing New college grads hoping to stay in the state where they have made tight community bonds By having to move away to other opportunities because they can't find safe affordable and available rental units A dual income household losing childcare after leaving chinden county moving outside of the county due to high home prices Forcing parents to leave their jobs A c-suite executive living in a hotel for nine months while house hunting in chinden county even Before settling on a rental unit That can't come Accommodate his family to come from out of state These are all bipoc stories that we have heard over just the last 12 months and that does not include the flooding period Why does my organization care about this issue and these proposals? Because we are constantly being asked Help me find how can I find housing help me find housing because the bipoc community the people of color here Want to be in vermont. They want to live in vermont And yet we are also being asked How do we as the state as businesses as organizations retain and attract bipoc professionals and business owners to the state Our housing crisis is at a critical juncture It hinders other areas of growth like workforce development that the state really wants to accomplish So a bold comprehensive action is imperative These proposals today here are the next step to ensuring that the community of color And really future generations of vermont will be able to choose to stay in vermont To have safe shelter to build lives and families in and that can anchor them Within the social and economic fabric of vermont. Thank you, and I will turn it to mike del treco president and c of va h s h s So thank governor scott and members of the administration. It's an honor to be here When I heard about this bill we jumped at the opportunity To to participate as mentioned my name is mike del treco when I serve as the president and ceo at the vermont association of hospitals and health systems We represent all vermont hospitals And the great thing about our hospitals is they're all not for profit Why is this so important to us? A safe stable healthy home Is the foundation to an individual's health It's key to the health of our communities that we serve It's pivotal to building vibrant downtowns and the end it's critically important to all vermonters. You've heard a lot about that here today Too many vermonters lack the necessary home Not to mention one that is modern safe and healthy This is particularly devastating for the most vulnerable Including those that are homeless Those living with chronic or complex health conditions our children and our elderly This is why our hospitals are so supportive of this state's effort To develop more housing of all types in every region is critically important Our hospitals are amongst the largest employers in our community and our staff our nurses and our doctors Often find A problematic to find affordable housing This impacts their ability to live here It impacts our organization's ability to recruit doctors Nurses and support staff that we greatly need to care for the communities we serve Where possible our hospitals have stepped up to invest in programs and services like housing Initiatives because our community is desperately need them However, it's no secret that our hospitals have been stretched for resources Which are necessary to invest in their staff their facilities and equipment and their communities As we build our budgets for the next year We'll continue to look outside the hospital four walls and ways to support community needs like housing This is way too big of an issue to ignore and we must make progress The fact is if we get this right and invest in more affordable safe homes We'll see an improvement of the health of vermonters The simple reality is housing is directly connected to health As the state's health care leaders were committed to working with the administration Lawmakers and the community leaders to address this issue. It's an honor for me to be here And thank you so much for the opportunity and i'll turn it back over to the governor Well, thank you very much and thank you to all the speakers thus far and everyone who's participating today We'll now open up to questions. We'll stay on topic first And then move on from there Governor, how does this affect the the sort of the classic divide of the last few years that we can build in downtowns We can't build hardly anywhere else. How would this change that? Well, I think I believe I'll let Alex talk about this, but it expands the area. It's not just in downtowns. It's in gross centers And to provide more density Yeah, sure so The the home act took a lot of steps last year including raising the act 250 Trigger within designated downtowns and villages from from 10 units up to 25 units before act 50 is triggered now what this bill would do is Create full exemption within all those designated areas downtowns villages neighborhood development areas growth centers And then even outside of those where we have municipal water and wastewater and where we have zoning It would raise the cap from 10 to 30 and thus making the best use of all those assets That that we really have the capacity to build in Anyway else want to add to that give us a wave senator if you'd like us Yeah, um, if I may we you know, we just heard the Uh, the report of the natural resources board on the hearing structure that they're proposing To create exemption from act 250 and they are including any area that a municipality Would propose provided that the municipality has sufficient Water and sewer and zoning. So I hope that that extends to transit corridors You know to second clusters of development that many communities have like burlington or south burlington You know, we need to see growth where we know act 250 jurisdiction should end act 250 is about land use And we've already determined that the land use in these areas is commercial residential or industrial and therefore There shouldn't be duplicative processes that That developers and municipalities have to engage in to build housing I just want to clarify so this is you mentioned 30 units I know in the past it was 10 by 5 by 5 or whatever the ratio was is this just 30 units? Still with five year period five mile radius or 30 units flat out we can build whenever you'd like so short so full exemption within the designated areas and then Outside of that where there's municipal water and wastewater and zoning. It would be 30 units By two years and then removing that mileage requirement and and the thought there is in a lot of ways 10 5 5 Can encourage sprawl because you're being pushed further and further out to avoid hitting that trigger And this way it can allow for more units to be built per project and then more more densely as you go on Anyone else I think surprised to know that many of our downtown's village centers are prone to flooding So I'm wondering how the authors of this bill are thinking about incentivizing Growth and development in areas that are are seeing future flooding Well again, expanding the area is going to help in that regard. It isn't just in the downtown There are areas in within the district the growth centers where you can build safely in elevated areas Yeah, yeah Yeah, and I think that's right So growth centers and neighborhood development areas are great opportunities for this And the fact that we're not just restricting it to these These uh downtowns and villages gives a little bit more leeway to to move out of those areas I also just mentioned that I think yeah This bill complements other work that I know senator ron hemsdale and other committees are looking around flood resiliency and recovery How are we also standing up access to Capital so that communities can do really critical work to make our existing housing and future housing less vulnerable to future events So we need to both address kind of regulatory reform about where we're encouraging development and also making sure That we're providing access to the capital needed to do that work That helps make our communities more resilient to events in the future. So, you know, all of these things are so intersectional What does this bill propose regarding governance? What what role do you see of the district commissions going forward versus The the natural resources board. I know there's talk about professionalizing it or maybe expanding it Just where does that conversation line alexa sabina? I can and so what What we're really trying to emphasize is this maintains the integrity of act 250 such that it wouldn't change governance There are other bills that are contemplating changes in governance structure And we'll allow those bills to contemplate what they will and this does not negate that This will only change where act 250 is triggered What are the phones for on topics, but then we'll come back if you have off topics start with Chris Roy, and if you don't have an on topic, just let me know and we'll come back to you for the off topic portion All right, we'll try tim the quizden from my business magazine Is it about this magazine? I don't have a your main question on this.  Uh, tom davis compass from off Try Keith the rotten herald Um, there are some provisions in this bill around, you know, incentivizing the conversion of hotels and motels into affordable housing I'm wondering, you know, it will take a long time for this regulatory reform to create units And so I'm wondering how you're thinking about these interim solutions particularly for You know the thousands of homeless people we have in our state and those will be losing shelter this spring through the motel program Well, everything's on the table at this point in time. Obviously, we our needs are great They're immediate they're urgent and uh, so there's nothing we can do that would That would hurt anything of the long-term initiatives So we are going to continue and to look for those opportunities to expand shelter capacity and homes permanent homes for the homeless Let's Come back to that if we could I'm not going to consider that on topic at this point Well, we maybe so just want to give one last I just have one thought at the car lose question. I guess regarding the general assistance program You know come spring, uh, this funding will end. There's potentially thousands or at least over a thousand people that will become Unsheltered. I mean, what what is the plan or what do you see going forward to avoid mass unsheltered homelessness? These are big longer-term Sit there solutions, but what can we do in the interim? We there are many measures. We can take and we're working on them Mr. Winters Thank you as the governor said We are taking a number of measures to try to create shelters in the short term But I think it's really important to Remember that in the long term A bill like this is one of the most effective things that we can do to address the problem That we're facing today the scope could be much smaller if we had units DCF is the is the safety net and we want to emphasize the importance of this bill this bill in front of us today To people experiencing homelessness it might seem obvious, but it's really worth repeating That there's a direct correlation between the availability and the affordability of housing And the number of people who are unhoused. So if you look at the states with the lowest vacancy rates And the higher cost of rent. There's a direct correlation to the number of homeless they have in that state. So I'd really I'd really implore everybody to support this bill as one of many ways to address the the problem of homelessness that we're facing in brahman today Governor what arguments would you use to get buy-in from the house and senate natural resources committees that have been somewhat intransigent against rural housing development Well, I believe that having this broad coalition of house and senate members goes a long ways towards seeing change so I don't know what the perspective is of the senate or house natural resources are on this bill in particular But I do know there's a broad coalition of members of the legislature That do see the issue and want to see change Can I add something sure? So, um, you know, I think what's what's complementary in the senate is outside of session I actually teach environmental policy at the law school and senator bregg who chairs the natural resources committee is a home builder You know, so we have been able to find some common ground in the past and we're gonna have to work harder this year But what I would say to those committees and to the environmental community Is that we can't believe in climate change without believing in support for climate refugees? And I think we often think about climate refugees coming from other states and other countries And us needing to open our arms to them But what we have right now are climate refugees that are our own neighbors They're people who want to stay in vermont And simply cannot find another place to live. They want to stay near their existing community So if it wasn't apparent from last year Once we've gone through all of this flood activity and we know it's coming fast and more frequently Um, you know, we have to understand that we have an obligation to climate refugees within our states They're vermonters and they're our neighbors I think that's a great point senator and we have legislators that have experience Flooding themselves and had to make the tough decisions to move elsewhere Any other on topic? This is the queue Unless you want to stay and answer some more questions Just because I can't remember exactly which I know what it was about but I've I've seen yes, I've seen portions of it. Yes I don't know what it's going to look like when it comes to the senate or a house floor Eventually pass the house but My position hasn't changed on the injection sites and I have communicated that with house and senate leadership So there's no surprise, but it's just the bridge too far from It's just from my standpoint, I just don't think a government entity should be in the business of of Enabling those who are addicted To these drugs that are illegal And I just it's just counterintuitive to me And I have a great deal of sympathy and empathy for those who are addicted and I think there are other ways We can counteract that and we have We have measures in place the treatment and recovery On prevention and enforcement those four legs of the stool. I talk about a lot That we need to to double down on and if we want to build hubs expand hubs to provide some of the harm reduction that's fine, but the The portion where we allow the safe injection Of illegal substances just just too too far for me to go Um What we're doing not just in vermont, but across the country though the epidemic is Initiation wide just simply isn't working right now. We should try something New and novel that hasn't been done before just to do anything different. Yeah, the the drugs obviously have changed from opioids when governor shulman gave That his remarks in the state of the state Um number of years ago Um, it was a different If it was a different opioid at that point and now we have fentanyl Um, and we have other substances that are highly highly addictive And uh and are different than what we're dealing with before so we have to To we we have to adapt to that, but I still don't believe that allowing for The safe injection uh is the is a way to counter that The judiciary committee in the house, uh, they've been tackling retail theft also, eventually more resources for the judiciary to To expedite justice. I think is how they framed it We're public safety commissioner this morning told them that public safety and accountability Is is a piece of the puzzle that that she sees that's missing. I mean, what's your assessment of? You know where the legislature is in the public safety conversation right now Well, specifically would you like to see? Well, again, I'm encouraged and whatever our Public safety commissioner had testified on that is us And so she was speaking for the administration at that point And we um, as I said my state of the state, we have to be honest About what we've done in the past and and if it's not working we should reflect And do something different and and again, I I was part of that I signed some legislation that I'm not sure Was the right approach now, uh, so We just have to be honest with ourselves and uh and put into place measures that we think Will keep the public safe and and I again, I I am encouraged to have the judiciary committees taking this up And we'll hopefully get to a point where like we are with with housing Where we can come up with common sense solutions that protect the public What does that look like mail reform Editions of release and all the above. Yeah, there's no one single element that That I'm looking at it's it's the accountability It's it's about some of the measures that we put into place over the last few years that aren't working And so we just need to reflect on that and come up with something that will work So last year the senate pastor s a team, which is about abandon all types of flavor tobacco flavor babes things of those nature and House human services and picked it up had testimony from dr. Lee this morning more tomorrow throughout the week Just wondering what your thoughts would be on that. Yeah, again. I uh I don't I don't appreciate smoking myself I think it is a tremendous health risk and something that we can we can counter in many many different ways I'm not sure That the That the flavored tobacco products are Going to be the solution either I'm not sure that that is what gets people Addicted to tobacco But but again if it's if it's something the legislature Moves and and puts on my desk and it was and it's Within the parameters of what we're thinking I would probably sign it But it's not something that I think is we should spend a tremendous amount of time on I think there are other issues that I'm much more concerned about like edibles in terms of cannabis and That's that's something that's real. It's growing. It's building and I'm very concerned about that You can affirm that stakes troopers at the same johnsbury erics were placed on administrative leave and are facing an internal investigation I I'm aware of that But I would probably refer to the commissioner on on the details, but it is an internal investigation I I don't know exactly what it is But but I know that they saw an issue and they decided to put them on leave and and investigate it In an abuse prevention order for survivors to include coercive and controlling behavior The intent is supposed to be to help I've done separate from their partners before it turns physically abusive Do you have thoughts? I'm not aware of exactly what that does But here's what I do know. I domestic violence domestic abuse is rising And we need to find ways to counter that as well and that's disturbing So I will um, I will get with my team and if it moves forward Take a look and see whether we can support it or not. Maybe we are But I haven't I haven't spoken to our department of public safety or my general counsel on this I know any house judiciary some of the no votes were to get to A concern over Again, I know the judiciary system is compromised challenged at this point in time, but um at the same time it's hard to To utilize that as a reason to not provide for the safety of those situations While the compensation is back on the table It's a little water down from from last year's it doesn't have the health care benefits Have you have you seen the proposal? I know you were I have not My feelings haven't changed on that either, but I have not seen the new bill There's also actually separate from the bill's senator to legislator compensation There is one bill after the introduction of Kosti Reduce your salary and those administrators to the level of We'll see where that bill goes and And if they decide they have the super majority if they decide to pass that And they have the power to do so We'll We'll live with it. What do you make of the principle? Um, it sounds like retribution and You know my opposition to their pay raise A couple I'm getting a few days into the session, but you know the second year of the By any and really when things really start moving.  You know this this session so far with the the super majority and with the legislative leaders Um, it's I think it's cordial. Um, I I treat everyone with respect and civility We have our differences. We may not all agree on every issue But but again, I respect their work and and again seeing All the the legislators who are on board with this housing initiative Gives me great hope We'll go to the phones. I think there were a couple off topics there We'll start with Tim McQuiston from our business magazine Tim McQuiston from our business magazine We believe I'm pretty sure that's in the Can you You picked that I'm pretty sure that's uh in the BAA And uh, it's something the attorney general The attorney general We're getting feedback from you When you're listening So Um, I think that's a better question for the attorney general, but from my standpoint, uh I'm not sure that it would be successful Okay, that's all I have and no Chris Thank you all very much


Appalachian Wireless has a plan to make your life simpler. It's called forward pay. No contract, no credit check, no problem. Plans start at $19.99 a month and include unlimited talk and text or ticket to the max with unlimited data plus for only $89.99, which has 50 gig of high-speed data because we are you. We are Appalachian Wireless. The Pike County Public Library will be hosting Professor of Film and Media Arts, Andrew Reed, for a presentation on the history of horror films on Thursday, October 6th. I myself am a long-standing fan of horror films. Ironically, I grew up watching most of them censored on AMC. I had very protective parents that would let me watch stuff, but it was always age-appropriate. So I had to wait till I was 13 to watch a PG-13 movie. So if something was rated R, but it was on cable television during the day, it was censored. So I grew up getting to watch some of the classic horror films. I really enjoyed a lot of what was on AMC. With Halloween just around the corner, it is the season for scaring. With that comes a showing of many new and old horror films. Horror films are popular for different reasons. I think with the general public, you have a love of horror because part of us likes to be scared because it helps us, I think, cope with our own more realistic fears more easily. The history of horror films presentation will be held at the Pike County Public Library on Lee Avenue on Thursday, October 6th at 5.30 PM. Anyone interested in furthering their study of film can contact Andrew Reed at andrewreadatupike.edu For Mountain Top News, I'm Kelsey Dean.


Thanks for joining. This is an AMA, stands for Ask Me Anything, and I especially appreciate hard questions on things that are not going well, culture, pay, team composition, things like that. Clement, thanks for starting us off, Clement. How did I get connected with my current mentor? There's a couple of people that I learned from. We have our investors, especially Bruce and Vili, the A and B round investors, because they work at a venture capital firm and they have a board seat. They spend a lot of time with us. Then there's advisors, advisors to the companies, so that's Luke Canes, ex-CEO of Puppet. There's Zach Holman, prolific programmer, and there's a third one, Zach Erlacher, an ex-CEO of Zendesk and Duo Security. But probably the most important one is my CEO coach. His name is John Ham, and he got introduced to me, I think, to Bruce, and he's been a CEO himself. Jim asks, what are you most excited for for the year, either personal or business? The personal thing already happened. We moved to a better place. I'm excited about that. We just had a housewarming party for people living in the Bay Area yesterday evening, so that was fun. But business-wise, I'm really excited about completing our vision of not just making a tool for developers, but also making something for dev and ops. Let me share my screen. If you look here, all the ones in bold are things we're adding to GitLab this year. I think we're on track. We have added about half of these, slightly less, but the year is not half as well. I think it's so... We stumble across a secret. It's a secret not in the sense that we don't tell anyone, but it's a secret in the sense that people won't believe us. The secret is that it's so much better to have a single application for all the steps in the DevOps lifecycle, all the way from managing to monitoring and securing. We didn't believe it. Camille had to first convince Dimitri that it was better to integrate GitLab CI with GitLab, and then they had to convince me, and we both reluctantly agreed, and then it turned out that it's a lot better to have your CI integrated, and we thought we could get all the benefits with just a really great API integration, but it turns out, if it's a single application, you're able to work from one interface, you're able to message back and forth. You don't have to pass credentials around. You don't need another login, or you don't need another session to set up. It's just better, and I think that's our secret. That's what makes GitLab unique, and now being able to do that across more parts of the lifecycle is really amazing. We're trying to kind of write down a couple of like, what are the emergent benefits of a single application? And there's probably a hundred, but there's a lot of things that just become easier, post a link in the chat. So that's what I'm very excited about. Then of course, I'm also excited about where the business is going. Matt is visiting San Francisco from Colorado, and he was at housewarming yesterday, and me and Michael McBride were talking. We're going from a feature cell to now we were talking to a, he visited a potential customer, and he's like, well, yes, they were interested in GitLab almost to save money, but now the discussion is going about, okay, well, how important is security to you? How important is it to speed up your DevOps cycle time? And for them, it takes about six weeks for them to release something. If they can cut that down to two weeks, it would mean a kind of a major improvement to their business. They'd be able to launch much faster, get new ideas out faster, get things tested faster, and they could kind of outmaneuver the competition. So I think us, instead of selling, hey, we're GitLab, we're selling version control, we're now moving to, hey, we're GitLab, we're selling complete DevOps, we're now moving into, hey, we're GitLab, we're selling concurrent DevOps, we're selling you a 200% faster DevOps cycle. And that's interesting, because suddenly you are solving a business problem. Like, what more, like, if you tell executives like, hey, you now have to wait six weeks for something to get done, it could be reduced to two weeks. How would that, what would that do for your business? And most of the time, the answer is a resounding, wow, that would be awesome. We'd be able to generate more revenue that way. So I'm really excited about kind of having that conversation more, because I think we'd be helping customers more and we'd be able to generate more revenue for ourselves too. So Clemente asks about a compensation discussion. Yeah, I haven't followed the whole discussion. I see, I can, I understand what's in the description, I've seen the issue, but I haven't read the whole friend. I think in general, there's all kinds of ways to kind of improve, improve kind of our ability to attract and retain great people. And we have to do what's most efficient. So efficiency is one of our values. So we have to kind of balance the different things. And right now, I think, two things we can do to increase efficiency is to reach out more. I know most of the people that are currently in the company probably opted in to get lab like they, they, they, you found get lab instead of get lab finding you. I think in, in general, and that's, and that's, that's awesome. But I think in general, like for example, when we do an executive search, it's, it's with executive searches, it's like not possible to say, Hey, we're open.  And I think we'll always have a mix of kind of people that really like want to work here and that found us, but you got to recognize that most people are not aware of get lab. So we're missing out on a whole bunch of candidates that don't know about us. So actively going after people, I think it's really interesting. We've got a great story to tell. We're a very interesting company to work for. And I think we should, we should tell that story more often, just like we, we don't just rely on inbound sales. We, we have SDRs that reach out. I think for, for attracting the best people, we should also reach out. We'll have the people like most of you that joined that found us that really are interested and that joined and that should always be a healthy mix. And actually, I think we should also probably work more on employer branding. But I also think we should reach out more. So I think that's, that's a very cost efficient way to do it. Andreas asked, how did we come up with the name get lab? Mitri came up with it. He named it and he created the project a year before I even know it existed. And I think there's a common ancestor in get web. So get the program used to call or still comes with something called get web, which was a quick way to browse repositories. You could set that up on a local server. And you can say that probably get hop took inspiration from get web. And then we took inspiration from, from get web and get hop probably to come up with get lab. David asks, where I want to travel to? Yeah, I think very high on the list are Japan in general, not a specific place. Although I'd love to see Tokyo. And I'd love to go to Japan because it's a very kind of advanced civilization and culture, but very different from, from us. And, for example, the street naming, like we refer to things by, by street and number and they refer to, to locations by the building. Like, it both makes sense. It's just the opposite of what we did. And I think that's really interesting. And the other one would be Moscow. Not sure if I want to go or my, my wife Karen just really wants to go there, especially see the beautiful subway stations there. I think maybe the inverse of the subway stations in San Francisco, I live near Civic Center. If you want to Google Civic Center Bart, then on YouTube, you'll, you'll find out what I mean. Philippe, if you could go back in time and change one thing and get like, what would it be? I'd get more serious about get lab.com sooner. Now, how soon? I'm not sure, because like you have limited resources. So was it 2015, 2016, 2017? I'm not sure. But I do think right now that we shouldn't, we're not where we should be. Now, I'm very proud of the team and we're making great progress. I just was in the GCP migration call and it looks, we made like 25% progress towards the migration. So with very kind of being way understaffed, I'm very proud of the team and I like the progression now. But it's the progression is nice, but where we are is not where we should have been in this part of our life cycle. So from an investment perspective, hiring and people, it was too little too late. Kim says Summit 2019 in Japan. Kim, in Tokyo, I think an Apple cost like 10 bucks or something. Like it's, it's, it's not outrageous, but it's, it's a very expensive country. Joe asks, how much, how many hours do you sleep each night? Try to sleep eight hours, sometimes a bit more, sometimes a bit less. But that's about, we're getting, we're kind of getting that much sleep. We go to bed around 10 o'clock, probably sleeping by, by 1030 and then wake up at 630. And then within 10 minutes, we're at the elevator going down to the gym. I've, I've went to the gym every single day since we moved here. So I'm on a streak. Clement says, I noticed we changed the handbook to set a target date for the IPO. Yes, that's a, that's a, that's an interesting one. I think it's Wednesday, November 16, 2020. The fact that we made it more specific doesn't imply that it's more likely. I think what we're, what we're saying is we're going to strive towards that and we can decide at any point to kind of delay it. And that might be like most companies end up delaying it because it's, there's, there's lots of downsides and upsides to it. If you want to get an idea about that, there's a document called IPO 2020 pros and cons. Oh, let me make sure I message everyone. There you go. And there's the pros and cons. So we're not sure whether we, we do it. However, we're sure that we're going to drive towards it. So we're probably going to start kind of the, the, the, the legal process, but like the preparations for this in the fourth quarter of this year, because you kind of need two years to prep and it's going to be about a million dollars to do all the things. We could start a year later and have a year to prep, but then it gets twice as expensive. So now you need two million dollars. So it's the earlier you take a decision, like we might do it. The, the kind of the more time you have, the easier it is and the more affordable it is and the less stressful. So considering that we're going to, we're striving for it, what would be the earliest time to get out? It would be when you have a million, a hundred million dollars in recognized revenue. So that's not the same as ARR. That is kind of ARR is like your run rate or even the recurring revenue, but you kind of, it's like past revenue that you recognize. So for example, when we make a sell, like we say, Hey, it's an incremental ACV of like, so suppose we sell subscription for a million dollars, it's a million dollars incremental ACV, but we recognize that over the course of the year as like a 12th every month and we need like that recognized part, we need a hundred million of that and pulled it the stats and came like, we could probably go out four quarter of 2020. And yeah, so it's kind of late and then you want to be before Thanksgiving. So this was kind of the date and I've learned with setting a date of 2020, it made all our kind of kind of company and leadership decisions kind of easier. You say like, Oh, 2020 want to be here, you can plan back from that. And I found that planning back is a lot easier than planning forward. Just planning forward, you don't know what whether the curve is going to be like this or this. So then you're debating the whole time. If you know you've got to go here, it's much easier. So planning is much easier if you know where you want to go. So we'll keep it. You now have a specific date in the year and it makes planning for the executive team really easy that any point we can decide, okay, we might be ready to IPO, but we're not going to do it. So that's, that's the current thinking. Oh, and how the date was decided. Yeah. So as late as possible in Q4, but before Thanksgiving, what are my favorite snacks? Wow, that's nice out of the left field. So I drink a lot of Soylent because it's kind of delicious. It's like tastes like chocolate milk, which is amazing. And it's kind of healthy. And I don't have to spend a lot of time prepping food. However, reminds me for lunch now, I currently purchased a couple of gobble soups. So I'm going to try a soup today for the first time in a quarter or something. And gobble is this amazing service. I know there's a thousand meal services that gobbles really, really legit. And I eat better at home than at fancy restaurants. It's amazing. So looking forward to that. And then I don't have any other snacks in the house, because if they are there, I eat them. And we have a problem because there was a housewarming yesterday. So I think there's lots of stuff left. It's kind of healthy. So but I think I'll start nibbling on that. But very frequently I walk through the kitchen, I open all the cabinets, even though I already know there's nothing there. So I'm really glad I don't live in an office that has like M&M's or something, because I'd be gaining weight like crazy. Thanks. And feel free to ask for me to elaborate on any of the other questions if you kind of have specific suggestions. For example, on the people ops 111 issue or things like that. Clement asks, how's the search for the CMO? Yeah, it's going well.  We hired a recruiter, Steve, from 343. And I really like how they're approaching it. It's been, it was kind of the best kickoff call we ever had. Based here. So I'm excited. But the bar's super high, so it's going to take probably months to find the right person. So yeah, personality traits. Thanks, Suri. That's a great question. Let me find some relevant materials. So this is like the experience and the characteristics we're looking for. I assume you can read faster than I can tell you about it. So I'll leave it for that. Yeah, Clement asks the story like what have we learned so far about CMOS and what are we looking for in the next person? I think one of the things that I'll be, two things I'll be watching closely, kind of planning back from a target. So in reference to the IPO, I already said it's much easier to kind of know where you want to go and plan towards that than knowing where you are and then guessing kind of what direction you have to go. And I see we need someone that does that, takes where we need to go and plans back from that and knows the implications for that, for like what they got to do today, this week, this month, and where they need the organization to go. And you need that because we're tripling every year and marketing kind of needs to go even faster than that. That's quite a pace. And if you're not diligent about how fast you have to grow, then you end up behind. Another thing I'd really love to see is a very strong kind of data and ROI driven decisions. In marketing, basically where we want to end up is that we look at LTV versus CAC per channel and then do investments based on that. Let me try to unpack that. So LTV is lifetime value. So with that, you look at not just what you the incremental ACV you get from a customer in the initial deal, but you look at like, how long are they going to be a customer? How much net retention is there going to be? How much extra are they going to spend with us? Are they because they could move to a higher tier or they add more users? And then the CAC is customer acquisition costs. So how much did it cost us to acquire? You could imagine you spend 100,000 bucks to acquire two customers. And both of them spend to have an initial order of $200,000. Great. Like your LTV-CAC ratio is two. Like you spend half to acquire them, what you get in the first year. What you want to get to is know how much they're going to be over time. If one of those customers you sold like to every user in that company and at the highest tier, and you got a one is a much bigger company where you just have an initial entrance, but there's so much room for expansion and that expansion actually probably will happen. That is a much better investment. Now you want to attribute that to the different channels and campaigns you're running. So know what is working. Is it content marketing that brought them in? Is it the Alba marketing that brought them in? Is it the analyst relations that brought them in? That's super hard to figure out, but it's very worthwhile because if you know what bought someone in, you can adequately kind of load those costs and you can see, oh, we're going to invest more here and less here or vice versa. Dan says, look, we tell customers they can release more often. Do we have a time frame for releasing more frequently on goodlot.com? It's improving, Dan. So it used to be that we did no release candidates. That's a long time ago. Then we did a few release candidates. I think the trend is more and more release candidates. We'll keep upping that to not just release candidates, but just making sure every single feature that gets merged into master gets released separately. Now, right now, we're still using our omnibus packages to release and we kind of have to build a new package for every single thing we do. We want to move off of that and towards cloud-native charts where we're using Kubernetes and it's much easier to do deployments, much easier to do canaries where you only send a certain part of your traffic to the new release. So we need better tooling and we're working on that. But we're not, as said before, with goodlot.com. We're not where we need to be, but the team is making progress towards that.


My fellow Americans, permit me to start today by wishing you and your families a happy and prosperous 1986. As we begin this year, we can be grateful that America is at peace, that our economy is growing, and that throughout the land there's a renewed sense of confidence in America and our future. I'd like to speak to you today about two vital aspects of foreign policy, our relations with our neighbors, Mexico and Canada. Right yesterday I traveled to Mexicali, Mexico to meet President de la Madrid. This was our fourth meeting since his election, and my seventh with a Mexican president since my own election in 1980. Today, relations between the United States and Mexico are good. There's no clearer proof than our cooperation in rescue efforts after an earthquake struck Mexico City last September. And my talks yesterday with President de la Madrid were marked by an era of friendship. We've made progress in a number of areas which concern our two nations directly, including the improvement of Mexican American bridges and border crossings and the expansion of trade between our two nations. We paid particular attention to the fight against illegal drugs, both drug production and smuggling. In the past, our cooperation in this effort has helped stem the flow of narcotics into the United States, but in recent months drug smuggling has been picking up. Well, President de la Madrid and I have agreed to redouble our efforts to bring this illegal trade, this trafficking in the warping and destruction of human life, to an end. We're of one mind about the need to eliminate drug crops, to provide heavy patrols on the border, and to step up the prosecution of those who deal in illegal narcotics. Both Mexican and American officials have given their lives in the battle against illegal drugs. With the sake of those brave men, and every young person whose life is at stake, we must all and will continue the fight until victory is won. In the international field, President de la Madrid and I expressed our respective viewpoints, notably on the problems of Nicaragua and other countries in Central America. President de la Madrid stressed that the conflicts in Central America have in many cases arisen from social and economic injustices. Well, for my part, I agreed that the nations of Central America have for many years been beset by poverty, and I pointed out that the United States is currently providing some $1.2 billion a year to the region in economic aid, but I felt bound to add something else, something crucial. The answer to Central America's problems is political and economic freedom, not Soviet tanks and ruthless regimes like the Communist dictatorship in Nicaragua that wages war against its own people. And this is why the United States will continue to support those fighting for freedom and democracy in Nicaragua. Permit me to turn now to Canada, our neighbor to the north. Last March I traveled to Quebec City to meet Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. The Prime Minister and I agreed that relations between our two countries are excellent. Canada and the United States maintain the largest trade between any two nations on earth. We cooperate in the defense of North America and our partners in the NATO alliance. We share a tradition of democracy and political stability and a firm commitment to economic growth. We're not only friends and neighbors, we're cousins. Since our March meeting, the Prime Minister and I have worked to improve our relations still further. Already, we've committed ourselves to joint efforts in defense, the environment and space. With regard to trade, I've informed the Congress that I want to begin negotiations with Canada on an agreement of historic significance to both countries. Our goal is to promote free and open economic competition and to reduce those few barriers to our trade that still remain. When Prime Minister Mulroney visits Washington this March, I believe the mid-1980s will already have taken shape as the most productive period in the long history of Canadian American friendship. During my 1980 campaign for office, I called for a North American accord, a renewed spirit of friendship and cooperation between the United States, Mexico and Canada, the three great nations which share this continent. I was delighted to see that spirit so much in evidence yesterday in Mexicali. And I'm confident that this spirit of friendship among our three countries will mark 1986 and the years beyond. Until next week, thanks for listening and God bless you.


Yes, so we can continue. Okay, thanks Robert for allowing me to be here and hi everyone, I'm Tuan from Brave Beats. It's my company. I'm one of three co-founders at this company, also some kind of startups. And so today we will talk about WhoCommerce and especially WhoCommerce ecosystem and what's around it. So I'll start with who knows about WhoCommerce, hurt or use, okay you're all familiar. Okay I won't talk more about what's WhoCommerce about but I will update you with latest news about WhoCommerce firstly. So firstly I would like to mention that the company Automatic, someone maybe already know, someone not yet. So Automatic is the company behind WordPress system and so in May last year they officially acquired WhoZeams.com. The team which developed WhoCommerce system, it was in the last year. And so actually WhoCommerce is controlled or is belonging to Automatic actually. So just to let you know about that. And so next is, this is the official information on both blogs on WhoZeams.com, also this information is available. And so it's officially. And so from that time until now the team WhoZeams, they work it closely with the new workflow of Automatic. And so now they are quite, they are working quite closely. But before that Automatic, they got the funding with 160 million dollars. So actually they got this funding early in May last year and after they got funding they acquired Automatic, I just misconcept with that. And so now WhoCommerce is belonging to Automatic company. And with the progress, I would like to share you with this one great website. It's called buildwith.com. This website it's like a big database. They have a crawler around the web and based on WhoCommerce, you can see that the WhoCommerce statistic. You can see there is the three graph, red one, blue one and green one. Which means that red one is for websites is like top one million. It means that website with low traffic, blue one with some kind of average traffic and with green one is about top 10k traffic. Which means that WhoCommerce is designed for small businesses, for small business especially. Big business like enterprises, they won't use WhoCommerce. Instead of that they will use like Magento system and other system for enterprises. So it's clear that WhoCommerce is for small businesses. First with that one. Next one is about Google Trends. It's the second things I would like to share with you. Let's check the real result. In this graph, okay, I use it WhoCommerce, Shopify, Magento, OpenCar and PrestoShop. The blue one is WhoCommerce. And you can see it's grown from 2011 and from that time until now it's still growing. And after equations of automatic companies it will I think grow more rapidly. The yellow line you see this is Magento. Magento is quite popular in the past. You can see it started actually from 2007-08. But the growth of WhoCommerce is quite quick and it's competing with Shopify system. Shopify system, does anyone know about Shopify? Okay, Shopify is like software as a service system which allows you to create online store but you pay subscription monthly. It's the big difference between WhoCommerce. WhoCommerce is standalone system based on WordPress. You can install and use it forever for free. But Shopify is commercial system like Magento, OpenCar, other system. So an important information here is WhoCommerce reached 1 million active downloads. So you can see on WordPress.org this number is increasing. This peak is the release of new version of WhoCommerce. So from each new release you can see the average daily download number is increasing. And right now it's about 1 plus million. It means that 1 plus million online stores around the world. Quite impressive. Okay, and finally just two more updates, yes, two more updates about ecosystem. So the last year was the first WhoCommerce conference organized in United States of America. It was about 250 people gathered in November last year and networking and sharing sessions about WhoCommerce. And the last information is about WhoCommerce partnered with SlideKick. SlideKick is the tutorial service that it was installed in the WhoCommerce. And so with SlideKick.pro the user shop owners can learn WhoCommerce much more easily. It's like WhoCommerce wall troops. It means that it will guide you from step to step. And so it's a great news because it's all for us and users to know WhoCommerce better. Okay, for now let's move on with what is WhoCommerce system. From research I see that it consists of following components like community, ZIMs, providers, plugins, learning tutorials, services and WhoCommerce showcase. We let's have a talk with the community. What do you think that with social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhoCommerce is available is popular in which social channel. Part of the community is on Facebook or on Twitter. Any idea? I mean that where WhoCommerce community is engaged with each other in which social channel. Slack, Facebook, Twitter. So actually I made a few research with that and found that guys are quite active in work camps, it's offline meetups at the conferences. But with social media I found that there's interesting information about Facebook groups. So maybe some of you know about Advanced WordPress group. It's quite popular, it's most popular WordPress group on the Facebook. But in spite of that there is the Advanced WhoCommerce group. And so it's also very, very popular. It's the administrator of that group is Brett Griffin, American. And so he co-founded this group. And also there is other group like WhoCommerce Help and Share. I mostly like WhoCommerce Help and Share because when you just start with WhoCommerce you have a lot of questions. And you can post questions here and people engaged will try to help you and recommend appropriate solutions. Maybe it's related to ZIMs or plugins. So there are two main groups, Advanced WhoCommerce. Right now it's about more than 4K members. And WhoCommerce Help and Share, a quite great group with 3K members. Moreover, in Google communities, there are on Google plus communities too. And so you can see that numbers. This article actually was written a few months ago but now I think its members are more. So Facebook is quite active and so if you want to socialize and get a lot of information about WhoCommerce you can go to Facebook groups and you can get a lot of value from that group. And also next one is about Influencer, I would like to mention here. I call, we call it 13 WhoCommerce Ninjas. You should know about it. It's infographic so you can easily, oops, some buggy. So there are some guys, popular like Marforester, Magnus, they are both co-founders. The guy Mike Jolly, this one, he actually one of core developers of WhoCommerce, Bryce Adams, they all have developers and supporters and quite active community members. And next, I would like to tell about WhoComference 2016. So we will be in United States, it's about in April, 6th and 8th April in Austin, Texas. So if you are interested in WhoCommerce, it's good to subscribe and get latest information about WhoCommerce conference. The first WhoCommerce conference was a great success with Woozy and Steam. If you are interested in Recap, in important information from WhoCommerce conference 2015, there are two links which you can find and get more details like from this link I found with WPTavern.com. By the way, this link, this, how we can say, presentation I will share with our Facebook group. So by the end, I will post this link to our Facebook group. So all you can get to know more details about information here. Let's say in WPTavern, he's a quite active WordPress journalist, I think and have a lot of information here Recap it here. So it was about the community. Next is about the ZIM story. I work a lot with WooCommerce ZIMs and so I think there, let's say with WooCommerce ZIM, if you want to find appropriate ZIM for WooCommerce, there are three kinds of categories. You can move on to official WooZIMs.com website and in categories ZIMs, you can find a lot of WooCommerce ZIMs. The main ZIM there is storefront which is released free. You can download free and set up online store absolutely at no cost. The second category, I would like to mention it's three party developers. It's independent developers who have own domain website and release and build, design and create WooCommerce ZIMs. The third category I would like to mention is about marketplaces and directories. Let's move on with three party providers. In that category, I found that there are three types of WooCommerce ZIMs providers. Let's say the first one is specially for WooCommerce. It means that these guys, they focus only on WooCommerce ZIMs. Let's say commerce gurus guys, they distribute on ZIMForest.net in beta and so by looking at portfolio, you can find that all their ZIMs are mostly related to WooCommerce. So you can find appropriate ZIM for your business. The second one, I noticed that some guys which started the business from JUMLA content management system, they expanded to WordPress too and they also released some ZIMs for WooCommerce. So it's some kind of between JUMLA and WordPress. The third type is e-commerce oriented guys. Let's say with template Mela. You can see that they also distribute on ZIMForest again. As you can see, they are oriented in e-commerce system. The same design, let's say Shine PrestaShop Responsive Theme and Shine OpenCut Responsive Theme. It means that the design actually is the same, but they convert it to different content management system. And so, let's say if you want to find e-commerce system and let's say you sold a beautiful design on OpenCut system, but you want the same design for WooCommerce, these guys probably have for you. As you can see, let's say Fashion Fist, there are PrestaShop version and there is WooCommerce Shop version. So actually there is the plenty choice of WooCommerce ZIM. Let's move with third category, marketplaces and directories. Officially, WordPress.org, they have ZIMs which you can filter based on WooCommerce factor. And so there's a lot more than 200 ZIMs available for WooCommerce. And all these ZIMs are free, but please take into account that free ZIM is, they are free, it's cool, but the support is limited or in some way it's not good for long term. Let's say developers just built these free ZIMs for just proof that they have a good knowledge of code quality or they just want to in some way be featured on WordPress.org. But if you are serious about business, I recommend you start with premium ZIMs. And in spite of WordPress category, you can find on ZIMforest.net as I showed you before on CreativeMarket.com, Modular ZIMs and Template Monsters. All these marketplace, let's say Modular ZIMs, they have WooCommerce compatible ZIMs. And so again you can choose any WooCommerce ZIMs that suit your needs. Right now there are plenty of choice for WooCommerce ZIM. One interesting factor with WooCommerce trends, I closely watch on InVanto and especially ZIMforest.net and noticed that they push, they organize a lot of contests. At least there are two contests related to e-commerce and WooCommerce. The first one was with this price, this was the contest for ZIMforest authors with building the best WooCommerce shopfront ZIM. They announced it in quite a long time ago. It was, let's see, it was, I remember it was in summer, oh, five months ago, yeah, five months ago into summer. And after this contest, a lot of authors submitted WooCommerce ZIMs and so they have a big collection of WooCommerce ZIMs. And the next one, they decided to just open a new contest about two months ago with also with e-commerce theme. But the difference here is they want to focus on single product, like say GoPro.com or Fitbit.com. It means that they focus on e-commerce on the sides that sell only one type of product. In this example is GoPro camera. Okay, moving forward and just a few notes that from the category search, you can see that there are a lot of ZIMs. It's about more than 200 WooCommerce ZIMs only on ZIMforest.net. Yes, with 200 of WooCommerce ZIMs. And next is about extension story. As you know, for setting up the shop, the ZIM is only the design part. But the next part is about the functionality and especially with, let's say, with payment get away, with shipping, with marketing. And so, there are two great places where you can find appropriate plugins WooCommerce. The first one is about Codecanyon. It's the child marketplace of InVanto. It means that the same owner of ZIMforest. And the second one you can find on WooZims.com in category plugins. The difference here is interesting. The price on the official website is a little bit higher, but I believe the quality a little bit, it's better than on Codecanyon. On Codecanyon there are a lot of small teams and freelancers from around the world. But the code quality is well-controlled on WooZims.com. So let's say, if you want to get a quality product, you can move to WooZims.com plugins directory first. And if there is the case that you cannot find the plugins that you need, you can, let's say, check Codecanyon. On Codecanyon there are a lot of WooCommerce plugins. Right now it's about more than 500, yeah, 100 plugins extensions. Oops. It's my mistake. And so, and this is the official category of WooCommerce plugins. So two marketplace, WooZims or Codecanyon. But in spite of marketplaces you can find WooCommerce plugins from two guys. First is Skyverge. These guys are from UK and plugins are quite good. You can find, I think, for any niches, for any WooCommerce niches plugins. The same story for your inspirationalthemes.com. These guys have been on the market a pretty long time. These guys are good from my point of view that they always have the free edition. It means that you can try free edition, make sure that this plugin works well. And in premium versions there's the difference in the features.   This is the download access. It's directly from WordPress.org. It means that all free editions are available on WordPress.org repository. It's your inspirationalthemes.com. And a lot of small independent developers and teams around the world, which they have websites, separate domain, but about the quality of the plugin need to consider and need to be careful. Better to move with trusted companies who have been on the market for a long time. Almost the next is about learning and tutorials. It's also the part of ecosystem. Imagine WooCommerce. What's behind WooCommerce? It's ZIMS plugins. WooZIMS also call it like extensions. And now we move to learning and tutorials. Because for someone, WooCommerce might be a complex system, but for all other people, it might be easy. But these guys exist. They are portal press guys. They are from UK, too. They have been writing WooCommerce tutorials for a long time, released update versions. And so their tutorials are quite good, easy to understand, and it's worth money. The second guy I would like to mention is about BobWP. He is the veteran in WordPress community, actually. And so he also have the category about WooCommerce tutorials. You can find a lot of useful tutorials from Bob Dan, quite popular guy in WordPress community. Another way you can learn WooCommerce is about Udemy. I think most people heard about Udemy. They also have a course about WooCommerce so you can actually learn WooCommerce easily. So there's plenty of resources to learn. Of your show documentation is available on Woozims.com as well. From the last time I talked with community manager of Woozims and they finally released a series of videos educating you. It's absolutely free. You can start learning WooCommerce and setting up the show. In spite of tutorials there is the fourth component in the ecosystem WooCommerce. It's about services. The first one, the first guy I would like to mention is about WooGuru. WooGuru, the things that I like in this company is that, let's say you have the WooCommerce store, you already configured it and in some way you need a little bit customization of your shop. So these guys provide WooCommerce support. And let's say you want to customize CSS or add functionality, update WooCommerce, etc. You can use their service. These guys are global and so you pay by subscriptions. And so it's good because we want to solve the problem and WooGuru is the solution for our problem. And the guys to mention is Codable.com. It's actually the company where you can outsource your WooCommerce project, WordPress project in general. In Codable.com you can also find WooCommerce experts to fix the problem. And the third things I would like to mention is about Woo experts. These guys are verified guys by Woozim's team. So let's say you want to build customized WooCommerce websites. You can find these guys, you can find the company which built this website. Let's say everything or WooCommerce development. You can filter by the country where you would like to order the service. So it's quite convenient. So I see that the ecosystem is growing and it's quite popular. And the last one I would like to mention is about the showcase. For those who are new to WooCommerce you can visit showcase section and see real examples of shops. With WooCommerce you can build a lot, a different kind of system from let's say Espresso public is in coffee industry or you can build the shop, Mirhan dies, you can sell cups like Dojo and etc. There are a lot of interesting examples. I think that's all for now because the time is limited and hope this information is cool for you. Thank you. Thank you. Do you have client websites where they actually use WooCommerce that you can just see through or something? Client's website right now. What did you guys build? Right now we are building, it's something off presentation but just a few words. Right now our building Nitro is multi niche e-commerce centric WooCommerce theme. It's actually under beta stage, there are no live clients yet, we are doing some closed beta, private beta testing with this. So just imagine is one WooCommerce theme but fit all these niches. So which one theme you can actually build any stores. So that's the main purpose of Nitro. It's really customizable, different layouts, header builders. Of course in our generation it must be responsive on any devices, mobile, iPad or just desktop and a lot of interesting things. But I think it will be released really soon in December or January. But yeah, it's the product. But it's about WooRockets, today it's about WooCommerce mostly. Any questions? Yeah. Okay, question does WooCommerce handle different currency? Handling different currency. Do you mean that plugins that can handle it or? Payments. Payments, okay great. Great questions. With this I have found that on extensions directory they have special sections with payment gateways. Yes. And so it's different actually. Let's say in United States it's quite popular with PayPal or Stripe. In Vietnam there is PayPal available and also CyberSource. So actually when setting up payment gateway for WooCommerce it's not really hard. And a lot of payment gateways are available. Let's say based on WooRockets case our main customer are agency and freelancer in United States. And they mostly use PayPal and Stripe.com for accepting payment gateway. So payment gateways are customizable. As you can see there's also a lot of payment gatesway from different providers like AutoRise.net, WorldPay, Braintree or PayPal also available. So those plugins they are free available and they are commercial pro. You know when we work it on Nitro WooCommerce theme we also try to solve the problem with payment gateway and especially with Stripe.com. On this page you can see that the price is $79. But to be honest you can try to search on WordPress.org directory firstly. Because on that directory you also can find payment gateways that connect API of Stripe and WooCommerce system. Actually it's the same but the difference here is for $79 you also pay for support. So let's say if you have the problem when setting up payment gateway let's say Stripe.com with your WooCommerce store. So guys from this plugin will help you. But from WordPress directory I'm not sure. It depends on directory because plugin is free so you still have to pay maybe. I think the question was more on multi-currency. Multi-currency. Okay multi-currency. I saw some store shipping methods. Okay it's not available here. However we can try to find. Is he asking about exacting payment in multiple currencies? Yeah I think the question was more on accepting payment. That depends upon the gateway right? That's correct. Payout is usually in the loop currency. Yes that's correct. Adding the price for different currencies in a single currency. Okay so basically displaying currency and doing real-time conversion. Either displaying currency manually and putting the currency or doing the automatic conversion. By default WooCommerce support. By default WooCommerce support but one currency. But if you want let's say switch currency you have to install additional plugin. In the past I did a search but sorry I don't remember exactly name. But I will do a search and post in Facebook group. Because I faced up with similar problem. I have a question on capabilities like in your experience how far we can stretch WooCommerce almost before it becomes like okay you need more to imagine or something more. About scalability. You know I have talked with local Vietnamese developers. And they also built the shops for local merchandise. And so when the number of SKU items reach about 10,000 or maybe more.  The only solution for now is about investing money in server. In order to handle more items in WooCommerce. That's actually that's why most people small business use WooCommerce. But big guys they will use more e-commerce system. But the only solution for now is investing server in hosting. Is it painful to modify or design the WooCommerce team? Actually it's not painful because let's say you can buy the original team. After that you create a child team. And so you make customization based on child team. And so from footer updates your changes will be saved. What if you wanted to make one from scratch? I think there is... do you mean from code scratch? From the beginning no, just basic templates. From basic template? When I worked with my developer team. So actually they base it mostly on API of WooCommerce. And so let's say from advanced point of view of developer you can build WooCommerce team from scratch. It's not really hard. But it's possible absolutely. Because API is quite well explained. Because WooCommerce, who seems they have a special portal for developers. Where they describe in details each elements of WooCommerce. And they also have a special Twitter developer channel for WooCommerce. Are the WooCommerce custom post types exposed by the WordPress API? To be honest I'm not the techie. And these questions I can answer you after I have to talk with my development team. I'm mostly involved in research. And the research and understanding the community around it. So let's move on to the next one.


And this is my channel, Laura's Little Library. So today is a very exciting video for me because this is my, I hit 100 subscribers. Let's chat and answer questions and do other slightly bookish things. So yeah, I, about a week ago, maybe a little bit more, I recently reached 100 subscribers. Thank you all so much for subscribing to the channel and talking with me about all things bookish and watching my videos and whatnot, engagement, etc. and so forth. So I thought I would answer some questions. I did a little poll on my Instagram and if you don't follow me on Instagram, I do post pretty regularly on there my bookish updates. My handle is in the description along with all my other bookish themed social medias. So feel free to follow me there as well. So I thought I'd answer some questions and also just kind of give a little background because I gained a lot of subscribers recently, but I've actually been on YouTube for a decently long amount of time. So I started YouTube almost two and a half years ago, but I was not posting very regularly. I was, it was more posting maybe once a month or if you can hear my tortoise in the background crashing against his cage, I'm sorry. He's crashing against a little shaded area anyway, where was I? But yeah, I wasn't posting very regularly and I was still kind of figuring out my content a little bit and just exactly how to make videos and whatnot. I didn't start posting regularly weekly until earlier this year. So my videos did not mesh with the algorithm well and they still don't, but you know what, that's okay. I'm having fun anyway. I have always posted bookish content. I love reading and I also love writing, but I haven't talked about that a lot on my channel just because I've been prioritizing reading so much more, but with NanoRemo coming up, I hope to do some writing. I am very much at the point in my life where I am a college student. So I kind of move around a lot of almost every year we move departments and my bookshelves have been slowly, very slowly growing because I am initially from Michigan, but I'm living in Minnesota, but I want to move back to Michigan when we finish school. So I don't want to get my, get, I don't want my bookshelves to get too big before we have to drive 10 hours and permanently move there, but that's why it's my little library. Also that reminds me, fun fact about my channel, if you are new and you have seen only or mostly my recent videos, I actually used to have a different YouTube channel name. I used to be called a reading warrior and that was fun and I liked it, but I just it got a little confusing and it just didn't quite pan out the way I had hoped it to.  But yeah, I've done a lot of growth since then which has been really awesome, but yeah, I mean that's pretty much the basics of my channel. Not very interesting I know, but I just kind of wanted this to be a sit down, chit chat, kind of chill, vibe with me video. So I'm going to answer some of the questions that y'all have asked. The first one being, how long does it take you to read an average length book? So I'm going to say an average length book is probably 300 to 400 pages because I do, I do read a lot of fantasy, but I have been branching out into different genres lately and so those have varied. So I'm going to say it's three to 400 pages and this question is a tricky one because if I am sitting and physically reading the book, it could take me like four or five hours just in general to sit and read because I, so I did time myself actually once because I was very curious. I read about a page a minute. I'm not a particularly fast reader, but I'm not exactly slow either. The issue is I am a slow reader, but I have the terrible habit of skimming paragraphs or even just skipping paragraphs if there's no dialogue, like descriptions and movements. If it's not interesting, if I'm not captured in the book, I will just skip over until I get to the next set of dialogue. So I'm trying to slow down my reading a little bit just so I can actually read everything. But if I'm listening to an audiobook, which is probably, it used to be half of my reading and I think at the moment it's majority of my reading just because I am, I have been pretty busy lately. So the only way I can read is with an audiobook. I listened to my audiobooks on two times speed. So it really depends on how long the audiobook is. So if it's a, if it's a 10 hour audiobook, I listened to it in five hours. All right. The second question is what's the one thing you hate most in books? And I hate most in books are specific tropes.  Like I don't care most of the time about miscommunication if, if, unless there is an actual valid reason which most of the time there is not, I am, I get so bothered by the miscommunication and it upsets me so much and it frustrates me to a point I will put down the book. I just can't. So miscommunication and love triangles are the two things I hate most in books. I can't do it. What is your favorite genre to read? Good question. Uh, I think my favorite genre to read is probably fantasy. I have, fantasy has kind of always been my favorite genre since I started reading like way back in elementary middle school since I actually started to like to read. I always read fantasy, always, always, always. But more specifically I love reading mythology based fantasy I have found. I enjoy that quite a bit and I really enjoy fantasy books with good world building as well as like characters, but if it's got a great magic system or great world building then there we go. I am set. Alright, next question, what genre do you want to read more of? I want to read more of historical fiction. I know I like historical fiction, but for some reason I get so bored listening to other people's recommendations for historical fiction and then I just never find historical fiction that I want to read, but the reason why that is though is that because so much historical fiction is solely World War II. And that's great, but there's a lot more fiction out in historical fiction than out there that's not World War II. And I have a hard time finding that and then also finding books that I like. So I want to read more historical fiction. I have historical fiction on my TBR so I have a place to start, but I really do need to like put more effort into researching authors and series and finding historical fiction that I would actually enjoy to read. And then the last question is what are some of my other hobbies that I do other than reading and writing? I am, so like I said, I do like writing. I am currently working on a writing project. Initially it was a, it is a manuscript that I would like to get published, but it was first for my major capstone, then that I was going to get published afterwards, but now because of school switching and transferring and all kinds of messy life things, I may not be able to do that anymore, but because I've already started the manuscript, I really want to see it through. The only thing I will say is that it is based with Irish mythology because that is a huge passion of mine that I have. Otherwise I love crocheting. I haven't done that in a while, but I've recently been getting back into it and I watch a lot of TV, which is not great for reading. I recently picked up Irish dancing at a local pub and I love it. So yeah, those are kind of the other things that I do with my life when I'm not working. Oh, I guess another hobby is baking, but I also do that for my job. So I do it at home, therefore it's a hobby, but I kind of use the skills that I gain at work, so. Alright, well thank you all so much for watching. So this video was kind of short and not like book recommendations or reviews or anything like that, but I just wanted to celebrate and kind of hope to get to know you guys in the comments, but also allow you to get to know me a little bit more through your questions. I've had a lot of fun and so yeah, thank you so much for allowing me to get up to 100 subscribers. I loved meeting you all and communicating with you and I would love to continue that going forward. And please, if you haven't subscribed already, feel free to do so. I upload every week. I might change around what days I upload just because my work schedule might be changing, but I would like to continue posting twice a week if I can, and I have lots of exciting content ideas, so I think I will be able to continue posting twice a week. So hit the bell to be notified when I do post. But until I see you all in the next video, I wish you happy reading.