This is Coach Mack. Welcome to Beneath the Surface powered by Microsoft Surface. Today we are going to look at two major contributors offensively to the huge Titans win at Houston that won the AFC South Championship for the Tennessee Titans. First play we're gonna look at. First and 10. Five man front. Now you've got eight people in the box. Play action pass. Watch Ryan Tannehill drop back. Beautiful beautiful protection and he throws to AJ Brown who had a monster day. Went over a thousand yards from the season. Ryan Tannehill stands in there strong in the pocket. Takes a hit as he delivers it. AJ Brown strong hands catch. Gets up limping a little bit but don't worry he will be back to put together a marvelous day against the Houston Texans. Now what we're looking at is second and two. We're gonna get a nice inside handoff to Derek Henry. I want you to watch your blocking with Derek Henry as he starts on the inside handoff makes two really nifty skip moves in the backfield and it is able to run through arm tackles. Big run. This is on his way to eclipsing 2,000 yards for the season only the eighth player in the history of the National Football League. Now what we are looking at nice man-to-man defense by the Texans and what AJ Brown is doing now sets up the man covering in man-to-man and then the ball is placed perfectly and allows AJ to turn up the field. Great separation in man-to-man. AJ Brown is not only a contact catcher but he is also an excellent excellent nuanced route runner. Now the next play we're looking at we're gonna go back to Henry. Now we have eye formation. Houston was loading the box all day. Watch the blocks up front. Watch everybody zone off hat on a hat. Henry slips through a small crack. Now he's up the sideline. Watch the left soup bone right here to just completely eject the defensive back coming over from the inside to try to tackle him. Great vision. Watch how violent he is with his soup bone from the left arm. Derek Henry again a battering ram in this game. Now to score 38-38 18 seconds left. Pass protection superb pocket trust AJ Brown. He's been having a big day perfect throw over the shoulder catch beautifully placed. Lines up the winning field goal by Sloeman who banks it through of the right upright Tennessee Titans win this ballgame. Massive massive contributions from AJ Brown from Derek Henry.


So, you're number four, so you'll be there. Great, okay. So, anyway, all the slides are on. We'll have one microphone for you to interrupt. That's right, channel. And speaking through this hand, you might be able to do it in a while. That's what we're going to put our channel about. Because we're in order. You don't have to stir it up. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to stir it up. Yeah. It is being reported in our broadcast. Okay. Not at all. Okay. I just got pretty loud. Sorry. Okay. I know you're vocal. Okay. It's on YouTube, it's on YouTube. It's on YouTube. It's on YouTube, YouTube channel. I can't believe how hot it is. All right. Ladies and gentlemen of scale, we'll get started in about three minutes because it's raining and, you know, people are slower in rain. I forgot we're both on stage first. Hello everybody, welcome to Upscale. So thanks for being here tonight. My name is Jason Hibbits. This is Hannah Anderson. We welcome you to Upscale. I'm with open source.com so hopefully most of you know about that but if you don't we're an online publication in community and we'd like to share all of your open source stories. So we're happy to help organize Upscale this evening. Yeah big thanks to the open source.com team. They do a lot of the content and help make us make this possible. So big thanks to them for hosting and co-sponsoring with scale Upscale. And for those of you who have never been to an Upscale before, each speaker has five minutes. Most of them have 10 slides that will auto advance at 30 seconds. There's a few special presenters in the audience. Instructions are hard. Yeah. But we may have confused them because you know sometimes we do lightning talks which are 20 slides every 15 seconds. So we decided to change it up this year and you know you're going to get 10 slides at 30 seconds. For the most part. So we'll see. I think that's it anything. Yeah so without further ado we want to bring up our first speaker. Our first speaker is Brendan Gregg. Good day my name is Brendan and CPU utilization is wrong. This is my five-minute public service announcement. Now you may say that utilization is a metric has always been wrong but for CPU utilization it is particularly wrong and it is getting worse as CPUs get faster. Yes I'm talking about CPU utilization. This is a metric we use everywhere. It's in all our dashboards. It's in our tools. It's used by Netflix in auto scaling rules and it's a metric that's very old. It's been around since time sharing systems. How it works is the kernel measures CPU utilization as the time from when a thread begins running on CPU to when it stops. However the kernel assumes that the CPU is utilized the entire time. What can happen is instructions they're running stop and they are stalled waiting on an external resource. The kernel chocks this up as CPU utilization. To give you a visual idea of how this works imagine I told you your CPUs were 90% busy. You might think of it like this. However what's really happening is that the CPUs are 20% busy and they're spending 70% of their time stalled not making forward progress on instructions as they're waiting on external resources. This ratio between 20 and 70 that I've drawn this is what we see in the Netflix cloud so this is real and it's getting worse. It's getting worse as CPUs get faster. To really explain this in more detail I'll show it an example a case study. This is my SQL. This is running the same workload on two servers. The second server is 27% slower than the first and if you look at the metrics it's CPU bound. Wow I love issues that are CPU bound because it means I get to use CPU flame graphs and I would expect to see for the second server some tower in code that's 27% of the overall time. However when I did flame graphs for both of these servers the code was basically the same. The widths were just a little bit different so there's about 10% difference but there's no extra code here to explain it. Now I do see this from time to time and the reason is there is something happening at a lower level than the code and so this is where I need to look inside the CPU and I need to look at performance monitoring counters and model specific registers to understand it. My first stop at understanding low level CPU issues is to look at the real clock rate that's running. Now I've written a bunch of open source tools to help do this so this one is show boost and it uses MSRs to show that the two servers were actually running at 3,300 megahertz so that doesn't actually explain the difference. One server can run at a different speed to another because it's in a colder part of the data center and it's allowed to turbo boost more quickly. So I always run show boost just to check. There are other tools that can look at this as well you don't have to use my open source tools you can use other ones but that's my first stop. Next is instructions per cycle. Here's another open source tool. Instructions per cycle is like miles per gallon it shows how many instructions completed for the CPU cycles that were consumed the higher the better and server B had a lower instructions per cycle 20% lower which is a very big clue that this really is a server a CPU low level issue. So now I can then find out why IPC is low IPC is low because of stall cycles and I wrote many other tools this one is TLB stat and it shows that the there are 16% more cycles in TLB misses so the TLB is the translation look-aside buffer that's what the memory management unit uses as a cache for virtual to physical address translation whenever instructions doing loads and stores and if the TLB cache can't return an entry the MMU must talk to main memory and do page table walks which are very slow. Now TLB issues I haven't seen TLB issues in a long long time it seems very strange that I'd pick a TLB issue as my case study for CPU utilization is wrong. Now there's a reason I picked this and I'll just give you a few moments to think about do you expect to see such a TLB issue in the real world my next slide will show what was causing it yes you will see this in the real world this was caused by the KPTI patches that have merged in Linux 4.15 for the meltdown vulnerability these have been back ported to all of the other kernels the patches cause TLB flushes that causes stall cycles in the CPU this is reported as CPU utilization and that is misleading I have a blog post about it and that is my talk thanks Brendan first one up so far so good our next speaker is a longtime scale attendee and longtime speaker but first time on the upscale stage so we're really excited to have him please welcome up Kyle Rankin hello all right so my name is Kyle Rankin and I'm the chief security officer at Purism so this is a five minute lightning talk based on a 50 minute presentation that's based on a chapter in a book I wrote called Linux hardening and hostile networks I usually do slides one bullet point at a time but you can't do that in upscale so wall of text get ready it's going to be really great but you can see the proper presentation that's 36 slides at that URL so computers didn't always have passwords it turns out we think of them as a good thing but it turns out some people thought of them as a bad thing Richard Stalman in particular saw passwords as a means of control so we know of him for a lot of contributions but a lot of people don't know that he's a password cracker so he joined the MIT labs they didn't have passwords he was cool with that the admin put in passwords and he started cracking them and then going to users and saying hey by the way I notice your password is mumble why don't you do what I do and just hit enter it's a lot faster that way and so yeah so then we had passwords right so but the thing is most computers supported at most a character some of them mixed uppercase and lowercase so what you got were single words really easy to guess popular passwords or things like love sex secret and of course god and even more so password because that's a great password as we all know so if you wanted to hack someone what you would do is just go through the dictionary try them all and you would find the password if that's too slow you know a little bit about the person you make guesses and that's how everyone got hacked in movies so if you want to hack the whopper you would pick you know joshua if you want to hack the gibson you pick god so with things like john the ripper you could automate this so it policy started jumping down with active directory and allowing you to set policies so for example you'd have a policy that says you must have at least one uppercase letter so what do people do well they did this because you would have 19 billion combinations which sounds like a lot it's impossible atoms in the universe right well so people would just uppercase the first letter and so you'd have qwerty secret password and the attackers like huh i'm just going to uppercase the letters too so then they said well we're going to be smart we're going to make have you have at least two numbers in addition to the uppercase letter because that's 57 billion combinations impossible to crack again atoms in the universe so everyone just put two numbers at the end um and the attackers said okay that's cool i can just put two numbers at the end of my dictionaries so then they said well okay that's fine stupid users not following our rules we're just going to require a symbol too because that's 782 billion combinations again impossible no way to do this so what everyone did was they started adding bangs to the end which i like to call a password mullet you know you have uppercase in the front and all of the numbers and symbols at the back so then it people said well i don't know i'll be really clever i'm going to take a dictionary word and apply leet speak to it because then i can remember it and so if you have password you know change the a's and the fours and things like that if you want to be fancy you do an ampersand instead of an a um and you get a password that we use for an admin password at a previous job um the problem is hackers know leet speak to i don't know if you knew that so then they said i know what we'll do we'll rotate passwords and so they say every three months we'll rotate them so what the users did was they picked password one then they picked password two bang then password three bang um the attackers guessed your first password and then from then on they knew every other password you would ever pick right so then it spent all of their time every three months dealing with account lockouts and resetting passwords all the users who picked a really hard password would get frustrated because it would be reset and it basically never worked so then we had xkcd correct horse battery staple and we started doing long pass phrases and so right now i would say what's a good password i would say okay fine at the very least 12 character minimum no rotation and no complexity that's 95 quadrillion combinations by the way that's better than the 7.2 quadrillion that you have in an eight character complicated password no rotation means users are going to pick longer more complex passwords because they can remember it and then muscle memory but you don't have to believe me because what do i know nist even thinks this is a good idea now after decades of bad policy so you can't take a picture of that slide now but you should you should take it to your it department so um what's a good password one that you can't remember so i'd say very long 20 plus characters truly random complex in a new password for every account that's impossible so use a password manager so you don't have to do that the problem is you do have to remember a couple of passwords for your password manager for disk encryption so use a password database like key pass x or something like that um and then that makes it a little bit easier so the conclusion you can do strong authentication today but info set can't decide what that looks like the everyone disagrees on what a good password is in what good office the other thing is attackers have always paid attention to users and user behavior but defenders never really have they just sort of push down policies so defenders need to change that researchers need to focus more less on movie threats and more on real life how real users use policy and in general stop blaming users for their problems the end all right i just started using last pass this year and i don't even know 90 percent of my passwords anymore so um our next speaker is also a first time to the upscale stage i'd like to bring up kim McMahon and we're gonna learn about how to promote your open source project and building online community with social media so i'm one of those that don't follow instructions because these are all 30 seconds and i have some that are a minute and this one was going for only 20 seconds so um i'm filling time but i am gonna talk a little bit about social media and mostly just twitter uh on what and i'm gonna use a little example of what we had done at the co team as well as what i personally do to try to provide some interesting content so the next slide is going to be a meme that amanda katana and i came up with we were sitting around talking about like fight club um boy that was a long 30 seconds so we're talking about fight she was talking about fight club i wasn't because i haven't seen the movie but we we're coming up with the number one rule in open source marketing is that you have to participate in the community and we started talking about what was really making our team successful or what was making anybody successful why any of us know the people that are here is because one we're here and we're out here talking to people and that we are participating and we're a member in the community and that is probably if you do anything is you know who your influencers are and you you share their content and you know and you participate in the community the second thing is the good tenants of open source and well we made some goals um one is because yeah it helps us stay focused doing the things that are the right things and actually the thing that um a lot of us strive for is that we really want to work less so uh so we do follow the good tenants of open source as we all should when we're sharing content in um in this community and that's um transparency and openness and that as a group we really can produce some better content so that kind of flows into our goals in the code team um and my goal when i'm sharing on twitter is that i try to do about 50 engagement which means that i'm finding content that somebody else has shared and there's an alien back there that somebody else has shared and try to retweet see or i'll turn around try to retweet that content um and then the rest of it is i find interesting things that people say like i'm gonna look for that alien picture later and then i'm gonna reshare that on twitter now how many times do you tweet a day and um you can read this like research has it all over the board and and when you read those articles they say but if you don't do just choose whichever bullet you want on that then you will never be successful in on twitter and it's just frankly not true um the magic number that i came up with for the code team was about five days times a day for myself i do three to five times a day i try to be consistent any more than that and people just kind of start shutting you off but the number one thing is that you can't you need to be consistent you need to be out there um doing it every day or at least a couple days a week and that we were very community focused i'm very community focused i leave my content with the community i make sure that i use i use their twitter handle whenever i can i use the hashtags like this um event hashtag whenever possible because that's the way that people are going to find your content and that last bullet on the last slide talked about engagement and that's what social media is about and especially social media here in the open source community is it's engaging with your audience and i have a couple pictures here of some twitter lists um that's the code team's twitter list and the others my twitter list they're open go out and find them you know i don't i didn't know who the influencers were were or the people i wanted to follow or the people that even i think say something interesting once in a while i didn't know who they were when i started so i created those lists so go out and copy some lists um so if you're gonna do this set some goals so that you're not working too much uh know who you know how much time you have to be doing all this stuff share community content and twitter is the easiest way in this community to get started and have your voice being heard so just spend a little bit of time getting a profile picture and a decent um description twitter description and you'll be good that's it thanks kim i'm really bad at twitter so maybe i need a private lessons um i'm really excited to welcome up our next guest which is pat david he's going to be talking about building a freedom-based photography communities we're going to mix it up a little bit more art involved which i'm excited about hi i'm i'm pat david um we had a libre graphics track for the very first time on friday here at scale where we had a lot of folks talking about free software and the software and communities that we have around creative creative endeavors i'm going to talk today about building something that we called pixels.us which is a photography community that's based entirely on using free software but also extending those ideals to the material that people might want to have when they want to learn how to do things with photography and why did we look at this and the reason that we did was that we looked out at the creatives that like to do things um in particular with photography and video and other things and that there was no central place for this right if i wanted to talk about photography or something i didn't have a central place to go to commune with other people that were based around the concept of doing that thing doing photography from my own part i did it because of bad gimp tutorials originally and when i wanted to learn how to process some of my photographs to make them look great and find a free software option to do it you end up at gimp for the most part i hope i'm a member of the gimp team if you want to fight you can meet me outside the door the and the problem was all these tutorials had they were poor quality they were cheaply monetized right i have to click through 10 different pages to look at 18 different steps so that i could see 20 different ads to learn how to add a blur to an image or make it pop a little bit and it was obnoxious which was pain extra painful because there are proprietary options and learning platforms that we're doing this far better than anyone in the free software community and it's painful because we have dark table raw therapy gimp fantastic projects that i think are at least on par or better than some proprietary options but that's not the same thing with the community and learning resources that were available so what do we do what was the answer to that problem i have great software but not so great community and learning resources well and true open source spirit i just said i'm gonna go do it i had no idea if it was going to work but i said i'm going to make a community that specifically had the goal which was to provide tutorials showcases and workflows for doing high quality photography using nothing but free software and even better extending that ideal to the material we produced if i write a tutorial it's cc licensed you remix it as you want to all the images in it are also cc licensed all these images by the way are from our community members at pixels dot us done entirely with free software in every instance i happen to be lucky enough to be friends with a lot of guys from cool projects anyone ever heard dark table raw therapy gimp i'm a member of the gimp team again gimmick digicam these are all fantastic projects but guess what they were siloed right if i wanted to learn how to do something in dark table i will go to the dark table mailing list which is great unless somebody from the raw therapy mailing list might know something that would help me with the problem i happen to have and that person was never going to see my question because they weren't on the dark table mailing list necessarily right we fractured this and the problem was i said look let's get everyone together in the community around the idea of photography with free software not a piece of software i'm not talking come to the gimp community right i'm not talking go to the dark table community i'm saying come to where we have other photographers talking about photography we all happen to use free software and so it did we started to kind of coalesce it's been a just over three years now since i sat at my dining room table and said maybe i should make a website i think i would like to meet some other people that do photography and we have we've had a ton of articles and blogs on the site now a ton of great tutorials with a lot of community engagement where people are writing things for others and sharing it all freely um with everyone in the community to use remix learn and extend that's the most important one right from an open source standpoint free software standpoint one of extended and we've had great growth this is the bottom down there is kind of a just my generic um traffic growth patterns it's not exponential because it's free software photography the small venn diagram where it collides but it's you'll notice though it's it's steady right it may not be exponential growth but it's a slow bit of steady growth as we begin to publicize and proselytize about coming out to do um photography and learn about it so if you like photography i guarantee everyone in here likes to take pictures i very much doubt anyone's going to say they don't enjoy taking photos well you have a place now as a photographer to come and check it out using nothing but free software and free software workflows and where everything is being shared openly for everybody thank you very much again i'm pat david all right i think i'm gonna sign him up for a few articles on double source dot com so we'll talk afterwards uh our next speaker is kevin flaming and i'm really excited to to learn more about software financially for everyone so i guess i look along with her this is my first time at scale by the way it's a fantastic conference so uh before i get started when the next slide appears there's gonna be a picture on it the first person to yell out what they see in the picture wins six free internets or something so all right so if you don't know who bloomberg is we are a global company that produces a bunch of different things financial services products media news all kinds of things but the most important thing is we have five thousand people writing software so we are heavily involved in open source we do a lots of things but as you've probably all heard michael bloomberg who's the founder of our company is heavily into philanthropy what is it come on no no no no no what kind of event is this you're looking at it's a hackathon right so what we have here is two hackathons one in our new york office one in our london office they happened on the same weekend they had about 75 bloomberg employees they had 20 or 30 people from these open source communities and about 20 or 30 students from nearby universities who all came in on the weekend to hack on scientific python open source tools this was a lot of fun this was actually i think our seventh event doing this the reason we do this is that bloomberg we have a culture of volunteerism so we have as you can see numbers there i won't quote them all but we have thousands of employees who contribute all kinds of time but on top until four years ago they never had the opportunity to contribute that time to open source projects we've now given them that chance so we've done this for well the ones you saw there the next slide is going to list a bunch more logos for more projects that we've done this for and we're planning to do more this year interestingly we get people come in on a weekend even when the weather's nice to write software even though they write software all day long every day we're crazy people aren't we we do this kind of stuff so these are all communities that we've contributed to we are continuing to contribute to them more we obviously use all of tools from these projects which is why they were important for us to contribute to and so when the slide changes you're going to see what we actually produce out of this and then i'm going to talk about what it takes to put on events like this part of the motivation for this is we want to get more people involved in open source projects for those of you who still remember the first time you try to contribute to an open source project it's a little scary you're a little you know there's there's some trepidation there you don't know you're going to send a patch and they're going to flame your patch and you don't ever want to contribute again doing it in a group environment where the people who are going to review your patches are sitting right next to you and helping you make good patches is just amazingly powerful we have had events where people's patches got merged into the master branch of the project just in an hour after they submitted the patch it wasn't wonderful so these things for running these events these are easy right we have offices we can provide food we can provide water we can provide red bull we can provide all kinds of things and of course internally to our employees we can advertise these things really well i'm hoping the slide would change there dang it wasn't listening to me so um now i have to wait wait oh here we go the harder things finding out when you can do this people have lives amazingly people have lives outside of writing software it's crazy people have conflicts and all kinds of other constraints we have to bring people in when we did this project we brought in i think a total of eight project leaders from those projects literally paid for their travel to come to our offices and put them up in hotels so they could be there for the weekend to do this so obviously they have schedules and families and those things and interestingly we found that a lot of big many open source projects including big ones have no good place to advertise events like this so you end up having a really hard time getting the word out now they're really hard parts we do surveys in our engineering teams which projects would you like us to do these events for i get the results back i sort them by popularity what's at the top of the list a patchy spark patchy spark is a fun project how many developers out of five thousand do we have the no scala six eight maybe i mean it's ridiculous we would never be able to contribute effectively to this project so those are the things we have to work through to make this happen obviously our goal is patches getting more patches up as we've done eight or nine events i think we probably produced a hundred and fifty patches so far for a bunch of different open source projects and i'm trying to encourage more people to try to do these things if you work for a large company that has a volunteer program of any kind that so that contributes to charities that you can even convince your human resources department to give you whatever you want to call it comp time time off whatever for in return for contributing to an open source project and organized way like this please encourage them to do so if you're interested in contacting me to learn more about this you've got contact info there and if you want to see the full version of this talk there is a video on the fosdham 2018 website because i gave the full talk there thank you very much all right next to the stage is michael williams and he gave such a great upscale talk last year we decided to add him for a new topic this year so we're really excited to have you back michael talking about mentoring and creative spaces welcome scale yeah you know this is the second time i've ever used slides so forgive me last year you guys are such a wonderful thing i thought i'd get a little bit of more abuse and come today unprepared to talk about mentoring and all the problems that young people and people that make changes and the solution that i came up with the last year i talked about free education in a community-based type of a platform which allows people to get free education and degrees world mentoring academy and basically an open community very much like scale and the linux and apache and php community basically mooks started two years after i started and we built a platform out and it's about 34 000 35 000 users the problem that a lot of people do is they get into the content and they don't know what they want to do which i find kind of sad because things are changing so rapidly with big data automation robotics that people get rather confused they're in college they're spending all their money and they're spending five or six years they still haven't declared a major and i thought well how can i solve this big problem and uh i i actually knew what i wanted to do when i was in college i wanted to be a clown so for 35 years is a clown after i graduated in engineering and i used to be four four years of college boy my dad's mad right so that you know actually kathy davison who actually wrote a nice little article about me in in new york times she said that 65 percent of today's jobs will not even exist that when the elementary school kids get of age and actually that kind of reminds me i'm from alaska we had gold you know dredges and stuff like that so i thought no how can i solve this problem if the target keeps shifting around and i noticed something about young people you know when they're younger they know what they want to do like i want to be a you know a doctor an astronaut and they get to middle school and their friends say so what do you want to be oh i want to be an astronaut oh but you're not smart enough to mess besides that you're a girl so then how can i solve that so i got my camera i was a member of the pasadena media and i took my camera and i went out to caltech and i thought well maybe i should ask some people that might know something about being an astronaut so i uh i was ready and i so i i talked to three astronauts i said hey what could elementary school kids get involved in for future space and technology because i'm not an astronaut i wouldn't know they said hydroponics and robotics go wow hydroponics and robotics these slides aren't shifting quick enough but anyway well wait that's actually a very nice guy i was talking to him i said so what do you think the future is gonna need you're gonna need minors and he laughed at me it's so i thought well i said hydroponics i went out to an aquaponics farm and filmed all the wonderful fun things you can do in a aquaponics farm you know learning all the different types of things and i was amazed to find that there's quite a few of them around where you can go in you can volunteer you can work on you know horticulture and learn all kinds of cool stuff i thought you know kids would really like to go to these kind of places and a lot of times they're in underserved areas like this one in particular was in the projects in long beach and so what i did is i went out and i start to build a database of all the community gardens hydroponics aquaponics permacultures in the world everything about it kid friendly hours of operation youtube facebook instagram snapchat so so the young people can find you know they're watching youtube video with the interview with the astronauts and the the interview with all the various different fun stuff at there and then they go out at the end of the video they go find a garden next to you they click on a button the map opens up local them four blocks away on Toledo is a hydroponics that they can enjoy two years later they get to middle school and their friends say so what do you want to be oh i want to be an astronaut but you're not smart enough to be an astronaut the young person can say well for the past two years i'm working on a variety of tomatoes that's been considered for the martian colony i don't think you know what you're talking about right because when that flame gets blown out middle school the kids have no direction no ambitions no drive the only reason they do well in school is because of good teachers and parents so i went out and interviewed a bunch of other people because you know i've i've interviewed astronauts interviewed a senator barbara box or time you know all different types of people say where are these creative spaces that young people can go to to get support instead of being heckled at when they come up with the idea that they want to be a spokesperson or in fact actually a new york marathon a chilean legan who i interviewed march won the new york marathon so if you like to participate with me come join me i appreciate it thank you very much our next speaker is michael gatt and apparently uh we were both on the open data track earlier today and i gave uh half of his talk in my talk um i have no idea what he's about to say next so uh we won't have that problem tonight so come on up michael hi i'm michael gatt and i'm a failure and if you're in this room you probably are too hence how many people have blown up production okay yeah we're all failures uh it's endemic to our industry if you're in tech you fail you fail every day if you're a big company you fail thousands of times a day this is fine so long as we keep it to ourselves but it becomes a problem when we interact with the rest of the world because the rest of the world has slightly different standards of professionalism and they tend to think of us as sort of clownish individuals who really don't get it uh bowing can't tell you that they can't duplicate your crash because it must be your environment do something different uh our standards as i said are different and this needs to advance um sometimes our mistakes cause real problems for people and these are the mistakes these are the failures that can be career destroying they can be life destroying mostly if you don't know how to handle them and what i'm gonna talk about here very briefly is what you should do because we are all failures we're all going to fail well of course you're gonna do what you have to do which is fix it you're gonna put in the hours days weeks whatever it takes to make it right but beyond fixing the immediate problem assuming they don't walk you straight to the door is how do you plan for that failure how do you make sure it doesn't happen or if it does happen how do you make sure you can handle it best first of all think about what you really want to do what are the failures that you will do best at as mark manson asks what flavor sandwich um do you like to eat the most because you're going to eat it a lot so if your favorite flavor of failure is in dev ops do dev ops if your favorite flavor of failure is in straight development that's what you should do if your favorite flavor of failure is in networking go there beyond that choice think about where you're working ask the company you're working for or you want to work for how do they handle failure they tell you to ask questions in an interview have you ever asked them well what happened to the last guy who blew up production hopefully your interviewer will laugh and give you a great story if they don't worry because those are companies like this one those of you who never saw this read it look it up uh guy showed up first day of work they handed him an onboarding document this is how you set up your environment he copied and pasted he didn't realize that in that onboarding document they had root production access and the first thing it did was delete the database uh surprise surprise this company also never tested their backups the cto blamed him this is another great one sometimes you don't need to ask sorry this is really blurry but um sometimes you don't need to ask this is a company that says on their website they believe winners have always won thanks to Corey Quinn for pointing this one out by the way um they don't believe that a startup should have devil's advocates this is a company that deals with personal health data sounds like a great security approach to dealing with data no devil's advocates but beyond that have a plan b not just for your career for your life uh failure is a lot easier to deal with if you have six months in the bank do you because it's a lot tougher if you're worrying about living in your car next week uh if you haven't thought about those things please do but beyond that think about the people around you as i said we're all failures it's part of our business so when you fall flat on your face ask for help someone will give you help because we've been there and when you're the or and when you're running along and you hear someone behind you fall flat on their face stop you got the time turn around give them a hand up because that's how we all move forward together tech is a team sport surviving failure is a team sport thank you all right so the last two speakers are going to practice your failure maybe no i'm just kidding um if you want you know uh so our next speaker is actually a very long time scale attendee and we just found out that she had never spoken at upscale so we bullied her into creating a last-minute talk which we're extra excited about uh so can we please welcome keila banks up to the stage so hi everybody my name is keila banks and like i was saying this kind of lasts me last minute i was literally at my track me yesterday when my dad told me i was going to be doing a talk so bear with me on these slides so this is a picture of me at scale 11 you see me a little seedling in the back and this is a small group and there's sara in the front if you guys know her too and this is a small group of kids in scale oh by the way i'm going to be talking about why kids should talk of conventions so this is where it all started and this is my first presentation at scale 11 free to be a kid if anybody has been to scale that longer remember that talk so my first thank you so my first talk was basically about me using open source that's what's called free to be a kid and how um i basically made like an open source fifth grade newspaper and that crowd was like this is like a biggest crowd and i was super super super nervous and this is me at the women in advanced computing and actually i also um i teach at different schools and i was actually speaking at the school right down the street from here if you guys are used to Pasadena there's a school called normal cooms and i was talking to some kids we were teaching like code spark and using code spark and there was this this little girl in the back and she was super super nervous and remind me just like me when i was in fifth grade did my first talk i was super super nervous and now i'm sitting here talking to you guys and so um yeah ever since scale they kind of guarded my passion for going to conferences and learning and talking to adults and what a lot of people don't know is that you know kids can talk to adults and adults can learn from kids um that's kind of what the inspiration for the kids track at scale and the i don't know if anybody actually went to the kids track or the kids development that was in room one oh across the hall but yeah um so me and Justin have been long time and so this is me when i was 13 i was on tv at Melissa Harris Perry show and they chose me to speak for um i actually forgot what i was speaking for it so yeah every every time i've been getting bigger and bigger and bigger and people were just sitting like what are you talking every time i go to church they'd be like oh i saw what your dad posted on facebook about you what would you possibly be able to talk to adults about well one thing people don't know is that there's actually a large large gap especially for engagement because i know what a lot of people have been talking about engagement there's a large gap of engagement and that's the youth people don't people tend to think they understand the youth you know they think we're on our phones 24 7 and all that playing games wasting our time but they actually don't know that we have a lot of valuable input like a lot of perspectives you wouldn't even know from kids like me and so um this is my first keynote when i spoke at osconn in 2015 and that one went kind of viral um and this is me at scale again last year so i just want to say that um speaking at conventions really has brought me a lot of opportunities and you'll see those in the next three to four slides um it's brought me a lot of opportunities scale's been the first one so i'm just gonna wait till the next slide okay so um that's actually my friend jonah bacon shout out to jonah if you guys see them i really love jonah um this is actually a panel that we did last year and i don't remember if that was the panel that we also did with um the crater of linux yeah like i said this was kind of last minute so i'm not used to this flow okay so this is also me when i went to the white house so like i was saying all these speaking at these conventions that got me to so many places and i'm only 16 um i was invited i was invited to the white house to speak for the cs raw event also please don't mind the picture i look really ugly in it and um yeah so you can see the white house still still in the back just waiting for the next slide okay so there is a linux sandwich you can see so you can see there's me and my dad and there's linux turbos i want to say after going to the speaker the white house for obama this is my peak of speaking at conventions it's me and linux turbos um this was taken at the oh i'm right at the time so also i just wanted to touch the bases on it's really important for kids to speak at conventions because not only have i been able to meet linux turbos go to prog for free there's also colleges that are come reaching out to me and i'm only in 10th grade and so it's a really impressive part of your memory and your resume anyways get your kids your cousins nieces nephews get them to speak at conventions especially skill thank you great job our next speaker is no stranger to the upscale stage and clory quinn's gonna this is more of an experience than a talk we're gonna see what it's like to be at the c-suite all right cori you got this you is good you is kind you is important hello and thank you for inviting me here to your company's board meeting although later when you check no one will remember actually having invited me don't worry i'm not going to stop talking long enough to take questions from anyone you probably recognize my company from making statements on airport ads that make no sense that's fine there is no call to action there is no buy here button the entire point is so that when i'm here standing in front of you you don't question what the hell i am let's talk about how my company's product works i will not explain it to you i will not expand my acronyms and if you ask i will very subtly imply that you're the dumb one i'm not here to give you a 10 000 foot view i'm not here to give you a 50 000 foot view i'm here to give you an orbital view think strategy think beyond think the new later i'm going to go out and play golf with the man or woman who makes the actual buying decision so this is really just a dog and pony show that was a joke this is a fortune 500 company of course the decision makers a man diversity isn't a thing here now please note that my product or service is not actually going to solve your real problem you'd be amazed astounded and grateful at how little that actually matters to anything consequences don't matter because when the finger of blame comes to point at someone rest assured it's not going to be pointing at you by doing business with my company you're doing everything right you've done your homework you have the right thing to point at we're in the good part of the gartner magic quadrant everything adds up and to the right low and to the left is called niche player which is gartner speak for shitty we talk about this extensively at length in every in-flight magazine which is what your cio reads and then decides okay i need a resume project what am i going to do ah here we go and here i am it's all about getting in front of your buyer now you have a choice you can pick some dirty open source hippie you can solve your problem in 20 minutes yes or you can hire a bunch of mba consultants who are eager to prove themselves they'll work 120 hours a week and bill for 40 your choice it's up to you what that dirty hippie doesn't realize is that the halls of power are greased with favors yes it's a slippery hall however the point is is i do business with you and later you come and help me out is this dirty little bit however you're a fortune 500 company that does something i haven't bothered to look at what that is however it's not saving the whales if you want to do that go work for unicef they're not on my client list doing business with my company is a win for you and it's a win for me we all come out of this ahead that's what large-scale business is all about there's never been a better time to work with me i have to say the time is meow there has never been a better chance to partner a large enterprise company with a large enterprise service provider there's something to be said for that unfortunately i will not be staying to take questions there's someone else who desperately needs whatever the hell it is that my company does but that's all right i will deal with them later remember we've been we talked about the high-level orbital view of strategy other people who will have other conversations will go down to the 50 000 foot view and down to the 10 000 foot view as those conversations continue to evolve but you stay right where you are on your boat because you are all c-level executives my my name is kori quinn i'm an advisor to reactive ops specifically because they don't sell that way mostly if you've enjoyed this talk feel free to see mine tomorrow at 130 silence of the lambdas terrible ideas in serverless thank you all right let's give another round of applause to all of our upscale speakers tonight thanks again for coming out after this directly after this is game night in right outside the exhibit hall so you can head directly there if you want the party to keep starting uh continuing and because we love ending on downers yep one more one more slide we're just a reminder that uh we lose an hour of sleep tonight yeah so party hard at game night thanks everyone so much for coming


So welcome, this is our cloud funding panel. So we've gathered an awesome panel, and it's a small crowd, so I'm going to pick out names. And I get the questions. So let me just introduce the panel. These are all Barcelona-based, either VC communities or founders of their own startups. So how many are startup founders here looking for money? No one. Aspiring founders. Aspiring founders? Looking for advice. Looking for advice. How awesome. OK, so let me introduce the panel first. I have Guillem Sage. He's the Investant Manager at Nata Capital. They're the same ones that invested in Abaco, which is like a cloud management startup, and others that I can show you. I have Alex Maloff. He's the Managing Director and Head of Growth for Harbor Space. Harbor Dot Space or Harbor Space? I mean, it's Harbor Dot Space, but I mean, we're called Harbor Space. OK, Harbor Space. I'm going to give you a few minutes to talk about each of your areas, but I'll just kind of get everybody started. Scott Macen, he's the founder of Barcelona. So if you read up on the startup scene about Barcelona, that's how I figured out this thing. I had not ever been to Barcelona. And Scott, he's like all the editors and all the articles about all the cool startup scene. That's from Scott's company. And I met Carlos, actually. Something's wrong with my laptop. Hold on once again. Oops, almost snuck that away. I met Carlos. He's the person who's responsible for startup grind in Barcelona. He's also the founder of Liam. OK. So my name is Susan Wu. I'm the Director of Technical Marketing for MetaCura. So MetaCura is a 50-person startup. We are based in Switzerland. We have engineering offices in Tokyo, Barcelona, and San Francisco. We're a network virtualization overlay company. And we're the certified neutron plug-in for networking. So with that, I'm going to let each of the panelists talk more about the areas. And then I have some prepared questions as well. And then I'm going to let everybody ask their questions since it's a small crowd. Guillem, do you want to start, Susan? So my name is Guillem Sagué. I'm, as she said, Investment Manager at Nauta Capital. Nauta Capital is an international VC fund with roots in Barcelona. That's where we started. But we're currently in Barcelona, in London, and Boston. We have offices in various locations. And invest approximately one third of our funds from each of those locations. What we usually tend to look for are what we call companies that are capital efficient. This doesn't have to do with how much the founders earn. That's not the point. The point is how much money we think the companies will need to become something important in their industry. And we tend to find those companies mostly in the B2B software space. We started 12 years ago doing basically on-premise software. And now, obviously, all our companies are in the cloud. So my name is Alex. And Harvard.space. .space is actually a TLD. I need to explain it, because people would .com and end up at NASA. So we are actually a university based here in Barcelona. We are hyper-focused on tech education, very high level, because we run a data science program, cybersecurity program, and computer science programs developed together. We're, say, like Spursky Labs and Yandex Data Factory. So they're very, very high level, hard to get in. I'd like to think we are in tech space, because we're changing a lot about how universities operate in terms of approach to education. And in addition to that, we also run a lot of initiatives. Like we have a conference on data science. And coming up in February, we are running a bootcamp here in Barcelona to prepare teams for ACMICPC competition. And that's essentially the foundation of what we're doing right now. Scott? Great. My name is Scott Macon. I'm a US expat, now based here in Barcelona. But originally from Boston, and I spent some time in Boulder, Colorado, as well as LA and San Diego. I'm involved in a number of projects here, mostly around digital marketing, and specifically with B2B startups. But one of our more popular projects is Barcelona, which is an international tech platform focused on Barcelona's startup and innovation communities. And what we've kind of become over the last few years is a de facto landing zone for any non-Spanish speakers around the world that have some sort of professional business interest in Barcelona. So we kind of become like a two-way communication channel between Barcelona Tech and the global business community. And my name is Carlos. And on the one hand, I organize events at IGM, so to help companies connect with their stakeholders in a personal way. And as Susan mentioned, I'm co-director at the startup brand Barcelona Chapter, which is a global community of entrepreneurs to connect, inspire, and educate them. Basically, we work on a local level and help people connect within the community and with the international communities. So recently, Barcelona has named a new Silicon Valley. I stole the slide. But look at all the investments across the areas. And the funding amounts weren't small, like up to 30 million. Is that euros? It's still very, very significant. And then I saw the investments were all across the board, whether it's enterprise software, cloud management, some SaaS companies as well. So look into your crystal ball. What's the hot stuff and what's not hot so that we don't tune our companies to what's not getting invested? There's a view in the Silicon Valley. They actually invest in things that are so early, like five years ahead. So they're investing in AR, VR. And I don't think there's a whole lot of commercial applications. But what's the scene in Europe? What's the scene in Barcelona? Any? Go ahead. Yeah. So what we've seen in the last couple of years is kind of a fintech bubble. You start seeing fintech companies popping up from everywhere. Many of them do not do anything different than what the others are doing. So that's what happened in the past and probably is going to slow down. And so what I think that the next logical step is that the intro tech companies pop up. So I expect that in 2017, we'll see a lot of investments in companies doing insurance technology. Did you say insurance? Insurance technology. Oh, OK. So that's like what we see like the next hot stuff. Is that Barcelona, Spain, or is that all of Europe in general? I think all in Europe, but usually in Spain, you tend to be six to 12 months after Silicon Valley and then maybe six months after London. So you can kind of see what's happening there and then you know what's going to happen here. So it's easy to say. There's your crystal ball. Just look at Silicon Valley. Yeah. I didn't have to say. I think it is happening quite like that. But I think there's just a difference in the Barcelona VCs, though I noticed. So some of them are taking firms from Europe and then taking them to the US. So a bunch of, and I saw that with French nationals. So they would actually not start the company in France and they would immediately take it and headquarter in US. Is that what's happening in the Spain scene or they're keeping the companies in Spain? Fortunately, we're moving into keeping the companies in Spain. When I first came here, it was very much the place Barcelona is a great place to build your team, build your prototypes, test, test, test, try and find product market fit. And the second you need to raise money, go to London, go to Silicon Valley, go to New York and raise a big round outside of Spain. In the past couple years, two to three years, we've seen a number of larger, more kind of traditional series A type investments happening here in Spain. Spanish companies kind of plant in their flag and say, no, we're not leaving. We're going to build here despite some of the Spanish bureaucracy and challenges that that imposes. As far as the crystal ball thing, and this isn't just Barcelona or even Silicon or even Europe, although we're seeing it here, is I think AI startups are having, that's the trend we're seeing across the board is a lot of projects trying to automate things with deep learning and machine learning and artificial intelligence projects that can automate a specific sector and niche industry. I think those will be a big wave here in the next couple years as well. However, regarding what you mentioned about companies moving or being moved to the US, I think that we still have the mindset of that if you want to go big, really big, you need to go to Silicon Valley. And it's something that you can still feel on the ecosystem here in Barcelona. Alex? Well, this kind of insurance technology, I mean, that's been happening for the past several months, if not a year already, because we've seen some kind of accelerators verticalize and go in insurance tech in the US and in Europe, most of them being run out of either Germany or London or going to the US. So that's probably happening. Fintech mostly played out, I think, at this point in time. I'm not a big believer in blockchain. I mean, a lot of these stuff, kind of if we're using Gartner stuff for each other, kind of hype cycle and need to essentially, you know, a few years to stabilize. I mean, because there's a lot of experimentation, but it's not clear where things are going and we need to reach kind of deployment phase where it's actually something interesting that's gonna build on top of this. Barcelona, Spain, sector-wise, the strengths here in terms of companies that we've been here, I mean, we have this wonderful chart, but we're talking mostly kind of e-commerce and fashion. And that's where most of the money went into and that's where we've seen some of the bigger exits. And Europe-wide probably B2B software. And that's kind of, I think, European strength because a lot of specifics about the size of the markets, the fragmentation of the markets in terms of the funds that can be raised here. And generally speaking, Europe is still kind of, in my opinion, not very optimistic. It's still, for example, behind the US. Especially when we're talking follow-on funding at series A, series B, or say, crowdfunding. Statistically, we're looking at what companies need to have been founded back in 2008, 2009, 2010 to be raising kind of AB rounds around now. So it's, and the size of the rounds is generally smaller. So the good thing is that the kind of the foundations for good ecosystem are happening. So I mean, there is more money, kind of Europe-wide and Spain as well. Although, I mean, it's in a lot of good ways. I mean, we have governments getting into this. Biggest investors like France is the French government. In Germany, it's the Hightech Gründerfunz, which is also very government-funded. Here in Spain, I think Kasia Capital Risk, which is also essentially redistributing a lot of public funds. So there's more money to go around. There's obviously a lot of talented people. And we have seen a lot of exits and from like these companies and others, that are, you know, it's people that have experience that are coming back, staying here, and kind of sharing their experience, mentoring new founders, mentoring new startups. So, and that's kind of the third factor, but we're still behind like the US. And I mean, if we're talking Asia, it's a completely different world. Yeah, we raise our money from Japan. We all, almost all of our rounds. Though we have a lot of employees in Barcelona. So there are probably a few aspiring entrepreneurs or people that work at startups. I actually helped out with the funding pitch for my company as well. So what do you look for in a team? Because I met one VC who says, Susan, I meet 1,000 companies a year. I invest in one. So the odds were pretty tough with this particular individual. But what do you look for? There's good engineers worldwide. There's good technologies globally. But what is it about the funding team or founding team? So I think that the main topic is that we look for, and I think many of these look for is excellence. So I think you can describe it as very shortly as excellence. But you wanna look at the entrepreneurs and you wanna see excellence in their background, in the way they interact with customers, in the way they interact with investors. They wanna see excellence or you wanna see excellence in the way they attract talent.  And in my case, I have a personal exercise that I do to try to find out if I would like to bug the entrepreneurs is that I try to imagine them in a panel like this. And I put mentally all the CEOs of our companies, of our portfolio companies, and I try to put them also in the panel with our current entrepreneurs. Kind of like a smackdown. Yeah, and then exactly, and then I try to find out if they would fit, if they would be at the same level, if they would be part of the group. And so this helps me, but it's a personal exercise. I don't think everybody does this. One question, Guillem. And do you look as well like for that excellence among the interaction of the team, no? Because maybe a team can be individually excellent, but not everyone fits with each other. Yeah, but that's right. This is usually something that they by themselves will sort out. So we as a VC won't tell them who fits within the team. It's something they have to find out themselves and they are, if they are smart and usually are, they will find out. Well, I mean, the dynamics in a team is something that's very challenging to kind of quantify. Having kind of gone through kind of accelerators and accelerators, different companies in kind of past life, the team kind of, it's a feeling. It's something that's important because I have, for example, gone through an Accelerate one point in time and there were like, you know, 10 companies going in and the takeout at the end of the whole thing was really that, I mean, ideas a dime a dozen, but at the end of the process, I could build a super team that will then give them kind of a good idea and they market opportunity, could do whatever they want. But it's not very quantifiable in the sense that, you know, you can't put a number on it. Yeah, I mean, I'm not an investor myself and so when I speak about what to look for in a team, I think you look more at what are some practical ways you can avoid disaster down the road, you know? And as we mentioned, some of the companies in Barcelona have failed simply because of internal dynamics or problems with baggage in the cap table, the equity structure of the company, maybe the shareholders agreement wasn't well defined at the beginning. So you have a lot of kind of very important stakeholders in this startup, not just the founders, sometimes it's early employees, sometimes it's early investors who have a very different idea of success or a very different idea of what the exit plan might be come down the road. So, you know, whereas in the early stages, it's very exciting, you're getting traction, you're raising some money, in Spain there was a time where if you were kind of, you know, I know startups that have 29 different investors, you know, and they've only been around for like two years. It's like, how did that happen? You know, how did you get 29 investors in two years? And all those different parties have a say, you know, and they have a vote or if the board of directors is very kind of mixed and people didn't all come from the tech world, some are restaurant investors, hoteliers, you know, they have a very different idea of growth and success than what maybe a high scale, a high growth startup would typically go through. And so I think making sure for future endeavors, future projects, just laying it out on the table as crystal clear as possible, making sure you're on the same page with your early team through a written and notarized shareholder's agreement, I think is critical, you know, in subsequent years. Yeah, so I want to open up for questions, actually. There were some people looking for advice, startup founders or people figuring out whether they want to work as startup. Do you guys have questions that you want to ask? I'm going to call you for a gentleman in the middle. Did you have your question or you want to wait till we go on the way before and behind you, actually? I'm not specific. What's really happening in the startup space, how do founders, you know, on this, you know, once you read a lot of blog articles, you get to, you know, recognize and appreciate how difficult and challenging it can be to, you know, start a company. So, you know, just, you know, whatever experiences that you guys have had, some of the pain points that you had to go through. Getting funding, obviously, is an important aspect, right? But taking an idea and digging it to a point where you can create a company, how challenging was that for you, perhaps? Yeah, just a paraphrase. It's kind of like related to, you know, what's the best way to approach this investment community going from a concept to, and what point too? Because I actually worked with startup founders and they said that you can either build the product and then you have to build, like you have to completely focus on building and then when you're fundraising, you have to completely focus on fundraising. So what's your advice on how to approach and when, right?  So I think the ideal situation would be to always be fundraising, always be networking, always be meeting with investors and potential partners and even your vendors and service providers that you can be partnering with and working with down the road. Just make sure those lines of communication are open so when you actually do need to open a conversation, it's a warm contact, not just a cold call. Like she said, investors are investing in maybe 1% of the projects they see every year, maybe. So you wanna have some sort of rapport with them and that when it comes time to raise money, anticipate that it's gonna take you two to three times longer than you thought. So if you're thinking, okay, I'm gonna give myself 90 days to raise the seed fund or this bridge capital to get me to the next stage, well, it might take you more like six months or nine. And so, if possible, I would definitely say to try and kind of always have one eye on the fundraising. What do you think, yeah? Well, I think that's a very good point but not only for fundraising, I think it's important to always be connected to the community. So I think the best thing you can do is to always go to talk to entrepreneurs, VCs, business angels and so on. And this way, you will always learn how these guys think, how these guys interact with others. And this is something that, as he said, it has to be done always. Even in the company that we backed, we asked the entrepreneurs to continue doing fundraising, not fundraising in the sense that they wanna ask for money but in the sense that they wanna talk to people. And we also asked them to connect with the ecosystem where they are and talk to other entrepreneurs permanently. So I think that's the best thing you can do. Yeah, I cold call every Barcelona base VC, no one returned my call or my email or the contact form, not one. So I was able to connect with Startup Grind and Scott, which got me, Giel, and which got me, Alex. So, and I'm not fundraising, but it actually took a few cycles. What sort of a warm introduction? So in the end, you brought the key point for me, which is like having in mind that everyone or behind everything, there is a person, no?  Your customers are people as well. And like having a relation them and making them aware that you're a person and what are your strengths and what you are doing. That's the key point for when you need it to be able to get that. Alex, you've been Startup founder several times. Any secrets? Yeah, I mean, fundraising is just like one part of it. And for example, in Europe, there's some kind of nuances to fundraising in terms of the metrics that the companies need to meet. And I think that's why we see companies formed in, for example, e-commerce and B2B spaces because that's where you actually can have cash flows at early stage. And whereas BTC markets developing them in Europe, where you're not talking about like homogeneous countries, I mean, everybody's a different language, different market sizes there. And the amount of money needed to be kind of invested before you can actually get to revenue is much higher. So, and that's the kind of specificity of the local market, which is completely different than the US because they're talking 300 million people or I mean, China, which is like one point. I mean, nobody really knows. So, but I mean, fundraising is just part of it. It's a very time-consuming process. What we did in my companies is we had split responsibilities between the founders. So whenever we fundraising, I mean, because it's essentially a full-time job, it's very time-consuming. So if you're in fundraising, like the last three, whatever, six months when you're going through the diligence, you're just on that.  So that's why it would be important to have a team for somebody who can actually focus on the business. And I mean, just starting a company, it's a lot harder than people think it is. I think it's been glorified. It's become an abode, but I don't think people actually understand what it is. I mean, we pulled the plug on my last company because at some point we sat down and we realized that, I mean, there are some fundamental challenges in terms of technology and infrastructure and in a vertical, which is what's so big. I mean, as a startup, we would essentially have to burn money for the next five years, wait for the deployment phase to kind of complete before we can actually do something meaningful and during the time, we'd still be looking at whatever, 70, 80 hour work weeks, there is always uncertainty and there's this massive opportunity cost in doing startups that people do not realize until they're in it, you know, six, 12 months in and like, that's it, you cannot get out. So you're in it.  That's why it's actually, you want to have investors that are qualified in a sense that they know that they're investing in something that is exceptionally high risk because investing in startups is a very high risk investment vehicle, you know. So and most, you know, VCs do not perform well in terms of like returns because it's a challenging environment. So and bad investor can ruin a startup essentially. Same thing goes for founders, for how you allocate equity, sweat equity, whatever, because roles change. So I mean, just having a cap table that makes sense, everybody overlooks it, especially first time founders, they're like, oh, we're all buddies, we're friends, this is going to be wonderful and we're going to change the world. Yeah. Like six to 12 months down the road, regardless of whether things go well or poorly, in a sense, I mean, you raised around and everybody's like, it's amazing, we're going to change the world even more. Or if things are going poorly and I mean, there's always struggles. I mean, something is always like, it's roller coaster. So there will be friction. So and the best way to get around it is to have an agreement where there are kind of no bad feelings. And so because at the end of the day, you want to be in friends and something that will allow you to be flexible. So in a sense, I mean, founders leave, teammates leave, and I mean, you don't want to have that equity locked up, you want to give people a flexibility and you also need to be able to relocate it to a new team member or to whoever. So it's very, very complex. So I mean, that's the thing I was like, how long is this panel? So because we can run a session on HR, we can run a session on growth and like customer acquisition, which is also very kind of region, sector specific. Some countries kind of in Europe and everything, like we just, I mean, there's that slide that Barcelona is Silicon, New Silicon Valley. I'm like, no, it isn't.  There are some things and I mean, and Shanghai is Shanghai. So there are some things that will work well in a particular region and aspiring. And I mean, that's what happened in Boston, like in New England, I mean, back in what was it, 70s, 80s, because it was the defense contractors, universities there that had cloakers that allowed a particular ecosystem to develop over there. There were specific conditions in Silicon Valley that allowed this industry to be developed there. They are conditions wise, London for FinTech and Insurance Tech, well, remains to be seen for how long, it's because of specific conditions because it is the financial center. Same thing goes for and trying to force it. I mean, we've seen it's attempted and tried. I don't think it works. I mean, at some point we need to understand that they are market conditions, cultural, whatever they might be that are conductive to certain types of companies to be founded there because there's certain talent available or there's certain social economic dynamics, demographics, whatever it might be. Because I mean, trying to build, I don't know, like Instagram or some very heavily oriented consumer company like, for example, in Barcelona, I mean, I would struggle to justify it without financial backing or something because it's essentially a very small market. Same thing goes for like, I guess I was in Japan recently, it's also very specific market and how it operates and some things work and some things don't. Yeah, so my company is headquarters in Switzerland but it actually started in Japan and in Japan they were eager to put models, the Japanese government is eager to put Japanese startups into the global scene actually and maybe we're like the guinea pig as well because in the Japan market, it's the threshold for IPO is a lot lower. I think it's only 10 million US or something. So it's pretty easy to accomplish 10 million in US and put yourself on the Nikkei stock exchange or something. So that's why I was gonna ask a question about the political scene, right? So does Brexit affect investment? Cause I met a startup founder that had some discussions with a UK VC and it literally fell flat, which is bad luck on his part but does it affect your investments or anything like that or do you see any effect on what's happening? For us it's zero, zero effect. We have a team in London and we're gonna be investing in London forever regardless what the politicians say because politics does not really affect much the performance of startups in the end. First they are mobile, they can go anywhere they want. Software is everywhere and nowhere. So before the Brexit, England was an attractive market. After the Brexit, it's still gonna be an attractive market. Yeah, I think there was an initial shock when that news broke and I think just in general business people, investors of any kind, they kind of don't like uncertainty. They don't like, that's something that will have kind of a knee-jerk reaction. So we definitely saw that. We also saw a couple of cities lining up trying to take over the Fintech Capital Award. Berlin was actually hiring buses to drive around London and say, keep calm and move your startup to Berlin. And I know Frankfurt's making a play. Amsterdam might be a natural place for it to be a Fintech capital. Obviously Barcelona had a nice ride up in Financial Times last week. I don't know if you saw that but Financial Times covered Barcelona as a possible Fintech capital. This week it was Madrid doing some PR. So, I think some of the cities are trying to scrape some of the juicy benefits from that. But I think in the end startups are adaptable and depending on your situation and the industry you're performing in, it's gonna more or less affect it specific to your case. So we have a lot of employees, engineers in Barcelona because there's a good university network. And I think even the Docker guys were hiring out of their old school epitech. And so do you see that as an advantage for European startups? And I had hired some people from Eastern Europe as well. Is that an advantage? Is like the more effective use of labor, keep your costs down? Or what are the tips for startup founders? I would say that cost of course is an advantage and especially in a city like Barcelona that compared to the rest of Europe is pretty affordable. But I would say more, no? Barcelona is a place that everyone or 99% of the people likes, probably Alex and Scott can answer in a while. They came here and did their business here but everyone or most of the people like to be here. So if you base your company here or you have an office with engineers here, it's easy to convince them. You're probably with the same salary tell someone to go to Stockholm or to Barcelona. I think that 90% of the people could choose a city like this one. So a good quality of life is something very important, like farther than the costs itself. Maybe now you can let us know why you came here. Certainly quality of life had a major factor in choosing Barcelona. It also has a great group of MBA and business programs. So there's definitely talent coming out the years. Every year is graduating 100,000 students or at least engineering students, PhDs, MBAs. They're coming from all around the world to Barcelona to study. Hopefully we can retain some of that talent here in Barcelona unfortunately due to some strict visa laws and restrictions that they tend to leave. Also the salaries low, that's good from a perspective of a founder but it's bad from a perspective of an employee. So there's loyalty, there's churn, there's the retainment.  So we would like to actually see the bar raise a little bit there, especially if a Facebook or a Google were to open offices here, they would just snatch the top cream of the crop, 10%, and come over work for us, kind of like King.com did when they came. But in general on a more philosophical, global economic vision we're heading into, we're going towards a gig economy. We're moving towards a freelance economy. We're moving towards everything as a service economy. So as we move that way and as people can kind of work from anywhere and technology allows us to be very remote and geographically agnostic, I think Barcelona is only gonna get more popular because if you think about, as a founder perspective, you're gonna spend the next five to 10 years easy in your next venture. So you have to start thinking like, where do I want to raise my kids? Where do I want to have a family? Where do I want to live the next five to 10 years? And I think that the minute you don't need to be in London to do your project, you don't need to be in Silicon Valley, I think Barcelona becomes very, very attractive. And I think we're moving more and more in that direction. I mean, Barcelona is, I mean, it's a wonderful city. I mean, we have amazing weather, like 300 and something days of sunshine, but I'm not sure the attendees managed to experience because it was cloudy and raining. So, and I mean, the quality of life is very good. There are some wonderful universities in the city. I mean, we started a university here and we're actually bringing talent from Eastern Europe to teach and transform. So that's something to keep in mind. So it's a great city. So, I mean, there's still a lot of work to be done. I mean, let's not kind of fool ourselves. So the foundation is good.  So because you can't swim in the ocean.  I tend in some ways to disagree with that because like in a highly regulated industries, okay? Regulation plays a tremendous role because I've been on the sidelines of kind of number 26 when they were trying to get their licenses done in Germany and it was a nightmare. So, I mean, but that's going back to, you know, environment being much more conductive to certain types of businesses. So, and if you're in a regulated environment, which would be, you know, anything medical related insurance, tech or something like that.  I mean, that whole thing about, you know, move fast and break things.  And if you are at a point where you have X number of employees, you have some fixed cost and you're shut down by the government, while you're litigating, which also costs money, I mean, you just might run out of money, as simple as that. So, I lost my train of thought over there. So, but I mean, no, Barcelona is wonderful. There's, it's a great foundation with, I mean, I'd like to see much more companies here. And I'd like, I mean, there's been a lot of talk from the government about changing your regulation, making it easier to set up companies here, hire employees, et cetera. And there is a problem with retaining a lot of the talent that comes here to study universities, because a lot of those people still go back. So, and that needs to come from the government. So they make it easy for these people who have graduated with an engineering degree from somewhere to stay in Barcelona, to work in a company in Barcelona. Because if they go back to, I don't know, wherever they live in the world, I'm in great. So, because Barcelona is, I think, the second kind of in terms of number of students' destinations of popularity by student destination in the world after London, like as a city. So, I mean, there's a lot of people coming here to study. So, just not a lot of people staying. Were, was there some questions out in the audience? No, I wanted to add something like, regarding what you mentioned regarding governments and their paper, of course, in Europe, they have a much bigger role than in USA, and luckily, I would say. But talking about Barcelona, specifically, I think that the city council is doing a great job in this sense, because they're like doing a lot of things, but not trying to do them on their own, but supporting the private sector that all these initiatives that are coming out in Barcelona and these startups, and supporting them and not just trying to do their thing and with their vision. Still, there's a long way to go and talking about the things of barriers. We have the example of Cantocs, that is a super successful company from Barcelona, but they actually had to found to the company London, because otherwise, probably they couldn't be legal yet if they had waited to be allowed to operate from here. So you're talking about Skyscanner, right? Sorry? Skyscanner? Well, that was Cantocs, but Skyscanner was in, I think, the Scottish company. Oh, I thought Skyscanner was Barcelona. They have a big dev team here, but I think the headquarters are in Skala. I see. So I think that Cantocs is an interesting example because all fit, not all fit the companies, but most of the companies that are VC backed in the fintech space are willing to be international. So then it's not about caring about what one government says, but caring about what all the government say and everyone has its own opinion.  And that's what they do. That's what happened with Cantocs and what's gonna happen with blah blah car, what happened with Uber and so it works. So there's a saying in the Silicon Valley, something like annual recovering, oh, I said misspoke, monthly recurring revenue, they're talking about like two million US dollars per month. Is that the same bar in Barcelona or Spain? If it's lower, I'm gonna move my company over here. Because Storm Ventures that used to do this panel, Jason Lemke talks about two, because they've gotten used to all these, they've gotten spoiled basically by these, you know, these home runs, right? They're looking for like two million monthly recurring revenue. And frankly, if you had two million monthly recurring revenue, that means you need 10x the pipeline. That means you have a $20 million pipeline every month. I don't know of anyone that can do that. And so what's the bar in Barcelona, money-wise? Yeah, I think it depends very much on the stage. So some we see is investing certain stages and they have different bars. It depends on the industry to some extent because monthly recurring revenue is for software, but in case of transactional or e-commerce business, it's a bit different. I don't think anybody in Spain has a bar at two million MRR, because this is probably a bar that is from maybe or four VCs like Accel or Index that are in London and come from time to time to Barcelona to invest. Because you don't have many companies reaching these levels per year, so. There was a question here. Yeah, entrepreneur in Europe sometimes seems to some of us that you're being a small company even before a game starts because of the huge domestic market that the US has. And you start off with a potential market of 320 million. And if you're unlucky, you start in Estonia, you start off with 350,000. And you might be a bit more lucky if you're in England or Germany. How do you guys look at that challenge for European startups into small companies operating internationally with domestic prices? You may want to start off with the international market. It was good, yeah. Well, I think Estonia has done it pretty well, right? Despite being a small market, because they have a couple of very big companies, so I would challenge this. I'm not sure that having all your customers in the US makes it easier for you than having them, some of them in Spain, some of them in France, some of them in Italy. I know the language is a barrier, but to some extent, all the customers speak English. At least. I wish you could. Plus you get your taxes, you know. Well, the main thing is you get a good client, a good client in a whole different dimension than getting your client in the States, revenue-wise. I don't really agree. I think most of our companies grow from Spain, then go to Europe, and then go to the US. And they don't find big differences between the kind of customers they find in Europe, in different countries, or in the US. So I think to some extent, the kind of customers that our startups have are very international, have been to some extent in many different countries. So I would say that startups live probably in a different level than the hyper-local level that some companies in different countries might be. And especially because of being able to sell it from as a service, hosted in the cloud, you have very low friction to selling anywhere in the world. So I'm pretty optimistic about Europe. And I don't feel it's too fragmented or too small for growing startups. Yeah, Alex, did you have an opinion? And I'll take a question right after that. I have an opinion. I always have an opinion. So my opinion is that having a large starting market is obviously an advantage. Selling even BTB SaaS in Europe to different countries, even if you're in the cloud, they are friction points. Because for example, you cannot sell something in German in English. You need to localize it to German. Otherwise, I mean, they will not buy it. And in Germany is kind of the Europe's largest market. So I also find that sales cycles and the sales process in the US, or just like in the English accent world, is different. And I find it faster in terms of at least from experience of like two to three SaaS companies. I find it faster, much easier to close deals, slightly different ticket sizes. Well, again, it depends on the vertical sector and everything, but it's easier to convert an American customer than it would be to convert an European customer similarly. And there is also specificity in selling in certain regions in terms of even developing a sales force. Because again, it may not matter as much when you're, say, at a freemium self-service sign-up process. But once you start to move up into like mid-market enterprise, it's like you need to develop inside sales. That means local knowledge, team on the ground. And you also, like in, I don't know if it's still the case, I haven't sold anything in France in ages, like regulation about having to establish a company in a team there and just run a lot of this stuff. At some point, you're like, really? For a whatever, 60, 70 million market? So, and yeah, so, and then you kind of, it does help a lot. Because again, there is the story of the name of the Barcelona company that was Hotel Tonight before Hotel Tonight was a thing, has been forgotten. But I mean, they started in Barcelona. They had the idea first. And then Hotel Tonight started much later in the U.S. But by the time that the local company died, Hotel Tonight was on their E-round. So, which was in the space of two, three years. I mean, that's like an outlier example, but it does help. So there's a question there, and then I'll let the panelists do some closing thoughts. Just really quick, do you all have engineering backgrounds? That's question number one. And question number two, if I were to move to Barcelona tomorrow, how would you advise me to connect with these ecosystems of startups and VC? I do not have an engineering background. The question number one. Question number two, Barcelona is very open and inclusive in general. It's a very international city. It's a very transient city. People are constantly coming and going for business or otherwise. I think the best and fastest way to get involved in the local tech and startup community is to be a part of it.  And within a few months of really going to the meetups, finding your kind of people, Barcelona is an outlier when it comes to meetup groups. I'm sure you're all familiar with meetup.com. Barcelona has, I think, the leading market for meetups in all of Europe. And it's in Barcelona, it's larger than all of Spain meetups combined, just in Barcelona. Meetup is one of our clients. That's how I know that. And so they are fascinated by Barcelona. They don't understand. They're trying to mimic Barcelona's rapid adoption of meetup to the rest of Europe. And for us, that works as a super fast end because you can find your group of people and the subjects you want to learn about it, be a part of, and get in and become an organizer, become just a collaborator and just go to these events. Within a couple of weeks or months, you're going to start seeing the same faces, meeting the same people. Everybody in Barcelona is about one degree removed from each other. We've all met before. Even though we don't work together or anything, it's a kind of a little cozy ecosystem. And it's growing rapidly. There's a lot of hype around it right now. And as Carlos said, the city's done a great job to brand itself as this innovation capital, this smart city world capital, the mobile world capital, the IoT is here right now. I mean, they've done a great job kind of branding it as an overall great place to start companies. I think you just kind of get involved. Yeah, so with that, I'm going to let each of the panelists give some closing thoughts, advice for aspiring entrepreneurs or people who want to work in Barcelona. So Guillaume, you can go first. OK, so just answering also your question. The first thing I think you could do is to sign up for his group, for Carlos's group, because it's very, very popular. And you can find a lot of people there involved in the ecosystem. And in general, for any entrepreneur going to found his company in Barcelona, I think I would repeat the same thing that I mentioned before, which goes in line with his thought. And it's a very open community. You can come here and talk to everybody. So use this, because people are going to give you advice and you're going to learn a lot from many different players in the ecosystem. And I will explain to you how things work. And it's pretty transparent and accessible. So this would be my advice. But cold calling didn't work for me. Maybe one point. I, myself, accept every LinkedIn invitation just by default. And actually, when I get one LinkedIn invitation and they want to talk, then usually they have a call. So you could have tried that. I wasn't smart enough. I used the web page. So I think many people are just open here. Alex, any advice, closing advice, before they pull us off? No, I mean, Barcelona is a wonderful city. It's gotten much more international over the course of the last decade or, say, 15 years. I think the most recent statistics is about 17% of people living in the city are expats from somewhere else compared to, I think, it was like 1% to 2% in 2000s. So the ecosystem is growing. So there are VCs. There are wonderful startups. There is a lot of talent. There are universities. The weather is wonderful. The food is amazing. And the wine is even better. So I think it would be even better if more people actually moved here and kind of lived the dream and tried to make it the best place that it can be. Scott, real quick.  And by doing that, you're gonna refine your pitch, your value to your benefit to the people you're trying to serve with your startup, with your idea. And then what you also do is you get better at communicating that to people. And the more people you talk to, the better you get. And the better you get, the more people know how to help you. So when you can explain what you're doing in one or two sentences and what you're looking for in one brief sentence, people know how to help you. And as a second, they know how to help you, you're top of mind. And so when they meet somebody who you might be looking for, they already have you crystal clear in their mind of who they can connect you with. And I think that's kind of just a general thing with your projects. You can do this now while you're working in other jobs on the side. A lot of the best startups come from side projects from things people tinkering on the weekends and the evenings and building things one of Barcelona's best companies, Red Booth, started as a side project. And that's the end for us. Sorry. Carlos, one more, I thought, and then that's it. I'd like to say, I think that all the factors that we mentioned about Barcelona and Europe like relate somehow to people, no talent, life quality, good wine. So in the end, if you put the focus on people, that's a way to succeed. Because people will be your customers, your team are people. So Barcelona is a city where you can find good people. So thank you, I want to thank the panelists. We wanted to showcase the VCs and the investment community and the startup community in Barcelona because it's unlikely Opensack will ever, we don't repeat cities. So thank you, it's kind of a once in a lifetime thing. And enjoy Barcelona. And thanks for attending.