Kia ora koutou, no mai haere mai. Ko Erika Austin Tokungua, we will start this session today with a karakia as we transition the energy of the virtual space into our formal sessions. A karakia is a non-religious blessing and is a practice of our indigenous people of Aotearoa, the Māori people. Pākatakatehau kete'uru, pākatakatehau kete'tonga, kia ma'kinakina, kia uta, kia ma'tāratara, kia tāi, e hea akeana te arakura, e tio, e huka, e houhu, ti hei, mōriora. Greetings to you all. My name is Erika Austin, community activator at Edmund Hillary Fellowship and the host of the session. The Edmund Hillary Fellowship EHF is a community of 500 bus innovators, entrepreneurs and investors committed to Aotearoa New Zealand as a base camp for global impact. Our vision is that Aotearoa New Zealand inspires global leadership and solutions for future generations built on principles of tangatatatiti and values of Sir Edmund Hillary. In this session, we will hear from fellows, Sean and Christy, and they will be covering a topic on demystifying early stage fundraising, avoiding common mistakes. As you can see on the screen now, the seven reasons why your start-up isn't getting funded. We are here to explore some of the questions around why businesses are not getting funding, where do they go for funding, what are the motivations for funders, and what are they looking for? New Zealand market versus offshore market, generalists versus specialist. And first, some housekeeping rules. As we all kind of tune in into this virtual space, it would be really great for you to stay muted as a start, but feel free to put in your questions into the chat. And during Q&A, we will have a space for you to ask questions by unmuting yourself and putting your hand up to indicate. And some of you may have to leave at various times and that is okay too. And Christy and Sean will be taking the virtual stage for about 40-45 minutes, followed by the Q&A. Before I hand over to Christy and Sean, I'd like to share a little bit about them. So, Christy Reynolds is an EHF fellow, angel investor and company director with deep experience investing in start-ups and working with ambitious New Zealand SME businesses that are poised for international attention. She has 25 years of commercial experience developing businesses internationally throughout the Asia-Pacific region, across a range of industries from SMEs to MNCs, including founding her own export business, which she ran for 80 years. These experiences have helped to inform her understanding of the unique challenges faced by business owners who are invariably constrained by limited resources, thereby impacting their ability to scale their businesses internationally. Sean McGrale is a committed social entrepreneur and impact investor based in Tamaki Makoto Auckland. As an EHF fellow, an investor fellow, he propels entrepreneurs to create world-changing businesses with a focus on UN sustainable development goals like gender equality, clean energy and fair work. Prior roles include managing director of Golden Sea, where he supported women-led start-ups and co-founder of Paint Night, an award-winning social impact company that became one of the fastest-growing private companies in the US. So, thank you both so much for taking the time today. Let's start with Christy. Do you want to say hello and introduce yourself? Hi, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm looking forward to having this conversation with Sean. We have both had an entrepreneurial background and as well as investors in the space I've now been investing in the start-up scene for about eight years. I love working with founders and helping them navigate their capital raise process. So, looking forward to sharing with you all today. Go, Sean. Thank you. Thanks for having me. So, most of my early-stage investments were in the Boston area supporting women-led businesses with Golden Seeds and now I'm in Auckland. And I think today's conversation is going to be robust about comparing both markets, what we're seeing and whatnot. So, without any delay, let's jump right into it. So, we thought we'd start off by talking about what are some of the different ways that people can raise capital. And the most common is bootstrapping. So, you know, you use your credit cards, you take mortgage out on your home, or you can reach out to family and friends, bank loans, venture debt, grants, philanthropy. And there are also programs like that are run by accelerators and incubators that can provide funding as well. Another one, which is more recent development in the last sort of five to eight years, has been the crowdfunding space. And there are a lot more businesses offering resource that way. And then, of course, there's angels and angel groups and venture capital. And those two are going to be the two that Sean and I really focus on today. Then you've got private family offices, private equity for later business. You know, when your business is more established and then looking at ultimately initial public offerings is another capital source. So today we're going to be focused more on angel and angel investment and venture capital stage of the business. Yeah. And just to jump in here, because of Shark Tank and Dragonsden, that angels and venture get a lot of attention. But we really wanted to put this slide up here because a lot of entrepreneurs kind of forget about these other sources and they can be really great. So that's why we want to start there. So why do some people strike gold and others find it more difficult? Well, we just wanted to give you a sense of what is actually happening. These statistics are focused more on venture capital rather than individual angel investors investing. So the actual total amount is likely to be a little bit higher than this or a lot higher than this. If we look at New Zealand venture and early stage capital investments, last year it was at 319 million into 222 companies. A year before in 2021, it was actually at 380 million into 224 companies. So the number of companies being invested in hasn't changed very much, but the amount invested last year was slightly lower than on the previous year. So which are the sectors that are getting most of the capital? Well, software seems to be still the main winner in this space. And then looking at deep tech, other areas such as clean tech, health tech and space tech. So that's just, we just wanted to kind of give you a bit of a flavour of where is the money going? What is it being invested in? Sean, anything else you want to add to that? Yeah, just to kind of let founders out there who might be frustrated when they're talking to a lot of investors, if they're not in these categories. It is a bit higher of a hill to climb when you're going after and trying to find an investor if you're not in these spaces. So if you are in these spaces, it'll probably be relatively easy to find, raise money, whereas if you're not in it, it's just a bit tougher. So we sympathize with that. And then here, you know, this is just one of the things a lot of entrepreneurs think that a brilliant idea is going to take them all the way and all they need is a light bulb. But I always try and use the analogy that businesses are more like a puzzle that you need a lot of pieces to come together. So that's, you know, a business model and moat and market share and whatnot. And a lot of founders sort of fall in love with the idea instead of building a team and how am I going to execute and make this idea a reality. So I just wanted to make sure that people understood that like an idea is not going to get you all the way and get you the funding. I tend to break down businesses into four categories and business ideas into four categories. One is a bad business that's actually most ideas fall into this category of it'll just never make money. It's not really solving a problem. Unfortunately, there's a lot of those out there. Then the next category is the side hustle. This might make you, you know, 10 to $150,000. It can maybe generate enough money for you, but it really can only support a founder. So as angel investors, a lot of people come to us and pitch some ideas that are really more of a side hustle and they really can't scale. Then there's the lifestyle business. These are nice businesses. I think of like a nice pizza shop or a hair salon or something like that. There's enough money there. It's a good business can put a roof over your head, put your kids through college, but there's not enough meat on the bone to have investors. So, you know, you should still move forward with that idea, but going after and talking to investors, they're not going to be interested because it really can't scale beyond say 10 million in revenue. And there won't be enough cash being thrown off to, you know, sort of feed the investors and a lot of investors will realize like the return on investment here. Most of it's going to go into your pocket and not into theirs. And then a really small percentage of businesses are what fall into the category of what I would call investable businesses. So this category meets a couple criteria. It can scale beyond 10 million in revenue. It can grow 20% year over year and have 20% plus profit margins. Those are just sort of some rules of thumbs rule of thumb of that investors are looking for. And those businesses can scale big enough that there's enough cash being thrown off, you know, five or 10 years down the line that it can not only feed the founders and sustain them, but also there's enough cash being thrown off for investors as well. Then I'll let Kirstie take this slide. Okay. And I just want to mention that if anybody has any questions with regard to the particular slides that we're on, please put it into the chat and Erica will share those questions with us. Then we can try and answer them on the fly. So how does start-up funding work?  You're putting in 100% of the equity. And so at that, so there's very little leverage there, but you might want to leverage by adding a co-founder in which case then you can might share the equity 50-50. You do half the work each and you put in the same amount of money. Then another phase is like the friends and family. You can go out to a family member who actually decides to put in some money into the company in return for a small equity share of the business. So this is really when you are committed because you've taken on external funding. Then the next phase is angel investment. You've maybe got some proof points, but you're still at what we would call precede stage where it's still an idea. You've got a basically a bit of execution. You're wanting to raise a little bit of money to maybe build out some of the tech. And you might be offering investors 20% of the company for say $400,000 on a $2 million pre-money valuation. So this reduces your equity share down now to 38%, both you and your co-founder. And you've given up a share to the angel investors. Then the next stage would be series A. You've actually proven, but you need some more capital in order to be able to continue the growth of the business. And so your valuation rises slightly. You're getting in a little bit more money to really execute on the business. And that again reduces your equity shareholding in the business. Then you go to series B and this is again more capital being injected into the business. And just in the same way as series A, the types of investors that would be looking at this would be angel, VC, possibly a family office. So again, this is a stage where you're almost passing over the control of the company to not to the investors, but to the group. So you've potentially got less than 50%. And this is something that we're very aware of as investors. We want to make sure that the founders are well set up if they are going to take on external investment. And there are differences between the US and New Zealand in terms of expectations. It's much better for a founder to have over 50% or co-founders to have over 50% share before say a VC company would come on board. And I don't know, Sean, whether you want to mention anything about that. Yeah, I mean, I think sort of the title of this session is demystifying. And a lot of founders, particularly when they're in the early stages and are raising money, maybe don't fully appreciate that when they get to that series B, that one, they can lose control. And not every founder is destined to be the CEO that can take the company public. So a lot of founders at this point will maybe get shuffled out of the business, get put into an R&D role or something else.  So that's sort of a downside that a lot of founders don't fully appreciate when they start down that phase. And then, you know, when you hear of companies exit and, you know, you hear a company sells in this example for 30 million. The founder might only get, you know, 6.8 million, I say only, but, you know, a lot of times you're only left with a small percentage after you've gone through these series of rounds that can really water down. You know, your equity in the company. Yeah. And I think there's something else here, which is really important to point out your cheapest form of capital was actually revenue. So it's actually incumbent on founders to try and generate revenue very early on in the piece because with revenue you've got cash flow and you need and then you're in a position not to have to take on external. Equity, which then has the potential to dilute you down further than perhaps where you want to be. So, and sometimes founders get so much on a chase of wanting to raise the next capital raise to fund the business and the next growth phase that they lose sight that they're actually there to make money and to generate revenue. And that's something else that we really want to stress here as well. Question here from James. What advice do you have for social enterprises or impact led businesses looking for impact? I mean, with social enterprises, they're going to go through a similar pathway. But I think they actually have it harder than say a non impact business, just because if they are allocating a certain profit, part of their profits to, you know, a certain cause, then it just makes it tougher for that business. So, as I was kind of saying before, you know, when we're in the angel, we kind of expect anywhere from 70 to 90% of our investments to go up and smoke and fail. And that risk factor goes up even higher with social impact businesses, but it follows the same pathway for this. So, I don't know. And I think, Jay, just like any business, often it's trying to find the aligned investors who align with your mission. And there are organisations that are focused more on impact investment that you could potentially go and have a chat with. So it's just about trying to align yourself with the right networks that have an interest in the work that you're doing. And that goes for whatever startup you're doing, whether it's food and beverage, whether it's deep tech, etc. It's the networks that you build up that become really important to try and identify the right investors. And I believe, Mark, that you've got a question that you'd like to ask us or a comment that you'd like to contribute. So I'll over to you. Yeah, I wanted to make a comment. I think what you've said so far is exactly right. But I would say in this question about equity ownership, there's actually what we would call a ditch on either side of the road. Having too little equity is a problem. Having too much is a problem because, and I've seen this happen, owners who want to maintain too much control actually alienate investors and board members. And I've seen this happen in a number of museum companies. I've seen more of them go the other way where they don't have enough equity. So you need to be sensitive to that. The other thing is that, as you get into, say, Series B, it is important, and Sean said this, to do a little bit of soul searching of what is your goal, is your goal that you have to be the CEO forever. That's a constraint in most cases. And often when you get to Series B, people do get diluted below their controlling position. But if they've done a good job and they have the right relationship with their board, their investors, they really still have security in their role. They just don't have numerical control. And we've seen a lot of US companies where the owners have created strange structures where they end up with control even if they don't have economic dominance. And those have not always gone very well. So it's a complicated question. The other thing I would say is the idea of driving early revenue is really applicable, particularly in SaaS kind of businesses. It's harder in a deep tech business. There's even a danger of a SaaS business chasing revenue. I have some of these in my own portfolio. They start doing services to drive more revenue. And in some cases, when they do that, they change the perception in the community of what they're doing. And investors don't like to invest in services business, so they don't scale. It can distract them. So there's a balance there. Maybe there's a balance in everything. And just to go back to Jade's question about social impact, going back to our original slide there of different ways to raise money. You may not want to go down the angel investor VC route. There are foundations. There are other philanthropists crowdfunding. Those might actually be a better route depending on your business and your industry. So I mean Mark brought up a good point. Like if you're in deep tech, you almost have to go down this route whether you like it or not because you need that cash. Because it's going to take you 10 years to develop your business anyways. But whereas a social impact business, you may be able to get away with other avenues of funding rather than looking for angel or VC funding. I think there was one more question from Stephanie. Just making the statement that there's a lot of focus on SaaS investments. And what advice would you have around looking for investment in clean tech infrastructure space? So Stephanie, not sure whether you want to actually ask your question directly. Are you looking at that from an investor point of view or are you looking at that from a trying to raise capital point of view? I can't hear you. Sorry, can you hear me now? I can hear you now. It would be from a start point of view looking for funding. So I'll go back to my comment earlier, Stephanie. In the same that we talked with Jade, it's about actually understanding which investors are really interested in the clean tech space. And also connecting with organisations that are specifically focused on that clean tech. So Ed Sean's just brought up 25% of funding right now is going into clean tech. There are organisations like outset ventures and ice house ventures where we regularly see clean tech type solutions being presented for investors to consider. So definitely you shouldn't feel out on your own on that. There is a lot of interest in that space. Yeah, and just to clarify this slide too, it's 25% of the 34% that goes into clean tech. So you can do the math there. But there's a bucket of money there and then there are specific investors that are very interested. So if you're meeting investors just generally and you're finding that most of the focus is on, you know, 45% of them are going to be putting their money into software. There is a group of people. So it is about being selective of who you approach. And typically VCs, angel groups will actually put that on their website of where they believe the world will be in five, 10 years. And that will give you an idea of whether you should even approach them or not. The other thing and maybe Sean, this is a really good opportunity for us to sort of delve into this. We've noticed some differences and Sean and I have discussed this between the New Zealand market and say the US market, whereby in New Zealand, we are far more generalists because of the small size of our economy. So venture capital companies here in New Zealand tend to be agnostic with regard to sector and they tend to be looking more for what is the best deal that is being presented. Whereas in the US, you will get VCs that are focused specifically on clean tech or focus specifically on SAS or food and beverage or, you know, so there's a lot more specialisation in that regard. Sean, do you want to add anything else to that? I mean, you're exactly right. I think you're getting a little ahead. But you're absolutely right. In the US, a lot of angels and VCs like to bring their industry expertise.  And if they have a stake in it and they're going to see 10x, they can make the connections. They can say, you know, this person left one of our portfolio companies, but they're great in marketing and really kind of help you launch that. So that does happen more in the US than here in New Zealand. But I think this is a good launching point to get into our seven reasons why your startup isn't getting funded here in New Zealand. And these are sort of meant to sort of inspire you. I always find that I learned better from being told sort of the mistakes than being told the to do list.  Companies that we meet as angel investors, sometimes they only think about the New Zealand market. And investors typically have this number in their head of having a total addressable market of a billion dollars or more. Because the thought process is that you're going to get a small percentage of that to see if it's a viable path forward. So this is what I would say is the number one killer for a lot of the businesses that I see that I don't invest in is just the founder is thinking small, maybe only the New Zealand market and not thinking abroad. And so if you are in that idea phase, you want to show on an Excel spreadsheet how this business could at least scale to $20 million or more. And that is going to somewhat challenge you to think beyond the New Zealand market potentially. And ideally you want to show that, you know, this business at some point can get to 100 million or more in scale. So Kirstie, I don't know if you want to add to that. Yeah. So having spent 20 years of my career of helping to grow New Zealand businesses internationally. One of the things that I often see with companies that are trying to go international or export is that they are undercapitalized and under, you know, and they don't necessarily have the capabilities in house. So they're under resourced. And we have this conundrum in New Zealand because of our small population that we're often sending companies out into the big wide world before they have really developed the, you know, that level of intensity, that level of profitability, that level of expertise in a particular area. And so you're building it and on the fly as you're exporting. So they are just some things to be aware of because if you can develop a strong domestic base to start off with, which gives you a good income, then that's going to help fuel your international growth. But saying that when we're talking about angel investment, ultimately, and venture capital, we recognize that right from the start. And so part of what we're trying to do is fund your ability to be successful and to grow internationally right from the beginning. So businesses that are just domestically focused are less likely to get interest from investors over the long term because we recognize that it is a very small market. So just keep that in the back of your mind as well. I see a comment from Mark. Thank you, Mark, for those of you who can't see it. The other aspect of connecting with a specialist VC is that they can connect you to their network, which can be a huge help, especially when entering a new market. Yeah, totally agree. Oh, we've got another question. I love it. This is such an interactive session. Kim, thanks for your question. Can you speak to the balance of presenting the local versus global market potential that should be communicated in a pitch as a company with global IP? We often focus the narrative on the New Zealand impact first and the global as a next step. Would we ideally be starting the global expansion simultaneously? Yeah, a good way to pitch it or have your pitch is you might say, hey, we're starting in New Zealand as our beach head market. But then from here, we're going to go to Australia and then to the UK and then to the US. So you'd be able to show a path of how you're going to take over the world. And there's going to be some logic and reasoning behind that.  And if you're currently not tackling a big market, that would be a challenge for you as the entrepreneur to be like, OK, this is why the investors are turning this down. And you shouldn't just be doing it for the investors. This will actually make your business stronger. And why investors sort of have these little checkboxes is because when you don't do that, there's a higher likelihood to failure. So even if you never go and raise money or never talk to an investor, you should still try and make your market as big as possible because it makes the likelihood of that your business will succeed that much higher. Lucy, do you want to jump in with anything more? No, I think you've covered it off well. So let's move on to the next slide. Yeah, do you want to talk to this, Sean? Sure. A lot of times when this kind of ties into going global, which markets you enter into after New Zealand will have a big impact. So there are tax, legal and regulatory hurdles. I see this a lot with medical devices. So in New Zealand, we have universal health care in the US. It's a very fractured market. And a lot of medical device companies that are finding success here immediately think to go after the big US market just because it's a much bigger opportunity. But Australia offers more streamlined. It is more like the New Zealand market for that. So just think about how you're going to go overseas. And that'll pick your strategy there. And then also there might be certain regulatory reasons that your product won't exist in that market. So cannabis is a good one. That in some markets it's available and in others it's not. And then whenever those regulations do change, that does offer an opportunity for you to enter the market is another one. So Kirstie, I don't know. No, I think you've covered it well. I've seen it many times when companies have tried to go in. We often call them in the export world non-tariff barriers. So there may not be a tariff which is precluding you or making your product more expensive to export into a market. But they can be these non-tariff barriers which are regulatory, et cetera, that just mean that it makes it so much more difficult to trade. And so New Zealand has in place with 99% of our partners free trade agreements. It's really important when you are looking to go into a new market that you're aware of those free trade agreements and whether your product or service or what you're looking to do is actually covered by that so that you're aware. The other big thing is and we often talk about the US is one country but it's 52 states. Well, same thing in Australia. We think of Australia as being one country but it also has different states with different regulatory arrangements. So it's about understanding how those can impact your business and selecting which market you want to go into. If you're going into the States is it just California and look at the population there and the number of big cities they dwarf New Zealand. So there are plenty of opportunities. You only have a finite level of resource so you need to choose carefully and do your homework before going into those particular markets in order to maximise the resources that you've got available to you and the opportunity. And for investors if you can show that strategic thought that goes into it. So if you're an alcohol brand where the alcohol laws are different state by state in the US but you can say I'm going after California because it's one state but has 19% of the US population. So that will show some strategic thought that you've actually spent time thinking about these things and will build confidence with investors. This is the problem solution mismatch. So I see this with a lot of social impact businesses where they take a global problem such as climate change and they say you know climate change is a problem and is it a problem. But then their solution is cauliflower ice cream right it's it there's a mismatch there of who they're solving the problem for. So you need to make sure that whatever problem you have in your deck is actually the problem of the customer the person who's taking money out of their pocket to pay for the solution. And there's different ways you know reasons for why people would pay for a solution for this. I'll just bring up one of our EHF fellows. Tim Moore has a company called Vortay. And you know his initial pitch was that he was saving the planet with this device that helps heating and cooling. But the solution that he eventually struck upon was for Coca Cola in Indonesia. So he was willing to drink warm Coca Cola. So with this device it allows the Coke to say cold and an eco friendly cooler that doesn't use as much electricity. So Coca Cola is willing to spend, you know, millions of dollars to solve that problem. So phrase your problem solution to make sure that it there's a there's a match there. So if that makes sense, but if you want to know it's great there. So another big issue is around how you term how you project what your profits are likely to be. So you know you've got to have plans and what we notice is that often with women founders, they will be a lot more conservative with male founders. You'll get much stronger hockey stacks, you know, growth plans. So what we're really trying to say is strike a balance.  It's, you know, we don't expect you to get it exactly right. But we want to see that you've actually thought carefully about how you can achieve these predictions and work with you to achieve that. So, Sean, do you want to add anything? Yeah, just I only wanted to touch on that 20% year over year growth that tends to be a number that investors will have. So some of the pitches I've seen, it's like, you know, 3% year over year growth. And the expectation is when you do raise money from an angel investor or a VC, they tend to want to see that you're going to deploy that money quickly and be able to get really rapid growth. You know, I don't know whether it's the New Zealand style of under promise and over deliver is maybe behind some of that sort of slow and steady growth, but investors typically want to see a more rapid growth. So it should at least on your Excel spreadsheet show that this can scale pretty quickly, but also don't go to the other extreme and say 2000% year over year growth. You won't be able to keep up with that or hire quick enough that the wheels come off the bus. I'm noticing all my punctuation problems here on the slide. So you can speak to this one. I think we touched on this already. So often businesses, we want you to think about the difference between being a generalist and a specialist. So if you've got if you are singularly focused on what you are doing and that you're not going to get distracted by lots of other things and you can really build a strong business. Well, saying that we recognize that New Zealand is a unique market and that it is small. And so often businesses will try and diversify in order to gather, you know, to generate more revenue, but that doesn't necessarily always risk because it can dilute your focus. So it's just about really understanding what your focus is and making sure that you're playing to your strengths. Another aspect about this is make sure that when you're in the early stages, you're not necessarily going to have the resources to employ people full time. So make sure that you outsource some of that. So you bring in somebody that can help with marketing or can help with the IT side of things. Bring that skill set in, but don't bring it in necessarily as a full time employee, but either on a contract basis. So, yeah, Sean, do you want to add to that? Yeah, just I mean, I don't know if this is a lot of New Zealand companies that I see that in the consumer space of say they have an underwear brand. And they often are like, we're going to have a manufacturing plant, you know, actually sell, we're going to open up stores. And each one of those are actually different business models. And they're trying to attempt to show that they're capturing more value in the value chain. But as an investor, I often say like, ooh, they might nail two out of those three of those businesses. But they might fail at one that will take down, you know, the whole business altogether. So I think if the simpler you can make it and use distributors, use consultants, really just get down to the core of the business and what you're good at, particularly in those early stages of the value prop that you have and offering that. The more likely are you are to see success and be able to raise money too. This one is purpose over purpose over profits. Social impact businesses are obviously trying to do well. But oftentimes I see that they're going to give away 100% of their profits to, you know, whatever their cause is or they do the Tom's shoes approach of buy one, get one free. And that's good. But you need to make sure that your business can actually sustain that. So it might be better instead of giving 100% of the profits to the cause, you give 10% of the profits to the cause because social impact investors are investors, not necessarily philanthropists. A lot of times the conversation kind of blends those together. So you want to make sure that the investors do want to see a return on investment. It will be patient capital, but at some point down the line they do want to see some sort of return. And if your business will never be sustainable, it is a nonprofit and you should classify it as so and go after philanthropy. And I just want to touch on too. It's okay to make a profit too. I think there is some cultural stigma to like fighting the good fight, doing some social impact and making a good living.  So just want to touch on that. I don't know if you had anything else. No, I think you've covered it. I had there. You want to talk to this one? Sure. So the other thing is timing. You've got to think about why you, why now? Because timing can really make or break a business. Some good examples of that, for example, is Netflix. It couldn't have existed without high speed internet. If we think about Netflix initially started off posting out DVDs in answer to Blockbuster that had physical stores. And it evolved into this incredible service that we now, many of us use. So Sean's given some other really great examples. Chat GPT couldn't exist without NVIDIA's GPU. So the whole idea here is to understand sometimes your idea can be ahead of the market or it may be too late to the market. And the trend in the opportunity has taken off already. So just be aware of these things. Don't underestimate the timing of your business idea coming into the market. It's a really important aspect that we think a lot of, a lot of founders can miss. Over to you Sean. I think that was it. And yeah, I think we can get into Q&A. Yeah, so we're happy to take any questions if people want to come off mute and or put your hand up and then we'll take them, you know, on a first come first serve basis. Tim, just clapping. Yeah, go on. Me. Can you, thanks Sean and Christy. Can you talk to a little bit specifically this, the ecosystem at the moment given the kind of general global disruptions that are happening? Can you speak to the landscape at the moment?  And there's no money being deployed. That's just not true. It's, there has been a decline. But as you could see from the numbers at the beginning, there's still $320 million that was deployed last year compared to the $380 million the year before. So it's a little bit lower, but there are still investors who are funding. And so there's money out there for good ideas. It might be a little bit more challenging. And there's obviously some group think that happens within the investment world. So if you put AI at the end of your company's name right now, you'll probably get a check. You know, whether that's a good investor that you want to have on your team or not is another question. But that does seem to be where the trends are for different things. But there is still money out there. And even if you weren't in those sort of hot items or sectors, it's just going to be challenging to find money in general. So I don't know, Kirstie, do you have a different perspective? I think that, I mean, we saw between 2021 and now 2022, there's been a drop of 61 million invested into the space. So, you know, that's a reasonably significant chunk of investment that hasn't, you know, hasn't flowed into the market. But we were also at 380 million. That was literally the highest level that we've ever had in New Zealand in that particular. So for 2021. So I think that it's probably not levelling out, but it's probably coming to a more sustainable level. The big changes that have happened in the New Zealand market over the last four to five years is we had a very active angel investment. Community, but we didn't have a very strong venture capital industry in New Zealand. And so, you know, you had MOVAC, which was really the start of our venture investment community back in the early 2000s. And we've had over the last three to four years, more companies come in from the US, from Australia, that have set up offices here and are specifically looking at trying to provide follow on funding. So it's just really about identifying which ones might be interested in the opportunity that you are wanting to fund. And do your homework. Make sure that you speak with a lot of investors. Capital raising is not easy. Talk to any founder. It is the hardest part of running their business. And they often say it distracts them from running their business. So you want to have a good team behind you that is supporting you on in this whole process. I can see three questions coming from Victor, Michelle and Jade. I probably, yeah, we can read through these and hopefully we've got time to answer all three of them. So from Victor. Hey all, I'm Victor from Nigeria. So I'm in the middle of a discussion between a dev shop and tech expert as regards him coming in. But the shop is more about baseline offer and expert is very concerned about projections. How do you think this should be handled? It's a great question.  And a dev shop would offer a lot more depth depending on how big their team is. But you might have a better chance of getting the tech expert to take less cash in exchange for equity. So if they wanted to be your co-founder, that would be an option as well if that's some expertise that you don't have. And you can give potentially a percentage of the company. It doesn't need to be 50%. But that would help you if you're pitching for money from investors. You know, to have them know that somebody on your team was able to help you execute that might increase your chances of getting some funding. The other thing that I would say about that, I have worked with teams where they've had both external as well as internal development. Often it's a transition. They might start off with external development and then move into as cash improves within the business, bring that in house. I've also seen it work the other way whereby the talent that was employed first off wasn't of the calibre that was required. And so they then move to an external development team. So it's really, it comes down to what you are trying to do and the resource that you're looking at and who has the best expertise and balancing the cost of having it external against having an internal resource. OK, so Michelle's question, you have mentioned civil gender differences in the approach. Can you speak to this and how women can address it please? This is like a big issue for women and minority founders and that Kirstie and I are going to have another session in October just on this topic alone. I think one of the best things that female entrepreneurs can be aware of is just when they're getting asked gender questions of things like, you know, away from your family and things like that that you might not get asked. And so just be aware of the unconscious bias of investors and always steer them back to the business and what you're offering instead of sort of getting in the weeds there. But it's a big topic to cover. Kirstie, is there anything else you want to touch on here? I think, yeah, I mean, it's a it's a subject that you and I both really passionate about. So please join us in October. We've set a tentative date of the 25th of October for a follow up session on to support women founders. So we will be diving a little bit deeper into the subject at that session. But I echo what Sean said, when you have difficult questions come up, which are not oriented towards the business, but are more oriented towards personal how you're going to manage, or they might be, you know, please can you justify or demonstrate, you know, you you just bring it back to the business, you bring it back to what you are on a mission to achieve. And you focus on the numbers, you focus on your plans and make that question irrelevant. Yeah. And there's a lot online of promotion versus prevention questions. So, you know, I know we didn't do a good job here in the one minute or a few minutes that we have, but you probably want to look at those and how to address those questions. And we'll cover more more of that often in October. The research was originally done by. She's now Dr Dana cans. She was doing her she was studying at Harvard and doing her PhD, and had identified when she was a founder that she was receiving different questions from her male co founder. She ended up doing a deep dive into why that was, and that was the basis of a lot of the understanding around promotion and prevention questions. And it's appropriate that as investors, we're aware of these so that we can make better informed decisions as well and direct better questions both towards male founders as well as female found women founders. We don't want to just presume that men have all the answers and ask them promotion questions. We need to actually tackle them to with some, you know, more difficult questions as well to demonstrate that they really do know their business. I'll actually jump to Stephanie's question and I'll come back to yours. Jade to wrap us up. I have heard a warm intro is better than a cold email when approaching investors is there a database of events networking opportunities to meet investors in New Zealand and if anyone else and the call have other links and other, you know, resources please stop them and the chat as well. Yeah, I mean, there's startup grind out of the grid AKL. They have like monthly events. There's also flying Kiwis is an angel group that I think it's every Thursday at grid AKL in Auckland has what are sort of office hours where you can go and pitch them and that's that might be a good starting point. Angel investors generally want to be found particularly angel groups. So that's a good way to get in front of a bunch of angels. I'll jump in there and I would also contact the Angel Association of New Zealand. We've got a great there's a great team there, and they regularly organize events which are geared towards helping founders connect with investors, but also helping you promote your business so they'll run deep dive sessions they'll run and I forget all the names but they'll run on a regular basis different sessions that allow you to connect with different people and so that's another option. I sales ventures is also a really good resource for companies that are wanting to pitch. They should, you know, talk with the team there. And if the business meets the criteria, then they will then enable you to present to their investor groups. They will so have the funds available there. So they're different organizations that do different things. And it's the Angel Association is certainly a good one for helping you understand where the opportunities lie in the marketplace. There are angel groups throughout New Zealand that are summer more active and summer less active, but at least you get to connect with some people on your region depending on where you are. And it's same in the US lots of Angel groups, same in Australia. Lots of Angel groups there as well so depending on where you are in the world. I'm just conscious of time. I will wrap the final question from Jade into this. So has there been any intentional collaborative investment across EHF community as investor fellows, but also just some live comments to wrap us up for the session. The word intentional, there's been cross collaboration between EHF fellows and I've invested in different funds. I'm sure Mark Bergman can talk about EHF fellows that are in his fund and I've invested in some of the EHF startups, but I don't know if it's coordinated. So the tough thing with the EHF investor fellows is everybody sort of has their view on where the world is going and what they're passionate about. So for myself it's female founders, but for somebody else it might be AI and another person it's biotech and another person. So it's tough to get sort of a rallying around a single topic about what they're passionate about. Kirsi, do you have any input there? Yeah, I agree with you. Again, that's just different. Different people have different investment mandates and that's why you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find the prince or the princess. It's a lot of conversations with a lot of people over time but that's the richness and the fun as well. I love looking at different business opportunities and working with founders. I know somebody said NZVC is founded by EHF fellows, that's correct. We've had a number of funds which have been set up by EHF fellows here including Mark Bergman's one who was with us earlier. So thank you everyone for attending. I hope this was really helpful and I'll pass it over to you, Erica. Yeah, I just want to say thank you, thank you, thank you to Sean and Kirsty for taking this time. But also we've got again a follow-up session on the 21st of October at the same time 12pm in ZT. So save that date, more details to come. And also thank you all so much for joining this session. The recording will be uploaded to our website very soon. So the last thing I wanted to mention, if you have an idea or topic for a live session, please let me know. We'd love to make these sessions more relevant to you and your communities. I've been just dropping in my email address erika.ostin at ehf.org to co-create future sessions with you. Close with a karekia. Tuia i runga tuia i rara tuia i roto tuia i wahu. Tuia i tehere tangata, ka rungo te po, ka rungo te aw te i hei mauri ora. Ngamahinui kaki te ano. Kia ora. Kia ora. Thank you. Thank you.


Good morning everyone. Dr. Salkirin Beverly Hills. We're starting the week right with this nice beautiful young lady who has done a magnificent job of losing a lot of weight. So she's here for a little makeover. We're going to tighten some things up. She's beautiful. We're just going to enrich the beauty today. So one thing we're doing is brachioplasty. Brachioplasty is when we do the arms. You can see she's lost weight, very thin, but what we're going to do is take off the skin. What I'm going to do for her is a Jane Brachioplasty. It's going to tighten her sides too. As you can see, I'm going to take all this extra skin and it's going to come right in the crease here and do, I'm going to do perfect suture in for her so the scar is minimized. So we're going to do the same thing on the other side. The left is a little bit bigger, you could see, but everyone has a little bit asymmetrical. So that's why. So we're going to take all that out, coming here into the jade. That's number one. You can put your arms down. Number two is we're going to do some Michael at the Flansen Cubic. That's going to give her some shape here. Give her the hourglass look. Then number three is we're going to do a super extended tummy tuck, which is going to go almost to where her buttock is. What I'm going to do is my line is low and it comes high. So they'll pull up on the skin a little bit like this. We're going to take as much as we can. We're going to take all this out. This point is going to come down here and we're going to go all the way across, all the way there. It's going to look very nice. Everything's going to be low, but it's going to lift things up also. If she turns around, you can see, usually I don't come this far, but we make exceptions for everyone. For her, we're coming all the way back here to get her skin in the back is good. I think she's going to retract very nicely. So I'm going to limit my incision to not do extra scars if we don't need to. For the icing on the cake, the fat we take out here and here, we're going to put here on top of the breast. Her breast, she has large breasts, but the thing is that up in the superior pole, I can feel her ribs. So the prudent thing to do is just add the fat up here so it gives her more volume up top because down here, she has quite a lot of volume, but what's lacking volume is up here. You can see the green arrows and that's where the fat will go. So this is going to be a fantabulous case. Stay tuned until we fantabilize her. So we're getting started on the case. What I'm doing right now is just taking out all the fat because what we're going to do is we're going to take out the skin without disturbing the lymphatics and the arteries, the veins and everything. So we're trying to get this area as thin as possible. You can see I'm taking out all the fat in the area. So it's basically just going to be skin. And this is the fat we're going to also transfer to her breast. So you guys never see me get it this thin when I'm doing it in an area where we're not doing excision. Look at how thin it is. You could basically see my instrument. The only reason I'm doing this is because we're going to take this off and I want this to be as thin as possible. I want it to be just purely skin, which you could see I'm already pinching it together. You could see my marks, my hash marks going around, and that's what's going to happen. So here we go. We're cutting the skin. It's all, you know what we say? Measure twice, cut once. We already measured twice. So there we are. Ready? Ready? So here look at this. This is a superficial vein. This is the lymphatics. This is the muscle fascia. All the good contents, it's still in here. We didn't take any of it out. Let me have a pickup so we could put it together. But you could see all the major veins and stuff were not cut. The lymphatics were not cut. So she'll have less swelling and everything after surgery. So here's this side to our mark. Green to green right there. Here we go. Another blue. This was from her arm going to the lateral area. You could see how thin it is. It's not thick because we already lipoded out. Look at how thin it is, but it's just excess skin. And she's not going to sweat anymore because we got all her sweat glands. So here we are on the left side. Look at how thin it is. Again, we want this super thin because we're going to just take off the skin and leave the lymphatics and everything behind. You usually don't want to be this thin when you're doing lipos because it's not good form to get it so thin. But because we're taking all this off, we're just, I'm coming very superficial. Regularly, you don't want this, this much superficial lipos. You can see my instrument almost threw the skin. And it's all connected. Watch this. Let's see. All of this is connected. So you guys can see how thin she is. She's just skin. Look at how thin that is compared to here, how thick she is. So we're just going to go her and start. It should just peel off because we've already lipored good enough. So it should just be, you see all these lymphatics and stuff that need to stay back, they stay back. You see all those? These are lymphatic channels that stay back. Let's give me the, then we go our hash mark to hash mark. You can see it's just, it's just by the deep dermis that it's connected. You see all the, all that honeycomb that's from the lipo. You can see there's no fat. These are just lymphatics and veins and stuff that need to stay back. All the way from here we're going to isolate the belly button.  It stays in. Everyone is, everyone's favorite question is, do I get a new belly button? Technically no, because it's your old, old one. And we just pull it through a different hole in your abdomen. So it's, but it does look different because we do make the hole you desire. So it does look different, but it is your own belly button. Isolating it. It's on a stalk and it's attached to the abdominal wall. So it doesn't go any higher or lower. It stays at the same area where it's been. But you guys, here for you guys at home, we've isolated the belly button. There it is. This is the hole. It's already on a stalk ready. We're going to start going down here to the fascia. The fascia is what covers muscles. That white sheet, all muscle practically in the body, with some exceptions, have a fascia around them. There are only a few in the face that don't have a fascia, but most muscle in the body do have a fascia covering them. So here we are. You could see the abdominal muscle fascia right here. This white thing is what we call fascia. You can see how it's nice, how gently, if I even use my fingers, I could push it back. Gentle movement on my fingers. And once in a while, I use my bovi pen and then push it back. It's in a layer where there is no blood vessels. So it's a vascular. So you don't have to worry as much about bleeding when you're in the right level. So now that we've cleared all the way to the belly button, this is one of our favorite parts is when we split it in half down the middle, and we go all the way to belly button because we know we're going to be able to get that amount of skin off of it. So here we are. Here's the belly button. You can see that it's on a stalk. So it doesn't move. It's connected through the abdominal fascia, abdominal muscle. It goes to the inside. So we're here. We're just going up till we get to the xipoint. You can see we're right here. We're getting some fluid and that's all the numbing fluid I injected. Of course, you're going to get some bleeding.  It's not a big deal as long as it's controlled. And we have good anesthesia today. So we've dissected. You can see this. This is her six-pack muscle.  You can see her pelvic bone right here and right here. She has very little visceral fat.  You can see how tiny she is. I'm going to close up her her defect right here, although it's small. I want to give her that internal corset look. So we're going to start doing that. So once again, this is the belly button. It's on a stock. You see it goes through the muscle and it's connected to the internal abdomen. You can see what I've drawn up. What we're going to do is take this side of the muscle and approximate it to the other side, which is an internal corset. You can see as I'm going through, I like to do this multi-layer closure because I just like it to be reinforced. So I do two layers. Your surgeon might do one, two. I'm not sure. But here, we always do two, just in case you have a backup. If you pop a stitch, which is, you know, it's a suture. It could be popped. So we like to be cautious. So you could see here, it approximates it. So what we're going to do now is one, two, get a knot. So you can see the lines are together. If you remember, they were apart. They were about inch and a half to two inches apart. Now they're all in one line. Now for the second layer, we're going to do a running suture. A running suture, we tie up top and we just run it all the way and tie it at the bottom. This just reinforces the incision and reinforces the internal core set that we have. So here we are. We're done. You could see the abdominal wall is nice and tight. We fixated our belly button so it doesn't move around all over the place. And now it's time for the skin excision. So we measured both sides equal distance and now we're going to make the cut on the left side of the tummy tuck. And here we go. And one swing of the back. So here we are. This is it. This is the midline. There it goes. We got it all up. Celebration. Let's pop the champagne. Pop the champagne. Whoa. That's a great piece. So we measure out where the belly button is. I feel it from underneath. I see where it is. So what I do is I'm going to make her a nice classic incision for the belly button right here. And that's how a belly button is made. It's brought out through incision and it's your actual own belly button. So you could see I tunnel it all the way down the thickness of the whole abdomen. So there's a tunnel made between the anterior wall and where the belly button is so it could be pulled through. So everyone, our marathon case is over. We did bilateral J-brakeioplasty. You could see it started out here and the elbow comes in and really contours the chest. We did 600 cc's of fat to each breast. They look rejuvenated. And for the main course, this was pretty big. I want you to see how long this is actually. This was the old belly button. Look at how it goes from side to side and let's see how the new one looks. Whoa. Look at that beautiful thin scar. Everything stretched out. She has curves where she didn't have curves. Her incision is down low. She looks fantabulous.


Mr. President, it's so good to see you. It's good to see you, too. Thank you so much. Your home is rebuilt, and thanks, Mr. President. Yeah, thanks so much. You've been all right today, and doing so well. Thank you so much. Thank you again, Mr. President. The guys and your team, the guys. It's a pleasure to be here with you today. As I learned from President Zelensky and his security of the Ukrainian military is making steady advances against the Russians, and I assured him that, for my part, we'll continue to do everything in our power to make sure that we provide the Ukrainian military with the support they need until they repel the Russian invasion and restore the sovereignty of this country. And I have every confidence that the day will come when Ukraine's sovereignty is restored and our territorial integrity is restored. And in that moment, I believe we'll not only have served the interests of the people of Ukraine, but I truly believe it's in the national interest of the United States and all of the free world that the Ukrainian military prevail. We need to make sure that we provide the Ukrainian military what they need to push back on and defeat Russian aggression here, because it will make it clear to Russia, to China, and to any other nations in the world that would seek to redraw international lines by force, that the free world will not stand for it. The free world will stand together for freedom. Russia has gone from being the second most powerful military in the world to being the second most powerful military in Ukraine. That's real progress on a strategic level.


You ever worry about yourself imploding? Like it's just too much? Yeah, absolutely. No one should put this many hours into work. This is not good. People should not work this hard. They should not do this. This is very painful. Painful in what sense? It hurts my brain and my heart. I once heard Elon Musk say, I work 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year, and they still call me lucky. While I admire Elon's genius, innovation, and contributions to society, and do not believe his success is lucky, it's earned, that type of schedule is not how I choose to live. Don't get me wrong, I love what I do, but I have no interest in keeping that type of pace. By design, I am not a part of the hustle culture. I choose not to rise and grind.


Professional MMA star and one of the most popular fighters on the entire planet, Conor McGregor, hails from the Emerald Island of Ireland and has amassed a startling net worth of over $200 million thanks to a number of massive paydays. Including the roughly $100 million he took the L4 against Floyd Mayweather back in 2017 as well as an astounding $200 million pre-tax earnings from the sale of his whiskey brand proper number 12. Thanks to all that money, he's been able to construct an enviable real estate portfolio with homes all around the world. Of course, with such strong ties to Ireland, Conor's most expensive home is located in the country of his birth. In 2019, Conor McGregor spent some of his Mayweather earnings on a $2.5 million mansion located in Strafen Co. Kildare which formerly belonged to a son of the former Prime Minister of Ireland, Albert Reynolds. Known locally as the paddocks, Conor's home base sits inside of a gated upper-class community called the K Club which was famed for having hosted the Ryder Cup back in 2006. A short drive from the club's main building, you'll stumble upon Conor's home sitting on gorgeously landscaped gardens with extensive frontage bordering on the river Liffey. From the very first moment, you step foot inside the premises, you'll be greeted with luxury including a spiral staircase in the front foyer along with tiled floors and a crystal chandelier. Elsewhere inside, you'll discover five bedroom, six bathrooms and fully realized living spaces like the living room and kitchen which have been blended together into one vast open concept. If you're looking to set a mood with a little more intimacy, you could always move mealtime to the stunning dining room. Sure, it might be big too, but at least it strikes the right tone. And when Conor's done filling his guests' gas tanks with some five-star meals, he can show them to the games room where they'll spend the rest of the night drinking and playing pool. More likely than not, however, your best bet at locating Conor at home is inside of his own personal gym where he never has to miss a training session thanks to his array of state-of-the-art equipment including a treadmill, cable machine, squat rack, bench press and more weights than anyone can count. Local reports also suggest the Conor is looking into extending the size of his home and has submitted a plan to the Kildare County Council to make significant addition to the home's current layout. Part of the proposed work includes the demolition of Conor's current garage and the construction of a part single part one and a half story extension to the front, side and rear of the property. According to the filed paperwork, Conor also plans on relocating the home's tennis court while building a partially sunken basement underneath to contain a car park and a new gym. Initially, this plan was rejected with the board telling Conor that the scope of the project was too large. But after a comprehensive resubmission was made, the council granted McGregor the necessary permission so my best guess is that Conor will be looking to stay somewhere else in the near future while his Irish home gets a bit of a facelift. Thankfully for Conor, he's got choices when it comes to where to head next. As beautiful as Ireland is, it doesn't exactly boast excellent weather all year long so that probably is something to do with why Conor decided to spend $1.6 million on a holiday home in Marbella, Spain back in 2018. Situated in an area of the sun-soaked city known as the Heights, a luxury development that boasts wonderful views of the Mediterranean and located right on the doorstep of La Rosina Golf Club, Conor and his family's new home is the perfect spot to relax and chill out. Of course, when a neighborhood is this nice, good luck keeping it a secret. Conor might be relatively new to this area but celebrities could be spotted all over, including European football stars like Harry Winx and Tom and Sorensen, as well as US Open Golf champ Michael Campbell. As nice as their homes, no doubt are, it's Conor who might own the prettiest of the bunch. His home boasts some modern touches that keep it looking spectacular. In particular, an awesome LED lit driveway that also boasts a stunning water feature as well. Inside, you'll find a fully stocked kitchen with built-in appliances that sits directly next to a living and dining room combination surrounded on three sides by gorgeous floor-to-ceiling windows that show off the home's incredible views. Elsewhere, the residents boasts a primary suite with a sitting area and direct access to the outdoor pool as well as a home spa. Better yet, the home also features a dining area that overlooks the Atlantic Ocean where Conor can stargaze to his heart's content or at least until he's had so much whiskey to drink he can't keep them straight anymore. You know, whichever comes first. Then again, if for whatever reason, Conor isn't feeling up to traveling in Europe, his other option is to go to one of his favorite cities on the planet, Las Vegas, Nevada. When Conor McGregor's UFC career was in full swing, it just made sense for him to have a home in Las Vegas considering how many of his fights emanated out of Sin City. Conor's one-time home in the city was a residence nicknamed the McMansion which he once showed off to ESPN in 2015. Two years later, he'd returned to Vegas before his fight with Jose Aldo but this time, he'd stay somewhere new, a home boasting 12,000 square feet of space. That's also only a 15-minute drive from the Vegas Strip. Known as Vegas Views, this mega mansion is situated on a 1.5-acre compound on Sunrise Mountain and features amazing panoramic views of Vegas along with six bedrooms, just as many bathrooms, a walk-in wardrobe and a kitchen that is so state-of-the-art. It was once used in the filming of Top Chef. When it came time for a little rest and relaxation, Conor could kick back in the home's one-of-a-kind entertainment suite which boasted not only two TVs but every conceivable video game console, an air hockey table and even a disco ball for some late-night dancing. Then there's the gym where Conor lifted weights and utilized every single piece of equipment routinely so that he could maintain the peak physical condition he was in throughout his prime. Conor could also beat the Vegas Heat no problem by jumping in and out of his 50-foot-long infinity pool or maybe he'd rather barbecue on the property's massive terrace or enjoy a round of golf on his very own private back garden golf course. Even though this home wasn't located in a private community, it did include its very own concierge who could accommodate anything Conor needed from dinner reservations to post-fight entertainment and even setting up appointments with fashion consultants. But here's the thing, Conor never actually owned this home. He simply rented it. People who did own it, however, put it up for sale in 2017 for $2.8 million. According to reports, whenever Conor is back visiting Vegas these days, he tends to rent out a penthouse suite at one of the city's many famous hotels. There have also been whispers that he's training out of a Vegas compound for his return to UFC in the near future. But first, he's gonna become a crossover star with his first starring role in a remake of the 80s hit Roadhouse. He's also hoping train new fighters as part of UFC's The Ultimate Fighter reality series where he's working as a coach against the team of up-and-comers being taught by his next opponent, Michael Chandler. But no matter what corner of the world he's in at any given moment, one thing's for sure, Conor McGregor knows how to kick up his feet and relax in a lap of luxury as his real estate portfolio so clearly reflect. All right, everyone, that's gonna bring this latest house tour to a close. Thanks so much for watching and before you head out, consider answering the following question. If you were a professional fighter, which room in your home would be the one you spent the most amount of time in? I mean, logic says it's the gym, but I'd be interested to hear if you can come up with other ideas. Otherwise, like, subscribe and turn on those notifications to make sure you never miss a video. My name is Karah. If you would like to check out more celebrity homes then stay tuned because coming up, I'll take you inside the properties of Rihanna. I'll see you all next time. After working her butt off to secure a wildly high net worth, estimated at $1.4 billion, Superstar Rihanna is said to have quite a stacked real estate portfolio. While she owns multiple properties in Los Angeles and even a spawner native Barbados, it seems most recently Riri has splurged on a glamorous $21 million condo. While she already has called the luxury building this century in Los Angeles home since 2014, with her second baby on the way it was time to upgrade to a bigger, better residence in the same structure. This time, a penthouse covering the entire 40th floor. Rihanna and her family's new spread offers over 9,000 square feet of space, jaw-dropping views and features like floor-to-ceiling walls of glass and a personal movie theater. Back in 2014, Rihanna moved on into her stunning condo located in the Century Building, a 42-storey condominium skyscraper in Century City, Los Angeles, about 10 miles from downtown. Other residents who live in the stylish Robert A.M. Stern design tower have often spotted the high-profile singer coming and going from the building. And according to several sources, Rihanna has long been using this condo as her primary residence. She sought her first condo here for safety purposes after an intense break in incident occurred at one of her former homes. At the Century, there are private elevators and what's described as three layers of anti-Paparazzi security. Not to mention, the building is also famed for its 24-hour valet and 75-foot luxury pool with private cabanas. Rihanna's first unit was said to boast three beds and four baths and cost her $5.45 million. So comparing to the price tag of her latest purchase here, this condo was definitely much smaller. According to reports, it spanned a total of 3,500 square feet. The Century boasts 140 units and other reasons for a high price tag to live here concluded amenities like a movie theater, spa, wine storage, fitness center, four acres of landscape gardens and more. Most recently, in April 2023, it was reported that Rihanna had added onto her already large property portfolio with the purchase of a sprawling penthouse in the exact same building. Only this time, it cost the billionaire a whopping $21 million. This entry might be one of the most prestigious and pricey residential buildings in all of LA, but we know Rihanna can afford it. Considering she not only has a new baby but also another on the way, it would seem that she and her partner Asap Rocky needed a larger space for the growing brood. Rihanna's new condo is one of the largest in all of the building. It's a massive penthouse covering the full 40th floor and boasting 9,920 square feet of space throughout. Aside from all of the designer details and amazing views of the city lights below, her new crib comes with four bedrooms and 6.5 bathrooms throughout. Plenty of room for the soon-to-be family of four. Another billionaire, Nick Molnar, co-founder of Afterpay, sold the residence to Rihanna and while he wanted $28 million for it, she was able to negotiate a nice little discount. This could have worked out because the deal closed only one day before the new Los Angeles mansion tax came into play. And if they waited one more day, the former seller would have owed an additional $1.1 million in taxes. Still, Nick lost out on $600,000 considering he bought the penthouse two years prior from friend star Matthew Perry. While Perry lived here for four years, he seriously customized the property, getting help from architect Scott Joyce as well as interior designer L.M. Pagano. Stepping into Rihanna's new luxury crib, a private elevator landing transports you directly to the home's entranceway where the grand living room has soaring ceilings and full walls of curvy glass showing views of the city skyline. Also here are dark hardwood floors underfoot that continue into the formal dining room. Nearby, the modern all-white kitchen has top-of-the-line appliances, double islands, snack bar style seating, and plenty of marble counters. Other stunning features in Rihanna's new family home include a plush soundproof theater with velvet couches and a cozy vibe as well as a massive master suite that comes with not only a curved bedroom with walls of floor to ceiling glass but also double walk-in closets, double-on suite bathrooms, and its very own private sitting lounge. Finally, the unit also justifies its hefty price tag with it's not one but four separate outdoor terraces from which you can view the ocean, Catalina Island, downtown Los Angeles, the San Gabriel Mountains, and even Mount Baldy. Rihanna's penthouse also comes with a jaw-dropping monthly fee of $8,814, which gives the wealthy residents like her access to all of the amenities like four parking spots in the underground, a 24-hour concierge and outdoor swimming pool and gardens, an in-house restaurant, and much more. Other famous neighbors of the century include the likes of reality stars, Terry and Heather Dubrow, as well as Denzel Washington, and even Candy Spelling, who owns the famous two-level penthouse just above Rihres. While Rihanna also owns two next-door mansions in Beverly Hills, she reportedly rents them out, but let's check those out next. In December 2020, Rihanna purchased a home in Beverly Hills, more specifically in the Beverly Hills post office area, on the same star studded in Posh Street as legends like Paul McCartney own properties. Her contemporary crib is nearly invisible from the street due to imposing privacy gates and hedges, and it has undergone massive renovations to blend both traditional and modern design elements. Meanwhile, inside the home features 7,628 square feet of space with five beds and seven baths throughout. The home was built in the 1930s, but it had been completely torn down and rebuilt in recent years, making the new style very modern. Curves stairs out front lead you to the house's exterior which these days features white paint with a black metal roof and trim. Interiors resemble a modern farmhouse design with French white oak hardwood floors and an open plan layout.  An open air courtyard with terrace, swimming pool, spa and fire pit. Most of the lower level in this home surrounds the courtyard which is accessible through walls of glass sliders.  Another, also with fireplace, is fitted with shades of gray from the walls to the bookcases and even the wet bar. Rihanna's kitchen in this residence has plenty of space to cook up a meal or entertain since it's bright and airy and features gold hardware, two white marble islands and access to another slim terrace. Not to mention a cozy breakfast naquir was made glamorous with black leather seats. The master suite has tropical vacation vibes and looks like it's straight out of a resort. Also including a custom closet with black cabinets, well the ensuite bath opens up to an outdoor lounge area too. Also on the upper level of the home, you'll find a home gym with full wall of windows overlooking the central courtyard as well as the guests and family bedrooms. Throughout the home, there are plenty of open spaces to socialize such as an intimate lounge area, a luxury wet bar and the El Fresco courtyard. The half acre property is on a slope overlooking the canyon but the courtyard was a creative way to get the most out of this space and because of its position on the hill, the entire property is surrounded by tall walls for extra security. Then in April, 2021, it was reported that Rihanna added onto that property and bought the house next door for $10 million. This home was never on the open market but the gated property includes a large home originally built in the late 30s, spanning 3,000 to 500 square feet of space with four beds and 4.5 baths. The Tudor style home is designed with a mostly traditional vibe, offering up formal living and dining areas along with an Eden kitchen on the main floor which opens up to the family room. There are also some cozy fireplaces throughout the home too. That family room has glass sliders out to the backyard while the upstairs master suite boasts its own private balcony. While the homey look a little bit basic for Rihanna and ASAP Rocky, since they likely rented out to tenants, it was an investment. Now, they own over an acre of land total with both of these Beverly Hills post office properties combined as well as over 11,000 square feet of living space between them, two pools and tons of parking. Out back, there's a brick patio with room for eating in the fresh air as well as a built-in barbecue and oversized swimming pool while on top of the garage, you'll find a separate guest house with full bedroom suite. Now that we've checked with the homes of Rihanna including her latest Century City purchase, that's gonna bring this house tour to a close. Before you go, answer this question for me. Would you prefer living high up in a penthouse or in a private home with a big yard? Let me know in the comments below. For me, I'm gonna pick the yard and full on house every time. Don't forget to like, subscribe and follow me on Instagram to chat.


As I already mentioned, this work is a joint work with my PhD supervisor, Alexander Mai. And it is called Maximizing Small Root Bounds by Linearization, which is itself quite surprising because we can use such a simple thing as linearization to obtain quite good results. And yeah, the subtitle applications to small secretive exponent RSA, this is what I'm going to be talking about during this talk, so let's maybe start. Small secretive exponent RSA. Well, the RSA system is as usual defined by some public parameters N and E. And a secret parameter D, the encryption works by taking a message N and raising it to the ETH power to obtain a ciphertext and decryption similarly works by taking a ciphertext and raising it to the DTH power to reveal the message again. So if you think about something like low cost devices, you might be tempted to speed up the process of decryption. So what options do we have for that? Well, one simple method to speed up the decryption is to use a small parameter D because then we don't have to do that much exponentiation to compute the message from the ciphertext. But it has already been shown by Michael Grina in 1990 that if we choose the parameter D to be smaller than N to the power of 0.25, then this is insecure, which means we can reconstruct the parameter D by just using the public parameters. And this result has been further improved by lettuce-based techniques from Bonnie and Durfee in 1999 and they show that it is insecure if D is smaller than N to the power of 0.292. And well, what other options for speeding up the decryption process do we have? We might as well use the Chinese remainder theorem because the party who knows the secret parameter D also knows the factorization of the modulus N. So what we can do is we can compute c to the power of dp modulo p, where dp is just d modulo p minus one. And the second value c to the power of dq modulo q and combine those values by the Chinese remainder theorem to obtain c to the power of d modulo n. And if you use this Chinese remainder theorem, RSA, we might be tempted to use additionally smaller parameters dp and dq such that this is even faster. But in Johansson, Alexander May showed in 2007 that if we choose those parameters dp and dq to be smaller than N to the power of 0.073, then this is also insecure, which means again we can reconstruct those parameters. And what is the contribution of this talk? Well, in this talk, we want to investigate the results of Bonnie and Derfie on the one hand and on the other hand, the results of Johansson and May. And for Bonnie and Derfie, we will present a simplified proof technique because for those of you who know the proof of this result, it's not that easy, but in a minute you will see that we can formulate it very simply. And in the second part of this talk, we will investigate an open question posed by Johansson and May about the possibility to improve this result by using something similar like Bonnie and Derfie. Okay, so let's start with the attack of Bonnie and Derfie and let us look at how this works. We start with the RSA key equation, which is e times d is congruent to one model of phi of N. And this can also be written as one plus a factor k for the modulus times the expansion of phi of N. I've written it here as N plus one plus minus p minus q. And now let's introduce two variables, a variable x for the value k and a variable y for the value minus p minus q. And for the term N plus one, let's write capital A. Then if we take this equation and reduce it, modulo e, then we obtain a polynomial equation one plus ax plus xy equals zero modulo e. And from the point of view of an attacker, if we can, maybe I'll say this at first, this polynomial on the left hand side, the one plus ax plus xy, we know that this polynomial has a root, namely the value x zero y zero equal to k and minus p minus q, modulo e. And if an attacker is able to find this root, then using minus p minus q, we are able to factor the modulus, so we can say that this RSA is broken. Bonn and Duffy employ the technique presented by Coppersmith to find small solutions to polynomial equations and using this method, we are able to find roots of some polynomial equation which are upper bounded by some values capital X and capital Y. And because it is an integral part of this talk, I would like to give you a short idea of how the algorithm of Coppersmith works. So first of all, we start by defining some collection of polynomials, which all share the common root that we're looking for, modulo some integer, some value e to the power of m for some integer m. And the first thing to notice here is that if we take a bunch of polynomials from this collection, a linear combination of a bunch of polynomials from this collection, then this polynomial, this linear combination has also the same root. So now our goal is to find a special linear combination, namely one such that for all values small x, smaller than capital X and y smaller than capital Y, it should hold that g evaluated at those points is smaller than e to the power of m and this modulus that we defined above. Because what do we know then? Then we know that on one hand, because that's how we chose the polynomials, we have g x0, y0 evaluates to zero modulo e to the m. And on the other hand, because we defined the linear combination to be, let me say small, we know that g evaluated at that point is smaller than e to the power of m and those two points combined give that g evaluated at x0 and y0 is zero, not only modulo e to the power of m, but over the integers. And when we apply Coppersmith's algorithm to find such a root, well, the ultimate goal is to maximize these upper bounds on the variables and the maximization process is usually done by tweaking the collection of polynomials that we take in the beginning. So maybe let me give you an example for this. So this example refers to the Bonnie and Dorfie attack. So on the right hand side, you see the polynomial again that we wish to find solutions for. And we take a collection which consists of polynomials, which consists of the constant polynomial e, x times e, f, y times e, and y times f. And notice that all these polynomials share the common root that we're looking for modulo e. So we took the integer m to be one here. Okay, and what we do to find the linear combination that we're looking for, we write, we employ lettuce techniques. So we take the polynomials as basis vectors of lettuce. Actually, to be more precise, we take the coefficient vectors of the polynomials to be basis vectors of lettuce. And this looks something like this. I have to take the rows here. You see the coefficient vectors of the polynomials that we have in our collection. And each entry in this vector corresponds to one monomial. So the columns of this matrix correspond to the monomials that appear in this collection. And these columns are further scaled by the capital X and capital Y, but that's not so important here. What is important in order to find a polynomial that fulfills our requirement to be, I'd say small again, we have to derive some condition on the determinant of this lettuce. So we need to be able to compute the determinant. Well, in this case, the determinant of the lettuce is equivalent to the determinant of the basis matrix. And this is just the product of the entries on the diagonal because we have a triangular lettuce basis. So if we go on with the algorithm, it puts out some bounds on capital X and capital Y, up to which we can find the solution to the initial polynomial. Well, Bonnie and Dorothy noticed that if we take just a subset of this collection, we actually improve the bound. So for this very example, if we remove the polynomial Y times E, we get a superior bound on the bounds capital X and capital Y. But the problem that occurs is that this basis matrix now is no longer triangular, and it's not that simple to compute the determinant of the corresponding lettuce. What is actually done is to give you an intuition. So you have to multiply the contributions from the Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization. And here for the last basis vector, you somehow see the contribution of the X, Y squared is probably much larger and is the dominating term over the contribution of the Y. But to get this shown rigorously is quite involved. So especially if you think about taking a collection which is not fixed as here, but for some parameterized collection where we take the parameter M to be not fixed, but variable, then this gets very complicated. And this is exactly where our new technique comes into play and this technique has been presented at last year's ADECrypt and it's called unrevealed linearization. And it basically works in three steps. The first of which is performing a linearization on the initial polynomial. So if we take the polynomial from Bonadorf's attack, one plus X, Y plus A, X, we perform linearization which is shown here by gluing together the terms one and X, Y. And let's call this polynomial F bar. The second step is to build a lattice basis just like before. But notice that we take here the collection C prime which is exactly the collection that was suggested by Bonadorf for the improved bound. So we already removed the one polynomial Y times E here and the last step of unrevealed linearization, well as the name suggests, is to unravel the linearization. Well, what does that mean? Remember that in the first step we introduced a new variable U for the term Y plus, one plus X times Y. Well, we can write this, we can solve this for X, Y and this gives X, Y equals to U plus U minus one. And now the trick is, when building the lattice basis in the second step, every time you encounter a monomial X times Y, you replace it simply by U minus one. Okay, how does this look like? Let's look at the example. Okay, here's the collection C prime that we were just talking about and we start by plugging in the coefficient vectors of the polynomials. Okay, so far, no problem. But in Bonadorf's approach here for the last polynomial, the problem occurred where we no longer had the triangular basis matrix. Well, let's see what happens here when we take the polynomial Y times F bar.  And now remember the replacement that we suggested.  And if we write this now in the lattice basis, you see that the only new monomial that occurs is U times Y, so we have a perfectly triangular lattice basis and once again, let's compare this with the approach of Bonadorffy. The contributions of the first three polynomials, well, it's pretty much the same. Notice all the contribution to the determinant in each case. Notice also that the upper bound U on the left-hand side is from the size, speaking of size, pretty much equivalent to X times Y. And, well, as our intuition suggested in the case of Bonadorffy on the right-hand side, the dominating term, the X times Y squared is just transferred to a U times Y and the, let's say, error term Y does not appear anymore in our new lattice basis. So let's summarize this Bonadorffy attack in short. Okay, the original analysis was very complicated because we had the non-triangular basis matrix and there were several approaches to make this more simple, but none of them were. And in the new analysis, using the unrevealed linearization, results in a perfectly triangular lattice basis, and so we may say this is a very simple and natural analysis. I now, for the second part of the talk, I would like to look at another application of this unrevealed linearization, namely, in the case of RSA with zero G exponents. Well, in that case, we start with the two key equations. E times Dp is concurrent to one, modulo p minus one, and E times Dq is concurrent to one, modulo q minus one. Similarly, we can resolve the modular operation by introducing two new variables, k and l. And for this system on the right-hand side, we transform this system on the right-hand side into a single equation by doing the following. We take the RSA, the RSA equation, n is equal to p times q. Solve this for p and plug it in in the first equation. And finally, from the system of those two equations, we eliminate the variable q. And this results in one equation, one quite large equation for unknowns. And the problem is now to find the solution of this equation. Johansson May did so in their crypto work from 2007, and they showed that we can find the solution if Dp and Dq are both smaller than n to the power of 0.073. But they observed a strange thing, namely, they observed that their experimental results were better than suggested by the theoretical analysis. So their conjecture was, maybe we can do something like one in Darfi by taking just a subset of the collection of polynomials to improve this bound. But unfortunately, or fortunately for me, they were not able to do so. And let's see what happens if we take the unrevealed linearization. Okay, we start with exactly the same polynomial they did. And now we introduce a new variable for each monomial that occurs here, not for each monomial. We glue together the terms as can be seen here. And so this gives us your five equations, five equations defining the newly introduced variables. And if you look at those five equations, if we count the unknowns, we get nine unknowns. So we try to eliminate the, let's say, old variables, Dp, Dq, K and L. And if we do so, if we eliminate those, we get a relation between the new variables. And you see this is slightly more complex than in the case of one in Darfi. But what we do is pretty much the same each time when building up the letter spaces, each time we encounter the monomial Vwx, we replace it by the term on the right-hand side. And as it turns out, in this case, the theoretical analyzer perfectly matches the experimental data. To show you this on a small graphic, we see the dashed line is the result from Jochen's and Mai, where I plotted the bound for Dp and Dq that we can achieve for a specific lattice dimension. And our new approach is the blue line, which is drawn above. And yeah, you see this is, for all lattice dimensions, a little bit better. And this also has a little bit more practical influence because this is pretty much all of lattice dimension that is achievable in practice. So, and here for each lattice dimension, we are quite a bit better. So we might say that the unrevealed linearization captures the sub lattice structure, the sub lattice being just the removing of some of the polynomials in the collection. But unfortunately, if you draw those two lines into infinity for the lattice dimension going to infinity, the asymptotic result is not improved. So, different from the case of Bonnier-Durphy, we were not able to achieve a better result, but as I just said, for practical applications, this might really be good, yeah. So, all right, let's quickly summarize what we have. Showed you some applications of unrevealed linearization, the small secret exponent RSA. Started with Bonnier-Durphy attack and small parameter D, and we may say that it used to have a very complicated analysis, and now using this unrevealed linearization, it became very simple and very natural. And in the second part, we looked at the Jochen-Smeier attack on RSA CRT, and we can say that we closed the gap between the theoretical and experimental results. And unfortunately, we answered the question about improving the bound in the negative. Well, what can we say about unrevealed linearization in general? I think it's a very simple technique and it is probably useful in many other lattice-based attacks. So, thank you.


Four breakfast myths debunked. Did you eat breakfast today? If you answered yes to this question, no one cares. Because according to new research conducted at the Cornell University's Human Metabolic Research Unit, breakfast doesn't matter. Based on new evidence, here are four myths about breakfast debunked. Myth one, breakfast is the most important meal of the day. False. Your mama may have been right about many things, but this ain't one of them. Breakfast is only the most important meal of the day if it's your only healthy meal of the day. Myth two, eating breakfast makes you smart. False. Eating breakfast doesn't make you smart, not being distracted by hunger or squirrels makes you smart. Myth three, breakfast makes you lose weight. False. Eating breakfast may help sustain your hunger until lunchtime, but studies show that breakfast eaters end up consuming more calories per day than non-breakfast eaters. Myth four, breakfast jump starts your metabolism. False. Breakfast eaters burn 11 more calories per day than non-breakfast eaters, which is basically nothing.  In short, if you're hungry when you wake up, eat. If your appetite doesn't kick in until later in the day, wait until it does. Don't force yourself to eat breakfast based on myths. Do you have questions about a particular health concern, a vitamin or a supplement? Professional Supplement Center's resident nurse will respond to your question and guide you in making healthy choices. Please follow the link below to the Ask the Nurse form on our website and submit your questions.