What's going on everyone Sam here with late in sports cards and I am ripping three boxes of 2021 panini one football And one box of 2021 panini national treasures football for harper b. So good luck harper. Let's see it buddy go Yeah, there it is Seven of 20 treyland Let's go harper Heck yeah, dude 49ers new starter, baby. How we started what we like to see right there Heck yeah Let's go. That's fire Great way to start it, baby Empty All right, let's see what we got here 78 of 125 terrace marshal jr. Three colored rpa panthers Nice tmj probably wide receiver two well wide receiver two slash three depending on robbie anderson Hang on nice tmj Cool another niner's hit panini day one trace sermons 66 of 75 These are nice looking actually very cool Day one trace sermen There you go. That'll do it for panini one. All right. Here comes some nt. Let's see it, baby Come on. That's thick. That is thick Thick with 12 cues treasure chest That's some sort of something in there Got that press got 81 of 99 base Pat fryer muth one out of 25 rookie got steve atwater heirlooms 37 of 99 Broncos that's cool player warren on the atwater Got a colossal two colored patch chase clay pool eight out of 25 Hey, what's up, brennan? Brennan, you came in at the perfect time, dude. You wait for the next couple of personals Nice one there in the clay pool got uh That is john l. Way 41 of 99 Hall of Fame player warren slash used All right, so we got uh Devonta smith jalen waddle jamar chase. Let's see some patches, baby nice patch Hatch hatch. Let's go Two color on the chase four color on the waddle Four color on the smith. Wow nice hit That is five out of 25 nice, man frat harper. That's sick, dude Beautiful beautiful booklet right there Yeah, you can see two on the chase there sin see the orange Yeah, it's hidden a little bit and then same with the green on this the devonta You can't really see it on camera. You can see like down in the bottom right. There's a little uh Little bit of a uh green uh, we've got from 20 20 mt. That's lin bowden jr. RPA three color For the dolphins Memphis legend We've got that is hunter long 10 out of 25 on the gold Nice hunter long there We got Minka Fitzpatrick 26 out of 99 patch auto stealers do not see a lot of minka stuff. That's sweet And sick one here three color rpa to 49 devonta smith Nice hit harper Very very cool. Love to see that man Get that one in a mag for you for sure. What's up, Dennis?  Thanks for this up there, Dennis Empty That will do it for your great harper congrats on the hits man Really awesome. We'll get them right out to you. Thanks as always. I'm sure you'll pick them up So thanks as always


When a bush fire comes close to your home, you'll have to think quickly to stay safe. And it's not easy to think clearly once the fire is close by. That's why it's so important to have a fire plan. What will you do? You need to leave early. Do you have somewhere safe to take your pets and animals? Have you got your important stuff all packed up so you can grab it and go? My family has a plan, and every spring when fire season approaches, we check it to make sure we remember what to do.  Have you talked about it? Why don't you make one this weekend?


Hey, you guys. So I think this is just going to be a standard thing that I record a little video debrief of the laboratory adventure at the end of every week, what I guess it's actually Sunday morning right now. And so your lab work is already due. I haven't actually gone in and graded it, but I have a couple of comments just based on some questions that I got throughout the week. And I did grade your lab group discussions, and so I kind of have a sense of how you utilize those. But I haven't gone in to actually grade your lab notebook reports yet. So I probably, you know, pay attention to the comments that you get from me around the lab report because I haven't looked at them, and I don't address anything in this little conversation. But I made myself a list, so I wouldn't forget the things that I wanted to tell you. First of all, I want to talk about the lab prep. What is true is, well, there's like 8,000 things that are true. First of all, in my world, I feel like I'm doing a service by offering this class online. It isn't my, like, I don't feel like, oh, teaching general biology online is like the way to teach it. Like, it's better than teaching it face to face. I feel like there are certain circumstances in which the opportunity to take this class online is super convenient. It addresses a need because I do think that it's easier to take this class face to face because of the lab. If there wasn't the lab component of this thing, I would probably have a different opinion about that. But because of the lab, and my unwillingness to, like, eliminate the lab-iness of the lab, there's a trade-off. And I'm assuming that you're here taking this lab, because it fills a need that you have. It's early. We haven't even reached census yet. And so honestly, if you're in a place where you're like, dude, seriously, like, these labs, I can't hang with this kind of prep. I can't hang with this amount of time. Do a really serious, like, self-analysis and decide, I'll let you in. I mean, really, honestly, I'll let you in. I'll have to discuss with other instructors to see if there's space in their classes. But I will make space for you in my face-to-face class if you feel like you need a face-to-face experience for this class.  They're kitchen labs. Lab three is not kitchen, ingredient, grocery, like, nothing. Like, you get to sit and maybe that's what you envisioned the labs were going to be like. They were going to be these virtual, like, simulations. And that's not what I envisioned that the labs would be like.  And I'm, man, I'm real interested to see what you think of it and what I think of it. But the experience of having to go through a grocery list, like, you're going to have that experience again. The experience of doing the lab work without me standing there answering your questions, that's the way it's going to be. Know that, dudes, you guys have access to, I can go show you, but in every single module at the bottom of the module is the questions for rigs discussion board. Shoot me questions there.  Take advantage of your lab groups to brainstorm ideas and figure out where supplies are coming from and what the results are. Because I'm trying to create a social experience for you in this online setting.  Okay, so the whole point of that is yes, there will be labs where there will be that kind of prep. In the future, here's what I'm going to do for you. Here's what I'm going to do for you. I am going to work really hard when I know that there is a big prep coming up. I'm going to work really hard to get it published sooner than I would otherwise get it published. So lab four, there's going to be prep for lab four. I am going to work really hard at the beginning of this week to get lab four ready to go for you so that you can see what the grocery list is and have more than just a weekend or whatever. That said, I promise they will always be done by Friday before the next week that they're happening. And that gives you almost a week to get stuff together. So you be proactive, I'll be proactive, holler at me if you need something. Group discussions. I'm happier with the muddy fun discussions this week. I feel like they were a little more valuable. I'm curious to see what you guys thought of it. But the lab discussions, there were a couple of people engaging in lab conversations that were awesome. But for the most part, they were very superficial and definitely not what I was envisioning. So I am percolating on how to improve the quality of that. And I'm also percolating on how to hold you accountable. Unless you literally barely participated, I pretty much gave you full credit. That's not going to last. So while I'm figuring out how to coach you toward or how to teach you how to engage in those discussions in a more meaningful way, but think about that and really try to make use of the discussion to help you learn. The level of the discussion makes me really worried about the exam that's coming up, not this week, but next week. So I think that that's something that you guys need to sort of look at and think about for yourselves. There were a couple of content things related to this lab, number two, that I wanted to address. Some things that I saw in multiple discussion boards that were an issue.  And you guys saw this when you blew bubbles in your cabbage juice. And if it didn't work for you, some people reported out that that didn't work. You know, take the data from somebody for whom it did work. And you can try to figure out why it didn't work. But the bottom line is that if you bubble carbon dioxide through water, you will form carbonic acid. And so the pH should decrease because the solution is becoming more acidic. If carbon dioxide combined with water becomes acidic, you hold your breath. You're actually increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in your blood because you're not getting rid of it. You're not ventilating it away. So holding your breath increases the acidity of your blood, which is all bad. Literally, your blood is held within a range of 7.35 to 7.45 on the pH scale. Like it's, you're amazing. Your kidneys take care of it. There's buffers in your blood. And then breathing takes care of maintaining your blood pH. So if you hyperventilate, if I'm breathing out really fast, I'm actually going to breathe off the carbon dioxide. So I'm decreasing the amount of carbon dioxide in my blood because I'm breathing it off so fast. And that actually increases your pH because you're getting rid of acid so your blood becomes more basic. That's why if you hyperventilate, you become lightheaded. That's why breathing into a bag is helpful, although for some reason not suggested or whatever by healthcare people. But it's helpful because you actually, you're breathing out too much carbon dioxide. In a bag, you're going to breathe that carbon dioxide back in.  I hope that makes sense. Give me a huller if it doesn't because we can continue to discuss it. It's definitely something that will be present on your exam. There's a question about, okay, so part four of the lab talked about hydrophilic substances and hydrophobic substances. Salt is definitely hydrophilic, water loving. Sugar, totally hydrophilic. Anything that dissolves in water is hydrophilic and sugar absolutely dissolves in water. So something oily, fatty would be hydrophobic. And that lab four was asking you to identify some substances. For example, any, like, what's that? Food coloring. Food coloring mixes with water. And so it is a hydrophilic substance. And if you dripped food coloring through your little oil and water tubes or glasses or however you set that up, it would actually go through the oil and dissolve and diffuse into the water below the oil. Something like, okay, vitamin, what is it? It's orange. It's like vitamin B6 or something like that. There's this orange pill. And vitamin B6 would be a lipid soluble substance that has some color to it. And if you dripped that into the oil substance, it actually would dissolve in the oil. It wouldn't drip down like the food coloring did. It would stay in the oil because it is hydrophobic. And now my goal was for you to find something, like experiment with it and find something that dissolved in the oil and find something that dissolved in the water. If it dissolves in the oil, it's hydrophobic. If it dissolves in the water, it's hydrophilic. So that's your test. That was the take home for that one. I'm not sure how we did on that. I also talked about the cell membrane. This is something that, you know, we're talking about the cell on Monday, Tuesday, next week. We're talking about the cell membrane on Wednesday, Thursday, next week. So that set of questions about the cell membrane, how is the cell membrane both hydrophilic and hydrophobic, that's like, you'll get there, you'll get that information. So don't let that go away from your brain. I'm going to give you a little heads up that the cell membrane is made out of phospholipids. And phospholipids have a hydrophobic part, which is the lipid part, and the lipid part is sandwiched in the middle of this bilayer that makes up your cell membrane. The phosphos are hydrophilic, they like water, and they're on the outside and the inside. So you end up with this sandwich of hydrophobic stuff surrounded or sandwiched by hydrophilic stuff. And when you watch that part of the lecture next week, I think that piece will kind of come clear. There is no question that, I mean, in a face-to-face format, general biology is not for the weak at heart. Like it's a hard core class, and the standards are high, and the content is intense, and I personally find it fascinating, and super cool, and an awesome class to teach. I get really excited. Did you know this about me yet? But you got to probably pick up your game. That's my general sense of the situation, like pick up the game, you guys, because our first exam is coming up in less than, well, I guess it's a week, I don't know what it is, but it's like next week. It's a week and a half from now, I think. Not next week, but the week after that. Not week three, week four. Okay, I got there. All right, so keep your head up, holler at me if you need something. You can do this. I'm going to give you another pep talk in just a second, because I'm going to talk about week three.


I'm Lauren Cirqueau, I'm the Chief Investment Officer for the Sorenson Impact Foundation. We have recently in 2020 crossed 100% mission alignment across our entire investment portfolio. Thank you. And we've also launched Sorenson Impact Advisory, which is an investment advisory firm dedicated to impact investing to help other families and foundations and pools of capital who want to take similar mission alignment journeys. So with that, we wanted to share three of the investment strategies we have in our portfolio that are pursuing 100% market rate returns alongside strong, measurable impact. So I'm thrilled to introduce our three speakers, Julie Lean from Urban Innovation Fund, Stephen DeBerry from Bronze, and Ashley Bittner from Firework Ventures. I'd love to start with just a brief introduction, tell us a little bit about you, your firm, and your impact and investment thesis. And Julie, we'll start with you. Awesome. Thanks everyone for being here. My name is Julie. I'm one of the co-founders and managing partners of the Urban Innovation Fund. We're a venture capital firm that invests in startups shaping the future of cities. We always get involved early, precede, and seed. And in addition to providing capital, we also like to emphasize that we're very active hands-on investors, and we do place a special emphasis on regulatory support since we've seen it be an area of need. We're currently investing out of our third fund, which is a $101 million core fund along with a $20 million opportunity vehicle. Just excited to be here, meet all the entrepreneurs and investors, try to make the world a better place. Stephen. Hi, everyone. My name is Stephen DeBerry from Bronze. We invest against what we call our East Side Investment Thesis, and that focuses on areas of deep structural disparity, social, economic, environmental disparity. And our investment strategy is looking for areas where we can profitably push that disparity to prosperity. So we invest across health, education, financial services, other categories like that where we see these deep historical rifts. And we see those opportunities to push to prosperity as a long-term secular opportunity to basically redesign our society so that it works for everyone. And Ashley, round us out. Hi. Thanks for having us, or me today. First I want to say thank you to the Sorenson Group here, one of our earliest investors, just instrumental in helping us build our firm. And so I just want to say thank you before I dive into what we do at Firework. So at Firework we invest in the future of work. We define the future of work as technology that drives social and economic mobility. That tends to cross a couple different verticals. So we have investments that touch HR tech, FinTech, EdTech, and then well-being, sometimes also care economy, can fit into that thesis. We actually invest at the series A, so we lead and we take board seats. That is for the type of portfolio services we provide, specifically helping founders make that jump from product market fit to growth. And we have an impact framework as well as a founder support framework that we use to do that. So I'll leave it there for now. Thanks, Lauren. Well, great. It's wonderful to be with you all. We're so proud of the work that you're doing. I do want to spend a couple of minutes with each of you just kind of digging in to your impact and investment thesis. We'll mix up the order a little bit. So, Stephen, I'm going to put you in the hot seat. Talk to us. Uplifting marginalized communities has been a big focus of many LPs coming out of a global pandemic, some of the social injustices that happened in 2020. Really let's get into your Eastside investment thesis. How was it born? How does it bear itself out in practice? Yeah. Thanks. Well, I'll describe why we call it Eastside, because I think that points a little bit to how we think about the overall dynamic and the environment that we're investing in. So the general idea is this. Of course, we all understand that we have dispossessed communities. Some communities are wealthy. Some communities are not. And we often have this debate explicitly or implicitly about whether things are intentional or not. It's fair. That's just the way things are. Certain people want to be together. So it's like, okay, well, let's just think about that. We have four cardinal directions. If things were random, you would expect dispossessed communities to be plus or minus 25% in any given direction, like the math should work out that way. It turns out if you actually plot where dispossessed communities are, it's not nearly distributed that evenly. Strangely, they are clustered on the East sides of places. And so I had that observation many, many years ago. I didn't have an explanation for it until working on that particular issue for years. And I finally realized that now we can point to a bunch of data, like in a particulate matter, PM 2.5, et cetera. Basically the way to think about it is imagine you have like a campfire.  But the wind is blowing to the East. And that's basically the way the wind blows in most of the planet. Now the problem with the campfire is you've got to keep everyone warm.  That's the design problem. And the short answer to that riddle, as answered in cities and communities across the world for much of time, is that it's people with less power who sit with the smoke blowing in their face. And that's literally what is happening when you think about communities pretty much anywhere, including here in San Francisco, Hunter's Point, on the East side, East Oakland, East LA, East Philly, East St. Louis, you know, this is true in London and Jerusalem and Paris and around the world. And so we talk about our East side investment thesis because really what that's pointing to is the design ethic that comes from a place of assuming that we have to design for haves, the folks who don't have the smoke in their face, and have nots, the folks who rudely get the smoke blown into their faces. And the first principle of our investment thesis is super simple, which is to engage in an experiment that we've never really engaged in fully as a collective. And that is to start by designing systems, radical idea, but start by designing systems that work for everyone. And if you start with that first principle as we venture capital and innovation investors, you know, drive innovation, if you start with the idea of designing products and services that work for everyone. That one act of that, you know, starting from that point of departure flows through everything else. And so, you know, our belief is that we'll build better products, better services, those become bigger markets, more durable companies, and it seems to be burying out in our portfolio. Very well said, Stephen. Any examples of the types of sectors you're looking to invest in or any investments you've made that you're particularly proud of, would love to highlight some of those? Yeah, for sure. So as I said, we'll look for any area where there's a dislocation where we can profitably move disparity to prosperity, but I'll give an example, multitasking. So down the highway here, 30 minutes south in East Palo Alto today, it's 2022, and this entire city, there are only two places you can eat with a metal knife and fork. One of those places happens to be on the west side of the freeway that runs through the town in the Four Seasons Hotel. So let's at least put an asterisk on that one because most folks in the community are not going in there. The only other place you can eat with a metal knife and fork in the entire city is the second floor of the Ikea in the cafeteria. That's what it looks like to be in a food desert. And so you can imagine the nutritional density in not just East Palo Alto, but East Side communities generally, food deserts broadly, you know, is horrible. And one of the impacts of that is that type two diabetes is off the charts. Interestingly and sadly, the reversal rate for type two diabetes is 0.4%. So around that zero, you can't reverse it. That is the medical standard of care to expect no reversal. This is a $400-plus billion annual spend category. When I made the investment probably four plus years ago, that number was like $340 billion annually.  It's bad. So, you know, we've got a company that has a 60% reversal rate in this category, 6.0. So it's literally 150 times better than the medical standard of care. It is the only non-surgical, non-pharmaceutical intervention that has anywhere close to these kinds of outcomes. And it turns out this is the exact kind of business that we like because every time we make a dollar in this business, we're also having an impact. And in addition to that, when you look at the epidemiology of diabetes as a disease, and just I'll speak plain English because we're all friends here, who has diabetes. It's black, brown, and poor folks, basically. And so when you do the math, it turns out in this $400-plus billion category, it's actually impossible to build a large business without having an outsized positive impact on the folks who are most marginalized. So that to us is a bullseye business, and, you know, I'll be brief, but we've got other businesses that have similar profiles, and, you know, in the new portfolio, we've got a company that's training diverse talent and putting folks into cybersecurity jobs, you know, and these are six-figure, well into the six-figure range, you know, many of these jobs, and so one of those jobs for a family, many of these folks don't have college degrees and don't need them, but you get someone into, you know, an earning opportunity like that, and it changes the trajectory for a family for generations, and as an investor, the math is pretty good, too. So there's a category of companies like that where every incremental unit of revenue drives an incremental unit of impact, and we can get in and, you know, help those founders, you know, build big, meaningful businesses. Thank you, Stephen. Ashley, I'm going to go to you next. Future of Work has become an absolute buzz phrase, catchphrase. You guys have been here for decades thinking about investing in this vertical. Talk to us about the themes that you're interested in and excited about in some of the portfolio companies that you've backed. Sure. Thank you for the question. So there's two things I'll talk about. One is some of the macro trends, and then two is just how we think venture is changing. So on the macro trends point, we believe that economic and social mobility, or the lack thereof, is one of the greatest challenges facing our society today, and therefore one of the biggest market opportunities. If you look at, this is going to be very nerdy, so stay with me for a second, previous technological revolutions, we saw that more people benefited, and now we're actually seeing technology drive more inequality in ways that we haven't really seen before. There's stats like 30, excuse me, a billion people need to be re-skilled by 2030, for example. So just drastic kind of changes, and we think we're at this point where we can choose to invest in technology that's actually helping support people through this major transition, and it's not inevitable that it will. And so we see this again as one of these really significant market opportunities, and one again, of the biggest challenges facing us stay alongside things like climate change. The second thing that drives how we approach the market is actually our view that the way that venture is happening is also changing, or should be changing. And for us, you often will see firms kind of have themes that they invest in, which is great, but we're actually thinking a little bit forward in our view by saying not just themes of what are the outcomes we're driving for. So it's not health or education, but what about those are actually core to our investment thesis in front and center. So yes, we do have some verticals underneath, like HRTech, FinTech, et cetera, that they tend to be in, but we're actually trying to keep that focus on the outcome from the beginning, the core of the thesis. So that really drives how we approach the market and venture. Again, just thinking the lens that we take to it is really changing. And the second question was companies. Yep, any companies you're willing to highlight? Sure. So a couple come to mind, I'll keep it brief though. One company that we're really excited about is called Transfer. Transfer was our first lead series A investment out of this fund. And Transfer's mission is to be the world's first SaaS economic development platform, so super aligned with how we think about our thesis. Some folks have probably put it in ed tech, but again, our thesis is more around this economic development piece. And what Transfer is doing is they are actually using cutting edge technology to train folks in middle skills jobs. They use things like VR to train in hands-on, or to provide training for hands-on roles. Middle skills jobs are more than 50% of jobs in the US. And one of the fastest growing categories, it's everything from like a certified nursing assistant to green technology jobs, to aviation, automotive. A huge part of the market that our view has been largely underserved from a venture capital perspective. You also see this technology serving populations that have been largely underserved. So they tend to be working with community colleges, workforce agencies, as well as employers in creating new pathways for these jobs that not only have good wages but also benefits. So we see this as super aligned with how we think about our mission. When we first invested at the A, we had preempted around after they won a statewide contract in Alabama. Another thing we loved about this company really focused on the Southeast and Midwest as their core early customers. Now they've expanded nationwide, but really serving a different population. So what it really fits for us, again, thesis alignment, it's around using technology to drive economic and social mobility first and foremost. Using that cutting edge technology that's largely until recently has been too expensive to be used in populations that otherwise would really benefit from it. And then serving populations that have been left out of some of this investment in venture capital and retraining, et cetera. So transfers are a really good example of a company in our portfolio. Excellent. Thanks, Ashley. Julie, we'll close out this first segment with you. At Urban Innovation, you're investing in startups that are changing the future of cities. We are sitting in a city that looks drastically different to what it did a couple of years ago. What are your reflections? How do you think about investing to transform urban centers going forward? And if you're comfortable, share with us a couple of the types of investments you've made. Yeah, sure. So I think the pandemic forced us all into a reckoning of what the future of cities would look like. And certainly we thought about that first and foremost. And I would say the TLDR that we decided is, unfortunately, venture capital is not going to fix cities. It's really sad, but it is unfortunately true. But I think that we can make a measurable dent in cities in kind of a really thoughtful way if we approach it correctly. And that's really what we've tried to do. We are really trying to focus on companies that are reimagining the livability, sustainability, and economic vitality of cities. And those three pillars are kind of what guide us. When we're looking at startups, we don't profess to have all the answers. We're really looking to entrepreneurs and builders and operators who are on the ground and they see a problem. And they're just maniacally focused on tackling it. And I think that's really what's resonated most in our deal-sourcing approach and what's really popped up in our portfolio. In terms of those themes, one of the things that we like to say is we like to collect and find founders who are working in areas that aren't seen as particularly sexy in the beginning, but they really prove their market value and worth over time. And so one of those examples in 2019, we led the seed round for a company called Electrify, which was essentially a software solution for fleet owners who are trying to move their fleet from traditional combustion engine vehicles to electric vehicles. It's hard to remember this now, but in 2019, that was actually seen as kind of a unsexy, non-consensus bet because a lot of people had the question of, was electrification actually that imminent? Was it going to go the way of autonomy where it would be a 10-plus year time horizon? And a lot of people were still burned from CleanTech 1.0. So when we made that bet, it was very much a bet on the team and the fact that the market trends and the regulatory tailwinds were really in our favor. Pandemic happens, the whole world blows up, we have no idea what's going to happen. But one thing that did happen was that consumer preferences really ramped up in electrification and that was also spurred on by a new U.S. administration that was really prioritizing on electrifying the federal fleet by 2030. And so it was really interesting, our company, Electrify, ended up getting a ton of inbound sales interests. They were really ramping up. They had just signed this term sheet for a Series A when Ford came in and said, we want to make Electrify the kind of center platform for all of our software around commercial fleet efforts. So they ended up being acquired by Ford. It's been a really interesting transition because they still serve as that software backbone for all of Ford's electrification efforts. And so you see it out in the wild and what was a really young, bootstrapped, kind of hustling startup now, part of this bigger corporation really helping move them in that right direction. So that was a cool example and one that I think speaks to what we're all doing, which is trying to identify these trends really early before they take off. We're trying to find things that aren't considered sexy necessarily. And I would say all of us in this room are probably part of that trend, which is impact wasn't considered sexy for a long time, but now everyone's talking about ESG and impact, so maybe we're all trendsetters. And on that note, this question's for any of you. Talk to us a little bit about what do you see as the biggest challenges for driving more capital into impact venture capital today? How do we build this ecosystem, I think is a question on many people's minds in this room. Anyone wanna kick us off? Oh, now everyone gets all polite now, right? Okay. Well, I mean, I think this has been a debate for a while and I'd say the two polls are that either we don't have enough capital or we don't have enough deals. My perspective is that we have enough deals. So it's not an absorptive capacity issue, it's a capital allocation constraint. And so if you think of it that way, I would click down one layer or couple layers at a more granular look at what's happening in the impact capital market. And I guess one observation I would share as a manager, I wonder if you all would agree, is that for us, part of our job is of course to do good deals and so forth, but we also have to go out, it's a capital market. So we have to go shopping and we have to assemble pools of capital and make them big enough that we can build our portfolios. And one of the challenges that has been the case for the last decade plus and still seems to be a challenge that is not diminishing is when we assemble these pools of capital, the providers of capital tend to have very narrow expectations. They want to impact a certain geography or they wanna invest at a certain stage or they wanna invest with a particular strategy. And so it makes it in many cases logically impossible to assemble capital at the kind of scale that we can see that we have absorptive capacity for. So one of the things that would help, I think, unlock scale in the space is some reconciliation across the LP, the investor community and some loosening of some of those tight constraints whether it's geography, stage or what have you. So that we can have more degrees of freedom to do the work that we're doing. Well said, Steven. Ashley, it looks like you might wanna. I was gonna add a slightly different point to this. One, it's a build on it though. I think if you look at the concentration to your point of capital tends to be just venture capital generally, very, very concentrated and a couple really, really big funds. And then this also you get mirrored down in the impact world. And one of the things I think that the Sorensons have done well is to support emerging managers other folks who are taking different lenses like Julie and Steven here are taking a very different lens to venture different thesis impact first. Like people being able to back new managers, take risk. And then also I think building a little bit on your point have nuance to the reporting and other things they're asking for making sure that that is aligned with the stage. You're not asking for like a 40 page report from a five person team of seed company type of thing. So there's a couple of different factors here. I think one of them being just the overall trends in capital concentration and funds that gets mirrored down and impact that then you see that also down in emerging and then where do we actually fall on the expectations to your point of managers and what we can ask of the underlying portfolios as well. Yeah, I would break it up into kind of twofold. One is just having really big exits to point to in the impact space to say that this is a category worth investing in. And that's really what people look for in inspiration. And I think for a long time, a lot of the companies were relatively small or the exits were few and now we can kind of, there's just such a pervasive widening of the lens of what is impact like even impossible and beyond me like that category didn't exist for a long time. They both go public. They're really trendsetters in creating new categories. And I think there are a lot of those companies to point to. So I agree wholeheartedly with Steven that there is not a pipeline problem in the lease but having more of those exits and certainly having more of those exits across impact funds really showcases that there's a there there that we can have both the returns and the impact. And then I think the second challenge is what Steven alluded to, which is essentially there is this kind of narrowing of bands and reality of what people want, which is let's say I have an impact thesis. I really care about doing well in Alabama, let's say. The reality is when you're investing in venture capital, you're investing in startups that are going to scale beyond a specific geographic region if they're really successful, you want them to be available everywhere. And also there's a reality, which is that early stage companies shift a lot, especially at the stage we're investing, pre-seed and seed companies. It's two founders, maybe three folks working in a co-working space, trying to figure it out. And when you're at that level, having really tangible metrics and going through a B-Lab impact assessment, some of these things are just not realistic for that early stage company or founder. And so you need capital around the table that understands they need to be flexible. And the goal is always, you know, more money equals more impact, but recognizing that these companies are growing to shift and morph and their metrics may change over time. And hopefully you pick the right people that can really, you know, tenaciously navigate the ups and downs, especially what we've seen over the last year and a half or so. Excellent points, all three of you. One observation about all three of your portfolios, you all are writing, oftentimes some of the first institutional checks that these companies are receiving. So very, very early stage. You all also now have unicorns in your portfolio, so a company that's valued over a billion dollars. So that journey is pretty incredible. What does it take to get that right? What do you look for in entrepreneurs? Is there a secret sauce? Someone told me recently their secret sauce was investing in distance runners because they have the grit factor. Are there any lessons learned along the way in terms of what it takes to pick the top talent and the top companies? I'll start. What I look for most, I think about it from a founder perspective at least in this arc of journey, is capacity for growth. And for that specifically looking for, are they able to look at their own role in shaping the company? How they're creating their team? How that's impacting the folks around them? And Lauren's probably heard me say this so many times. Like we typically invested the A, so they might have, you know, like transferred 17 people and we led, they had 117 people 16 months later at their series B, and that is a dramatic change in the role of the CEO. So where we spend a lot of time understanding the CEO and their executive team, their capacity for growth, because when that ARR is growing 400% every year, that team is probably also growing, at least doubling, and how can we help set them up for success? So that is one of the main factors that we're looking for, and everyone talks about investing in founders. The thing that we're really looking for is that capacity for growth. What's the evidence of it? Part of our diligence questions around how do you want to continue to grow? How can we support you in that? A lot of our portfolio services are really centered around that kind of support. So that's been really instrumental in our portfolio and the work we've done, you know, prior to this fund to see those kinds of trends for those big outcomes. Great, thanks Ashley. Any other secret sauce, things you look for in entrepreneurs? Lessons learned? I'd say for me, it's the reason why. And what I mean by that is the best entrepreneurs that I know and know of, usually in addition to all the fundamental, you know, large market and a good team and discipline, you know, to be able to manage growth and the sorts of things that you might learn about in business school. It's useful to have those for sure. But I mean, I'll give the most recent example in my world. I'm working on a deal right now. The founder, this is a company in the healthcare space, incredible technical entrepreneurs, the guy who built the Apple store, the app store for Apple. So incredible, I mean, this is someone who could go out and get a check from anyone who wants to and, you know, et cetera. And so we got into diligence and we did all the B school things. But the question that was most important for me was why are you building this company? And I got some answer, I don't even remember what the answer was, but I just, something made me, it was like, that ain't it. That's not it. I went fishing with the guy and we started talking and, why are you laughing? That's how you get the truth, you know? Oh, that fishing, that's my answer, go fishing with people.  I went fishing with them and we talked about the why and it turns out his mother passed away from cancer.  That's the thing. That's the thing. I think a founder of, you know, that's building something for a reason that's bigger than just the market slide and the high end to the right growth. Like it ain't about that because building from the early stage, you know, is such a difficult thing for even the most talented, most connected, most well-resourced, it's so hard that at multiple points along the journey, it's irrational to keep going. And you need someone who's gonna keep going when it's irrational to keep going. That's how you get to the biggest businesses in my experience. Can I just add one quick thing to that? So when I'm talking about capacity for growth, I am talking about personal growth of that founder and their team and how are they supporting their growth edges as they're going through this. One, just an example we've seen is I've talked to some founders I've worked with who are super mission driven. You see one of two things happen.  And so that is one way we've seen things kind of can go awry. The other is sacrificing all of their life on behalf of the mission. So marriage is falling apart, they're not seeing their kids, things of that nature. And that's the other area where we're really looking to make sure these founders are taking care of themselves and their team so that internal capacity for growth is what is happening for me? How is that affecting my team? How do I support everyone on behalf of this big mission? Because I also have seen the dark side of it, where they are bulldozing or sacrificing their life. And that's at least something we're trying to buck in venture is saying that you need to be a martyr on behalf of this mission and that you can actually build a billion dollar business, have huge outcomes, while also being the person you wanna be while you're doing it. And that's something that we think's really important. Critical founder support, fishing trips to discover the why. Haven't done a fishing trip, that sounds amazing. Offside activities. Julie, anything to add to this before we roll forward? Yeah, I would just say quickly, what we look for is maniacal execution and tenacity. And when I say maniacal, I know it sounds absolutely psychotic and it almost is and has to be because there are so many ups and downs, there are so many times the founder hears no and you have to listen to all the no's and still wanna plow forward. And so you do have to be maniacal about evangelizing your business and selling and really bringing something from zero to life. And that's really where we come in, when a founder has an idea, sometimes they're pre-product, they're certainly almost always pre-revenue, but you have that belief that they can bring this to life. And I think that's something that's really, really hard to do. I think Julie's point is important too, like stage, it also varies by stage. Like when you're a little bit later, in series A into growth, you have a team, you're managing different expectations in the early days when it's an idea that you're trying to, you have nothing to show for it yet, like you can't be like traction, here's why you should fund me, where it's really about that vision you're selling. Yeah, and actually I would say 2021 was such a weird time for that perspective because we come in pre-seed and seed, one of our companies went from, literally to founders, to unicorn status in a year and a half. And that was absolutely chaotic, going from building out the core of the team to a 200 person company that's doing business globally across 11 countries. And I think that's where you can get that real burnout and team strain and everyone's just trying to figure it out. Thank you all, incredible words of wisdom. I'd be remiss if I didn't acknowledge that certainly for the public markets, but I think the private as well, this has been a really, really trying year. How has that played itself out for your funds, your portfolio companies? What advice are you giving to entrepreneurs? And most importantly of all, is impact in mission helping propel folks forward during these difficult times? Open to anyone on this one. Yeah, I feel bad for founders. I feel bad for all of us because anytime you're in a bad time, it trickles down to everybody. What I would say is our founders are experiencing whiplash between 2021 and the beginning of this year to now. I mean, everything was go, go, go, grow, grow, grow. Think about the next fundraise. And then it was like a freight train just stopped and crashed and suddenly they have to care about profitability, burn, making sure the runway is at least 24 months. And some of our founders had a really hard time taking that in. I will just be transparent about that. And we tried to really help them think through the transition, but it's hard. One month you're in a board meeting saying, you've got to grow 5x year over year at all costs. And the next you're like, wait, wait, wait. Stop just kidding. We're kidding about that. Still keep growing, but do it profitably. Yeah, really easy. So I would just say that those lessons learned are real, we're all trying to take them in. What I will say a lot of our companies are doing is they're adapting, they're being extremely thoughtful about their approach moving forward. And my hope is that it will lead to better and bigger and more resilient companies moving forward. So for example, some of our companies that are now at the Series B or Series C stage, one of the things that they're focusing on is instead of growth at all costs, they're really trying to get higher margins, really trying to make sure that they can grow thoughtfully with more focus on unit profitability. And our hope is that that will make them more resilient and better companies into the later stages. That's what we're telling ourselves, fingers crossed. One thing I also just want to acknowledge, in 2021 obviously was a crazy year. I think it was, I think one of the things, a disservice to founders was like, it's easy to raise money in 2020. It was hard for a lot of people. And I think that like I sat with a lot of founders who are really down about this story that it was now easy to raise money. When for most founders, it was still really challenging, even though there's a lot of craziness in price, inflation and things of that nature. But I just wanted to acknowledge that, yes, it was a crazy year. And also for a lot of founders, it was still really challenging time to raise money. One of the things that was, we didn't give any blanket kind of advice across the portfolio. I think Julie's point is really apt in that kind of taking it case by case basis, founders being more thoughtful, et cetera. One of the things that we're, we really focused on, even in 2021 was having, Lawrence for me say this price discipline to make sure we weren't like setting our founders up for failure, because when you take crazy rounds and crazy valuations, if you're not actually growing into that, it can come back to really hurt. And so that was one of the things that we were really mindful of even when it was pretty crazy. And then this year we're seeing certainly, I'd say a slope, like a slowing of the frenzy. But we're also seeing our companies raise money, continue to grow. And I think they've had that kind of discipline and still allowed for that. But yeah, to your point, it's been tough and for some founders, it's felt raise as much as possible, the highest valuations possible, grow as fast as possible and now being told to stop is pretty jarring. I expected the economy to slow down. I went back and I started looking at my quarterly letters to investors. And so I've been expecting the music to stop for more than eight quarters. So I'm entirely unsurprised. I tend to pick portfolio leaders who protect for downside. And so I think I'm all for growth, but I don't think that means you abandon fundamentals. So it's not like, oh, we can be less thoughtful because the economy's running hot. Like no, stick to the basics. So our portfolios doing, I'd say generally well, financing, the pace of financings has slowed down, but we're not seeing catastrophic losses or anything like that. I will say to your question about the impact piece, Lauren, that I think our companies are more durable because in a labor market, like the one we're in now where folks can afford to be picky, having an impact orientation, having a mission, having leadership that can look you in the eye and make you feel like, wow, it actually matters. You know, in a labor market where in a lot of instances it's less about the check and more about the meaning, I think our companies have an advantage because of that. So that's good. But the last thing I would say is, you know, I'm, whether it's eight quarters ago or now or some other timing, if you understand the venture capital asset class, we're on a long arc. We will at least see this inflection and probably another one before we return capital to investors. And so, you know, one of those quarterly letters to investors was answering one of the questions I was getting in from investors saying, like, what are you gonna do differently? Now the economy is what it is. And our answer to that was absolutely nothing. We are built for this. We're built for the long term. We're gonna keep doing what we're doing. We think that's how you win in this asset class. Very well said. I want to pose a question that is hopefully a little bit sparks some debate here. Interested to hear all of you, I think, are impact venture capital funds, but I think have raised capital from impact allocators and traditional allocators. Can you talk to us about leaning in to the label impact of an impact fund? And is that something you do? Do you think that helps the narrative, this industry? Any thoughts around kind of using the impact label? Oh, you want to be polite again, huh? And then start up controversy. Which side do you want? I think there are good arguments on both sides. What I would say is the bigger issue for me is that we have a nomenclature problem, which is that, you know, I bet you there are 50 different interpretations of this question right now, because she said impact. And we don't have a common interpretation of what that means. And we don't have effective language to separate the nuanced differences between these perspectives. And it's tough because it's a field that's evolving and there's, you know, kind of an ecosystem around this sense of this broad universe of meaning. So we have some vocabulary work to do. But, you know, my sense is, I mean, I just gave you an example of how I think in the labor market, for example, we are seeing benefits because we are impact oriented. Our companies are. I certainly know many managers who say I do not use the term impact when I'm fundraising because that means to investors that we're soft and we're not soft. And so some of this I think is vocabulary work that will happen over time and some of it will shake itself out. Some of it needs some structural work from communities like this. And I think some of it will be metabolized and sorted out because the proof is in the pudding and you can look at portfolios that are in fact impact oriented that perform very well. And so I think that's an antidote to those folks who say, oh, well impact is necessarily soft. It doesn't have to be. And there's a really important role for concessionary finance and other parts of the ecosystem that I think are part of the complexity of the vocabulary piece of the equation. Disagree with that. Yeah. I agree with all of what you just said. I think what I would add is maybe the spicy thing to say is like, I don't really think of worry about it that much. It's like, I think a lot about fundraising in terms of the words labeling, et cetera. I think all about when you're raising capital or for a company raising capital from an investor or us raising from LPs, it's all around fit and like is there alignment in what you're both trying to achieve. And so I really lean into that as our thesis, it's around economic and social mobility and like certain groups that is what they wanna invest in, they wanna invest in the A, they wanna do that. And so it's around finding that fit. And so I don't really worry so much about trying to like shift the way I talk about it to meet some endowments, whatever goals. It's much more around being really clear of what we're doing and understanding the ecosystem of funders and where is the fit? And that's very much how I think about it. So it's not something that I spend a lot of time thinking about these days. Yeah, I would say I had a stronger point of view of this when we were earlier in our fundraised journey and we had just launched the Urban Innovation Fund because I basically focused on myself and my co-founder Clara, so two women and they're like, oh, you guys are impact. And in their mind impact came with soft, maybe concessionary, maybe you don't know what the F you're doing. And for lack of a better term, I felt pretty aggrieved by that. But I think what has become clear to us is we are definitely a mission-driven fund. We have a lot of folks in our universe who are investors far as that I would describe as impact curious. They might not necessarily label themselves as impact but they might care about the fact that we're women or the fact that 77% of our portfolio companies have a woman or a person of color on the founding team or maybe they just like that there's a differentiated thesis in the space. And so everyone's got their own reason. It's hard to kind of keep pinpointing and break it down. But at the end of the day, I think one of the things we find is our companies really vary and vacillate in terms of whether they self-identify as impact-driven. Some of them wear it very proudly on their sleeves. They're incorporated as a public benefit corp or they've gone through the B-Lab kind of labeling exercise. Whereas others, they don't think about that. They don't really care about that. But we see them having a positive impact, whether it be through a transportation startup or other type of startup. So I think what we're trying to do is be thoughtful about the fact that our approach is different. But for lack of a better term, I do think impact is still loaded and maybe some of the negative affiliation that I have with that comes from my early days of fundraising. But I still worry. There's never a time in our fundraising deck where I'm like, we're an impact fund. Yeah. Well said, everyone. I think impact is a loaded term. I will just say I think at the Sorenson Impact Foundation, we have certainly found that we are earning market rate returns, not in spite of, but because of our impact. So I can just add one thing on the impact side for us is we're on these boards of the companies and we're actually on a board level tracking and outcome and access measure, but they're tied to the top line of the business. So to your point, we can show that they are connected, but it's not something that we're advertising separately. But it's how we actually think about governance. So second to last question, I wanted to give each of you a soapbox moment, where you could say anything you wanted to LPs that you wish they knew when they were underwriting your funds. So think back, reflect, and would love to kind of go down the line on this one. What's your soapbox moment, Ashley, if you want to kick us off? Let's see. I think one thing I would love to see more of is, let's see, right-sizing diligence for a fund. You might see for an early-stage fund a private equity ODD, which has a whole bunch of stuff that's not relevant. I've got asked ones for the cash flows of every single company I've ever invested in, which is just not a reasonable thing to ask for. So just kind of think about the right-sizing of the fund. The other thing I've been surprised by from different firms I've worked in and then co-founded is I do still wonder about the scrutiny of track record that can happen in certain when you're looking at new managers. And there can be a really onerous amount of work to get every CEO to verify every single transaction that you've ever done when you have an extensive track record. And so I'm curious if there are ways where we can start to make it a little bit less onerous on the founders and these new fund managers as they're doing things like verifying track record. It's a very, very technical diligence soapbox moment. But I think it would really help to facilitate more emerging managers with different theses, being able to scale funds faster. Great. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I think that's one of the challenges in the impact space. Everyone wants it to be perfect. And it rarely is, especially with early stage companies. I mean, we see big companies with all sorts of governance and employee challenges. Imagine at the early stage when you're just growing, you don't have all the right team members in place where things are breaking all the time. And I think that's one of the challenges in impact more broadly, which is you really want to be thoughtful about the outcomes that you're having, but not everything's perfect, especially. Especially at an early stage company. And so that's my quick soapbox moment, which is just, I think this is a challenge in the impact space. And I do it too, which is I have such high hopes and aspirations. And when things go stray or awry, it's really easy to say, but you're not living up to the potential of what we thought the mission could be. And it's like, no, no, no. It's really hard. It's just really hard. So don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Don't let it stop you from deploying dollars. And take that shot, have conviction, and really stick by it. Thanks, Julie. Steven, any soapbox moments? I went last because I was thinking about whether to give the right answer or to just dig deep and turn myself inside out. And I'll do the latter. So I'll just tell you a quick story. So I was in diligence for probably 10 months with one of the largest consultants out there, big name, blah, blah, blah. You get their stamp and it's all good. And this is my life's work, y'all. This is who I am. It happens to also be what I do, but this is my work. This is my art. This is my family. This is everything to me. And over the course of that 10 months of diligence, 10 months, it's a long time. You can make another human in that amount of time. It's a long time. It's a long time, you guys. It's a long time. And over the course of that 10 months, this is during quarantine. I mean, they saw me cry. I confessed my aspirations. We talked about everything you could imagine. They knew me. These folks knew me. And so we're in the last mile of diligence, waiting for the last call. We're going to get the allocations. It's the victory lap part of DIL. I've been in the business for a long time. I know the cycle. So we get on for the penultimate call. It's going to be the victory lap and it starts. And the whole team was on the other side of the Zoom. And you can see I'm a pretty relaxed guy. So I joked with them a lot over the course of this. We got on the call and it looked somber. And they said, we're disappointed. We're so disappointed, Steve. And I thought, you guys, you got me. Because I joked with them a lot. I got them several times. They weren't kidding. And they said, we're disappointed. We're sad. We're disappointed that you didn't tell us. And I realized they weren't kidding. I said, well, tell you what? What are you talking about? And they said, you didn't tell us about your breaking and entering charge and your DUI.  And we learned that you had a speeding ticket in Colorado in 1990, something, something. And you had this breaking and entering and this DUI charge in Virginia. And I said, I have never spent any time in Virginia. I don't know what you're talking about. And they didn't believe me. The same folks that I had enough track time with to make a child. And to whom I had confessed all of my everything, my aspiration. I saw my kids run around the back of the Zoom, like all the things. And they didn't believe me. And I immediately activated lawyers in Virginia and California. We were in the courthouses. And fortunately, I am connected and I have resources. And I was able to figure this out. Turns out, I had spent time in Virginia. I just didn't think about it. I drove to Dulles Airport. And I got a speeding ticket in Virginia. And somehow, I don't know, because the documents still do not exist today. Somehow, there was some attachment of my name to these other charges. But the point, the bigger point I'm making here is about the reaction. When they rounded down, they got some reference or whatever, which is factually incorrect. But they immediately went to rounding down. And they didn't believe what I had to say. And I got a lot to contribute to this space, y'all. But the moral of this story is not about me, because I got over that hump. I'll get over the next one.  And some LP is rounding down on the folks we need to move forward the way we need to move forward today. And it'll happen tomorrow. And so my soapbox thing is don't round down on us, man. Round up. We need it. We need to round up on each other, because we've got places to go. And the only way we are going to get there is if we do it together. We need everybody doing what everybody can do. If we don't get all of that, we don't get there, y'all. So that's my, I implore you, please round up. That's what I have to say on that one. Very, very well said, Stephen. Very, very well said. I feel like that's an incredible place to end. It's going to be pretty hard to top that. So I think we'll give folks some time back in their day. And thank you. I'm going to stop the party. I'm just saying round up. I mean, I got to. It's OK. I still love you. Just round up. That's all I got. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you to Ashley Bettner, Stephen DeBerry, and Julie Lean.


This study examined the relationship between trust in different sources and vaccine hesitancy during the Covid-19 pandemic. The authors found that trust in science was negatively correlated with vaccine hesitancy, while trust in social media and its use as a primary source of information were positively associated with it. Among those who had higher levels of trust in social media, there was also a greater prevalence of conspiracy beliefs, which further contributed to vaccine hesitancy. Additionally, the temporary suspension of the AstraZeneca vaccine in March 2021 led to a significant increase in vaccine hesitancy, particularly among those with lower levels of trust in science, those living in rural areas, women, and those experiencing financial distress. These results suggest that trust is a key factor in determining vaccine hesitancy, and that pro-vaccine campaigns should focus on targeting populations with low levels of trust in science or social media.


Okay, and it's time. So I'm Tim Orling. I'm from work for the Consulco group and today's talk is tales from the crypt and implementing secure boot and disk encryption on Tegra platforms. So let me start off with the straw poll How many people are here because they've heard about secure boot and they need to know more? Okay, how many people are here because they heard about disk encryption and they need to know more? How many people are here just because of the Tegra platform in particular? Very hardware specific. Okay Cool So Consulco group we're a services company specialized in all kinds of embedded Linux stuff We have a lot of very highly skilled staff that can solve a lot of problems for you. So We do hardware software all kinds of things. We're actually based in San Jose, California But we have engineering presence in Sweden, Bulgaria Port Portugal, Greece, United States, Canada, so all over the place. I Always include my abstract just so that people who are writing new Presentations can actually see what it was that got accepted and hopefully it's a Hopefully I'm I stay true to the abstract as to what I actually got done So here's the agenda. So why is it tails from the crypt? Okay, this is a war stories talk, okay?  Okay So the cool thing is once you break that wall down you get to the other side you get to do the happy dance, right? And so that's a little bit about what I wanted to talk about today I will assure you that I'm actually giving you, you know links to fully functional things that will really help you in the case of the secure boot and disc encryption and especially on the the Tegra platforms So we're gonna start off talking about secure boot and then we go into disc encryption and then I'll talk about future work Another thing about embedded space is nothing ever stands still. So secure boot Nvidia has got a particular implementation. I think from a hardware standpoint and software standpoint This is actually one of the better ones out there. I was really pleased when I did the assessment of of how this stuff is working So you've got keys or a hash of a key So you got a hash of your your private key or has hash of the public key for your private key For instance, we'll be in burned into the fuses Burnt into the fuses. That's an important thing to know and then there's also this Encrypted key storage Partition and this has additional keys in it. So that one is unlocked by the ones that are in the fuses, right? So you've got a ROM that then looks for something that's secure and then it opens up Another layer of you know security and another layer of security and another layer of security, right? So there's this trusted operating system At the time that this development was done. It was called trusty I'll get into where they're going with opti in the future after that Once you've gotten into Your init.rd now you have client applications that can start to query those trusted applications For keys, they're going to do things like unlock your disk partitions, right? so this is kind of about four layers in already in terms of Stuff that's secure and encrypted and and trusted before you even got to unlocking the disk encryption So there's a couple of example applications for trusty and also opti the hardware key agent and the lux serve Trusted applications. There's client applications that talk to that In general for secure boot specifically there's multiple levels of pop of Possible security the initial thing you have to have is the the pkc the public key Cryptography so this you cannot flash the device without You know once it's been public Public key encrypted or you know set up for secure boot you can't flash it without knowing what your public key is So you have to do everything over secure communication once you've started down this path The next level is secure boot key. So this is where you actually get secure boot, right? You don't with just the public key encryption. You don't actually have any secure boot All you've really done is kind of protected your ability to flash the device On top of that you can also do user key and this is where you want to start to encrypt your kernel or It's also used in the disc disc encryption. So there's kind of these three layers of progressive Optional, you know security that you can do specifically for secure bit the user key doesn't really come into play too much for Secure boot it like I said it is it is useful if you want to encrypt your kernels or sign your kernels So Secure boot is not one-size-fits-all by any means right it is really really specific to different platforms how it works So most of my experience was on Intel platforms, which is entirely different than what we're talking about here in terms of secure boot What I did in this work, this was customer paid work This was specifically targeting the Jetson a gx Xavier platform or the T194 class of stuff So this was specifically done with this, you know SDK that comes from NVIDIA Jetpack 4.6.1 or Linux for Tegra 52.7.1 those two kind of mean the same thing and this is Yachto base. So this was on the Yachto Duntel LTS release so You know highly recommended that folks work on an LTS release not not some random release We'll make your life a little bit better By the end of the work we I forwarded ported it to Kirkston and a newer jetpack and Before I you know came to give this talk an even newer release came out, which is we'll talk about in future work So about the fuses I Think this is kind of confusing at first. So what the fuses are what's what's there? What do you use them for? So there's this ODM production mode fuse Once you have burned that fuse that one does not allow you you can no longer set any other fuses, right? So this is it if you if you set that fuse only You can't do anything else, right? So In practice, I think for secure boot you really absolutely are going to be focusing on the public key hash So that's you know your RSA 2k bit or 3k bit on this platform Private key you get the public key hash of that and then are the public key from that and they make a hash of that That's a 256 bits that they flash into memory or into into fuses And then there's the secure boot key and this is again what actually allows for secure boot, right? So that that's also needed We've got these other keys. So there's the key encryption key zero and one Those can be used by any of your client applications to talk to the trusted applications to get a key For whatever purpose you need a key for this could be anything, right? You want a key to talk to some cloud provider service, right? That that could be what you use it for those are kind of like user user keys There's also this optioned on the the AGX Xavier platform to do the KEK 256 That's just a combination of the 228 bit keys into one key to give you more more bits of security, right and Then there's the KEK 2 key Which is 128 bits this one is what is used in the default Linux Luxe encryption disc encryption is the KEK 2 key. So that one's kind of important later In the slides, there's a link to where these all came from in the documentation So big big warning, okay, it's called a fuse for a reason All right, it's a fuse Once you turn it from a zero to a one you're done okay, so The board ship with all the fuses at zero except some stuff in the middle that NVIDIA has Put in there. That's plop. That's the device specific, right? But NVIDIA recommends burning all the fuses at once at the beginning so plan ahead, right? So in practice, I would say for development purposes, you're gonna want to have production key or sorry the public key the secure boot key and if you're trying to go secure, I would do KEK 256 right for your user key But if you have maybe two different applications that want to do something with a key You might want to use both zero and one and then the KEK 2 is again going to be used for for disk encryption later Keep your keys in escrow. So by that I mean, you know make a tarpaul of it put it somewhere, right? Keep it safe Even for development purposes, right? You still want to keep it safe somewhere because once you've burned these keys You have to have them already to talk to your board anymore, right? So I read the documentation multiple times I Looked through all the steps. I thought I knew exactly what I was doing I read some posts about things that had gone right or wrong and I still thought I knew what I was doing and I created a lovely brick Okay, so my guess it's just a guess as I was on a Slightly older release that may have had a problem with an RSA 3k key So it may have created too big of a hash and Overwritten one of those magic things that's in the middle that NVIDIA has flashed into the fuses or Somehow as an idiot I burned the fuses twice and so I burned them with one key and then then burned a few more bits On top of that But what no matter what happened what you know what ended up and there's a link to the Forum posts that I did where this board is just not gonna come up anymore. It can never get out of ROM anymore. Just done, right? Not a happy day But again, I wanted to tell you, you know real stories, right? We brick boards You know if you if you haven't bricked a board in 10 years, you're not trying hard enough, right? Please work harder You're not working at all. Yeah, exactly. So So where did I go from there? Well, it turned out I found this repo from one of the meta tegra community folks called secure boot tegra They specifically wrote this Because they were having trouble communicating with the NVIDIA tech folks on the forums to prove that something had gone wrong Okay, so they wanted to make sure that everybody was following exactly the same steps Well, I found that and I said, wow, this sounds fantastic And so it turns out I've modified it a little bit, but you can generate your keys There's scripts that'll burn the fuses for you, right? It does the magic command line incantations to burn the fuses, right? Then you can actually flash in a Binti based OS to your target that is now secure boot ready, right? So you can absolutely prove secure boots working. You have no doubt whatsoever. This is secure booting Okay, which is a nice comfortable place to be before you start going into Yachto land and Ripping everything apart and doing whatever you're going to do with it So paranoia I originally started with a debbie in 11 system this version of the SDK says it supports a bun 2 1804 and that's it they also say don't use a virtual machine and So I ended up pulling out a nook that had and you know in the closet Putting a boot to 1804 on it and from then on all flashing and fusing and everything that I ever did was only on that bare metal system Okay, so that's what I will guarantee works Okay, so links to the console coversion of the secure boot tegra Guaranteed this stuff works. There's documentation in there and on how to follow the steps So a little bit about meta tegra. So if you haven't heard of it, this is a very Vibrant community that has set up the Yachto project layers to to let you build things for your tegra platform So it's really really well maintained and tested like any other open source project. We've got you know issues with Resourcing and so you can only do so much, right? So it tends to be on the development end of things a little bit So in order to do secure boot support you can read more documentation specifically about how to met meta tegra does it but basically it's as simple as Take those keys that you generated from that secure boot tegra repo. I mentioned earlier, right? Take those keys put them in your build directory and add this to your to your local.com So you're going to add the RSA private key and you're going to add your SBK secure boot key to that and The resulting image that's built is installed just like any other thing would be that you've built with meta tegra Because of the fact that you told it these keys It built that into all the scripts that are going to run and so when you run do flash It's just going to flash it for you and so at that point you're doing it with sudo and so Everything is just going to work and and if you've already flashed your fuses You don't have to worry about things anymore as long as you have these things in there So I was really it for it for secure boot, right? It was oh my god there's a lot of information this documentation and then oh my god I've bricked the board and then oh this magic and Kentation works and it always works So the next thing was the customer wanted disc encryption So There's good things and bad things in my opinion about Nvidia's Implementation so they did two really good things right they're using Luxe The Linux unified keys setup and they're using DM Crypt. Okay, so this is really well supported stuff or very common we use stuff They've got a bunch of scripts which are all Very convoluted bash scripts I don't think bash is the right tool for such convoluted things once you've started adding libraries and things like that You should be using a real language like Python, but that's just my opinion So you also have to rip apart your root of s to create an unencrypted boot partition such that you boot or see boot can Can open that up get the kernel running and then Unlock your root FS. That's encrypted Not so happy here, right? So now you got this window where Where you you're not secure really and and You're also able you know you've got this your kernel and everything in an encrypted partition So the Luxe passphrase one of the things I do like about it is that the actual passphrase is derived from keys that are in your fuses and in your EKS Partition that encrypted key storage partition and It uses a unique device ID. So all of this together means that the actual disc encryption key They're gonna be using is Pretty darn bulletproof, right? It's it's got like multiple levels of security already built into it So the decryption is actually done in the unit RD They have a Lux serve app, which is the client application that talks to this Lux serve app That's a trusted application that's running in the trusted OS and It unlocks the device mapper devices and switches over to the full root FS just kind of like normal So My first or my second war story, right? I went down a wonderful wonderful path because I thought Let's create a new image class Let's do all the DM the Lux encryption in this image class And so the resulting tar ball and everything that I've got is just ready to flash and it's already encrypted, right? but pseudo tasks run in In a not really pseudo root space, right? You don't actually have full privileges. It's kind of a fake Pseudo, which is why they call it that So we couldn't communicate to device mapper no matter what I did I tried a whole bunch of hacks and We couldn't ever create the Lux header. So we couldn't actually format the container and we couldn't start Writing encrypted stuff into it So I might be able to do this with QMU possibly The other thing here is once you start having AB partitions now you have to know everything about your entire in all your partitions and everything ahead of time and It's kind of a bad assumption to know What your A and B partitions are going to be right because they're supposed to be interchangeable So yes, the first time you burned this it could have been okay, but how are you going to do upgrades and things like that?  All right, so I know I've gone down the wrong path. Let me try something else out So I wanted to keep part of what I liked about the NVIDIA implementation one of the things they had was they have a different Passphrase for every partition. I thought that was kind of cool, right? Rather than like most of our desktop systems when you're doing Lex encryption, you've just got one passphrase for the whole computer, right? So I created another image class to create it to rip apart the root FS and create the unencrypted boot partition and I did a hell of a lot of crazy stuff with var flags to store the UUID for each of the partitions and then I used that to Generate the Crip tab and generate the passphrases and a bunch of stuff like this, right? At one point I even started using XML lint and XML starlet to actually parse and Insert stuff into this flash XML file which describes what all the partitions are actually going to be But you probably already realize this is over engineered like a lot Like way over engineered, which is what I tend to do anyway, but really over engineered It got really hairy trying to do all the changes that needed to happen inside the Etsy Crip tab And I needed the Etsy Crip tab before I created the init in it Rd right the init remfs So it turned out to be this like nested, you know dollar squiggly bracket Variable expansion hell. I mean I spent hours trying to figure out how to properly, you know escape Characters and everything to get it to to work And ultimately still never even got to like Lex encryption I'm doing all this stuff to set up all the partitions and set up Crip tab and all this other stuff And I never actually got there So I've got two links there for for where this crazy stuff went By this point you can imagine I've been working on this for a while. I'd already bricked the board I've gone down to kind of dead ends. I'm getting frustrated, right? So I did find a solution and it wasn't I didn't author it I've augmented it, but what if we don't root rip apart the root FS? Okay, what if we don't require the unencrypted boot partition? Can we do that because that sounds better to me What if we perform the disencryption on the device Rather than ahead of time on the host, right? So if you're doing it ahead of time on the host that means your factory floor has to have the keys and Then they have to create the new root FS for every single device and then flash it That is not production ready, right? This is one of the biggest failings in my opinion of what you know, NVIDIA was putting out as their implementation The other cool thing is that this approach allowed us to sign for secure boot independently of the disencryption Completely a hundred percent divorced you can have either one or both together So bonus, I think it's way more production friendly because you can actually sign send your images off to a secure enclave that has you know your keys stored in a HSM and actually do the signing there and The images can then be installed on the factory floor without needing to know a whole bunch of information and special bonus OTA updates just work Because there's nothing special about your OTA bundle and It's already going to be installed on a on a encrypted system. So I Use Tegra test distro. This is there's another distro called Tegra demo distro They're part of the meta Meta Tegra community So this was created by Matt Madison. He's actually the you know the godfather of meta Tegra And it what it has is a two-stage approach. It starts off by booting into a system installer So it's got a special init remfs that Knows about your flash partition table and it writes those things out creates all those partitions creates the Lex headers it takes your real root FS and writes it on device into the encrypted partitions now and Bonus it installs a bootloader update. And so when this system reboots all signs of the installer operating system are gone Right, so now you're just in your purely secure booting system with everything disc encrypted So how long does this disc encryption take on disk? Like a minute Who cares right? It's nothing. So it's really cool So I really love the fact that it decrypted or say decoupled secure boot from Lux Because everything's happening on the on the device So what do you do to enable that so basically we're abusing a machine override by telling it to be crypt parts Right, so we're telling your machine You have this crypt parts capability and that just stands for crypt cryptographically signed partitions, right? We do need to have the tar ball that we're going to actually install and so Not just the normal tegra flash Which is the normal image class ease to to have the flash scripts and everything to flash to your device But we need the tar ball because that system installer is actually going to have the tar ball present and then it's going to install it All your Partitions that are actually going to be encrypted all you have to do is put a crypt dash in front of it and the scripts are actually going to Look at that and see this needs to be encrypted Add it to the crypt the secrypt file and things like this and it basically just kind of magically takes care of everything for you The one cool thing that I didn't know about at this time You know looking at these crazy flash XML scripts was you could use ID equals number and actually specify which Partition number to use this is kind of important because on a stock system. It's got 46 partitions Anybody want to guess what any one of them does some of them have some names that make some sense some of them don't so it's kind of confusing So once you've set these these things up You just do big big tegra system stalls This creates the special system staller image that has that special init ramfs that does all this auto install for you So this is not all fully upstreamed yet, but I've got Functional branches for Kirkston release and the jet pack 4.6.2 or Linux for tegra 32.7.2 and it's We've got some discussion happening on the actual tega test distro for a poll request a little bit about Little more details here about the eks image and things like that. So You don't need to create your own eks image With the the keys and everything like that until you get to lux disk encryption You just don't you can do secure boot all day long with the stock Eks image you don't have to worry about it The moment you set the moment that you fuse and burn kek2 that you're going to be using for the Lex disk encryption You must create your own eks image. You have to there is no option So the other thing is that the stock eks image is all zeros So the user key that's in there is also all zeros So even if you were to use the stock Eks image you still have to pass the user key and all zeros user key in to Do the disk encryption later on Following What had been so successful with the secure boot? I just added on to the secure boot tegra repo and created another Another branch that went into that adds some more scripts and some more test scripts and things like that to actually like make sure all this Lux encryption is working and again. I used NVIDIA's operating system So not only do you know for a fact you're doing secure boot, but you also know for a fact that you're doing lux disk encryption so you know that before you even started on yakto everything is is As secure and everything as you wanted it to be So my favorite part of this whole project was when I came to the OTA updates Because it just worked I did nothing special So we were using Raoq in this case Also works really well with Mender So because of the fact that the disk encryption is performed on the device Once your device is up and running and communicates to get your OTA bundle You don't have to do anything special right your device was already secure booted There's nothing magic, right? You don't need you just use your normal Raoq signed bundle Mechanism or or signed Mender bet mechanism, right? So you already have the ability to talk to that server get that get that bundle Install it switch over and you're done I can't tell you how happy I was that that was just Done it just worked like it never I never had any problems with it whatsoever. It's just normal procedures for OTA updates so Future work So I think it was like two weeks ago There's a new jetpack 5.0.2, which is the new general audience release and I was really excited about this because they switched to optee So more of an industry standard arm standard trusted operating system They switched the UEFI instead of their C boot bootloader or we had actually hacked things to work with with u-boot But it's just nice to have them standardized on something, right? And I think with system ready arm systems are going to UEFI being required and Also, no more 4.9 kernel it's 5.10, right? It's not 5.19 is not 5.15, but I'll take 5.10 over 4.9 any day of the week, right? Please The cool thing is they also ported the Lux serve trusted application the Lux serve app client application and the hardware key agent and hardware key app And so Those are there. They're ready to for us to you know, do some more testing and everything in the Tegra community but But it's promising that I might actually be able to get all of this to work on the new system pretty simply, you know famous last words So they moved from C boot to UEFI 4.9 kernel to 5.10 kernel and You can at least use it in Ubuntu 20.04 host But you're not stuck on 18.04 because every time you run 18.04 it says, hey, there's no more updates Are you sure you want to run this kind of you know stuff? The only caveat is it only works on these Ajax Xavier Xavier NX and the new Ajax Oran Platforms so the old TX one TX to you and so on those those aren't supported anymore. I Think Nvidia just want you to move only to the new hardware So the other thing that I'm working on right now is actually taking the components that I have in that that feature branch that Totally worked for tip for the test distro and getting some stuff into The demo distro, which is the more community supported thing that goes through CI and that all the time So there's this special the thing the thing that does all the magic in that auto installer is Tegra system stall. So that's gonna have to be added. I Need to add in, you know Into these into Tegra demo distro. We need to add in the Crip in it ramfs You need to make sure we got CI and test actually like making sure this stuff's working, you know as much as possible and In the short term, you know just because I already have it all working, right? I know it works I'm gonna be pushing up the existing work that was fully functional get that out there and then we're in the middle of Working with Langsdale the new Yachto release 4.1 release and the jetpack 5.0.2 stuff Mostly the jetpack 5 is working Meta Tegra community. We're all working on this stuff Testing it out. There's a couple of hiccups here and there, but you know looks pretty good so far There's a couple things that don't quite seem like they should have been claimed to be production But it's not too bad But in particular, I haven't tested any of this stuff out because as a contractor I've moved from project to project. So, you know, I'm not we're not working on this specific thing right at this moment But but all this stuff will be up streamed. So I Really want to thank Matt Madison for all that he does for the open and better for Tegra community and specifically the stuff that I got to piggyback on top of from Tegra Chess Distro and so on and you'll use Chagui who He did a lot of early testing on stuff that I was trying to get out there for the community and Found some typos and things like that. So it was really helpful to have that and I really want to thank the OE Ford Tegra community for Just being really excited that I was working on this and and really being excited to you know Answer questions or test stuff out and everything was just really awesome, you know I think we're all here because this is open source and we're all into community and It's just awesome when that's reinforced by a community. You've never worked with before and They just accept you and and work with you on it and that was just awesome So, I think we've got some time for questions About six minutes. Yes, so the nit ramifest could have been signed But the The way that Nvidia was booting it. It was actually booting From the bootloader Into the unencrypted Boot partition and then from then on it was encrypted, right? so the reason they had to do it that way was the way that they were doing the so they were doing the Encryption first and then signing everything and then then flashing it So because of the fact that we're doing those two things completely separate and doing the encryption on target That meant that the signing Is completely a hundred percent independent so all the secure boot and all that kind of stuff that was You know was needed in order to be able to even unlock the unit ramifest all that stuff's just already there and So basically, you know, see boot just hands straight off to you In a net ramifest which has already got the ability to unlock the the Partitions because it can talk to the trusted Applications, but it's signed Yes, yes, so that partition is signed so that partition could never have been loaded It would barfit you because it wasn't wasn't signed. Yeah So I Will say that I did all I did a lot of the work without ever doing any secure boot I just did pure lux disc encryption. So in that case, yes, I was vulnerable to the attack you're talking about But ultimately once you were doing the full secure boot and everything The init ramifest and everything was signed Yeah, so the question was what is the unit what is the unit system being used and in the unit ramifest So this is one of the things I really liked about Matt's Implementation because it's all it's all system D Okay So I know that people have they grown about system D because it's a little bit heavy on embedded systems I understand that right, but everybody's moving to system D these days and System D really feels nice to me like it's just I understand it really well And I'm not hacking at shell scripts all the time so I've done some really really hairy work on init RD systems that were Sysfi in it and it It was just so much extra work To make the make sure the shell scripts worked It I just don't think it's worth it anymore. So I system D made so you you benefit from a bunch of stuff about crypt tab and FS tab and all this other stuff, you know and the The DM crypt stuff that's already built into system D All of that stuff came along for the ride for free and it made this really much easier to work with Yes Yes, so the question is Is this implementation able to flash directly to an NVMe? So yes, so I did not have an NVMe on the particular board that I was using so I didn't test that path out Yeah, so it's it really doesn't matter what the storage media is so SD card or EMMC or NVMe would work as long as Because basically the most of the magic is is the stuff that's flashed into So Obviously you have to have the fuse is set up and also you have to Have your system set up that it's going to boot to whatever the device is that you want to boot it to But it should not affect the ability to flash So the flashing scripts from meta-tegrist should have flashed the same auto installer operating system onto your NVMe and then once that booted up it knew because of There's there's a service that's similar to what system D has but it knows about the boot devices that are going to be coming up and then it uses that to to do the actual Final Crip tab and the disk encryption. So there's a lot of details here I had to gloss over because it's only so much time in the talk, but I'm I'm quite confident that that would be no problem Couple more questions. Can you repeat one more time? Yeah So I think it all comes down to what capabilities pseudo is allowed to have right and and So I couldn't run LO setup Right, so that's what I had to do LO setup and so yeah I'll just say I spent enough time hacking at it that I thought I was burning customer dollars and so I just moved on I'm pretty sure there are other ways around it. I'm not sure pseudo is going to be the best hack I think it'd probably be better off running Q mu as part of the build system In video did everything in a charade, but you know it just started to get Pretty ugly. I did some pretty pretty heavy hacks to try to get things to work And it just wasn't getting anywhere short of actually patching pseudo so You know, it's it's possible. I'm not I'm not sure To be honest with you. We had at least two others. I'll go to the back. Oh Sorry time is up So I will be at the yachter project booth the next couple of days and you can see me in the hallway And I love talking to people so just you know or find me on Twitter or whatever I'm really happy to talk to people And that's it. Thank you so much