Good afternoon and welcome to today's energy seminar. Our speaker today is Arvin Gupta from Mayfield, also known as Mayfield Fund, also known as Mayfield Ventures. That's a 54-year-old established Silicon, sorry, Sandhill Road venture capital company. He is going to talk about what he's doing at Mayfield now, but I think the story that got him here, which he'll do better than me, started for me and Tom Hormio, who's up front here in chemical engineering and energy systems in engineering, where we share joint appointments, said I got an interesting guy I want you to meet. I said, Jesus Christ, he knows Bill Gates and all kinds of scientists, businessmen and celebrities who could be more interesting than that. So I wandered in, I think it was a Friday afternoon and met Arvin that actually went through an early version of this talk, which allegedly is a lot better now. So Arvin's deal is he was a bioengineer by training, and then, I think this is probably significant, worked in Shanghai for IDO on ideation and creativity for it. And then I don't know, the actual transition back got really interested in seeding VC funds with biojack people to ensure planetary health. And at that point, it was really based on food alternatives to animal products. And that led to his formulation with his partner here, Po Brunson, who's here with us. I guess he was one of the founders or early hires of IndieBio, which over a five-year period funded, see if I can get the number right, 126 startups, some of them are well-known companies now. And I think along the way, in looking at the pitches for the, hearing the pitches for the company said, geez, this is good for revolutionizing food, which does have a direct link to energy, but also is probably expandable into this frame that he calls planetary health, which means food health and climate change are all intimately related in a way that he described. He's won many awards and given many prestigious addresses and has produced this book, a book called Breaking the Code, which I highly recommend, by the way, which he'll talk about now. And he and Po are actually going to produce a trilogy out of that books by the same name. You'll have to have the cold ends or something for the sequels, a little bit like Lord of the Rings. So I talk too much, without further ado, the one and only, Arvin Gupta, Arvin. There we go, it is now on. Well, thank you so much, John. I really appreciate it, and it's been lovely getting to know you and Tom here at Stanford and getting to know the Stanford community in general. So yeah, I wanna talk to you today about reversing climate change through capitalism. And those are two words that don't often go together, I think. In fact, the only time they do go together is when you take out the reversing part, right? And so the way we do it is the subject of the talk and the way you can actually do this consistently and repeatedly over time is the goal of this talk. So first, John mentioned a few things about me, but yeah, I invest in companies. I'm an investor now at Mayfield as a general partner, prior to that as the founder of IndieBio. I invest in companies trying to reverse climate change, like I said, using capitalism as its engine. Prior to that, I was a designer, and I think that uniquely taught me to look at problems versus solutions. As a design director, I always said the best problems lead to the best products. So really take the time to find worthy problems. And as I was making my transition from being a designer to being a venture capitalist, I thought, okay, well, what are the problems that are gonna generate the best products in the world? And climate change really is the thing that emerged from that question. Where else are you gonna find consistent, durable problems over time? So with that, I did also write a book with Poe Bronson talking about the early stages of that journey called Decoding the World, and like John said, two more to go. So that's me in a nutshell, and I just want to share that with you a little bit. So the question is first, why is this important? I know it's a patently obvious question to many. Why is planetary health even worth talking about? And here you can see the an animation of the temperature rise every year from late 1800s. Here you can see World War II is happening and really oil has become the battery of choice for the world, and what that is starting to do for climate change. You can see inexorable warming of the global average temperatures. Now, it's really important to see one that this is a trend that's happening over time, but what's its effects?  That's due to wars, translocations, things like that, that nature.  This is just an anomaly, it's gonna go right back down. Sure, but if we can't figure out how to make capitalism sustainable over time, then we're gonna have a real problem with keeping things more equal and we're gonna have a bigger disparity between the haves and have-nots. We can talk about that a little bit more later as well. So in any way, shape or form, helping to make capitalism sustainable is the problem of choice for me. So I talked about enduring planetary health businesses. Why is endurance or longevity important? Because dead companies don't change the world. And so we need to build business models and build approaches in the marketplace that are sustainable for decades, not just to get in and get out as investors. And so these are some of the five-year charts of some recent planetary health-focused companies. Granted, a lot of this was driven by the 2021 hype cycle, right? So it's a little unfair of a chart, but it helped me make a point, which is we have to build businesses that succeed against other businesses that are not trying to make things sustainable. And really, we have to beat those companies at their own game, which, by the way, to give you the punchline, is totally possible. And in doing so, we have to look, okay, what are some lessons from CleanTech 1.0 that we can draw from? That we can say, oh, okay, let's not go there. Well, by the way, I don't know how many people have heard of CleanTech 1.0, but CleanTech 1.0 was a 2008-ish circa 2008 wave of companies that were really looking to replace oil as an energy commodity. And that was driven by excitement around biotech and hydrogen and other alternative fuels. And so I'm not gonna go through all of these because in the interest of time, there's a lot to discuss in this talk, and I promise not to keep you here until tomorrow. But in essence, the biggest, the big takeaway is you can't invest in high technology to make low-priced commodities. Low-priced commodities will never give you the margin that you need to put back into the business, okay? That's really what it comes down to. And I am excited to say that today is different. Today's different than 2008, and it's because we have a completely different social environment. We also have a completely different understanding of the problem that we're trying to solve. So CleanTech was really driven by this idea that oil was gonna go to $400 a barrel. Climate tech, the wave that we're in today, is driven by the idea that CO2 levels keep on rising. Those are fundamentally different problems. And so what's interesting is when fracking was invented, or became popular and widespread, the price of oil in around 2008 cratered, dropped to under 50 bucks. And that just basically decimated the CleanTech sector. Now, the people that were really sad about that were the investors. When CO2 levels drop, the companies that are still around are gonna be the ones that drove that drop. And the people that are gonna rejoice are society in general. So I think these are fundamentally different movements. And that's what I wanna really drive home, originating from fundamentally different places. But every tech wave has an amazing silver lining, the busts have an amazing silver lining, which is CleanTech 1.0 drove the cost of enabling technologies down dramatically, especially solar cells and other fundamental units of CleanTech. So here's a great slide of different technologies and their associated costs over time. You can see they all fall dramatically. The rate at which it drops is called the learning rate, technical term. You can see synthetic biology has had the most dramatic drop in sequencing costs, which is leading to all sorts of new data, allowing us to understand how to manipulate life fundamentally in much greater fidelity. There's also, you can see photovoltaics or solar panels have dropped by more than 97% ethanol. So there's a lot of hope for me that this bedrock of technologies can go ahead and help us drive more innovation, which is gonna be really important and very helpful because human desires are fundamentally unlimited. That is a truth that we must accept if economics is a field of study, which is the study of scarcity. If we didn't have unlimited desires, we wouldn't actually have any problems with scarcity. And so John Keynes talks about the invisible hand of the economy, it's not invisible, man. It's the hand of the consumer. And so where the consumer goes is where capitalism goes. So to direct capitalism to be a better capitalism, we must go through the consumer. And this is an issue because this unlimited demand is creating five earths of pressure on one earth of supply. So there's a conundrum. That's happening in real time right now, which is gonna get delivered on. Why? Because capitalism is short-term greedy, which is fine, which is fine. Capitalism works great for innovation, it works great for a lot of things. So capitalism as a force is really supported by quarterly earnings and the decision-makers making short-term decisions, which is changing, interestingly enough. Why? Let's go back to the hand of the consumer. They want innovation but they don't wanna pay for it. Enterprises have figured that out. And so there's a lot of goodwill, brand goodwill, being put to work to generate real value by showing consumers that they are sustainable. So this really complex chart on the right hand side basically says that 25% of Fortune 500 companies have made climate goals. $38 trillion, $33 or $38 trillion of market cap have said we are going to be net zero by some date in the future. Now those statements and those goals get translated into innovation through market forces. So this is the opening salvo. And again, I have hope that the voice of the consumer, the hand of the consumer will guide us there. So I think better capitalism, which is the same thing, will give people what they want without having to steal it from the future. And that actually creates a sustainable and scalable future for everybody. Again, even if you don't believe in climate change, what this does is it helps create more equality throughout the world in terms of living standard. And I'm a venture capitalist. So why do I care? Why do I care? Because you could make a lot of money by solving these problems. I already mentioned $38 trillion are being allocated, or not being allocated, but of market cap are looking at solving these problems. The entire world of GDP in 20 years will be $100 trillion. There's an opportunity. Now it's kind of doubled by 150. Sorry, thank you, thank you. Yes, it's gonna double in another 20 years. So the takeaway here is, look, all of these sectors have to become sustainable. And so innovation is gonna drive all of those waves. And the demand is on the other side. So feeding the world, building the world, and powering the world. Those are the three major activities through which all carbon flows through society. And those three major sectors are all becoming decarbonized in various ways. And I think one of the exciting things is, is getting decarbonized through a huge variety of different ideas and products and companies. Again, it's not this narrow area of activity. It's a broad revolution in movement. So why is now, again, different? Or how is this gonna work? I've just given you a bunch of paradoxes. If I'm in the audience, I'm going, yeah, I don't understand how that's kind of possible. And so I'm excited also as a venture capitalist because there is a lot of innovation happening in multiple areas of science that can be leveraged and harnessed to solve these paradoxes. So I'm not gonna spend much time on these slides, but I just wanna give you a flavor of the breath of what's happening in the world today. In just biology, we have genome editing and CRISPR. That alone has spurred a huge amount of innovation. Microbial solutions, so methanatrophs, as a matter of fact, we'll talk about this later. Methanatrophs eat methane gas. They've evolved to use methane as energy source. There's carbon capture, plants, trees, best carbon capture source we have. So making those even more optimal. Doing our agricultural systems to become more sustainable. These are all areas where biology has been innovating. And so I mentioned this is a company that Mayfield's an investor in actually called Windfall Bio, and they're using methanatrophs to take waste methane emissions from dairies, from oil fields and landfills, and using the methanatrophs to then create high quality organic fertilizer. How? Well these methanatrophs, when they're consuming the methane, they take nitrogen gas from the atmosphere, tear it apart, and fix that nitrogen into the amino acids that it's using to grow. And in doing so it becomes bioavailable. So that's a way of really starting to take some of the problems that we have and turning them into solutions. The Every Company is actually one of the first companies I ever invested in, formerly called Clara Foods, they are using synthetic biology to make egg whites without the chicken. So you could code egg whites, egg white proteins, into yeast, and then have the yeast basically brew them, and then you could reconstitute those egg white proteins into a product, and make them into things like macarons, meringues, and others. Geltor is another company that's using synthetic biology to create animal free collagens. And not just any animal free collagens, human collagens, for things like makeup. When was the last time you can get a human collagen for makeup? It's not possible. Upside foods, many people have probably heard of cell-based meats, or cultured meat. So upside foods makes actual chicken without the chicken by growing the actual avian cells in culture and then reconstituting that into chicken breasts. They're now being served at Bar Cren or Atelier Cren. So that's just biology. Chemistry, huge advances as well. For carbon capture and storage, this is, there's a lot of applications using moths, using different types of CO2 to fuels, electrochemistries. There's also, some of the advances in chemistry can really help us think about sequestering large amounts of carbon, like enhanced rock weathering and things like that, other approaches similar to that. Direct air capture, if we can get better sorbents, adsorbents, we can figure out how to actually remove some of the CO2 from there, which is very hard to do energetically. So more advancements in these areas will turn that into a focus area that might bear real fruit. I could go on, but let's just take a look at some of the companies that are also starting to commercialize these technologies, like 12, using electrochemistry to take CO2 and turn that into plastics fuels and other products. And they have a collaboration with Mercedes-Benz now. Again, showing that there's real economic interest in this. There's real, and it's all being driven by enterprise. I think that's one of the big things that's changed recently, is enterprises have really woken up to how to address this. Climeworks is a company that is doing direct air capture. This is in Iceland, I'm married to an Icelander, so I know this company well and have visited them many times in the past years, but they're looking at and figuring out how to best capture the CO2 and do this in an area that is got free, well, very cheap energy, geothermal. Lithos is a company that is using olivine and basalt to do enhanced rock weathering. So when olivine and water come together, it's able to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere and then it makes its way all the way to the ocean where it goes down into the sea and gets stored for thousands of years. This is the natural weathering problem. That's the natural system that happens in climate today. It's just doing it way faster. Lindgrove is a company that is making wood without trees by using flax instead with a bio-resin. That's a guitar that top piece is not from a tree. It's made with a resin and flax. So again, if we can leave our trees in the ground, rather than cut them down, it's a lot better for our future. Physics. So yeah, even physics has a ton of advancements recently that are driving things forward. So from quantum computing actually, which is interesting, because I meet with quantum computing companies every once in a while, and a lot of them talk for their first applications being coming up with new materials for climate change, for mitigating climate change. There's incredible buzz about fusion and fission and other areas. So speaking of which, common with fusion systems recently raised $2 billion with a B and is getting from what we hear closer and closer to actually creating a sustained fusion reaction. I was talking to an investor about this, and it was an interesting conversation because I said, well, electrons are pretty cheap, right? We're gonna put a lot of investment into fusion to make pretty cheap electrons. And their comment was really great. I said, well, demand for these electrons are gonna go way up, continue to go way up. And so we need sources of those electrons that aren't determined by the wind and by day and night. And so this is a huge step forward once this is able to happen. But it's no longer pure sci-fi. I think that's the biggest thing for me that's changed from even five years ago. There's a lot of buzz about the superconductor on Twitter. Like what was it like three or four months ago? I thought it was kind of funny, but it is a holy grail. And the idea of a superconducting wire to losslessly transmit electricity over long distances would have an enormous impact on our ability to mitigate climate change, just for moving energy around. So there's a company called Inertly Materials that's working on that. And then nuclear fission reactors, good old-fashioned fission reactors, coming back into finding new application areas. Here's radiant, which that is a rendering of something that goes in the back of a semi. So you can just drive it around. And so as the public starts to come to grips with the safety systems, and as we believe that fission can become safer and the waste can be dealt with, it becomes a very viable alternative to creating electrons that aren't dependent on intermittent sources. And AI advancements continues to go. The advancements in computation, especially in the past six months, as everyone here knows, with large language models and AI, is truly an extraordinary pace of change and innovation. So this has direct impact in climate technologies because we can start doing things like create digital twins of agriculture, digital twins of the national grid, and figure out how to optimize how things are going and reducing waste. We can start looking at our waste chains and our supply chains and optimize all of those. So a Mayfield investment is Chemics, which is using AI to design batteries, better lithium ion batteries, because they could search the entire space of mixing electrolytes very quickly and optimize it for very specific conditions. Another one's Amphrobotics. This is a company that's using vision to look through the trash. And as the trash gets, there's got robots, it sees, and you can create better and more pure waste streams that have higher value, and that value can get turned over. Avallo is an AI company that is using AI to look at genomes, plant genomes. And in doing so, look at creating rice that doesn't release methane and more tolerant species for drought in other conditions. Framework44 is a company that's getting incubated that is using LLMs to design better catalysts, moffs in particular, to actually find, do the search space for converting CO2 and other chemicals into other higher value chemicals at a lower cost. So the one thing you might notice through all of those is that all of these examples, all these companies, what's common? They're all deploying those technologies to mitigate climate change through products, through products that people use, whether they're enterprise or consumer, but they're products, physical thing that gets sold. And so there's three paths to market for any product. You could either be better, you could be cheaper, or you could be required by law. So for venture, as a venture capitalist, I live in bucket number one.  They tend to be lower margin, and so different capital sources can fund those as they scale up. They just require a lot more capital upfront. And then required by law, that's just a tough one to predict. So an incumbents usually win those, which again, it doesn't mean that's a bat, like we should, I think law is important, right? There's, we shall be wearing seat belts. That's a good law. But as a VC, I think we live in bucket number one. And so, I think this is really important. The best sustainability companies are really the best product companies. And I'm gonna use Tesla as an example a lot, so please bear with me on that. But I just can't think of a better example in history. And we'll go over why. But just as a little anecdote to bring it home, our Subaru outback died. And so, me and the kids, I have two girls, six and eight, and we needed a new car. So we're gonna get a minivan because we were renting a Toyota Sienna. While we were getting a new car. And it's like an apartment on wheels, I don't know if anyone's seen one of these things. It's like literally a box, a giant box on four wheels. And it's super fun for them.  Like we're trying to reverse climate change through our investing, might as well do it through our actions as well. So we get in the car, we go to the Tesla dealership and test drive a Y, it's got seven seats. And we leave the, I'm driving and I leave the Tesla a lot. And I make a right and stomp on the accelerator and we shoot down the road like a rocket. And the girls in the back start screaming, Tesla, Tesla. And right there as a family, we made a product decision, not a sustainability decision. And I think it was a really important lesson for me as a VC in that moment. And so, I think that's where we see it. And there's a lot of decisions that Tesla has made that make the company that it is. And so, if we're trying to figure out how to make capitalism sustainable and we know that it's going through products and we know that those products are created and deployed by companies, question could naturally ask is, what are the common traits of great planetary health companies? Can we learn something that is common to them all and repeatable? And so, as a partner Mayfield, I talked extensively with the managing director, Naveen, who's had decades of experience in the space, had my entire Indie bio experience from the past 10 years. And so, we also looked at public company comps. What do companies look like after 10 years in the public markets? Where do they evolve to? How does it go? Because if we need to build companies that stand that test of time, what can we learn? So, what follows is really a summary of 10 traits that are common to the real outliers in the past years in planetary health. So, one man is just uncompromising founders. Uncompromising. Notice I don't say mission driven, notice I don't say unreasonable. It's a very specific word. And this is the thing that in my own experience have seen over and over again. These really great founders are uncompromising. They have a bar, they have a really high bar for themselves, for the problems that they're trying to solve. And they bring that to them, to their work, and they bring it to the teams around them. So, they also go all the way because they're not looking for a quick financial win. They're looking to solve a problem. So, they also tend to set really, really good goals. Goals that are hard to understand from the outside. But make complete sense to their own internal guidance system, which turns out to be right in the long run. And so, these uncompromising founders tend to attract N of one teams, what I call N of one teams. That means the A team. I don't know how many kids from the 80s are around. I might be the only one. But yeah, so there was a TV show called the A team. And it really is about the best team on the planet with the best expertise in the area of problem that the company is trying to solve. And uncompromising founders can bring those types of people together and then set those goals that the A team could go and execute on. And that becomes one of the best moats there is. You might be able to copy an idea, but how do you copy a team? One company has the best people in the world. It's gonna be tough to catch up. This N of one team then always generates 10X products. What's a 10X product? It's a phrase that captures the idea that a 10X product is a product that once I use it, going back to the old way is something I could never do again. It just becomes patently silly to go back to the old way. The iPhone is a great example of that. The whole world was using blackberries, mechanical keyboards at the time. And uncompromising founders named Steve Jobs decided to just make it all glass. And within just a year or two, a few years, the entire world switched over to that modality. There's no way you can go back. That's what a 10X product is. After driving, you have two Teslas now, I can't imagine driving a gas car. 10X products, the great thing about them is they generally create high gross margin potential. Why? Because they tend to be premium. People will pay anything. Everyone talked about the iPhone when it first came out. Oh, it's so expensive, no one's gonna afford it. Well, guess what?  People will save up and spend a disproportionate amount of their income on that product. As the cost curve is coming down on Tesla, originally it was still a very premium product. It hit a trillion dollar market cap as a premium product. Now, a high gross margin is also relative to its TAM, total addressable market. So that's something that's important to talk about. Generally when you have a very, very large TAM, a trillion dollars, 500 billion dollars, you can have lower gross margins than say software. That's the classic example, 80% gross margins in software generally. But if you could generate 10, 40 billion dollars of revenues a year, that supports valuations that still makes sense for investors. Number five, these products tend to be a daily habit for someone, for someone. And why does that generate, why is that a common trait of these companies? Because when it's a daily habit, it lives rent free in my mind. I talk about it with others and I don't have to spend as much on marketing to convince you of anything. Tesla spends zero on marketing. Number six, they all control their destiny. So that means owning a path to your customer either through direct distribution or through the ability to communicate your brand values or your values or your value proposition to the customer. So this is Michael Works, an IndieBio company that has invented a way of creating leather from mushrooms. And so the product is called Rishi, they named it Rishi and it's a B2B product, fashion houses buy this product but they talk about it as Rishi as a material. It's not mushroom leather. That's critically important for Michael Works to capture the value that it has created. Here's one that's interesting to me is they've all innovated in the assembly line. Here's a picture of the gigapress. This is a giant press that can make the Model Y in three parts, the shell. And that's critically important because it allows you to lower costs and get to better gross margins which allow you to spit more money back into the company. It's a flywheel of good. So all of these great plans for health companies figure out how to innovate on the production side as much as on the product side. They also tend to work with corporates and governments to their advantage. SolarCity was a solar panel installation and distribution company that started by Kimble Musk and they were very good at this. There's a lot of tailwinds right now in sustainability with the Inflation Reduction Act and companies are taking advantage of it today. So this is something that allows you to have to raise less money and get subsidized for it. Then you have to have a durable note. This is an important story that I'll talk about shortly but you can create a bunch of value and be unique and have a 10X product but if you have no way to defend it it's over within a couple years because everyone will see it, copy it and you're left scrambling to catch up. Oftentimes what that means is spending more money. So with high tech you could try to use IP but I think execution is the ultimate mode. So if you can really just attract the very best people and it goes back to if you can get a lot of these traits these common traits, it's a flywheel that enables you to keep ahead. Finally, this is becoming more and more important in our current financial environment, capital efficiency. Planetary health companies tend to be capital intensive and so any company that is loose with its finances tends to run into trouble. So great founders really are constantly thinking about the ROI of every dollar they spend.  Does that generate $2 of value? Asking that question on every decision. And they also find other sources of capital, debt versus equity, things like that. So from those 10 we can come up with these simple 10 KPIs that can help guide the way. And these change over time. What the right shape is changes over time which we'll get to in a moment. But ambitious goals. Do you have ambitious goals with clear milestones? Do you have a unique 10X product? Unique is really important, right? It's really hard like I said to be 10X on everything. So what are you gonna be uniquely great at? Tesla doesn't have better range than a gas car. But that's okay, that's not the point. That's not the value proposition. A massive 10. And the 10X product helps you understand that 10. In other words, if you are 10X better than a substitute that substitute is your real 10. You might be able to grow it over time as you get better at other things but then you could be very precise. High gross margin potential. Fast cash flows baked into the business model. So all businesses go through this loop. Cash inventory accounts receivable back to cash. The company that could do that the fastest generally wins. So if you can find ways of speeding that up you'll be in a better financial position to weather storm. Be a daily touch point for your customer. Figure out how to become that. Again, look at your operating efficiencies. Making sure that there's a direct relationship between you and the consumer. That you have a moat and that you leverage the capital that's available for free. So let's do a quick case study. Case study is probably the wrong answer. It's not very detailed. So this isn't going into a 20 page discourse here. But a quick snapshot. Let's just take these KPIs and take a look at two companies and see what they did. One left is Tesla. The one on the right is Beyond Meat. They're both public companies. So you're able to get some data on them and take a look. So let's go ahead and take a look at Tesla. Ambitious goals with clear milestones. Yep, Elon Musk always puts out very ambitious goals. He said Cybertruck's gonna be ready. He might miss some. He might, just maybe. But it drives the team. Do they have a unique 10X product? Yep, people love. And again, I say the quickness of Tesla. There's something precise there. There's a lot of reasons to love those cars, but there was something precise in their entry point with the Roadster. It was built as faster. Massive Cham. Yep, cars are 1.5 trillion. High-ghost margin potential. So this has actually dropped since the last quarterly announcement, but the 13% industry average, Tesla's higher than that. And it's rewarded in the public markets with a massive enterprise value to revenue multiple. Does it have fast cash flows? Yeah, it's innovating. It's okay, it's not super fast. Yeah, there's a daily touch point. It's fun. People talk about it. They have good operating efficiency early on. Now, that's dropped. The operating margin is 7.6%. So that is accurate. And I think that's the, but there's room. Because of that operating leverage, there's room to fight a price war, which is what Elon has started. And he knows that everyone else has to create a lost leader for them to stay in the EV business while they learn. There's a direct relationship with zero spend. Such an important lesson there. Zero spent. The Gigapress makes production cheaper, but the supercharger network makes switching costs extremely high. The Tesla supercharger network. Man, switching out of that. It's so high that I think like the government's stepping in and helping to make it available to everybody. I didn't know this. I looked this up. Tesla did actually receive a $465 million loan pre-IPO, which it fully repaid. I think it's the only car maker that ever repaid its loan or something like that. Let's take a look at Beyond Meat. So Tesla's not bad on that list overall. Beyond Meat was the darling IPO in 2020, 19 maybe? 18, something like that. June of 19, yeah, thank you. And it was also one of the only pure play planetary health companies you could invest in at the time besides Tesla. So is there ambitious goals with Clear Milestones? Yeah, there's a stated goal of being better for the planet, but it's not precise in its messaging. They're not like beyond 3.0 burgers coming in June, right? Is there a 10x product that people can't live without? So it's red now. It was green, what, six years ago? It was green six years ago. There's an important lesson in here, which is it was green for vegetarians that had boca burgers, frozen patty boca burgers is what they were called. They are called, I think it's still around. And the substitute product, Beyond, was way better. But the market size for boca burgers was like $200 million to the most, $100 million, not one trillion. So by being precise, we can get to actual market sizes and understanding what the total sales potential could be. And so to Beyond Meets credit, it's done an amazing job of expanding the TAM of plant-based meats and burgers, which is now $5 billion. That's a huge increase. High gross margin potential. It actually had pretty good gross margins when it IPO'd. The S1 showed it was at 26%. It's now at negative 2%, which is killing the company. Why? Because it doesn't have a mode. And so everyone comes in with a plant-based burger. So spending on advertising has to increase massively. Production has to spin up. There's a lot of issues you have to solve. And so therefore gross margin goes way down. Is there a daily touch point? Is there a fast cash flow? Yeah, it's a daily habit, buying a burger, eating a burger. It's a daily thing for many, many Americans. The operating leverage and operating efficiency for the reason that I just talked about is now staggering negative 82% operating margin. That's tough. It's tough. Yeah. I'm getting the, we should move on. It's five, I said I'd be down to five, 20. Okay, there's a mode built into it. There is a weak mode. And that's been the biggest issue, I think, with Beyond Meat. So getting to the end of this presentation. These are 10 principles. These traits can be used as principles to design and during businesses. And it doesn't mean that you have to have all of them maxed, that's the wrong takeaway. There's a shape to these, if you think of it as a graphic equalizer, what's the shape at different time points in a company's career or questions later? And one thing to take away, right? 10X products win. If you could do one thing, if you just walk out and remember one thing. 10X product, be unique, differentiated, and win on one dimension that you could own. And so for me, what gets me excited is actually this idea that using these common traits, using all those technologies I talked about, and shared, this incredible diversity of innovation that's happening right now can truly create a utopian idea of what a future is. Which is better products that don't take from our future. So, Tom's suggestion. Here's some future work that we can do to think about how to push on some of these ideas. Is there a quarterback ranking? Like where you could just boil this down into a score for a company? Is there a universal law or metric that can explain how climate tech adoption curves are happening? These KPIs, can we make them quantitative? What are the relative weights? And what are new models for financing? I think that's an important one. There's different ways of getting to market and not all of them need venture capital or should have venture capital. Not all of them can create venture returns, but they're companies that need to exist. So, thank you for listening. I really appreciate it. I want to say a special appreciation to Naveen Chala from Mayfield, Poe Brantz from Indian Divyao, and Jocelyn Kinsey from DFJ Growth who all helped me revise and refine this presentation for you all today. So thank you very much. We have time for just a few quick questions here. Students first and student questions. Actually, I figured out what your volume three it's going to be. It's going to be the screenplay for Aventura 3. What do you think? Sounds good. Thank you guys. Questions, let's go over there. Burris. You're good. You're good. Burris, thank you so much for coming and speaking. This was very interesting. And I think it's a really interesting lens to look at venture capsules and through climate change. And I guess I wanted to ask, what was kind of the background, be it through education or internet experience or industry work that kind of led you to this English area? Yeah, it's a great question. So I studied molecular cell biology and genetic, with an emphasis in genetic engineering at UC Santa Barbara. I then went into finance, as one does, as an options market maker on the Pico's Exchange. And from there I learned that making money without creating value wasn't something I wanted to do. So I went to figure out what it is that would be something that I can do to create value. And that's how I found design. And really for 10 years at IDO, what I did was building businesses through product. And I was constantly looking for the constraints that lead to great products and great businesses because of that. And that led me to understand that the problems of climate lead to great constraints and ones that we haven't considered. And when we consider those constraints, we can build better businesses. And that's what led to this talk. Arvin, great talk, really enjoyed it. And I wanted to get your take on things from your top 10, if you could just flip through real quickly and tell me which ones you think are non-negotiable. As you said, we can't have all of them, but which two or three do you think you really have to have? Yeah, that's a great question. Thank you for asking that. Let me see if I can find it. Let's see, I should have had a summary slide. Yeah, they're kind of like versions of them. The 10x product is really the non-negotiable because unless you can do that, you don't have a path to change. That is the path to change. And so it's iterating on that until you find what is the 10x for it. It doesn't matter if it's a smaller market. If that's a natural thing when you're finding real 10x products, your market size naturally gets smaller because there's fewer people that are willing to pay even more. A good question to always ask yourself of startups often is when I meet them is what would it take for a customer to pay double what your offer, what your price is today? Is there a customer that would pay double? Because now you found your actual price, right? So I would say that's the number one thing, non-negotiable. And then because everything flows from there. Thank you so much for the talk. So you mentioned the 10x is kind of like the non-negotiable. And you said beyond meat, it's kind of like non-differentiable anymore because of these other meat companies. But why is Tesla still differentiable compared with other electric car companies? They all are quick and they all got these fancy screens. That's right. That's a great question. They have two things that are really going for it. Well, one, they could stay in business because they make money from selling cars. So don't underestimate the fact that making money is important in the long run. Two, and that's because of the, like I mentioned, the gigapres and innovating in the assembly line and taking out SG&A costs like advertising and all of this overhead, distributing directly through apps. There's a lot of things they're doing from a business perspective that allows them to make more money than others. Then, and the most important one I think is the switching cost of the supercharger network. Leaving the supercharger network is really hard once you're used to it. And so I think that's what is creating a differentiated product. The rest of those features, you're right. Everyone's like, oh man, people really want an electric car because of those features. So they go after those features, but they realize that that's not the long-term competitive advantage of Tesla. Great, I think we're just about out of time. So Arvin, thanks again for a truly inspiring talk. Well, thank you guys. Hope you liked it. I'd love some feedback.


As it is just about time and this is a much longer deck than I anticipated. I'm just going to dig right into it Hello My name is Bob Killen. I am known as mr. Bobby tables across all the things I am currently a OSS programming manager at Google's Ospo I come from an academic background where I was there honestly far too long but for this I am currently a member of the community steering and former chair of kermase sig contributor experience and For all this though, probably the more relevant thing is like I have been a you know an end user consumer I've been a hobby contributor I've been a maintainer and now a corporate contributor and I feel like on the stamp card of roles in open source The only thing I'm missing is like being in a VC startup Which I don't necessarily want but I bring this up Because I have spent a lot of time wearing these different hats and have had to justify my own involvement or Especially as you know a steering committee member in contrabix help others justify theirs sorry it has given me a Better understanding of the various like issues and various dynamics at play and sort of the ecosystem how all these things come together and More importantly how we surface value Now I generally like to say value over business value because there is so much sort of like say Unrealized potential in products that just exists already It's just not being surface. Well but You know as we can sort of see here most of the contributor base at least within the CNCF is Contributing on behalf of an organization I It might not necessarily be the case like they might my policy where they have to you know do stuff with their work email But in general it that is sort of the case also I'm sorry for the green with the VMware thing that was auto chosen color by Google slides I tried to make it clear Anyway, the interesting thing about this distribution is that it surprisingly carries over to the maintainers to I honestly wasn't expecting this for like the CNCF contributions To be so close to the percentage of maintainers. They're both roughly 95 percent and This trend also extends beyond the CNCF a bit to general open source these days in a 2023 study asking what brings people to open source 52% Contributed in both work and personal time 30 percent contributed in professional time only and Only 18% contributed in personal time only. I know it's not a perfect representation of The you know doing it for work doing it for personal balance, but it's still you know a pretty good decent that like approximate Still it means you know 82% of contributions are doing at least some contributions as On behalf of their employer So the TLDR and all this is so most Contributors are contributing on behalf of their organization And while this is anecdotal. I know there are studies out there that have backed this up Don I should have asked you for them Most contributors like contributing to OSS and which they could just you know spend more time doing it and Ideally that means they're also getting paid to do it. It doesn't necessarily mean Being a full-time maintainer, but at least getting some time and recognition for their work in open source You know, we we also know That the businesses behind these projects, you know for them to succeed We want them to succeed so they can continue to pay Maintainers and ideally hire more The hard part and all this is giving the business justification for it So trying to explain business value can Feel like trying to connect a bunch of random dots together and lots of fuzzy, you know connections and correlations and the people listening to you, you know, honestly might think you're a bit crazy Most of what we know is how to convey is like the general benefits Like influence, you know reduction of risk You know the other benefits like retaining and attracting talent But that is not what most of businesses employers are looking for They are looking, you know, how it works to support the business and the business's goals They're a little more okay with letting people do OSS and you know have those fuzzy connections To value when times are good, but times like now Where people are having to reprioritize and with cuts being made open source will be one of the first things to go unless you can actually convey how it supports the business and I'm going to tie like the upstream work to value and for this there's really like Two standout areas that can kind of help those are data enablement and communication It could be, you know presentation and just sort of more so how we actually convey the information But anyway, let's get on with the data enablement so The big problem is insufficient data in all of this and I can I you know, I know some people might grow in at this But seriously, have you ever been pressed to give like more information about a project and You start looking at it and find it's friggin impossible to do without like a lot of manual collating of data I've been through a lot of these, you know fire drills where it's like we're presenting the leadership tomorrow Get us the data and you know if the project hasn't been Dilligent with their triage their labels and milestones that request Can go from, you know a couple of hours of work to I'm brewing multiple pots of coffee and pulling an all-nighter in the state That state of you know insufficient data is sadly much more common than you would think So I looked at 12 cncf projects at random. I literally random number generator And chose four projects from each tier and frankly it wasn't great Six actually labeled their issues consistently only two labeled their PRs and only seven used milestones By the way when I say it labeled here I'm talking like even basic labels like bug and feature or enhancement, you know And I I made sure to ignore things like depend a bot and all that And things that you know would auto merge You know what makes this even worse is I originally was only doing three projects from each tier But literally didn't have any projects in the first nine that labeled their PRs I'm sorry if my frustration is coming through a bit, but seriously like it's hard to produce data in this kind of state like It's maddening trying to go through like PR PR PR PR by PR issue by issue trying to get an idea of what it actually is and These kind of labels these things It's a big portion of the stuff that's being used by businesses to justify investing in a project And you know ideally giving their employees more time to work in it and more time for them to be maintainers I did jump like on a little bit on like labels and milestones without explaining why But I want to sort of like set the stage a bit before you know really you know exploring them Truly though, I can't emphasize this enough Consistent and descriptive labels provide context right off the bat They help you prioritize and for you know this discussion really help you track trends that are important to you and your organization Fundamentally, they will help you answer questions and express change And with that, let's actually take a look at a couple examples really quick So with labels, you know we can ask how many bugs were in the Kubernetes 1.30 release boom simple query Is PR has a label kind bug and is in the milestone 1.30 get up returns a quick You know answer of 180 another example how are we progressing on cleaning up tech debt in sig node and add the label sig node and kind cleanup for labels and 71 right there Now imagine trying to cross a whole bunch of things and trying to figure out manually this these things gives us things that we can track and Tracking is how we can show impact In this question has you know Kubernetes stability improved over the past six releases or two years I ran the query for each version On here to get you know the number of you know bug PRs You know let's say you know whoever Google whoever made a strong push to pay down bugs After the rise in the you know 1.27 release. Well The line going down is a nicely. We can actually show that they have made an impact and have paid things down To continue with this like what if you if you want to specifically like target regressions easy enough add a label or Bugs for the API server at a label Well, let's say you're you know working on the team that owns cube proxy boom easy at a label I'm sure you're getting tired of hearing this, but you have a metric you can use and show change and show impact When you've heard me talk about the label first all able but So now if you can really imagine doing all that work crawling, you know Thousands of issues and thousands of PRs trying to do all that without labels and having to actually look at those things No, just no In general you won't and you have to fall back to overall, you know number like a PR is velocity But the thing is like that information is so much less meaningful when trying to show you know change in specific areas Change when you've made specific investments or initiatives in an area And you can combine, you know all the label filters with you know say author to get things you have you know personally done for you To show your work or if like you have a small enough team You can actually combine, you know multiple authors in there and show the work done by the team and show it over time And that is incredibly helpful The next thing You've already seen me use them, but really that's milestones Sorry, I don't want to spend too much time on milestones But I do want to highlight it You know essentially they're a logical grouping of issues and PRs When doing milestones Say by release, it's incredibly easy to you know quickly query the items that have gone into it You can sort of you know You can potentially replace that with date range In a github query But you're going to get everything and usually there's going to be multiple issues and PRs That are going to be targeting different releases or branches or whatever and it's it's not going to give you you know Accurate data you get everything So generally as you might guess I'm I'm a pretty big fan of milestones So part of this is you know, it begs the question if labels and milestones are so useful Why don't more projects use them? It's largely triage issues And a lot of projects They just don't do it or they don't do it consistently that they'll do it for a little bit And then someone might get busy and you have this big stream of stuff that comes in and it doesn't get triaged But really like I've spoken to a bunch of different people about why it must have it boiled down to like a few things First in like ye olde github days They did not have a role for triage to add labels and milestones the person had to be granted right access to a repo and You want to be very restrictive with that So kind of understand why it you know, they just didn't know didn't progress The next one I think is an issue with sort of like understanding how they can actually be used You know, some of the maintainers They don't think this stuff actually matters If they have a you know perception that no one uses them They aren't useful and just take you know more work for them to manage why bother You know, even if adding a label or milestone takes a few seconds tops It can just feel completely unnecessary and a lot of work when you're burned out Like I know we've all been there at one point in our lives like where something stupid and trivial is You know would actually be helpful to you But first for some reason it is a mountain of work for you to actually get yourself to do it and That is that is a problem But the last one is you know They thought their project was small them the maintainers of it were you know, they all had enough context and You know that can work But what happens when they start to grow? And they start to actually need this stuff. Well a lot of those old patterns of not Labeling or milestoneing anything just carry over and it it becomes harder And they get in the state of like why isn't anyone helping? Why isn't anyone seeing this stuff? Well, it's hard to actually surface that information Now all this said there are some tools that can actually help make things easier Get up actions has created a nice like ecosystem of things that can you know, you can reuse I have on here Three actions that can help with labeling Copy issue labels syncs issue labels to PRs following like if someone says like fixed issue, whatever It will copy the labels from the issue over to the PR You can also adjust keywords that way. It doesn't actually follow closed ones Or you know fixed fixes some of those and uses your own keyword You can sort of customize your own pull request labor alert that labor will automatically apply labels based on glob patterns Say you're working out on a project with like different languages and you have different people triaging those You can have it label things like dot py with python or you know dot go it go Or you know sub directories Label sinker is just a nice little thing. They kind of copied the what Kubernetes uses for Keeping track of all its labels over the place like copy At least the the style format of them, but it allows you to consistently have the same labels across like all your repos and The last one on here is you know add to get a projects Talking about projects a little bit more later. It is very flexible. It can help you create and manage multiple boards for your own like triage purposes and We'll yeah, we'll explore those a little bit more in a bit. I definitely remind checking it out though The the next thing for those of you that aren't familiar prow is the CI system for Kubernetes It's also pretty much 100% label driven in one thing like any project that I found randomly That was using prow they were labeling everything correctly. So it's just sort of like that pattern carried over There's also a prow GitHub action that Basically copies a mimics a subset of the prow commands without having to actually run an instance of prow so You can use you know the milestones little milestones stuff and labels for things It can also use a proven LGTM to so he forces people to have to reviews before it merges Oh Pretty useful stuff Now one other point on here that I don't have a slide for but I want to mention is Triage is an excellent thing to actually like recruit people with a good knowledge of the project But you know might not have much coding skills To help with they're usually have enough knowledge to be able to go through things and you know figure out like is this And what the root cause of the problem is at least get it to the right team Think like you know sys admins, it's it's also like it's a very good Non-code type role that you can use to recruit people and if you do recruit some Make sure that they actually feel recognized as a member of the project is this There's a lot of people that don't think that this kind of work is you know necessarily important But frankly getting this stuff labeled is the way you get to justify your job And you continue to work on a project. So like to me that's pretty important now the Problem for most of this especially for corporate maintainers is why bother They don't get recognition for their work management doesn't understand. They're told You know to spend less time on the project, but still deliver features Why should they bother? Why should they triage and the problem is that this can help them explain or justify their work And get that recognition You know, I understand why they don't they've lost sight of the fact that you know certain groups in their org want this kind of info and The thing is is like the people that want that kind of info are usually the ones that can make resource adjustments They're the ones that can help with headcount or allocate more time and If you're you know presenting the leadership that you're you know various things like your time to resolve bugs is going Say up along with the bug count and it's taking longer to deliver your features Especially it's like, you know critical to your software stack you start to you know increase the risk and you have you know Potential justification for more time and or more people to help work on the project especially again, especially if it's critical to your infrastructure Let's see the other thing with all this especially if they're giving you more time or assigning more people They want to know that those extra resources Were actually helpful Impactful they want to know in six months that the bug count is going down or the state of the feature has gone from you know Red to green you need some way of showing that information and just telling them that like yep It's good now or you know, we need more resources Isn't going to cut it. You have to give them data and this can give you some nice raw data to back up Okay, I've I've ranted about labels enough Let's dig into the second part of all this and that is communication Matrix is great. I can give you some solid numbers to back up your org's investment But your impact will likely go unrecognized if you don't provide some context and Communicate it in the right way to the right audience So explaining things explaining things in a way that they care about So to sort of like get this section started off I kind of want to go over a few of the players or you know personas that we kind of see in all this You know, we have our Open source enthusiast They're the ones who know how to navigate the you know ecosystem. They could be a contributor. They could be a sysadmin the developer They could be doing it for work or hobby purposes they're you know, happy to talk shop and get into technical discussions about stuff and Honestly, probably a large portion of us here today are probably fall into this category Then we have our maintainer They're like the OSS enthusiast They could be doing this as part of a job or hobby But a good chunk of them are tired under pressure to deliver Some will spend, you know all hours of the day working on the project because they care about them and most of them in my experience I Don't want to sound bad, but like aren't too keen on the whole project management type work They like coding and doing more of that, you know deep technical work Okay so Next Next we have our other sort of four big players you know Leadership the VPs, SVPs, see whatever They're concerned with resources and the overall health of the company Or you know greater org They care about the health of the business. They're looking for opportunities and risks And they are looking for return on investment and they're also the least technical We also have product managers who you know prioritize making the best product They're skilled at conveying technical details in user-friendly fashions But and they desire, you know customer user feedback But tend to be like a lot of them don't know open source very well However, I will say there has been some amazing open source PMs that I've been lucky to know Next we have our managers and leans who are you know concerned about their employees and meeting, you know, their okay ours Better understanding they have a better understanding of tech than like leadership But they have you know good idea the teams and prioritizing, you know a smaller set of objectives, sorry Then we have our end users and you know, they are Prior prioritizing how tools features things like that work for them, you know, what what can they use in their environment? There's a diverse of technical skills, but still, you know, we're we're we're all at a point in our lives where we Where a lot of things are going for our attention So you you you really need to if you want to like attract users or reach them Well to you know talk about things in a very clear concise manner Tldr everything The big thing with like all of this and going forward is if it takes like unnecessary cognitive overhead to actually like Understand the basic terms of what a project does Find your roadmap Or like, you know, look at the various like initiatives you're working on and know what Parts of the project the features and initiatives are at risk You are losing out Significantly you are losing potential users future contributors and you are making it more difficult for yourself To justify further investment of resources So I want to talk I want to go over a few examples of this kind of language stuff that I'm talking about So please raise your hand if you understand what this is about I'll give another minute exactly This was the user-friendly version by the way and then the description of this feature But you know, who would understand that enough on first reading to know, you know, you To try it out and provide feedback now try giving that description to like, you know your VP That's you know, not gonna go over very well So this is the final person actually made it on the public website and You know actually who has a better idea of what this does now, please raise your hand Yeah significantly better So This this is honestly actually where you know pms can be very helpful in trying to break down the technical version of That mess and get it into a more user-friendly fashion The other thing is like with all this it's yeah Part of the way to like encourage pms to work on this stuff is like getting feedback in the OSS version is earlier than you know trying to get in the you know product that you're delivering So there's a chance to actually get things better done the line So let's look at the next example so I'm not going to bother asking people to raise your hand on this one, but You get the idea again. This is the user-friendly version And this is the version that I wrote after after reading this These are both from kubernetes. I don't want to throw shade towards you know other projects But when showing these examples, I can promise you it's it's not an uncommon thing I saw examples like this in every project I looked at So A lot of stuff is actually you know really targeted towards other maintainers and other technical people but The problem is is these people also desire feedback from users also if early on of early on in all this You know when you know features are alpha when they think they can actually make changes I'm sorry, but very few users are ever going to provide feedback if you're giving them these kinds of descriptions Another thing is like if you're having to report On the status of this thing internally to say multiple groups Which is going to be easier to understand by that larger group of people Okay. Yeah, now it's the other thing is like it's not just how we say this stuff But also how we surface this information So in including the you know projects I like randomly selected I did look at others and only a tiny handful of them had like easily discoverable information about What the project was working on things like design proposals or even you know feature tag issues Like there's some blog posts and links There were a few roadmaps that I found but like it if it takes me more than 15 minutes of digging and me being an experienced Person in all this that's a problem so This isn't just a like user problem But if I or a p.m.  I there are some options to you know make this better like Publishing a release report with a bunch of information or an annual report But let me actually tell you about my favorite thing that I've really come to know and love. That's github project boards Thanks. Kubernetes Enhancements board. I I really like the new github project boards for surfacing information in friendly flexible ways because Also like these days, I never look at the Kanban version. I only ever look at the table version They're very easy to automate and can have you know selective Field population based off, you know label or milestone You can have different views of the data to cater to like different groups in your project for you know general consumption and You know the the most important thing to like p.m.'s managers, whoever is it's actually exportable to TSV And it's very easy than to import into Into like essentially like Excel or sheets. Okay. I need to speed this along I'm sorry So You can also use them at like as a roadmap to get like a general status update. I just use this as an example It's very easy. So like you can have a published view parse a field in your issue template and Populate that that description with that, you know, actually user-friendly version that I showed and Being able to put all this information in one place in a very consumable way It's very Very like I don't want to say impactful, but like it's very useful You can give users access to it. It's one roadmap And like just being able to import it. You can relate it to like internal initiatives really easily Honestly, it's really nice I Do want to cover about talking to leadership a little bit, but I think most of this will actually be covered in the Examples that I'm gonna cover here in a sec and I want to talk about those so I'm going to fast-forward through this slide I'm sorry. Oh my notes are in here. I will show that after the class Same thing with this. Okay. So now the fun part These are a couple stories based on true events These are based off discussions that I've had. I fudge some of the numbers a little bit But to keep just to keep it like generally anonymous, but they're close enough and the actual outcomes are real So let's talk about the trouble to end user I Was connected with a end user company that was contributing to several open-source projects. They were even maintainers of a hue But they were you know getting significant pressure from above them to basically cut back and drop Either drop their contributions fully or cut back Significantly because they couldn't show the impact of their work So I had a long talk with them I asked them, you know, what they had done previously and what they reported a leadership They list out, you know, what they used what they contributed to they pulled some stuff from like dev stats like Their presence their contributions things like that. They also, you know included a list of you know The features and things that they were driving upstream and using But they were not giving leadership what they actually wanted This is a trap I see people fall into often they can you know give them, you know Information that's easily to get like from dev stats, which is generally great and easy to for us to like produce But they didn't think about what the driving motivator was behind this and didn't think about what you know Didn't think they could gather the kind of information that leadership actually wanted So we went back and talked about like risks and opportunities We need to think about stuff from leadership's point of view They need to provide them With how is the project benefiting the company? Is it critical to their stack? What is the risk if the project goes? You know un-maintained What is the company getting from its people being maintainers? How much time are they actually investing in these projects and that is the kind of information that You know leadership wants they they don't necessarily care too much about the technical details They want to know like sweet hours and things like that So this is the stats from one of the projects they weren't maintaining I like bug fixes a lot because it relates to overall stability and something like everyone understands So in the previous year there were 55 total bugs 11 of them were submitted by this team only six of the 11 were fixed by people of the same team and The mean time for those fixes to be reviewed and merged was three days Which was actually much shorter than the time was to get things merged internally and like that's pretty freaking fast especially Yep with almost half the bugs that aren't actually getting fixed by you So we knew leadership was concerned with sweet time so I asked them seriously how much time do they spend on the project In a given month it turns out actually wasn't a lot about 10% the reason for this is like a lot of Small amounts where like they might have like one part where they're doing four to an eight-hour block So essentially for you know the cost of half a sweep They got the features. They wanted delivered. They had they had their bugs fixed and They did this like that This is the kind of thing that they you know really really liked and they did this kind of You know analysis for a bunch of their projects In the end they gave leadership big spreadsheet. They included, you know, critical criticality They had their sues estimate time per project and you know, it's not great, but they tried Leadership really liked it and from their view in Investing in overall small amount of yearly sweet time was ensuring the service stayed up and stable Bugs could be fixed quickly and honestly from the bugs fixed features delivered and looking at overall activity versus their investment It was a very good ROI, which is what they want And it's that kind of messaging that has landed with leadership Every time I have been in one of these engagements where I've talked to a group and tried to help them go through this kind of problem We are very much out of time so I'm just going to Like jump over this really quick. There was a struggling maintainer. They were the only one left They never surfaced the problem helped them surface that problem to You know a lot put issue template PR template Actually went out and talked to like their boss and other companies that had an investment We're able to get those other companies to you know help Sorry invest people time into it because We were able to get the maintainer block time to Actually, you know mentor these people into becoming new maintainers and one of the the great outcomes in all this is that Once the the maintainers company understood the risk and then they had a single point of failure They actually put another person in this whole mentoring cohort thing So they actually like it was enough of a motivator for them to add another person and and like again De-risk their own usage by getting rid of a single point of failure as well as you know bootstrapping a bunch of other people so This is really only the tip of the iceberg There's a lot more to thinking about the you know business value of open source and how to justify these things Like I haven't touched on KTLO keep the lights on fitting overall project health into this Justifying improvements to documentation other non-code work, but it's a start again. I've had to cram this into 35 minutes I'm already going over time. I'm sorry But you know we can encourage more users and larger diverse pool pools of Contributors if we can surface the innate value that already exists in these projects We can help organizations understand the impact of their contributions impact of their investments by being able to convey Explain the impact of these investments. It creates The business justification to contribute to hire contributors to grow more maintainers and create more sustainable ecosystems Okay, thank you for listening be like ramble on for 30 minutes If you'd like to chat I can be reached by Yep reach my email LinkedIn, whatever Also, they happy to chat after this Last thing and you know metrics related if you could Please leave feedback. I've spoken to a lot of people about this topic. This is actually the first time I put a deck together I already know I kind of need to cut this down to fit it into this time slot To be a bit more effective, but yeah, please let me know if there's anything you think I could do better. Thanks


President of the Senate Ahmed Lawan says the leadership of the National Assembly will not succumb to blackmail over the Electoral Act Amendment Bill 2021, presently before both chambers. Lawan attributed the falsehood peddled in accusations fingering the leadership of the National Assembly of manipulating the contents of the bill as the work of mischief makers bent on blackmailing their leadership. The report of the Electoral Act Amendment Bill 2021 was laid by the chairman of the Committee on Independent National Electoral Commission, Ainek Sen. Kabyrugeya. Lawan said there are various accusations and insinuations that the leadership of the Senate have tampered with the report of the Committee on Ainek of both chambers. The Senate present therefore advised Nigerians to lobby lawmakers on any aspect of the bill they feel strongly about. Mr. President, I would like to move that the Senate do receive the report of Independent National Electoral Commission, Ainek, on the Electoral Act Amendment Bill 2021, SB 122. I so move, Mr. President. There are various accusations, insinuations that the leadership of the Senate, sometimes leadership of the National Assembly are tampered with the report of the Committee on Ainek of both chambers. Some of those accusing the leadership of the National Assembly are misinformed, innocent. Some are simply mischievous and rubber rousers. This is the first time this report is laid here and this report of the Committee. This is the decision of the Committee on Ainek and therefore whatever will be discussed or considered about the Electoral Act Amendment Bill will be on the basis of what has been presented to the Senate here. If anybody feels very strongly about anything, lobby the single senators to converse for your position rather than blackmail leadership because my telephone line and that of the Honourable Speaker were published in one day I received over 900 SMS messages saying we have manipulated this. We didn't. We will do what is right. We have our procedures and lobbying is part of democracy. NEWS OPDATES