Hi, welcome everybody. I'm talking about the state of and power VC or as it's generally marketing known as these days, power on Fedora. They're the two main architectures or groups of architectures really that as my role in release engineering I'm responsible for. I also get to do bits on S390 and the MIPS guys and I'm not sure whether they're here. Excellent. I'll speak to you later. But yeah, so the vast majority of my time of my day-to-day is spent on arm of power. So that's primarily what I'm going to cover today because that's what my head is primarily filled with. So I'm going to start with called toolchain and toolchain features and functionality. In all of these cases, in the case of both arm and power, across, well, I suppose I should say, arm covers, arm V7, A32 bit arm that we support, plus AR64 or arm V8 architecture and the power side of things supports power PC64 bit in both little and big Indian modes. So that is primarily what I'll be covering on. In terms of the core toolchain, PCC, GLC, the new tools and friends, we're primarily feature complete and identical in terms of core functionality with X8664. There's a few bits and pieces here and there that are a little bit behind power PC, for example, doesn't have full set support as yet, but that's been worked on and should hopefully land shortly. But generally speaking, on a day-to-day functional level, there's a very little difference between all the architectures and as a core toolchain used to build the distro should be, it's relatively boring. But then you start to get into more of the fun, interesting toolchains that while aren't used to build the core distribution, are starting to become dependencies for core functionality such as Docker, containers, various other bits and pieces that while we don't strictly need them, there's a lot of interest in them and a lot of use cases for them. Go-Lang both runs on RV7, runs just fine on R64 and power PC64. The support has mostly landed upstream with the Go-Lang 1.5 release. So we're starting to deal with bootstraps and various other issues. So hopefully by the time F23 goes GA, we should have most of that stuff in place. Of course there's also GCCGo, which worked actually fairly well and is mostly feature-complete or has feature parity with Go-Lang, although we're still sort of, still work how to deal with different toolchains to achieve the same goal in Fedora in general. The support there is still a bit more up in the air. Feel free to interrupt and ask questions if anyone has any specifics on the way through. Getting to the various different additions that we now have in primary, I'll cover over server cloud and workstation. The server addition is basically the same. There's a few minor functional differences in the way things are being produced at the moment. We're working to ensure parity across all of that. On the power side of things, it's 100% there, as you would expect. AR64 is pretty much 100% there. It's relatively boring, very stable and generally just works. We're enabling more and more features and functionality along the lines of Docker and containers and roll-kit and testing and integrating. But for all intents and purposes, the vast majority of the server addition across all the ARM and Power architectures is complete in that. Cloud addition, on the power side of things, released the first cloud images as part of Fedora 22. We didn't quite make it there with some bits of functional issues with some of the tools we used to build that on AR64, with some issues surrounding console support, EFI bootloader support. I'll get to more of that later. And a few other bits and pieces around there. But we're getting there. Hopefully in the F23 cycle, we should start to see cloud images or Queen Moon-based images for AR64. There'll be Docker images for both power and AR64 for F23, and then we'll start to build up some of the functionality similar to what primary is getting in terms of layered images and stuff like that. For the ARM stuff, where would you deploy that? In what? Deploy what exactly? With cloud images. So ARM supports hardware virtualization. So there are people that are using, you can write open-stack nodes on AR64 and braver cloud. There's not a lot of public cloud yet to support AR64 architecture. No. That will change in the future, but we'll be ready for that. Yeah, I mean, a lot of images are sold as cloud images. But the base Fedora cloud images are Queen Moon images. You can run them anywhere. You have KBM hardware there. And so, you know, the Fedora cloud Queen Moon-based images, for example, on X86, you can run on your laptop or you can run in open-stack or you can run in over or red or anywhere else that supports KBM book. So just because they're labeled cloud, they're not just Amazon or they're not just open-stack because, I mean, ultimately, depending on the edition of open-stack you're running, obviously, any open-stack instance that's running KBM hypervisors, you can run, you know, X86 Fedora cloud images, but you can also run them on your laptop. So it's, you know, you can have your own private little... So anyone that has AR64 hardware has hardware capabilities there. Anyone that has in-house or local power hardware or, like, PowerA hardware which supports Livevert, KBM and everything else can run the power cloud images. So, yeah, just because it's cloud, it's like, for example, we're not producing EC2 cloud images on either Power or AR64 because EC2 doesn't support it. So it makes no sense to do that. But in the case of, say, these seven Docker images which Dennis produced for F22, there are hosting providers out there now that are doing cheap R&B7 hardware and you can run the Docker images on those. So there is some public R&B7. I'm not sure if any publicly announced R&B8 or Power public cloud instances, but, you know, there's a lot of companies that are using it for other things internally on private clouds or just standard virtualization. Workstation Edition, I'm told on Power it actually works. I'm not aware of anyone that is actually using it in production because there's not really currently any power-based workstation-style things where you would use it on a day-to-day. It does work. It's all built. Not widely tested. Similarly with AR64, it works. There's a few people around that have managed to find ancient graphics cards that will run on the PCIe buses and it works fine. You know, in the coming year or so and Mr. Masters wandered in and then wandered straight back out again. But, you know, there's going to be a lot more lower-end style deadboards and things like that coming out where workstation will make more sense. So it all works. It's there. We're not actually producing workstation images just simply because at the moment there's no real demand for it because there's not really the publicly accessible hardware to do so. And a few people on the power side that have shown interest in running the desktop edition on power have done it with custom install anyway. So it's there. It works. It's improving. There may be, I hope in the case of AR64 in the next year, some decent, cheap, readily available desktop laptop style hardware which will make it worthwhile starting to produce said images. That's what you said last year. Of course! It's probably what I'll say next year as well. And it's being recorded so you can quote it back at me. Which is why I said hopefully. It seems like we had some kind of a bet on when that first hardware was going to be available for other developers. We all lost that bet. I never was involved in that because I was always skeptical. I mean there are, like with the high-key board or the 96 boards with consumer edition in particular the Qualcomm board the up-strain developer that's been developing that open source has AR64 running, like Fedora, 64 running on it, running full-none chip and fully accelerated and everything. So it can be done. And there is, like that, the Qualcomm stuff is available. The boot loader is truly terrible but that's no different to any of the other Qualcomm dev boards that have been out. And hopefully that means the 96 board enterprise edition with the AMD Seattle weather has been announced should hopefully be out before the end of the year. I was told, I think, of Toyota? Yeah. So you... Yeah. You're going to harm that. 64 bit. 64 bit. And from the AMD 7 point of view the Nvidia Tegra stuff is now almost up-strain completely. The user space is all there. The firmware, surprisingly, is actually up-strain. And the final bits of the kernel are scheduled for 4.3. And so that will give us finally gain and Ian, I did say that last year and the year before on the AMD 7 stuff it was a nice fully accelerated 32 bit solution. So I was thinking about bringing the board with me and trying to do the presentation on it but given that I actually did most of this presentation after I arrived I didn't think it was necessarily the best thing to do. The rest of the general user space well there's 18,000 large source packages in Fedora in general. The vast majority of the user space is there. There's a number of corner cases on ARM64 and Power. ARM64 doesn't have mono with the Rebase to mono all the power have mono now. But in good shape as people are starting to use Fedora on both ARM and Power we're seeing more and more optimisation bugs a few runtime bugs a few assumptions made by different projects about bits and pieces but I think that's really good because it shows people are actually using things and testing use cases and generally trying to do day-to-day work with it and finding these bugs in the morning which is good because it's really relatively straightforward to compile those 18,000 source packages onto different architectures and go yay we have all the 250 packages built but it's not until people start to use them that you start to see bugs about the usability of them and if you're starting to get bugs it means people are using it which is awesome. Kernel on the power side of things very boring there's some interesting features that have been coming along there with regards to some of the advanced power hardware the best way to find out about those features and functionality is OpenPower.org website there's a few issues there we've seen with feature enablement in 4.2 which meant we had to disable a few things like transactional memory and bits and pieces like that by the time f23 comes out they should be enabled and back and there on 64 side of stuff with the 4.0 kernel that f22 ships with we had enough upstream that we managed to drop the big 64 kernel patch which at one point was around 100,000 lines of code that we were patching into the Fedora kernel now the only patch for ARM that we carry is for an out of tree pre-production hardware that will never go upstream because that hardware revision will never be generally available so we carried at the moment to make it easier for people with that hardware to test and consume but that is literally at the moment the only patch we contain with the 4.0 kernel or upstream landed the massive big ACPI patch it's not enabled by default because on the Mustang board in particular it will take you back to a feature set about the equivalent of 3.17 with device tree where you get a single neck and a set of port and a serial console and that's about it there's a huge raft of ACPI based enablement hardware enablement patches that are on their way into 4.3 and so I think this 4.3 maybe 4.4 ACPI should be functionally equivalent to device tree but that's that's been relatively amazing and the ability to be able to use a pure upstream kernel that made my life and a bunch of other kernel people's lives much easier and much less stressful when patches don't rebase and we have to run around and get that fixed because it generally will interrupt x86 and the things that other people need to do to develop the distro so I mean that to me was a big step in the evolution of AR64 in Fedora or in my opinion general as a platform to show that it is coming of age so to speak in that we don't need to carry a whole bunch of non upstream packages bootloaders I mentioned before that I would touch on this again obviously in the 64 space where purely at least at the moment UEFI based one of the issues with regards to this and cloud images is that we don't actually have the ability to redistribute a completely open UEFI bootloader hopefully soon John I see you're reading up the back would you have a comment to make on the state of that so the issue as I understand it without going to the government is can build the stupid UEFI just now to be the problem of the licensing it's the big fat driver licensing in particular which makes it currently unpalatable to Fedora it's been worked on and there is yeah what you said I've had that for two years I recently I think you just did through somebody else yeah from an AR64 point of view and virtualisation when that happens it will make the bootloader and cloud side things much easier for us to deal with can we take this so that's AR64 on power users I don't know if you understand but it's oval which is anyway it's completely open standardised bootloader very similar to the and that's used both in the virtualisation use case and on the as part of the open power consortium the open power hardware also uses that same bootloader that's all packaged up and chips and just works with Fedora VRT which is great on v7 obviously we have Uboot that's evolving actually quite nicely and we have 130 on board so last time I looked we should be able to boot using a standard distro boot procedure using xdlinux comp to give us standard upgrade paths single kernel so it's still evolving, it's still being polished we have a few minor issues there around setting up consoles and stuff like that but generally on the vast majority of the platforms with the actual devices that we currently support all of that is there most of it's upstream I think we carry four or five patches in total for that that they're working with the upstream maintenance to polish up and get upstream but again it's obviously not quite as neat as we would like but a number of the vendors have picked that up now are using the upstream distro so any of it and video stuff you can literally just plug in a Fedora card and it will just boot which is kind of nifty and it's taken us a long time to get to that from the F13 release with Seneca F14 where we had multiple kernels and cobbled together Uboots from God knows where similarly the Anaconda installed a number of people have asked me when will ARM V7 support Anaconda installed well it does and it has done for some time you can pixie boot I mean ARM doesn't tend to have the traditional x86 put in a DVD style install but you can pixie boot from Uboot and do a complete interactive Anaconda install exactly as you would or you can use a Kickstarter install exactly as you would on x86 and the same is case the same is the case on ARM 64 bit and the same on all of the power platform so while the lack of optical media and bits and pieces like that are somewhat different ways of consuming Anaconda than people are traditionally known to use on x86 the mechanism is generally the same and works correct me if I'm wrong but on 32 bit ARM interactive install generally speaking it won't boot when it's done depends on the system that you have no does Anaconda have code to detect or to ask you which SPC you're on and then do them I don't want to derail you it will detect yes if you install to a system at least at the moment if your system the petition that you're installing is not the petition that you can not want to boot from so if your U-boot is on flash or if your U-boot is on an SPC and you're installing on to a side of this you do an install and at the end of your U-boot it's going to reboot if you have to like U-boot into the start of an SPC and you're installed with that SPC today Anaconda whites out and we don't have something that is putting U-boot back in place and so in that case it doesn't reboot so I'll put it into regularity flash in the U-boot and then okay, so you've already set up U-boot to work and that's how you bootstrap Anaconda then it will work there's a number of people that actually put in like a scriptlet in the post-install of a kickstart to do that for them in which case it's automated and you don't need to fath about with other machines if the U-boot is on like a NAND ROM or something like that or the detection is there and it will just boot Any words moving on AR64? Yes, on AR64 with the UEFI of the platforms we've currently tested and support which is Mustang and Seattle but there are other I know people have been testing it on cavium hardware I'm not lucky enough to have a 48-core piece of cavium hardware to play with and test it on but with the standard UEFI where the UEFI on those more expensive boards is on a NAND ROM it will work with traditional legacy whatever you want to call it spin media and questions? Can you go about uniting the various cookies into one cookie so that the American cookies have all the fun? That's sort of not entirely related to my support of and power hardware it's something that I have been it's something that I would like to do with so to give a brief overview of it the idea is to decouple the primary and secondary architectures from where they reside in what Kogi instance so in the case of i6 like 32-bit Intel or 32-bit X86 they are wanting to demote the cloud image and server image to a secondary architecture but with regards to that how do you then take that 32-bit architecture and then say leave all the spins in place as primary on 32-bit and then put the server and cloud into a different Kogi instance well you don't so the idea is basically we will decouple the Kogi from the secondary and primary and then potentially import all the architectures into a single primary instance of Kogi and so when you build something it spits out all the architectures in a single build at which point the way you compose as a primary or a secondary can be done as a separate feature or it can all be done as a single process of composing the distro server image and then where you then put it on the mirrors determines whether it's primary and secondary or the QA process that goes through this is a primary architecture for the server addition so we're going to QA in this way for all these secondary architectures of the server addition we're going to assume that it's basically working in the same way as it is on primary QA on that so there's a bunch of ideas floating around there's no roadmap as to how that will happen if it will happen and what the final outcome will be but that's some of the ideas that are sort of starting to be discussed and float around I wanted to know if you do do one unified Kogi and then build a build in the secondary architecture I'm sorry if the build fails on A architecture it fails on all but the fact of the matter is and dealing closely with secondary archers every day in most cases it's rarely an architecture problem that bails are built there are a few the big one that comes up on a slightly more regular basis than most is a big Indian issue versus a little Indian issue in the case of the core fedora that is used by everyone every day if a GCC build fails due to an issue on one of those architectures the GCC maintainer is going to have to fix it anyway and when the GCC maintainer pushes GCC build he simultaneously pushes GCC to all the Kogi instances at the same time if a build fails on power on GCC he re-spins that and pushes it to all the architectures anyway so a lot of people are dealing with that sort of stuff already and in the case of dealing with say some graphical package say blender for example I happen to not build on all the architectures but say for example blender goes we don't support power or we don't support S390 well that's already the case and the architecture maintainers have already put in excluded arch S390 excluded arch for all intents and purposes a lot of the process we do already deals with that and there's probably four or five people in red hat that are dealing with Kogi shadow dealing with players from Kogi shadow and stuff like that and it suddenly frees them up from a very tedious, very repetitive and the most problematic part of building the secondary architecture is actually not the building of the packages but issues with the towing and various other bits around the packages which if a single package fails and causes other things to block it ends up costing the maintainer on that package in most cases more time than it would be if it fails across all six architectures at the same time it would probably take the maintainer less time to fix it then and there to build on all architectures than the loops required often to go around and back around and back between the architecture maintainers and the package maintainers to get that fixed which gives the package maintainers instant failure so they know that it's an issue then and there and if it's because some features have been enabled like land like a new major version with a feature that uses say Mongo which we don't currently support on ARC64 they can go give ARCs to disable that feature then and there and deal with it and maybe file a bug what file a bug with the architecture guys so that they can do it and it gives the guys that are doing this repetitive task day to day a whole lot like frees up probably the vast majority of their time and I can pretty much from working on secondary arches now for five years the time that's freed up only a small time of that would then need to be spent assisting other people with those sort of failures to get them fixed quickly so that it doesn't block that functionality does that answer your question John I was thinking about this something with a bunch of sub-appliates where if you have to build this for AC6 but now you have a case where some spin is not actually critically locking and then you think about it some more you think actually going back to the old razor proposal and the minimal OSB and these are talking about actually don't kind of fit in nicely because if we build a very minimal core base not core OSB whatever you want to call the lowest fees actually this fits in very nicely but that's going to be basically according to what's right behind everything and you know it lives in world to today so it's talk of what Red Hat needs from Fedora because Red Hat already supports PowerBegendian, PowerLittleMD and S390, AR64 and that core group in most cases either has a Red Hat maintainer or a co-maintainer or Red Hat actively participating in that maintenance of those packages anyway and so part of their day job is to ensure that it builds across all the architectures that Red Hat cares about so it's part of their day job anyway and it's something they do and I know there's a number of packages not going to mention anything like Java but I have a constant backwards and forwards with the Java maintainers about the architecture and they and it's not their fault at all but you know they'll push a build it will break something in AR64 I go and say hey guys this is broken and then we go backwards and forwards backwards and forwards backwards and forwards it ends up being if they know that they need to deal with all that at the same time it ends up like probably saving the last case we did this and a whole bunch of my time I mean one of the interesting side effects from that they're like open to 80k upstream build and it's like what kind are you using 3.19 well this one's broken in 4.0 even though the actual ABI didn't change because of the big number jump a lot of things broke yes Adam so I guess since it's not a primary architecture yes that happens already now no it doesn't happen right now you can talk about it in a proposal where you all build you should be finding a bug somebody and block the abstract so that someone from the upstream can know about it I agree I'm getting to the point where somebody does it in a free time for AR64 they say are you here for 0 and just coming out and move on at what point does that become a point of retention the thing is that already happens now and it is already at times a bone of contention as it is so in terms of increasing or decreasing that bone of contention I don't think it will change the status at all so it all just increases the visibility of the problem so I mean it enables a lot of I have people like multiple times a week saying to me why isn't AR64 server edition primary and it's like well because and like because why it's like because in the current state of promoting an architecture we have to do server we have to do if you go to that it's an all or nothing thing and at the moment it makes no sense to promote say cloud on AR64 to a primary architecture or even like say on like cloud on power cloud on power on AR are a primary architecture and make it blocking because there's not a lot of people using it and so it's the sort of thing that would be remained vertically and secondary but server on AR64 is something I've asked about multiple times a week so the ability to say server on AR64 is ready for primary let's promote it and all it is it's flipping of some bits rather than a huge massive amount of work and everything else it's similar to like the demotion of I686 on server which has been discussed on the mailing list at the moment it's just like you know we're not producing the bits anymore where if we have the ability to say demote that and then there's this massive outlaw in the community that use it on a day to day basis that don't follow the list closely and probably actually they test something until it goes GA we can go oops sorry we fucked that up and quickly re-promote it in the next cycle or something like that without major amounts of work required by a small amount of people as is currently the case of demote or promote an architecture yeah yeah so at the moment where demote I mean in the case of I686 we're sort of already implementing this policy because with the demotion of I686 some subsets of I686 to secondary they're not getting whole bottles evicted from Koji and expected to go and say up another another whole set of Koji instances and build a whole bunch of community around that and everything they're not getting demotives like if our image just went away we don't have a way at the moment to promote this we need tooling work to be able to do that but in theory we can much easier do that and by having everything built in once there's times where it's going to cause a lot of people but most of the time they're never going to notice it stuff's just going to build and we just carve up the output and ship it into different locations and and I mean we've had a few like in the lead up at 21 going like in the death cycle I think it was just before beta there was a toolchain issue discovered on S390 but that's still necessary a a partial mass rebuild across all the primary anyway so there are issues there that like people say oh you know if something happens on S390 it doesn't affect primary well actually yes it does you as the like the random person who said that that doesn't care anything about S390 didn't see me doing an entire weekend of work to do a partial mass rebuild to on primary to get that fixed similarly in I forget exactly the component but in the lead up to f22 there was an issue in part of the toolchain that actually that package I think it was it might have been a few tools it was one of those low level toolchain bits and it regressed the regression on that affected actually all architectures but it instantiated itself slightly different on AR64 and actually stopped that from building all together for whatever reason but when the maintainer went and actively looked at it he went oh shit this is like a toolchain bug issue across all architectures and we have no idea why we didn't see it on x86 so there is value there Simon let's come up a couple of times with GCC as well where there's been a bug that has manifested itself on ppc or S390 but the bug is it's in the generic node parts and exists on x86 and all the other arches and it isn't visible it's getting hidden and it is a bug but maybe not tomorrow before issues but down the road before issues having that wider build coverage does help I think having a wider ecosystem of architectures is healthy for the project as a whole and benefits each other not only is it healthy but it's a pretty good track for the ppc or issues when they pop up so each of your vegetables is the what answer to this after f22 came out there was a person in the community that has been massively critical of arm being promoted to primary he's been massively critical and when I sent out the release announcements for AR64 and Power he actually emailed me personally and said well I want to say thank you the uplift I've seen in the secondary architectures is actually making a really positive effect and it was just as well I was sitting down when I got this email because I had to pick my mouth up going Jesus Christ and generally the community in general is actually you know yes the rv7 builders are particularly fast yes we have a plan and much much faster hardware in process so that we can start doing rv7 on rv8 to solve that problem it's a little bit down the line much of people do primarily me and engaging with people in a whole bunch of other stuff to do some work to polish that up and make it beautiful and usable and in case of like power builders like power rv8 hardware actually makes our x8664 hardware look slow and ancient so there's stuff there that things like hardware concerns with regards to speed and quality and various other bits and pieces are very much in process to being addressed as part of that proposal very specific feature question related to what you just said and I want to ask it because I know the answer is somewhere in this room at a hard time finding so when I get my affordable 64 bit AR arm stuff in December 6 months 6 months but he also told me so whenever he says something I always just go the other next month to ensure he says next month I would say to him that would be 28 so John's lies are always even more optimistic than yours but will I be able to John do I not question your timelines you tell more realistic lies so I'll try and the treatment unlocked let me get my question out will I be able to do hardware accelerated the 7 virtual machines yes yes yes yes we have that working now I wouldn't know because I can't get the hardware sorry there is one thing but your machine needs to have 32 bit arm support for CPU because this is optional if you copy our error if you take the counting example of public knowledge at this point they did not implement 32 bit some of the people who buy hardware you won't have these 7 support so there is an army in that way but the CPU that's coming out in the future that one definitely has the support but what I'm thinking of is other 500 bucks coming very soon that's the one the publicly announced prize edition has the ability to do that I believe there may be a demo coming up at a major arm event in the next few months so one of the internal guys spent a bunch of time going through all of this to make sure it happened and he sent me this amazing email that I kid you not if I printed it out it would be about this long but to deploy it nicely into Fedora infrastructure and various other bits and pieces there is no way in how I am going to be running a Qimoo command line this long so basically I'm taking that recipe and I am polishing it and engaging with the Libvert guys and the Qimoo guys and we're going to get a Qimoo in place that we can boot U-boot so we can do standard and a condor installs with standard YUM upgrades with the process that we currently have we can't do but ultimately that is a proof of concept to ensure we could do it and to engage with like there was a bug in big U-tools with regards to 64K load sizes which the fix actually landed to give you an idea how long they've been doing this landed fairly early in the F22 cycle it needed a mass rebuild of everything to ensure that it worked in the F22 cycle after that landed a minimal install build route had everything just through standard upgrades package churn in the distro dev cycle we could run a minimal F22 install as such and because I knew we weren't going to have the hardware and the other bits in place beforehand I wasn't going to yell and scream about a mass rebuild just for this in F22 we've now had the mass rebuild in F23 so everything's there is me this is a project that I've been inching towards over the last over 12 months so all the bits are slowly coming together to enable that and yes you will be able to do it


Welcome back to my channel. For those of you who are new, take a look around if you like what you see. Go ahead and subscribe.  So I've had a lot of questions from re-applicants because I was one myself. As a re-applicant, I think that there are some major points that you kind of have to hit when you are re-applying and that is what this video is going to be about. So I think the first thing that you should absolutely do as a re-applicant is look at your application and try to delineate the areas that you were deficient. You can obviously look and see okay, my GPA wasn't as high as it could have been for that particular program. My GRE score wasn't high or they required the GRE and I didn't have the GRE so maybe I should take the GRE if I'm interested in that program. But there are obviously like specific areas that you can touch that you can change via GPA, GRE and personal statement. Those are in also hours, shadowing or healthcare experience. Those are areas that you can absolutely address and touch and hit prior to doing any of this other stuff to make sure that yes, okay, like these are the areas that I was deficient in and now these are the areas that I need to fix. So after you've done that and gone through the application to see the areas that you have been deficient in, I think it's also important to reach out to those programs. I know that I did that, I called the various different schools just to kind of get some insight on hey, like why, you know, wasn't I chosen essentially and not every program gets you that information but most are willing to be like well, you know, you just didn't have the GPA or you were missing this class and we actually require that class. It's one of our requirements, not recommendations. And so those are things that you can get from the program and that is invaluable information because then now you can add that to what you've already done prior in looking at the areas that you were weak and be like, oh, okay, well, I can absolutely fix that or I have this information. It just wasn't sent in time. So go ahead, call the school, make sure you've looked at your application and after you've done that, I think the third thing that you should absolutely do is fix those deficiencies, right? That is like the major absolute thing that you should be doing is fixing those deficiencies. So be it going to get some more healthcare hours or going to get some more shadowing, raising your GPA by taking some classes over actually going through and taking the GRE, doing a consultation session to get your personal statement in order or going through one of those kind of overhaul systems that there are programs out there that for pre-PAs that allow them to kind of just get a complete overhaul of your application. Those are things that you kind of have to go through and make sure that you're able to now fix those areas that you're deficient in. And once you've fixed those areas, depending on yourself and what you want to do, like do you want to apply the next year or do you want to apply in two years, that will allow you to now make a decision on how much you can get done and you also when you're trying to fix these areas, you want to look at the areas that you can get like your most bang for your buck, right? So if it's going to take too much for you to raise your GPA from a 3.4 to a 3.5 or a 3.3 to a 3.5 and you want to apply next year, then focus on areas that you can address immediately like the GRE or your patient care experience or your personal statement. And so you have to kind of rank those in your head like, all right, well, what is the most important thing for me to do at this moment in time? Once you've figured that out or you've had someone help you figure that out, then it's time to reapply. The fourth thing that you should do is reapply. Don't be scared. Don't give up. You know, keep trucking along. Make sure that you've fixed those areas and now you're reapplying to the same schools if you're really interested in those programs. But I suggest you also like kind of broaden your search and see exactly what areas you may not have a problem living in and apply to schools in those areas as well because PA school is competitive. And so it's really important to kind of just get in where you can, but also make sure that where you get in will be a benefit to your mental health and your overall health in general. After you've applied, my fifth thing that you should do is pray. And now, and that's obviously for everybody who prays, but like, I'm a praying woman and prayer is like the way to go. Like you have to have faith that, you know, you've done your best with this application and you were ready to put it out there. And so all you can do after you've applied is, you know, pray and wait, play the waiting game. So don't give up and you don't stop, right? So even though you've applied and you've prayed, you don't stop. And that's not the end all be all because you've no idea if you're going to get an interview request or not. So it's important to continue to work on some of those areas. So now like let's say your GPA wasn't something that you could have addressed in time to apply before the various different deadlines. But while you're waiting and you're praying and you're playing the waiting game, like I said, then you're also making moves. So you're also applying to these different classes to make sure that you can retake them or take new classes that will raise your GPA so that by the time you get into PA school, you have some extra knowledge or God forbid, if you don't get into PA school that cycle, then you've already taken a class and your GPA would have been raised. You want to be in PA school so bad that everything that you do reminds you of PA school? This would look good at a PA school interview because I'm a star. No, that's different. No. This makes me look desperate. But you are desperate girl. Let's get this. I bet this is what PA school smells like. Anybody looking? Nobody looking?  That smells so good. I'm getting in. If that was you, you're doing way too much. Just let me help you get into PA school. Starting this Sunday, I will be doing live 60-minute consulting sessions where you'll be able to talk to me via phone or video chat and ask me any question that you may have about PA school and the PA school application. We'll also be able to sit down and talk about everything from your GPA to your personal statement. So just head on over to my website at www.adonnathepa.com to book your session today because slots are limited. So head over there right now. So those are the five things that I feel like you should absolutely do as a re-applicant. Once you've kind of followed that model, I think that you're on the right track and there's really nothing else that you can do at that point in time, but kind of continue to move forward. So I hope this was helpful to you re-applicants out there. If you have any other questions for me, please leave them in the comment section below. If you have not already done so, subscribe and like this video and follow me on Instagram at www.adonnathepa.com. Thank you guys so much for watching. I will talk to you guys next time. Bye.


Supposedly, Chile is going to come down from the University of Baltimore, and then, next day, we'll be behind them, and the players are going to be behind them. Yeah, I'm going to write that down. Alabama is playing Texas A&M. It's going to be a beat down, as always. I'm going to have 41-14.


Welcome to DAV's Caffeine Connect. Starting on January 1, self-certification of service disabled veteran owned small businesses is a thing of the past. Moving forward, at the turn of the year, all veteran owned certifications will transfer from the Department of Veterans Affairs to the Small Business Administration Center of Verification and Evaluation. Larry Stubblefield is the Associate Administrator for the Office of Veterans Business Development at SBA. He's here to talk with us today about this big change in other initiatives and services SBA provides veterans. Larry is a retired Mustang colonel with 30 years of service in the Army. He oversees his office's efforts to develop and implement policies that equip veterans, service members, and military spouse entrepreneurs with counseling and education, access to capital, and contracting opportunities. Thank you for joining us, sir. Thank you, Dan, for that warm introduction. It's really a pleasure being here. I want to talk a little bit about our Office of Veterans Business Developments. So with that, looking for our first slide here. So while the slide is going up, let me just tell you a little bit about our office. We are part of the Small Business Administration, the Office of Veterans Business Development. We're a small office. It's only about 20 of us when we're fully staffed, but we're a mighty office. And I'll tell you a little bit about our mission and what we do for the Veterans Small Business Community. So with that, let's go to the next slide. So in our Office of Veterans Business Development, and for short, we call ourselves OVBD, we serve the next generation of Veterans Small Business Owners. So why is Veterans Small Business a big business? And I'll tell you, of America's 32 and a half million small businesses, close to 2 million of those businesses are owned by veterans. Those businesses produce $1 trillion in annual sales and employ 5 million people and are spread out across a wide variety of business concerns. So in our Office of Veterans Business Development, we empower veterans transitioning service members, and those are service members leaving the military, National Guard, reserve members, and military spouses with the tools and education that they need to either start a business, grow their business, or expand their business, or recover your business after going through a declared natural disaster. So how do we do this in the Office of Veterans Business Development? As indicated here on the screen, we provide business counseling, training, and education. One of our top priorities is helping veteran business owners acquire the needed capital to start or grow or expand their business. And we also help them in terms of contracting opportunities, getting them ready for whether it's a local, state, or federal contractors contracting opportunities. And as I just mentioned, the disaster assistance piece in the event that the business is hit by a natural declared disaster. So let's go to the next slide, please. So I mentioned earlier that OB-BD, there's only 20 of us on staff, but we have a nationwide ecosystem comprised of many of the organizations that you see here on the screen, whether it's our veteran business outreach centers, our small business development centers, the women's business centers, the score chapters. There's 10,000 members in terms of our score chapters. Those are retired senior executives that provide mentoring. And as indicated here on the screen, we have partnerships, if you will, with interagency organizations. And just a number of grantees around the country who help us provide training and support for services able veterans, women veterans, and those who are interested in federal contracting. Federal contracting is one of our top of mind issues with our administrator, and I'll talk a little bit more about what we're doing in terms of enhancing opportunities for veterans in contracting and that contracting space. Here on the slide, we talk about our 68 district offices. So SBA, we're a federal agency. We're all over the country. Our 68 district offices, in every one of those district offices, there's a veterans business development officer who is attuned with the local community and those veterans business owners or those who are interested in business opportunities. The veteran business development officers are there. And they also help us in one of our signature programs, which is Boots to Business. Boots to Business is a two-day workshop that's part of Department of Defense's Transition Assistance Program. So if you're a service member to include your spouse and you're leaving the service, as part of the Transition Assistance Program, the service member is offered one of four opportunities that can either take the workshop on employment, they can take the workshop on education, workshop on apprenticeship, or the workshop on entrepreneurship, which is our Boots to Business class. And that's, like I said, a two-day introduction to the basic fundamentals of owning a business. And then if the service member is interested in further support, then that's when we introduce them to a lot of the organizations you see here on the slides to include our veteran business outreach centers. We have 22 veteran business outreach centers known as VBOX located around the country. They cover all 50 states and US territories. We are very excited at OB-BD and at SBA with the fact that in fiscal year 23, we're looking to extend the VBOX program, if you will, grow the VBOX program. We're going to go from 22 veteran business outreach centers to 34 centers. And for the first time ever, we're going to have a center in Alaska. We currently have two in California now. We'll be adding a third center in Central California. We're going to have one in Nevada. We're putting one in Oklahoma, one in Kentucky. We'll have one in Ohio. Pennsylvania is a very large state with a large military presence there. They currently get their support from our VBOX. This is Maryland. We're going to put a VBOX in Pennsylvania. We're going to have one in South Carolina. And we only have one VBOX in Florida. So we're going to add a second veteran business outreach center in Florida. And then we're really proud of the fact that we will have our first ever VBOX in Puerto Rico. So more to follow on the expansion of the VBOX program. But again, that's a very good news story. Our administrator, administrative Guzman, received additional funding from Congress. And she made the VBOX expansion her top priority. So we're very, very proud of our plans to expand that program. So if we go to the next slide. So I mentioned federal contracting. And as it was mentioned during the introduction, the FY21 National Defense Authorization Act mandated that VA certification for a verification, or center, I should say, for verification and evaluation. The CVE is moving over from the VA to SBA. And that's going to be effective 1 January 2023. So we are currently working hand-in-hand with the VA to make that transition. And the reason why we're really excited about the transition is that for the first time ever, all the certification programs will be housed at SBA. So now we're talking about the certification program for services-abled, veteran-owned small businesses, CubZone, 8A, as well as the woman-owned small business program. So we'll have all of the programs together. And we're working in conjunction with bringing over the CVE. We're also working on a unified platform, if you will, where all of the certification programs and all of our lending programs will be on this one platform. And we will have a single portal entry for business owners to access all of the programs and services that we have at SBA. We currently have multiple ways to get to those programs. And we've heard all of you, veteran business owners, in terms of the discussions in regards to accessing multiple programs and having to turn in the same documentation, if you will, at certification program A. And then a year or two later, you want to access another certification program. You've got to go through that entire process. The way we're looking at this now with the unified platform, and I'll give you an example.  And then, oh, by the way, if you're interested in SBA lending, you'll be able to access everything on this unified platform that we're calling. We're calling it MySBA. So we're looking to roll that out in 24. And the first program that's going to be on the platform will be the CVE. So here on this slide, I'll just briefly touch on four aspects of the transfer. I've had a lot of the VSOs, veteran business owners have reached out in terms of funding for the transfer. Yes, it's true. When the law was passed, there was no funding associated with the transfer. I'm here to tell you, and this is a good news story. We have worked with OMB and the VA. The VA has been wonderful partners. We now have the funding secured for the transfer to include VA funding the new system that we're building. So that system will be up and running and ready for certification processing on 1 January 2023. So that's a good news story. The technology piece there, we elected not to bring over the system from the VA because we're looking to leverage the existing technology that we have on board for the COVID relief program. So that's allowing us to build this new system very rapidly.  Are we confident that we can get the system up in this short period of time? And the answer is yes. In fact, we're going to have it up in about a six-month period. We brought on board a vendor who we're familiar with, very familiar way to work with in the past, who's also a veteran himself. And so the tech bill for the new platform is going very well. On the personnel side of the house, the law allows us to bring over the VA employees who are currently working for the CVE. The employees had a choice. They can either come to SVA or stay with the VA. We have been meeting on a regular basis with the employees. They've all elected to come over. And our thinking is, why reinvent the wheel when you have people who have been working the system and are very familiar with the veterans' small business community? And all the feedback that we're currently getting from the community is that the CVE has a very high-touch customer service experience. And the processing times, by law, they have 90 days to process an application. It's generally like around 30 days. So rather than train an entire new staff, the VA personnel, they're going to come over to SVA. They'll be in place to help us get the system up and running. And then the last thing I want to touch on here is the policy piece. I want to thank all of you who provided comments when the proposed rule was out for the public comment period ended on the 5th of August. And so right now, we're evaluating those comments and incorporating those into our final rule, which we will have in place by law. It has to be in place 30 days before you stand up the new program. So we're on track to have the final rule in place on 1 December, a month before we stand the system up, 1 January 2023. So we'll go to the next slide, please. So the last thing I wanted to touch on, so I've talked about the VBOC expansion, what we're doing with the Center for Verification and Evaluation. And then I just want to conclude here to just put a plug in for National Veteran Small Business Week. So National Veteran Small Business Week is celebrated every year the first week of November. This will be our eighth National Veteran Small Business Week coming up here real quickly. We're excited to have this year's National Veteran Small Business Week, because it's going to be in conjunction with what we're doing with the CDE. But the purpose of National Veteran Small Business Week is twofold. Number one, if you go back to my earlier comments on the impact that small businesses, veteran-owned small businesses, have in their local communities, our 68 district offices, our resource partners to include our veteran business outreach centers, the SBDCs, women business centers, and so forth, all highlight those veteran small businesses in their local communities. So we have hundreds of events during that week all around the country highlighting and saluting those business owners. And then the second reason purpose for National Veteran Small Business Week is to let those business owners know that SBA is here for them. Entrepreneurship is not a solo journey and that for whatever you need as a business owner, we are here for you from cradle to grave. Like I mentioned earlier, the business counseling, training, mentoring, access to capital, whatever that business owner needs, SBA and our Office of Veterans Business Development is here for that business owner. So again, National Veteran Small Business Week this year will be from October 31st to November 4th. And here's our theme, marching toward veteran business success. And then I've given you the site here to learn more about National Veteran Small Business Week. There'll be press releases and things of that nature. So please join us in helping celebrate and honor our nation's almost 2 million veteran owned small businesses. And then finally on my last slide, this is just contact information. I encourage anyone who wants to reach out directly to me or to our office to learn more about our programs and what we can do for you here's the contact information. And here's the one thing I've been at SBA since 2016. I've actually been in the Office of Veterans Business Development since 2018. And the one comment that I consistently hear from business owners is they wish they had known about SBA when they initially started their business. So we want to get the word out. And I appreciate, again, being here today, being able to share what we do. And here's the beauty of what we do is 99% of what we do at SBA for the Veteran Small Business Community is free. So I just mentioned, number one, the business owner who says, oh, gee, I wish I had knew about OBVD at SBA and what you can do for me years ago. And then number two is the business owner who is out paying a consultant or someone to develop a business plan for them or to do a feasibility study or to help them in terms of access to capital. And they're paying. And you can come to us. Like I said, we're a national organization with our resource partners. And everyone is leaning forward in the voxel ready to provide support. And then the last thing I'll say here real quickly in terms of our Veteran Business Outreach Centers, the Veteran Business Outreach Centers are manned by veterans themselves. Former military members, a lot of them are business owners. They speak the language. They walk the talk. And they're just like being in an active duty unit. They're here to support their fellow veteran business owners and those who are aspiring to be business owners. So here's our contact information. Reach out to learn more about our programs. And if you ever need help in any capacity during your entrepreneurial journey, OVBD and SBA is here for you. So thank you again for having me here. And Dan, I'll turn it back over to you. Hey, thanks, Larry. I know we have a lot of questions. One I have was the Veterans Business Outreach Center expansion. That's really exciting. Can you speak more, especially for the uninitiated, about the services that VBOX provide? OK, absolutely. So the number one service that they provide, they support our Boots to Business program. And so Boots to Business, like I mentioned, is a program that's associated with the DOD's Transition Assistance Program. But we also have a reboot program that they teach in local communities around the country. So it's the same program. One is on installation for transitioning service members. The second program that's in community around the country are for veterans from any era. Military spouses are invited to attend as well. But the Veterans Business Outreach Center, if whatever your need is, we have veterans who come in and they want to start a business. And maybe they need to do market research to see if their ideal for business is feasible. Who are their local competitors? Do you need access to capital? One access to capital is one of our top priorities. And what we find a lot of times is the veteran community is more likely to not receive capital on the same par as their civilian counterparts. And there's a number of reasons for that to include being mobile, moving from assignment to assignment and not necessarily making those social connections in the communities. But we are in tune with lenders who specifically lend to veterans. So not everyone is going to get along from JP Morgan Chase. So access to capital, if you're interested in contracting opportunities, we can help prepare you to make you procurement ready. And then the other thing that the VBOX do is they're on the ground in those local communities and they know the additional resources that are available. And they make a lot of referrals, too. So the VBOX are like what we like to say is they're a one-stop shop for all your business needs, whether it's business counseling, training, mentoring, access to capital, whatever you need. From cradle to grave, the VBOX even help business owners who want to sell their business. We do help them in terms of retiring their businesses and so forth. Great. We do have a question here from Reg from Fintech. Reg, you want to come on and ask? Sure. So we're at a really critical phase of our development. I'm the founder of Fintech. Basically, our company measures the financial health of individuals and businesses and who or what is working towards that or not undermining it. But we have a solid team in place. There are two priorities for us right now that it sounds like you might be able to help with. One is certainly access to capital, but we're very interested. We're probably less interested in debt right now, more interested in equity or grants. So that's one question. And the other question is what type of networking? We're actively looking for banks and credit unions to be able to pilot our products with. So those are the two priorities. How can I guess the VBAP or SBA help with that? So where are you? First of all, pleasure meeting you. Thanks for being here. Thanks for the question. So where are you? Where are you located? I'm in Atlanta. You're in Atlanta. OK, so in Atlanta, we have our district office there. And thanks again for the question because I could have put this on a slide. I guess we could put it maybe in the chat. But if you go to SBA.gov, forward slash local dash assistance, it allows you to put in your zip code. And then once you put your zip code in, it will tell you where every SBA resource is located near you. So what I would say our SBA district office in Atlanta there would be a great source to start. And so I would highly recommend you connect with them. And then again, the SBA, whether it's the VBAP, the district office, or whatever resource we have, they're connected in those communities as well. And so I would start with that district office. OK, thank you. Thanks, Larry. We just spoke before we went live about the devastating hurricane in Florida. I imagine you might be gearing up for some assistance that you're going to need to deliver there. And over on Facebook, Sean Ford had a comment that will probably take offline about an issue he had with FEMA assistance and an SBA recovery loan. Can you speak more about the work that you do for natural disasters? OK, so we do work with FEMA, our veteran business outreach center, like I'm pretty sure I haven't heard anything from them today, but I'm pretty sure they're engaged in Florida. The first thing we make sure is that they're OK. And they have a database of their clients. And then whatever it takes, if it's an economic injury disaster loan, the IDOL loan, lending in that regard to help get them stood back up. And then our VBOX work also with our SBA has an Office of Disaster Assistance. And the IDOL lending is one support that we offer. And we're in a process right now of standing up a mitigation program. I know this is going to be for future disasters. But to get on the ground, our administrator has asked us to be a little bit more proactive. In other words, helping business owners develop mitigating strategies to be able to survive in the event of a disaster. So again, being connected with FEMA, the lending, the counseling, and part of the SBA lending is not only just for the business, but if your living conditions have been impacted, we help out in that regard as well. So we are definitely involved where natural-declared disasters are concerned. Great. We have another question here from Heather. Heather, I'm going to put your last name. Can you help me with that? Yes. Hi, V.C. also. Beautiful name. Thank you. Hi, thank you. Thanks for all your time and information. So for those of us that we have a plan in our minds, but we haven't put anything. There's nothing solid or concrete yet. There's not a business plan written. It's all here. But we need a lot of guidance on how to make that tangible. Can we get assistance from SBA, VBAC, and other resources? And if not, what do we need to get that assistance started? OK, great question, Heather. And right off the bat, the score comes to mind. And so there are senior core retired executives. So there's 10,000 scored members around the country. And they do mentoring. And I could tell you, we have numerous success stories where people have started in the situation you just described. They walk in the door and they sit down and talk with a score member, a score mentor. And that score mentor will help you in terms of thinking through your business ideals and thoughts. And then the beauty of our ecosystem is that we connect throughout the ecosystem. So it may be where the score member will help you develop your business plan. And then maybe the next step after your business plan might be some additional business training that could either be provided by the Small Business Development Centers or the VBAC. And then we would have you ready for a possible loan. So I would say to start maybe with a meeting with a score mentor. And again, if you go to sba.gov.org slash local dash assistance and put your zip code in, it'll tell you where the closest score chapter is to your location. Awesome. Thank you. So you may have answered it when you said the closest location. Are those meetings able to be done virtually, especially if we have one that's a little further from us? Yeah, I know you said I'm in Florida. So I know you said that we don't. There's one office in Florida. Well, there's one better. There's one better in Business Albury Center in Florida, but numerous score chapters. Yeah. And to answer your question about virtually, yes. Since the pandemic, a lot of our services have gone have been provided virtually. We had a question from Paul. Paul, do you want to come on? Yeah, when we talk about, excuse me, first of all, like everyone else, thank you for everything you're doing here. You said that the certification program is going to change where you'll be taking that over July 20th, 23. If we're looking to get certified, and I noticed someone already answered, should we, would it be better to wait since that time is coming so close and just go with the whole new certification or to start now? OK, well, that's a good question, Paul. Thank you for it. It allows me to make an important point on the certification piece. So if you're currently certified through the VA and just say, for example, you got your certification in 2021 and it's a three-year certification period, meaning that you'd be up for your renewal, if you will, in 2024, there's absolutely nothing for you to do right now because everything from the VA is going to transfer over to SBA. But in the case that you've just identified, the VA put out a memo, I guess, last week saying that the last day you can apply through VA is the 24th of October, and then they're going to shut down their portal for receiving applications. And they also said in that memo, they encourage folks to wait until we get to 1 January. It's going to be 1 January 2023, not in the summer. So I would say at this particular point, whatever you're comfortable with, but if you approach the VA, you've got to have your application in by the 24th of October. So if I'm hearing correctly, if we're not prepared by the 24th of October, we should wait till January. You can wait till January. And I will say this, too, is we're looking to do a little what I'm calling a lighter review. So the VA, they have their processes in place. We're looking to do something a little lighter because there's a lot of documentation and stuff that you have to turn to VA. And you're smiling like, I guess you might be familiar with this, but yeah, we're looking to do something a little lighter. That never knows that. And I'll tell you the reason. I'm glad you're bringing us up because the reason why we want to get more veteran business owners in the federal contracting. 10 years ago, across the small business community, there was about 180,000 companies participating in federal contracting. And that number is down now to like around 80,000. And so that has an impact on the industrial base. And so our administrator, Administrator Guzman, has made it a point to do everything that we can to increase the number of participants in federal contracting to include one big thing that we accomplished back in January was getting veteran businesses moved under this category management concept, getting veteran businesses moved from tier zero to tier two. And the reason why that's really important is because the contracting officers, they get credit for when they issue a contract.  So our administrator was very successful in getting veterans moved to tier two on that category management tracking scale, if you will. And so we are seeing a little bit of an uptick in veterans now receiving contracts. But we definitely want to build a pool. And that's why, like I said, we're going to do something a little different than what the VA is doing now. So if you start now, you could have turning everything that you need to turn in. Or if you start in January, it might be a little lighter look at you and your company. Understood. I have one more question if it doesn't take up too much time. You said there was VBOX across the United States. Is there a list of where our local one would be that maybe we could? I work with my local VSO Veterans Service Office, but I've never heard of a VBOC. So where are you at? I'm in Ohio, the southeastern Ohio. So our local Veterans Service Office is in Marietta, Ohio. So I didn't know if you said there was one in Ohio. And I was wondering where it would be. Ohio is one of the states that we're expanding to. OK, thank you, sir. And I'll say this. If you go to sba.gov, and it was on our last slide, it will leave slides with DAB. But OK, well, if you go there to our website, it lists where all of VBOX are to include their contact information. And reach out, because this is what they do. They're veterans, and they're looking to support you every step of the way. Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Appreciate your time. Thank you. Larry, we have a very diverse audience. And one of the questions that came up, just because people are at kind of different levels in their understanding, and Laura's doing a great job answering some questions. But can you speak about what is an SDVOSB? I'd say that's a long acronym. But what is it, and why is it a benefit to have that? OK, so SDVOSB, Service Disabled Veteran Own Small Business. So in other words, if you have a rating from the VA, and I believe you can also get a ladder from DOD as well, that states that your service is disabled, and then if you own a company and you own 51% of a company, or it could be a combination of other veterans owning 51% of the company that puts you in a category as a SDVOSB, a Service Disabled Veteran Own Small Business. And in the federal procurement system, there is a goal for every federal agency to award 3% of the dollar value of their procurements to Service Disabled Veteran Own Small Businesses. So there's 24 federal agencies. They have set aside contracts and sole source contracts that are just for veterans who are Service Disabled Veteran Own Small Businesses. And I will tell you that in fiscal year 21, there is $24 billion awarded to SDVOSBs across the federal government. And that's a $1 billion increase from fiscal year 20. So the advantage is being able to compete for set aside and sole source contracts at the 24 federal agencies. And Paul asked about that. When it comes to your disability rating, which DAV is happy to help you obtain and work with you on, is there a minimum percentage required of disability rating? As far as I know, if you're, I don't think there is. But that's one I guess we can take back. And maybe I could get back with you. I could check what our VA counterparts. But I don't think that's the case. I don't think that's the case at all. OK. John had a question. And he says, do you have any advice for someone who's a little apprehensive to get into federal contracting because of financial constraints? Specifically, he's concerned about operating costs to maintain a company for a year. Again, I would say two things. Number one, again, going back to I was talking about the resources and that we have available. I was just on a panel yesterday. I'm sorry, a day before yesterday, yesterday, a travel day to come back out in California. Well, we had our VBoc from Arizona, who was also on the panel. And a similar question came up. And the VBoc director kind of walked through a lot of things that the business owner needs to take into consideration, things like when you're competing for a contract or even going for a loan, you as the business owner, you're selling your company. You're selling your product. You're selling your services. And so there was a lot of discussion during this panel about your capability, your capability statement, and how you're actually marketing your program or your services. And to include knowing whether or not the federal government even buys your product.  We have business owners who come in and they what they think is a fantastic product. But who is your market? Where is your market? Is the government buying what you're selling? So again, I would say rather than me, sit right here and just kind of speculate a little bit, you want somebody who is going to do a deep dive on what you're doing to include helping you with that market research and helping you get what we call procurement ready to include, like I said, your capability statement and what you're doing. And you don't necessarily, and I'm saying this in a general term because this may not apply to everyone, but you may not necessarily be ready for a prime contract. You may want to get your foot in the door as a subcontractor. So again, being able to come in and sit down with an SBA resource partner or go in a district office where you can talk to lender. Now I know this is in terms of lending, but they have lender relations specialists and others that can help you think through and then develop a strategy, a strategy going forward. Thank you so much. I think we have an outreach question or comment from Belinda. Elibi Belinda, do you want to ask on Mike? Can you unmute there? Yes. Thank you very much for the platform. Yes, Mr. Stubblefield, I have a question. I am with the Clayton County Library System right outside of Atlanta. I was wondering, since I host workshops for veterans, for business owners, is there an opportunity to perhaps host workshops so that veterans will have the opportunity to come in and get those workshops and those trainings? I know Atlanta is the district office for SBA, but I would like to bring that training and workshops to my local community. Is that an option? OK, so in my office, my budget is basically in grants, if you will. Like the Veteran Business Ivory Center program is a grant program. We have a grant program for entrepreneurial training for service-disabled veterans, women and those who are interested in federal procurement. And those grants are competed. So I guess what I would say is on that last slide, I have my contact information. Yes. You probably should reach out to me and then we could have a discussion about how the grants work and if there is an opportunity for you to compete for a grant. But that's how we have the fund, the support that's in our office. Now having said that, I do know that with all of our resource partners, whether it's the women-owned small business, the RWBCs, Women Business Centers, the Small Business Development Centers, the SBDCs, and the VBOCs, they do have contracting opportunities for if there is something that the community needs in that particular space, that they do have funding to bring on others outside of the VBOC or the SBDC or the Women Business Centers to provide training. So I would just say, reach out to the local SBDCs or Women Business Centers or the VBOC and just tell them what you offer and see where you go from there. But keep in touch with me, too. Thank you, and we'll do that. Thank you both. We had a question for the SDVOSB certification process. Does that apply to spouses? And I think another question that follows that up might be, what resources are available for spouses? OK, so in the Office of Veterans Business Development, and all of our programs are open for spouses. And so that's a great question. I'm glad to take that one on, because we here, occasionally from staffers on the Hill, they're inquiring how can we go about getting the word out to get military spouses more involved in our programs. Like I said earlier, Boots to Business, military spouses can attend any of our grant programs, a VBOC. And I was thinking about when I was in uniform. And I said, when I was getting out, did I come home and tell Iris about all the different programs and things of that nature? And sadly, I didn't. So I appreciate the opportunity here now to say that all of our programs are open to spouses. And then in terms of the services-able program, we do have military spouses that participate in that in there. But it's kind of in line in terms of if the service member is deceased, or if we're in a situation where maybe you're a caregiver. But so it's in those areas where military spouses actually participate. Great. Craig asked, as being a co-founder of a company and veteran qualify for people to access the services that SBA offers. A co-founder of a company and a veteran? Yeah, the answer would be yes. I mean, because here we're talking about veterans. But SBA is for all small business. So the answer is yes. Thanks. Darlene had an interesting question. Darlene Leyva, she asks, which businesses do you feel are needed now? And do you have suggestions for those who want to start a new business? She's hoping some of those things might align with her skills and attributes. Well, I will say this. What we saw at the height of COVID was a lot of creativity where veteran business owners were concerned. In other words, they were able to pivot and go to areas that were needed. Like I'm thinking of one veteran-owned company, the veteran and spouse-owned company up in Massachusetts, I believe it is, that they made furniture. And with the pandemic, they were able to pivot. And they started making the plastic protective shield-like equipment for offices to protect from COVID. So in terms of needs and things like that, we don't really think in terms of what's out there. What we do is we'll take your business ideal, help you think through. Help you research the market, if you will, to see if there is a requirement for your business. And if you're interested in federal contracting, that's a huge piece there. Because again, like I said earlier, you want to know if there is a market for what you're producing, especially if you're selling to the government. Thank you so much. Kind of on that note, Lisa Brown-Bannock on LinkedIn asked, are there grants available to start a franchise or other funding? She's thinking of an edible flowers, Taco Bell kind of thing. If so, how do you apply? And is a deposit required? If there is a deposit required. OK, so now that's an issue with deposits of things like that, how that works. Like say, for example, you mentioned Taco Bell, that would be something between Taco Bell and you, the business owner. We do have a directorate of approved franchises at SBA. They're available for lending and things of that nature. But I would say, again, this is one where we're talking to general terms where Lisa should reach out to an SBA resource, probably a district office. And sit down with members of that district office and walk through what it is that she wants to do. I don't want anybody to take away anything that I'm saying here today. And especially if you're looking at investing money and things of that nature, you really want to have a solid plan, a thought through plan before you jump out there. Paul had another question. He said, are there any opportunities or benefits for the children of veterans or disabled veterans rather than spouses, but for children who want to start a business? I have not worked with children, per se. We generally talk about the military members, the spouses, the counseling and things of that nature. It might be something possible, but as far as lending and things of that nature, I don't think so. Larry, thank you so much. Is there anything else you want to add? The only thing I would say, again, Dan, thank you very much for having me here. The takeaway for the audience is that SBA is here for you. And I know in uniform, we're taught sometimes to get the mission accomplished regardless of what. But to be in business, to be an entrepreneur, it's not a solo act. And we're here. I mentioned all those resources that we have. We talk about thousands of people, hundreds of offices around the country with people whose sole mission in life is to support you as the veteran small business owner. So come and see us. Don't be one of the ones who I hear from all the time to say, I wish I hadn't met you before when I crashed my first company. And you don't want to be one of those people. Come and see us. And please share the contact information again. Anyone that wants to reach out to me, please do so. We're here for you. Great. Thank you so much. Do you want to throw that, Brian? Michael, you want to take that last slide and put that up one more time for folks? Closing out, thank you, Larry, so much. Thank you, Laura Wages and Brian Mays and all your talented team. Just a fantastic job. And I hope we're able to have you or a representative of your team back again. I just want to remind folks, if you want to catch more of these, get more information about DAV and DAV Patriot Boot Camp, please visit patriotbootcamp.org and or dav.org. Feel free to reach out to SBA. They're a great group. Coming up next month in October, we're going to have our next DAV Patriot Boot Camp event here at DAV National Headquarters. We're thrilled to do that. Again, if you want information on things like that, just sign up at DAVpatriotbootcamp.org. Thank you and we wish you continued success with your venture.