From Sand Hill Road in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, presenting the People First Network, insights from entrepreneurs and tech leaders. Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We are here for a special conversation as part of Mayfield's 50th anniversary, People First Network. This is a series of interviews from thought leaders around entrepreneurship and insights. I'm John Furrier with here with Manish Chandra, who's the CEO, co-founder and CEO of Poshmark, a very successful company, serial entrepreneur. I've known Manish for many, many years, going back to his early startups. Great to see you. Thanks for spending the time today. Thanks for having me, John, and it's great. We were just talking about our early days, where you were doing your podcasting company. I was doing a social shopping company back in 2006, 2005 timeframe, right, for a long time. Pioneers have arrows on their back as they always say in entrepreneurship. But if you look at the time when we were doing startups over 14 years ago, social sharing, democratization, these were the buzzwords, these was the way that we were all trying to ride. You know, the 2008 hit kind of took the water down a little bit, but still the game didn't change. The rise comes Facebook, Twitter, social, multiple channels. The consumer's expectations changed a lot in that timeframe. And I want to get your thoughts because you have two successful companies, Kaboodle and now Poshmark, almost 40 million users, billion dollar valuation, hundreds and hundreds of employees, you got like a hundred openings in your company. You're ramping up when you're scaling. But the expectations or uses have changed. What are some of those dynamics in your business that you're seeing? I think the biggest sort of culmination or ignition point for social platforms came with the advent of mobile. And early days of mobile were crude days, but you know, if you look back to the advent of Poshmark where sort of the idea of Poshmark reignited in my mind, it was 2010 and iPhone 4 had just come out. It was a couple of months after Instagram had started and Snapchat had not even started yet. And what I think mobile platform did, and especially with a high quality platform like iPhone 4 was it made the process of content creation, consumption and sharing so fast. And you finally had the device that could produce it that it just kept accelerating. And now in the days of, you know, iPhone XS Max and what have you, it's just so easy. At the same time, the speed expectation, the transparency expectation, the velocity of expectation has gone up. And so what we've seen in Poshmark is day one, our users were spending somewhere between 20 to 25 minutes in the app. And here today we have millions of users and they're still doing that same thing. So that level of deep immersion that you see is sort of unique to the mobile paradigm. I want to dig into the user expectation and the experiences that you're delivering. But before we start, take a minute to explain Poshmark what you guys are doing as a core business, how it's evolved. So Poshmark very simply is a simple way to buy and sell fashion and other sort of style based paradigm. We call it a social commerce platform because it really brings together users in a unique way. But it really allows anybody to build a business starting with their closet all the way to opening up a full brand wholesale engine on the platform. We provide all of the infrastructure, you know, shipping, payments, technology, and you have to bring in your inventory. So we don't touch inventory but everything else we handle for you. So you're really helping people enable them to be successful with these views. Heavy lifting, heavy lifting. It's kind of like Amazon. You don't need to provision anything. You just kind of get started. E-commerce, in the era now of Google, Amazon and cloud technology, you see the rise of all the scale. How are you riding that trend? Because that's a tailwind for you. And what is that doing for the user's expectations? I mean, I have four kids, I'd see them all online. They never use their laptop stuff for homework, but they're on the mobile device. They're doing new things. This is the new expectation. What are some of those expectations? So in our business, which is the business of fashion and style, what it means for people is, number one is if they see something, whether they see something on Instagram, or there's something on Snapchat, it needs to be instantly shoppable, right? And that obviously benefits a platform like us which makes easy access to all of the different brands and things available. At the same time what social media is also doing is making the obsolete-ing of your products very fast. Because once you've used it, you've posted a picture, you want to be able to not consume it again. You've been seeing it. You've seen the same outfit. I can't wear it twice. Exactly. And so we make that easy as well. And then the third thing is, everyone is a content creator. Everyone is a seller. Everyone is sort of participating in this economy. People are hosting air and regest in their home. People are selling on Poshmark. And the reason is because phone and sort of this new mindset of collaboration and social makes it very easy for people to participate. So they want to be able to sell, but they don't want any hassle in that process. And so the new consumer expectation is instantaneous, deeply immersive and constantly changing. And if you can't satisfy all of those things, then it becomes harder for you to scale. So you have to use technology, the physical world and sort of the emotion all in the right mixture. One of the things I know that you're passionate about and we've had this conversation and we feel the same way, certainly at theCUBE is the role of community. And I see a lot of companies these days, whether they're saying we're doing an ICO using tokens to getting a big bag of money from venture capitalists. Oh yeah, our key strategy is to build a community. You can't buy a community. You got to really win the hearts and minds and provide value.  Talk about the role of community for you guys, especially in the stylist world, we have all this, where styles involves very robust community. How did you do it? How did you foster a community? How did you nurture it? And how has that played out for you guys? So community is a foundation of Poshmark and community is our value, our sort of, not just our customer, but also what we are. And community is what I'm more passionate about, even more passionate than fashion. And that was sort of in my previous company, the thing that was really highlighted for me. And so we did it very slowly actually. So in the first year of our company, we only had a hundred users. But these hundred users emerged. Then we went from a hundred to thousand, then thousand to five thousand, but very deliberately and slowly. So at the end of the first 18 months of our company's life, we had maybe 10,000 users, right? And then we went from 10,000 to 300,000 in the next seven months. Then we from 300,000 to 12 million in the next two years. And then today we are 12 millions to 40 million in the next few years, because once you have sort of figured out how the community is created, it can scale very fast. But the early days, if you compromise on how the community is being created, it's very powerful. For example, in the first probably eight, nine months of the company, I answered every single customer service email. And today I probably interact with 80 to 100 customer directly every day, really keeping the pulse and sort of servicing and service and love are sort of two of our core values. And it is very important that's built into the system. The second thing is the community has to be authentic. You cannot fake a community, which means there is conversations that'll happen in the community. There is, which may be antithetical to what you think is your brand. But if you don't let that authenticity happen, then what ends up happening is the community sort of with us away. Because people are not going to tolerate anything inauthentic. The third thing, as you mentioned, is trust. And so from day one, we created not just trust in the way the platform was built, but also in the economics. So day one we said, hey, if you're going to be part of this platform, there is two things that you're going to pay for. One is, as a buyer, you're going to pay for shipping. And as a seller, you're going to have revenue shared with us. And we're not going to charge you any other money. Nothing. And so we started from day one, our 2080 partnership with our sellers. And today here we are six or seven years later and we have the exact same partnership. On the buyers, we started by charging them $7 for shipping. Today our shipping is $649. At that time, our shipping was three pounds. Today it's five pounds. Everything was priority. Today everything is priority. So in six to seven years, if you think of any other marketplace in the world, not just in the country, how many times have they raised their fees? How many times have they changed their paradigm, changed their shipping paradigm for us? And it was very important in the early days it felt people were saying, why are you charging so heavily? I said, I don't want to charge anything different tomorrow that I'm charging today. And by the way, there is no additional fees we've ever imposed on the platform. So we don't have any marketing fees, any promotion fees, any credit card fees. And so that trust that's created ultimately leads to a lot of loyalty. So today you see our consumers growing, our users growing in every single cohort we have continues to grow in revenue more like SaaS businesses of those e-commerce businesses. And that to me is the power of community if you do it right. And that's an interesting point. There's a lot of things you said in there. I think worth doubling down on one. I just want to highlight is if you're creating value and you're certainly scaling, passing that down in cost savings and reducing costs and adding value, that's a secret formula. See, we know one company that does that really well, Amazon. And that has worked. And they recognize the value of keeping people in there engaged. So I think that's almost a takeaway for everyone watching is that if you're not adding value in reducing the costs while you're scaling, they probably don't have your math right. Absolutely. The second thing I want to talk about and get your reaction to is you know what community is slowing it down at first. That's almost counterintuitive. The almost the answer is put the pedal to the metal. Let's get some numbers. You took a different approach. You decided to take your time. Was that to get a feeling for the community? Build the trust. Understand the dynamics. Talk about why you went slow at first. The key is that the first two, three years, you are perfecting a lot of things, right? You have to make sure the things are getting right. And in the first year, it was all about getting the product right, right? And then we scaled. And then we quickly realized that that scaling was breaking everything. It was breaking our shipping system, it was breaking our technology software. So actually Mayfield, which was an early investor in Poshmark was on the board and I went to my board and I said, you know, I'm going to actually slow down growth by 60%. And if you can imagine a venture board hearing that from their CEO in the early days, it's challenging. It's a conversation. Yes. But I think one of the things that I value about Mayfield and my early investors is their focus on partnership with, at a people level, at a human level with me. And trust. And so we actually cut down our marketing budget by 80%. Built out the systems, got the partnership with USPS where we created the country's first fashion shipping label called Posh Post. And built out our technology and infrastructure, built out our payment partnership with Braintree and PayPal. And by sort of early to mid 2014, we started scaling and I've never stopped. And in fact, I had told my investors early on that first two, three years of building this business will be challenging. So hopefully you're prepared to go on this journey with me. But once we build it, it'll accelerate. And what you see with us is the business continues to accelerate every quarter. And we are seeing hyper growth six, seven years into the business, which is even faster than the growth we saw in the first few years. And part of it is that network businesses which are built around true sort of networks continue to accelerate and can accelerate later on in the process. But if you haven't created the right foundation in the early days, they fall apart. And I think that's a lesson. I think that's what entrepreneurs can learn because you got to go slow to go fast because in cloud-based businesses where you have network effects, if there's a crack in the foundation, it could come crumbling down. It can come completely coming down. And it did. I mean, there were times in 2013 when people were literally doing things and their data would get lost and other things. We had to fix many of those broken pieces. We had USPS come to our offices and say, hey, either you pay us multimillion dollar fine or we have the right to arrest you. We had to renegotiate our contract with them.  And you hear terms like blitz scaling and stuff these days and they're great terms. But at the same time, if you don't fix what's broken, you can't build a super scalable business. You got to be ready to blitz scale. As Reid Hoffman's famous channel, Masters of Scale points out, which by the way is great program. But if you're not ready, you could crash and burn big time. This is a good point. I have conversations a lot with a lot of senior people. One of them Theresa Carlson who runs Amazon web services, public sector cloud business. She talks about doing the hard work up front. And you know, she's in public sector so you have to get those kind of certifications. Sounds like this is a lot of things that you had to do. How did that test your entrepreneurial spirit? I know you and you're hard charging, but you're pragmatic and you can see that. But taking the time to do the work can sometimes test the patience of the team and the entrepreneur themselves. What's your reaction to that? I would say that when we started Poshmark, the mission was that can we serve 100 million people in the country, not even around the world. We're in our way, we have 40 million people. From day one, what we saw was deep engagement in the platform or because of the level of usage we had because of the level of sort of activation we had, we knew we were on to something. I'll share a small episode with you which convinced us that we've touched a deep nerve within the community is in May of 2012, we were barely six, seven months into our app being launched in the public space and we had maybe five or 10,000 users. At that time, we were adjusting our shipping for the first time and literally we announced, we had launched the product with a small discount on the shipping, we were going to take it back. And we just said, we're going to take it back. We got 200 plus emails, which range from you're going to take away my entire set of clothing and my entire business and we barely thought we were even launched. And so we knew we were servicing something very deep. That commitment to servicing the community where you are really helping people at a deep level allowed us right through these crazy ups and downs. And there was a point in time we went around the valley even though we had the initial funding, in the mid stages of it, we got over 200 rejections in the paradigm. Sometimes multiple buys by the same investors. And so it was definitely not a smooth ride in the middle of building this company but that sort of passion for community and what they were experiencing kept us going. Let's talk about people first and venture capital. One of the things I'm impressed on with this program we're doing with Mayfield is and theCUBE has a network effect business in the U.S. as well with the community. It's a people-centric culture. We live through the social media early days when social and democratization was happening. More than ever now, you're seeing the role of people because we're all connected. So there's rapid communications, there's frictionless people to yell and to raise their hand and give accolades as well. So you have now a social dynamic with the fabric around the world. People can transact, communicate, complain, applaud. This is changing everything. How does that change your outlook on life? Because you have to recruit people. They want to work for a company that's people-centric. They want to work for a mission-driven company. These are the new dynamics we're starting to see in this next generation. How does people first impact your mission? So for me, life is all about people. This company is all about people. We serve people. People is one of our core values. And my connection with Mayfield, which was through Naveen, started back actually in my previous company. At the very beginning of that journey, 0405, and we tried to partner up, but the timing was never right. So when we were starting Poshmark, Naveen was the first one with a term sheet even before he'd sort of seen the business idea. And to me, that was a huge belief in me and the team I could put together. And then I have the same sort of feelings about the people we bring on into the company where many of my team members here, including two of my co-founders, were involved with me at Kaboodle. One of them was a co-founder in Kaboodle. The first 20, 30, 40 people I think in the company are still here seven or eight years later. There were people who are now playing very senior roles in the company where they've gone through their ups and downs and we are always behind. Two, three people left and we re-recruited them back into the company. So I think at the end, life anywhere, but particularly in today's world is so much about people and relationships. And it's the same thing we take to our community. I mean, we just finished our sixth annual user conference which was six times bigger than our first one. But what was amazing was there were so many people who were there in the first conference who have been coming to all the six conferences and they are now like many celebrities in the community. And so it's just amazing to see how focus on people can be both rewarding at a business level but also very gratifying at a personal level. It's nice to see you hit that tipping point. Congratulations on your success. It's great to see your great entrepreneur. I want to ask you the question around funding because I know we've both been through venture capital fundings. You've been through this one building this great company you're on now and you actually hit massive growth to a whole other level you're challenged today and going forward. And this is given it's Mayfield's 50th anniversary. You've seen a lot of changes in venture capital. A round used to be A rounds, now there's Steve and pre-seed. There's all kinds of nuance and now you have alternative funding now in a global lens. Keeps you seeing blockchain and cryptocurrency although ICOs have taken a bath because of the regulatory issues around regulation. Some scams out there obviously. But venture capital has been tried and true. What's changed in venture capital the past 25 years in your view? I think two things which have happened particularly in the last seven or eight years is there's a lot of it. And secondly it favors the mighty more than the weak. And so those are sort of the two big changes that have happened in the venture capital business. And I think you were just mentioning is that the people I used to work with who are angel investors who are now investing in post growth stage funds, right? I mean the same company. So everyone is sort of leveled up and leveled up and then leveled up. You see venture capital is raising two, three, four billion dollar funds. I mean that's not venture capital. There's no way you can deploy it at the venture stage. Companies are staying private much longer at different scales. Which I think is probably more sort of a sign of the times. And finally I think it is the metrics and the scale that your business can achieve that VCs are very aware of is an order of magnitude bigger than it has ever been. In fact sort of in some ways unicorn being a unicorn is sometimes people joke is almost an insult. You need to be a deca unicorn these days. So the feeling of not being enough is constant. And that's challenging too for the venture industry because there's still the classic building blocks of entrepreneurship and venture architecture which is you start with an idea and you get a prototype and certainly it's easier to get on cloud computing. Certainly a great win for the entrepreneur. So I can see some maybe some acceleration but at the end of the day it's still the classic blocking and tackling of building a company. Yes. Building a durable company. Absolutely. And you and I have both seen the 98, 99, 2000 timeframe. Everyone believes nothing repeats and we certainly see maybe not exactly the same thing. Maybe it's an order of magnitude less but there's definitely some level of exuberance we see today. But if you're building a fundamentally good business that has robust economics that can scale and has built on foundational principles with a large sort of market, I don't think that we are wrong in terms of deploying massive amounts of capital against it. But at the same time, I think it also creates certain socioeconomic as well as responsibility challenges that I don't think we are fully facing up to as a economy and as a valley. Well, you've raised over a hundred million plus so you've done some funding, a lot of funding. So you have a lot of cash you've raised. When you had to go through those exercises of looking at the fundraising because you don't want it to die on the vine. You're building durable business. You got to go through multiple round of fundings. What were the key decision points for you as you started to look at this fundraising process to build your business? So in the early days, it was literally just about survival. I mean, there were times when I ran the business on negative balance sheet, right? So it isn't that it's been easy. It was only, I would say, the last funding round was the one that was easy where we got multiple term sheets proactively and the first couple of them. In between every single round. You're gonna work on them, things are scaling, things are great. In the middle of it, every single round was effectively zero to one term sheets every single time. We were lucky to have Mayfield as a partner and some of our early investors like Inventus and Menlo who sort of supported us through each of these pieces of journey. Mayfield has an anchor point, but it was really, really hard. And part of it is that what we were doing was challenging so many things still are that even to process our cohort data is hard. Do you think of it as user? Do you think of it as buyer? Do you think of it as seller? What is it? It looks like a bird, but it moves like a plane, you know. What is it? It's Superman or Superwoman, right? And so that being a challenge, only in the last round did we have the freedom. We could raise no money, some money, all of the money and most of the focus for us for that capital was really to have the deep pockets that'll be required for global expansion. We had actually scaled the business at that point in time that we didn't need too much money for domestic expansion. And in fact, not only have we not touched any money from that round, we've not touched money from the previous round so far, most of the money from the previous round. So again, it's part of it is you need muscle to compete in a bigger world, but at the same time, if you build a fundamentally sound business, then over time you can scale it without, without money. And you got SaaS, services service and network effects booming in great community. That's great tailwind for you guys for sure. It is a phenomenal tailwind. And in fact, I was just in my management team meeting this morning and I said, you know, we are growing, but we can grow even faster at this point because the level of network effect we are seeing in the community is it an extraordinary effect where there's sort of second order. Our community is opening up Instagram accounts to promote Poshmark to sort of go out to YouTube. So there's sort of this viral organic movement that's happening across the country, which is just bringing out a whole different level of growth than we've ever seen. You know, there's a whole new dynamic. It's interesting. I'm seeing it. Not a lot of people writing stories about it or documenting it, but you know, the masses of scale has a whole different perspective, but no one's really talking about some of that you guys are touching upon and we're seeing it in our business. Creating an environment that has network effects and community and good content, in this case, product for your end. Creates a flywheel. And what's interesting is in this new era of people who can create value with the ability to capture it, it's really a unique formula. And I think this is the new kind of management discussion. Certainly lower prices increase value. That's an Amazon effect, I call that. Black from the words, good examples, well documented. You do that, you're good, you're doing it. But now you've got the ability for people to create value. Who can then capture it? This is almost a whole nother big wave. I think the power of people today is at a very unique level, right? And it can go in the negative direction, but when you harness it from a positive perspective, it's phenomenal. To me, we sort of added a fifth core value recently is that at the end, the true happiness come from service of others, right? And if you service everyone in our job, you're servicing our community, who's then servicing other people, and that creates an amazing sort of paradigm. And if you remove the conversation money because it's taken care of, it's built into the platform, then it just keeps sort of circulating. And I think that's something that people underestimate. And one of the things that you see is that, for example, an open source software, right? You start by focusing on community, then it becomes all about money, and then you forget about the community, and you see many of the large open source companies slow down because they forget the fact that what got them there was the community. And to me, I think that's the heart. If they agree, the projects fail. Exactly, exactly. And so the hardest thing at scale to balance is, how do you make sure that you're still focused on the community? Great stuff. Final question for you, you know, on these days with venture capital, the question always is, where's the value add? Talk about your experiences with Mayfield, and what differentiates a value add versus a value subtract investor? When should an entrepreneur feel it? What's the sign, tell signs of someone who's got value add and a partner who's not? I think Mayfield is so aligned in so many ways with our core values, which is focus on people and focus on service, that it's been just an amazing partnership with them. You know, even in our lowest moments, I knew that we will get funded. I didn't know how it is, because I knew that Naveen and Mayfield will figure out a way. So I never sort of worried about the capital after I partnered with Naveen and saw him in action for a year and a half. And if you're a venture capitalist, you need to provide capital. And forget about any other service. Many VCs fail that one test, which is to provide capital when you're most needed, right? But beyond that, it's been a great resource. I mean, I met my co-founder through Mayfield. Tracy and I were first introduced via Mayfield. Many of our recruiting of the top executives have come through Mayfield, but they're always available as a sounding board across the pieces. So I do think that they take their service paradigm to a whole new level. And I realize too, right, the supports there, they support, I mean, they have an HR partner who's helped up with, you know, thinking through some many of the recruiting issues, hiding the recruiting partnerships, et cetera. BR, other areas as we need it. And somebody that you can call on to, my CFO was just talking about, we are in a searching for a general counsel and Mayfield has been great, even in that help at this late stage of a company. So it's fantastic. It's a great network. People value paying it forward. Manish, thanks for coming on, sharing your insights here as part of theCUBE's 50th People Network with Mayfield. Thanks for sharing your experience. Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure and joy to see you after so many years as well. Yeah, you look great. This is theCUBE here on St. Hill Road at Mayfield for their 50th anniversary as a venture capital firm, sharing insights and ideas from entrepreneurs and tech executives. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.


Well, anyway, we're a few minutes late, but welcome to the operator's view on the certified open-stack administrator exam quiz who's passed or who's taken the certified open-stack exam No one okay. Thank you You didn't raise your hand Okay, well, let me introduce the panelist Something's wrong with my slides Okay, it's working. Anyway, I want to introduce the panel, but myself my name is Susan Wu I'm the director of technical marketing at Mitokura. Mitokura is actually a global startup We have about 50 people with locations in Tokyo Barcelona right here in Barcelona, San Francisco We provide network virtualization overlay We're the plug-in for open-stack neutron We are also the top contributor to open-stack neutron core and we're also the founder of the Courier container project. So let me introduce the panelist It's not in any particular order. I have Samir Ibratic He's the head of systems and infrastructure at Mitokura Samir Robert Sarmor Robert's the founding partner and cloud advisor for cumulus technologies cumulus with a K Ron Terry Ron is the training architect for Sousa and has done a lot of work With the certified open-stack administrator exam. What is this thing? Anyway, and why are we here? so a number of us Volunteered to work on this open-stack administrator exam where we actually Defined the job task and a number of us wrote items on the exam actually So we we have some tips So just very quickly the definition of the open-stack administrator is that you have six months of hands-on experience and the exam covers a lot of areas, but the core open-stack projects like compute storage networking and things like that and When you're taking the exam you can answer the questions using the web interface or the CLI Mostly those two very unlikely you'll touch the API actually, but it does involve skills at Typical open-stack administrator would use on a daily basis. I'm the only caveat is there's no Expectations for you to like install or architect the full open-stack environment So that's kind of the definition of the open-stack administrator. So How does this exam work? I'm gonna let the people who have taken the exam talk about that and actually Ron actually was part of the committee in Defining the items and writing the items. I'm gonna let Ron talk about that a little bit. All right, so It is on all right. I'll just come up here and stand here so I can kind of point at this at the slides as I go You know with the magic invisible pointer All right, so One of the key concepts to this exam is it is 100% practicum meaning there's no true false multiple guest questions It's all you have to do it. They give you a scenario. You have to actually do open-stack cloud administration And One other cool thing about it is it can be remotely proctored meaning you can take this exam at home Okay, I would say at home in your underwear But you probably don't want to do that because you have to have a webcam turned on because they watch you So I suppose you could do it in your underwear if you really wanted to that might be kind of embarrassing Okay, but the idea is you have to have again a computer at home you have a webcam you install a browser plug-in and One of the catches that we have found people who've taken it remotely is you can only have if you have a Multi-monitor system at home. You can only have one monitor active. So you'd have to you have to deactivate the other monitors For some reason they don't like you to have multiple monitors because they think you might be cheating off of one of the monitors I don't know okay Another thing about the exam is based on the open-stack Liberty release So it is a couple of releases back the idea is they're going to be revving the exam every what was it two years? I think yeah, we're gonna do every two years So it's gonna skip quite a few Versions, but that's actually okay because you're really only being tested on the core stuff That's in open-stack. That's really gonna not change much of anything across the different revisions The cost to take an exam is three hundred dollars as a matter of fact if you actually go to the foundation lounge This week you can get a fifty dollar discount off of that So if you pay here for the exam voucher you can get the exam voucher for two hundred fifty dollars So if any of you are thinking about taking the exam anytime in the near future Buy it here.  Okay. Oh, we talked about it being Revised every two years your certification is valid for three years So if you take the exam and pass it today Three years from now it would time out you'd have to take the exam again to renew your certification Me again machine-migrated, but we talked about so you you just you run the You're given a set of items you need to do hands-on you do the things when you get done It's actually tested not how you did it They're testing if you successfully completed the thing they want you to do so that they're testing the end result And that's a machine-gradable that way You don't have a human picking through your check in to see what you did and whether it worked the exam environment is Currently deployed it's on a boon tube But it deploys a vanilla open stack on top of that using open-stack ansible now This is actually something that there was just a press release it went out today from Susa There's actually an update to this one of the things at Susa that we found as we've been teaching this is that the Having an open-stack exam Generic open stack is great We have no problem with that, but we found that people who are not familiar with a boon tube Maybe they're you know red hat people or maybe they're Susa people being forced to use a an a boon tube command line Has caused some some difficulty people are like oh do I have to learn a boon tube to be able to take this exam? And it keeps them from you know taking the exam because they're worried that they need to study up some other stuff So what we've done is we're piloting a program that's going to allow you to have Basically choose which command line environments you want in the exam So the open stack is going to be identical But you can choose whether you want to do a boon tube and the first additional command line It's going to be available to you is open Susa So you'll have the chance of an open Susa command line where you run that the CLI commands But you do have both the CLI and the dashboard available to you So you can use either tool to accomplish most of the exam items However, I will warn you there are some exam items that you really can only do from the command line So you need to be familiar with the command line So that when you get to those you can do those exact those items so let me let Some of let Rob talk about that area so where which area was so particular sticky that you actually need the CLI I knew you had some great insights there a couple like Like storage so Swift is actually a really important component of this test I've played a lot of open stack systems that don't use it, but it is one of the core services So understanding Swift and understanding some of the advanced capabilities of Swift becomes important And many of these capabilities if you've used the user interface if you've used the CLI You'll know that the CLI gives you a lot more control over what objects how objects interact in the Swift environment So being able to interact with those objects Manipulate the object in real time is a core part of being able to administer Administer and manage the services that were deployed in that sort of environment knowing that is critical if you don't know that The help that's online may not give you the answers So really having having gone through a lot of different exercises around things you can do with Swift is one of those things I wish I knew when I took the test Yes, so meet occur we're all about neutrons so Samir actually helped me write some of the neutron questions And about 13% of it is troubleshooting. So Samir What did you want people to know when you help me with those questions the test has a troubleshooting part? That's mostly like a standard command line log repping Troubleshooting session. So it's not something that's most of us Ain't used to it's a standard system administration stuff So anybody who has any experience with command line should be able to do it but again the stress on Knowing the command line in theory. It's possible to pass the test just by clicking on horizon and doing stuff But the time of the test the time frame you can't really make it in time waiting for clicking in every response Yeah, definitely So the exam is two and a half hours So I remember that it was really aggressive So you do have to have some strategies to maximize your time. Did you have some tips right? So the strategy is like what you can do what you're very confident of doing do it fast in CLI If you have something that you don't really are not really confident really leave it for later Maybe try to do it in in a web interface or horizon or whatever Just a quick note when you mentioned, you know, you could probably pass the test by clicking everything in horizon That may be true, but you won't get a hundred percent Realize that the passing score. I think is what seventy five seventy three percent something seventy eight percent Okay, and so you can miss some items, but if you don't know the command line if you have to rely on horizon That means you would probably have to get a hundred percent of everything you did in horizon If if you wanted to pass not ever touching the command line, we don't recommend it That's kind of what we're saying here is get used to using the command line because you will Because you will need it another note about the troubleshooting bits Some of the key things that I would point out to that is make sure you know What messages are going to show up in which log files and Where those log files are that's one of the one of the key things that I would maybe suggest in the troubleshooting part because You'll probably have to do that quick show of hands, how many people have operational experience like really using open Sack, okay, you yeah Samir like where are those commands? I have to memorize all the neutron commands Basically, I look for the var log basically both the troubleshooting and the rest of the test it It's very hard to pass without an actual hands-on experience Whether it's like self-training or Working with open stack. I don't think like just making an artificial test and trying to remember stuff is a good way To pass the test you have to play with the open stack And you have to understand where things where which service has logs in which files, etc etc, what to expect from open stack and Susan mentioned it's a based on Liberty open stack, but it's not really Open-stack distribution specific test. It's pretty general open stack kind of experience We touched a little bit on the time The exam itself is 2.5 hours, but I know you guys were working like all the way through right and there was like no extra time So I need are there any tips, you know to figure out number one is understand the command line I Can't I can't stress this enough because honestly a lot of the things you'll see a question in the in the test Maybe that you've never done you haven't gone through every possible permutation of interaction with the system If you know the command line or at least know the basic commands to utilize the command line Then the number one thing that you can do is use the command line help the command line help Believe it or not has Nearly all the answers with exceptional swift read your swift documents But really that the help is the help is amazing and the help really can get you through answering all the questions There are still some things that you'll just have to have experienced and I would say you know Understanding domains in Keystone is something that if you've used older open stack environments and haven't used domains Get an idea of what they're like. I think that's the other key thing I would say Command line auto completion is your friend in this case it helped me answer some questions I wasn't sure about for example The next thing there is a very clear clearly written COA tests exam specification document online Read it. It's everything's there. What you need to know and what you don't need to know That's my advice. So Samir was referring to the weights So there are weights for different portions of the exam So the troubleshooting was worth 13% ish And don't think of those as actually time that you spend though It's the weight of the grading of the exam and there was some percentages associated with storage and Yeah, so if you're wondering what we're talking about here And I think we've got a we had a link to it in a previous slide But if you just do a Google search of COA objectives, it's like one of the first top five links that you get to it Does it gives it lists you here's of all the different categories Here's all of the objectives that you need to know how to do and we keep hammering on Swift here And the reason we are doing that as he mentioned is Not as many people have experience with Swift as they do other things and the command line is not as easily understandable But if you look at the objectives that it tells you you need to know about Swift And you learn how to do all of those objectives, you'll be okay It's just remember that it may not be as easy to find those how to do those things from the command line help with Swift as it is with the other things so we're gonna switch gears and Kind of talk about how to prepare for the COA because it's actually not like a paper exam So Ron, maybe you can talk about Training or yeah, so Samir said one thing get hands-on experience I think both of you guys have said this it really is true You need to have hands-on experience you can't just go read a book You can't go read some man pages and go take this test and expect to pass you have to have hands-on experience now My job being a training architect for SUSE is to design training good training. We've done that in SUSE We have a great COA prep course matter of fact. I'm teaching it upstairs right now. They're doing labs as I'm doing this But but that's one way that you can get the hands-on But I would also suggest don't just go take a class and think you're ready to pass Take the class and then practice practice practice Because you need to be comfortable at the command line I tell my students this when they do they take the class if you can do all of the hands-on exercises in my course comfortably without having to refer to the Lab manual then you Can do about 90% of what is on the exam and that other 10% is really like you said the experience That you just have to do it and there's just some things that you just run into in Day-to-day operating an open-stat cloud I think people really care about the answer to this question actually. Hey, what are the hiring managers look for? You know, do I get more money if I take this exam? Do I get a promotion? I think people care about this and by the way, how many folks are getting ready to take this exam anyway? I didn't see anyone Anyway, Samir you hire people all the time I run clouds production clouds on a daily basis and I have a team of people who is doing the same thing in multiple geographies and after I've seen this exam and After I took the exam and experienced it. I can confidently say that I wouldn't hire people who didn't pass it for for running this kind of club because even though with a Relatively a lot of experience with open-stack. There were some items there that really Required me to take a look again into docs and remind myself how to do it And this is really a good and comprehensive way to prove yourself that you are worthy of running production cloud. I Would hire people who who passed the exam Yeah, I'll take another approach at it I also have hired people at the path in the past looking at their capabilities in the open-stack environment and I've talked to people that have taken other Classes and taking the tests that were associated with those other vendors classes And the worst thing is that when you asked somebody said okay look you took a three-day class on open-stack Can you tell me one thing about it given that you've also passed apparently a test and they say well It was six months ago, and I really don't remember anything All right, I mean that's that's part of it is that a lot of the tests that that have been put together are basically Yeah, it's a it's a checkbox at the end of the class to say oh, yeah I kind of remember a couple of things from the last couple days Really this test because you're forced to actually show that you can if not know it off the top of your head Which we don't expect and I don't think anybody expects to be able to get through this test with that You can discover it and that really shows a lot of value in a person's ability to actually be an effective resource For a team and especially one that understands open-stack because you understand then at least something about the networking space Something about the compute space something about the storage services in space and something about the identity space right the core Things that you need to understand in an open-stack environment So from that perspective, it's amazingly powerful And I don't think there's any question that if you have proven that you know this stuff You should be able to get a better salary than just somebody who's coming in as a sys admin Who knows potentially one of the many silos in the in the service space But doesn't understand the the the operations of a multi variant cloud like this Let me open up for questions because this is sessions really for you You're here to figure out whether you want to take the exam. What do you get out of the exam? Is there any promotion in store any questions out there at this point before we get back into some of these others? Yeah, go ahead sir Sample questions so actually last session and Austin we actually gave a sample for every Key area you can refer back to the video So we gave an example of the neutron troubleshooting question a compute question and a storage question but formally though the foundation is not offering any sample exams or sample questions because Then you could probably study to the exam and just pass it the all COA Exam requirements is the name of the page you can Google it and actually it has a list of all possible Questions, let me make sure and I'll tell you what that is actually So the COA is a composite of the task that an open sac administrator is expected to do And so it is not like an exam question Like you would study up like for SAT or something like that But it is the things that an open sac administrator would do like something like set up tenants or How to sign a floating IP, you know that kind of thing or the floating I can't ping the floating IP. What's wrong with it, right? So that's that nature of the what's called COA requirements. I'm not aware of any like practice tests That is probably what you're looking at but again using just a training material that we do We're very much exercise and hands-on exercise oriented. So if you were to take like say the SUSE training We give you all of the exercises which are basically example like we showed in the the last Opus that summit give you examples of the things that you would need to know how to do. Yeah You know just a second that most of the classes that are out there including the one that we've put together It's the same sort of thing I'm not going to give you the exact answer to the question But it's things like you know like like Susan was saying and most of us have been saying I need to create a user Right, do you know how to do that? Again, if you click through the UI you can probably find where users might get created You could probably create a user that way if on the other hand You know the keystone command or better yet even the open stack command that you can use to create a user Or understand the open stack command and help to find the way to create a user You can probably get that done much more efficiently and it's not just a user It's all of the other things that are listed in the requirements document right same thing for virtual machines Same thing for storage both swift storage. Let's not forget volumes are an important part of storage in the open Stack space as well So all those things that are listed in that environment if you think about the operations that you have to do around them And you know stand up a dev stack environment worst case right start working through the process of well Can I turn a virtual machine on what does that require? Can I get a volume mounted on a virtual machine? Can I boot of you know these are the sorts of things that you need to be able to do Whether it's through the UI or through the CLI again I would recommend if you can do it all through the CLI that much the better but That's that's the approach that we can take and that's really what we can offer from a class perspective Because we aren't trying to teach you all the know you don't forget this one little command and swift because otherwise You're gonna fail a test because that's not really true anyway But what our classes are intending to try to do for you is give you the model for how to do these things How to learn that's why I say from the perspective of what I hire you if you've been able to pass that test I know that there's something that stumped you that you passed through right you got beyond That's the real key to me Another thing when we talk about hiring managers Being in the training and certification world for many many years We always joke that a certification exam basically is just telling people that I suck This at least this much or I don't suck at least this much You know and that's really what it is it you can't be expected to know everything But like you said you can be expected to Find out how to do things and that is more important than almost any other skill is knowing how to find the right answer in a timely manner But that still means you have to have enough experience so you know where to look So each of these guys have this really bright red certificate with like a number on it. I saw that So what happened after you got the certificate? After I passed the the test the exam I used the opportunity to put that the little sticker you get in return to my LinkedIn profile and it's like two hours later Emails started to arrive like crazy recruiters It's like there's this position opening in this company that and every like 30 minutes and following Seven days phone. I just started to receive you more and more these recruiter emails I mean in our jobs. We usually receive every now and then these these emails But after this thing I was so surprised like he got an offer from Goldman Sachs Yeah, it's it's a lot of companies are really looking for this skill set. It's valuable Robert We launched the exam in Austin and so there were test takers that took the exam in Austin But I think we actually have some statistics for passing actually I do and I'm trying to remember I saw those statistics recently and It's surprisingly low like 50 to 60% I think are passing I begin That is a difficult one because they announced in the the The keynote it's been a little over 500 people have taken the exam Since it was released in Austin and if the pass rate is somewhere around I think that's 60% I mean you can kind of do the math there and I again I'm fudging numbers here because I don't remember the exact but it really is it's a challenging exam So what it is is the foundation has a lot of codes So some of them the codes may have been issued But you can register for the code and then have a year to take it So some people might have the codes already, but they may not have taken it So I my company we have like 20 engineers that have codes, but obviously only a few have completed exam Yeah, we need to get them on that come on They need an environment. They need the same way. I think we're all the same way Another question there. So the question is are you asking about is is the exam Available globally or is it most popular in certain areas? Is that what you're asking? Yeah, okay So is it the accreditation widely accepted by hiring managers I think is the question So since it's launched in in April and and one thing about the Chinese market that I've been speaking with the OpenSec foundation is that When the exam is not localized to the local language So there are fewer test takers in certain countries that prefer to take the test in there in the language of their choice So I believe currently I think only English is available and so for China I think and and then this is the same as the user survey as well until they localized the user survey to Chinese the Number of deployments is artificially low actually when there's actually a bigger number of deployments that we saw today, right? We saw like China mobile and and Bilan group and there's several really large Chinese deployment. It's just as artificially low And it's not really truly reflecting Therefore they're not going to recognize the exam as much either because they're just not seeing it as much I would think the The class or that the COA is actually accredited by the Linux foundation the Linux foundation does a lot of other other Tests that are accredited tests So there's a history there just from the other other Certifications at the Linux foundation provides around Linux based services basically Linux sys administration services This is effectively an extension to that And that's one of the reasons that the OpenSec foundation partnered with the Linux foundation to provide this test So that it's not just, you know cumulus technology saying, yeah, I've got a certification test You want you know, nobody's necessarily gonna believe me because I'm a small company But the Linux foundation does actually have some weight behind it as a real accreditation partner for the value of that that examination I just add to this as a answer I got like at least two recruiter offers for well-famous Chinese companies as well Wow That might be oh, so one second while it loads up, but we have the link. Oh, sorry about that We have the link to the COA requirements in the slide So feel free to refer to that. That's what were the weights of the exam and also the job tasks are on here So if they're do you guys have any questions for the panelists or for people in the item writing community? Okay, so the question is This is this an admin level and are there additional exams coming in the future? so yes, this is an admin level exam so a level one exam and the current Position of the open-stack foundation is That they don't want to go up the stack They they're gonna allow going up the stack out to the different vendors Which kind of makes a lot more sense especially when it comes to deployment and architecting because the different vendors are all gonna Recommend different ways of doing things in which one is right. Well. Yes is the answer It really just depends if they're your vendor you need to do it the way that they suggest that you do it So the again the current position is they're gonna do the base level administrative Certification and allow the additional exams to come from the vendor side of things. Yeah Were there any other questions in the audience? Yeah, go ahead, sir. Is it possible to only use a command line? Yes. Yes Questions up here. That's right here. Yeah, the key is you need an open-stack environment There are lots of ways of getting an open-stack environment stood up on your laptop I'm partial to the cola model today I think cola is the most amazing way to deploy open-stack ever built And I'm not a core developer or anything. I just really think that from an operations perspective It is the answer but that also means that you also need understanding of containers and some of these other services as well Dev stack has some benefits and that is a very easy way to get an open-stack environment running and again The point in this test and the point in the certification is not that I can turn an open-stack system on It's that I can use that open-stack system and actually get real work done with it Right. Yeah, so that's that's why that's why I suggest that Dev stack is a simple way of getting there But even Dev stack still has problems because you have to go turn the neutron services on in Dev stack Don't forget to do that Yeah, I like cola is my answer to that you need several hosts actually to understand how to troubleshoot things If it's only like one host and it's although the exam itself a single host Yeah, but you just need to Yeah, it really is kind of irrelevant how it's deployed as long as you've got the services deployed I mean for example, I mentioned that the exam environment is deployed using open-stack ansible and it's deployed on a single system So it's actually spread across a whole bunch of containers But that's actually irrelevant. It doesn't matter that it's deployed that way because you're gonna talk to the API's However, it's deployed. So I guess the simple answer is get it deployed however you can and then use the Requirements guide to go through and make sure you know how to do each one of those things Researching those things from the documentation and again I got to give props to the document documentation team the open-stack documentation is some of the best technical documentation I've ever used Especially for an open-source project So they so it's really good information even though if it may lean slightly developed heavy it still has good administrator and User level documentation that can help you answer all this stuff Did that answer the question? Okay, okay, and back so the question is do you have to dig into the configuration files for the services For this exam and the answer is you don't have to dig into the configuration files for configuration purposes But if you can use the configuration files to help find where things are such as where do the log files exist? That could be very useful, but again There's no deployment or configuration of The underlying services required for the exam. It's a clouds deployed. You're gonna use it from there up The container aspect is one that that may give some folks pause But the the couple of of test questions that I remember seeing at least that actually have you interact with containers in any way Those are documented very cleanly This is what you need to do in order to get to the point where you should be able to do the right thing with the open-stack system So may I do you want to comment on the neutron logs? Actually, I do that And having been involved in the update of the exam where we're you know being able to choose different command lines There's been a slight rearchitecture of the exam as well that's trying to even eliminate the whole container isms That that are in there that could potentially cause problems even though they are well documented out So it's again. We're trying to do things to Make it easier because that one particular question you're talking about is the single most missed question on the test And so that was one of the things as we were going back and doing some reviewing trying to go All right, this is not hard what we're asking him to do But the way we're asking him to do it seems to be the problem and so again We're trying to even abstract away from you know the container Ness to make it even a little bit. You know just more generic in nature Reflect on on on the questions of the exam about troubleshooting. They are really Basic questions Most you you don't really need to fix anything in the deployment at all you basically need to find very trivial issue and Fix it by a very simple way is kind of almost trivial, but You need to be familiar where to look at and how to act But it's basically it's basically most trouble most simple troubleshooting there exists But still it's a troubleshooting Mm-hmm Okay, so any more questions. We only have two minutes and then we'll write. Oh, there's one last one here Okay, sure Correct. So yes, you have one free retake and I think you can do that within 12 month as well Yeah, and I want to just kind of hammer bring that because that is a really good point When I do my training I Testing anxiety is Huge among students and I think anybody who's done training who's been a sack classes and had to take exams knows what I'm talking about here And I try to hammer into my students that tests are actually learning experiences not testing experiences They help teach you what you don't know so you can go learn it and the fact that the open-stack exam has a built-in Free retake you should definitely be using that mentality Study up get as prepared as you can go take the test And find out what it is you didn't you don't know just in case you do you don't don't pass it Go learn it and then take it again and pass. So that is a really a good thing. I'm glad you brought that up One last question for me Is it possible to not know all the projects and so pass like could I not know something or? Which project do I not if I didn't know it would I still be able to pass? Yes Maybe it depends. I mean honestly it really is depends. I would not advocate you saying well I know everything but Swift so I'm gonna be fine. You can't count on that Honestly be familiar with everything that's on there to the best Possibly your best ability. Is it possible? Maybe but I would not advocate that at all Only if you know everything else the perfect Present then then you can but knowing a little bit of everything is better than no Concentrating on just one or two or three things. I guess there's the open-stack idea anyway Yeah, you should know them all So I'm only bringing this up because I knew somebody who actually never used I want to say cinder and they were able to pass exam Again, I think that comes from being able to understand how to use tools like the command line client help to discover The answers to the question that's being proposed correct They were able to figure it out in the exam room It's like I know enough about the other tools to understand how this tool should work. Okay I think we're out of time. I so I want to thank the panelists Robert Starmer Acumulus Samir from me to Kura Ron Terry, Suza, and they might be around for you know Questions that you want to ask personally, so thank you very much for for this


Conor Dunham, welcome to simulation. Thanks. It's great to be on I'm excited for the conversation. I met Conor very recently just a couple days ago and Conor and Jordan Jordan Rain has been a friend of mine seven years now Very close friend and Conor and Jordan co-founded Sobound Labs Yeah, and so we're gonna be talking about decentralized reputation and we were having a good Conversation about the importance of this.  Sure Because I think it's very relatable for the audience which is rather than taking the existing style of governance which in many ways is like Plutocracy governance by the wealthy to be able to buy voting power and pasting that into web 3 into blockchain crypto, etc Because right now it is coin or token based governance voting So we had an example just happened a couple weeks ago where Beanstalk had a flash loan attack where there was a Malevolent actor that took out a massive loan of of beanstalks token and then hijacked the voting power the governance to take out a 182 million dollars out of their treasury and then within 10 minutes they did that whole process and returned the loan And they got 80 million dollars through that process and and I don't know Thousands of people lost tens of thousands of dollars or something. It was it was a lot of people that were like what the and So what the taleg buterin has been talking about for a while now has been moving beyond Coin based or token based governance and one of the big things that Connor and Jordan are pioneering here is Reputation based governance or merit based governance on-chain activity or events being Rewarded through non-transferable NFTs or badges or soulbound badges So a little bit of backstory of where we're going with web 3 with what you guys are building So at least that and then now I would love for you to also take over share anything of what I just said about Play on that and we can also talk about what you were sharing on the porch as a good way to Bridge this into the mainstream. Sure. Yeah, I think the the beanstalk example is a great way to kind of like Explain why it is that we are developing new forms of governance. It's not really a problem with the the smart contracts It's not like there was a bug in the the beanstalk smart contracts. It's just the the governance system They're using how to flaw in it where someone can take out a flash loan and then exploit some contracts So this is a very hot topic right now in web 3 and lots of lots of people are spending their energy working on this problem I was introduced to the graph and sub subgraphs about a year ago and I realized that If you could get this information that a subgraph picks up and put it back on chain Then you could use it as a as a form of governance That it cannot be bought so you can actually Give the governance power to the people that have actually done the things that are Beneficial to the wider community or the protocol or whatever it is that is being voted on Yeah, mm-hmm Yeah, okay Yeah, so there's a good thread to pull there and Maybe I'll just table that because it already started going into subgraphs and Just for a bit because I we will get there I want to also have you mention the very relatable example that you were sharing with me on the patio about the way that today we look at LinkedIn and What how we feel like that will look in the future? Yeah, so right now you know if you want to Advertise what you've done in your past because you want to you know Get awesome jobs you put post your employment history up on LinkedIn or something like that and It's a interesting process because you know No one's fact-checking fact-checking anything there like you can can make things up and people do all the time And then they get interviews and maybe the interview goes well, maybe doesn't but The bottom line is that it's all self-reported most of the time And then the second side of that is you're sharing your data with this this company and if they they go away or They can use your data to their benefit So a new system that kind of takes advantage of Blockchains and web3 could be built where you can verifiably claim that you Did things in the past so you contributed towards certain protocols or you maybe you were a user of protocols It can even just be for you know making a certain number of trades on a decentralized exchange or whatever it is So anyone can come up with a new Criteria for what? constitutes a badge and then publish that in a permissionless way and then the people that satisfy that criteria criteria can then Claim an NFT that is non-transferable and therefore cannot be Bought and there could be voting power attached to that It's optional, so it there doesn't have to be voting power attached to it, but we imagine that a governance structure that uses this kind of Non-transferable voting power has some benefits to it and it doesn't necessarily have to be a hundred percent badge based governance and zero coin voting there there are balances there and there could be You know you could take the best of both worlds and utilize them both to yeah And move be even beyond it to something that's going to include a third or fourth element and stuff like that That's an unknown right now, which is which is cool. This is like the first push Let's say beyond just solely coin or token base voting What you just shared there is super powerful because we're all very relatable example of going and looking on LinkedIn or basically even Instagram or wherever because what's happening is people are using Social media or the internet as an extended phenotype of themselves portraying out to the social sphere their merits Right and so the idea is now can when I see somebody saying something on their LinkedIn or on their Instagram about their proficiencies their skills, how do we verify and It's through On-chain events is to how to be able to verify this in the future like that thing that you're saying that you did on LinkedIn We're just putting that in a verifiable way on chain and then we're able to have a non-transferable NFT that you Have on your portfolio Let's say and then that verifies that the thing that you're writing on your LinkedIn or your Instagram In the past and like web 2 you were writing it that you did it but now in web 3 you have a badge That is a direct correlate of an on-chain event, right exactly Yeah, it could be a collection of events Maybe you have to do something many times or maybe you have to do Five different things that admit five different events and once you've done all those things and you get a badge Yeah, yeah, this is so this is the cool like Way to understand this I would say for the mainstream like a mainstream perspective of understanding this I would say this is one of the most friendly ways is like Man like web 3 is gonna be about badges To correlate to on-chain events that are non-transferable They're soulbound and that I'm gonna have a collection of soulbound Badges and That Those are going to correlate to not only single Events on chain, but like you said multiple events on chain So over a period of five months if I do the thing one time per month And after five months checkmark then I get said badge That's so there's yeah, that's cool. I love that. I love that. It's a it's a very powerful way to visualize Reputation and merit and then I like another thing you said which is crucial is then it's Merit based access control or reputation based voting Yeah Yeah, I think that there are a lot of A lot of benefits to having sort of Reputation based voting that's going in line with a token based governance model because the interesting about interesting thing about governance is It's not necessarily a bad thing if people are not participating in governance, you know, if If you don't need to contact your Congressman Then you can kind of assume that things are doing pretty well, right? Like if people don't need to talk to their government officials, then things are going well So it's hard to tell when you know people are just not voting because they're lazy or if they're they're voting because they Are not informed or whatever it is But usually with a web 3 protocols, especially there's like a kind of a smaller group of people that are have like a Larger stake in it. Maybe they're actually spending their time working on this thing and then there's people that are interested in it from like an investment angle and The ability to kind of have more say If you have skin in the game, I think is pretty valuable And I think it's something that a lot of web 3 projects will be moving to in the next few years nice all right venture us into the Subgraph so what you started unpacking earlier? Sure. So a Subgraph so this this is coming out of the graph protocol a sub graph is a it's kind of like set of instructions on how to index the blockchain so Once you have a set of instructions that tell you how to index the blockchain You can have different parties. These are called indexers Indexed the blockchain according to the that set of instructions and then they can serve queries to people that are Interested in accessing that that information In a decentralized way because if everybody's agreeing that we're all indexing according to the same set of instructions then we should all be Responding to queries in the exact same way and so the graph has a whole system for how to handle queries that are query responses that are incorrect basically the grt token is Staked by indexers and if they respond to queries Incorrectly they can get slashed so they lose some of their grt stake so yeah, that's how subgraphs work and I Guess the realization that we had at soulbound labs is that a subgraph could be used as kind of a almost like a roll-up So you can Bundle up a bunch of interesting things that happened on the blockchain Condense it into like a 32 byte hash or something really really small and then put it back on the blockchain with the attestations from the indexers so that People can look at that That thing that you post on chain and know that it's legitimate because a bunch of people are Staking grt and they could get slashed if they're lying about it So it's almost a form of like an optimistic roll-up in a way Okay all right So indexing is a A Specific style of the data on Chain Indexing is storing data on chain in a specific way Not quite so the data is already on chain. It's just Organized in ways that are not conducive to humans so I think is organizing on chain data exactly Yeah, all of the data is publicly available Anyone could look at the blockchain and come to the same conclusions that the indexers are coming to so right now if I look at Ethereum block it's not organized It's organized according to standards that are you know meant for other smart contracts to read to yeah, okay? Yeah, okay? Yeah, and then Indexers further organize Right, okay, and the main use case for this right now Things like the uniswap dashboard that just displays all of the you know trading volume of all the different pairs and stuff like that That's built using subgraphs. So on the back end. They have a subgraph They're querying to come up with all the data to display on the website Okay, so indexers are further organizing the data on chain and then They're making that able to be queried Okay, so the the idea of like the of the graph not of subgraphs, but of the graph is to be able to make the data on chain Retrievable for those that desire it and then to make like an inclusive stakeholder process so that indexers are incentivized for good behavior to return the correct Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, the graph protocol is I mean their endgame is to create a decentralized marketplace for for data and It's not quite there yet because there's there's still the decentralization side has a ways to go I'd say but It's a great vision and I really hope it plays out. I'm happy to be contributing towards this kind of thing Yes and now So subgraphs are Is it a way of? Visualizing indexed what indexers are doing a way of visualizing it like is it is our subgraphs a Way of visualizing what is happening on chain The data on chain that indexers are organizing I Suppose you could put it that way, but it's still like it's still all just numbers, right? There's no there's no UI there. These are literally just like queries to a database. So usually Yeah, and it's current form the most common thing. You'll see Being used with the subgraphs are you know dashboards that kind of display data about certain protocols Okay, and so then how do you envision? Subgraphs in the process that we were describing and what is role and how do you roll up? Like reputational or merit-based data Yeah, that kind of Yeah, so okay, so if a subgraph Defines the criteria for Earning a badge then it can it can roll up all of the badges that have been earned into an encrypted An encrypted hash that is like very small We're I love this we're gonna break this down piece by piece. Okay, so the subgraph is The Like what would be required as On-chain behavior to earn a badge That's defined within the subgraph that's defined within the within the subgraph. Yeah, it's not the whole subgraph, but it's part of it. Okay. Yeah interesting then each Dow or each community is Designing their own subgraph and then Dependent and then the on-chain behavior of of agents Then depending on what the Dow wrote as their subgraph would then reward those agents with The communities badges. Yes. Yeah, exactly. And then Just to add one more thing there the criteria for earning a badge Doesn't have to be baked into the subgraph. It could change like you can deploy a subgraph And then the subgraph can listen to a smart contract to see if any new badge criteria Should be tracked and that's what you guys call foundry Foundry it would be like a that's what we're referring to as like a like our governance Badge-based governance. So so when a Dow wants to update their subgraph, I thought you guys were calling that foundry. Oh Yes, so yeah, if the governance determines that they want to update the subgraph Which would mean that the subgraph needs to track new events or new you know new stuff. Then yeah foundry That's fine. Cool. Cool. So that's Yeah, one of the ways that That's how that's what soul bound is calling that Functionality is the foundry component to it. Now is updating the subgraph Tracking new on-chain Events to then give their community members badges Okay, so that was the first part of what you shared was trying to So one part of subgraphs is Monitoring on-chain behavior of agents and then rewarding Those agents with badges, right? Okay, and then what was the second thing you said about? Oh the Get getting that information back on the blockchain. I think So yeah, so a subgraph it can award badges, but those badges are just existing in the Indexers, right? So as as I would get the badge then that data also needs to be placed on chain Is that what you're saying? Yeah, it doesn't need to be placed on chain But we feel like there's significant demand for it to be on chain There's also cool things you can do without putting it on chain. Okay. Oh Yeah, okay. So that's another component to subgraphs. So it's yes to you so far Yeah, I'm not so getting the the data from the subgraph and putting it back on chain is kind of a Technical problem that popped up for us kind of from the get-go really we initially planned on using chain link as an Oracle service to Get information from a subgraph and put it on chain, but we felt like it was complete overkill and That this could be done better by using attestations from the graphs dispute process because they have a really good Setup for slashing indexers that respond to queries incorrectly. Oh, so can indexers also put Subgraph data on chain They could yeah, okay, so yeah, really any so it could be set up in many different ways and theoretically it could be permissionless where literally anyone can query the subgraph for the latest state of the roll-up and When they query the decentralized network They get a response back and they get an attestation back from an indexer Okay, and so if you just post both of those things the response and attestation and the query to a smart contract Then the data could eventually be used once it's been sitting there for long enough that people agree that oh It's been here long enough and no one's disputed this so it's got to be true So it does take that extra step of everyone agreeing. Oh, how long does this need to? To be here before we can start extracting data out of it And then after that window is up then essentially you have this tiny bit of data That you can extract badges from by providing proofs to a smart contract and The way we imagine this working at least initially with soulbound labs is that we will literally just mint all of the the badges for Maybe for a Dow like if a Dow wants to have badges for their users We would mint all of them on a layer too because it's very cheap and as long as You understand the sub graph code and you kind of understand the protocol that you're making reputation for you have some kind of idea How many badges will probably be awarded or at least some kind of upper bound like? We can't commit to minting five billion badges on polygon even if it's one cent, right? Because it's just too expensive so There's that side of it as well like you have to know How many of these badges will come into existence and whether or not? Centralized party is willing to mint all of them or if you want to keep it Decentralized where like like for example, maybe if there's no party sitting there minting badges for everybody And I did something that's badge worthy Maybe I could query a sub graph and then just post the response and attestation to a smart contract myself and of course There's there's not actually a lot of technical know-how behind that if you have a nice web app Where you just click buttons and it does it for you? Like it sounds scary because it's like oh individuals are querying a sub-graph. Why would I want to do that? But really like it it could be a good use case for people that want to opt-in to their reputation instead of Having someone just summarize all of their history and put it on chain without their permission, you know Oh man, this is so good Okay, so Trying to keep breaking this down in Digestible ways so So is What is a roll-up in this process with sub graphs and data that's on chain The roll-up is basically, you know, you're taking well You ask me like what is a roll-up in general or for for this use case like a sub graph acting as a roll-up If I understand really is rolling up just compressing data Yeah, essentially and it's It is also ordered. So it's it's additive like you can't And in other words like you can't remove a badge like once Once something has happened The thing that happens after it has to build upon that. I got it. It's additive. Yeah You can't go back in time on chain and change things right immutability. Yeah, right. Okay, so it's additive so So actually roll-ups never in a sense decrease in size unless the compression becomes better They're always increasing in size in terms. Yeah, the state of the roll-up is always, you know over time. It's It's history is growing Okay, so then how does this work with the sub graphs? Yeah, so the sub graph what is the roll-up consist of with this? Yeah, the roll-up. So it's it's looking at all the things that the sub graph in the sub graphs In the sub graph code You you point it towards certain smart contracts and you say oh Listen for you know events that emitted from this smart contract in this smart contract Yes, and then whenever those events happen. Here's how you should respond. Here's how you should organize your data So is the is the roll-up a compression of the sub graph? It's a compression of part of the sub graph That you want to be in the roll-up. Okay, so in our case what we're interested in is reputation So the badges so what badges were earned? I see so your the roll-up is Compression of this repute of reputation of sub graph Reputation. Yeah, just the badges though just the ones that were actually earned like okay The stuff that you want to take from the sub graph and put on the blockchain That's the stuff that's in the roll-up. Okay. Okay, cool Okay So then I Or any Dow Ken We uniquely Program a sub graph to monitor for on-chain events Right, and then that's rolled up Yeah, that's what's rolled up. Yeah, that's what's compressed Yeah, the actual events not not the Which events to look for like the actual events that happen as they come in and they happen cool That gets rolled up. Yeah, very interesting. I keep I keep seeing this as some like ongoing like chain every whatever minute or the block on the chain and then I'm visualizing it as some sort of like a Like those thin silky hairs or something like that are just like kind of all pointing down That are all like looking for those specific on-chain events Hmm Interesting. Yeah, and then like As those are like being being being like it those happened then that is Like that's what's rolled up and then that's against stored on chain. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah Interesting and that's a sub graph this yeah, but the right and the storing on chain part The sub graph doesn't deal with that. Yeah, that's what you're talking about as An oracle that you are looking at potentially using. Yeah, so Right. Yeah, and in this Kind of design that I just explained the oracles would actually be the Indexers because they're the ones that are attesting to the data That is not even though it was generated on the blockchain. It was summarized in a Way that was not defined on the blockchain. So it's It's called a computation oracle like you are It's an oracle in the sense that it's Providing data that's not native to the environment that it exists in so and it's computation because it's it's literally just computing Data that was derived from the blockchain So oracles like chain link that provide price feeds It really is a different architecture than what we're looking for because we're just computing data that was already Generated by the by the blockchain What in this visual that we were talking about where the indexer is needed in what specific process Well, the indexer is Basically responsible for making this whole thing decentralized so The indexers are staking GRT and so if you're going to have any kind of assurance that an indexer's Response to a query is legitimate You need to know that they have some kind of Punishment if they lied right so basically the DAO still needs to work through an indexer in this process Um Yes, it needs it needs indexers indexing their subgraph and It's not like they need to go find indexers and ask them to run their subgraph like the graph protocol has a pretty good System for you know, they have curators so curators are responsible for Signaling GRT on subgraphs that they think Will become big so anything like if you see a subgraph and this is you know You have to kind of know your way around web 3 to understand this stuff, but If you feel like a subgraph will have high demand in the future and people will be querying indexers that are running that subgraph then you can Stake your signal your GRT and then if it does become big later and many other people start curating on it Then you've now made a profit because it uses a bonding curve So the people that buy curation shares early buy for a lower price than mm-hmm. Yeah ones that buy later very interesting so curation is sort of like Projecting out subgraph popularity. Yeah, yeah, exactly interesting Okay All right, so so one of the big questions maybe that we can also Leave the audience with is What would you in your communities? look for as On-chain events that you would like to reward us as soulbound labs like what I'm talking in terms of The viewers listening. Oh, yeah, so for them a question that they would ask themselves would be well What what would I as a DAO or as an organization? What would I want to reward as On-chain behavior with badges? that would then give merit-based access control or Reputation-based voting in my DAO or company So yeah, so what would they want to look at as on-chain behavior like for their unique initiative? Yeah, it's different for every initiative, right? So you have to define I mean, I think it ties in with your business model like what what are the on-chain actions that People that have skin in the game and your protocol are performing and those are the ones that You know, you want you want to reward reputation for a good example. It might be a little bit To to like crypto native, but uniswap little over a year ago did a airdrop to Users of their protocol in the past and so people people that traded on uniswap many years ago were rewarded for just using the protocol really just using the protocol and so And they also they launched a liquidity mining pro program So you could provide liquidity through uniswap and then get rewarded with this governance token union So one one thing that I kind of thought of at the time was like, oh, it seems like Uniswap governance would want to reward people that don't just liquidity mine and then immediately sell the uni token You'd think that oh, maybe that maybe it would be more valuable to the protocol to give people more voting power if they Liquidity mind and then held the uni token or put the uni token in another uniswap pool Like that's the best right if you if you literally take the governance token and then put it back in the protocol like it doesn't get better than that from You know a protocol perspective So it just seems like there are things that could get rewarded that are not already built into smart contracts and Subgraphs can be used to reward people for those things and hopefully years from now many more of our real-world events are Recorded on the blockchain so you can then reward reputation for them, you know, if a university is willing to Post on chain who has received a diploma then, you know, you can build off of that. Yeah, it's all composable Okay, so we're putting real-world events on chain and then we're having Communities create subgraphs that are looking for specific events on chain to then reward people with badges Soulbound NFTs saying that yes, we verify that this person did in fact Have this on chain event or the series of on chain events that then yes reward them with the soulbound NFT Yeah, so so a big part of of the future is putting real-world events on chain and then for Communities to create subgraphs to look for those events on chain to then reward their community members Yeah Very cool. Yeah Very cool. Okay. Now. This is great. I think we did a good job both getting into like Division and Big-scale stuff, but also Trying to get into these technical weeds that are like man It does take a good amount of time like going in deep to really grok this stuff. Yeah, definitely Do you feel like there are other components to the technicalities that you feel like you want to share? That could be helpful or do you feel like We didn't okay job covering I think we did a pretty good job covering it because it really is still In development like these are things that we're currently working on and so I don't want to like make any promises about We're designing it and then we end up going another way. You know, this is all innovative. It's fun Yeah, super fun working on this because it's a cutting edge And I like that's flexible. It's a dynamic It flows. So Yeah, I do I feel like this has been a great like first Like this is what's all about my abs is up to and this is what's possible. This is what's possible to go beyond Coin based governance into reputation and merit based governance and access control voting Which is really cool, right and right now there's an obvious demand for this in web 3 But I just imagine that years from now More data will be posted on the blockchain from the real world and not as a result of soulbound labs or reputation protocols but just because there are benefits to posting things on chain where everybody can see it and it can't be taken down can't be censored So in an environment where more things are getting put on chain Then reputation systems that are only looking at the blockchain become much more valuable Yeah, a world where reputation and merit systems are constantly scanning blockchain which is putting real world events on on chain and then rewarding community members for that that's Yeah for for reputation for merit and for access control for voting power that That makes I mean it just feels like it makes sense like in the in the heart and the gut In the mind it really just feels like yeah like That makes sense and it and it protects us from Like we were sharing earlier Flash loan attacks or just plutocracy or Any of the things of the past that we can feel like no longer work for the whole really well There's still too many let's say holes or leaks or Attack points and to Smooth To smooth all of those as many of those out as we can with reputation and merit based governance access control is exciting Yeah, absolutely nice man Do you feel like anything else about the vision or I mean, I think it's important probably to mention like So best place to find soulbound labs is emblem dow.com Right. Yes. Um, and you said that's your first adapt emblem is your first adapt decentralized application Right. Cool. And then that um That has Two main things cooking right now role bot and soulbound studio, right, right. Cool.  You can maybe should we explain those? Yeah, so uh soulbound studio is kind of this idea for um a user interface for like creating reputation with like a drag and drop type of Flow where instead of actually writing subgraph code you can You can look at At icons and drag things around and and determine the criteria for winning a badge And then the idea is that once you once you've determined that criteria You can click a button and it just generates the subgraph code for you So it really lowers the bar for creating reputation Yeah, and then a role bot Anyone that has been in web 3 discord servers knows that There's a huge problem with uh scammers and as soon as you join a discord server you Get a bunch of messages from random people pretending to be from the team of the server you just joined and they're Whatever they're trying to do like get your eth or whatever it is So role bot is a way to verify That a discord user Also owns an account that has some reputation attached to it. So Like for example in the graphs discord server There's an indexer channel where all of the indexers communicate about You know upgrading their node or just quite random questions that they have and just being able to communicate with each other Is nice But anybody can join that channel. You don't have to be an indexer to join it So there there are improvements that could be made on discord servers to really just improve the quality of conversation that happens there because there there is A lot of benefit to having a platform like discord to communicate on and the The cleaner we can make it the better. I think so role bot is then showcasing that this Agent in the discord server actually has a high reputation Right and yeah, it could either be the access control like you can only get in this channel if you have these badges or You could also maybe like when you respond to a message It shows your badges next to your name or something like that so that people know right away that the people are talking Have actually done these things being passed. Yes. They're not just bullshitting. Yes. Yes Okay, cool. And then it would be good also for you guys to check out what Connor was mentioning about soulbound studio to just even go and if you feel like it on emblemed out you can find this little gooey and begin like playing around with what you're Your sub graph architecture would look like your badge reward system what that would look like cool And so yeah emblem dow.com The ability to what join the discord if it resonates follow on twitter. It's soulbound labs. That's right right on twitter What else are good action items If you're really interested in what we're building Uh Contact us on discord. I think is is the best we have we use notion and um a lot of our kind of The stuff that we're working on that hasn't been fully developed yet is in notion And if you're interested about that stuff, you can you can message us on discord Actually, I think you can access it just by going to soulbound labs dot xyz that will take take you to our notion nice Sweet so all of these links will be in the bio below Um, so go and support if this resonated go and support. This is the best way I as you guys know Is to Is to join these initiatives that most resonate with you And also if the video resonated with you is like the video Subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet comment below with your thoughts on the video on what conor sharing around the mission and the vision And the implementation of it and also share the video with others that you feel like this idea this vision could positively influence and maybe even get involved in the community Yeah, that's I mean those are the biggest things i'm super excited for the continuation of soulbound and In the vision man, this is beautiful stuff. It's exciting. It's been great being on yeah And it's a powerful beginning to our friendship too. I'm really excited about it It's gonna get even better tomorrow with spike ball spike ball, baby Yeah, man, so excited on the beach on the beach in this beautiful Santa Cruz, California, man Thanks everyone for tuning in infinite love and we'll catch you soon