So this is our other platform's panel, and we segue pretty nicely into this with a lot of what we were talking about at the end of the last panel, which is how some of these artists have to sort of make a living in ways that don't completely drain your soul. So we're going to get into how all of these artists do that. So I'm going to turn it over to Beth Blickers, who is our wonderful moderator. And you're going to get started. Awesome, thank you Amy. I just want to take a second because I've had such a fun day and last night, and I have learned things and I have laughed really, really hard. And I have met really cool people, including somebody that we've known each other by email and phone for like 20 years. And we both live in New York and I had to come to Miami to meet her. So can we just take a second to say thank you to Susie, to Amy, to the volunteers, to everybody on this panel. It's remarkable, like the entire event, the care taking. I forgot my phone charger. Lauren saved me. I needed a Diet Coke. Amy saved me. So I'm just really grateful to everybody. And I'm grateful to all of you for being here. This is a very odd shape. I'm going to do that a lot. And I'm thankful to everybody on this panel both and then a lot of them shared work with me in advance of that. So I've been reading and listening to things. And so I'm going to give you, even though you've met about half of them at this point, I'm going to give you a little praises on each of them. And I didn't write it in the order in which they were sitting. So I'm going to have them just give you a little wave as I talk a bit about them. So we're going to start with Greg Edwards. He is a lyricist, a playwright. He wrote books and lyrics to two of the Take A Ten podcast, which we've heard a bit about today and one of which you're going to see tonight. He is also a computer game designer. He writes essays and humor pieces. And he has some Laugh Out Loud funny insights into working in India and going to Disney Paris. I encourage you to see those out online or to hit him up in person to tell you some stories. We also have Donna Hoke. Have I said that right? Yeah. Awesome. She is a playwright, a blogger, a regional rep for the Dramatis Guild, a moderator of the official playwrights of Facebook, a stage with helpful career-building insights, as well as special features of interviews with artistic directors and literary managers, and interviews with playwrights who do not live in New York. Andy Romandon. As we know, he is the force behind the Take A Ten podcast.  He is also a pianist, a music director, a composer and a lyricist.  She said composers should work in lots of different forms. He has worked in forms as varied as bluegrass, ska bands, church choirs, and rappers. I have a feeling I him a drink too. Here are some stories. Jennifer Jasper is a storyteller, a writer, performer, and director, and author of solo shows in a number of short plays, including one you will see tonight.  Find her at the bar too. I was listening to them last night and I was like, oh my gosh, we had such quiet dinners in comparison to our family. And then Casey McClain, who joins me from New York, as we've heard, works at Samuel French and is the co-artistic director of their off-off Broadway short play festival. But she is also a lighting designer and is resident designer for Concrete Temple Theater with whom she's toured to Sri Lanka, Turkey, Italy, Bulgaria, and India, which means I want a panel of Casey and Greg talking about internationalism. But not today. Or at least not this afternoon. So what we're here to talk about, and I love that we have a bunch of young people sitting at the table, actually by show of hands, who's a writer? Who's a performer? Who's a director? Okay. Any choreographers? Alright. People who do a web series. Okay. Producers? Okay. Anybody left from the Kenny Finkel-related writers group that's doing the radio place? Yes? Yes? Okay. Excellent. Good. So, you know, I was going to sort of make a point of how much we have multi-hyphenants up here on the stage, but also to make the point that we have a lot of you in the audience as well. And that's kind of what we're here to talk about is to say, when you think playwright or you think musical theater writer, you think, you know, they write a script that in playing time is 90 minutes or greater and they attach it to an email and if it's a musical they attach some Dropbox files and they send it out into the world to get it produced. But in fact, there are many, many other things that you can do and the panelists may join me in saying you probably should do if you want to build a thriving career. They are all doing that and we are going to talk to them about that. I am not going to make each of you, because we only have an hour, answer every question. So if you have a dying need to answer something or say something, please leap in. But we're just going to kind of start by saying that if we all simultaneously agree that sitting in your writer's carrot writing is no longer sufficient to having a career, why do you think that is? We're talking to your microphone. We're live streaming. Nobody knows you're there. And Casey, as somebody with half of your hat on, is the person that artists are trying to access, what are some of the things they can do to find you to get to you? Where are you paying attention to things? Well, to the city. Absolutely. I love this festival. It's also hard to question too, because it's also like where do I look? Where do the artistic directors or the literary directors look and work in front? One of the things is like, come be our friend. Don't stalk us, but be our friend. Talk to us, tell us what you're doing. Become Facebook friends with us. Then we see your posts.  There's also conferences. This is a great opportunity. And I know that there's a couple other different conferences that are leaking out of my head right now that literary directors, artistic directors are at. There's this mission, of course, that's always rolling around. But if you get to know us and we start to know who you are, we'll start to take note of your work and follow it. Great. Donna, since you interviewed 52 artistic directors and literary managers, was there a recurring theme to what made an artist pop for them? What made them pay attention to an artist? There wasn't. And what she's referring to is a blog series that I did called Real Inspiration for the Playwrights Project, which started out because people were complaining that submitting works cold was not ever going to get them anywhere. And I was convinced that there must be success stories to cold solutions. So I went in search of them, and that's why I did this series. And they do exist, but what it ended up kind of morphing into was a primer. Is that on? Like you can hear me anywhere. Was a primer on how to try and get your place produced. And there was a ton of advice that they gave, similar to what Casey's saying. And from my perspective, I think it all comes down to the same thing. You have to get your name recognized so that when that script crosses their desk earlier, I've heard that name, or I know that person from somewhere. And, you know, to go through everything that they talked about would be a lot. But it really isn't having much of what Casey said in terms of just getting to know. In terms of just getting to know the theaters that you want to work with, and getting to know the people, and maybe your work, and using the internet to build some name recognition for yourself. But I suggest you go read that. It's RIPP on my blog. And it's still archived, even though it's like two years old. Great. And Jennifer, you were nodding your head through a lot of that.  I am. I'm Seattle based, and it's very hard for me to find a character. It's the last thing on my list.   Get yourself present and go to functions like this and network. And submit, you know, who, why is it going to hurt, right? Why not try it, because amazing things can happen. I had a submission process that amazing things have happened, and now I'm here two years later. So, yeah, I think, and also, you know, don't be, don't be afraid to follow the road that your life is leading along. Like if somebody had ever told me I was going to be up here at the playwright, I would have left at you. Because I've been doing theater since my teens, and I'm now in my fifth decade, and I'm doing something I would never thought that I would do, but it's all at this point. So all the experiences and all the stuff I've done up until this point just got in my hair. So never say no. Great. And I love that you highlighted having a website, because this is a fight I have a lot with a lot of artists who say, you know, I haven't done enough, why am I doing a website that just looks, you know, ecomaniacal. So having been on a lot of your websites and having a somewhat reluctant tech guru on this panel as well. Let's talk about what makes a good website. What do you look for when you go to other websites and you're doing some homework? What came up as you were designing your websites? At what point in your career did you do them? I married a graphic designer. Always helpful. And so let's unpack that. So when did you first build a website? When you got married?  I think a lot of artists are.  It's really difficult for me.  Let the people who want to help you help you, I guess. Because for me it's really hard, even though I'm a solo performer, it's really hard for me to push myself with that. So, great. Was there a thought process behind what you curated to put on your website? And I'll admit that that's a somewhat leading question. You have some photos on your website that I have to say it takes about 1.4 seconds to get an impression of who you are. It's fast. Yeah. And that's like people who came to see shows and took photos of me and also the graphic designer element. But I did it specifically to get my solo workout. So that's when I really started pushing the website to win at least developing my solo shows. Great. Does anybody want to talk about what they kind of curated what they put of themselves online? Sure. I should practice this by saying I do have a website, but unfortunately my graphic design skills are on par with my fashion. So it's about like one step above inserting your eyes into a shredder. However, the audience doesn't probably go into this. When designing the website, I wanted to make sure that information about the various shows and essays and whatnot I worked on were all available. So I break it down into sections kind of like each of the different platforms that I work in, namely theater, essays, games. I think that's it. And then for within each platform having to break down the various projects that exist, just things like someone who's trying to learn about me or someone who wants to do the work would be interested in. For instance, what are some highlights from the work? What are for the plays? What are their character counts? If these have been reviewed, what are the most flattering critical quotes taken out of context? And then also just I'm also, I mentioned like most writers, really bad at self-marketing. I hate talking about myself. He said, well, talking about himself. And so for me, most of it is just being like, okay, I will put my website in my email signature and call it a day. So I called it a day roughly six years ago and just hopefully like what people need to find me online if they've ever emailed me before, they know my web address, if they Google me. I am not the black median, but two or three spots down, that's me. I'm not the farmer's insurance agent from Phoenix or the soccer player from California.  Casey, I want to add though, if you don't have a website, and I'm going to talk about mine, but if you don't, the very least you should have is an NVX presence, which is, you know, if you have a profile on NVX, that should be one of the first things that pops up when your name is searched, and you can put your bio on there and your plays and, you know, the production histories of the plays. So it's kind of a compromise if you can't afford a website or you just don't feel like you have enough to go online, at least there's somewhere people can find you and your contact information in your place. And do people, does everyone know what NVX is? Is it helpful to unpack that at all? So there's an organization called the National New Play Exchange. It's run by this amazing force of nature named Nan Barnett. And they have member theaters and core members and associate members, and they put plays into their own pipeline where if multiple theaters choose to produce the same play and everybody does their own standalone production, their own actors, their own directors, they each get a little bit of funding to be a part of what they call the rolling world premiere. They can have kind of, you know, group confabs to talk about marketing challenges or casting challenges. And one of the things that NNPN did to further disrupt the system was that they decided the sort of agent submission to theater process was not the most effective process on the planet. Debate amongst yourselves outside this panel. And so they created what's called the New Play Exchange, or NPX, and you can very, very simply upload a snippet of a play. You can upload the full script of something. You can have your contact info. Georgia said earlier this morning, you know, one of the things she had to do was just make sure she was findable. And that's huge. I used the New Play Exchange to find people. And I'm an agent. You would think I would know how to find people, but I will go out and say, you know, are they represented? Where are they represented? What's their email address? So it's definitely a super handy way if you're a writer to get material out there. Yeah, and I was just going to say, my partner, he's an e-commerce, and because e-commerce works for major fashion brands, but I actually take his head all the time because he's one of those guys who, I don't want to know it down, but he makes you Google-able. So he knows all the tricks and tips and spins. And e-commerce isn't just for Nike or, you know, Gap. It's for us too. It's for theater. I know Facebook is one of the quickest ways that I learn about events. And I know it can seem daunting and annoying to keep inviting people to Facebook events or things like that, social media. But it's actually really important. I know a lot about people in this room just because I watch them on Facebook. You know, I'm always watching you guys. But it's important for us too. So my theater company, Concrete Temple Theater, our website is built actually very specifically for tourings. We like to build visual shows that we design and do in New York. We do and run them in New York for short snippets just so that we can get it up on its feet. But our actual passion in life is traveling. So we built shows to travel to Sri Lanka and India and stuff like that. So our whole website is designed so that you can see our tour packages and that kind of stuff. And as if we needed further confirmation as to technology facilitating communication, I just got texted a picture of myself on this panel. So thank you for just doing that.  Is 15 minutes too much? Do I want the whole thing up there? You know, clearly making the choice to put podcasts out in the world. How do you decide how much? Is there too much? I'm very specific. And I don't allow anyone to film me in my work. And usually I have people that they are going around and, you know, my wife is one. She sees you in the camera and she'll be like, no. So I do have video, but it's all passworded for when I apply for grants and stuff. I only want them to see it. However, I do do a storytelling program down in Portland. I'm invited down there every once in a while. They're PDX and they do, and I sign a release. And my stuff is podcast with them and out. And there's a few on my website from that. And so those I'm very specific, I sign a release and I say yes because they're a great source to get my material out to different areas that I wouldn't normally be. So I think it's, you know, your responsibility to make sure that people aren't filming you. And I was part of a show that we conceded and performed back in the early 90s and not around five years ago I found it and like somebody had filmed the show and had put it out on the web, you know. And it was like, oh my gosh, our script is out there that anyone could have taken it. I don't think anyone has, even though it was brilliant. Has anyone gotten a call about work because of putting themselves out there, either specifically a theater writer or through cancel play or work? George just did, wants to leave it. You're a part of this conversation no matter where you sit. Awesome, she's definitely gotten inquiries through her website because of videos that are on YouTube. I know that people have gotten things through NPX. I have heard success stories about that and I wanted to speak to you. You could put up the sampler a whole play, as the project manager for NPX has said that like 90% of theaters want the whole play up there. And also there's an opportunities module whereby a theater will put out a call for plays through NPX. You will not get notification that if your whole play is not up there. So that's just something to think about and know. But to answer that question directly, I can't say that I've gotten an absolute direct hit, but since I increased my web presence and had a website, I've definitely gotten more work and more productions. I think I became a better playwright. I think that people just started to recognize the name. So I can't really point quantitatively to what made that happen, but I think it's just kind of a momentum building. And for me, my experience has been primarily getting cross-platform work in that because of my travel blog to NBI I ended up getting my first awkward way show which was commissioned by a travel agency that wanted a show about travel. And apparently they wanted people to like travel, so I don't think they'd run my blog that closely. It's actually a funny blog. You have to hunt it out. And also for, I had also do travel writing. I'd written as part of a travel blog about my experience at Euro Disney. And a friend saw it and submitted it to a contact he had at Los Angeles Review Books and then it ended up getting published there. I'm being reframed as a culture essay. So like, I'm not a culture. So I guess my experience is like, when I work cross-platform, it's not for the conscious purpose of I'm going to try to get a job in the least direct way possible. But rather just, especially with theater, especially with musical theater, you're so beholden to the schedules of others that when a particular project is on temporary hiatus, the choices are, okay, I can sit there and do nothing, or I can work in another medium that interests me. And I have found that to be, like, unexpectedly useful in terms of getting work in the mediums that I do work in. Great. Anyone else with a burning story to tell? So the big topic that I feel like I constantly have in my life is, you know, sort of drain and work-life balance. And as I've been sitting at this conference the last few days, I've been planning a conference that happens in two weeks in Portland because I, for a few more weeks, was the president of literary managers in drumticks with the Americas, so I literally just answered a text about seeing a walkthrough of the banquet space the morning we arrive. And I will admit that there are times that I am just tired. I'm almost too tired to ask the next question. You know, how do you carve out time to be people? I'm also an aunt, which is the one thing I will actually carve time out for. Are there things you will carve out time for? Do you think you're good at it? If so, give me tips. If you're bad at it, just make me feel better by saying that. I'm a terrible mother. I suspect that's not true. What do you have to make time for? Like, your children probably have to eat once in a while. They probably have to eat every time. I think, for me, because I have a lot of hats and a lot of different jobs, and I love everything that I do. But I also have a border colleague. I don't have any children here, but I have a border colleague that I love to walk. So I definitely carve out time for that. And my partner is here at the conference with me. But it's important to actually, you know, one of the good things about theater is you know there's a season and you know the months that you're busy. So if I just, you know, go, okay, January's going to be hell because we're busy at T-Mail French and I've got this show and this show and this show, but February, that's looking a little better. So as long as I can plan my year in advance or at least six months in advance, and I make sure that I'm free here and if somebody's like, hey, I've got this project and if it doesn't pay a lot of money, then honestly, no. If it pays a lot of money, then I'll say yes. This kind of, you mentioned it earlier with your tech job. I do point and sale restaurant systems. I install point and sale systems for restaurants. So I have a little bit of a tech geek as well for Italian restaurants. It's even super clear. And I get really passionate about it. But I did that for like 12 years. I traveled a lot and really kind of disconnected from my theater and worked and worked and worked and got myself out of debt. And that was my priority to give myself to a point where I could, you know, at an older age then be able to take more creative time and I budgeted it down within, like, I am very, very tightly budgeted. But I've gotten to the point, and this kind of refers to the panel previously that's taken me, I'm in my 50s, and I now finally at the point where I'm 50-50. I'm 50% worked for money and 50% worked for money. And creative. And I'm hoping to keep making that that percentage of me time be more creative and more flexibility. But even now, even carving out two and a half days it's still very hard to find enough time for all the different hats in those two and a half days. So Joey's a struggle, but... I want to say, I mean, I'm in a point where most of my pain work is still not theater-related and, you know, I want to get to the point where it's the other way around.  And then whatever money is left for the rest of your stuff. So I kind of take that mentality with this. So the first thing I do every morning is make my submissions. Because even if you're not writing, you still have work that you need to be working out there. So that's the first thing I do. The first hour of the day. What new submissions are there? What do I need to get out? So that even if I'm not finding the time to write, I'm still doing the marketing, which will keep the momentum going until you can carve out that writing time. So that pay yourself first mentality works really great with that. I'm working out, too. I'm working, I'll skip it in time. But yeah, that I would definitely recommend. Always be marketing even if you're not creating. Great. So we have a bunch of students here who are in the pathway of life of deciding where they're going to school, maybe if they're going to school, where they're going to live. We've got Florida-based artists. We've got panelists from a variety, who live in a variety of places. So clearly you do not have to live in New York in order to be an artist. The panel answers this. But can we unpack a little bit about where you live, having impact on career, choices people have made with that regard, choices they may be regret, choices they are thrilled about, knowing that you're possibly influencing future generations of decision makers and artists? I'll recommend the series that I wrote called Tony Playwrights Living Outside New York, where interview 10 really successful playwrights who don't live in New York City, and they all talked about what their journey was in their city. And I also recap them in a piece for Hal Brown, but one of the big things that came out of it is that it does matter what city you choose to live in. That's not New York City. Buffalo, for example, is horrible, and I live there. It's a great theater town, but it's not a good place for a playwright. You need to have a city that's... I mean, if you're talking about writers, it's a great place if you want to go back and build your resume, but for a playwright it's not so much. But a theater that has connections to the new play sector, that has an NPN board theater, that has an MFA in playwriting, that has something that is making people look at that city. That has a regional theater. Any one of those things is an arm into the new play sector.  So I think that's really important. I moved from Albuquerque. That's where I got my degree, and I moved with an improv company that we were five years in Albuquerque. And in the late 80s, because there was nothing happening in Albuquerque, there was a little something happening now in Albuquerque. There's much more theater now than there was back in the late 80s. And we decided to move to Seattle, which was just starting to really get its theater lights underneath it, and the small theater community booming. And it's now really vibrant, and it's an amazing place for new plays. A new playwright, so. And if you're in the tech industry that want to work for Amazon, it's awesome. But it's a really great city work, and I'm finding it's a really young theater's town. There are people who are just digging their feet in and doing new work constantly. There's lots of theater opportunities for people. And for playwrights. It's a great place for a new playwright to get their work produced and workshopped.  So it's kind of mine. Yeah, and I'll just say, as my company is in New York, we certainly like to get out of New York. New York is a very jaded theater town. And, you know, as much fun as it is to have all your friends there with the audiences.  We'll go domestically too. We did Colorado Shakespeare, or Colorado French last February. And you just go into these places that don't have lots and lots of art. And you're just like, amazing. I saw theater, and there was a live cellist on stage, and there was puppetry, and just things that they don't see. New York is just convenient for us because we all live there. But you can live anywhere as long as you're passionate about knowing what you want. And also, you're going to school.  Will I be in five years? I don't know. I don't know. I'm looking forward to seeing. Yeah. So, Andy, one of your kind of other platform capacities is that you serve as pianist and a music director to other composers and musical theater writers. And I imagine there are days where that's amazing and you watch somebody fix a problem and it shows you how to fix a problem in one of your own shows.  Why am I supporting you? Why am I not working on my own work? Is that true? Or everyone's a genius. I work mostly musical theater and regional theaters and the kind of work that's already been established in the classes. Okay, so it's past a certain litmus test. I'm not working very often with new composers on new works. I've done readings here and there, but when I'm a music director, I'm just there to present what they've given me. And exploring somebody else's score with that level of depth, is there a journey for yourself as a composer doing that? Only that. I mean, yeah, well, part of why I started the podcast was just being frustrated with seeing a lot of bad stuff get readings and producing productions and workshops and just being like, I know I can do this. I just don't have a venue. But also, the better part is sometimes you don't see stuff that really inspires you. I can't think of anything up top in my head besides like, what's that story in Chicago or something where I know it sounds kind of down and obvious to kind of bring up those. But getting to play what's that story for six weeks, and that's a weekend every night, discovering something in that score that was new every single night and new and amazing and perfect and brilliant. Or Chicago or little night music or whatever it is and kind of learning from the classics and the greats that way is really informed kind of what I do as well. That's great. I have a totally tangential non-fellow question. So I can sort of imagine like this morning as watching Georgia do her conversation and I thought, I'm not a writer, like I could picture writing a play or a book of a musical like a character talks and a character talks and in theory I could picture writing lyrics like there's a moon, it is June there, I just wrote a lyric. But the notion of like sitting down composing something absolutely blows my mind. So like, I couldn't ever write any of the essays that I'm reading in my office this week but I could picture writing an essay and putting it online. But when you sit down to say, I'm going to create a podcast of short musicals, I would imagine there's 8,000 steps to making that happen. All right. You want to walk us through some of them? We're talking about the music writing part or the podcast. Well, you know I'm obsessed with how you write them and that may be another panel unto itself. But sure, like are you in the same room with your collaborators? Are you scaping with them? Well, I'm just, the writing process itself is its own process. In terms of writing music, composition, that's, I'll just say to all the non-musicians out there, you're not non-musicians. You're totally capable of any of that. It's just another language. It's just like learning another language. When you took Spanish and high school in Latin, music is just another language and there's a language too.  You know, things get loud. You know, things get soft. And that's pretty much the basis of all language and all music. It's just recognizing the boundaries and the opposites and all that. So that's music writing. Oh, there you go. And then there's a collab. So this is, then there's the process of actually putting together musical, which even a ten minute musical ideally takes months. How long, can you remember how long it took us for Alan Schaffer when we started talking about it? I think, but Alan Schaffer in the almost a month took us maybe three months prior to talking to having a final draft. That sounds about right. There is another ten minute musical that's on the podcast, which is called the Answering Machine, and it took about nine months for a ten minute musical. So that's my only kind of correlation with the longer form, you know, five, six, 15 year musicals over there. It's like, that's kind of the equivalent. And that one went on to be, go into this festival called Soundbites in New York, and won best music and best lyrics. Got produced in France and at college in Ohio. That was a success story. Then there was another one where we had two weeks to write it, and that's the one that I'm still kind of embarrassed about. But that's just the kind of, so then there's the writing part of it. After that, there's the, once it's all written and rewritten, then we go into, then there's sometimes readings that I would have, I try to get at least one reading of everything, or try to get a song, critique in the VMI workshop, and try to fix that, and then recording the actors individually for the most part. So I'd record all their dialogue, rehearse, and record their songs. But hang on, meaning like there's six people in your closet with your microphone in your garage, do you have a studio? One at a time. Yeah, my closet, it was just me, I bought a microphone and an audio box, and I'd sit on my bed and the cat would be knocking over stuff, which was really helpful when the actress was allergic to cats. But yeah, so then it's recording that, and kind of trying to bust it out and trying to get several takes of each line. And even sometimes if the actors are in trouble with the song, actually for Evelyn Schaffer, the actress, it was she was a third actress to play that role because the first one had scheduled conflicts, the second one got sick, and then it was like, okay, well we need to get this done in 24 hours. So we found somebody who was willing to learn all three big, epic solo songs and then record them the next day. And she was not quite as quick a learner as expected. So at times I had to record one bar at a time and I put them together. So if you listen to the actual podcast, that's the culmination of me putting together one bar at a time, fixing that note and moving things all around. So then, okay, so then there's the editing and then putting together where there's conversations. You can hear these conversations and these actors, and it sounds, sometimes it sounds like they're in the same room and almost certainly they were not recorded at the same time. And then it's editing together so that it sounds like they're listening to reacting to each other. So figuring out which takes sounds like they're listening the best, placing them apart, how much distance between the lines would be, are they overlapping, whatever it is, are there certain non-verbal reactions like grunts or laughs or whatever the way it's put in. And then, you know, recording to a piano demo track and then after that piano demo track orchestrating it with all my fake instruments on garage band and logic. And then mixing, remixing, putting that together, sending it to the collaborators. Is this okay? No? Okay, fixing it, sending it back. Is this okay? Until midnight of the first of the month every month. Jennifer is thinking to herself, I'm so glad I'm a solo artist. My wife is a musician and she's wanting to start to do musicals together and I'm hoping you're listening to this. There may be a conversation together. I'll tell you what, my last question before this or whichever one it was about budgeting time. Yeah. I have no idea. I don't either. All I know is I started off by saying I'm going to get this done on the first of the month every month. And at the end of the first episode I said, next month on the first of the month and every month we're going to have a new tenement of music before you. And I remember after I released that first one and I came home for Thanksgiving break and my mom said she generally liked it except for this one character that she hated. She was like, it was pretty dumb of you to say first of the month every month because now you should have said periodically and I said no because otherwise it would never get done. So I'm a big believer in deadlines and pushing your back to the cliff which is a metaphor relating back to the story of these ancient Spartans fighting the Persian army as that number was 300. Anyway so there were 300 Spartans who were up against the 10,000 person Persian army and they were just they were clearly screwed. That was the understanding was there were 300 of us and there were 10,000 of them there's no way there's absolutely no way we can win and so the general said alright well what we're going to do is we're going to go out to that cliff and when they come up then we're going to take them and the soldiers were like that is crazy because we will not be able to retreat but we have to draw a buckler so it's okay so for me I got that podcast done because it had to come out and there were a lot of sleepless nights and a lot of last days of the month where I got nothing done couldn't go out for Halloween or New Year's Eve there's several times where that was the case even actually my birthday is on the 29th of the month and my parents were visiting me in New York and they were visiting for my birthday we went out to see so I actually sat in Vegas and after the show I said great I now have to go to Brooklyn to record violence and they took me and that was kind of and it came out on the first of the month and at 2am or something like that we just staying in there and there's a lot there's a lot that you can do if you just make yourself do it and so with budgeting if you just say I will do this or otherwise I will die or something and that's called states that's called blended states right where would I have died if I didn't make it? No but I couldn't make that one deadline and that's why I'm on hiatus right now and it's great to have all that extra time right now and I look back and I think about all the time I've put into it all the ridiculous hours and I can't I cannot figure out how I did it because right now it doesn't much work so it's really just making yourself giving yourself a deadline and you'll come up with something which is why musicals very often have reading and reading and reading because you need that reading and excuse it like those actors are going to need to learn this material and time we've got to get it done and I'm a big believer in deadlines but yeah yeah no definitely so we've been talking a lot about other platforms in terms of sort of self-created platforms that you write is one of them you're a writer you want to come and network here's a place to come off of Broadway play festival with Sam French is one and Casey can you talk us through a little bit about how do you reach out to writers to make sure people are applying I know at least one short play has become a full length play because Joe correct those directing it at the signature this season so have there been collaborations for years so we're old festival and we have had a lot of great Theresa Rebeck we found her through the festival which is you know she's okay Shirley LaRoe wrote a short play for the festival that then then went on to be a full length on Broadway so you don't know what's going to happen Jennifer here she left our festival and was it you were at the airport yeah I was going to be doing the festival and it ended up one of the six winners and that was even crazier and we were at the airport leaving and I got an email and I got an email from a producer in New York who happened to see Friday Night Show and said I loved your play and I wanted are you still in New York if you are I'd love to meet with you if you're already in Seattle can I call you and she contacted me and said do you have any full lengths for that long and she said how about more shorts and I'm like well I do have some shorts and so April 17th of next year I have a evening of my short play it's going up off Broadway okay thank you you never know yeah you never know so like another story that I'll have outside of the off Broadway festival so my company we toured in India Greg and I we toured in India for two weeks we submitted a play called The Whale it's a one man movie dick it's much better than it sounds right and to the only English speaking festival in India which is in Chennai and they were like okay yeah that sounds great come on over here so it was like full movie dick here we come so we went and it was really cool we saw some I saw one of the best plays it was the Indian piece there was also the Indian piece about what they thought of the American president and there was like 2008 so it was like right before Obama so it blew my mind so but because we were going to this festival they paid for our airfare there but then they were like why don't you reach out to the US embassy and so we did and they were like great since they paid for the big airfare why don't we tour you guys around so then the embassy became our hosts for the next two weeks and then they flew us to Kolkata and Dubai and Delhi and Bangalore we ended up doing five other shows in India and then they called their Sri Lankan embassy and they were like hey we got these guys over here in Sri Lanka like great send them over and so then we did two shows in Sri Lanka so like and you know there's also this American jazz band that was following us too so the US embassy is actually a great booking agent you guys they also like we like so and we submit to these international festivals and then when we called the local embassy and like we were seeing it five star hotels we were first off and last off on priority on planes like people would like the stewardess would come over and she would be like oh you guys are coming down oh my god you're big celebrities so like you never know what festival can lead to you know off-Broadway or a whole tour of India and then a blog about travel and that's a lot about travel so surprise question that we didn't discuss in advance but I just feel inclined to ask it because we have the time um I've become podcast obsessed over the last nine months and one of my favorite things to listen to is the pop culture happy hour and at the end they always talk about what's making you happy this week so it doesn't even necessarily have to be something from the art world but I'm just wondering if there's what do you turn to for inspiration for sucker for happiness to keep yourself going what's making you happy one thing that I did in Seattle is I curate a one same month um cabaret night and it's in a little tiny big black box of like 55 seats and I get different artists from around um Seattle to do work about family because as a as an autobiographical storyteller I think that that's one thing that finds us together as family artists is the families that we make the families that we're born from and um I get five different artists from different disciplines so for me it's really important that the literary world meets the theater world meets the music world and then we get different artists from different um disciplines into the same house because we rarely mix and um they the only thing needs to be something about family and then we raise money every month for an artist so somebody's having total making rent is money so my favorite night of the month is every third Wednesday and my favorite morning of the month is every Thursday Thursday morning when you wake up and it just makes it all kind of it's that connection and um makes you feel good for doing the work that we do right anybody else something that makes you happy I'm gonna I'll speak again um just so like something that is important to me and my community theater or my theater is community so we we actually have a couple different ways every reach how we work with senior citizens on writing plays and doing performances we go to schools we teach with schools I work with a lot of autistic children teaching them theater and actually when you get out of your like professional bubble um and you still get to do theater it's so rewarding and plus you are connecting and they start to support you and they start to come to things so for me it's when we get to do those other collaborations workshops and such I think that that's a big thing like being represented for the Guild I do a lot of stuff in my community for playwrights writing my blog which is really about advocacy inspiring playwrights um I think playwrights you know can get into that and be part of the greater community so that you're not so focused on what you have happening and you just you're giving back and it just makes you forget about that and then you know things happen anyway so far less altruistic than everyone thank god that was his final when I was over here feeling horrible when I need to feel happy um I ignore our artists and read him I read Calvin and Hobbes um and I when I was young I owe a lot of my artistic disability to Calvin and Hobbes when I was young every year I would like reread the entire like what seven volume said um and I haven't done in years but I still just have most of the comics like seared into the base of my brand stem and I think it's I think the the simplicity of most awesome evil babies that are ever are what I aspire for in my own Andy uh could you repeat the question yeah it doesn't have to be anything in the world of art but what do you turn to to kind of recharge reconfirm get back in touch with yourself let go what makes you happy uh sex drugs and rock and roll we have young people in the room be careful yeah what do I it's a hard question I'm very lucky that I get to do that a lot for living I get to play piano I get to make music I get to hear a lot of extremely talented people sing right in my face um it's it's great I got nothing good for you Netflix and just being bored and it's lazy and it's terrible so I have to force myself to do other stuff things that make you happy what helps you recharge books you've loved any ideas impulses I put my garden gardening yeah perfect anyone else yes freaky and gracy excellent perfect not even cast albums you put on like Sweeney Todd and run around your living room singing at the top why why why okay anybody back there gala okay interesting two votes for gala all right what do you turn to recharge reinvest travel excellent travel he took mine beach it's a beach excellent you may have just won that answer we'll let people keep trying Elizabeth anything meditation great meditation we can probably all take a where's my yoga teacher is he still here the guy there you go yeah go talk to him over here things that help you recharge or re-inspire you it's a hard question Susie flash flash okay walks in nature clearly numb you live in Brooklyn excellent awesome yes cuban coffee oh yes I've already been pitched on the cuban coffee but the description scared me all right young people away with the future what's inspiring you it's not a challenge talk to him finally I have a client a playwriting client who says everything he understands about how to structure a play he learned from reading architecture reviews that when he would read architecture reviews and people would talk architecture critics would talk about how the structure of a building worked or didn't work in relation to itself in relation to the buildings around it somehow those dramaturgical impulses about building an architecture spoke to him about how to structure a play so you know inspiration can come from anywhere excellent anything in particular go for catastrophe on Amazon excellent excellent plays good standby I'm changing house yet I agree awesome anybody else at that table I guess video games they kind of help me out wanting to lead it excellent video game designer talked to him after other impulses from that table meditation and friends excellent okay table hiding in the back kids yeah don't come talk to me about my nephew so play your videos anybody else at that table great get a date over here and tell me a context into something you have a hard time walking so you know that therapy in the day is trying to get a life to work better just basically stepping away from my desk to pay attention to the real world perfect ten minutes that's awesome great this line at the same time does the dog also get some soaking animal yeah other folks hot yoga do you do hot yoga yeah okay yes love it Michael Sheen other folks inspiration phone calls with my 95 year old friend oh my phone calls with his 95 year old friend excellent Georgia when you just need to cut loose and dance around what do you listen to Amanda excellent Jennifer is such a musical theater person great so I think we have time for a couple of questions so now that you're all warmed up who is a question for the panels for the room for me if not I'm going to release you all early anyone that just means I did a really good job oh hard casting which requires looking at you yeah I'd like to do a family affair podcast but we have yet to get there great well if you didn't scare you off I know I would love to be involved with animation somehow that's kind of I was thinking about you know big inspirations and like Pixar is a huge inspiration you know they're not musicals but also lots of great cartoons but also adventure time is there any adventure time yes thank you so like they get it and it's it's a cartoon a cartoon network and it looks like this it looks like dumb from the outside and it pretends to be but it's so smart and morally complex and the music the score and the songs they throw away and they throw away feel very kind of haphazard and random just sort of accidental but there's clearly it's so wrong in a sense the music is so structurally doesn't make any sense that it has to be the work of a genius and completely on purpose and there's a lot of brilliant animation work and music and otherwise awesome anybody else play it I would love to write in the serial form app at some point like webisodes or anything serial I used to work for silk opera digest and I have appreciation for the serial form and just staying with a group of characters for a long time great anybody else well last week I just did lighting for a fashion event and it was amazing there was like no pressure great okay I'm the one left I mean in the past years I've been trying to they have a couple TV running fellowships where in order to apply for them you need to write a script of an existing show so I've been putting together a script for that do you say what show you've been spending? sure I've been working on a kidney sketch I don't know excellent Susie you have a question? David of all of you up there have spoken to things and interconnected but that's why you're here and that's how you got here if it was Casey inviting me to come in and and to Sam French and then seeing Jennifer's work and starting to see what she's doing and that now she's doing this anti-bullying anti-bullying girl thing which is part of what our tour is about that's very interesting to me and then of course seeing what was going on with Evelyn Shaker I hate to say the name Evelyn Shaker because it gets in my head and then it's gone it's gone I can see it all here and the one from Warp that's the other one but truly I'll get up at three in the morning and I'll have somebody's words floating around in there but because so Sam French has been great because then I'm seeing new stuff short format sometimes longer than ten minutes but I like to see so you know like really what does how like something different that runs 18 to 25 minutes different from what I'm looking at you know and and then of course finding Donna through multiple layers of relationships and what you know just sort of following the things you're writing about has also informed opportunities were brought to light other writers that I think oh well that's somebody I should probably take a look at or go into NPS and try to find the work so I mean all of us that are sitting here right now like running into France loose at Sam French so just briefly France loose was my student 24 years ago don't tell them all about it we'll edit that out over the last year too late and I was supposed to direct a play which I'm not a good director but we didn't know that then and I was pregnant and I said to her you know I'm going to go have this baby and then I'll be back it was the end of the school year and I'll you know and then I'll direct this play and wisely looked at me like you know I don't know that that's how that works but as it would turn out it isn't how it works for us but we remained in touch and then I was at Sam French and I was watching shows and I suddenly see her walk in and it led to this conversation well what are you doing what are you writing why don't you send me something and thus the last couple years I had to do two pieces of translation in summer short but she also became a playwright I commissioned for the tour so I mean all of this in here I could you know sort of go on and on because it's a few degrees sort of as I said last night but each of you is here right now for that same purpose and I'm sure in conversations and drinks or listening to any of this and talking to these folks now that who we are all getting to know so much better we are making connections that are leading to opportunities or ideas for collaborations that any other number of things they may seem benign at the moment so well she's been with me for six years every single city right she's a veteran Susan Chulman so that's all I really wanted to say to this in Beth and I go back for many many years as well but it is for you guys an opportunity now to be a co-worker because years from now you all will be remembering how you met and how you first began to write or work in a theater then how do you are helpful to each other or unhelpful but sometimes that happens but but then around here you know that's what we're all telling you that because there's truth to it so thanks for that we'll see yeah I think that's so important thank you for saying that Susan because I think the interconnectedness of this industry the sense of community the falling out of touch with someone and then coming right back as if no time has passed it is a testament to how to build a career and I think one of the things that I like to do what makes you happy is also just a reminder everything always has to be about theater and then in fact you know watching a movie may help you crack a structural question or you know those kinds of things so I think that's really important um any final remaining burning question from anybody no okay everybody run to the bathroom we'll see you in a bit thank you thank you for telling us


at Big Data SV 2014 is brought to you by headline sponsors, WAN Disco. We make Hadoop invincible and Actian, accelerating Big Data 2.0. We're back, this is Dave Vellante of Wikibon and this is Silicon Angles theCUBE. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. This is Big Data SV. We're running concurrently with the Stratoconf. We're here across the street from the Santa Clara Convention Center. We're at the Hilton, so stop by and see us. Our good friends are here. David Richards, who's the CEO of WAN Disco and Jigain Sandar, who is the CTO and Vice President of Engineering for the Big Data side of the business, which is the one that everybody's excited about. Gentlemen, welcome back. Good to see you again. Thank you, Dave. It's a pleasure to be here again, Dave. So we saw you last October. We were at Big Data NYC. Give us the update. What's new for you guys? Well, we continue to make very good progress. I mean, today we announced a new product in our Hadoop stack, which is a non-stop H-base. And we've got a fantastic demo, which we're doing on the show this week, a live demo. And I think Brett Rudenstein will be on the show later this week, doing a live demo for your viewers, of showing a streaming Twitter feed, taking servers down, putting servers back on. So we're continuing to use our unique Active Active Replication Technology that we've had now for the past six, 12 months in the Hadoop space for HDFS. And we've now applied that on Gigane and this team. They've done an amazing job in applying that to H-base. Yes, sir. Well, in 2013, Jeff Kelly just came out with his Big Data Report, the third Big Data Report. And he referenced the WINDISCO non-stop name node in there as one of the key milestones for the industry to really, you know, the active, active technology to really put forth that infrastructure that CIOs need for, you know, make sure that they're comfortable, they're sleeping, that they're going to put their mission critical applications on there. So that was a key milestone. Maybe, Gigane, you could talk a little bit about that and how it applies to H-base. Certainly. So the non-stop HDFS product that we introduced last year is specifically for the file system. And what we've done is continued to build on top of that by approaching the next layer up, which is H-base, the database layer. The little known secret there is that the region server of the H-base system is a very bad single point of failure. And we've solved that problem by applying our patented active-active replication and creating multiple active replicas of each region so that should a region server go down, service is uninterrupted, you can continue to run your H-base applications without any interruption. So H-base is sort of the de facto database for no SQL database anyway for Hadoop. And we have some experience with H-base. John Furrier has talked about it a lot. We used H-base extensively and obviously had some challenges. So what are you seeing, David, from the customer base in terms of how they're using H-base? I mean, we were using it for sort of a little side project which has grown up. What are you seeing in terms of H-base adoption and where do you guys fit? So we're seeing a mix, I'm thinking of one very large company in the semiconductor space, we're about, what was it again, 30, 40% of their deployments are HDFS and the rest are H-base for streaming-based applications. So it's everything from stock feeds through to doing, we're doing an example with Twitter feed analysis. So it's those kind of streaming applications. I mean, H-base, of course, was designed after the Google product Bigtable and that's really what it's designed to do. So as you're going to say, we've moved a layer above the file system, we're now into streaming real-time-based applications. Yeah, and so you're right. So Google used a Bigtable, Facebook is big H-base consumer, we use it at CrowdChat and have used it in the past. And so we've expected it to go mainstream but there's a lot of competition in that no-SQL space. So do you see you guys knocking down sort of other no-SQL database types or is it sort of coalescing around H-base? What can you tell us there? Well, I'd like to go step up, actually, and let's take a view of the whole market and what we're seeing. I was saying off-air before we came on that we're seeing. I was with the CIO of one of Europe's largest companies a couple of weeks ago, who you would never expect to be talking about doing wholesale, large-scale replacements within their data center of traditional technologies. And I know that some of the other vendors in the space are part of some of those traditional vendors like Teradata, like Oracle, et cetera. We're not, so we can pretty much say what we want. And we're seeing a great desire from CIOs to do wholesale replacement of those traditional technologies, replace it with the lower-cost, higher functionality. Lower cost is not enough, you need higher functionality as well. Products like Hadoop and specifically Hadoop. So the desire certainly to have the no-SQL stuff with H-base and the HDFS products in one place from one vendor is certainly that. Well, I want to ask you about that because I made an observation, I saw Jeff's report again and it's sort of littered with the big whales or sort of co-opting a lot of the space and I say to myself, wow, are we sort of already reaching an equilibrium where the guys disrupting the market are sort of being subsumed by the larger guys as a distribution channel and there's no question and you alluded to it. You didn't say it directly, but I'll say it, there's no question that it somewhat waters down the messaging, that sort of, hey, we can do something 10x better, 10x cheaper and much, much faster. You're starting to hear in the marketplace that's much more temperate. Well, we don't want to say that about whether it's Oracle or Teradata or IBM, whomever it is, you guys, it sounds like you see the world differently. You really, I mean, in the early days of big data it was all about disruption, it was all about really changing the way in which organizations operate, making them data-centric. We still hear that, but you're hearing it tempered down. I wonder if you could comment on that and give us your point of view. So analyzing the market, which is kind of your job, is difficult. It's really tough, right? So one of the measures, and I was at the Barclays Big Data Conference, which is a public company conference yesterday and I was speaking at it, I wanted to analyze sort of said, well, I'm looking at one of the proxies for big data may be the disk manufacturers, hard drive manufacturers, and they're up about 15%. So is data intergrowing at 15%? I don't think it is. I think what we're seeing in the early part of the market, and this is a classic adoption curve, right? So we're in the early part of the market. There's certainly a lot of divisional, to use the word POC, I think is doing the world in injustice. I think these are trials in production. I mean, we're doing something with a hospital that's hoping to save people's lives. And I wouldn't want to tell a patient in that hospital, this is POC. Well, we're hoping to keep you alive. Kicking the tires. Yeah, just going to press it and see if it works. No, these are real production environments. And I think that we're seeing, nothing's ever as fast as we all want it to be, but this is happening. It is going to happen. And those proxies are only really, I mean, the big whales that we're talking about in the marketplace, yeah, the market's dominated in the early phases of those companies, but we are going to see the likes of Hortonworks and Cloudera, et cetera, really come to the fore. And let's face it, Splunk overtook Teradata in market capitalization in the past six months. I'm glad you brought that up, because you certainly see Splunk, CliqueTech, Tableau, are really disrupting, certainly on the visualization side, for Tableau and CliqueTech, and Splunk in the core IT space. And so we would expect that similar things would happen in sort of big data infrastructure, unless either they get taken out, or big guys are able to convince their customers because they have such huge distribution channels and such a inertia around their install basis that, oh yeah, we can get there too, and let's make incremental 10% a year improvements. Yes, I mean, this isn't new, right? It's called Innovator's Dilemma. And those traditional vendors have a humongous problem. They've got shareholders that they have to appease. They can't fundamentally change their business models overnight and suddenly support a product that's 10% of the price of theirs. That's gonna be pretty darn difficult. So I would expect, in the same way that mainframe moved to three tier client server, when I talk to customers, I go, mainframe, three tier client server, and then what? Well, then what is big data? It's gonna happen, it's gonna happen at the same pace that three tier client server overtook mainframe. We agree with you. So the premise that we've always used in this space is that the customers are gonna create more value than the vendors.  But we're in that space right now where you sort of have this equilibrium. As I said, you're seeing a lot of partnerships announced.  You've got a fundamental innovation. You're solving a hard problem. Frankly, we'd like to see more of that. We'd like to see this area of the world maintain its aggression. So how was the Barclays big data conference? So was that up in San Francisco or? Yeah, it was. It was up in San Francisco. It was organized by the investment bank. They had, you know, everybody, Mike Olson from Clutter presented. Herb from Hortonworks presented. John Schroeder from MapR was there. A whole bunch of those kind of companies were there. I didn't actually see any of the traditional vendors presenting. Oh good, okay. So it really was a pure play sort of big data conference. It really was. And what we're seeing, by the way, and what I expect to see about disclosing anything, I would expect to see companies that traditionally invest in public companies have to move down the stack and come to private companies to invest. I mean, amazing things are happening. You know, a bit like the Goldman Sachs deal with Facebook before they did the IPO. I would expect to see a whole bunch of deals like that where quite simply those big investment funds can't get exposure in the public markets. I mean, we're about it to be quite frank in the doob space as a publicly traded company. I would expect to see those types of companies do massive investments above venture but below public. And you know, when you start to see those deals and some of the valuations that I expect to see coming out of those private investments in the non-public markets by public investors, I mean, the world's gone crazy, right? But I would expect to see those kind of deals happen in the next few weeks. I got a question from a journalist today asking me, are we in a bubble? And why or why not? And why does that matter? And I said, it's not a broad-based bubble, but there are pockets that are kind of bubble-licious. You know, what's your take on that? I mean, you've certainly benefited from the excitement around big data. You know, investors are very interested and intrigued and excited about the big data side of your business. Are we in a bubble? I think, as you said, in certain sectors, we are. But when I, you know, just to allude back to what I think is going to happen in the big data space, we ain't seen nothing yet. This is just the beginning of a fundamental shift, a tectonic shift in the marketplace. Is every company going to win that comes with the word big data alongside their name? No. Are they going to be, you know, is there going to be a change in the order? As we move from mainframe to three-tier client-server, we saw companies like Oracle, like EMC, like Intel for Chips be born. I would expect to see those fundamental shifts in the marketplace. So I got to ask you, so UK-based company, you guys got to report finances once every decade, I think, right? So no, I think you're coming up to another reporting season, right? Shortly, is that right? Yeah. You've announced when you're reporting? Late March. Okay. So I know your colleague, Richard Branson at Davos, was saying, no, it works in the UK. Once, twice a year is good.  I presume you agree with that because you don't want to have to report more frequently. It's somewhat onerous, but let's talk about that a little bit, that reporting cycle, four times a year versus two times a year, do you have an opinion on that? So I like reporting quarterly, actually, believe it or not, and we do. So we do an update to the city, which is the London Stock Exchange, every quarter, and that's voluntary because normally we'd only have to report every six months, but we like doing quarterly reporting. We recently hired a new CFO, a guy called Paul Harrison, who is the CFO of SAGE, one of the biggest software companies in the world that joined us, that wanted to be part of this big data wave. So we're not scared of suddenly doing quarterly reporting. We've got our eyes on certainly, you know, moving to different exchanges, moving up the charts, et cetera. I know that, and you can get bits and pieces of information that you can't typically get from European companies, and I agree with you. I think it's actually helped US companies. I've heard for decades that the short-term focus is bad, but you look at the dominance that US tech companies have, is that how is that bad?  My sales team are very quarterly driven. I just do not think that's a bad discipline to get into. So Jigain, what are some of the things that you're tracking from the technology side? What are some of the things that excite you these days? So HBase, as we've spoken about already, is front and center in our awareness. We're seeing good adoption of non-stop Hadoop, which is our HDFS product. Particularly, the van addition for disaster recovery is very attractive to customers. There are no equivalent solutions out there, and we're easily able to show the flaws in existing hacks, such as disk CP, and win on the basis of that. HBase is also very interesting because people make the mistaken assumption that it's the HBase master that's the single point of failure. Turns out that's not as, it is also a single point of failure, but it's the region server that really kills you. Applications will freeze, data is likely to be lost, so region server failure is a bigger problem than the HBase master, and at the lowest level, that's the harder problem. There are various open source efforts that are active standby. We don't believe in that. We always do active, active servers. That's what our product does today. We'll talk about that a little bit. We've talked about this a bit on theCUBE, just kind of to refresh my memory. So you're talking about the HBase master versus the region server, and we've discussed recovery. That's always, when something goes wrong, how do you get it back, and how do you know that it's accurate, there's a single point of control? So in that world of HBase master and region server, how does that all work? How does recovery work without WinDisco and how do you change that dynamic? So if you look at the region server, all current efforts are towards keeping standby servers hot sometimes, cold sometimes, cold meaning they have to read the edit logs and come up to speed and start serving content. That's a flawed approach in many ways. We have the ability to do coordination before data goes into the system. Therefore, we have exact replicas. This is not an eventual consistent system. This is exact replicas of the same content of the regions in multiple servers, and some of those servers can be in a different data center spread across the world. That's our key value, and we've applied the same distributed coordination engine to solving this problem. So how does the conversation go, David, with your customers? So I presume you're going at a fairly high level at talking about sort of the need for, whether it's organizational change and the potential of big data and the like. And then, but you guys sell some pretty geeky stuff, right? So you got a big spectrum of audience that you have to sell to. So I wonder if you could take us through sort of how that whole motion works. So in key four, we announced two very important strategic partnerships to us, which were two big boys in the Hadoop space, which are Cladir and Hortonworks. So we go in behind the Cladir and Hortonworks distribution. So both CDH4 and CDH5 support a nonstop technology we're certified against CDH4.4, what I expect to be certified soon against CDH5. And HTTP 2.0, 2.1, we're also modified to support our active-active replication technology. Ad conversations typically happen with the CXO level, to be quite frank. So you'll see a CIO say, okay, we're gonna move to this Hadoop stuff. We're gonna be able to do things that we've never been able to do before with data. I'm gonna be able to query all of my data instantaneously across my entire organization. What happens if it goes down? And that's when we get a call. I'm very fond of saying, well I say to my VP of sales all the time, we sell Bibles, not religion. My goal is not to do religious conversion of the world to convince them to use Hadoop. I think Hortonworks, Cladir and others are doing a fantastic job of doing that. I think that's gonna happen naturally. We wanna go in behind and sell continuous availability, of which CIOs, by the way, already understand the importance of that. Now, as for the geeky stuff, that's interesting. I was in a meeting with one of the preeminent Silicon Valley companies last week, and Jagain was doing, Jagain and Dr. Konstantin Shwasko were doing a presentation.  They said, just a second, this is one virtual cluster that we can spread across the world. He said, yeah. Now, most people think that's impossible. Yeah, how'd you do that, right? That gives, it gave me goosebumps, just watching these guys go, really? That's one virtual cluster? Yeah, you can do that. That's interesting how you described it, because I wrote down as you were talking, you're not evangelizing Hadoop, you're evangelizing quality Hadoop. And that's sort of the discussion that you're having. And I don't claim to fully understand all the innards, but my colleague, David Floyer does, and we talk about this stuff all the time. We've been watching this market space for 20 plus years, 30 years even, and this is a hard problem that you're solving. And I can see why sort of the Technorati get excited about it. So always a pleasure having you guys on. Thanks very much. Really appreciate the insights and the support. And we'll see you around. We'll be watching. You know, you guys do a fantastic job. You really bring this conference to light. It really is great watching you. I love watching the rest of the conference on your Silicon Andal TV shows. Thank you. All right, appreciate it guys. Keep it right there. We'll be right back with our next guest. This is Dave Vellante. We're live. This is theCUBE.


Welcome. So you've made it early in the morning to the first session, and I would argue maybe the most important session at this summit. And the reason is we're here to talk about the global goals. My name is Raj Kumar. I'm the president and editor-in-chief of DevX. We've been covering the sustainable development goals since they were first an idea when people were talking about the post-2015 agenda years before 2015. Here we are in 2017 now. And it almost is like a little test. I have gone around wearing this SDG pin. And I can say that I still get people coming up to me at events and saying, oh, that's a beautiful pin. What is that? But increasingly, including at this summit, I have people coming up saying, oh, the global goals, the SDGs. Awareness is much higher now than just even a year ago. At Davos this year, this symbol was everywhere, on the lapels of corporate CEOs, world leaders, as the backdrop to so many events. So the sustainable development goals have arrived. They should. It's 2017. We're here to talk about maybe the hard part. We thought the hard part was creating them. The hard part, turns out, is implementing them. So we have a fantastic panel working at the level of the region, of the country, of the company, to talk about how they're actually being implemented and what some of the barriers are. And we're going to get into a discussion right now about that. So let me tell you who we have. Alicia Barsena Ibarra, who leads ECLAC, which is the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. She's got a long career at the UN and in the region was the Chief of Kofi Annan's cabinet when he was Secretary General and has, in addition to expertise across many issues, particular expertise in environment, which we might get into in a minute. It's key to the SDGs. We have Simón Gabriela Muñoz, who is the Minister of Planning for Colombia and has been working on these issues at the level of Colombia quite a bit. You may have heard him speak already a few times here at the summit. We will be digging back into some of those issues with him today. And then we have Javier Pastorino, who is the Chief Executive for Siemens, which is the Chief Executive for Siemens here in Argentina, but he wears another hat, which is he leads Siemens energy business for the entire region. And so we're going to talk to him quite a bit about energy as well, which is another key pillar of the SDGs. So we will be operating in English and Spanish. So you have your headsets if you need them. I'm going to ask Alicia to get us started with a little bit of the background on what the SDGs are, why they matter, and especially the regional perspective, why they matter for Latin America and the Caribbean. Please, Alicia. Muchas gracias y muy buenos días. Good morning, and this is a pleasure for me, because this agenda 2030 with its 17 goals and 169 goals and so many indicators. We have called it a civilization agenda. Why? Because it talks to a change in paradigm, facing a problem that we know in civilization-wise, where we have to solve at least some of the most oppressing problems, such as global inequity or growth. Yes, but not at any cost. Or we're talking about shared prosperity and, of course, how we manage to get to environmental sustainability. This is an agenda that we have qualified as rights agenda, where the citizen adopts his or her own rights, and it's a difficult one because unlike the ODGs, this has been developed by the member states, and also because it's a universal agenda, not only for the environment or the developing country, but everybody for Finland, Norway, the US, et cetera. Everybody has to comply. And I call it a civilization agenda because it has very important proposals, such as eliminating extreme poverty in 2030. So there's a vision towards 2030. It's not an agenda for tomorrow, it's an agenda for the upcoming 13 or 14 years. And it's an agenda that sets forth very concrete goals, like eliminating extreme poverty. In Latin America, it means taking 75 million people out of poverty, and the countries have engaged, like the Society of Colombia, you provide electrical power to 23 million people who are those who do not have electrical power in our region, or moving from zero percent starvation or food security, not only not being hunger. We move away from basic diseases not being covered, but moving towards a healthy life, and a very important thing is how we accompany people throughout their life cycle, from cradle to tomb. So that is the attention from cradle to grave. And this is very important. One of the most important things is the gender equality, that is the equality of women throughout her life. It's not only a social issue, it's an economic issue as well. Women are most of the population, so it's not a minority issue. And I think that the gender equality is absolutely of the essence, starting from economic, political, and physical autonomy. I believe women may contribute and can contribute, and that's what the agenda talks about. But the agenda also talks about very concrete issues such as water. Water will become one of the main problems in the future. Look at what's going on in Africa today. There is already a migration, why? Because the Chad Lake has been reduced 70 times in the last 14 years in Sudan. They have other problems as well, true, but yet that's a big problem. In this agenda, we also find something which I believe is essential, which is jobs, employment, the importance of solving poverty and inequality, not providing people with money or grants, but with work, with decent work. And I think we also tackle issues such as cities, oceans, production, consumption, biodiversity, and so on and so forth. You take a look at this little booklet where we have the 17 goals, the agenda. You will say, hey, I would love to have a world like this. I would love to have this world by 2030. So this agenda has become a fundamental agenda. Simone will tell us because Colombia is the most advanced country on how to move towards the agenda. But what I want to say, what ECLAC suggests. ECLAC suggests to the region, first of all, to really bring this agenda on board the national development programs and the national budgets, because this has to be implemented because it's already beautiful, but where is the money? Follow the money. So we need means for implementation. Second, this has to be measured because whatever is not measured is not counted and what you don't count doesn't count. So you have to break the statistical silence. For example, in the case of gender equality, and that's why we in ECLAC have the statistics of the American Conference. We have brought together all of the institutes of the region, together with the geographic institutes, to make sure that we can measure, measure, measure. Give it to the people, not only with statistics and data and surveys, but also big data. And here we need the private sector. We've done some agreements with Twitter, WhatsApp, and Facebook to know what people think of some of these problems. Third, we are suggesting a form of the Latin American Caribbean countries that will take place between April 26th and 28th in Mexico, where the countries will come. These will be the countries that have to report on the progress made and will bring the private society to debate on these issues in Mexico from April 26th to 28th in Mexico. I'm glad you mentioned that these goals are universal. I still hear people saying the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, they're not the United Nations goals. They are every country's goals. They're every citizen's goals. Ultimately, that ownership that Alicia referred to is our ownership. And it's up to us to work with our governments and our companies to ensure these goals are met. And with that, I'd like to go to Simone to hear about the case of Columbia. As Alicia mentioned, you are quite advanced actually as the Minister of Planning in using the SDs. How are you using them? How are you implementing them? Well, thank you. Columbia was the first country to implement. So we had nobody to teach us, nobody to show us the best practices. We just did and learned together at the same time. I have a number of thoughts. First of all, the Sustainable Development Goals are just common sense goals. These are not strange things. They are not complex things. As Alicia was saying, these are things that everybody would love to have, drinking water for all citizens, improving the quality of education, fight against climate change. These are reasonable things. And these are probably things that the governments have already been doing, but they don't know. So that's the first step. The second step is the so many facets or faces that the Sustainable Development has. It's not only having a developed country and a recipe for development, although the Millennium Development Goals have the 18 goals and 169 sub-goals. And just for you to know, 110 need for the national government and territorial entity to work. That is, mayors and governors must work together if we want to comply with the goals. 88 of these goals have to do with private sector and civil society. If we don't work with them, they cannot be complied with. 34 have to do with international issues. That is, just like ECLAC, which is for Latin America, the countries have to get together to agree, discuss, know how to solve problems. In other words, it is not only that the developing countries and developed countries get together, but there must be with mayors, with governors, with civil society, private sector, and with the international community. And looking, revisiting this national example. We've interviewed you before on DevEx about six months ago, and you gave an example of food waste, just so we can make it really concrete for our audience. Tell us about the case of food waste. These are common sense. Some of the interesting things about public policy of the ODS is that always in Latin American context, we are used to think about lack of food, lack of education, lack of energy. It's that we never think about waste, which is a very important part of the agenda, but nobody ever measured it, as Alicia said. One of the goals is precisely to talk about the waste of food and the framework of implementation. What we found is that everything was fine, and we had something like 32 indicators that we were not measuring. So we started measuring them for the first time. And we had, for example, food waste. The number was 34 percent, 34 percent for a country that has malnutrition, 8 percent of its population in extreme poverty, and a Catholic country where the idea of wasting 34 percent of the food produced is impossible. Maybe if we didn't have so much waste, we wouldn't almost have to import any food. So we have had three projects that are Republican in the name. We work with finance organizations to have financial funds or funding for prevention of food waste. And you can see one single data can change the policy of a country. In other words, the goals have given us a number of views or paths. We have today actions, laws, budgets, and 86 percent of the goals. It is really a ministry priority. Every minister knows what he or she has to deal with in these goals. But we are still learning more. But the good thing is that we are here in a context of private sector, and I will end with my presentation with this many. Countries do not have long-term perspective tools. Nobody can tell you what the energy policy will be 10 years from now. However, something very good about the SDGs is that these are regulatory perspectives, especially for the private sector. In other words, if you take the goal number seven, energy, it tells you what you have to reach. And if I'm private sector, I know that for the upcoming 13 years, we will have to introduce renewables in the matrix. I know that energy efficiency will be of the essence, and so on and so forth. The private sector has views that sees the regulatory perspective where the regulation is going to and where the government is going to. Maybe this doesn't happen this year or next year, but it will happen. Eventually it will happen. So for the private sector, must cater for this because the goals are exactly this regulation perspective that is so important for investment. Next speaker, Javier, about the private sector. I'll just mention when the SDGs were being implemented, I got the opportunity to attend the UN General Assembly and to do a panel like this, and Bill Gates was one of the panelists, and a reporter asked him from the audience, said, you know, doesn't this all sound like happy talk? There's no way you're really going to implement these SDGs because the cost is in the trillions of dollars. There's no money to do this. And he had a one word answer, which was innovation. And when I think of where that innovation is going to come from, it's companies like Siemens, who are driving the innovation that is going to make these SDGs possible. So tell us Javier, a little bit about how the SDGs matter for your business. Is it something you do kind of philanthropically on the side? Is it part of the core business? What is it? Well, that is exactly the issue. First, it starts with the commitment of business leaders. But to me, the key of all this, which creates a sort of virtuous circle, is when working on the SDGs becomes an integrated, an integral part of the business processes. And this creates a virtuous circle, as I just said. Another effect that's very positive is that very often in HR, we talk about motivation of people. And one of the components, one of the key components of motivation is what we call purpose. So if the business strategy has a purpose that is completely aligned with the achievement of these SDGs, in addition to motivation and attracting people, they act as a motivating element, as a key motivating element. Let me give you an example of how we are addressing this ourselves. Because our strategy, we call it business to society. We say, we make real what matters. That is, all of our strategy is aimed at this concept of business to society. And in this regard, we've defined six pillars. I'll give you very concrete examples. And these pillars, in these pillars, we address all SDGs. First is advancing the economy. Siemens is a company that's present in 200 countries. And in direct and indirect terms, it has a growth impact, GDP of around 250 billion, just so you see our impact. And one of the issues we're working on here is access to energy and electricity by the people. Let me give you an example. Here in Argentina in the last 10 years, 80% of all the installed capacity was made by us. We made that. And the other point, again, the second pillar of our strategy, business to society, is developing, creating jobs, providing, delivering training and creating quality employment. In Berlin, we have what we call the Siemens Professional Education Center. And where we work on education, on mechatronics, robotics, digitalization and this is then people duly qualified for the jobs. And today we have the idea of replicating this method in other countries. And in Argentina, we are working on this. We referred to innovation earlier. That's the third pillar of our business to society strategy. Siemens invests five billion euros a year in research. We created what we call the next 47. That's a strategy to make investments in incubators or new innovative proposals to generate new business models. And one billion is being invested in the next five years. The fourth pillar is environmental stewardship and the environmental portfolio of Siemens, ranging from energy efficiency to renewable energies, generates more than 500 billion worth of reductions in CO2. And that's approximately 60% of Germany's emissions or more than 100% of the emissions generated here in Argentina. The fifth pillar is improving living standards, the quality of life. And this has to do with all SDGs. And there we have our healthcare portfolio, which is aimed at working on this direction. And lastly, supporting transformation in society. That's the last pillar. And there we have all the corporate social responsibility initiatives. Just to give you an example here in Argentina, we're working on the experiment project with all the schools of the city of Buenos Aires and several schools from the suburbs. We created a kit, which is an experiment box where teachers together with students work on projects to create, come up with ideas for energy efficiency. And all this, and just to conclude, this has to do with pursuing SDGs. SDGs have to be an integral part of the business strategy. That is what we call business to society. And when that's embedded in the strategy and in the business process, it becomes a virtuous circle and it does work naturally. Give you all a scale, the sense of the scale of innovation that we're talking about in a company like Siemens, as you're here today, spending the day at the web, just imagine just this one company will register 30 patents, just one company. So you think of all the innovative companies in the world and you think of issues like renewable energy or food waste or energy efficiency, this is absolutely critical to what underpins the SDGs. So we have very little time left, but I just would like a couple of sentences from each of you. For those who are watching this on the live stream or the reporting media that are here, how do they know how we're doing with this implementation? How can they keep track of this? What should be some kind of important indicators they look at to understand, particularly how this region is doing when it comes to implementing the SDGs? Anyone wanna start with that, Alicia? Yes. We have a webpage about SDGs and that is where we publish everything that countries are doing in terms of institutional arrangements, how they are incorporating SDGs to their national development plans, indicators, and we intend to make an annual assessment of progress. This year we will present one first assessment. I love what Siemens is presenting because we believe that in the Sustainable Development Forum from April the 6th to the 28th, where countries will meet civil society, participants from the private sector, they will all meet for the first time to make a regional assessment and measure yearly what we achieve. We want this to be an open platform so everybody can go in. We want it to be interactive so people can say, well, I'd like to know how Costa Rica's doing, how Argentina's doing? Well, Argentina says they're doing this, plus this, plus this. Let's publish all the indicators and the follow-up that each country's making. I would say that they started in 2015 and now countries are getting ready to comply. They are finding the institutional architecture for implementation, they're gathering data. I would say data is very important for this exercise. They are looking at baselines, not only measuring things, but how they break down things. In other words, if I want to have a gender vision, how do I look at data for women or for rural areas? So what we're mostly doing is preparing the baseline where we stand, deciding what we will do. In the case of Colombia, we have 86%, but to conclude, one of the important things is how we relate internationally. That's part of the equation. Many of these issues are not just things that depend on the government and on the government talking to their private sector, but this calls for a rethinking of international institutional architecture because what we have is not well adjusted to these goals. So I would say that we should think about how to incorporate technology is innovation. That could be very useful, but there is no good platform to do this at this point. So I would say that to comply, much of the reform required by the UN and the multilateral system has to be reflected. There are three ways to implement this. Money, financing, trade, which can help, business participation, investments, and I would say technological innovation. And that'll come not necessarily from government stakeholders, but from the private sector and civil society. We're more at DEV-X. I've had how we reform the international system. Javier? No, just to simply reinforce the concept of... Just to reinforce the notion that at least from the private sector, we need to have a strategy aimed at sustainable development goals. Goals, six initiatives, and actions. This has to be entirely embedded. It has to be embedded within the business process. Otherwise it doesn't work. Another important thing, and we've discussed this, is to have indicators, but not just indicators, but a very concrete action plan and a follow-up system, a follow-up scheme. The Germans have a good system there. But again, when this is part of the business process, the virtuous circle is created. Addressing SDGs, more business can be created. That is the virtuous circle. If we keep it separate, if we keep it at something marginal, it won't work. That's our reflection. That is something I've absolutely noticed. I was a skeptic when they were announcing these SDGs. As many people were in the global development community, the idea was, look, we need a whole book to understand these. They're so complicated that so many indicators and targets, but it turned out the complexity of these made them more useful because they actually reflect the complexity of the world and the issues we're dealing with. So when I speak to corporate executives, they say, we love this, because exactly to Simon's point, it gives us a guide. It tells us where things are headed so we can plan our business around it. And I think companies increasingly are adopting this. We certainly saw that in Davos this past session. And I think we have 13 years left. Might seem like a lot of time. It's actually not given the scale of these goals. So it's up to this excellent panel you've heard from today and to all of us here to ensure the implementation happens. So thank you for being part of this most important session of the day. And thank you to our fantastic panelists for being a part of this.