I'm actually really excited about this talk. This is something that is gonna make my life easier because I'm dealing with these issues myself. So our speaker is Karina Zona. She's a San Franciscan. She has been a Ruby developer for five to six years. She does a lot of work with Rails Bridge and Women Who Code.  What's the full name of Svissi? San Francisco Sex Information. Okay, and they're a nationally known sex information phone line and service.  So thank you, Karina. Thank you, Josh. Well, hello. As Josh noted, I am both a developer and a sex educator. And I think a lot of these do things overlap. XKCD, by the way, of course. Research, culture change, and self-reflection have stirred an increasing range of labels that people are ascribing to their important relationships, their sexual orientation, to gender. And social apps in particular now are being pressed to adjust. Imagine walking through the world, knowing that everyone's first assumptions about how you see yourself, who you love, what feels right for you, are completely wrong. Now imagine signing up for a cool website and then being required to select an option from a drop-down menu that doesn't include anything that represents you. You'll feel defeated. You'll want to argue that whatever they think they're learning from you, that it's not really true. You'll want to tell them that they're adding to your humiliation by making you do this. You'll want to tell them that they're missing a huge, great part of you. So users are giving us pushback to ill-fitting assumptions. And if you feel out of depth in dealing with these issues, well, you're not the only one. So what would a canonical set of relationship statuses look like? Three years ago, Facebook figured this was a pretty good model. And arguably even pretty progressive, right? I mean, we got stuff here, like open relationship. Users disagreed. They disagreed strongly. So under pressure, Facebook had to nearly double the options in just two years' time. And when Google Plus launched last year, it largely adopted that list, although for some reason they left out separated and divorced. So we still don't know what's a canonical list here. Notice that they also added something else. Choice, the right to opt out of being labeled at all. Allowing users to identify their relationships with labels of greater personal significance. This was being driven by people rejecting a user experience that wasn't working for them. It's not about monetization. Facebook doesn't even care. They're not even providing the option to advertisers. We're dealing with three core problems. First, there's a premise that deeply personal stuff about humans can be reduced to lists. Second, the assumption that canonical lists for these things do and must exist. Or at least surely that we can create them, right? And the third problem is our faith that the first two can be easily solved just by adding more list items. And this is not gonna work.  This is what happens when we try to throw more labels at the problem instead of examining the assumptions in the database schema. An open relationship is definitionally a one to many join, okay? With the usual understanding as an engineer about what that means, that the actual number of relationships could be zero or one or many. But this is Facebook failing at modeling relationships in a relational database. The schema forces the user to choose. Either get to look evasive or be inauthentic. And it's not just for relationship statuses and it's not just for people in open relationships. They're being made to feel like they're not real or don't exist or have to lie. And it's the tip of the iceberg. In 2008, Sam Hughes set out to create a modern relational schema for marriage. He went through about 14 iterations in SQL before realizing that the problem was never gonna be solved that way, that the foundation itself was wrong. Relational databases just couldn't model real life's complexity. A graph database is what would be needed. So how do we bring modern realities into data views and logic then? We start at schema. As developers, we're being tugged in two directions. Keep that code base manageable, right? And get designed for modern complexity. We can build a foundation for great UX and same development. Let's look at what the approaches are. First, we had to get schemas into alignment and I said schema's plural. That's because we have two different types. We have mental schema. That's an individual set of preconceived ideas, a framework for representing some kind of aspect of the world. And it's our personal system for organizing information, especially new information as it comes in and trying to fit it into that existing schema. And then we have database schemas which are essentially the same thing. It's just a mental schema translated into blueprints for a database. When you use Rails Generate Scaffold or Rails Generate Model, it's creating a migration, right? Well, maybe you created something like this one. Those migrations ultimately get translated into a unified schema to be used by the environment's database. So what you're looking at, all this UX, this is just manifestations of mental schemas. Our schemas and our UX are leaving people behind and we can fix it. And we start with a question. What benefit will the user notice? When developing a schema that's going to ask a person about their experiences, their feelings, their sense of self and identity, there just isn't gonna be a single right way that I can tell you to solve this. But what we can do is evaluate the trade-offs and ask what benefit will the user notice? That's not equivalent to how will the user benefit. Okay, that's a question that grants us a lot of latitude to just assume that whatever we wanna do, it's gonna be to their benefit, right? Because it's just making a product that's awesome and that'll work for them. Evaluating from the user's perspective is how we keep focus. So I've got this lovely little chart here. The problem is that there's absolutely no point on it where everyone is gonna see maximum benefit. All we can do is really look at choices and try to work out the trade-offs.  Checkboxes, radio buttons, select menus, they're all implying that they're all possible values can be represented. So the message is, hey, user, just pick up the right ones and everything will be fine. But think back to those opening slides that I showed you. Does that stuff look like it maps to checkboxes or radios?   Checking a box is a one-step action and that's really great for the usability. Entering a text string is not and so that's a free form solution such as a text area or a text field that we don't automatically see is exciting. Nevertheless, that form field can deliver striking user benefit to users. A metafilter gender has been a text field for over a decade and initially there were programmers there who just shuddered at the thought. I know you are too. And that was for about five seconds and then they jumped on board because you know what, you could be creative and you could be silly. And because they could express this thing about themselves fully with authentic voice, that text field grew into a beloved institution at Metafilter. And what you as a user now put into that field is saying something revealing about you. What you're allowed to put in and that you're allowed to put in anything or nothing says something revealing about what Metafilter is meant to be for. That schemas trust in users was the foundation for the users to start asking Metafilter, can we please, please share more? And so today Metafilter's users are trust with many free form fields, including ones most developers would instinctually constrain, pardon me, or thoroughly validate. So even unsensical values are fine. Hell yeah, just go for that. And field values can blatantly contradict each other too. And there's no objection to that either because the message here is, hey user, this is your profile. Put whatever you want in it, make it comfortable, make it personal, make it messy if you want to, because we as developers can handle it. And it's easy to get into that habit of structuring data for easy analysis. We're gonna need to just step back, wallow in the user's perspective for a minute because data does not have to be for analysis. It can be for sheer expressiveness. It can have character and individualism and distinctiveness. Diaspora is a project that many in this room are familiar with. Couple of years ago, diaspora's Sarah May turned gender into a text field too. And just like on Metafilter, the users had fun. On the other hand, this time developers did not. One of the major complaints that was raised was the effect on internationalization of gendered pronouns. And here's what I have to say about that. It's a rat hole. It gets hella messy. It does it hella fast when you deal with internationalization. It's a plan that comes with a level of complexity that English just hasn't wrapped its head around. In a level, sorry, in a lot of non-English languages, again, XKCD, grammatical gender and what you and I would call gender, they're just completely independent of each other. You're not gonna be able to extrapolate. So internationalization based on gender is gonna screw you over so bad. So you wanna think about ways to avoid dealing with gendered pronouns altogether, not how to cope with them. If it's a requirement, then the best way to cope is to straight up ask. So here's Ryan O'Monro, who is XKCD and he's examined this problem pretty thoroughly a number of times just in relation to English language projects. And he found that asking straight up which pronouns do you prefer was truly the best thing he could possibly come up with.  This matrix gets so much worse in pretty much any other language. You don't wanna go there. If you insist there are some Ruby gems that you can check out, I refuse to recommend them. The first one, Sex Machine, is using essentially a database of first names from countries around the world and it's trying to predict for you based on a name you feed it how likely that name is to be male or female. Especially if you hand it off a country, it can be a little more accurate in its predictions. But it's still just giving you a guess and probability factor. I think most people, well I don't know about most people. There's plenty of people in the world who'd be pretty offended if you called them by the wrong pronoun. Especially if you could've just gotten it right really, really easily. So I don't know that there's any amount of wrong in a gem that's gonna be okay. And the other one we have here is L18N inflector. And this is using Rails inflector and this is using something more like a whitelist. Essentially you can pick out words that you think should be detected in a gender field and map them to male or female in your opinion. This is gonna fail even bigger. So as developers we've got this vision of what a good code base should and should not be. What we want, we want things to be structured and orderly and predictable. And that's why we love stuff like relational. And we got indexes so it's all really easily grabbable and sortable. And we think that we can make lists that are neat and exhaustive. And we wanna do it right because we wanna be able to do things like nice easy clean analytics. And why do we do that? Because we wanna be able to make good decisions. But what we get when we try to do this with personal identity data is we have to start doing tons of code. We've gotta do validations of what we think human beings are like. And then we're throwing exceptions because they're not. And then you gotta deal with all these conditionals and partials for meeting each of these conditions. So you've got all this code you're throwing at it and you're trying to do premature and optimization. And you're never ever gonna get exhausted because cultures vary so much in how they use these labels or even whether they have some of these labels. And it's all individual perspective anyway. You really are not gonna be able to assign this stuff to people. And of course it's a moving target. So many of these labels were not popularly known and some of them didn't even exist. Say five, 10, 20, 40 years ago. We're never gonna stop making lists. So all of our decisions are really gonna be based on completely false premises anyway. As engineers, we've got this instinct. We're uncomfortable. We wanna step away from this. To deliberately not structure data for easy analysis just feels so wrong. And I feel you cause I really, really get freaked out by that idea. But again, that foundational question is what benefit will the users notice? This isn't about serving our interests. And if necessary, we can strike some middle ground. This is where a guided response comes in, auto suggest. And if it's really necessary to get some sort of structure out of it, we can try just doing minimalist suggests rather than every possible value that we've got in the database. Safe or gender, you can suggest the two values that you think are interesting or the four or the seven, whatever it is. And as soon as I start typing something that doesn't match that, then it becomes completely a free form. But you're still getting some data. So the structure data is gonna be there if you want it. And this can be a really balanced solution in cases where you're willing to tolerate some ambiguity. And of course, there's trade-offs on that. The data quantity is definitely lower. People, once they're freed to opt out of providing personal information, of course some of them do. On the other hand, I think that data quality is gonna improve when people get to be honest and get to choose when they share and when they don't. And that's really proven by meta filters experience. Despite that fact that people can put in anything they want, other people who do put in something, 40% of them do choose really nice, simple structure data that we can use. So it's fine to mix and match from some of these solutions to find the one that's right for your app and your users and your business objectives. So Facebook, for instance, they make relationship status completely optional, but it's also coercive to those who do opt in. They have to set a value. And most actually, most, pardon me, most users do opt in. 60% of them select some relationship status. So the bottom line is that we do want everyone to feel excited about what we build. We want users to feel passionate about their involvement with what we build. And of course we want the analytics, the investors, monetization. We want all of that to be based on sound premises. But the data that's being collected by coercive approaches, the risk is that it's all bullshit. Some people are lying, because lying has been made a requirement for getting past our barriers. Because conclusions drawn from that bad data misdirect our decision making about the next stage of development. So restrictive options, that stuff I showed you in the bottom left, those don't actually have to be marked required. That's not what the meaning of this is. But the way we do set up schema often embeds assumptions anyway that we should and we will, so we do. A field that's not allowed to be null is pretty much destined to be mandatory. And a field that sets a really short value like this, a short length, is asserting that any reasonable value is gonna be under that length. So this migration is implying, you're gonna be either male or female. Transgender definitely is not a reasonable value in this context. And if you're transgender, you're gonna wind up being coerced into a response that's inauthentic. And that's all being set with the very first line, with the schema itself. So boom, this is how easy this is to solve that. This is a foundation for a whole different user experience. And notice what the cool ninja move here is doing absolutely nothing. I love that. You can make this stuff flexible up front. You can optimize for storage and indexes later. Just decide what's valid later. All that code later. So there you have what a discretionary field is. It's when a value can be optional, where the user is left to decide whether to respond at all. And as developers, we may look upon something like this as really obviously redundant, and that's unnecessary, right? But making this explicit that null is allowed is a communication to the team and to your future self. It's a statement of intent. It's documenting a product decision. This is something to refer back to later. So here are the takeaways that I hope you're gonna have today. First, that modeling the real world is complex, and it's gonna be okay. Two, assuming that we know who users are, is surrounding our opportunity to learn who they are. Early constraints in the schema, net crappy, misleading data. So keep constraints out of the user schema, at least at first. You can go there in a while if the data justifies it, but gather enough initial responses that you can do some just like raw data mining, and watch that data for a while. See what happens. Keep an eye out for emergent trends. Right now, we're being pushed from behind. This is not innovation. This, this can be innovation, where we get there first and adapt to what's actually happening instead of waiting for users to be irate. Let's find out what discoveries that we can make.  We really can't handle this. Data quality improves when our lives are merely optional, not required. We don't have to be false. And it gives us data that's rich and specific so that we can unearth patterns that were undetectable when the data was generic and pre-provided. We get to discover, we get to adapt. When we show trust in people, they get to feel good about placing trust in us in return. And their response to all that is engagement, passion, loyalty, all the stuff we want out of them. Those are foundations for great user experience. Any questions? Nice cupcakes. Okay, so questions, hand up high. I think this is a really interesting topic. I was curious, the thing running through my head during the presentation is there's a lot of ad-driven revenue business models, especially like Google and Facebook. I was wondering how something like this might play into the demographics used by advertisers and if you've given any thought to that. Could you be a little more specific for me? I wanna make sure I'm answering the right question. Well, like if NBC wants to advertise a show targeting 18 to 49 year old males and the things in the database are like fella and dangly bits, I was just wondering how maybe that plays out if there's any way to kind of get close enough to what the advertiser's looking for. I can't speak to that specifically but I can tell you that Metafilter is financed purely by Google ads and since there is no gender information, in fact Metafilter doesn't even run any analysis on it. The first time, and only time they did was in 2010 and it was purely because users were kind of curious. So they just like spat out the values. They weren't even running any sort of analysis on that. But clearly Google advertising doesn't care enough. So it doesn't seem like it has to be an issue. And we could really be educating clients as well that you have the potential to learn who else is in this audience and you can start to address niches. Yeah. So not to diminish people who don't follow the particular category but say for the case of a check box versus a text field. Would you say that, well arguably that it's a worse user experience for the majority of people to have a text field versus having a simple check box or radio box? And I guess the question is like, at that point is it worth it to do that? To me that's the question. I agree. I agree. Like I said, these are all trade-offs that have to be out of your user sets needs and your apps needs and what you're willing to tolerate. I mean like I said, there's a lot of ambiguity. You have to be willing to tolerate in this stuff in order to get this kind of information and get this kind of experience. And there's absolutely no way to make everyone happy. In fact, you will get some people really polarized over this. But this earlier you do it, the less polarizing it is. Metafilter did this right from the start and it wasn't a problem. Diaspora went from a select to a text field. And so they had a lot more pushback because people were used to doing it a different way and they had built a lot of code around the assumption that it would always be that way. Sarah, I saw your hand. Somebody get her a bike. Oh wait, someone here. So you seem to be advocating this for all sorts of demographic data. Personal identity data, which isn't necessarily all demographic. But go ahead. Well, there seems to be some legal requirements that might be in conflict with this and is personal identity data not part of the advertising category model? I have to answer any question about how advertisers do their stuff with I don't know, that's not my field. What legal requirement were you thinking of? The only one I'm aware of is age where you have to be over 13 or else you're not supposed to let them into the site. But that isn't the kind of stuff that I'm asking. There's also ways you can do that if necessary, like a checkbox saying I am over 13 instead of actually collecting their birth date. But I don't know enough of the details of law to say whether that's considered acceptable. Was there a question you wanted me to get over here? Oh, I saw Sarah raising her hand and now she's waving her hand. I'll get you in a moment, Sarah. So I've worked in the dating space a bit, which comes up with a user-driven reason for narrowing these down. Given that a lot of the users will be gender normative and expecting that for matching. If you do open up the gender field, how would you address sort of gender seeking questions in a dating or people matching field? Your voice was a little quiet, so I hope that I have just said all that. In the dating space where you have to deal with gender seeking, how would you address the more open input field for 90% of the users, say, expecting more gender normative answers? I think that auto suggest is really useful there and the people who are not gender normative are actually gonna be really excited to be able to search for people who sound more like them or share some of their sense of self or values. That's a real opportunity. On the seeking? Well, if you're making a free form of collecting the data and then a select of searching for it, yeah, you do have a conflict there.  But maybe it is something like if you're using auto suggest, then you know it's pretty predictable that a lot of those values are gonna be male and female and you do something like having the option to select on those or do something like, say, a wild card search or being able to spit out basically a list of what the other values are and let people kind of use those as tags to do some surfing around for people who sound interesting. Okay, up here. Hi. So I'm the programmer who made the change in Diaspora to move it from a select box to a text field. And, thank you. And we did get a lot, there were a couple of questions about whether people give you a pushback and whether it's a worse user experience for people that fall into the more gender normative categories and what I can tell you from our users is that even the people that do fall into the gender normative categories feel better about being able to add something else in there, right? It's, and a lot of people who identify in the gender normative categories told me that what they loved about it was like, it doesn't matter, you can put whatever you want in there. They felt free to put whatever they felt like. And one of my friends put, Ada Lovelace is her gender, right? And I think that when you do this, you're not reducing anyone's user experience. You're enriching everybody's user experience. At least that's been the experience with the Diaspora user base. I think this time we can go get lunch. This is clearly a rich topic. Maybe we can talk to Bosco about having a meetup evening to discuss it. That would be fantastic. Okay, great. Thank you very much. Thank you.


We know who this is. This is Hoover, gotta be Hoover, Jay Edgar Hoover. Look at that face. What a vile creature. The untouchable, literally the untouchable. The untouchable. I know a little about the history of this guy. A vile creature. Look at this portrait.  Captures what this monster represented. Just look at him. Sheryl's commenting. Would have loved to have a hint of a shoulder strap showing with this. Yeah. He was a cross-dresser. I think that's what Sheryl's referring to. What a portrait. Let's check out the text. Let's check out the text. FBI, FBI, Hoover looks the same. More power around more, yep. Marylandski, yep. Looks the same. Private, yep. Jim Rowley, the true nature of FBI, yeah. And it ends the same. We're going to read the original. Let's read the original. Card number 34, Jay Edgar Hoover. FBI director Jay Edgar Hoover hated the Kennedys and refused to cooperate with their crackdown of organized crime because according to him, organized crime didn't exist. Yet he spent his vacations gambling at Del Mar racetrack and relaxing at the Del Charo Motel, notorious hangouts for top-level mobsters and both owned by his pals, the Texas merchants. And he often met privately with mafia prime minister Frank Castello and has been alleged that Hoover had a secret hit squad of mob assassins recruited with Castello's help. The day after Kennedy died, the FBI taped gangster Charlie Ingalls telling his boss Sam Jacan Khanna, quote, two months from now, the FBI will be like it was five years ago. They won't be around no more, end quote. Hoover's power resided in his confidential files during the Warren commission investigation. For instance, he collected derogatory materials on commissioner members and their staff. He also investigated the sex lives of prominent people, particularly homosexuals. But ironically, it is rumored that Hoover's own alleged homosexuality may have subjected him to blackmail by gangster Meyer Lansky. Private corporations, government, and media were infiltrated by ex FBI agents who, while no longer on the payroll, remain loyal to Hoover. This may shed light on the true roles of ex FBI agents like Guy Bannister, William Harvey, Robert Mahu, Jim Garrison, and Secret Service Chief James Rowley. The true nature of FBI links to Lee Oswald and Jack Ruby have never been revealed, but they certainly were ties between the FBI and both men. And by controlling the investigation, Hoover was in a position to obscure the trail of the assassins. Just imagine what the United States would have looked like now in 2023 if Hoover was not in charge for the amount of time that he was, and if he was actually investigated and prosecuted for his crimes. What a different world we would be living in right now. What a monster. What a monster.


I had no idea people think everybody's telling me that I knew and I had to have known when I asked Ian Rappaport yesterday and Ian Rappport's face was like oh you don't know you know because I'm in Indianapolis and I was just in the Colt Stadium it'll be they're covering from November 17th or whatever all the way through the end of the season they're collect I guess they've been collecting stuff now in training camp they've been collecting stuff and we might I mean maybe potentially be a part of one episode I just hope this doesn't affect the Indianapolis Colts become the greatest Indianapolis Colts they can become in 2021 I don't think it will be and I'm very excited to watch behind the scenes of how this team this building operates right down the road from us here


Yeah, cool. Thanks, Michelle. Hey, maybe just as context just because I think this is the first one we're doing here. Some history. Josh Hannah and myself and then the last year and then this year Chris, Matt and myself put together first day physical road trip to the Bay Area and then this year with shelter in place a virtual road trip to the Bay Area and it was just a great experience. It was a really neat way of investor fellows like myself in the Bay Area to connect and try and add value to New Zealand based entrepreneurs and investors and and through the process was able to meet some really cool companies and really cool entrepreneurs and and so with the, with the advent of shelter in place with the use of zoom, we're like well, why do this, you know, you know, two big day sessions once a year, let's try and do this more frequently and thereby try to increase the connectivity between investor fellows and probably entrepreneur fellows over time, and the New Zealand community. So, Michelle and I came up with this idea of a monthly, essentially interview series. And so the idea is for one fellow to interview another fellow so I'm going to interview Chris today, just so that you get to know Chris in a little bit more detail and probably go for like 20 30 minutes and I think we've prepared questions and then open it up to to your questions from the group. So, maybe before we kick it off if we can do this super quick just so just to be fair to Chris and so he understands the audience and who all is is is logged in here and gets a sense of how to how to address the audience. If we could go around really quickly I think there's roughly 20 ish folks who are down then. If you could just really quickly say like, Hey, I'm from, I'm from Auckland as example, I run a small early stage company x. And then you can just go through really quickly so Chris has a sense of maybe some perspectives you all might be interested in so Mike if you could kick it off. Just make it really quick. I'm just conscious was that many people in there this will take over 20 minutes. Yeah, maybe a half minute each, or maybe less if we could just go just barrel through like you might kick it off. Hey guys, Mike Hanna from NZTE Investment Angel Investor from Auckland as well. Hey, Kyle Webster I think you're next. Hi, I'm Kyle. I'm a Wellington based founder. And I run a small company called Lipmaps that builds search and navigation software for scientific literature. Roland. Hi, I'm Roland Soler day job is general manager of Tycho electronics in Christchurch, New Zealand, and vocational job is with aerospace Christchurch where we're looking to set up a aerospace hub. Brooke, I think you're next. Hi, I'm Brooke Bonner. I am in Bellevue, Idaho, hoping to move to New Zealand very soon. And I currently work with an organization called Impact Finance Center where we do philanthropist and investor education to connect their values and their dollars. Cool. Sean, I think you're next. Sean McGrill, I'm from Boston Mass. I'm a recovering entrepreneur and currently an angel investor focused in on female lead businesses. Cool. Adele if I if I have that right. Hey guys, I am Adele. I run a little technical agency in Auckland. We focus on e-commerce but to identify gaps while providing services on a couple of SaaS products around payments and clouds and integration. Cool. In that, Matt Thompson. Got a title Max Thompson from Callahan Innovation. I work with our startup programs across New Zealand. Nelson. Hello everyone. I'm connected from Chile from America. I had a company that we provide the financial solution for small companies. Cool. Aaron, I think you're next. Aaron, Paul and Scott, I think we're pretty close to just trying to get through this. Aaron, I'm an entrepreneur and angel investor focused on like B2B SaaS. Hey Paul, I think you're on mute. As always. Paul Spence from Christchurch. Currently a mentor and program support at ThinkLab, the incubator attached to Canavera University. Very cool. Scott. Scott Cabot. I'm in the Bay Area. I'm a former consumer CMO who's running an advisory business 621 consulting that helps startups with marketing and go to market needs. Cool. Mark. I'm based also in the Bay Area just north of San Francisco. I'm launching an early stage fund to invest in New Zealand startups that are coming to the US market. Awesome. Hey Ed. How's it going? Hey Dave. I'm Ed Baker live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Ran international growth at Facebook and then started the growth team at Uber and now do angel investing. Cool. Christy. Christy, sorry. Hi, I'm Christy Reynolds. I'm an angel investor. I sit on the board of the Ice Angels and I'm really passionate and working on how we can provide access to patient capital for export growth focused SMEs. So that's me. Cool. Annie. My name is Annie. As you know, I'm co-founder of a number of four purpose businesses based in Auckland. And we're really a coach governance and executive leadership and also convene movements of change to reduce inequities for Māori and Pasifika people in Aotearoa. Cool. Yuri. I was a biotech entrepreneur, then I was a visiting partner on my combinator. And most recently, I'm a biotech founder again. Cardace bioscience is making oral antivirals for things like COVID. I think town of coronavirus. Very cool. Neil, I think we might have some folks that have stepped away. Maybe Anita is next. Good morning everybody. I'm from Auckland. I'm coming from the corporate world originally and I'm independent now as well as an investor and part of the puddles team. Cool. All right, I think that's everybody that's on video. So I appreciate it. I know that that took some time, but my hope is part of this is it's hopefully a conduit for you all to meet each other. Perhaps that's a way of flagging people that you want to connect with offline. All right, with that, maybe we can get into Chris. So I think the goal of this Chris is to talk through your interest as an investor, kind of your worldview, and maybe how you connect to New Zealand.  So, you know, ready to grow up, tell us about your family, tell us about Chris kind of before you became an investor. This is like the half of my career that I usually skim over, or don't talk about it all. So I was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, grew up there and then ended up moving to the Chicago area I went to school at Northwestern. First, I guess, job out of school was actually selling enterprise IT solutions to a lot of early stage corporates and folks that I found in Fast Company at the time. I think it was right around the time that Fast Company started publishing its magazines and so I use their hot lists as a way to kind of sell into hot startups and ended up connecting with a lot of companies that have then gone on to do some amazing things. But that was kind of my first foray, I guess, into Silicon Valley and more tech focused innovation. I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs, so I was always kind of thinking about different ways to start businesses and things like that. But this was kind of the first foray into some of what was going on in the tech side. Yeah. And what specifically got into VC like was there, was there an experience, was there a relationship or like how did you, how did you get into this job that isn't quite a job. So, I'm an accidental venture capitalist. So, this is more of this part of the story that I'm usually comfortable with. I'm a long time operator, first time fund manager so depending on how far back you go, I started a couple companies sold one for enough to cover a pizza and I think our AWS expenses. And then somehow ended up as first employee and CEO at a company building and launching small satellites, so literally Chewbacca satellites, CubeSats, and saw that from zero to space in 12 months with three satellites and then 65 over the following two and a half years. I personally got to start every part of the business from booking rockets with SpaceX and Rocket Labs and Roscosmos and Jix and all the others to traveling the world with an RF test kit to figure out where we drop our ground stations. I got some unique stories about TSA equivalent stops in various countries when you're carrying around the RF test kit with you. And then left that spent a couple years as a drop in COO a couple different frontier ventures everything from autonomous vehicles to robotics to more space to some computer vision platforms. And then spent a year at Costa Noah Ventures out of the Bay Area as an EIR where I thought it would be a forcing function to start my next company. And so, and behold, my wife and I found out we were expecting our first child decided no better time to move to a more crowded populated city so we moved to New York. And then when I got to New York, I kind of found that the type of fund I would want to work with at the earliest stages didn't really exist here. And so I started a typical to be the kind of fun that I would want to actually work with. So that's kind of the genesis. I decided to create your own fund rather than coach going to fund. Tell me a little bit about that that's a little. Yeah, so. So, I bet a number of the funds in and around New York and then obviously had a lot of connections to bear a funds. And so in the process, I kind of saw that the market was shifting up so funds were getting larger the stage that they were tending to invest in was getting a little bit later and or the round sizes were getting larger. And I felt like there was a bit of a gap at the early stages almost like institutionalizing angel investing, which I done some of but I didn't have a ton of capital so I still would you consider network rich and liquidity poor. Small checks and I figured that there's no better way to kind of get additional leverage than to start a fund where I could actually pool capital together and give people access to some of those truly early stage innovations where, at least in the deep tech side you tend to see your largest accrual of value going into the seed round and then going into kind of like series C.  So, being an angel investor in those deals can be very lucrative if you pick the right deals. And so for me it was kind of a question of what's on market, and what do I think the right opportunity is. And so I had a lot of entrepreneurs kind of reaching out looking for access to capital access to advice, and it just kind of happened, I suppose. And the name of the fund is atypical and you've talked a little bit about you've given some some hooks into what things you look for in terms of deep tech and in stage but but maybe flesh that out a little bit so just so people understand your context and your view. Yeah, yeah, so I tend to, there are a couple different ways I describe it depending on the audience I've thrown out plausible science fiction. So if you come across something that looks like plausible science fiction think atypical. So in reality, what I end up doing is I end up investing in high EQ engineers that are building primitives or foundational technologies. So I look for folks that are pre product market fit have some technical innovation in hand, and are looking for almost a thought partner to help them work through that process of customer development market discovery and getting to product market fit, and then connect as a bit of a gateway leverage around operations and how you actually get to scale and then obviously downstream investors and connecting with the right folks that like to back moonshots once they have a little bit of the proof points around customers and market. So we're engaging and I think this might be useful to both startups and other investors but just just to understand your thinking that where you're engaging is really a bet on the team. It tends to be investors tend to be team investors or market investors and sometimes a combination of the two but it sounds like it's mainly team. Yeah, actually, so I'm prepping for my first LP meeting tomorrow so I've been thinking about this a lot. And in my mind and kind of the frame for a typical founder technology fit is the new product market fit. For me, it's finding the right technical founder with the right kind of set of what I classify as high Q so balance of IQ EQ and a Q IQ being just raw technical ability is this person want to talk 100 people in the world to solve this particular challenge. It's finding their ability to work with others and also take critical feedback, because at the end of the day, you're not an expert in everything no matter how smart you think you are. So being able to kind of work with your investors and partner with me in a way is impactful. You can use a couple things of the proxy to evaluate EQ so looking at how a founder actually talks to their potential customers or does some of the market discovery I love to put a founder on to a phone call with a potential customer of the innovation and see how they pitch it. How they kind of convey that story and then how they respond to feedback or questions or so forth. And then a Q is essentially rocker it. So can this person take adversity. All the punches that come along with being a founder and then come out the other side stronger. Really, I'm looking for people that just can't quit. They can't turn it off. Yeah. Hey, Chris let's let's let's spend a little time on each of those because I think it's just as a as an investor and like as a person of the craft it's always helpful to understand how other people look at these things and then I think as as many particularly early stage startups you got to merchandise these three things somehow maybe not to you but another investor and so one of the tells. Yeah, so first talk about your product founder fit. It'd be different if this was, you know, pick your mainstream tech field I mean you're going after frontier stuff. And so how do you how do you validate frontier credits. Maybe, maybe this is an obvious question but it strikes me that you're kind of going into some some uncharted waters here. Yeah, so part of it. This is honestly where part of it comes down to relying on my LP group.  So about $10 million focused on pre seed so my check sizes are relatively small. The LP base is relatively diverse. The LPs as well are made up of a mafia of more entrepreneurs and operators themselves. So, to some extent I dive into the technology myself and then I bring in the right technical experts from within my LP base or within my network to assisting actually validating the technical chops of a particular founder. So that's part of it. The other part of it is looking at the EQ fit or the EQ combination of that because it's very easy as a technical subject matter expert, you know, I'm sure we will talk to PhDs and certain points that are over indexed on IQ to the detriment of their ability to work with others or their kind of take hits and keep on going. And I've experienced this specifically at the satellite company that I ran so there are big focuses on kind of this right balance of IQ EQ and passion. And that's really where a lot of this came from it came from interviewing literally thousands of engineers to try and define kind of the right characteristics for the type of people that would bring on board to the company. We're talking to more and more founders I kind of found that, at least when you're talking about technical expertise you can kind of look at that balance spectrum and use a rubric of sorts to evaluate the technical chops is almost more it's easier to define or scope to some extent the EQ and the personal balance is a little bit harder. And that's where a lot of kind of this experience having interviewed so many engineers and having built out kind of that rubric of sorts actually helps. So for me it becomes more of a sifting challenge and actually kind of sifting through the deals and opportunities that come my way to look for that piece of it, almost more than just is this technically interesting and compelling. Yeah, and just to be fair Chris you shared your rubric and it's not a conceptual rubric it's a spreadsheet. Well, that's a spreadsheet of questions that's not a question. But maybe share kind of without giving up your secret sauce, you know, maybe three of the, particularly the AQ and the EQ was just really tough to do that, particularly in a sheltered place world and talk a little bit more about how you vet those two elements. Yeah. Honestly, the AQ and EQ this is probably where you hear venture talked about a lot as part science part art, this is a little more, I guess, art in the sense that it takes a lot of process or having had, you know, thousands of interviews to talk to founders to potentially get to a place where you can kind of suss out where they fall in the spectrum. And then to some extent in the back of my head I'm always balancing where a particular founder falls on a spectrum of what I consider the average of all engineering talent that I've interviewed in the entirety of my career and trying to on balance look at kind of where they sit in that spectrum. And for EQ, again, one of the good proxies that I found is putting them on the phone with potential customer. So seeing how they interact with other people other than yourself, how they tell the story in a different light to a different type of customer because fundamentally at the end of the day what we're talking about is your ability to serve your customers as a founder.  And so to some extent the more people that you can kind of suss out how they serve that particular customer the better so if you can get two founders sitting down together have a conversation with them. You can suss out some of the interpersonal dynamics there. If you can put them on the phone with a customer you can suss out a little bit more about how they will actually serve their product how they will work through kind of the iteration process of product development because having a technical innovation isn't a product so much as it is a piece of technology that then needs to be packaged into something that serves a particular need, or putting them in front of another investor. I have a good suggestion today actually of someone who is another emerging manager in their process they go through actually getting onto a conference call with a number of emerging managers and having the founder pitch them at one time. That way they get kind of the balanced view of having other people with varying perspectives and insights asking questions of the founder at the same time the founder gets to short circuit their overall fundraising cycle. And at the end of the day you get to make a more informed decision based on how downstream funding may play in as a potential risk or non risk. And then the AQ piece of it is really, to some extent you need to look at how many times the founder has failed. I really like to delve into their past history of failures and or accomplishments. And that the way in which they talk about those which is informative as well, specifically to the EQ piece of it so are they taking ownership and responsibility for the failures that they've had or are they passing those off to things that are external to their own locus of control. Yeah, I think particularly you know in this context of EHF I think that the thing I really like about some of your heuristics are a lot of them can be done across borders they can be done digitally. There are some specific credentialing that are more community based right like probably product founder fit and a little bit of the referencing on the AQ. That is a segue. What's your experience been like in terms of investing across borders and specifically investing in the New Zealand community. So far, it's been pretty plug and play so I haven't had, well, there are a couple things going on here one I think that as a first time fund manager and a small fund. I don't have the same kind of ingrained processes or just process that you would have with a larger or later stage fund. So my willingness to kind of break bounds and try new things has always been there. Yeah, I started the fund about a year ago so it hasn't been that long that I've been operating with out COVID let alone with COVID. So being able to hop on a zoom call and just have a conversation with somebody hasn't really been a detriment at all. I think the more interesting thing perhaps is the loss of serendipity. So I think specifically more on like the top of funnel thinking about deal flow and opportunity you lose out on some of that access to just what's happening when you're at a meet up with someone or a number of people who have varying perspectives, odd jobs or whatever the case may be and things will just pop up. For me it's in part being on conversations like this where certain things come from but honestly that's probably the biggest detriment whereas the ability to find opportunities has been strong for whatever reason. It seems like everybody is fundraising, including folks who have been sitting at home and realize that now is the best time to start a new company. Not only people who had companies before but then also people who just are ready for a change. So that's been relatively easy. It's the conversion is relatively easy getting from kind of an initial conversation to then more technical diligence and diving in with the rest of the team and potential references. And then even getting into conversion. I mean, I'd say it's what q2. Well funny enough q1 I did no deals. And it wasn't because of coven. It was just I didn't see anything compelling that felt like it was priced appropriately and had kind of the right conviction around the opportunity with founder technology fit q2 I did four deals. And then all of a sudden q2 came back and full lockdown ended up doing four deals including one that was an incubation with a former colleague of mine, and then q3 come back I did one deal. So it's kind of this on balance it kind of measured out over time but you definitely see these peaks and valleys. And I don't know that it's coven specific so much as it's just perhaps opportunity or. I'll stop. Yeah, no it's me ask you a question and I think it's a good time to open it up actually because I think this topic is probably relevant to both the entrepreneurs and the investors in the group. As you think about that serum deputy in the top of funnel being shut down because of input lack of in person events and call us. How are you thinking about supplementing it digitally right part of it's these, these zoom calls and are there other other other ways and that that entrepreneurs can access to to get on your, get on your radar and investors right or generically. Yes, I mean for me specifically I have two things that I'm thinking about right now. You know people have strong opinions one or the other. I'd love to hear those because these are ideas in my head that I'm talking about with maybe two people. One is given that I'm the tip of the spear for a lot of deep tech things and a lot of the investments that I make her into technical innovations. There's inherently a lot of connection to universities and governments and different institutions. So one thought has been to create almost a Midas list of researchers and put that out as a way to look at university laboratories and otherwise where there's great innovation happening. And new companies being spun out so it's not just innovation in a vacuum but it's true innovation that's getting up to the world. And I think that that could be one potential avenue to open the funnel a little bit and then at the same point kind of create something that has value for others as well as value back to a typical and drawing and potential founders. And then the second is just as a product of my past life selling enterprise it solutions. I love cold emails. I love when people send me a really good cold email I really hate it when people send me a really bad cold email and I will tell them when it's a bad cold email. So I have a post queued up for a blog just talking about cold emailing, frankly, I think that it's underappreciated art and when we think about kind of getting outside of the box and specifically outside of kind of the I already know so looking for innovators and places that you wouldn't normally look. They don't always have access to the same investors and opportunities that some folks in their New York or Auckland even have. So I'm planning to put something out on cold emailing me and specifically looking for people outside of kind of the normal spaces. Let's take a moment. Are there any questions from the group. You guys can just weigh in just unmute and jump in. Chris great to hear your story and your journey. And I see that you're from one of the very early cohort to. I'm an investor in level two. Are you aware of level two here in New Zealand and, and which is effectively the birthplace of Lanza tech, and also some really deep tech. Businesses like Avetana, Mint, innovation, doctoral and these businesses are all repurposing things like waste or in the case of doctoral. It's around reducing sound noise to do with, you know, those flying objects that are ultimately going to deliver parcels and my point here is that I think we've got that there's another innovation called KiwiNet, which is commercializing or helping to commercialize research out of the universities. And I just think it would be really great to get you, you know, more integrated into some of the deep tech type work that is being done here in New Zealand, because there might be some synergies whereby you have an area of expertise when you know people that might be able to add value. I wonder how well are we doing that as an EHF cohort to try and create those, you know, those relationships and those connections. I mean, for one, I think that'd be great to get more closely connected to those I'm connected to the right now ice house and a couple other groups through. Even like Peter at Rocket Labs. I think we were their first customer on their test flight. So I have some connection there and that's kind of netted some opportunities. But yeah, anything to get more connected into the New Zealand ecosystem and specifically some of the research institutions and otherwise would be fantastic. You're you're about to ask something, but Yeah, just so I'm just like your comment, which I found interesting on the cold outreach.  There's some of the companies that we enjoyed working with the most in my group's world with the ones that actually we reached out to that we called cold them. I got to read an article in science or and get down the street. Wow. I really like what you guys are doing. And the the labs or the people that were in the Midas list, as you put it, the top innovative labs are actually some of the worst responders. Whereas when you reach out and this, this speaks a little bit to the New Zealand ecosystem, but also parts of America and other parts of the world as well. You reach out to somebody in the Midwest, they reach out to somebody in a place that's not Oxford in the UK. You say I really enjoyed your paper and you thought about turning this into a company. And that's had a pretty high success rate them for in the buy focus on biotech. And so for me, I'm curious in the space and engineering how that's gone, you've done that as well. I have so my second largest source of deal flows outbound. Thank you, I read I triple E and fizz.org and a number of other publications and have actively invested in companies that I have myself cold outreach to, in order to get that initial conversation going. I completely agree with you too I think that the quality of quality of the company and the opportunity is not by. It's usually oftentimes inversely correlated with one's ability to market themselves. And so I found a number of opportunities that are quite compelling and interesting, where the founders don't have the immediate ability to market themselves, which is part of the value that I then want to bring back to that company. So if they have the right balance of IQ and EQ, and can learn so they're effectively learning machines. It's easier to get them on board with the idea that they can effectively pitch something.  I would say just because it's not just pitching is its own kind of treat, but fundamentally, it doesn't correlate directly with the quality of the atomic metrics of the company itself. I would say that I would extend that even to later stage which is most investors are idea people. So, even if you're based outside the hubs, even if you don't have any overlapping networks to reference you ideas travel incredibly well. And it's a big matching problem. And so it's all discoverable. It's all discoverable in terms of investors that are interested in your field. And it's, it's, it's not impossible to, regardless of what your background is where you're based to, to get your get into the idea flow and, and, yeah, I would say that I track this once over a three year period I want to say I looked at 170 companies I invested in two, and the two companies were specific companies that I chased. Right. And so I think, I think that's a common theme across and so just as a, just extend the point with a great point that hearing me. It's also actually just extending on that for one second. It's also interesting how how much technical innovation has lost the chasm because of referencing. I think referencing is another important characteristic here, where, if you have something that's truly innovative and unique. You then take it to an investor who was David mentioned is an idea person, they will then go to their network, their network is ingrained in another way of thinking that is almost immediately biased against whatever it is you're doing. So unless you can short circuit that referencing process by bringing people to the fray who understand what it is you're doing, why it's different, why it's better, why it's important and they need to fund it. You're almost at a disadvantage from a get go because that investor has to rely on their own network to kind of help to vet what it is you're doing. Can you expect. Yeah, good, please, please. Can you expand on that because that's true at both ends of the spectrum at both of the very innovative things. And if you're doing something which is very hot. Right, so the signal to noise and one person I can recognize this signal or noise in the other space. I mean, the things that are very hot they tend to be very hot because people focus on social proof and the social proof tends to pop up in places that have to do with who's using something not necessarily why they're using something. I think the kind of clarification here that I'm trying to make is more on if you have something that's truly innovative piece of technology, you need to find technical experts who understand the technical nuance of what it is you're doing, and can explain that nuance to investors who themselves then need to turn around and explain it to their partnership. So unless you can break it down into terms that makes sense for not only the one investor the partner that you're talking to but also that partner to then sell it to the rest of the partnership. You're at a disadvantage. So in a couple cases I suggest to my founders that they identify either potential customers within the portfolio of that investor that they want to talk to get those folks on board with using this as a potential product because that circuits a referencing process, or to identify technical experts in the field that they can provide as a upfront reference sheet that look and feel like third party independent folks as opposed to people that are maybe working at your company right now, and would just kind of spout the same things that you are said provide some clarity there. No. Let me be broad at the point. It's specific to this this community which is the more the more personal interactions over a long period of time I think helped to get people would help and that may not be useful from an early stage context but I think the more common touch points, you come back and you do what you say you're going to do builds conviction over time and so for us. Again when I look back at the data that the average, the company the average company I've invested in I've known for three years prior to investing. It doesn't do wonder for early stage companies but then when you want to scale. I think there is a, there is a huge value to engaging on a regular basis doesn't have to be frequent and there's a credibility that is created. And so historical results don't the protective future results but they but they should have built a lot of confidence and so, as you think about it right I would, I think a first secure initial money. You know, keep the lights on but then as you think about pick, you know, 234 investors that are in your field that are one stage down to start building up a peer level relationship. That you're not asking it from for anything other than sharing your view of the world in the market in the business wall and you know, you start building credibility over time. What else can can we ask Chris given that in many ways you know he is the, if you're an early stage on for he's the target right he's wants to invest in New Zealand. I think it's a big risk on great founders and really interesting markets. Yeah, I've got one for Chris. Chris, have you in the light of the current environment where travel is, you know, pretty hard to do. Have you or would you invest in companies without actually physically meeting the founders and the team, are you doing it all virtually. Yep, have done it. I'm seeing q4 invested into company in the UK that I've never met personally, or physically I should say we've had a number of zoom conversations. I did the same thing in q3 with a company in Idaho. I've talked to actually a couple of companies in New Zealand throughout the lockdown. Right to you. Well, Chris, I was going to ask you about your anti portfolio but it sounds like it's been a year or so in. And so it's, it's, it's hard to know what the anti portfolio is. Yeah, but maybe take, let's take it, maybe we can end on a, on a different note which is like what's the craziest idea or craziest entrepreneur invested in just giving it sounds like you're on the, on the frontier. The funny thing too is I definitely have an anti portfolio. In my case, most of it relates back to when I was deploying time instead of capital. So I spent time with intercom when they were five people and worked with Owen and Dez very early on for kind of customer market development. I spent a little bit of time talking to Stripe early on. I think that at that point they were still like $100 million company or something like that. And then ended up putting my wife to work at Instacart. So I needed the three founders there personally for quite some time. Those are all random though I think the closest one to kind of the portfolio would be Stripe, just in terms of what they're doing and kind of the idea of primitives. Craziest idea I've invested in so far it kind of depends on your definition of crazy. The craziest technological thing that I've invested in is a nuclear reactor focused on radio isotopes for medical imaging and medical purposes. That was in Q3. So that's recent. I mean I invested into a biotech company that focuses on programmable chemistry and biology so they create effectively temporary tattoos that changes your health does. Very cool. Awesome. All right well with that. Thank you. Thanks for everybody joining and Chris, thanks for being generous with your thoughts and your time and and your stories so I really appreciate it. And the thing I want to get in touch with Chris, he can put his email address there in the chat. And you can also search for the fellows and best of fellows on the website, theechf.org under the fellows directory there. And if any of you and best of fellows want to be mixed up in February or March or April May for a conversation with the New Zealand ecosystem, just ping me and we'll get it sorted.  Great. Or I can match you up. Thanks everyone.


Hello, and welcome back. In today's screencast, we're going to use data from a real-world periodic phenomena to try to develop a sinusoidal function that can be used to model that periodic phenomena. So for example, in the case that we're going to be looking at, we're going to be looking at the number of daylight hours on the first of each month for Edinburgh, Scotland. The key here is that one thing we're going to be doing is to, what we say, model the data. So in some sense, our mathematical equation will not be a perfect fit for the data, but we'll should very closely approximate the data. And in fact, by how we look at the data, different people may look at it slightly differently and end up with slightly different equations. So again, in this situation, there is no one correct answer. But if we do follow the principles that we have learned about sinusoidal functions, we should always have sinusoidal equations that are very close to this. So what we're going to do to actually get data that we can plot is to change the months into numbers, and we'll do the usual thing, one for January, two for February, and so forth until we finish up, of course, with 11 and 12 for November and December. And again, there are different ways to do this, one of which is to use technology in particular to develop a, to get a sine regression equation, and we can do that, for example, on a TI-84 calculator. But today, we're going to learn how to model this and develop a sinusoidal equation by hand. And what we'll do is use very much the same principles that we used when we developed a sinusoidal equation when we were given the actual graph of the sinusoid. And in particular, what we're going to do is focus on a low point and a high point. And for this one, we'll use these two. So let's say that this low point has coordinates t1 and y1, and this high point has coordinates t2 and y2. And remember, that then allows us to determine many of the characteristics of the sine curve that we can determine the parameters a, b, c, and d. And in particular, what we're interested in, of course, is the amplitude, which is basically this distance here. That's probably more important to remember than any particular formula. And again, you can see it's kind of half of the difference between the high point and low point. So we can say two times the amplitude is actually y2 minus y1. And so we can use that then to determine the amplitude or the value for a in our equation. The other thing we can do then, of course, is to use that information to get the vertical shift for our sinusoid. And that's basically going to be the high point y2 minus the amplitude. And again, there are different ways of doing that. In particular, another way is sometimes to use y1 plus y2 divided by 2. And that will give you the same value, and you can get the amplitude from that. The other thing that the high point and low point get us is information about the period. And in particular, we know that 1 half the period is basically going to be the horizontal distance from a high point to a low point. So the way I've got this labeled, this will be t2 minus t1. And again, we can use that then to determine the period and from that determine the coefficient b in our equation. And of course, the last thing we have to do is get the phase shift. And if we focus on a sine function, the way I would get a phase shift might be to focus on this point right here, where it crosses the axis of the sinusoid. And we can see, and the way I've got this set up, this is a quarter of a period back to the left of the high point, or a quarter of a period to the right of the low point. So again, we can get that phase shift by using that general principle. In this case, we could write that as t2 minus a quarter of the period. So I've got to fix a little something here. So we'll write that it's a quarter of a period. So let's get to work on this. Use the fact that we can go back a quarter of a period from. So remember January, February, March, April, and so forth are 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. And we're going to do something fairly simple to start with. We're basically going to use this as the high point and this as the low point. So our high point will have coordinates 7 for July and 17.48 for the number of hours of daylight. And the low point will have coordinates 1, 7.08. So we can now use that information to determine our values for a, b, c, and d. And in particular, we can see that in this case, we do have a period of 12 months. It is an annual thing. And we can also see that the difference between the coordinate, the first coordinate for the high point and low point is 6, which tells us that the period is 12. So we do get 2 pi over b equals 12. And if we solve that for b, we get 2 pi equals 12b. Or b is going to be pi divided by 6. 2 divided by 12, we reduce to 1, 6. So there we have our value for b. The amplitude, of course, or in this case, actually 2 times the amplitude, is going to be the 17.48, the y-coordinate of the high point minus 7.08. And if we solve that then for the amplitude, we get an amplitude of 5.2. And then we can get the vertical shift by taking that high point, 17.48, and subtracting the amplitude of 5.2, which gives us a vertical shift of 12.28. And then, of course, the last thing we have to do is to get the phase shift. And again, what we're going to do if we go back to do here, and we can see the high point occurs at 7. So if I take the phase shift, we'll get 7 minus a quarter of a period. And remember, the period is 12, so a quarter of the period is 3. And if we take 7 minus 3, we get 4. And now we actually have an equation that we can completely write down. 5.2, the amplitude times the sine of pi over 6, the value for b, times t minus 4, phase shift, plus 12.28. And what would be good to do here is, again, and you can do this on your calculator. If you enter the data, you can get the scatter plot for the data. And then you can superimpose upon that the graph of this equation. And you might want to take some time now to try to do that. If you do, this is basically what you would get. And as you can see, if we look at the data, it looks like the curve is a little bit too far to the right. So what we're going to try to do is move that to the left a little bit. And there's a couple of ways of doing that. One is simply to adjust the phase shift. We're going to do something a little more substantial than that. In particular, what we're going to do is think about the fact that what we know about days of the year, and we had put the high point on July 1st, the maximum number of hours of sunlight. We know that that is not the case. The high point actually occurs around June 21st or so at the summer solstice. And so what we're going to do is put the high point at about month 6.7 instead of 7. And we might make it, if we look at how those two points up in here look together, the high point then might actually be a little bit higher than the 17.48. So we're just going to try 17.50. And if we use that as the high point, our low point is going to be half a period back. So if we look at 6.7 minus 6, that comes out to be 0.7. So the low point will have a coordinate of 0.7. And that, again, corresponds to the fact that the minimum number of hours of sunlight does not occur on January 1st. And again, we're going to make that just slightly lower than January 1st, and make it 7.06. And that's the type of information we're going to use now to try to modify this graph or the equation just a little. So here's a summary of kind of what we have done. The maximum number of hours of sunlight occurs about 10 days earlier. And the minimum, the sunlight does not occur on January 1st. So what we had just talked about, we're going to try a maximum of 17.5 hours and a minimum of 7.06 and have the maximum occur at t equal to 6.7, which is relatively close to June 21st. So here's, again, the data we're going to work with. And what we're going to try to do now is use that data in much the same way that we had before. Notice that the period is still 12. So that will give us the same value for b that we had before. So that'll be b equals pi over 6. And the amplitude now is going to be, we're going to look at the maximum of 17.5. If we look at 17.5 minus 7.06, what we end up with is 10.44. And so what we're going to have is an amplitude will be half of that, or 5.22. So you can see we've changed the amplitude just a little bit. And now we're going to go through our usual procedure here. The vertical shift will be the value of the maximum, 17.5 minus the amplitude of 5.22. And that, again, comes out to be 12.28. Okay, and then, of course, the last thing we need is the phase shift. And again, we're going to use the same principle we had before. We're going to go a quarter of a period back from where the maximum occurs. The maximum occurs at 6.7. And a quarter of a period is 1 fourth times 12. And so 1 fourth times 12 is 3, and we get a phase shift of 3.7. So we now have an equation of 5.22 sine, again, pi over 6, times t minus 3.7 plus 12.28. And again, if we've already got the data entered into our calculator, we can now take out the other equation and sketch the graph of this equation. It should get something that looks like that. And you can see that is quite a good fit of the data. Not a perfect fit, but a very good fit. And we can use this equation then to model the number of hours of daylight. In Edinburgh, Scotland. In the next screencast, we're going to look at how to compare this to what we would get using a sine regression function on something like the TI-84 calculator. That's all. I will see you at that next screencast.


Yeah, this talk is preparing clients. I threw in and ourselves Because it in some ways that's what it's about for open-source contribution So hi a little background about me. I'm Aaron Cowich. I Help create decan. I've been working on open data for five or six years. I love cheap pizza If you want me if you really want to like To go from zero to ten for me is someone from New York Telling me that the pizza from New York is better than Philadelphia It hurts because it's kind of true, but just don't go there So I'm feeling really I've got the white dude privileges. It's a mixed bag to be honest in some ways, but I I just turned 40 so like my life is Early bedtime and and dad jokes and I'm currently talking to you right now We're all stuck in the present moment and it's really interesting way So if you want to talk to me about that after the talk, I'd be happy to But that's not what this is about So what is at stake? Why do I why do I care about false for you know open-source software? Distributed power Someone asked a couple me like a year ago like what am I really like what's my good professional goal? And it was to prepare ourselves for the singularity And I think Foss plays Roll in that in that it's it distributes power in a way that is really structurally important It the freedom part of it is like a visceral thing for me. I recently fixed my dryer Hold the applause, but it was pretty awesome but the belt broke and I went online and I Saw a tutorial and it was not actually that hard, but like imagine if you couldn't you weren't allowed to open your dryer Like that's kind of what closed-source code is like and So I it's kind of like a visceral thing for me The the idea of the commons like we're all kind of working together as humans is something that open-source code speaks to And it's awesome how it empowers contributors and empowers people empowers leaders to Help us envision an open society Why should government care about Foss? Yeah, it's crazy to spend public funds on private code. It's my favorite saying around that Transparent seeing accountability and Yeah, I mean it's our it's that's it's our code and it is something that we should have access to a Lot of the private companies create closed ecosystems around their data and their tooling that is pretty Anathetical to the public good And that's problematic as well So I work in open data Primarily and wise Foss useful for open data The if you if the tools to Unlock the data are closed then the data isn't Truly open we Have created a resource called the open data open source open data manifesto that is we're in a soft launch right now But kind of distills those beliefs and go check it out So what is not at stake there's been a lot of hanging I think in the civic tech community around like Are we not having the impact that we want to because like Civic tech and Foss aren't are not organizing. I think it's useful to be honest about what it is and what it isn't so like I think this is what we're doing and I think it's super important When I told my mom about this talk she said that doesn't sound very sexy And it's not but I mean indoor like plumbing like it's super important and I will scowl Versificely at anyone that disagrees with that So it is But it's not it's not social justice. It's it's a different beast, but it's it's super important so There was a really interesting talk that Joe gave yesterday about connecting people connecting with people that are Using software and like does what open source matter to them. So open source has to have ultimately we want the tools to be better and I think that's part of the Where the the goal for us Needs to be I shared this because I'm trying to quit Facebook like everyone probably but so my dad died recently and Someone shared something really personally Powerful about my dad that I wouldn't have had if I wasn't on Facebook and so I want to live in a world where I woke up. You know, I wake up Having an open source phone that doesn't have data that is controlled by Google and I want to interact with my lived environment with all these tools but as we Build and envision ultimately people are using these and so the theory verse practices Is important so who pays for all these open source tools that we think are important VC's clients foundations governments, etc and So where did how do we like how do we actually bring these things forward? This is kind of often what happens with open source. So we have, you know client a client B They have their feature set some of it overlaps with maybe something that's a little bigger so Similarly here these features, you know, maybe aren't useful for for this kind of core open-source thing So what if like when is the right time to actually Contribute back like is that is that a bad thing right there if you're mostly Using just extensions and configuration and you're not contributing back It has to be About values. So that's something that really just depends on The project so I what is the value proposition of clients for free and open-source software? I left this I left this blank on purpose So I'm gonna ask the crowd does anyone why why should a vet why should a client want to use free and open-source software? Does anyone I So just to repeat for the recording proprietary software vendor lock-in proprietary software can Go out of business and then you're screwed ain't any other Reasons why for you know from source software is important for clients Yeah, better support actually arrow is on the civic actions team who does support and I think he does better support than anyone else I know so So there's a lot of value in Free and open-source software. Why do we want why why would? Clients actually want to contribute to free and open-source software Does anyone To ensure continuity great any other reasons it's broken it makes me angry The visceral one it's broken. It makes me angry anything else Build in-house skills. Yeah, that one of the my favorite stories about Decan is that um we created a portal for Jamaica and hosted it and did all the work and Last fall they Basically took it over and are now hiring people Now have people in Jamaica Running the servers running like doing it fully. So that's another You know potential value is that for governments especially is that instead of having those jobs out in Silicon Valley having them in like VC funded kind of Structurally hierarchical places There's people in Jamaica That have got the training have and have taken over the tool So one one big value Proposition for clients to contribute to FOS and I think this is maybe the biggest one that I would argue or I Propose when talking to clients is that owning features is expensive. You don't want to they're You you don't want to Yeah own a certain feature because There's no public documentation for it. There's no public upgrade path. You're forking and That's that's really expensive It all it keeps the nerds happy. I mean is that is that kind of What we're saying as well So in terms of Talking to and convincing clients to adopt open source. There's a Whole there's the whole the whole the whole team needs to be involved in it It can't just be It can't just be these folks So let's let's look at that kind of cycle in some ways the community is kind of like the first place that those kind of that those discussions are had and Then sales and marketing is a bigger channel Then once you've got a client that you're going to onboard them Then you have the agile kind of process hopefully you're making big feet awesome features and Hopefully you're having a much bigger impact Mm-hmm So community Here we are we can all You know pat ourselves on the back But are we in the right communities or do we know what the client communities are? Do we know what the user communities are? And the idea of community itself like all of the all much of the engines that the features and and software that we are interested in Requires a community and a community is something that is not There's not like a direct funding model for so That's a tension that Is is hard to resolve so in terms of Sales and marketing you it's important to talk about for you know, it's been sourced software, right? So this is civic actions calm before before the talk I was It's gonna kind of show like okay, you know, here's how we're talking about free and open-source software and That's the Are you even talking about open source so I was like oh man, so that's the control F We're not even mentioning open source poop And Additionally so the the next step I didn't capture that but I click we have a decan and open data page that we haven't updated in probably a year and a half Similar probably marketing story. We are working on updating this I promise But I was like, okay. It's certainly decan our open-source Catalog says open source. It was the same thing. We didn't even mention it ouch Our source code is For the site it's in Gatsby Markdown So at least we mentioned open source in 35 places But most of them are either interviews or if you scroll down Like everyone's bio says open source. So it's interesting like and It's it's something that we value and try and Make sure that We treat we do communicate that to clients, but oops So the first step of once you want once we're past the sales and marketing So this is my reaction to to lawyer stuff But like it's super critical are you allowed to actually are you even allowed to contribute like You need that bare minimum This this is our lawyer. He's he's amazing his name is Mark Jones. He was super stressed about me having only one slide about this he He gives he gives like two-week in-depth primers about or trainings about Open source licensing licensing, but if you're interested in exploring it a little bit more This is maybe the best place to start. I'm not sure who this is, but he's talking to our security Or our chop security person. So that's even more scary lawyers and Security people So, okay, we've got the we've we've passed that gate. We've got the right license Now we're actually starting the work, you know, you we have that that that first that first client meeting where you're Where if it's a great Relationship you think back. It's like your first date, you know, everyone is happy and But are you actually talking about open source contribution from the beginning of the project? So surely you're talking about false at that point, right? But how do you even talk about that like what what are the What are your goals and your your KPIs keep performance? Indicators, can you measure what your open source contribution can be like can we have like a linter that says, okay, you know of the amount of code that we created we are Publishing 10 percent or 20 percent like would that would that even be useful? I mean, I think the biggest thing is is is features like what features are you building and are you? contributing those back to Where are you started? So typically There's this difference between like a configuration and and Actually feature building so if you're working on WordPress Like a WordPress site and you actually contribute something back to like WordPress core or like a new theme or something like that's amazing Because it's such a big project like if you're using something that's newer That contribution maybe should be bigger Or if you're I'm trying something if it's kind of a greenfield project like maybe the whole thing should be open source I have the frictionless data stuff here because I'm super excited about that and I'm hoping that people are Going to contribute that more So how like how do we? Okay, we've we've gotten past that first meeting. We've gotten the client convinced that okay X feature We're gonna we're gonna open source. We can either like as a new project or we're gonna contribute it back How do we actually get that into the? The project so this is my this is my new kind of big thing like or this is my thesis maybe is that? Personas are a way of injecting The open source user stories into the project So Here's to kind of open source personas for us an adopter like what do they want in terms of features? Like what's their experience and how can you actually build that create user stories in the agile? in the agile Adam so that agile is Adam is like the the place where all this work happens and We have the technology we can inject user stories directly into backlogs Around this so as an open data adopter. I want a new XYZ That's one strategy that I've started working on another is to like Within agile the day after the sprint is over. Maybe those are like a day or two of cleanup So yeah, these are some Strategies around that kind of That kind of contribution so Yeah, that's a good stopping point I think Does anyone have any questions or discussion topics? I was wondering if So like when you're like creating like open source software like some users are great But like you might get like a small minority of users who like why didn't you answer my email within the hour? So I was wondering if you had any like tips or guidelines about like setting expectations about the project Yeah, I mean that There's a like you could be you could give a whole there's a whole kind of Area of right community building that you need to try and figure out how to to allocate for and manage and like hopefully It's like a little bit of a chicken and egg thing like hopefully you can have enough clients where you can devote the time to that and Yeah within the Within kind of like the the program of your your work Allocating for that is is important But it's hard because those are the that's another reason that like the personas idea is important to me because like those aren't your paying clients And so they just like get like it's hard to Address that through a lot of the kind of agile processes that we have I Can I can describe an experience that I've had on open data projects? designed to outlive a company and then get a company to pay the development of the data and then The data goes over the company goes away. You can keep working on it in future projects This is what maps that has done and it's continuing to do it other companies Not so much a question. Yeah, no, it's I mean it's exciting because Yeah, the project is bigger than the company that's actually what happened with with decan and secan exists outside of a specific company and It's awesome because you can keep working on things that are interesting to you outside of like whoever your quote-unquote Whatever the structure is that In genders paychecks Do you find that in your experience anyone actually buys like the moral imperatives for companies to contribute to open source? So I'm thinking specifically of folks who like or companies that are really into using open source But basically don't contribute back money or labor to it So in your experience has anyone actually been like yeah, it's the right thing to do and not have to make all of these sort of marketing value propositions Yeah, I mean I think I think one of the hard things is that a lot of people think it is the right thing to do But then if it's not articulated why and how then It just creates like Like who's actually gonna do it is a problem like we have a yeah There's a I've had experience with a bunch of clients that are like yeah open source. We're totally into it But then like you're like, okay Well, this feature is gonna take longer because we're gonna contribute it back and they're like well, but we need that Like but we're launching soon. So why you know My question is basically like does the moral argument ever work and so if the answer is no, I think it does I mean, I think it does but ultimately It's like It it shouldn't we shouldn't rely on the moral argument like because it does Produce better value for people If it's done right Awesome. Thanks


Hey, what's good everyone? It is be a beer here for another trailer reaction This one is for Netflix's Marvel's the Punisher trailer number two. I love the first trailer. It was off the chain I'm super excited for this series. It looks like it may be the best in the Marvel Netflix series and the MCU and whatnot Unfortunately, you know this this season was supposed to drop the same weekend of New York Comic-Con But unfortunately there was a large tragedy in Las Vegas So the studio felt that you know, it was not the best time to release the studio, but let's keep it positive You know, so this is gonna come out November 17th I know this trailer dropped like a week ago, but I'm so late And I didn't want to watch it until I reacted to it not cuz I've been busy with other things But we are finally here now. So without any further do let me go ahead and put on these headphones And you guys can stop listening to me talk and watch me Watch this trailer Here we go gentlemen, I'm the only authority you will need I point you shoot Did you kill the target Things over there are different what we're doing is wrong. You did what you were supposed to do, right now The only person you're punishing is yourself Frank Castle you got something I need to show Rushed all the video files the US military turned you into a hitman Frank I'm looking for Frank Castle the Punisher. I think you know the bomb my case Castle's the last witness we can either clean this up or let them take us down You have nothing but a war inside you and they decide what the truth is We could make that right 117 All right I can just go ahead and tell you right off the jump that I like the first trailer much much more than this one This one was good, but I just like the first one more and beyond switch it seemed like that changes the origin a little bit or whatever like I don't know I mean I know about the Punisher, but I don't know everything about the Punisher, but I mean was he in the army and Maybe he was and also like the way they killed his family or whatever I'm not I don't know It just seems like they changed the origin and what's that page from Daredevil season 2 or whatever the one that messes with a Often to say Frank Castle was their devil's name man Charlie I'm tripping no Forget that freak that I don't know his name There I can't why can I Cannot believe that I am on Charlie Cox's real name But I cannot believe that I'm forgetting Daredevil's real name real name his name and a thing Matt Murdoch goodness gracious Yeah, is that page from? Yeah, Karen page Deborah Ann wall came in page from Daredevil was that her in this But the trailer looks good But for the I mean the first trailer I did like a lot better So we're gonna have to see no, what is it? What's today November not November? It was August. I can't I don't know nothing today October 28th, so we got what 19 days into this so right under three weeks so it's gonna be right around the corner dropping the same exact day as Justice League, so I Don't know why they did that. I mean Come on now. You could you have not did it a week earlier or a week later or something like that? But you know who knows maybe they have some strategy, you know that I don't know You know what's going on or whatever, but guys That's just my opinion of the latest Marvel Netflix the Punisher trailer number two. What did you think did it? Did you like it? Did you hate it? Did it turn you on did it turn you off? Do you agree with me or do you disagree with me? Let me know in the comment section below Let's get this conversation going and keep it flowing if you like this video Go ahead and give me the thumbs up and if you don't like to be though That's fine. Just leave me a comment below why and still give me a thumbs up Since you're why did this on YouTube go ahead and subscribe to my YouTube channel become one of my Subscribers so you get all the content that I have to provide you can click the bell So I can be notified when I do make uploads Also, you go to my website check me out there because I do have written reviews for movies And themes and also guys you can look me up on social media Facebook Instagram and Twitter All that good stuff It's right there at the bottom of your screen and I made it very easy for you guys about providing a link to all That good stuff down in the description box below But guys, I just want to thank you again for tuning in to my opinion slash review for the latest Marvel's Netflix Punisher trailer number two and before you go don't forget that my name is Brennan Keith Avery and That's just my opinion. Peace


Have you ever broken bows? Yes, we did. We broke many things, cellos, bows. Everything that you can break, we broke. You can make every disaster into your advantage, actually. How did we meet? We come from the same country, same region, same part of the world, and we were actually rivals. When we were, you know, growing up, practicing classical music, we would compete against each other, we would follow each other's career, and we decided, oh, we should do something together. We always felt that if we did something together, it would be something special. And the minute we joined forces, everything just exploded. Dreams do come true for all of your kids listening. Dreams do come true if you believe. Now. We sing through our cello, because cello, you know, as an instrument, it has the sound closest to the human voice. So we actually don't miss singing. We try to sing through the cello, and that's what's special about us, you know? Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho. And stop, stop, better not. It's like the extension of our body, the cello. Cello is amazing. You express everything you don't want to express with the words, you know? And so you can just pull it all out through the cello.  All the groupies, I'm joking. And, you know, I performed with him. I was like, another dream come true. Kids, if you're watching, dreams do come true. It would be cool to do something with that shiur. Or with Adele. You know, it's all British. We did with Elton already, so... Well, now we sell out like arenas all over the world, so every show is a highlight for us. It's crazy on just two cellos, you know? Who would have thought it's possible? We should do stadiums now. Just keep growing. Next is Wembley stadium. Oh, Wembley.


And we finished our first ever AMA. Ask me anything on Reddit. Down there in the comments below is the link. Tell me, did you like it? Was it helpful? Should we do it again? What were your favorite questions and answers in the Reddit thread? Tell me all of that in the comments below so we can understand whether this was a good exercise and whether we should keep using Reddit for future events in the future. That was repetition. Captain Obvious. Alright guys, hope to see you in the next episode of The George Show. My name is George, founder of Freedom, and you've been watching The George Show Unedited. Bye.