Alright, hello everyone. Thank you so much for coming out to this Law Hour slash Jane Polishlin expert residence lecture. Our guest of honor is Mandy Woodlands. She is a DAL alumni, graduated in 2006. She is a reformed corporate lawyer and molecular violation who is now the CEO and founder of Jellyfish. Yes, okay, excellent. So I'm going to let Mandy take it from here and explain kind of what she does and what her for every day looks like. Awesome, thank you. Thanks for coming. So I want to talk a bit about career paths opportunities and entrepreneurship but mostly about why lawyer should or shouldn't be entrepreneurs. So why me? I obviously come from DALA. I'm currently the entrepreneur in residence at an organization called Bounce Health Innovation and our goal is to increase the number of MedTech startup companies in Newfoundland and Labrador. I have a Masters of Technology Entrepreneurship and Innovation which was post law school and as you mentioned in my bio, I was a molecular biologist and a lawyer and I'm also a business coach. And so I come to that from an interesting path. So how many people here came to law school from a business degree? Everyone who didn't come from business, what did you study before you did law? Just shout it out. Sci? Sci, science, engineering. We do like humanities. Public relations, awesome. English lit, there you go. So when we talk about paths, pre-law school is the same as post law school in terms of the number of paths available to you.  And of course sometimes you can better solve the problems you want to solve as an entrepreneur than you can as a lawyer. So what do we think about when we think about lawyers? The stereotype is obviously very buttoned down typically very driven by precedents, not very comfortable with risk, very reactive, not very innovative. Lawyers are in the 90th percentile for skepticism, not particularly surprising. And also research has shown that lawyers have the lowest resilience or the least amount of ability to bounce back or deal with a setback of any profession. Which is kind of surprising because to go through a lot to kind of get to law school, to get through law school and apparently we're not very good at bouncing back. When we think of entrepreneurs we think of this different environment, right? Working from a coffee shop, kind of remote working in some cases. We think of people who are visionaries, who are good at execution and collaboration, and who are passionate about what they do and always like a little bit of madness. So I always say like this is my favorite like workshop of me because as an entrepreneur you have to be a little bit crazy. So a lot of grades in history were very financially stable, secure, socially acceptable path to a very respectable career. And you have this clear path. So when I graduated, which seems like yesterday but was 12 years ago and I didn't come to law school until I was older, this was a this was a path and this is what success looked like. I went to law school, I wrote an article, wrote to my exam. You became an associate in a firm. You paid your dues and then when I started it was you worked for six years as an associate and then you became a partner. That was it. If you were halfway as decent, that's what that looked like.  And that path was very specific. Lawyers traditionally controlled all facets of their market and we still do to some extent. So education, licensing, practice standards, ethics, delivery, insurance regulations, so a bit unique in terms of the professions in that kind of start to finish control and regulation of what we do. And what we sold and sell is illegal expertise. So by design, law has been exclusionary. And I'm sure you've all, whether it came from before law school or since you've been here, heard over and over about issues with access to justice, issues with diversity and tolerance of the profession, we have made it seem historically that only a very few are qualified to solve these challenges. As lawyers, we often solve business challenges that we classify as legal to keep things within that realm of our control. Lawyers crafted language, procedures, a very insular homogenous culture to differentiate ourselves from the rest of society. And this delivery of legal services was very contained. So it was really important that nobody else could practice anything called legal services. The language was very important. As you know, everything you read is a whole different language than what the rest of the world uses. Not in most cases because it needs to be, but because we've created this situation. Historically, it's been very labor intensive. We perform the work with no necessary regard to client objectives or the value provided, but with digging into every single possible solution and answer and challenge. There was no such thing as budgets or price predictability, knowledge management. Those things weren't in a law firm's MO. And there was very little competition. So historically, very frowned upon to poach clients from other law firms. And a lot of lawyers believe their credentials and intelligence entailed them to success. Where's an entrepreneurship? We know business is about something completely different. And it's a little bit more determined on your merits. I love this photo of a lawyer. It's probably about 70 years old. And it comes from this hard work that you did to get here. And believing that having a law degree and having done well academically, and having worked with a prestigious firm or in a prestigious place, gives you the credentials to be successful in anything that you choose to do.  The entrepreneur is definitely a very different animal. So when we think entrepreneurship, we think of this picture, oftentimes of a startup or a place where we have these big quotes on the wall that says teamwork makes the dream work or things like that very different than a very old fashion office with a lot of books and certifications. A lot of times entrepreneurs don't pay themselves because they need to pay their employees first. They may need to lay off employees when their business slows only to rapidly scale up again.  And when it does start, it may be extra motivated to succeed because we've experienced failure in the past and want to prevent it from happening again, which is a little bit different as well because I'm in a law school, the vast majority of us build up a significant amount of student debt or spend a lot of money and time not working and earning other income. And so lawyers traditionally are known as lacking the hunger that entrepreneurs and business people have because they haven't failed as much. So when they get in the ring in business against other entrepreneurs, it sometimes can lead lawyers to be less effective than their counterparts because they're not as hungry. They don't put as much thought into things like how hard they need to work, how they'll manage things, how they keep costs down, how to be aggressive at marketing, how to continuously improve and innovate. And instead of looking backwards, be very much looking forward. Well, it's not true across the board lawyers are notoriously poor marketers. How many people have seen a really bad ad for a law firm? Everybody, right? Many of the largest law firms view marketing as undignified, right? We don't need to solar services. It's beneath us. The message is the reputation quality of the work should be all the marketing you need. But that's not true in 2018. Most attorneys are often not the best managers. So for those of you who didn't go to business school, how many of you have taken courses on how to manage people? Very few, right? It's not something we learn in law school. It's not something we're trained in outside of that. And often as soon as you leave law school and start practicing law, you're managing someone. As a consequence, most law firms are led by lawyers who have no training of business or management. The way you're taught to think and see the world operates as a lawyer shuts down nearly every entrepreneurial instinct. Our job and what we're taught is to forecast every conceivable thing that can go wrong for your client, and then protect them against it. To remove ambiguity and uncertainty. With whatever time you've got left, you focus on the legal structure in place to maximize the upside. But that's nearly always secondary to protecting against the downside. In part, because it's more easily quantified, as because what clients hire you to do, and if you miss a risk and things go south, you're going to share the blame or take all the blame for the hit. So this kind of failure mindset is key to a job as a lawyer, but a total disaster to the role of an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs need to understand risk. They need to understand the need desire possibility. They also need to be pathologically optimistic. That's not something that's trained into you as a lawyer. You need to believe the impossible can be done on almost an irrational level. Don't get in the water with sharks, but at the same time, you need to think if I did, I'm going to survive. Uncomfortable. Uncertainty, ambiguity, the unknown is just day to day in entrepreneurship. And so it was really interesting when we saw, I say when we saw I'm old, but I'm not that old, the first wave of legal innovation in kind of the 1970s. And Mark Cohen wrote a great article in Forbes sometime in the past year or two. And he had this quote I love, which is this way of thinking as lawyers persisted into the 70s when law like basketball entered the free agency era. And so we started seeing more recently all kinds of other legal solutions. I could have put hundreds on the slide. These are just I know the girls from prior legal and record lawyer and legal zoomer, one of the ones that are most well known. If you talk to any of these people, a lot of them will say they think like an entrepreneur, not like a lawyer. Entrepreneurs have to take risks that would make a lot of lawyers uncomfortable. Lawyers are tied to rules and deadlines. But as an entrepreneur, you don't know what your day will look like. The guy who founded Rocket Lawyer, Charlie Morris says, you know, you have a lot of similar skills in both fields, including tenaciousness and resourcefulness. Telling clients you can't do that is probably the easiest advice to give us a lawyer. And certainly there are many times when I had a client call and say, hypothetically, if I wanted to do this, in the easiest sense, was just don't do that. If the lawyers are those who figure out the best lawyers are those who figure out how their clients can achieve their business goal. We're talking about business lawyers in that case, and achieve their objectives within the law. Basha Frost Rubin, who's one of the founders of prior legal. For her, she said, lawyers have trouble sometimes seeing that perfect is the enemy of good. So many of us can be crazy perfectionists. And we need to fight the impulse to go through like 10 rounds of edits that have diminishing returns, we're going to move quickly and be okay with done, but not perfect. There's a lot of interesting research on leaving the law. So we know that a lot of people who graduate law school don't practice. Of those who do practice, a lot of them leave within the first five years. And then there's a certain percentage of a group that stay in law for their entire career. That has decreased over the years. So obviously, people change careers more often now than they did at any other time in history. And there's a guy named Harrison Barnes that's written a lot about leaving law. And he says, which in some cases is true. Once you leave law to start a business, you've pretty much kissed goodbye your career working law. I don't 100% believe that to be true. I know many lawyers who have left practice and gone back to it. But if you do something that doesn't involve practicing law, the legal world is not often super welcoming in terms of welcoming you back. It's like a guild is what he uses as an analogy, and guild punish people for leaving them. So if you leave a guild, you better be certain you're doing the right thing. And so he takes a very strict negative approach to this concept. For me, I think about it a little bit differently. So 75% of lawyers who practice law are in private practice. Of those 69% of them are in small practices, so 10 lawyers or less. If you're going to be in practice and affirm that size, you are essentially an entrepreneur in a lot of ways. You have to have some entrepreneurial spirit and skills, you'll be expected to learn through trial by fire, you'll need to help in business development, promotion the firm, understand the firm's finances. And there's so many other types of legal practice right now that there's a really good translation between those. The internet obviously is leveled the playing field significantly. There's a lot more news and coverage and openness about the legal industry. So people are more aware of trends. Legal technology companies have opened up a lot of access. But to look at it from purely the entrepreneur's side, Scott Walker is one of my favorite writers on that topic. And he says the number one reason entrepreneurs hate lawyers is because lawyers are deal killers. Because it's easier to say you can't do that than to figure out a way to do that. So his top 10 which I like are lack of from 10 backwards lack of clear and concise communication. I like to talk as lawyers generally, we're trying to have a full and well researched opinion, lack of communication, keeping clients in the dark, that goes back to what I talked to you about like exclusionary language, and keeping law in a place that's inaccessible by outsiders. Over-lawing. So again, going through more stuff than is absolutely necessary. Poor listening skills. Listening skills are important as a lawyer, but sometimes we don't take a lot of time to develop them. In larger firms, often the most inexperienced person is doing most of the work. Failing to prioritize issues. Going through the motions or don't genuinely care. Legal fees, of course, are often quite high. Lawyers can be very unresponsive because they're busy. And of course, deal killing. So good lawyers are able to identify significant potential legal problems. Great lawyers provide solutions to them. And so thinking about that communication issue and how that goes. The guy who invented BitTorrent tweeted in 2010, this is a long time ago, lawyers are like phone companies, their bread and butter is to trick you into racking up minutes. And so when you go into the world knowing that this is often the perception, I want to kind of switch the thinking a little bit. So I'm going to quote Elle Woods from Legally Blonde, because, you know, it's a great old movie. So she says in her like two line valedictorian speech, our very first day in Harvard, a very wise professor quoted Aristotle, and this is the Aristotle quote. And she says, well, no offense to Aristotle, but in her three years at Harvard, she came to find that passion is a key ingredient to the study of practice of law and life. And so I want to talk about why lawyers should be entrepreneurs. Lawyers are able to avoid many of the legal mistakes entrepreneurs make. So as a lawyer, you're probably not going to go into a business partnership without having a written contract or some agreement in writing.  For example, you're really good at risk mitigation, which is a really important skill as an entrepreneur. Attention to detail is something that as entrepreneurs, we often gloss over because we want to be fast moving and innovative, but attention to detail is good. Managing customer expectations is another skill that goes both ways and careful communication. So all the reasons I just listed why lawyers shouldn't be entrepreneurs are also reasons why lawyers should be entrepreneurs. Analytical and sequential thinking. So when I came from science, I came from a molecular biology background. I worked in a cancer research lab before I came to law school and thinking about scientific method, it applies both to law school and to entrepreneurship. And it's something that I thought was a disadvantage when I came to Dallas and was surrounded by people who had studied business and political science and understood how the law worked and I had no clue. But this concept of whatever your background using your analytical and sequential thinking serves you really well in any facet. Negotiation is a huge one. I have a client working on a deal with a venture capital right now, a business client and their engineers. And so, you know, we usually kind of check in every day, but they will without some hand holding give away the firm because they have no background or experience in negotiation, which is something most lawyers are quite good at. Communicating effectively or articulating a laying out an argument with simplicity and accuracy is something that's trained into you in law school. Making a really persuasive written proposal to get your foot in the door somewhere is something that really comes from a lot of your law training. Confidence without arrogance is another really key skill. So hopefully you're developing that while you're here. Teamwork and leadership are both really important. And the ability to research was something I saw this morning in Professor Anderson's course. Four students gave presentations. They were fabulous and inspiring. And it really strongly reminded me because I work with a lot of non lawyer students. The advantage to law school training and presenting a really well researched topic. You have all learned time management and analytical skills. Those are critically important in being an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship, if you have tunnel vision, you'll fail. Same as in law. You have to look at your competitors. You have to know those who have different but complimentary goods and services. You have to forge partnerships. Successful entrepreneurs read a lot and read widely outside their fields. And this is a critical skill as an attorney as well. Firms run by CEOs with a legal background or actually associated with a lot less corporate litigation. Compared with the average company, lawyer run firms experience anywhere from 16 to 74% less litigation, depending on the type. So what drives that need to fix problems and remove inefficiencies. And it's fascinating because people assume lawyers want to litigate. But in reality that's I mean court is a lot of fun. But you know as an outcome for your client it's not the best outcome based on the time and the cost and the pain and fullness of going to trial. Both entrepreneurship and law are hard. The guys who founded PayPal, the woman who was the inspiration for Wonder Woman, Elizabeth Marston, she was involved in developing systolic blood pressure testing which led to the first polygraph. These are all people with law backgrounds that founded amazing entrepreneurial endeavors. So if you want to be an entrepreneur you have to really examine your tolerance for risk and ambiguity. You have to switch from that perfection to done, not perfect. Well a really small amount of entrepreneurs are natural born entrepreneurs, most are not. Most entrepreneurs have some level of natural born drive for that but a lot are just trained into it. In the end this is what I've come to believe. The lawyers who make the leap and hit the ground running were somewhat entrepreneurs in lawyers clothing but it's as much or as little as you allow it to be. The other thing I always want to mention is that you can be a real entrepreneur without pursuing entrepreneurship full-time. Entrepreneurship can be a bit of an exclusionary club sometimes too and a bit clicky and a lot of entrepreneurs like to shame someone who has a side hustle or some sort of hobby business but you can be a true entrepreneur without pursuing entrepreneurship full-time. So this is like one of my all-time favorite quotes. As a lawyer you need to think like that too so that you're not necessarily just a lawyer, you're not necessarily just a business person. You have all these things around you whether you're practicing in private practice or you're working in a non-profit or you're doing policy work or you're pursuing entrepreneurship. You yourself are a business which is why I wanted to bring that up to talk about opportunities. Your opportunities are really endless. You can work as an entrepreneurial lawyer. So there's so many great new firms like Axiom and Elevate. Deloitte now has a legal department as just praise Boater House. You can be entrepreneurial and practice law full-time despite a lot of people who say otherwise. There's so many entrepreneurial legal enterprises. One of my friends just founded a company last year that's using blockchain to execute legal contracts. And so he's an engineer but needed to partner with a lawyer for the legal piece. Everything from like robot lawyer, Lisa, rocket lawyer like I talked about before, logics, doxley. All those are legal enterprises that are tech companies. You can start your own firm which makes you very much an entrepreneur. You can work as a lawyer inside a startup. Obviously legal consulting, bounding a startup, becoming a partner in another startup, buying a business yourself and you're becoming a Dell alumnus, an alumnus of the Schulich School of Law. That is a super powerful network. I noticed that the other listen experts two weeks ago mentioned the importance of that network. And it's really true. I wanted to kind of double down on that to use your network in whatever thing you pursue. You need to definitely keep your non-lawyer friends, particularly if you want to be an entrepreneur and meet new people and hang out with entrepreneurs. You need to read, read some more. You need to really cultivate your mentor relationships and don't discredit the amount that you've already learned and experienced because you at this point could already mentor others. You've come this far. You have a lot of skills and experience and knowledge to transfer and mentorship really works both ways. So that's really important. I love this David Lynch quote because it really pulls into both law and entrepreneurship and just life in general in terms of everything that was made by anyone started with an idea. So for you in determining a path, whether it's career path or an opportunity or a one-off thing that you want to do, if you can catch an idea that's powerful enough to fall in love with, it's one of the most beautiful experiences. And so it's one of the reasons I wanted to talk about like designing your purpose. And how many times have you heard like follow your dreams or pursue your passion or anything like that? Lots? Once? Nobody? Yeah. Lots of times. We hear that throughout our lives, right? And sometimes, lots of times, it's really hard to know what that means. I don't know, I don't know what I want to be when I grow up.  And so one of the key things is figuring out what success means to you. So when I talked in the beginning about that traditional path, that was what success looked like because it was what we were told success looked like. If you didn't become a partner in a large law firm, then you weren't a success as a lawyer. And that was just how we as a group judged that term. For me, success means freedom. So that's my personal definition of success. If I'm successful, that means tomorrow I could hop in a plane and go somewhere. Or I can do what I'm going to do tonight, which is hang out with a bunch of tech entrepreneur friends while I'm in town. Does anyone have like a really great personal definition of success for themselves already? Yes? No? Curious. Something really good to think about. One of the companies that I follow the most is called IDEO. And IDEO is essentially a problem solving company. They're based in San Francisco. They've been around a long time. And they work in the field of design thinking, which is essentially solving a problem using ideation. And so they talk about as a kind of a side topic, designing your own purpose, which is one of the most complex and intangible challenge of any challenges you could ever have, because purpose isn't a singular thing. It's more of a mindset and it's a journey of experimentation and self discovery. So you need to really know yourselves that when you're faced with a key decision, you know who you are making it easier to decide where to go. So I actually work with business owners and individuals to map out kind of what their purpose is. Is it look at all the skills you have? What activities you spend your time on? What topics you care about? What you're curious to explore? And then figure out what can't you live without? Anyone tell me one thing they can't live without? Already? You're all good with anything? Terrible answer, but peanut butter. Peanut butter. That's a perfect answer. Food in general. Food in general. Yeah, but there's always like something that's higher priority. Anybody else? No. Your phone. Wi-Fi. A friend, a pet. Nobody cares about anything. Law school has changed you. Knowing you sleep would be more sleep would be good. But it's something we don't ask ourselves on a daily basis, right? What can't you live without? Where do you feel like you have the most impact? When do you feel most in flow? Particularly while we're in school, we are singularly focused for the most part, right? You get to the next thing. You have milestones and objectives and deadlines. So taking some time to think about that. Spending some time on an idealist, which is somewhere between a to-do list and a bucket list. So not either. It's aspirational, but it's also kind of near term intangible. It's really helpful too. So you can write down the things you want to accomplish and then just pick one and make a plan to get it done. Sharing what you want to do is also really helpful. So there's a law student at another law school that's a friend of mine from entrepreneurship. She decided to go back to school. And we talk all the time about what she wants to do when she's finished because day to day, week to week, it's something different. So she messaged me two nights ago and said, I think I want to do an LLF. Like you're in your first term. But it's because she spends a lot of time thinking about this, like where do I want to go at this and what inspires me and what am I passionate about? So we talked about what she's going to do is actually reach out to some people who practice in that area. And within a day she heard back from someone that said, yeah, just come hang out with us, like learn a bit about this topic. So she can see what it is. Feel it get a feel for whether it's a good fit or not and have some ideas. But without sharing that, it would she would have kept it internal and it's really good to share. And you need to really balance action and reflection. And those those things are really important, whether it's in law or entrepreneurship. The other thing is talking about our difficult stories, whether you're a lawyer or an entrepreneur. Bernie Brown is an amazing woman who writes a lot about failure and success and personal challenges. Often, particularly as entrepreneurs, we're a bit better at this than as lawyers. We attempt to disown our difficult stories to appear more acceptable or more whole. Certainly as a lawyer, I wouldn't broadcast the fact that I have lots of tattoos and I don't wear nice shoes most of the time. And those are very minor things compared to when we talk about mental illness or other particular life challenges. But our wholeness depends on the integration of all of our experiences, including the falls. It's so important. Difficult roads lead to beautifully beautiful destinations. And so as lawyers, we need to talk more about mental health. We need to talk more about addiction. We need to talk more about inclusion. And this is such a good time with entrepreneurship that both fields struggle with this. Both fields lead to significant challenges of mental health. And both fields are well known for having high numbers of people with mental illness, depression, anxiety. And so I think it's a way that as a lawyer or an entrepreneur, you can really think about what you want your life to look at without trying to disown your negative experiences. One of the best things about entrepreneurship is that failure is celebrated. We have a thing with our students at Memorial that's called a failtail cup.  And you got a good story about trying and failing. We need to do a little bit more than law, not obviously to a client's detriment, but in terms of learning and trying things and experimenting. I want to leave a lot of time for questions. But, you know, in wrapping up, I think about figuring out your mission and doing our mission at Jellyfish is to do good work with good people for good people. So our work is good. We want to work with good people. And we only want to work for good people. One of the joys of being your own boss is you can choose who you work with and who you don't work with, which is great. And we have our list of priorities in the wall at the office, which is everyone's pets, internal employees, and then clients. Because if you don't look after what's most important, you can't be successful on the outside. And my favorite, favorite mantra personally. And I give talks on this all the time is called Woobar. So it's wake up, be awesome and repeat. So you've got multiple ways to reach me. I want to leave tons of times for quite time for questions and discussion about entrepreneurship, career opportunities, alternate paths, and happy to chat with anyone anytime here offline wherever. Thank you. Questions? Sure. You love this organization. I like people you see so kind of law school and have this idea about leadership and really like doing folks straight into something like that. Or start with a more traditional group and realize that and then jump into something I don't think there's more defined one or the other. It really depends on how much you know what you want to do, or how much you know you don't like something or know what you don't want to do. So for me, I practiced law for 10 years. I was really unexpected because I actually didn't intend to do that time flies. And I wouldn't change that for the world is excellent experience. I worked with amazing people and got so much training, not just in law, but in life and entrepreneurship. But I have lots of friends who never practiced who just use their law degree as a stepping stone for other things. And that's, I think the beauty of a law degree is the doors that it opens. Yeah. You talk about how what it is. I'm curious though when or how do you know when your skepticism actually is legit? How do you figure what that line is? I think you don't. I think that's why science is interested in studying those kinds of things. There's probably more in depth like neurological research that I'm not up on in that field. But I think to some extent it becomes obvious to you with time that skepticism is either justified or is just part of your nature. You know, everyone has that one friend is just like jaded about everything skeptical about everything that's just in their nature. Everyone also has that one friend that is ridiculously optimistic about everything. And all the rest of us are kind of somewhere in between. And I don't think there's a way to know and I think that's one of the great things about you know, entrepreneurship and using a startup model of lean startup where you just prototype test it, fail, move on prototype test, iterate, which I think you can do in any field of knowing what works. And so instead of deciding whether your skepticism is justified, it's testing it and seeing. It's just my thoughts on it. Questions. Yeah. You mentioned student debt earlier in your talk.  This is an excellent question in terms of student debt and leaving something financially secure. In my mind, nothing's actually really secure anymore. It used to be certainly so I graduated university my undergrad 20 years ago and started working for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and this federal government job out of an undergrad biology degree was like the best thing ever. Very much unionized pay or finished work at 3.30 every day. This was some people's kind of holy grail. But those jobs went away. And so something that's secure is a bit of a fallacy. But for me, yeah, it was a big choice. It was a big choice to come to law school. I quit a job in research to go back to school and encourage that and then to leave law and go to entrepreneurship. I think it comes down to happiness and your definition of success because financially it is exceptionally painful. I talk to startup founders every day. I have it's this is probably the first year I've paid myself in at least three years. So you have to be comfortable with a lot of your peers thinking you're a bit crazy. I go to my lawyer's friends' houses and they have all kinds of nice things. I'm like, yeah, I'll get there eventually because I'm so happy doing what I'm doing. So you have to pay the bills and sometimes particularly as entrepreneurs, that means working while also working on your passion. So it's why I talk about like side hustles and other kinds of business of managing both while you get to a place where you're able to do that. But it's a real challenge and it comes with that comfort level with uncertainty and not being financially stable because you're so passionate about solving the problem that you're working on. There's no good answer because anything even that looks like an overnight success in entrepreneurship really took a long time. So it's the willingness to live very poorly to get to where you want to be. Yeah. I mean, everyone has an opinion on that. If you Google that, there's hundreds of articles saying leave at this point. Think about leaving at this other point. To me, it's just really personal. To me, there is no right answer. I know a lot of people who call themselves senior entrepreneurs who didn't start a business till after they retired from their lifelong career. I know a lot of people who call themselves senior entrepreneurs who didn't start a business till after they retired from their lifelong career. There's no right or wrong. It's really about what makes you happy. One of the best written articles I've seen talked a lot about how when they finally realized that they weren't passionate about solving their clients' problems and they were just going through the motion, that's what triggered them to leave because when you looked at that list of why entrepreneurs don't like lawyers and one of the biggest things was if they felt that they didn't care about their problem, they interviewed a number of lawyers who said, yeah, you know, I'm kind of stuck in this and I made this curve for myself. I'm not leaving but I don't care. It doesn't make me happy. I dread going to work. That's definitely an indicator that maybe you should do something else but it's whatever is right for you which again is not an answer but that's a lot of law, right? It's all gray. Yeah, it's definitely a lot slower for law to accept side hustles.  So whatever you want to call it, it's slower in law because certainly as an article student and as a lawyer depending on where you practice there are regulations around having another job or another business, right? So it's important to consider those. I think that's one of the reasons why it's been a lot slower to infiltrate than other professions. The other thing I think is that a lot of it is tied to this reputation piece of being a lawyer in that more traditional environment and how what you do outside of work affects the perception of your professionalism and your ability to be a lawyer. I mean, when I started the first time I went to court it was still required that if you wore brown shoes the judge wouldn't talk to you. So things have changed a lot but you can see where we're coming from is quite different than a lot of other professions. I have a colleague that graduated from here the same time as me and she runs a very successful food blog and we talk a bit about this concept of entrepreneurship and law and how it works for her in her side business but she works as an in-house counsel so it's a little bit different. So I think it's evolving like anything but law is definitely slower. We're an old, very traditional profession as a whole. We've evolved significantly but it's much slower and a lot of that has to do with regulation. Yep. Great presentation. I just wanted to ask coming from you talk about like going for a degree where you don't do anything really good but you have to drive and you want to know if you have great ideas or if you're coming from an American age etc. but you aren't really into the finance aspect. Do you think that as a citizen manager would you as an example talk a lot about like technical and what not to do not that person but you're very interested in doing something like that what kind of what does that person like that Yeah, that's a great question. So that's me essentially I think coming from any background you can be a great entrepreneur the key is to understand and accept that you don't know everything and that you need other people so when I have anyone call to get advice about starting a business I always talk about your A team you need an account, you need a lawyer you need an insurance person you need like a bookkeeper these are the people that need to do those things if one of those is your thing great you can cover that but otherwise whatever that laundry list of things you need to do to run a business you need to rely on others as an entrepreneur you need to learn a lot of that stuff yourself because you can't afford to hire for all of those positions you're not going to have a chief marketing officer day one unless you have a lot of cash in the bank that you want to burn for no reason you're going to need to understand especially when you're hiring people that you're able to understand what they're doing so I'm not a technical person but I know enough about the technology that I can have a conversation with technical people and those are all the things you pick up from the entrepreneur those cross skills for me I felt like I didn't have any experience in accounting marketing business at all I'd never taken even so much as one business course so I went back and did my masters in technology entrepreneurship and innovation and for me that was really helpful because I felt like I got that educational piece we learned start up metrics and start up finance but you can learn those quite easily we have evolved to a society where a lot of education is open and accessible online when you look at MOOCs and online courses there's so much you can learn and teach yourself through those things but to me it's all about using the people around you to talk to other people I think there's no barrier really to starting something that you want to start just because you don't have those pieces of expertise then you figure out the past that's best for you I have seven entrepreneurial work from students this term six of them are engineers and one is a business student and they all are required to do either a course in entrepreneurship to take a program at an incubator or to do a Udacity course online and all of those things it just depends on what works for them and how they learn and what they want to learn and who they want to learn from but they're all getting those skills from those different places no? no questions? sure I'd just like to thank you so much for coming to speak to us today it definitely gave me a lot of new career paths out of all degree that have taken me on thank you so much and thank you for coming out today thank you


what's up guys I'm here in Toronto with my boy Boris Boris is the actually Boris why don't you introduce yourself tell everybody who you are uh my name is Boris I run a website called Soxie.com we the best socks in the world right the best stylish socks delivered to your door without you having to go to the mall and waste time shopping going through store to store finding your favorite designs but sexy socks guys I'm telling you Boris gave me his socks maybe a couple of months ago and I wear them religiously every single day hands down the feel the comfort and above all the designs designs are just amazing yeah that's one way we kind of differentiate ourselves as we try to go for the boldest designs possible so we'll deliver five styles to your door you never have to go to the mall and we guarantee that you'll never get the same styles twice so that's kind of our way up well what got you into the sock game in the first place uh so we were running a different let's go before we get killed oh yeah we're running a different e-commerce business and one of the things that was selling really well were socks and everything else was size and socks are one size they're a lot lighter than most other products and we found that um returns and changes with some of the other products was kind of a nightmare when you're small uh small companies starting out and the cost associated with that was just too huge so we decided to kind of cut everything out double down on socks rebranded to Soxi initially it was S-O-X-Y-Y dot com because the S-O-X-Y was taken and uh we realized when we focused on one product and doubled down our attention uh our audience took us a lot more serious because they thought we were product experts because we were only doing just that one thing so it allowed us to just like uh take control of our market and uh yeah so it's been three years what are some lessons you learned in the last three years about running an online e-commerce biz some lessons uh or key takeaways e-commerce specifically or yeah for Soxi I think one of my favorite things early on for anybody starting like an e-commerce business is to try to avoid going into uh the production state of your product before you actually kind of get a product market fit so for example if we're if we're starting another sock business today what I do is I go to the mall I find uh quality uh a pair of socks I probably strip up the label and try to sell them up with the landing page initially to see if my offering matches uh what the customer wants a lot of people make guesses of what they think uh their customer wants but you know a lot of the times it's it's kind of a crapshoot yeah so this way you know you go to the mall you spend let's say a hundred bucks on product uh you put up a page with Shopify and you can literally test your idea uh in a matter of a weekend without going through you know which sometimes is like a three four week process with uh speaking with Alibaba or suppliers around the world uh so that's probably one lesson I'd say is most valuable and that's one that I give to many others we're looking to get into the product business uh another lesson you know we've noticed that free shipping goes a really long way yeah uh amazon kind of spoiled everybody's uh shipping habits and people just expect their product to arrive as soon as possible especially when you don't get to try it on so I I'd say focus on free shipping early on figure that into your margins and uh the other thing that really helped us grow early on was customer service and customer happiness we doubled down on customer happiness I mean I would spend weekends on the phone with customers uh just hitting them up and saying hey you know this is Boris uh thank you so much for your order what can we do to keep you a customer for the rest of your life uh you know j abraham talks about that is like it's not about getting a new customer it's about having a repeat customers if a customer is willing to spend say an average order size of say a hundred dollars on your product on average that customer will spend roughly 200 dollars in the life uh the lifetime of your company so focusing more on that relationship with your customers as opposed to I need more no you don't need more you need more repeat buyers yeah we've noticed that you know like if you think about your your daily life uh how many brands you interact with uh none of them really give you that personal touch right none of them give you that personal uh feeling like you're interacting with your friends a lot of it's just big box stores yeah you never really know who's behind it so if you take the time to uh personalize that experience early on especially I'd say your first 100 customers those 100 customers will become your brand evangelist tell all their friends first of all they'll be super surprised the amount of feedback that you can get just by being on the phone with them is invaluable would you say your first 100 customers came like that absolutely oh yeah yeah so we took we took a customer by customer uh acquisition approach early on and we literally called our first 100 customers uh so as I said Saturdays and Sundays I'd say our coffee shop pick up the phone and call them thank them and then find out what we could do better and uh what else they wish we could do so and and you know I'd make notes and then we'd kind of iterate based on that and uh go from there beautiful well Boris want to thank you so much you know for giving us value and sharing your story about Soxi if people want to pick up up here at Soxi where can they find them yeah Soxi.com SOXY.com uh and if you want to reach me directly be at Soxi.com and I'd be happy to take care of you for all of your listeners and kind of throw in a coupon code or something sweet awesome brother go check out Soxi peace


What's up everyone today's Monday today's YouTube live day. So as you guys know, I haven't made a YouTube video in a couple weeks I've been traveling to Utah. I've been kind of dealing with some personal stuff. I've been tired busy You know working whatever it is. So It's been a while since I made a YouTube live. So it's good to be here. It's good to be back And we just came back from our meetup in Utah. So we hosted our fourth year anniversary event in Utah We had about 150 people come show up We had, you know, food drinks. We watched the UFC fight all together, which was crazy An overall was a great experience the lifeblood and the soul of MIC's to host meetups And we haven't really had a meetup in a very long time because the pandemic But now that things are opening up again now that things are kind of getting easier to travel to again Except for all the delays we plan on having more meetups in the future. So hopefully you guys had a great time at the meetup We have some photos on Facebook. We're probably gonna put some photos of Instagram soon We have a video of the event that's probably gonna be ready in a couple of weeks And aside from that it was overall great great great experience So thank you everyone that came to Utah and what I noticed is pretty much everyone that came to Utah the next day When we were trading some people had their biggest days ever this meetup motivated a lot of people It was that missing piece for a lot of people and not to mention it was free, right free free free So it's probably gonna be our last free meetup these events cost a lot of money to set up So yeah, we'll see you guys at the next meetup So what I want to do guys is I want to talk about my red day today on any RV But before I talk about my red day I want to kind of recap the current market that we're in the cycle that we're in and you know What you could do to make sure that you don't lose your ass in this cycle so Obviously guys if you're watching this channel, you know I've been trading for about eight and a half years now man eight and a half years So although a lot of people started trading during the pandemic two years ago People start trading six months ago from 4x signals, you know, I've been here eight and a half years almost coming up on nine years I can't believe it. It's trading has been almost a third of my entire life. I've been trading, right? So anyway guys the point that I'm trying to mention that is because just like in small cap stocks Where you know, sometimes the longs are in favor and sometimes the shorts are in favor The overall market cycle that we are in right now is a bear market cycle So we've been in a bear market cycle for about ten months now ten months. Okay, it's a long time But on the flip side, we've been in a bull market cycle for ten years So that's also a long time, right? So it's almost like we're battling each other the bulls and the bearers are battling each other And the thing about MIC is the thing about our process thing about our strategies doesn't matter if it's a bull market bear market Donkey market draft market elephant market. We're still here making money You know last week or the week before I had probably my biggest week of the year I made two hundred something thousand dollars on that bath and beyond. I Nailed a seventy thousand dollar day I nailed a ninety thousand dollar day and I probably nailed another thirty thousand day somewhere in between there, right? So I've been doing really well in this market, right? So the short-term day trading that we're doing is going really really well because you know to be honest I mean the opportunities are still there, right? So what ended up happening is in the last two years the stock market turned into a casino People started gambling in the stock market And I want them to gamble as much as possible because we are not gamblers. We are professional traders What we do is we look for patterns in the stock market and when these patterns appear when these patterns show themselves We like to bet heavy on these patterns The best example of a pattern is the example. I give a bow at Disney World, okay? Say we're gonna make a bet that bow is gonna get drunk Okay, if bow goes to Disney World, there's maybe a 50% chance. He's gonna get drunk But if you say that bow is going to the club There's a bottle of Hennessy and a couple Asian girls next to him I know 100% of the time he's gonna get drunk So I bet heavy on that situation the Disney World situation is a 50-50 setup So just like in the stock market instead of betting heavy on those 50-50 setups I'm betting heavy on bow getting drunk at the club with a bottle of Hennessy, okay? So that's how you have to think about trading. You have to think about it is when is your edge in favor? Bed, bath and beyond was that example of bow drinking Hennessy So I bulldozed into bed, bath and beyond and made hundreds of thousands of dollars, okay? But today was an example of bow at Disney World There was a 50-50 chance that any RV was gonna go down. So I didn't use much size I ended up losing about nine hundred fifty dollars I got out around eleven dollars and as I'm recording this video now stock is at fourteen fourteen dollars Fourteen dollars, okay? So I did really well today. I did really well today considering how crazy of a stock this was, right? So the point that I'm trying to make here guys before we get into the details of this video is the MIC strategy The MIC process teaches you to bet heavy on your ideal setups If you do not know what your ideal setup is if you do not know what your edge is That means that you have not tracked your data enough to know what you are good at now I'm not saying you need spreadsheets.  Some patterns have a lot of edge some patterns don't have too much edge and that's the key with trading So in these bear markets what people have been doing is they've been trading the same size The same way that they've been trading for the last two years Because you made a million dollars in 2020 you made a million dollars in 2021 All of a sudden you're down two million dollars in 2022 because you got no idea what else happening the market changes The cycle changes So you must be able to adapt and bow being a 20 year trader me being an eight and a half year trader We know when to change Our style and our size in the market and that is what we try to do and try to teach you and try to educate you on So I'm sure you've noticed Whether you have been training for the last five years or the last six months I'm sure you guys have noticed that 90% of traders are losing money Millionaire traders from a couple years ago that got lucky are losing millions of dollars yet. Here. We are Still doing the same thing repeating the same strategies repeating the same goddamn videos that we've been doing for years and Making millions of dollars. I haven't ran my numbers, but I'm well over a million dollars on the air I might even be two million dollars on the air, which is crazy Considering that it is a bear market and people are losing money. It's just a testament to how much our strategy works guys. So number one is understand When to bet heavy in the stock market bet heavy in the stock market when your edge is there When your pattern is there and when you have proven to yourself that that is your best setup So I wait patiently I wait and wait and wait for my first red day to come and when my first red day comes I make hundreds of thousands dollars and still not enough. So If you're a new trader or if you're a trader that's been here for a while number one is find your best setup and Only size in on your best setup. Okay. That's number one Now let's talk about my losing day on any RV today. So any RV was a stock that was running Pretty much all of last week. So if I remember correctly on Thursday the stock tank to around six or seven dollars And I had a small short on it pretty well on it on Thursday And then on Friday it went from like eight dollars to like ten or eleven dollars And I was not involved in it right because I have a rule that if a stock breaks the previous days high the day It is no longer a short. So on Thursday, it was under the previous days high the day So I was able to short it on Friday. It broke above previous days high the day So I was not allowed to short it. So that simple rule will save me on Friday Now what happened today? So on Friday around after hours it hit around 1150 and 12 bucks This morning it tanked to about nine dollars and 50 cents So it had a top of 1150 after hours It tanked to 950 this morning So somewhere in the middle is where I wanted to short for a move back down Now what ended up happening on any RV is it pushed up? It kind of came back down and it was holding so I shorted it and again This was a bow at Disney World type setup. So I did a size up on it I maybe used no two thousand shares when on Bed Bath and Beyond I used twenty five thousand fifty thousand shares right so about a tenth of my size on something like this and What ended up happening is just squeeze me out My thought process was if it broke around above ten seventy ten eighty hide the day at the time I'll just get out and call on a day. It did that pushed up got out and as I'm recording This is at fourteen dollars going higher now broke above the previous days high the day at 1150 and 12 So it is now no longer short again Now what I'm hoping for on this is we get two three four five more days of extension This shit goes from ten to twenty to thirty to forty and then who knows maybe we get another first red day, right? So that's kind of my mindset on this stock guys.  How many times have you been there? I've been there at least ten fifteen times when I first started so I get it right I get it now We've been preaching the same thing for years. I it's amazing to see that other communities are finally catching up three Four years later, right? We've been saying this from day one guys day one MIC's process is based on risk Management, okay, the reason why it's based on risk management because professional hedge fund traders The guys that manage hundreds of millions of dollars have what is called a risk Manager they have someone sitting right behind them that says you are not allowed to lose more than ten thousand dollars today if you lose more than ten thousand dollars a day, I am cutting you off as Retail traders as retail traders.  That's why I have to tell you every single day So how to set it set it to no more than a day's worth of work I make around, you know five to ten thousand dollars a day. So my max loss broker limits is about ten thousand dollars That's how I do it. If you make a hundred dollars a day, your back's loss should be a hundred dollars That way you could never blow up more than a day's worth of work So imagine if I'm making five to ten thousand dollars a day, let's use ten thousand dollars just as an easy math example I lost one thousand dollars today. I lost ten percent of my stuff So if all goes well, I should be able to make this loss back plus more tomorrow And that is the whole point of MIC. That is the whole point of the lessons that we teach, okay? So I made hundreds of thousands of dollars last week and that doesn't mean that I trade bigger That doesn't mean that I go in larger That means that when the opportunity was there, I sized up. Well, the opportunity is not there.  So How to recover after a losing day number one is Show up the next day Just with green, you know, what we say is if you stick to the process the process will reward you So rather than trying to the biggest detrimental thing that you could do to your training after a losing day It's trying to make it all back on the same day or the next day.  So that's the whole thing guys now as I'm talking to stock is squeezing higher. Everything's going crazy. Whatever so The key lessons for this video so far just to recap is Understand that we are in a bare market cycle and things aren't the same way They used to be two years ago if you have not adapted and change your strategy and change your sizing It is very clear that you're losing money It's there's no if ands or buts, okay If you are training a stock that doesn't have much edge size down Size down size down if you just had a very big win whether it's for you It's a thousand dollars whether it's ten thousand dollars where it's a hundred thousand dollars Why are the profits out of your account? So you are not tempted to use it? I made hundreds of thousands of dollars and I'm wiring out wiring it out of my account So I don't see it there. I don't see it there because I don't want to be tempted to use it on a subpar setup, okay? Set your max loss set your auto liquidation set your broker limits. How do you set them call up your broker? Hey, I need to set up a max loss auto liquidation. Sure. How much okay? What's the days worth of work to a 200 bucks? Okay, done.  Okay So that's kind of where we're at here guys I want to kind of open it up into an audience Q&A right now before I get into member questions in my C Yeah, I've been I've been today what I did is I made a video watch list for members So what I used to do in the past I used to make a video watch this every morning before the market opens I provide a watch list and additionally what I do is I make a video Going over how I found these stocks in my watch list How I found these levels on my watch list and what my trading plan is before the market opens as I guide you you know for During the market open and I stopped doing it for about a month or two because I felt very discouraged because not too many people were watching it You know, we have thousands of members in MIC and only 10% of them were watching it and go figure The saying is 90% of traders fail and the point is that only 10% of these traders are watching and those are the 10% that are successful So I've been really struggling mentally with you know the MIC front of everything I've been kind of struggling because you know, we're in a bear market You know people aren't watching our YouTube videos people are watching our Instagrams people aren't watching anything because number one Most market participants blew up and they have to go back to their day job and number two people don't care about our boring Education and thought about it for a while and I thought about it and I was thinking, you know What can we do to make MIC refreshed? What can we do to make MIC more exciting? What can we do to you know provide more value and get more views and help more people and what I thought to myself is I Don't want to change the Vision and the goal of MIC just to get a couple more people watching these videos I don't want to start flashing my million dollars worth of watches.  So I've been kind of struggling mentally with the fact of what can we do to get more eyeballs in MIC And what I realized is the reason why we started MIC is because it makes us happy So we're gonna continue to make these videos whether a hundred people watch it or a hundred million people watch it because they make us happy I'm not gonna do something that's gonna be discouraging to me I'm not gonna start flashing things that are gonna be discouraging to me just to get more eyeballs so Although our community is small although we are in a very niche area of the market I'm not gonna change the life blood and the life soul and start bragging and showing off Just to get more views and just to get more attention MIC was started so that we could do something that makes us happy. I love trading.  I kind of want to you know, provide more value I kind of want to do more and you know, I will not change my personality And I will not change myself just to get more views because here's the secret guys We make more money trading than we do on YouTube and then we do on MIC. I've actually taken a pay cut from MIC I make zero dollars from MIC in all of 2022 because I'm using my portion of The profits to be able to reinvest it into the business So I take zero zero zero zero zero from MIC because I make millions Literally millions from trading and I'm okay with that. I'm totally okay with that because as I grow as a trader It will only attract more people at MIC So hopefully you guys learned a lot from this video Hopefully I'm able to provide value for you guys and hopefully you guys understand that we're doing this because we truly love it We are truly passionate about it.  I'm not gonna start flashing anything I'm not gonna start doing anything Maybe I might bring the day trading vlog back because I had a lot of fun doing that like the day in the life of a trader But other than that, man, I'm just gonna go back to helping members I'm gonna go back to making millions of dollars trading and whatever money I make from MIC I'm gonna use to grow the community and help more people So hopefully you guys like this video leave a like on the video Maybe leave a comment with a lesson that you learned from the video and I will see you guys back in the room


Hello, everyone. I'm Zanik from Bitfire, the team behind DaFix 5, which probably most of you already use if you're syncing your contacts calendars or tasks with Next Cloud or any other Kaldove servers. Yeah, we want to create a push standard for WebDoc Kaldove CardTurf, and I'm going to talk a little bit about that now. So just for a quick reminder, what is push about at all. DaFix 5 is the sync client. And well, at the moment, we can only do that with the interval-based polling. And we do that with the shortest amount of 15 minutes interval. And we would actually like that to be instantaneous. This is currently the standard in open source. But well, yeah, we want to make it better, right? And especially business environments, you don't want to miss that meeting. Or maybe the meeting got canceled. And then like last minute, and then you still have those 15 minutes or whatever even longer.  Yeah, so we really want real-time updates. So we also want to avoid the battery costs. Of course, we will have a problem if we actually just ask the server. So polling just quickly is asking the server did something change. If it didn't, then of course, we wasted some battery there. And yeah, you can, of course, poll more often, do the interval shorter. And then we just waste more energy if no updates actually were made on the server side. So we're going to save battery that way as well. Like I said, it's been missing in the open source world for quite a while. And we want to correct that. The competitors, the big tech guys, they have had that for quite a long while. And it's really a reason for us to just get back on track here. And it would greatly benefit the whole DAF ecosystem, of course. So the standard doesn't exist yet. We really want to make it such that all the other client, well, web.gov, cart.gov, and all those DAF clients or servers, you start to use it as well. So we want to make it an open standard, make it an RFC in the best case. And it's not going to be easy, but we really want to tackle this. And so we're really happy that NextCloud will start to work on this with us. We take existing standards, of course, into consideration where possible. Right now, such a standard doesn't exist yet. Multiple back ends we can use exist already. There's, of course, the Google Firebase Cloud Messaging, which we're going to start building on top of, because it's just the most well-known and easiest to integrate. But we, of course, want to try and leverage the power of unified push as well, so that people not using Google Play services can benefit from this as well. And then there's the WebSockets, of course, which we'll also take into account there, especially interesting for the WebDAF. And we know, of course, that NextCloud push exists. And we would love to talk to you guys who implemented it actually, so we can share some information on how you actually did that and whether it could be useful for us to create this. So please come to us, speak to us, or we're going to find you, anyways, afterwards later. So in general, it's a complex topic. More complex than you would anticipate if you just hear push. Yeah, there's the server's clients and different thing of the whole topic of creating the standard, which is new to us. But yeah, it's also quite exciting. All right, and yeah, we're really excited to do this with NextCloud. So any user is going to be, like, of NextCloud and Duffix 5. They're going to be the first ones to experience this. We're really excited to make that happen. We got funded by NLNet. Thank you very much for that, like shoutouts to those. And yeah, it's still going to take quite a lot of time to actually implement this. But maybe I'm going to talk here about it next year and tell you guys how well it went and how far we got with it. So help us out, spread the word, talk to us. There's the matrix room and otherwise, check out GitHub. We would love to hear from you guys. Maybe we can push this together. Yeah. All right, I think this is it. That's it. Thank you.


So for this group what opened up and changed in that third quarter that allowed you guys to put up 42 points? We limited their second chance opportunities. We were better defensive glass and then limited our turnovers and it created a good offensive opportunities for us. It was another night where we got to showcase and see the amount of shooters that you guys have. How fun is it to have so many teammates that can get to their spots and not go down? Yeah, it's definitely a luxury of this team. A lot of space on the floor for, you know, primary ball handlers, facilitators, and then when the ball is moving, getting guys shots. It's definitely a fun way to play and, you know, it's an unselfish group. So typically giving up good shots for great shots, making the extra pass and, you know, it's always always better to play that way. What worked so well that you guys are going to hold a trade, so just three and twelve, if you want to do a deal? I mean, to be honest, I don't know if it's a whole lot of what we do. He didn't seem to be as aggressive as he has been. Yeah, kind of leaving with that, I think. When you see Miguel Bridges have a game like he had tonight, at this point, you've seen it time and time again, but like just what was your just overall just impressive level of seeing him go off?  I mean, even earlier this season, even when he was in Phoenix, he, we played against him earlier. He was the primary guy in our Skyrim report with him and his ability offensively.  Did you envision that, like when he first came over from the trade, that you envisioned a world where he'd be having 40-point games, 30-point games for you guys? No, I mean, I didn't envision a lot though, to be honest. It's kind of a whirlwind when everything is going on, and then everybody kind of fills into their roles, and you know, this is where we're at now. Going off the jail, when does it kind of flip from like surprise to like expectation within doing that with you alongside him? I mean, I don't think it's ever a surprise, and I think, you know, the expectation is to come in, play good basketball, and try to win games, and, you know, Mikhail is you know, his aggressiveness offensively allows us to, or puts us in a good position to win games.


Pearl Motiati's Hard Times, From Breaking Up To Moving In With Family A year after suffering heartbreak and moving in with family for a bit, things are looking up for TV and radio host Pearl Motiati. Pearl experienced a rocky 2018, splitting from her bae. As a result she had to make some changes to her living arrangement and ended up staying with family and then a hotel. Reflecting on her struggles this week on Twitter, Pearl said it was a lesson that setbacks are just temporary. I was heartbroken this time last year. There was a change of plans in my love life and we had to cancel a property purchase. I moved in with my sister's family for a week then lived in a hotel for a couple of months. Pearl is doing much better and shared the good news that she is moving into her new home in less than a month. Soon messages of support flooded her inbox and mentions, including from 5 FM radio host and former generations actress Thando Thabiti. Thando said they were both in the same boat, after she split from her fiancé around the same time last year.


Hi, my name is Axel, and mine is Mikkel, and we are here to tell you how to successfully fail at life. The baseless claim that a company celebrates failure is becoming as common for trope in modern tech as have you tried turning it off and on again? It turns out that repeated failure is not enough to ensure future success, and in practice celebrating failure often amounts to not firing people who are bad at their job. As such, thinking about how to fail forward, that is, fail in a way that moves you meaningfully towards your goal is relevant. This talk is about how we failed five consecutive deploys at Spotify, and why we're reasonably proud about it. But first, a little background.  And for a long time, we've been wanting to run Envoy as an HTTP proxy at the perimeter of our backends. In addition to having a unified perimeter, there is a long, long list of futures we want to get out of this setup. Common metrics, authentication, rate limiting, client IP, lookups, access logs, and so on. And as you might know, Envoy doesn't actually do all of those things. Our desired Envoy setup contains a docker sidecar that runs a second service implementing authentication, GUIP lookups, and some other things. Envoy will call this service for most incoming requests using the OTSI extension. We started this journey over a year ago by adding our first services behind Envoy. We have then gradually added more and more traffic, and now it's time for the biggest deployment, the HTTP traffic from the actual Spotify clients. But before such an important move, we wanted to do a fair bit of testing to build confidence that this would actually work. We created a test setup that resembled the production setup as much as possible. Instead of a real client, we used a WRK2 tool which does open loop testing, that is, it allows us to set the desired request rate instead of just trying to fully saturate the system. This is almost always the correct way to load test a system. Our test setup uses the same load balancer as production, an identically configured cluster, but with only one host, and various different core counts on that host. Finally, our test used a single upstream service named NOOP. NOOP is a service whose reply time, status code, and payload size can all be configured on each incoming request. So, what did we find? First of all, regardless of number of cores on the host, Metric's propagation always uses one full core. Secondly, a few configuration bottlenecks were found. The biggest one was the HTTP thread pool in our off-sea sidecar. We tried 8 1632 and 64 core hosts, and 32 cores offered the best throughput per core. We saw some failure rate elevation on slow requests, but we didn't investigate this further. And finally, we could see that TLS used a bit more CPU than we expected in the flame graphs. Good enough, let's go! And we did! And thanks to that, we have this amazing news article. And needless to say, we had to roll back fairly quickly. What was going on? Well, it turns out that Envoy's circuit breaker, which is really just an outstanding request limit, had triggered. It has a default limit of 1000 requests, which we had not changed. Handling 30,000 RPS per host means that average latency on your requests must be lower than 30 milliseconds. We had in fact checked that the median latency was much lower than that. But as usual, the long tail ruins everything. So we had failed to check the right metric for this situation, which is the average. Because Envoy doesn't report the average. But the good news is, we could successfully reproduce the problem in our test environment. And we could validate that it went away when we adjusted the limit. So we adjusted the production circuit breaker settings, and we tried again. And this time it worked. For a few minutes. It started out fine. But as time went on, we got more and more errors. We noted this amazing graph, showing the number of requests for each host. Basically, the load balancer seems to throw all it can at a random host until it gets overloaded. Then it threw the load away at the other hosts instead, spiraling into more and more 500 diars from overloaded hosts. We adjusted our environment to be more like the production, by increasing its size from 1 to 10. We could then see the same problem in our test environment. And after some testing, we figured that if we tell the load balancer to target 15,000 requests per second for each host, everything looks fine. We had assumed that a single node test cluster would be fine. Looking back, it feels pretty naive to use a single node. But it's always easier when you have all the answers. We didn't know that the load balancer considered a single node cluster special.  And throttling to 15,000 requests stopped the flapping. But we have poor usage usage and an elevated failure rate. Clearly, something still wasn't right. But we didn't know where. So we tried to isolate the different parts of the system to locate the bottleneck. We started with the previously mentioned AuthZ sidecar. We disabled it, and RPS went from 15,000 to 20,000. This is expected, since the number of messages that are processed by the host goes down significantly. And also, CPU usage during these load tests still stayed well below 50%. So that was not the limiting factor. Next, we turned our eyes to the NOOP service. This fake service runs in Kubernetes. We did some quick profiling and found that each replica can handle 23,000 RPS. It is auto-scaled with a maximum of 100 replicas. That means it can handle roughly 2.3 million RPS. Once again, not the limiting factor. Most Envoy users use the HTTP2 stack, but Envoy and our upstream uses HTTP1.1. Perhaps the HTTP1.1 stack is somehow less scalable. We ran a test where Envoy directly responds to all requests, thereby bypassing any HTTP1.1 stack. And we found that we could handle only 30,000 RPS with a 10% CPU usage. Why? This is the low point. It is the part of the hero's journey known as the abyss. It is where we considered giving up on software development and finding a brand new career, one that makes sense, like carpentry. But instead, we started looking at the number of connections between our load balancer and Envoy hosts, and found that we have about 13,000 connections to East host. That's a pretty high number. And someone pointed out that the buffer size is 1 megabyte. And with some math, you get a total buffer size of 13 gigabytes. That's quite a lot of buffering for Envoy to do. So we try to decrease it to 32 kilobytes for each connection. And our request per second increased from 30,000 to 60,000 on direct responses. We did try to tweak similar settings like the number of concurrent streams and window sizes. But we didn't find anything we thought were worth changing. As soon as we hit 15,000 requests per second, latency started to increase. This did not happen if we removed the OTC decorator from the request path. To check if it was the service that was slow, we replaced it with a service that immediately returns 200 OK. Performance was still bad, and we only got 15,000 requests per second. Clearly, we have isolated an issue in the communication between Envoy and the OTC sidecar. This was narrow enough for a teammate to realize that they previously touched the network configuration on this cluster, and sure enough, we were using Docker network bridge instead of the much faster loopback device. Throughput increased to 30,000 requests per second. But why didn't we see this earlier? It does only increase latency, so badly that the load balance started considering the host dead. It didn't actually limit the throughput. Finally, we have reached the end of our journey. Everything worked. We hit production, and everything is fine. For a few minutes. Then, once again, the error rates started to creep up, and RPS went down to the same old 15,000 RPS. We decided at this point to drill down to the various thread pools on the system to see if any of them were overloaded. What we found instead was that the main Envoy worker pool was extremely unevenly loaded. Some threads were pegged at 100%, others were doing nothing. We assumed that this was a locking problem, and we started to work on profiling Envoy. That is, until someone noticed that the number of open connections to each worker thread was actually similarly lopsided. So why were some worker threads receiving all of the traffic and others none? We could not reproduce this problem in our test environment, which meant that we were flying blind. We decided to reach out to the Envoy community, as well as our cloud provider, Google. We got a suggestion from both in the form of Harvey Touche. SO reuse port. This configuration option in Envoy is described as such. This makes inbound connections distribute among worker threads roughly evenly, in cases where there are a high number of connections. Which begs the question, when would you not want connections evenly distributed among workers? Anyway, it worked. But why couldn't we reproduce this problem in testing? It turns out that load started out pretty evenly distributed, and then slowly diverges. Our test cluster was either reconfigured often enough, or saw long enough breaks with no traffic that things reset themselves, whereas our production cluster was always loaded. So this is the end of our journey. We have now had four months without any major problems, and to get more certainty, we did a successful regional failover test where we killed one region, and let all that traffic go to our other regions. And it just worked. So we have started doing fun things, like upgrading to version 3 of the XDS API, adding rate limiting, and looking at course configuration for our clients.  And we did spend a full week of performance testing before our last and final deployment. And still, we failed to identify five major scalability bottlenecks. Maybe, spending an hour looking at all the available metrics while load testing our setup might have actually identified a few of these problems. But probably not all of them. Looking back, this journey was a lot of fun, even though it didn't always feel like that while it was ongoing. And we for sure did learn a lot. So some suggestions we thought we would share. They would most likely have helped us, so maybe they can help someone else. Make the default queue size per core, so you don't have to remember to change it when you change your machine type to have a different number of cores. Make SREU's port default. We know this has some performance costs to low traffic servers, but we figure efficiency is more important on high traffic servers. Another alternative would be to highlight it in the best practices guide for Envoy as an edge proxy. And last, add average latency to the histograms. We know averages can be overused and misguiding, but when doing math on connection settings, it can be very helpful. Okay, so how do you fail at life? By planning for it. Assume that you will fail, because you will. Try to think ahead to when you will fail, and try to think of what you need to do next. And make sure that you have the tools at your disposal to do just that. This often means having the right metrics. Next, do your best to reproduce all problems outside of the production environment. Not only does doing so give you much more opportunity to see what happens in various related failure scenarios. The act of crafting a test environment often shows you blind spots you didn't know you had. And finally, communicate. Ask for help. Broadcast your shortcomings to anyone who can be made to listen. Like you. Even if your mistakes are embarrassingly done. Like ours. Keep talking. Maybe some of those mistakes can be prevented through code changes. And if not, at least more people will know about the common pitfalls. Hello everyone. Are there any questions in here? Thank you for all of the feedback and the thumbs up and whatnot. Let's see. Have you guys looked at enabling exact balancer on the listener? Mikke, I'm going to let you handle that one, because I don't know. I don't actually know what that is. That was what I was too ashamed to admit. I'm not ashamed of things like that. I have no idea. I will look it up. Thanks for the tip. A question about if HTTP 1.1 issue was identified. So there was no HTTP 1.1 issue. That was a suspicion that we had that maybe the HTTP 1.1 stack was slower or less battle tested or less scalable or something like that. And that turned out to be wrong. We are still using HTTP 2 from the load balancer to Envoy, obviously, and then from Envoy to our microservices, we're talking HTTP 1.1, and they both seem to perform just fine. Running into very similar problems at Twitter. I think overall, I would expect people that have very large request volumes to have similar issues, and I think there is a very good start of how to make Envoy an HTTP proxy for a large organization in the docs for Envoy, but I think there are opportunities to improve the configuration as well as improve that documentation to make life even easier for large installations. It's another way of forcing connection balancing. Then we should look into and see if it works better or worse. Thanks for the tip. Yes, Maxim. In our load testing, we've got about 1000 requests per second per core. I think in production, we get a little bit less. And Matt Klein asks, why are you using HTTP 1.1 to the back ends versus 2? And the answer to that is mostly legacy. So Spotify has very old network stack. It's about a decade old. We implemented our own transport layer instead of HTTP because we had a lot of scalability problems with HTTP. This transport layer called Hermes is basically very similar in most ways to HTTP 2. It solves the same problems in mostly the same way. And it tries to be very HTTP like in its API, but it is older than HTTP 2. We started work slightly before Google started talking about speedy publicly. And we are still transitioning away from this internal Hermes protocol. And what we have today for our Hermes-based services is a library that you can use to accept HTTP traffic as if it was Hermes traffic. And we are instead moving to internally use HTTP 2 and GRPC and then in the future, hopefully HTTP 3 and so on, modernizing our stack, but we're not there yet. And Christopher wears six people, I believe. Yeah. Something like that? Yes. And the other people are more competent than me and Axe. That's why they kicked me out. Yes. And Louise, I'm not sure how many requests per connection we had. If you ask me on Slack, I can check it. So with regards to much in the way of filters, we are using a few filters to filter out users who are not allowed on some resources and so on. But the big thing that reduces our efficiency, I would say, is that we are running both the both Envoy itself and this decorator sidecar, which is implemented as an EXT-AuthC filter on the same 32-core machine. So the three resource hogs on the machine is Envoy itself, which uses like half the CPU, and then the sidecar, which uses slightly less, but still a significant amount. And lastly, also the metrics propagation, which uses about one out of 32 cores. So all three of those are running on every single Envoy host. And also that means that you get a message in to Envoy, and then it's passed out from Envoy to the other service, and then back and then to the next, and then you get the reply in. So there are six message passing steps or something like that, not just the four that you would expect. My math is probably wrong, but something along those lines. And also our decorator is in Java, so we have some garbage collection fun things, and replacing it with filters. I don't think we have talked about that. I'm not sure why we decided to go with the sidecar. That was before I joined the team actually. That decision is over a year old. I was very interested to hear the talk, one of the starting talks about using WebAssembly to make your own custom filters in Envoy. That could definitely be useful for us. We did not want to write our own C++ filters because we, as a company, have too few developers who are super comfortable with C++, and then it becomes a who owns it problem, whereas we have lots of Java devs. But WebAssembly might help out with that. We don't know. We'll see. Yes. But overall, I agree that the sidecar solution feels like probably not what we want to do long term. Yeah. And Maxine, we're running on managing infrastructure. I think they answered all of the questions. If someone has a question that they posted that we didn't answer, it's not because we hate you. It's because we missed it. So please feel free to repost it in that case. Or ask on the Envoy Slack. At least I'm there. I'm not sure if you are, Axon. I actually am. Fantastic. I know. That seems to be it. Sure does. Thanks a lot, everyone, for listening. This was great. I will now disconnect and go say hi to the third talker from this conference, Titus. So, bye. Bye, everyone.