All right welcome everyone. We've got about a 40-minute panel. It's on the entrepreneurs perspective. I'm Simon Anderson. I'm CEO of a company called Dreamhost. We're an open-stack public cloud and then I've been a co-founder of a couple of startups in the open-stack ecosystem Ink Tank and most recently Acanda. And we've got a great panel here. Founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, CTOs, you know the folks who are really doing it at the coalface. And what I'd ask in terms of ground rules of all of us is let's keep it real, let's keep it authentic and you know really try and make this a rich panel for all those of you out there who are aspiring to do things in the open-stack ecosystem. Start your company, leave your big company and so on. So on my right is Jesse Proudman and then Chris McGowan, Ken Rugg and Joe Arnold. And I'm actually going to let them each do a little quick introduction so you hear their voice and they can tell you a little bit about their story. Try and keep it to like 45 seconds. So I have Jesse Proudman, founder and CTO of Bluebox. August of this year will be 12 years at Bluebox. I founded it in 2003 from my dorm room in Washington, just out of here. For the first nine years, company grew up as a managed hosting company very similar to Rackspace and competing with Rackspace and then raised Series A in October of 12 to take the platform we call BoxPanel, which is sort of our management, our management infrastructure and use that to springboard into private cloud. So then we raised the $14 million Series B in October and December of last year and I hired Matt Schultz, the CEO of the company. He was at tier three in May of last year and took over the CTO spot. Hi, I'm Christopher McGowan. I'm the co-founder and chief technology officer at Piston. We've been in business since January of 2011. When my co-founders Joshua McKenty and Gretchen and I left our respective companies, them, NASA, and Rackspace, to start Piston. I'm Ken Rugg. I'm the CEO, founder of Tesora. We're the Trove company, so the major contributor and company behind the Trove project for Database as a Service on OpenStack. We actually started doing a little bit of a different thing during Scale Out MySQL and then back in 2011 and then in February of last year of 2014, we jumped on the OpenStack and Trove Bandwagon and never looked back. So that's kind of what's my story. Hi, everyone. My name is Joe Arnold and one of the co-founders of a company called Swiftstack and we work on OpenStack Swift. We started around three and a half years ago building a product around it and bootstrapped for about six months and then we raised our first seed round of $1.5 million. Then we worked on that for another few months and raised our Series A and then closed our Series B last quarter and talked more about that and the process of that in this panel. Great. Thanks, guys. So Joe, actually I'm going to throw to you. I think when people are starting out and they're thinking about doing a venture on their own or with a group, what gave you the courage to just step up and do it? Was it just a timing issue? Was it a group of people that came together? What were the two or three ingredients that all of a sudden they just came together and you said, we're going to do this, I'm going to go ahead and found Swiftstack? Yeah. Okay. So one is I just really wanted to do a startup at some point and there was kind of a building up to that. My background is a programmer. I was an engineer and doing some operations. So that's where I came from. And so I found folks that covered different things that I needed. There was two other technical co-founders and then one other person who was on the business side and then I served as the CEO for the first about three years. This is actually, I think what you've just mentioned though is really critical, but I think a lot of people think of startups as being I'm out there doing it on my own.  But like even in mountaineering, it's all about a team, right? But we were just like, we were working out of this like co-working space. And it was, it was not very nice. And I remember even just getting like that first round of funding and we hired our first employee. He came out of Rack Space and they were in this, you know, Rack Space has a fabulous office out in Austin. And when they came in, he was bringing his wife and told me, hey, look at me, I'm joining this new startup. And here we are in this very, very dimly lit, five dudes all gathered around a single table. I mean, she was just like, oh, what am I, what am I in for? So it's kind of a shock for even like bringing on those first few people. It's a different experience when you're especially the really early days.  I mean, those investors that came in, what were they really looking for? What was sort of your unique value proposition that that hooked them in at that time? Yeah, it's a good question. So ironically, I was a single founder, which I did for for a very long time, and then started to build a team around us as part of building this new product. And so I just want to comment on that. Like that, that's one of the hardest possible things. And so while you can do it, I do a lot of mentorship at the University of Washington. And this is like one of the topics I'm really passionate about. Well, you can be a single founder, and a lot of people think they want to be a single founder, finding that team of people that can all believe in that common vision from from day zero. Man, like if I, if I went back and did it again, I think that's one of the biggest changes I would have done. In terms of fundraising, so I bootstrapped the company for nine years, I literally used like every source of capital you could come up with credit cards, home equity lines of credit, I borrowed money from my girlfriend, who's now my wife, like student loans, like if you can name a source of money, I probably used it. Did you pay it back? I paid it all back. Fortunately, it's probably why we're now married. And through that process as a management company, that was working because we were a services business, we were able to come to his cash filling, right? Every every customer that we got, we were able to cover the general operating expenses, but we realized as time was going on that to really be where we wanted to be, we needed to build a product and to build a product we needed to invest ahead of the the income from the customers. And so the story really was, look, look at this technology platform we've built. This platform allows us to be competitive with the likes of Rackspace, who have thousands more employees than we do. Look at the automation capabilities of this platform. And now look at what we can do with it in the private cloud space. And at that point in time, when we raised that capital, everybody in OpenStack was selling OpenStack as a distribution of software. And there was nobody really approaching, approaching the solution as a service, with the exception of MetaCloud. And so we sort of said we can use this technology and be first to market with delivering OpenStack as a service powered by this underlying tech. And that really resonated for the original investors that we found. And I think this is interesting because I'm with Dreamhost and right around that same time, we were thinking about something similar. But you know, this is just where startups or pivots happen and where you really go after things. We just didn't have the capacity to do it. And you did it, you went out there, you built a great business around it. You know, it's really cool. So one of the interesting things about what they're stating about the fact that everybody current when they started investing in OpenStack is doing products. When Joshua Gretchen and I started Piston, we had come back from six months working for this seismic risk analysis program, thinking we were going to do a geolocation database where you just drop in a rack of servers, go around, take pictures of their, of people's locations and do some transformation and they'd get a 3D model out of it. And we were going to run that on OpenStack. And we came back and the only people who were involved in OpenStack at the time were interested in catering towards service providers. So it's been an interesting, you know, four years, five years, how we started off at the service provider space, went into a very heavy product focused space where people wanted to sell software and then are coming back around into the managed service provider space. That's cool. And Ken, in terms of, you know, sort of following that thread, you're, you know, you're coming into the market, you're really building a business around one of the newer, you know, projects within the OpenStack ecosystem. And so I'm assuming that that's part of your strategic thinking is to get ahead of it, be one of the first companies that really looks to, you know, package it up and turn Trove into a service that's really consumable and so on. Yeah, definitely. That's really the focus for us is, and I think our view is that in the world of OpenStack, I think there's, you're always, I think, going to what you guys said, you're looking for where are the gaps, where are the things that everybody else isn't doing? You know, if everybody's doing a distribution, well, maybe I need to offer it as a service. If everybody's doing, you know, one one stack for all, everything in OpenStack, maybe you'd need to look for specialists. I mean, I look to you guys, you know, and I, you know, I kind of go to you as an inspiration, right, in terms of looking at SwiftStack, a company that was very focused on one project, you know, you have a lot of core expertise. We, we came into this, as I mentioned earlier, with a lot of background in how do you build big database servers? How do you do replication? How do you build, you know, an infrastructure backplane for very scalable database management tools? And, you know, we wanted to bring that kind of very specialized expertise to, and bring that to bear in an ecosystem like OpenStack. And, you know, again, we saw that gap in the market, you know, everybody else on Trove, when we came into the project, they were service providers, right, it was, you know, HP, eBay, within their, within their private cloud, you know, it was, were folks that were operating Trove at scale, but, you know, there wasn't a company that you could go to and say, hey, I want, I want this piece of OpenStack and I want a specialist who can, who can help me succeed. So, looking, looking for that unique, that unique niche or that unique selling proposition, but I mean, come on, let's get real guys, how do you make money from free software? How do you do it? Come on, this is where the authenticity comes in, how do you do it? Well, we're still thinking it out, right, right. Honestly, there's, there's, there's still, I think, a lot of work to do to figure out how do you do that and what's the best way, what's the best model. I think there's, there's a lot, you know, from my perspective. First thing you have to make sure you're delivering the value, you know, make sure that you're doing something people want and can help them get their job done, you know, and I think, you know, the business models, I mean, we, we think of ourselves as kind of more traditional open core model where you take, you know, you take that basic open source bits, you know, be very true to the open source project, you know, and I think that's, you know, we're the number one contributor to Trove, we wanted to give, even though we didn't start the project, you know, we jumped on the project kind of as, as newcomers and, you know, I think it was, you know, we, we were accepted by the community because we were coming with a little bit different DNA. But, you know, again, I think, how do we monetize it? Well, we're still learning that.  Yeah, we've been going for a little while, so the model that we have is, we shipped the open source version and then we contribute to that. But then what we've done is we've gone down not the services path, but we did go down the product path. And that was sort of, that was the way we wanted to do it because we felt like we could best support lots of customers versus going down the professional services route. So it was kind of a choice that we made. But I'd say like early on, it almost doesn't matter that much, right? Particularly on the, when we, there's four or five guys just trying to figure out how to get the business started. You're going around pitching the company, both to investors and prospective customers. We were just trying to get an early customer and an early win. And even when we didn't win a customer, we, because of, we were four guys that were just trying, trying to get something done, we could still take that prospect and bring them and introduce them to an investor. And because it's, it's just as valid. It's like, okay, yeah, here's a pain. I'm talking with these guys. I'm investing in this open source project, which by the way is really cool because they think, oh, hey, I'm just going to build this stuff and roll it out myself. And I'm using these guys to train me up and teach me all about this open source project. That's actually okay. And early on, because it shows that there's a need and that there's a market for what you're doing. And then that can lead to sharing that to people who may invest in your, in your company. So it's, it's still useful, even if in the early days you might not have the revenue stream coming in. You know, I think OpenStack is unique. If you look at open source software in general, they've typically, if we go back in history, they've been smaller probably even like the Linux distribution. It's a single server, a single entity. And so when something fails or a customer has a problem with, with that piece of software, it impacts a much smaller portion of what they're doing versus now with cloud computing with OpenStack, basically saying, look, put everything in your production environment on top of one set of software. And so the failure domain has gone up exponentially. And yes, it's still open source, but because the failure domain has gone up and because the complexity of the software itself is so wide because it's doing so much. I think that creates a huge opportunity for those that, for those companies that are either building a problem that, that solve, solve that operational challenge through productization or delivering it as a service. And that's fundamentally different. So you basically are, you've got product, you've got product opportunities, you've got services opportunities, you've got professional service opportunities. So it's, it's, I mean, it's like any other software industry to a large degree. Can I make, can I like share a mistake that we made earlier on? Absolutely. Okay. So, so one of the things that I thought was going to happen was we could get people to come to the website, see our glorious product and click and sign up and download and get started, right? That was like, oh, that's exactly how we're going to do it. We can run ads and we can show up and, and get visibility. That didn't happen at all, particularly in the early phases, right? We actually had to go out and find where our, our product actually worked for very specific use cases and went out and met the people. And then those people would tell us, well, here's why X, Y and Z reasons why your stuff didn't work. And then we could go back and fix it and go and try, right?  You actually have to figure out where the solution plays and go out. So, and before you jump in on that, because I think this is where you're going to go is, you know, with piston being so early in the community, I think this is a really important point around, you know, houses that has the open stack community helped you. I mean, how can folks out there who are thinking about starting their next adventure within open stack, how can they really leverage the community and piston was in early, what did you do in that regard? One of the things that the community did was they provided a lot of pain points and every single pain point that anybody has with open stack, myself, Jesse, Ken and Joe, all of us are all of those pain points are actually opportunities to create a company and fix that pain point because if you're having that problem, everybody else is having that problem. So there's that that benefit to joining the community. There are thousands of pain points in every single one of these projects. The other thing is the community is huge. And there's a lot of marketing and a lot of momentum behind people who join the community. You have very large companies who invest lots and lots of money to bring their employees here to make the community better, to invest in the code that we're building on to throw parties, to co-brand with the parties that we host, right? Piston probably threw the best parties. You've got the track record of the best parties. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Piston. Sorry, we didn't do one this year. Can I counter that a little bit? Which part? The parties or the community or the parties are great. The pain points being an opportunity? Well, no, just don't. I would say use OpenStack. But it's not necessarily to play inside of OpenStack. We've had more success in people who are just trying to solve a storage problem. And you're probably seeing the same thing on the database site where we're showing up and doing genomic sequencing. Where's the compute cluster? No, they're not ready for OpenStack. They're using HPC clusters and or in the media space, right? There's the we're just solving a storage problem with the OpenStack technology. I don't think that that's a counterpoint. I think that's the exact point I'm making. Okay. Keystone right now has a lot of pain points. There is a space for someone to come and be an auth company. Yeah. Yeah.  OpenStack is not my value proposition. My value proposition is you want to make it easy for people to provision databases. You want to make it self-service, easy access, managed database. You know, nobody cares about database as a service on OpenStack as a top-level point of view. I mean, they don't want to just fill in the checkboxes for OpenStack. I think this is what you're sort of touching on. And it's definitely been a big topic. You know, I'm on the Foundation Board, and it's been a big topic of conversation around what is OpenStack. And, you know, just for everyone's benefit here in the room, if you haven't heard it already, the board and the technical committee have gone through a process of what's called Defcore, which is defining the core of OpenStack in a way which is actually flexible and can be updated on a regular basis. So that is now done and that process is in place and, you know, it's early days, but it seems to be working fairly well. Now, that's primarily for trademark usage to be able to say you're an OpenStack-powered platform, OpenStack-powered compute or OpenStack-powered storage. And then on the technical committee side, the technical committee is making a pretty big shift where from really what was the integrated release of OpenStack. In other words, you know, this is a packaged product, packaged software, essentially. That was really the mistake, I think, which was that people started to think of OpenStack who weren't familiar with it as packaged software, which is not. And so now it's what's called the big-tent approach, which is it's not so much, you know, is it OpenStack? It is, are you OpenStack? In other words, if you have a project that's open-source or if you're part of the community, are you behaving in a way which fits the open values of software development and collaboration and so on?  You know, it's a set of projects that you can bring together in different ways and shapes and forms to solve a whole bunch of different cloud computing and storage use cases. But it's, you know, it's not one size fits all by any means. And I think this is what, you know, you'd emphasize, it seems like you guys are definitely seeing the gaps. Are we seeing the opportunities to bring value to the customer over and above what OpenStack natively offers? Yeah, I guess I wouldn't say I'm not focusing on the gaps so much as I'm focusing on the industry that needs a solution and figuring out how to tie that back to the technology. Where is the pain? You're looking for where the pain the customer experiences is. Often never has anything to do with OpenStack at all. Absolutely. Customers say, I need a private cloud. Now, how do I get that? And OpenStack is a way to do that, or Swift is a way to solve the storage problem and there's pain there. Yeah, and I would say like when we started out, it's like, OK, here's the technology and we're focusing on that. But from a use case, we're like, OK, let's see. Where are we going? Like, and we're kind of like learning as and we're feeling around the market trying to figure out who's using us, where the pain points are. But then as we got more mature and we learned more about not the technology but more on the market side, figuring out and that's where things that get narrowed down even further and further and further. And that's where we got more and more success and more and more traction is we got more specific on the use cases that we were and more specific on the industry.  But as you mature, you should start looking for those because that's what's going to be needed in order to figure out, OK, what kind of sales guy am I going to hire? So some quick tips on that. What conference is I'm going to go to? Yeah, quick tips on that though. How do the people in the audience and who are going to be watching this, you know, online, like how do they move super fast on getting to those kind of outcomes? You know, what do you guys have tips and tricks? Things that you did?  What sort of things did you do? Well, we had first we we listened to the inbound and in our in our case, it was we had we categorized the inbounds as they were coming in and we ran it leads from your website or leads from our website what leads from the website? It leads from OpenStack. Right. They really came from across the board and then we started categorizing them and and we look to see, OK, where are we having success? Where are we not having success? And this industry is consuming up a lot of time, but not a lot of a revenues coming from that. So all right, let's turn that off. These ones are are. Wow, when we go into this account, even though we don't know what we're talking about, we find a really smart customer, a really technical person is a visionary in their industry. They can go, oh, I see what you're doing. You're not using my language, but I understand it. So I'm going to piece it together for you. And then we look at that and go, ah, I see. And we can generalize that. We learn about that domain specific stuff and then we can go into the that same category. Cool. So I think to do that, you've got to measure everything. Right. And this is one of our biggest early mistakes was we did not measure nearly enough on a marketing side and a lead gen side. And there's so much valuable data there. And so in the last 18 months, 24 months, we started that process. And again, you start to see those trends and that's exactly the same methodology we're using now, but we wouldn't be able to do it without the data that we're going to. So were you using things like Salesforce? Yeah, now we're using Salesforce. Right. So you're basically looking, you know, who opens the emails who? Yeah, I mean, I guess a little bit less for us because we're less of a it's not about high volume. I mean, sure, we have all those those tools. So, but, you know, it's it's not about developing a marketing automation platform, particularly in the early days. It's just more about really paying attention to where things are coming from and then making calls. Okay, am I going to go invest in industry like the trucking industry conference and show up there and explain how your solution works in their terms? Right. Chris, that's kind of one of the things that I really wish we had done is we when we were raising, so we raised roughly five hundred thousand dollars in seed and then concurrently went and raised a four million dollar a round. And as part of that, we had this story where we were going to build this specific product and we sold it to the VCs. We sold it to the seed investors and by the time we spent six months actually building the actual product that was wasted. We should have taken that six months and actually gone and talked to the people we were convinced were our target customers to find out if they wanted it to begin with or if there was actually use for it. Because what was there was the idea that people were going to have a need for private cloud that didn't even exist at the time when we were actually launching that. So don't do the if you build it, they will come. We sold our very first launch customer. They signed the contract before we had our product. The first line of code committed on the product. Right. One thing I'd say though, asking them what they want and what they need only takes you so far. You have to watch them because I mean we again, we started down the path of saying how do we build and we had the vision of database of service in the beginning to say how do you scale up my SQL to service a very efficient, very address, you know, scalable database of service environment. Lots of people told us they wanted it. Lots of people said, hey, yeah, I need my SQL to scale better. I don't want to go to Mongo and replace strip and replace and whatever. When you actually get to the point of doing it, that's when it really matters. Right. You show them and they try and they, yeah, but it has to do everything. Get it in market. Get it in market. Figure out what the, and we thought of it as a minimal viable product. Right. How do you get something in their hands so they can experience it, not just tell you that they think the thing you told them because what you told them isn't what they heard. Right. What you tell them is not what they heard. They heard whatever it was they wanted.  What do you guys think about competition? I know a lot of entrepreneurs are kind of afraid of competition and so on, but in my own opinion, if there's two or three competitors doing almost exactly the same thing I'm doing, it actually can be a big benefit. You're competing with most of these guys, aren't you Simon? I think so. No, not at all. I'm actually a customer of Simon's, personally. And he came up to me at the booth and said, your network's too slow. It is. Exactly. Sorry. So to go back to the comment about going, talking to your customers or the people you think are your customers, you have to ask them what their problem is, not tell them what their solution is. You can't go to them with this thing because they're going to piece it together. They're seeing one side of the elephant. You're not there. You're seeing the whole thing. And the other thing you do is you ask them for money up front.  Who in here is an engineer? Who here negotiated their last job offer? That. No. About half. Was that about half? That was less than half. Less than half. That was way less than half. It's hard. Like, looking across the room at someone and saying, pay me is hard when you're an engineer. But that's the only way you're going to get people who are actually committed in the vision you are trying to build. And if you don't do that, it's going to be very hard to scale your business. So I want to save some time for questions because I'm sure people have some good questions. But before we do, I wanted to answer a very important question. If OpenStack today was a vegetable, what would it be and why? And you've got like 20 seconds. This is like fast. OK. Artichoke. And why? Oh, they're delicious. But they're hard to get into. Celery. It's tasteless. Fibrous. It's good for you. It's most. Nobody ever wants it. And they always want it as a vehicle for something that they actually want. Peanut butter. Or Nutella. Ken, do you have something? I'd say potato. Basic substance. OK. Basic what you need. Get going. Cool. Jesse. I'm going to go with asparagus. OK. Grilled, sauteed, fried. Just raw. Just raw. OK, raw asparagus. Cool. OK, so there's a mic here. Anyone want to get up and ask a question of this panel? Big opportunity here. Yeah. Just step up to the mic standing line and far away. And try and keep the questions like tight and focused. And we'll get through a bunch. So myself and some friends have been talking about, what is the importance of the idea versus the execution of the idea? And it kind of goes back to a little bit of what you're talking about of competition in the industry. Like can you iterate better on an idea that somebody already has and be successful at it? Or is it better to have a unique idea and be a forefront of the industry? Everybody has ideas. Like execution is everything. And going back to that competition point, I think getting into a space where there are no competitors probably means there's no business to be made there. So finding an area where there actually is competition that you know you can do it better than everybody else or approach it in a different way than everybody else, I think that's absolutely essential. Yeah, but there's a counterpoint to that, right? Which is if you're doing something and it's already obvious, it's going to be a little bit too late. I would say like there's a lot of sweat in trying to get even the funding grounds, because I felt like the investors we were talking to, it's like, no one's ready for object storage. No one's going to use that stuff. Well, we had that too. Sure, I'm sure you guys did, right?  Well, now we're like three years ahead of people who are starting out now, so that's also an advantage. But the counterpoint to that is Uber and Lyft, right? Uber is mostly like the unicorn side, but they're an obvious solution to an obvious problem, which is taxi cabs suck.  Ken, do you have any, who are your, do you have some competitors in your market right now? We are early, we don't have, no one else, we do have competitors that are in the database of the service. So again, how do you think about your competitors? It's a little bit of a problem though, not to have a competitor, right? Oh yeah, so there are competitors delivering database of the service platform in the market now. There are none on delivering it based on Trove. So this gets back to the, our value proposition is what you compete on, because that's what people care about. There are people that are delivering product that offer the same value proposition as us, slightly different, different feature set, different functionality, but not on Trove. So that's our, again, that's our go to market. We're targeting people specifically who are, are focused on OpenStack Clouds. Next question, yeah, good one. Hi, I've got a question regarding selling to Enterprise, specifically with regards to compliance, IT compliant.  Do you think it's important for a startup? And if it is, what state in your life cycle should you take that seriously? I would say, I'll answer that one. I think, because I'm from Australia, and you've got an accent, and yeah. But no, but it is actually, it's an important point, actually, it's a really important point that I think in, you know, in the US, because I've been here 15 years, but in Australia, it was all about certification and compliance and all this stuff. In the US, people just build great product, and then they figure that stuff out later. You know, and I know, look, if you are serving Enterprise, obviously being HIPAA compliant, if you could, you know, or ultimately being HIPAA compliant, but in my experience, selling to Enterprise, Ink Tank actually was like this, you might have found this with Joe with Swiftstack, is we would go in there and it's all about the utility of the software, it's about what you can do with it, and so on, and then, you know, we'll get there, if you need that certification, we'll get there. And a lot of these certifications also go well beyond the software. I mean, it's about your data center, it's about physical access, it's about all these other things. So I think if you spend six months, you know, in figuring out certification, you're kind of going, you're spending money in the wrong area. Yeah, I think that's the wrong customer at the very beginning. Right. So for us, we sort of approached it to find the bare minimum of certification that we could get that would allow us to object customers, and so for us that started out as the SSAE 16, because we're a data center provider, and that's now evolved into a couple of different standards. PCI. Yeah, PCI, but it's about, because you're exactly right. Most of those have nothing to do with the product at all, and it's around policies, policies and procedures and manuals, and ironically, the SSAE 16 policies are SAS 70 now, they're all retrospective, so you actually have to implement this stuff and then wait a year, and then you get tested on that year looking backwards, and so you can't even, you can't start with that to begin with, so sort of find the bare minimum and then work your way up into the enterprise requirements. And ideally, choose an industry or a space that doesn't require you to have the certifications before you go sell to these people.  I mean, the banks will do a lot of their own certifications for them, they're fine first customers to have. For the right use case. For the right use case, for the right use case, but in terms of like going public with external certifications, I mean, we're, so we're three and a half years in. The first one that we're really going after is like an MPAA transport one that we'll probably get to in six months from now, so just a data point for you. Next question, yeah. It's for everybody, everyone over there. What were your top three priorities when you were starting, and what are your top three priorities right now? And follow up question is like, have they changed, have they not changed? Why? Funding and team, probably the two, and then I think the one that, once you get going, it's really about execution and bringing it all together and operationalizing, that's what I would say. But funding and team.  If you've got the right team, if you can build the right stuff, you can find funding, right? I mean, I think one of the things we talked about, team product funding, you know, I'll take team team team, right? Because if you got the right team, you got people who are like-minded, you can deliver great stuff, the rest will come. Especially if they have very high credit limits on their credit cards and they can survive for a while. That you can. No, I mean, and they might marry you at some point. That's great. Revenue was a big priority for them. In B2B, revenue is a proof point that what you're doing is actually valuable to somebody with that. Once you have that team, the next thing you need from our perspective is revenue. If you're bootstrapping, if you're going for venture capital funding, getting revenue early is often detrimental to you. Yeah, I disagree with that, though. I mean, I think in a B2B business, I think in a B2C business where your metric is something else that's users or eyeballs or whatever it is, that's true. But in B2B, it is detrimental in that it gives you a history and a trajectory that you have to explain. It also limits you to the multiple on that revenue. Joe, do you have any on your investor? You know, I think team's important, particularly when you're doing fundraising. I mean, you don't really have anything. So when you go talk to investors, sell yourself, sell the team, because that's who they're going to be investing in. And I think the key thing is to take away is, I mean, there are 6,000 people at this event, right? I think this is one of the most vibrant communities. I'm not even software communities that I think I've ever been a part of. And so using the community here, and I know, look, people do move between different companies and sometimes that scene is a bad thing. I mean, we've had plenty of people who've gone over to other major companies in the ecosystem and so on. But I think if you take a sort of a bigger view on it, people are only going to move if it's sort of right for them, generally. For whatever reason, personal circumstance, something cool they want to work on and so on. So I think getting out, getting social, attending the events here, there's a lot of people that you find here. Look, and I certainly was leaning on lots of other folks what I was starting up, by no means was this stuff easy to figure out. And so I went to people who I respected and asked for their opinion and pulled them in early. So next question. I'm going to grab one more time. What are your top three mistakes? What are your top three mistakes from your study? Thank you. Why don't we just do one mistake? Yeah, so for me, it was team. Like, I had the wrong people. And it took me a while to get the right people. That's why he fired himself. And you know what I mean? You know what I mean? For me, I think our number one mistake was trying to write code before we went and talked and figured out what the problem was. Yeah, it's similar. I mean, we built what we thought people were asking for. It's a bad choice. Joe? I'd say we didn't focus in on specific use cases and specific verticals early enough. Next question. We've got a couple of minutes. So my question is that if you guys were to go and request seed funding again in hindsight, based on all the lessons that you have learned, what are the top three things that you will carry? So actually, I'll answer this real quick, because it's actually relevant between Ink Tank and Acanda. Both companies were sort of formed out of sort of dream host and dream host team members. In the case of Ink Tank, we actually put money in initially. And we did it as a convertible debt. So the reason was a very virtuous reason. We didn't want to value the company. Initially, we wanted someone to come in from the outside. But the problem was is that other investors then came in. And for whatever reason, there were various circumstances where they also put money in in the same form. And we ended up with this sort of debt overhang, as investors call it, that they didn't know what to do with. And even though the money was in the business and everything like that, so in the case of Acanda, we actually just did a $1.6 million seed round. And literally, we just valued the company.  We did it as a $3 million pre-money valuation and a $4.6 million post-money. So the company's notionally worth $4.6 million, which was attractive to investors. But really, I guess it's around certainty. Like you want to remove as many things as possible that create uncertainty or friction later on. Yeah, ideally, if you're going to do a seed round and you're doing it with a convertible note, try to put as many of them together so that they come in as the same group, the same closing. You don't want to have multiple closings because multiple closings can have different terms. And the different terms are really what gets you when you try to convert that at a named valuation or a named round. I would say find somebody you really like to work with as your first investor. Probably more important than valuation, structure of it. Just if you find somebody, a good board member, a good person to invest with. Good advisor. A good advisor. That is like the most important thing. Thank you. Our first seed investor is actually Jonathan, the executive director of the foundation. So unfortunately, we're out of time, 510. And I want to thank Jesse and Chris and Ken and Joe. You guys have been great. Really appreciate you being here and being candid and authentic. That's great. Awesome. Thank you.


Basically, well, first I want to mention, as Joan said, this is something we've been very proud at Roger Williams to be part of, particularly in the library of collaborating with Rogers Free, with on the Jane Bodell endowment as well as on the Mary Teph White speaking series endowment as well. So we've been able to pull that together to bring people such as Jennifer here today. I want to advertise that our next event at Roger Williams, speaking event will be the 16th of this month, so a week from Thursday. It will be a poetry by Vijay Sashrati. And if you haven't heard of him before, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2014, his book. He is really an incredible poet, incredible person, an incredible intellect. And as I keep saying to the students, even if you don't think you're interested in poetry, I think most people will be interested in being in the room with him for an hour and find that to be a good use of your time. Also for here on November 29th, Anne Hood and I will be reading here. So maybe we'll see some of you as well. So quickly, just want to give you a quick snapshot of Jennifer. Hey, Jennifer's published five novels and one collection of short stories. Her first book, Mrs. Kimball, which is how I first got to know Jennifer, was in 2003, and was a pen Hemingway, was a winner of the Pen Hemingway Award for first novel, a really interesting novel of three Mrs. Kimball's with one Mr. Kimball connecting them. Her most recent book, though, is Heat and Light, which is also from a writing standpoint interesting because Jennifer's second book was called Baker Towers, and the book Heat and Light Returns to the Town, where that book took place, this time exploring a Pennsylvania coal mining town and how the industry has affected the town and the relationship to it. And this book, Heat and Light, is last year best book by The Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, really a book that's earned a lot of praise and quite well worth the praise that it's deserved. Jennifer herself is from Pennsylvania, went to the Iowa Writers Workshop. She lives in Boston. And I think as long as I've been, so 15 years you said, so that's when I first met you, 15 years, and allegedly has a corgi. If Jennifer's a typical corgi owner can spend the next hour talking about the corgi before getting to the book. But at that, let me introduce Jennifer Hage in a letter. Thank you, Adam. So about my corgi, my corgi's name is Ginger. And she is four years old. And she is sort of the center of my universe. And I certainly can talk about this corgi for some time. But instead, I will talk to you about this new book, Heat and Light. This is a novel that was published in 2016. It is, as Adam told you, a return to the fictionalized coal mining town of Bakerton, Pennsylvania, which is very much modeled on the town where I grew up. In this new book, Bakerton is a coal mining town that has lost its industry 30 years back and has really not had a lot of good news in that time until the mid-2000s when suddenly gas companies, natural gas companies, descended upon the town, offering people money to lease their mineral rights for gas drilling. So this novel examines how the town is transformed when this happens. And I'll read from early in the book. The first truck comes in springtime, a brand new Dodge Ram with Texas plates. It trawls the township roads north of Bakerton, country lanes paved with red dog, pie crust roads that have never appeared on a map. The roads dip and weave for inscrutable reasons, disused mine trails, scarred and narrowed like the arteries of the very old. The driver, Bobby Frame, is as young as he looks, barely 30, a big husky kid who might have played high school football. Up and down the Dutch road, he is welcomed warmly at the Fettersons, the Nortens, the Kipplers, Marlis Beals.  He's asked at Friendly Acres, the Mackey Dairy Farm. No ma'am, just the opposite, Bobby says. At Cobb Krug's trailer, his first knock goes unanswered. When he knocks a second time, Cobb rolls to the door in his wheelchair, brandishing a shotgun. Bobby never returns. He bunks at the days in on Colonel Drake Highway, room 211, the windows east-facing for an early start. Mondays, he appears at the county courthouse as soon as it opens, clean shaven, hair damp from his shower. He has a way with the clerk, a middle-aged lady who mothers and flatters him. Bobby hands her a printed list and waits for her to bring the books, the official record of who owns what. His approach is always the same. Beautiful property you got here. This while removing his sunglasses, his eyes level blue and earnest in the morning glare. Except for Cobb Krug, folks listen as a matter of courtesy after he shows his business card and explains why he came. His explanation takes two minutes exactly. The shale lies a mile underground, has lain there since before there was a Pennsylvania, before a single human being walked the earth. Older than coal, older even than these mountains. It has an imperial name, the Marcellus. Deep in the bedrock of Saxon County, a sea of riches is waiting to be tapped. Natural gas? The words repeated with some hesitation, the first lesson in a foreign language. Vowels and consonants in odd permutations, awkward in the mouth. Those who know the local lore make immediate connections. There is a mountain spring, secret but famous, that bubbles for no reason. In the woods north of deer run at a spot called the Huffs, heady vapors seep through the rocks. The Huffs are popular for underage drinking. Teenagers pretend to, or perhaps really do, get high on the fumes. Buried treasure, says Bobby, feeling the poetry? The Marcellus shale is nature's safe deposit box. It's treasures locked away like insurance for the future. Now at last, American ingenuity has found the key. We drill a half mile down, then we turn a bit sideways. We can drill for miles like that right under your property. We're so far down you never know we're there. You wanna buy my land? The farmers ask, gobsmacked. As though Bobby has demanded a lung or a kidney, a piece of themselves God can't replace. Not buy, just lease it.  You get a bonus up front, 25. Later, 100, 500, 1,000. An acre, once we start drilling, you get a percent. Again and again the same response, what do I have to do? Reminding him always that they are farmers. Lives of servitude, unrelenting effort. There's nothing to do, he says with a grandson smile. Signed papers and wait for the check. Rural Pennsylvania doesn't fascinate the world, not generally, but cyclically, periodically, its innards are of interest. Borrit, Stripit, set it on fire, a burnt offering to the collective need.  Chester and Elias Baker through the first shovel bought up the farmland and hired the men, Poles, Italians, Hungarians, Croats, who came in large numbers by wagon or train. The men slept in camps and later company houses. Their wives washed black coveralls and had babies, bought groceries with company script. The babies grew up, worked, married, were drafted. The lucky ones came back to mine coal. Union wages meant fords and Chrysler's, split level houses. On Susquehanna Avenue shops opened. The new public high school had an Olympic-sized swimming pool. When the mines failed, the reverse happened, like a film run backward. Four sail signs dotted the avenues. One by one, the storefronts went dark. The miners too were extinguished, black lung or heart attacks or simple old age.  The children and grandchildren moved away, forgot everything, only the widows remain. They will, if asked, point out the old mine roads, the clearings where tipples once stood. Baker one, Baker four, Baker seven, Baker 12. This past holds no interest for Bobby Frame, though he owes his success to it. The distant memory of boom times, the ghost of prosperity that lingers in the town. Here, grand promises are met without skepticism. The landowners are churchgoers, people of faith. The agnostics, there are few, need only look to history. Bakerton has been favored before, tapped by industry's magic wand. He lives a nomads life, which is not for everyone. Four shale plays in six years. Barnett, Hainesville, Fayetteville, Marcellus. He's a star at the company, dark elephant energy. Twice a year they fly him back to Houston and turn him loose at a training seminar. This could be you someday, the new recruits are told and take notes. If he's made sacrifices along the way, girlfriends who sent him packing the college degree he didn't finish and now doesn't need. If he missed his high school reunion, family birthdays and holidays, weddings and funerals of people he loves. If regret can sing him without warning, as he lies awake listening to motel noises, distant televisions, the ice machine down the hall. If all these things so be it. In daylight, the phantoms dissipate. He appears at the courthouse at 830 promptly, his mind clear for the mission. Beautiful property you got here. The new recruits take notes. This Monday morning, a trainee shadows him. They roll along number nine road, an old mining trail that intersects with the Dutch road. They pass Jim Norton's pine forest. Carl Nugabauer's southern pasture sits at the top of the hill. Bobby signed both properties last week. With Kippler to the east that 600 acres altogether, he tells the trainee who guzzles coffee from a giant aluminum cup. Wow, wow, that's amazing. The kid studies the topo map spread across his lap and locates each property with his finger. Kippler, Norton and Nugabauer. Well, what's in between though? It's a big one, parcel 112. There is an awkward silence. That's Mackie, dairy farmers. They need some time to think it over. Bobby keeps his eyes on the road. Both times Mrs. Mackie saw him coming and met him on the front porch. He hasn't so far made it into the house. Quickly he changes the subject. Richard Devlin Jr. owns 60 acres. By all appearances, he's just sitting on it. Bobby drives slowly along the southern edge of the property. There is a newish suburban type ranch house, prefab from the looks of it. And behind it, a patch of neatly mown grass. Beyond my acres of deciduous forest, a creek in need of dredging, a sloping pasture overrun with kudzu. They pull into the gravel driveway. Up close, the house looks naked, not a shrub or a tree around it as though it dropped out of the sky. No porch, not even a sidewalk, just a single story cracker box wrapped in aluminum siding. Bobby knocks and waits. He hears voices inside, television noises. The door is opened by a young wife in a pink quilted bathrobe. Can I help you? She looks younger than Bobby, older than the trainee, but just barely. Blonde hair and a ponytail, glasses sliding down her nose. Ms. Devlin? Bobby introduces himself and the kid whom he calls my associate. Sorry to bother you so early. In fact, it's already 10 in the morning, the sun blazing overhead. Mrs. Devlin doesn't keep farmer's hours. She squints in the bright light. Oh, that's all right, come on in. The room is sparsely furnished and away Bobby has seen before the peculiar poverty of couples with young children. There is a couch, a giant television and not much else. In one corner sits a plastic laundry basket filled with plastic toys. Mrs. Devlin leads then into the kitchen, sunny and airless, smelling of breakfast. Toast crumbs on the counter, greasy dishes in the sink. At the table, a girl child, three or four years old, eats saltines off a plastic plate. I stayed home from school, she announces. Bobby sits beside her. Though it's already late August, the vinyl tablecloth is seasonal for Independence Day with a stars and stripes motif.  The child takes umbrage. I'm in kindergarten. She's small for her age. Is it just me or is it cold in here? Mrs. Devlin hugs the bathrobe around her. It's pleasant, says Bobby, already sweating through his shirt. Without asking, she pours them glasses of orange juice. Rich work to double, he should be back any time now. Where does he work? Bobby asks. Out the prison. Mrs. Devlin frowns as though wondering for the first time what these strangers are doing in her house. I thought you were friends of his. Her bathrobe is floor length, bulky as a down comforter. Beneath it, presumably she has a body. Bobby thinks of women in Arab countries draped head to toe in cloth. No ma'am though, I look forward to meeting him. Your neighbor, Carl Nugabour, thought Rich would be interested in doing some business. He launches into his pitch then, though it's a clear waste of effort. He'll have to rewind the whole thing when the husband gets home. When he finishes, Mrs. Devlin looks flabbergasted. On our land, are you sure? Beneath the robe, she could be anorexic or six months pregnant, a mermaid or a double amputee. Yes ma'am, the geologists have already mapped the whole area. We'd have to do some additional testing, of course. Find a best spot to drill. At last, he hears an engine in the distance, a scattering of gravel. A moment later, a screen door slams. Bobby gets to his feet just as Rich Devlin charges into the kitchen. He is Bobby's size, a big blonde man in a green uniform. His eyes go from Bobby to the trainee, to his wife in her bathrobe.  Beautiful property you got here, Bobby says. All right, so that's where the book begins. That is the moment where everything changes. As a novelist, I've always believed that a novel begins with the moment after which nothing will ever be the same. And that's how this book starts. This opportunity to drill for gas is a real game changer in this town. As I've indicated, it's a depressed area. It's a place that has lost all its industry, lost its whole reason for being. And for the past 30 years, its population has been dwindling, its tax base has virtually disappeared. So this is kind of a surprise third act for this town that was not expecting one. I came to this story sort of sideways, not because I had a particular interest in fracking or gas drilling, but because I have a long standing interest in this place, this landscape. As I've said, this town of Bakerton is very much modeled on the town where I grew up, a little coal mining town in Northern Appalachia that when I was growing up there was called Barnesboro. You know what? Really. So the story about Barnesboro is that after its mines started failing in the 80s, the town lost so much population that they really did not have enough income to cover basic services in the town. So in 2000, my hometown essentially voted itself out of existence. The town council voted to merge with the town next door. They gave it a whole new name. So now Barnesboro, Pennsylvania does not exist. You cannot find it on a map. The place where I grew up is now called Northern Cambria, Pennsylvania. It's simply the northernmost town in Cambria County. And the town, as I knew it as a child, has virtually disappeared. It is really a much diminished place. So as you can imagine, this new opportunity to drill for gas has seemed like mana from heaven to a lot of people in this town. Of course, it goes without saying that the technique of fracking that they use to extract the gas poses serious risks to the environment and the book really deals with those questions. This is a town that is really divided over this notion of whether or not to drill. There are people in the town who lease their mineral rights enthusiastically and feel it's the best thing that's ever happened to them. There are other people in town who refuse to lease their mineral rights. There are environmental activists who descend on the town, trying to convince people not to do this. So this really looks at the question of fracking from every possible vantage point. I should say that this is not a screed against fracking. I do have my own convictions about this, but that was not the reason I set out to write this book. It was simply to examine how this place changes when this happens. When I started researching this subject, this was a long and complicated book for me to write. It took about five years to research and write it. It doesn't sound like that long, but I gotta tell you, I have no life. So I'm not married, I don't have kids, I don't have a job. In those five years, I did absolutely nothing else but research and write about gas drilling. So it really did take over my life. For a lot of that time, I was doing interviews with people on all sides of this question. I talked to landowners who'd lease their rights, landowners who hadn't. I talked to people in the activist community who had very strong convictions that fracking was dangerous to the environment. I talked to geologists, I talked to industry people. And the more I learned about this subject, the more I understood that there were no villains in this story. That all the characters in this book believe they have good reasons for believing as they believe and doing as they do. So the writing of it was for me a real exercise in an extreme empathy. It forced me to see this question from the perspective of people who had very different convictions from my own. So it really was an educational process for me. I learned a lot about the issue and I learned a lot about the people who worked in the industry. So I'm happy to answer questions about that, about the research process, about the writing process of this book, questions about my earlier books, life as a writer, anything like that. They need to see things through their lens, through their eyes. And I really enjoy, because I'm definitely not a fracking person, I'm opposed. But I did get, as you mentioned, to see it from the point of view of people that were almost desperate for a salvation from their faith. And you can't blame them for taking, I mean, you can't use it. You know, that's part of why they do it. They may not like what happens afterwards. They take the course that they think they have to take. So I think, you know, you did kind of bring that to life with me as a reader and I didn't change my views on fracking, but I understand why people do what they do, as far as why they accept it. And that's a good thing. So you need some other people to do that. Thank you. Thank you for that. Yeah, yeah. I also, that it's part of the book club, and I enjoyed it very much. I have a question that at the end, I just felt like there's going to be a sequel. Because there would be so many people that were wondering what's going to happen with this person and that person. I don't know, you know, I've never written a sequel, but every time I write a book said in Bakerton, I swear to myself, this is the last time. Like, you know, I've said everything there is to say about this town. I'm done. I can move on to something else. But I've been wrong about that before. You know, when I published Baker Towers in 2005, I thought, okay, this is, I've done it. I've written the book about my hometown. All throughout my childhood, I'd grown up on these stories about what a great place it used to be, what a great place it was to live when the mines were booming. You know, my parents' childhood memories were really so different from my own experience growing up in that town. By the time I was in junior high, the mines were already failing. By the time I graduated high school, it was all over. So I had no memory of these glory days. I'd always had this urge to time travel back to when things were good there, just to see what it was like. And that was the impulse that led me to write that first, that first Bakerton book, Baker Towers, which opens in 1944 during the war when the mines are booming and goes into the Vietnam years right around the time I was born. So I was not drawing from my own memories at all. I was drawing from the memories of, you know, my parents and grandparents and older people in my family. And after I did that, I thought, okay, I did it. I didn't, you know, I time traveled back to the glory days. I'm done now. I can write books set in other places. And I did do that. I wrote a couple novels set in Boston where I live. And for a long time, I thought I was done with this little town. I thought, well, nothing else is ever going to happen there.  And it looked that way for a while, but then a few years after I published Baker Towers, I found myself thinking about those characters again, just as you say, and kind of wondering how did their lives turn out? So I wrote a short story about Joyce Novak, who's kind of the central character, the school teacher character in Baker Towers. And then I wrote a story about Joyce's brother, who was sort of a big question mark in that novel. And readers were always asking me whatever happened to Sandy Novak. So I wrote a couple stories about him. And before I knew it, I had a collection of 10 stories about people in this town of Bakerton. So I just backed into it. I had no intention of writing a short story collection, but they just accumulated over time. So then I thought, okay, now I've really done it. I've written all these stories about the aftermath of coal mining, how people manage, how they find a way to continue after the industry leaves. Then I thought, okay, now I'm really done. And then this fracking story came along. And it was just, it was too good a story not to write. So in every case, I thought I was finished. And then something else happens that leads me back to that town. So right now I feel like I'm done.  And I'm not to be trusted on that point. It's entirely possible I'll go back to this town. Yeah, okay, yeah, that's a great question. You know, I think writing fiction is a lot like being an actor, that you really do take on the identity of this person while you're writing him or her. So in the case of Heed and Light, you know, I think there are 15 point of view characters in this novel. It's got a large cast of characters. And I found that when I was writing from the point of view of the CEO of the gas company, I had to take his side. I had to see everything through his eyes. I had to see the world according to his values. Even though knowing that a month later, I would be writing from the point of view of the environmental activist who disagrees with him about everything. And so you kind of have to suspend judgment in order to write these characters. You have to take their side, at least for the time you're writing them. And I found myself doing that again and again in the writing of this book. As I interviewed people and doing research about fracking and I listened to people articulate why they believed what they believed about it, I found that I needed to create another character in each case to sort of fairly represent that person's point of view. So it's really, it is that exercise in empathy that I was talking about. It's just for the time when you're writing this character, that person is who you are. You adopt that identity. And you make common cause with that person. Even if this is a character who holds political views that you yourself don't hold or religious views that you yourself don't hold, you have to suspend all of that and just exercise loyalty to that character when you're writing that character. It's great fun really. It's a chance to steal more lives. I've heard actors talk about it that way and I think the same is true of writing fiction. We're all limited by the one precious life we get. And writing fiction and reading fiction is a way to steal more lives. It lets you experience vicariously lives that are nothing at all like yours. And I mean, that's part of the reason we read fiction to begin with. It really is the best technology we have for getting inside another person's skin. Yeah. In anticipation, Phil, you've got me awake for several nights, I have to say. I just finished meeting Mike this afternoon. But I was struck not only on your research and tracking, but there were so many other areas that I was learning about. Clearly there was drug addiction and prison guards like one child and one foster. I mean, can you talk a little bit more about the other areas in research? Yeah, absolutely. This was a hard book for me to get my hands around because when I started out writing about it, I really thought it was just a book about this fracking question. And as I went, my sense of what the book was kept changing. I did not at all set out to write a book about addiction, but in a large way, this book really is. And there are reasons for that. You know, in my part of Appalachia, addiction has been the only growth industry in the last 20 years. The central family in this book, The Devlin Family, is the prison guard you see in the excerpt that I read. A generation ago, this was a coal mining family. Rich Devlin's father was a coal miner who lost his job when he was in his 50s. So he went into business with his brother. They bought a tavern. His older son, Rich, is a correctional officer in a prison full of drug offenders. His younger son, Darren, is a recovering heroin addict who is now a counselor at a methadone clinic. So now you have a whole family that a generation ago would have been employed by the minds is now employed in the addictions business. And that mirrors the reality in these regions. That's what has happened. So the addiction piece of the story crept up on me. It was not something I set out to write about. It's something I just stumbled into. And that happened again and again with this book. Part of the reason this book has so many moving parts is that as I was researching it, I was monitoring very closely the developments in the news in New York state. And some of you probably remember this. You know, right around 2010, 2011, there was a very well-organized political movement in the state of New York that lobbied Governor Cuomo to place a moratorium on fracking. And they succeeded. That happened. So as long as Cuomo is the governor of New York, there will be no fracking in the state of New York. And I was watching this with keen interest and asking myself, well, why is it unfolding so differently in New York than it is in my home state of Pennsylvania? Why is that? New York and Pennsylvania are close neighbors, socially, economically, culturally, not all that different. Why is the story having such a very different trajectory in Pennsylvania? And the conclusion I came to is that unlike New York, Pennsylvania has always been an energy state. Most people don't know this, but the first oil well in the world was drilled in Western Pennsylvania. After that, we had 150 years of coal mining. We had deep mines. We had strip mines. We had the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster. So for 200 years, Pennsylvania has been on the front lines of energy and has benefited enormously from those industries and also at times paid a terrible price for them. And I think that people who are a product of this culture have a very different idea of what the land is for. That they view land as something to be used rather than something to be conserved. In my part of Pennsylvania, there has never been any prosperity at all except when the energy industries were doing well. So what has evolved there is this kind of binary thinking that people view it as a choice between living in a town that's kind of dirty but is prosperous and economically vibrant and has a job for everybody or a town that is destitute as it's been for the last 30 years, but perfectly clean. And so they see it as kind of either or. And that explains people's greater willingness to put up with a certain degree of environmental damage. There's just a higher threshold for it in Pennsylvania than there is in New York state. When I talk to people back home in Pennsylvania about fracking, I cannot tell you how many people said to me, well, you know, coal mining wasn't clean either. And of course that's true, I know that's true. I grew up there, I played in strip mines as a child. I know how not clean coal mining was. And so that's where the bar is. That is what people have been conditioned to tolerate. And they equate it with prosperity and economic security which has been unattainable for 30 years. Yeah, so that's how this book became this machine with many moving parts. There is a section of the book that deals with the accident at Three Mile Island in kind of exhaustive detail. I spent 10 months of my life learning about Three Mile Island, talking to people who had memories of Three Mile Island. I had childhood memories of that accident. And it was something that was so terrifying and so poorly understood, even adults didn't understand it. I always knew that I would write about that someday but I did not realize when I set out to write Heat and Light that this book was a big enough container that it also contained that. But really what I discovered is that this is a book about energy. It's a book about our relationship to energy. And all the various compromises we are willing to make in order to satisfy our need for energy. So, and that way it really is a book about addiction. It's another kind of addiction. Other questions? Yeah. You may have tremendously described the noise and then the, the, the air and the light. There's just so much description of how well constructed this for that angle that it has so much to do that it can't be on the side of it. You know, it's interesting to hear you say that. I have a college friend, a guy I went to school with who is, he is the president of the Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association. They're a lobbying trade group in Pennsylvania and they are great supporters of, of the gas industry and have welcomed the gas industry to Pennsylvania. And when he read the novel he was afraid that it was going to be an anti-fracking screen and he found it to be very, you know, that it's, it's sort of reinforced what he already believed. So it's interesting how different readers see different things in this book. I did not set out trying to change anybody's mind about everything. I simply tried to show as accurately as possible this is how it is. You know, do you want to know what it's like to have a drill rig 200 yards from your back door? This is how it is. Do you want to know what it's like to be one of these guys who's separated from his wife and children for six months at a time living basically in a work camp working 12-hour ships on a drill rig? This is what that's like. And so in every case, I just tried to show faithfully that's what this part of the story is like, draw your own conclusions. And, you know, a lot of people who care about the environment came away from the book really feeling like they, you know, they got this environmental message and that's certainly in there. It's really, you know, it depends on what you're reading for, I think. I think the thing is, there were no jobs. Well, this is an important point. Yeah, this is really significant. So part of the reason these communities in Pennsylvania have been so willing to accept gas drilling is that there is this fantasy that this is going to be like the coal mines coming back. That, you know, now once again, you know, our kids are going to be able to graduate with a high school diploma and get a good union job and support a family and send kids to college and have this kind of stable prosperity that the mines did bring. And that has not at all materialized. What has happened instead is that most of the best paying jobs have been taken by people who have been brought in from out of state because this is very, you know, this is very technology intensive work. It's, you can't hire somebody off the street to run a drill rig. It simply doesn't work that way. So the crews who are brought in to run the rigs, you know, they're entrusted with this gazillion dollar equipment and they're mainly guys who have worked on drill rigs in Louisiana, in Texas, in Oklahoma, in Arkansas. They are professionals. This is what they do. It's what they're trained for. So it has not brought these high paying jobs to local people. It's brought some jobs. You know, certainly there are a lot of truck driving jobs because this industry relies heavily on truck transport. To frack a well, you need one million gallons of water. Can you even imagine one million gallons of water? They're all brought in by tanker truck. Think of how many truck trips that is to frack one well. A well can be fracked 20, 25 times. So do the math. All that water that has to be brought in. Someone's driving those trucks. So those are the kinds of jobs that have been generated. They're not great jobs. They're jobs. But it has not fulfilled its promise to people in these communities. Yeah. Some of the storefronts to small businesses, do they come back and benefit from the large paying jobs from the people moving into the area?  Yeah. I mean, I think restaurants have done well. Hotels have done well because that's part of the problem. There isn't enough housing in these little towns to put up all these workers who are gonna come and stay for 12 or 18 months and then leave. They need to live somewhere. So there are certain kinds of businesses that, yes, have benefited. And there are jobs in those industries that have been generated. There are waitresses have been hired. Chambermaids at the days in have been hired. This is nobody's dream job, but yes, they are jobs. So it has brought some income to these towns. Certainly no question. But part of the problem is that these workers are temporary workers. So they're not paying taxes in the state of Pennsylvania. They're paying taxes to wherever they live in Texas or Oklahoma or Louisiana. So the town isn't benefiting in that way. Yeah, they run up some bar tabs for sure. And so there's some profit generated that way. But it's not what people thought it was going to be. Yeah. No, I don't, I don't. Actually, the ending of a novel always fills me with terror. I'm always afraid I'm gonna get it wrong because you've all had this experience as readers, right? Where you start reading a novel. The first chapter is terrifically engaging and you can really engrossed in this book. You love the characters.  You don't remember it as that book with the great opening chapter. You remember it as the book with the lousy ending. And so I always have this fear that I'm gonna write the book with the lousy ending. It's why writing the first draft is so anxiety-ridden for me because I'm just afraid I'm not gonna find the right ending. So it's, there's definitely some trial and error involved. You know, when I look at the endings of my novels, I don't know that I can see them as optimistic or pessimistic exactly. I just try to make them true. Just try to make them true. And I think if you're an optimistic reader, maybe you see the optimism more so. But I try to make them true. Yeah. I just wanna know what made the little girl. Okay, no spoilers. So ask me later. But not everybody has read the book. So I don't wanna give away anything much about the ending. But I will talk to you about that later. Anyone else? Yeah. What are you reading now? I'm just finished reading this book of short stories that I'm so excited about. The writer's name is Mariana Enriquez. She's an Argentinian writer. This is the first of her books to be translated into English. It's, but it's a beautiful translation. You don't have the sense you're reading stories in translation. There's stories set in contemporary Argentina. And they're pretty harrowing. They're pretty dark, but they're just gloriously written. So that's something I'm just finishing right now. You know, I have something started, but it takes a while for me to know if it's going to be viable. I once spent a full year on a novel and then just threw it away. And so I always have that fear that I, you know, you don't know the book is viable until you know. And sometimes you have to invest a lot of time on the front end before you know that. So I'm still in that stage where I don't know if this one is a keeper or not. But I do have something I'm messing around with. All right then. Oh, one more. Yeah.  Okay, yeah, I have, I know the answer to that question. So I don't know if anybody here has heard about this story, but in central Pennsylvania, there is a town called Centrelia. And there is, there is a coal mine there in which a fire has been burning underground since 1961. It's still burning. It is still burning. And there was a chapter in this, in this novel that dealt with Centrelia that I ultimately ended up taking out because it didn't further the story in the way it needed to. But I'm intensely interested in that story and I have a lot to say about it. And so maybe something more will, will happen with that chapter that I pulled out. I published it in a literary magazine called, Pangyrus, so it did, it did get a life, but it didn't make it into the book. All right then. Thank you everyone for coming out. I'm very happy to sign this.


please subscribe to this youtube channel mentor talk can do press bell button for notifications in 2020 i thought it would be a good idea for youngsters to know that while we speak of the world war one and world war two we must understand the ideology is at play at that time the Nazi Germany was under the tag of the fastest of the world and fascism we are all very familiar with you would know of the atrocities that came under fascism and there was a linkages to that to nationalism so that will be wrong to understand nationalism to be fascism they are totally to different concepts fascist is a state which doesn't take no for an answer and that in the same understanding you need to see that communist is also the same kind of state which doesn't take no for an answer now in world war the communist and the democratic nations fought together against the fascist nazi germany in 2020 are we looking at the communist party of china the ccp actually being the nazi germany of today while the ideologies of communism and while we have ignored the amount of atrocities that happen in the communist regime if you look back at the numbers the numbers of people directly dying from the atrocities of a communist regime are way more than a fascist germany but the atrocities of a fascist germany are so horrific and all children know of that and it is on us right now as a democratic world to fight from a rise of the same fascism in present day times so to give you a little bit of an idea about how i i say the communist is actually kind of like a fascist is because if you look at the full on dong spirituality aspect it has been totally curbed in china now these were spiritual people and there is a rumor and it is reportedly actually said also that their concentration camps being set up set up and that's where they're at and same for the muslims i don't know if i got the pronunciation right for that so when it comes to spirituality china is not your place to be at and that is why you will find this type of tippet the tippetians are very spiritual in the aspect we don't need to look further than the bilayama now when you look at china's fascist regimes you understand and communist fascist regime i move on to i want to say the very again the bri as well as the dsr so the belt and road initiative is an expansionist attitude the dsr was the digital silk road that they had as early as 2015 they decided on this no outlook is expansionist this is not a collective effort for anybody to do well together this is about taking over putting you in a debt trap this is about subterfuge of your democracies for whether it be on the digital platform or whether it be in your parliament or whether it be at your borders china is now looking at being the expansionist in our current day world and for a humanitarian aspect i think it will be the democracies of the worlds coming together to take on an expansionist communist china and that is why i asked the question again that is china the new nazi germany please subscribe to this youtube channel mentor talk and do press bell button for notifications


Hey, this is Brett and this 2021 Jeep Cherokee Latitude Luxe 80th Anniversary Edition is stock number 23J390A. I am here at Summit Automotive in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, near New and used Jeep and Jeep Cherokee headquarters. This 2021 Jeep Cherokee Latitude Luxe has the 3.2 liter V6 engine, puts out 271 horsepower, it's paired up with a nine speed automatic transmission. This Jeep has been fully safety and inspected by our service shop, has a fresh oil and filter change all the fluids have been checked and topped off per the state of Wisconsin inspection process and this Jeep is 100% ready to go. I'm going to go all the way around in this video inside, start it up, take a look under the hood, show you all the options and just give you the most accurate representation that I can of the vehicle. Slate blue metallic is the color, I shoot all my videos in 4K. If you like the video, consider subscribing to the YouTube channel, click the bell notifications, get updates on the videos I do each and every day as well as having access to one of the largest catalogs of vehicle and SUV walk arounds on YouTube almost 9,000 video actually over 9,000 videos and counting. This one comes with the 19 inch granite crystal painted alloy wheels part of that 80th anniversary edition and it has Bridgestone Duler HL tires, these are 23550R19s. I would say that they have probably about 60% of the tread left on them. Frame and underbody looks pretty good. This is one owner clean title history, clean car facts out of Wisconsin. Front fender is absolutely perfect, has the LED headlamps, running lights and fog lights. I'll turn all those on at the end of the video so you can see just how bright they are. I didn't see any dents, dings, scuffs or scrapes on the front bumper, that looks pretty good. You get these seven slotted grille with the granite crystal surrounds as well as the granite crystal Jeep lettering on the hood and that hood is in really nice condition as well. I didn't see any major dents or dings on there. Passenger side front fender is absolutely perfect and the passenger side front wheel, no major scuffs or scrapes on there. Slate blue, it's got just a little bit of metal flake in it, very fine metal flake but it does have just a little bit of sparkle to it. Good looking color, paint is in really nice shape and as you go down this side of this 2021 Jeep Cherokee, take note of how clean the body is, how reflective and mirror like that paint is. I take these HD videos so if you're far away or even if close by and you just cannot make the trip down but you're still interested in purchasing the vehicle, you can see the vehicle, hear the vehicle and have confidence in what you're looking at before you even get here so when you do get here there's absolutely no surprises and you can make a smart and informed buying decision from wherever you're at. Now if this video helps you make that buying decision, let your salesman know that you saw it and that it was helpful. Back wheels in excellent shape as well and the back tires have just as much tread as those front tires. This one does have the capitalist fuel fill which is a really nice feature, never get gas on your hands again. LED tail amps coming around to the back, rear bumpers in great shape, it does have the back of parking sensors, the chrome tipped dual rear exhaust, the towing package with the receiver hitch four pin and seven pin wiring and the rear gate is in excellent condition as well. Note that you get the granite crystal four by four and Jeep lettering back here. This is a power lift gate, back storage area is very clean and this one does come with a full size spare tire and jack tools. Those seats do fold down for extra storage and to get this gate down you press this button it'll beep at you three times and then begin its descent. So you can see that is working nicely and coming down the driver side just as clean as that passenger side no major dents or dings over here and for full disclosure this back wheel is in excellent condition as well, no scuffs or scrapes on that. Down the rest of the side of the vehicle doors look really good and I didn't see any dents or dings on there. Does have the heated power mirrors with the blind spot monitoring and built in directional signals has enter and go system so you just have the have the key fob in your pocket and it'll automatically unlock if you put your hand in there. Back seats are in fantastic condition you get the latch child safety system for any child car seats you may have. Seats are in really nice condition. They have cup holders back here as well.  Back here you get two usb's two usb c's in a 115 volt 150 watt plug-in. You get the berber floor mats with the 80th anniversary package side curtain airbags on the front seats. You also get the 80th tag on the seat side of the seats as well as the 80th anniversary tag. Child safety locks on the back doors and the inside and bottoms of the doors all look really good. Take a look at the front seats here. Latitude Lux gives you those full leather seats in the front no rips no tears very nice both these front seats are heated power driver seat get the 80th anniversary berber floor mats in the front auto headlamps power windows locks and mirrors hop inside check out the miles the radio and everything that this scv has to offer on the interior you get these seven inch lcd display there 23,736 miles on this vehicle the digital speedometer on that seven inch lcd display and a compass display as well you can change all those corners to read pretty much whatever you want has the heated leather wrap steering wheel cruise controls on the right bluetooth and information center controls on the left no major rips or tears on that wheel looks really good here is the 8.4 for c radio you do get am fm and serious xm radio capabilities you saw that you get your heated c's heated steering wheel controls and your backup camera is right there as well you get your climate controls including your dual climate controls and if you don't like doing the controls up there you got more tactile buttons and knobs down here as well then you get all your different apps this one has android auto and apple carplay capabilities where you can project your cell phone to the screen so while this one doesn't have the factory navigation system project your phone up there with ways or google maps and it's like you have nav right in the screen we did a demo on an eight four four c radio with android auto if you want to check that out that's in the upper right hand part of the screen to see how that system works um so that's pretty nice system this one doesn't have nav but you can project your phone up there that's just like it lane departure warning parking sensors down here like i said your more tactile volume tune and climate controls you get your select terrain for the four wheel drive system auto snores auto snow sport sand and mud keyless entry with remote start and power lift gate and you get an augs and a usb and a 12 volt power point nine speed automatic transmission with the optional or nine speed automatic transmission and then there is your electronic parking brake you also get an 80th anniversary badge on the dash right there and the passenger side format and seat are in excellent condition i don't think this vehicle has ever been smoked in smells very clean you get the second row fixed glass and the power sunroof in front home link buttons for your garage door security systems and lighting systems sunroof and sun shade controls and map lights and an auto dimming mirror all right let's start it up take a look under the hood go check out all those led lights as well starts right up no check engine lights or anything like that i would personally like to thank you for checking out the video today and hopefully from this hd video you've been able to verify the quality condition options and of course cleanliness of this cherokee all the way around inside out i think it is in fantastic condition you can see just how bright all those lights are and they are all working very nicely i've owned three cherokees in the past i've had the v6 and two of them love this engine very smooth plenty of power for this vehicle and once again this vehicle has been fully safety to an inspector by our service shop has a fresh oil and filter change all the fluids have been checked and topped off and this one is 100 ready to go there is the emission sticker shocks are doing a great job holding that put up and this one's all set i would highly recommend it from a quality and condition standpoint definitely a very nice vehicle like i said i've owned three cherokees whoever's going to get this one is going to be very very happy with the quality condition and options on it and to see more pictures of this jeep or one of other 550 new and used cars trucks scvs minivans wranglers half tons three quarter tons one tons cherokees grand cherokees renegades wagon ears grand wagon ears you name it we got it go to the website right there summitauto.com full pictures and descriptions of every single vehicle all at summitauto.com and if you'd like to check out more hd videos you can go to youtube.com slash summit auto click the bell notifications get updates on the videos i do each and every day as well as having access to one of the largest catalogs of vehicle walkarounds on youtube 9 000 videos and counting as well as staying current on our inventory that's ever changing and pretty big here at summit automotive fact in a second you'll see a link to subscribe to my youtube channel the upper left a link to all the Cherokee videos i've ever done in the upper right a link to this vehicle on our website in the lower left and a link to one of our latest youtube videos on the lower right click those check us out we're super excited to help you with this ultra clean 2021 jeep Cherokee latitude lux 80th anniversary in slate blue metallic thanks again for checking out the video remember to like subscribe and share on the youtube channel i really appreciate it thanks again


Twitter to ramp up censorship of misinformation about the Ukraine War. Twitter has published what it calls a crisis misinformation policy, announcing that it will be actively reducing the visibility of content found to be false, which pertains to situations of armed conflict, public health emergencies, and large-scale natural disasters. If you've been paying attention to the dramatic escalations in online censorship we've been seeing in 2022, it will not surprise you to learn that the Ukraine War is the first crisis to which this new censorship policy will be applied. Twitter says it won't amplify or recommend content found to violate its new policy, and will also attach warning labels to individual tweets and even hide offending content behind a warning label, and disable the retweet function on particularly naughty posts. The problem here is of course the question of how to impartially establish whether something is objectively false, without it turning into at best a flawed system guided by fallible human biases and perceptual filters, and at worst a powerful institution shutting down unauthorized speech. Twitter says it formed its new policy with input from unnamed global experts and human rights organizations, and will be reinforcing it with the help of conflict monitoring groups, humanitarian organizations, open source investigators, journalists, and more. This will come as no comfort to anyone who's familiar with the history of propaganda peddling that can be found in every single one of those respective categories. Twitter lists the following examples of the kind of content that will be found in violation of its crisis misinformation policy. False coverage or event reporting, or information that miscategorizes conditions on the ground as a conflict evolves. False allegations regarding use of force, incursions on territorial sovereignty, or around the use of weapons.atively false or misleading allegations of war crimes or mass atrocities against specific populations. False information regarding international community response, sanctions, defensive actions, or humanitarian operations. When Jack Dorsey resigned as Twitter CEO last November, I noted the warning signs we were seeing that his replacement, Parag Agraval, supported the use of measures which make unauthorized content much less visible than authorized content without eliminating the unauthorized content altogether. There's a lot of content out there, Agraval said in a 2020 interview. A lot of tweets out there. Not all of it gets attention. Some subset of it gets attention. And so increasingly our role is moving towards how we recommend content, and that sort of is a struggle that we're working through in terms of how we make sure these recommendations systems that we're building, how we direct people's attention, is leading to a healthy public conversation that is most participatory. This agenda to direct people's attention toward healthy public conversation by controlling how content is recommended to viewers, echoes the censorship by algorithm tactics we've been seeing employed by Facebook, Google, and by Google-owned YouTube. Google has been hiding dissident media in its search results for years, and in 2020 the CEO of Google's parent company, Alphabet, admitted to algorithmically throttling world socialist website. Last year the CEO of YouTube acknowledged that the platform uses algorithms to elevate authoritative sources while suppressing borderline content not considered authoritative. Facebook spokeswoman Laurence Vinson said in 2018 that if the platform's fact checkers, including the state-funded establishment narrative management firm Atlantic Council, rule that a Facebook user has been posting false news, moderators will quote, dramatically reduce the distribution of all their page-level or domain-level content on Facebook. Twitter has generally been the most reluctant of the major platforms to exercise censorship on behalf of the empire, which is what has made it a better source of ideas and information than any other major platform. But now we're seeing the most pernicious form of online censorship, censorship by manipulation of content visibility, take hold there as well. Censorship by visibility manipulation is the most destructive form of online censorship that exists because its consequences are both so much more far-reaching and so much less attention grabbing than the controversial act of banning users from platforms or removing their posts. It's a kind of censorship that people don't even know is happening, and it's happening all over the place. It is deeply disturbing that Silicon Valley mega-corporations have simply accepted that it is their job to help the U.S. win a propaganda war against Russia, and how everyone's just going along with that like it's fine and normal. Our ability to share ideas and information on the platforms where most people congregate is being increasingly restricted, not on the basis of whether a speech is harmful or even whether it is true, but on the basis of whether it helps or hinders the U.S. propaganda operation against Russia. Silicon Valley censorship with the Ukraine war is an unprecedented escalation because they are not pretending to be doing it to protect people from a virus or to safeguard elections or defend the public good in any way. It's literally just, well we can't have people thinking wrong thoughts about a war, without even really explaining why that's important in any coherent and sensical fashion. There's no longer any pretense that the internet is being censored to protect the public interest. It's just open censorship of information about a war, solely because they take it as a given that it's their job to control the things people think and say about that war. They're coming right out and saying yes, we are the platforms you come to in order to share ideas and information with your fellow humans, and yes, we are agents of the U.S. Empire. This is a dramatic escalation. All this public hand-ringing about misinformation and disinformation is itself disinformation. They're not worried about the spread of disinformation. They're worried about the spread of information. Your rulers are not concerned that you'll start learning false things about COVID or the war in Ukraine. They are worried you'll start learning true things about your rulers. That's what all this fuss is really about. They are locking down our minds and sanitizing our information ecosystem for the protection of the Empire. I will keep saying this and saying this for as long as I am able. We've got to wake up and stop these bastards before it's too late.