Welcome to this panel and thank you for coming. You know, every day in the news we read about challenges to the economic environment and to business. Globally it's the fourth industrial revolution and the challenges that it brings to the way that we do business, the business practices, and about robots taking over human jobs, about technology disrupting the way that companies operate, disrupting markets, disrupting industries and sectors. But also in the region we hear about conflicts in a number of major countries in the region. We hear about transformation, destabilized systems that are probably on the way to stability, but we have to live through a period of instability until then. Certainly a lot of chaos in certain regions and a lot of opportunities in others. And together with that we find all the traditional, conventional, acute crises that we've been living in the Arab world from political issues to governance issues and to the youth bulge which has continued to be a bulge for a very long while and we haven't yet realized the potential of that. So in the light of all of that we still need to sustain business and to grow it. And to discuss these ideas and what kind of leadership we need to lead business into the future, we have actually a stellar group of panelists. I'll start with Paul Rogers, the managing director of Bain for the Middle East region and Turkey, and he was managing their global practice for a very long while too. We also have Najla Mitfa, who's an entrepreneur, started a company called Khairat to build capacity in Emirati entrepreneurs but also equally importantly she is building the ecosystem of entrepreneurship in Sharjah through Shira. We also have Yadil Qassar, a computer science PhD who's running the internet, the rocket internet group of companies in the Middle East. Rocket internet is for you that are not familiar with it, it's a company that builds internet companies. And we also have Fahder Rashid who is the group CEO of the King Abdullah Economic City in Saudi Arabia and the founding chairman of the Red Sea Foundation which is an NGO that's developing the economic relations within the Red Sea Basin. So with all these questions and myself, I'm Abdul Salam Haikal, I run the Haikal Group which includes businesses in media and technology. And one of our publications in media, the Harvard Business Review is responsible for co-designing this panel, the Arabic edition of Harvard Business Review. So I'll go to Paul with the first question. So challenges inside, challenges outside, regional, things that apply globally and we still need business. When you meet with your clients, governments, business, do you see the sort of leadership that is needed to lead business into the future? Okay, well thank you and good afternoon. So the short answer is I'm very optimistic. I've been in the region for two years and I do see a lot of leadership facing into issues. But the question beyond that and I think the question of the session is what leadership is needed in the future in the region. And I think it's definitely true that the more challenging and turbulent the times, the more leadership is necessary and valuable, leaders really do set the toe. If we think about what characterizes great leadership, there's much been written on this. I'm going to try and condense this down into a few sentences, but vision and values, it never goes out of fashion. It's a cliche I know, but the ability to set direction but also set a behavioral tone that people can use to regulate their own behavior. There's some very interesting research I saw recently about what followers look for in a leader and they look for two things based on this research, which is competence and empathy. And I think if we think about the challenges in the region and in the world more generally, and we think about the next 10 or 20 years, that won't be any different. People will still look for competence and empathy, but what it takes to be competent and the kind of empathy, that's going to be different. And competence really is about driving to good decisions and driving to action around those decisions. But in a data-rich age, big data, social media, the ability to use that information constructively to improve the quality of decisions and manage to tune out the noise and the fake news, that's going to be a really important quality in a leader. The ability to have the judgment as to when to stay the course with everything that's going on and when to adapt, that's going to be huge. And then when it comes to empathy, that is about listening and connecting at a human level, but increasingly it's about inspiring the next generation, the millennials. And it's about not necessarily commanding in the way that leaders of the past perhaps did, but actually helping, it's more coaching than controlling. It's more helping people find the answers in themselves rather than finding them for them. And my last point is some things don't change and I think the capacity for self-reflection in an uncertain world is a really important characteristic of a leader. And I think it was Socrates that said those that want to govern others must first learn how to govern themselves. And I think that that's just going to be as true in the next 10 or 20 years as it ever has been. So yes, I see many of those qualities. I don't, for a moment, I mean, there are some very big challenges. Success is not guaranteed, I wouldn't say. But I'm personally quite optimistic about what I observe in the leadership that I get the privilege of working with in terms of the willingness to face the issues and demonstrate some of these qualities. Excellent. So I'm going to come back to you on a couple points that you mentioned. But before that, I'd like to build on another point you mentioned, which is the quality of the qualities that followers look for in a leader. And I want to ask Nizla because she works with young people and she works with millennials. And a lot of people actually don't know what millennials want. So what do millennials look for in a leader? Yeah, I should start that by saying I'm definitely not a millennial, but I'm happy to echo the thoughts of millennials. I interact with them on a daily basis. But before I start, let me take a step back and talk a little bit about Shara'a. It's really a proud moment for us to be here at WEF because two years ago, Sheikh Abdul Qasmi, who is also a participant here at WEF, was taking part in the WEF MENA Forum and was on a panel called the Youth Dividend. And she talked about the need to build a platform to support youth and to encourage them in their ventures. And two years later, here we are, that platform now exists. It ended up being called Shara'a Charger Entrepreneurship Center. And more interestingly, we actually have our first cohort of graduates of young entrepreneurs that have graduated from Shara'a. And we've brought two of them with us to WEF. And one of them is in the room here, who is Hashim al-Zaabi. So it's a really proud moment. And in our efforts to build Shara'a, we obviously were based at the American University of Sharjah. So we're based in the heart of a campus. And so we really get a chance to kind of keep our finger on the pulse of what millennials are looking for and what they're talking about. And based on what I've seen and what millennials are looking for in terms of leadership, in terms of learning, is firstly, yes, I agree, empathy. So I think that's definitely something that they are looking for in terms of people that relate to them, are willing to communicate with them. They've gone away. So when I think back to my time, when I graduated many years ago, the first thing I was looking for when I was looking for a job was to be associated with a big brand name. You know, my first job was actually at PWC. And that's really what I was looking for. Things have changed so much since then. They're no longer in being associated with a big brand name. They want to be associated with people. They want to be associated with impact. They want to be associated with organizations, irrespective of size, that will encourage them to learn and to grow. And so that's what we've seen with the millennials. And I completely agree with Paul's statement that one of the most important aspects of leadership is vision and values. And these are some of the values that we aspire to embody at Sharjah. Because if we are talking about supporting the millennials and supporting youth in their own ventures, then we need to embody those values as well. And so I think we can always take some thoughts from Hashem. He's sitting in the audience. But certainly what we aspire to do is to really allow our programs, our curriculum to be student-led, to be youth-led, rather than us telling them, this is what you need to do. This is what you need to learn. We actually want to hear from them what they want to learn. We give them a sense of agency in that sense. And more importantly, we're open to learning from them. I mean, everything I know about blockchain I've learned from Hashem, you know? So again, we have to have this open dialogue constantly with the youth rather than speaking at them. In fact, I always say that youth need to be part of these discussions and on the panel with us. But these are a few of the thoughts that I have noticed from my interaction with the youth. Excellent. Now we can give actually the floor to Hashem and Noah, if they want to say something. It's going to be an interactive session. So thank you. Thank you, Najla. I'm going to move to Fahad and I'm going to ask you, you're actually building a new city. How does that feel, first of all? Push-ups. Good. Good. And you're good at push-ups. So my question to you is that when we talk about vision and values and all the challenges the region is facing, the world is facing, de-globalization, the rethinking capitalism, and so on. And you're someone that started a foundation that could create opportunities across the sea from you and also within the basin of the Red Sea. Is the business of business only business or is there a non-business side of business?  First of all, because this is something I'm super passionate about. And second of all, and truly, I don't know the answer to it. Because I was trained as a capitalist in two business schools in the U.S. And what you're supposed to do as a business is actually focus on creating shareholder value. And that notion is being challenged by two currents, if you will. There's one current, I think it's an article actually published at the HBR, about whether the agent owner theory actually, you know, the theory says that the manager is an agent of the owner and therefore they should be maximizing the owner's value in the company, right? And so the question whether a public shareholder today that owns a share with you is an actual owner. What does this mean? The theory basically espouses the idea that the owner is unified, so they all have one objective. Second, that they are long-term investors. So they are really thinking about the long-term. And this drives this idea whether companies should be investing for the long-term and projects that might or might not work or should be cash cows. Basically pay out what you can now. And thirdly, that the owners that carry a share have a legal liability, which they don't. It's actually the board representing the owners and the manager that have legal liability. So the idea was sparked by this challenge. The second is what Paul Paulman is doing at Unilever saying that their business should not only be socially responsible but should be socially proactive in solving societal problems. And so when I go to my job and we invest in education, because I think that in a city you have to have great education. So we subsidize education at the K through 12. We create scholarships at our Mohammed bin Salman Business School. When it comes to the arts and culture we sponsor all of these events. Sustainability, women empowerment question is how much of my time and my resources should go to things that are socially important? And how much of it is, oh this is Fahad's next pet project. He just loves this so we do it. You know, what is the right formula benchmark for us in the corporate world to take on as responsible leaders? And how much it is for us not to do because it is not our role as business leaders to lead that. It's a question that I hope we would debate today so I don't have an answer for that. Excellent, excellent. So before I move to Ead, I want to ask Paul a question. I think you wrote one of a timeless article for HBR 10 or 11 years ago. The title was Who Has the D? And I remember the opening paragraph and it says regardless of how well you know who you are, how well you know the product, regardless of the sector and how smart your strategy is, if you don't make the right decisions then your company is going to die. Do you think we're making the right decisions?  So the article is Who Has the D? Who has the authority to make the decision? So it's really hard to answer the question you asked about are we making the right decisions because obviously some are and some aren't the answer. If I can bring it back to the qualities of leadership, I think it's a really important question you're asking because it's very easy and perhaps I did this earlier to get lost in sort of abstract notions of leadership. And ultimately it does boil down to making good decisions and making them happen, right? The best leaders get things done and it's really how, as I said before, if you think about the complexities of the world and the region and the next sort of 20 years as opposed to the last 20 years which were already complex enough, it's this ability to synthesize lots of data into on average high quality decisions, the right decisions, but it's also ability to mobilize millennials to get things done which requires a different style of leadership to what we've seen in the past and again at the risk of oversimplifying it's a move away from command and control to a more empowered style. So I think the centrality of a definition of a good leader kind of by definition is that for the decisions that really matter they get made right and they get well executed. That's timeless but what it takes to make good decisions in tomorrow's world and to get them executed in tomorrow's world is a very different proposition from what it was in the past. So you've built digital businesses here in e-commerce digital services and there's a newly found drive in the region that even conventional business should become digital. So is it possible actually to change the DNA of a company or do you have to start with a fresh DNA as digital? So I believe you can't change companies, you can't change people. I think leadership or change is not coming by convincing people about ideas.  There is this very well-known science researcher, Kuhn, which basically said like no scientific breakthrough ever happened by the young scientists convincing the old scientists that this is a good idea. When the relativity theory came, Einstein was I think 25 years old, very young and all the old physicians said, this is bullshit.  He didn't convince them. They died away because they were old guys. I think in the Arab world this is even more important. We should wait until all these old guys die away, I hope nobody's here. Don't waste your time with convincing. Do this thing, so I think that's a learning. We came to the Middle East seven years ago, six years ago. We said like e-commerce, it's great, we know in America it works. We were super enthusiastic young guys who didn't understand anything and we went to the big groups here and they said, no, we have malls. People never buy online, they have malls. Like guys, online is the next big thing. It's much easier, it's much better. They said, yeah, maybe it's a channel for us later to make some marketing. Now they are being killed away. They are dying. The big groups are dying. Big retail groups are dying and they are moving like crazy into because they think this is the last chance they can get into digital. So my advice and my learning is don't waste your time with old people. Don't waste your time with convincing, you're not old. You can find old, what is old? That's a good question. I think old means people who have grown up in a certain system and a certain thinking, that is very hard to change. Relativity theory, I think a good example again. These people were very smart, like the physicians of this time were very smart physicians, mathematicians in Germany and so on.  It was obvious that it's actually the right thing to do. But they grew up over 40, 50 years in this kind of system of thinking and they were there and they were stuck there. So I think that's not only true for business, I think that's true for politics in the same way, especially in this region. It's really about what you have to do is you have to do it better. At the end, success will show it to you. It's not like, again, don't wait. You are 22, 23, 24. Honestly, everybody will tell you in these kind of forums, you will learn so much and there are tutors and mentors and this and that. It's all to press you into structure to do exactly the same as people were doing before. You have to change and there is no time in history of mankind where you have so much means, so much power as today. I give you an example. YouTube, yeah. Three guys founded the company. They build a TV station which is reaching billions of people around the globe and they didn't invest into a single satellite or cable or anything. Everything is there. You can be sitting in your home in Dubai, in Riyadh, in Jeddah, in Basra, in Baghdad and you can control thousands of servers. You can control an infrastructure that is billion worth. You can build a company that is reaching billions of people and giving services to it and you are like an 18-year-old guy who just learned how to code and do a program. This was never in the history of mankind. This is so much power, so don't believe all the people who tell you you need to meet and network and all this stuff. You have to do it. I think we have all the power and we have to change the other people. Wait until they die. Don't wait. Just do it. I like your provocation. It's kind of a sweet spot for you because you are the disruptor today. Do you have a vision of a time where you could be disrupted? How are you going to try and avoid that? Yes, when I get old. I think what we also learn in the digital business, it's always good to have small units. Why is Amazon not Walmart? Why didn't Walmart become the Amazon? Because they had the retail and all this stuff. Why are all these new companies not like extension of old companies? It's not GE who did Facebook. It's not like the big media companies who did the internet companies. The reason for that is because if you're young, you have less to lose, so you start more aggressively. Usually big organizations, there's a lot of politics in. There's a lot of competition in terms of what is my area and the areas of others. It's not because they are bad, they are big companies. They don't go into disruptives. They don't disrupt, but they already have something that is generating money for them. That is good for them. It's like politicians. If I'm a ruler of a country, I'm already a ruler of a country. I don't need to prove to anybody. I have to maintain what I have. The disruptive guys don't have to maintain. They have nothing to lose. They have to gain something. There's always a risk. If you build an organization without having site organizations, where you can get people who have nothing to lose and can build competitive disruptive ideas. Very interesting. This is the post-oil era. That's big news for a country like Saudi Arabia. And, gladly, you have the very bold and visionary vision 2030. What do you think the shifts that are needed, not only in Saudi Arabia, but probably in the region, and I know that you have your footprint in a lot of places, what are the shifts that are necessary to happen as the vision 2030 and the likes in other countries in the region start to take hold? The shifts in leadership, and how you implement these strategies? I think we have, and it's very well documented, many challenges in the region, but ultimately you have three actors that can do it. It's either government, non-for-profit, or for-profit. If we take the government of Saudi Arabia as having figured it out with vision 2030, I believe in the vision, although we might agree or disagree on the tactics, but most of us agree with the direction, I would say that the biggest challenge to it is actually private sector embrace of this vision and actually participating in a true way, and moving from a renter economy, because they are mostly renter companies, to companies that actually invest in the country's future. And Ghassan Kipsi and I were on the panel yesterday, he used this word existential, which I really like, I've been using it all day. I actually think the challenges that we are facing in the region on employment are existential, and unless the private sector participates and doesn't say, this is just a job of government and we have nothing to do with it, we will be disrupted as a private sector and what we're building would not work. And I see unfortunately a lot of despair, a lot of the hoping that things will go back to the high oil prices, 10 million barrels that are being pumped, the government will go back and procure contracts. Again, we've built everything already. We have way too many universities, way too many stadiums, too much railway. It is time for the private sector to take on economic development and address some of the challenges that we have in the economy. Excellent. So I'm going to ask Nestle one last question and then we're going to move to the audience and open the floor. So Nestle, I chaired a meeting, a new initiative for university presidents this morning and one made, I think, a very, very remark that they always wanted to be the harvests, the MITs. This is the vision that they had and Dr. Koshak is here and he was in the meeting and someone said, I think he's also here, Kareem said it's the age of having global aspirations but you need to act locally and you need to be really entrenched in the local culture and understand the nuances and deliver to the needs that these nuances create. So you're entrepreneurs and this is a syndrome that I see across the Arab world is that we want to be the next unicorn, we want to be the next billion-dollar company and we want to have, we need to scale up to reach continents and so on. What do entrepreneurs that come to start in Shira'a want to do? Do they want to do conventional business, digital? Do they want to start local? What do you see in that space? So we see a good mix. So if I take the first cohort that graduated from Shira'a, there were 10 teams. The average age in the first cohort was about 25 years old and 70% of the businesses were tech-enabled businesses. 30% were, I would say, either social enterprises or more classic SMEs. And again, we don't want to disencourage people who do come up with the more conventional ideas. They can still become sustainable businesses that not only employ themselves but also create jobs for others, nothing wrong with that. But one of the things that I think I can say across the board for the region, actually, not just Charger or the UAE, is that I still think that ambition isn't quite there. I mean, I was in Silicon Valley a couple of weeks ago. And I think the one thing I felt over there is a sense of anything is possible. And I think that's still missing in the region. They are trying, but even the ideas are kind of limited in scope. Perhaps they're thinking towards the UAE's borders may be regional, but they're rarely thinking about coming up with ideas that can be world-changing or that can be exported to the world. And I think this is something that we really need to change. And I think it's starting to change. So now that we have examples like Souq.com, like Kereem, and so on, we actually have role models. So rather than us having to point to Mark Zuckerberg in Facebook and say, look, he did it, we actually have regional examples that we can point to and invite to speak to the students. So I think across the board in general, I would say the majority are leaning towards tech businesses. Some are leaning towards conventional businesses. Like I said, nothing wrong with that, but I still think we need to raise our ambitions in general and encourage them to dream bigger. And I think that's the role of a place like Shiraah. Aside from, yes, fine, we give them the skills that are necessary, access to a little bit of finance. But primarily, it's that ability to hope and to really dream big is the role that we play. And I think sometimes, and it's perhaps a sensitive point for me to bring this up if you're telling me that people from universities are in the room, but I do think that sometimes universities kill those ambitions. I think the education system really needs to change. It's something that I've always believed academically speaking, but now that I'm in the middle of a university and I see it for myself, the system is broken. It just needs to change completely. So I often say that if you give me these students, when they're coming into university, and I take them straight into Shiraah rather than down there, the course that they've chosen, I can guarantee you a better outcome in one year rather than the four-year courses that they're doing. So I do think there's a lot of room for change. Very satisfied. I think actually if by the time you're 18, most of our Arab youth don't know where they are, what they want to do, that's okay in general. But the problem is there's nowhere to go. So if you cannot carry your own self at 18, knowing how to get yourself into university or to go to vocational training or knowing what you want and helping yourself, the education system has already failed you, in my opinion. And I think that in the Arab world as leaders, we don't take responsibility. What if we decided, each one of us here, that given all the opportunities that we've had that we're going to help 10 other people in some meaningful way from mentoring to scholarships to training on the job, I think we will have a much different world if we all do that, especially in the Arab world. So I'll go back to the panel and ask them later on who's connecting the dots between tactical strategies to make some quick wins and some of the generational transformations that are happening. For example, empowering through education, empowering through creating an approach of the ecosystem. So I'll let you think about this for a while and having the right leadership there, connecting the dots in businesses, in the nonprofit sector and in government is essential actually to help us move into the future. Meanwhile, I'm going to open the floor to the audience for questions or quick comments. Dr. Nabil, please introduce yourself. Nabil Koshak, the Dean of Prince Mohammed bin Salman, New College in partnership with Babson. I like the comment about old and I think the right word from my perspective is outdated and resistance to update. And that's resistant to update and co-op with transformations happening in industry and digital transformation, whatever, especially educational systems are in the resistance mode. So it's classified all the unable to update. That's the case that's happening. And I think the leading universities, despite the ranking system that I don't agree with worldwide and universities that taking universities into more factory of papers, I would say, certificates or publications that is highly cited but now impact, and we talked in the morning among the panel that the need for developing actually through the World Economic Forum a framework to measure the performance and sorry, to measure the impact, the economic impact and the social growth of a university. That framework or index is not there in the market and I think that will help universities to get updated to the changes and the transformations happening everywhere else except education. I know this is not a question, it's a comment, it's a great comment actually but if there is any reaction to Dr. Nabil's comment from the panel. Good, so we'll... I think universities traditionally see themselves as the creators and disseminators of knowledge, right? So they see themselves as playing a role in research and role in teaching and they need to take on that third mission of social and economic development and I completely agree with what the gentleman is saying. Other questions, comments? Please, please introduce yourself. Cyril Faben and company, how would you describe a great leader in rocket ventures or in the digital age? I can give you an example, we have great leaders in our company so we have one of very successful leaders, Namshi. I hired a guy who was like 22 when he started. Like, basically he didn't understand anything about the world, less even about the Middle East. He studied in Berkeley I think, he is of Arab descendants so he came to Dubai and worked there and he turned out to be a great entrepreneur and why he was great is I tell you very simply because he didn't believe in anything he was told about the market before like trying it himself. So good leaders are somehow people don't take conventional wisdom as given especially in a new market and they go and take the risk to try something out new and he did it and he did it by himself. So what we look always for is people who are hands-on, who are not like I tell you honestly we hire a lot with MBAs from top universities like we have like an Howard MBA and so on. But we just do this because it's some kind of filtering that happened, right? So because they did a lot of interviews and we don't have to do all these interviews again. We don't hire them because they learned whatever they learned in Howard or wherever. And I think that's also a question on the education part. I mean for me as an entrepreneur I interviewed thousands of people, I hired hundreds of them. The important part was really never like what they learned there, right? It's for me like some kind of filtering that I get for free albeit McKinsey or BCG or whatever and then it depends on the people how hands-on they are and a lot in this region in Europe and so on. They take it as like okay I have this brand and now the world has to serve me.  We build a company in Tehran. Tehran is as you know not probably, I mean it's not New York or Berlin and the founders there like they came from investment banking and so on and when they landed they had to sit there building a taxi company for example two weeks on the street driving taxi all day to learn what the taxi drivers want and what they don't want. Again when we started there everybody was telling us ah nobody needs this service because everybody you can hail a cab very easily. Now we are doing hundreds of thousands of rides a day dominating, changing the entire logistics infrastructure of the country and these guys really learned it from scratch and they didn't believe in this conventional wisdom and did it themselves. It's interesting I just thought about this today that Bill Gates, the three companies that we think of today as the new economy whether it's Microsoft, Apple or Facebook, their founders are dropouts. Yet they are most rigorous from a human resource perspective and hiring the MBAs of the graduates of the top universities. So it's interesting as a founder and as an organization how you look for different levels of leadership and talent and that it is not what you think at first. Yeah, should we all drop out and go for it for Microsoft? I don't think that's going to happen. Well said. Please, gentlemen fourth row, fifth row. Yes, I'm Malcolm from QNED. I have a question about, now let's say the old people still willing one to embrace change but we know that it's difficult to change DNA in the company's decision making they still want to do it. Now is there a chance for the disruptor and the traditional being disrupted people to work together if the willingness on the top is there? It's just like you have the dropouts who actually hire actually the people graduate so they find a way to collaborate so can you think that's possible the disruptor working, the whole panel? Should I answer that? I mean I can speak for the rest of no problem. No, I think they, look I am not 40 yet. I'm going to be 40 in two months but by any definition I'm not on social media I just got literally, sorry to understand how Twitter works and so am I old or young or I don't know and I think and going back to my earlier discussion on investing in the future if we were to move what we do now digitally completely there's a lot of risk in going there. Now it's obvious that you should do it but three years, four years ago it wasn't obvious so are you as a leader able to listen to views that are different and to accept a data-driven solution as part of what you do? And then are you Meritrat? Meritrat, tick? I'm learning English as we speak so I think this is all you could do, right? Are you open to ideas and opposite views and do you judge people based on their performance and that's it, it's really simple and if you do that I think you'll be successful. So I want actually to ask Paul a question and it is my intention to ask it to a non-Arab because it's about politics a bit. So how do you account for political risk in all the equations? So the quality is for leading a business in Germany with all the disruption that is happening in the world technology and so on and so forth. Is it different from the qualities needed for someone that is based here? I mean I just mentioned they operate a company in Tehran and you operate here under 21 probably or more jurisdiction if you want to address the Arab market if you want to address Turkey and Iran then you add too and probably a lot of businesses operate out of a convenience base that is Dubai or elsewhere and few markets in the Arab world are easy to do business and at the same time they're good markets. Yeah so I think it's really important to understand your customer and the market you're operating in and that means the politics, the regulation, the culture, it's not just politics and so yes of course if you don't understand that and I guess that's what you're saying when an entrepreneur or a leader needs to get out onto the street that's the reason they need to understand how it really is rather than how they might think it is from some academic analysis. So yes it's different on the ground in Tehran to in Berlin and you better take account of that when you're designing whatever it is, your taxi company. You know behind that is the same what you were just saying openness to listen and to learn rather than to apply some predetermined recipe and behind that is the same drive and determination and desire to make things happen.  Thank you. Hummood. Hummood, editor-in-chief of Harvard Business Review Arabia. Actually my question to the panelists about the controversial debate going on when we compare between the base of entrepreneurial thinking, endeavours, ventures comparing to governments readiness with regulations to embrace those disruptive ideas and ventures. All of the things we are noticing that entrepreneurial thinking are ahead of government to embrace, to build the infrastructure and the ecosystem for it. So how do you deal in your NGOs, organisations with this challenge? In some cases we see entrepreneurs as like rebels or considered as illegal people until they improve themselves later on with the regulations. So can I just like answer in this way? I think like actually it's a good situation here. If you look even into Germany for example you have tons of regulations, there's no Uber now and it's regulated out and when you start something because there is already so much rules so much infrastructure, you're competing against a lot, right? And they stop you, it's harder, go to France and start to open a side up there. I think it's easier to start in Saudi Arabia. It's true, they're like foreign investment things etc. But in general because there is less end, if you want to say it negatively because they are slow they will not react quick enough to you. So you have I think even a bigger opportunity as a founder, as an entrepreneur to build something really big here because here you also are competing against less. If I go to Germany they have a good infrastructure they have a good like transportation system, metro system and so on. You go here, there's not much, right? So basically as an entrepreneur you have it easier. I have to tell you from my personal experience even regulation is better. I think also because there is some kind of feeling we didn't do it, so we allow the others to do it and as long as it's not like getting too political, and I think also because they didn't realize how important it is.  You went into e-commerce, they said, these are the internet guys, let's play. And then you own a huge chunk, you own Kareem, you own transportation, then you might get trouble and problems later on. But the interesting part about it right now is probably many don't realize how important it is. So there is a big chance that you can build something without getting stopped by regulation. And I think that's a very good opportunity. Can you comment on that because you're building actually an ecosystem in Sharjah and a lot of that has to deal with how government used this regulation framework. Actually I was also in a session yesterday where Joy from Fretcher spoke and then Abdullah from Kareem spoke. So it's really interesting to hear. In fact, Joy actually said that this red tape was her number one challenge. It wasn't even access to finance, it was the red tape. So I agree that it is still very difficult. I mean, it's very hard to paint the entire region with one brush but I can speak for the UAE and the UAE's government is trying very hard to build an enabling environment for entrepreneurs. Our role as a government-sponsored non-profit if you like is to also play an advocacy role and that's where I think that we can sit in between the entrepreneurs and listen to them because a lot of people know what the challenges are but no one's actually trying to do anything about it. So we have that special role where we have access to the entrepreneurs. We hear on the ground what those challenges are but we also have access to the decision makers, to the policy makers and we can actually share these our recommendations with them. So that's I think the role of an entity like Shira and that's something that we are trying to do. We've actually built a group, we're calling it Shabaka informally at the moment where we have the different centres of entrepreneurship in different universities. So you have AUC, you have AUB, AUK and YUAD so on part of this network and trying to play this advocacy role on a regional level, sort of everyone doing it in their own country. So we are trying to build that at a regional level but I can speak for Sharjah and the UAE. I think the government is trying very hard but I'll also echo what someone said on the panel yesterday which is, you know, don't wait for permission. Ask for forgiveness later. That's the approach that most entrepreneurs take. They're not going to wait, you know, and so I think I've seen that happen in our own cohort. Go out there and do it. Regulation will follow. So Fadi wanted to say something. No, I think what we're talking about here is regulatory entrepreneurship and that somebody like Uber or Airbnb is so disruptive, they go to a place, they produce such great benefits. Some cost and the government says, well, you know, how do we balance consumers against the traditional sectors that we run? It happened with us. So when we build cake, we had no regulatory framework for five years. We actually had a port that's operational without a license. So all the customs people are there, et cetera, and we didn't have a license. So this is a regulatory entrepreneurship where we create something that's so good for the economy and society that government has to follow you. But the insight here is very simple. Governments are generally incompetent. Yeah, and they need to be kept on their toes. And the reason for that is simple. It's not because you're smarter. It is because as a business, you get constant feedback every day. You try, you fail, do it again until you get it better.  As government, you try.  And if you fail, you just ask for more resources and you get bigger. Yeah, that's if it's a government that is not accountable. No, no, in general, all departments around the world, I can take it everywhere around the world and apply the same thing. But my point is around business, just having a lot more information. So what does a smart regulator do? They hire the best consultant. Mackenzie is right behind the viewer. And then they ask people, what do you think about the regulations? That's as far as they can go in terms of getting feedback. So it's a completely different cycle of feedback. And therefore, they're always going to be behind. And this is going to get worse as digital disruption is happening and the business cycle is just becoming so much faster. Well, no one is going to ask Mackenzie anything as long as we have been on the panel with us. Please, the gentleman in the back. Sorry. Hi, my name is Neerskland. I work for a Norwegian oil company called Statoe. I'm 50, so I probably have no future in Rocket Internet. And I also represent an industry that also is kind of a good example of this topic. How do you lead into the future and how do you lead oil, gas and company into the future? You need to be part of the change. At the same time, you also talk about entrepreneurship. And the big ideas don't come from the existing corpus. They come from those that sits in different structures. So I just want to ask the panel, how do you lead through this with a business model as of this? Any takers? I mean, I'll take a crack. So you mentioned Einstein. I'm going to mention Darwin.  I think there's a lot of strength in what you're saying. But what Darwin, one of the quotes I like from him is he said it's not the strongest or the biggest of a species that survives. It's the most adaptable to change. And at a time, again, like you talked about at the beginning, where there's just so much disruption and so much opportunity for disruption, the key thing as a leader is to be forward-looking and open to adapting in the way, and obviously you have to make good choices about in what way you adapt. But if you're, I mean, the horror stories of the companies that get it wrong, you know, the Kodaks that just go out of business because they are not able to adapt to digital film is because the leadership, even though they knew what was coming, were just somehow unable to change. They were exactly what you were describing. But if you're able to, it's not really a question of age, it's a question of mindset. If you're able to, you know, with sensible judgment, figure out what is changing about your world and therefore what needs to change about your business model, then that's how you adapt. And there are plenty of examples of incumbents that adapt it as well as disruptors that displaced them. Yeah, that was a great reference to Darwin. Really. So Hashem, do you want to say something or Nuh? Because I promised to give you the floor. I mean, just if you're interested, I don't want to put you on the spot. Use the microphone, please. Son of the outdated. One question is those outdated, the people under them, they're also a little bit outdated and also the people under them. So as soon as the first one goes, the next one comes in and the next one comes in. The fourth or fifth one comes in. Your business is dead. There isn't enough time to actually enter the market. The other question is, or a comment is stuff like Shira that's in the educational part of it, since I was part of Shira and I experienced this, is that they clear up the picture of what you see and you need to just make sure that you're on the right path. And I mean, I'm an economist. So some of the things that I get taught are mostly theory. 20% of the forecast or regression that we do doesn't work. So whatever we're being taught is not actually applicable. And with the rate of change and especially technology, the universities are not speeding up. So how can you deal with that? There isn't enough time that you graduate. If you're going to go to a corporate to work there, it's just a signaling tool that you want to have a good uni. But if you get a startup, then your knowledge isn't enough. So I believe that we need more things like Shira that help us to just fill in that middle gap. And then there's another gap, and I think most of you covered which is the gap in the market that the private sector needs to help to develop the economy in a sense that the government isn't fast enough to adapt that development. Thank you. That's from my side. You have a good combination of being an economist and an entrepreneur at the same time. So that will work well for you. Please gentlemen in the back. Hi, good afternoon, everyone. I'm Mohammed Tamalia from the Jeddah Hub. I had kind of two questions I wanted to address. Professor Schwab met with the 100 entrepreneurs here, and he told us when he met with the global shapers yesterday that the average age was 40. When he meant the entrepreneurs in China, the average age was 20. So businesses are being led by 40-year-olds, not 20-year-olds. So for the future of business to be led, we need the youth to be involved in enabling these businesses. But for my end, I believe maybe part of the issue is the culture of failure that youth do not want to fail, and maybe education, the education system does not encourage entrepreneurs. So that's one aspect of the question. Maybe you guys have a comment on it. Why is the average age 40, not 20 like China? The other aspect is in the Jeddah Hub we organized youth conference last week. We had youth from 57 countries come and attend and come to Jeddah. And the main aspect they raised regarding entrepreneurship was the lack of financing, and be it from the banks that did want to finance SMEs, or be it from entrepreneurs that don't have trust in the youth, and when they want to invest in the youth, they want a high equity stake to control the business. So how can that be resolved as well from that end? Thank you. So Fahd, can I ask you, although you're not 40 yet in two months, can I ask you to answer the question on why you have to be 40 on average? I actually have the data to back it up. So it always bothers me when we have a conversation and there's no data, because you can, you know, it's a meagrelious conversation. They're sitting there telling me your opinion, I'm telling you mine, but then, okay, we end up nowhere. So we actually talk about the ecosystem of entrepreneurship in Saudi. So I don't have the data on Jordan, but I'll give you a very, very interesting evidence on this. So we benchmarked our ecosystem among 66 countries in the world to see where we ranked. So when we ask Saudis, what do you think of entrepreneurship? Are you afraid of being an entrepreneur? Do you think Saudi Arabia is a good place to be an entrepreneur? It turns out that Saudi Arabia's youth is the most ambitious among the 66 countries, with 81% answering yes. It is a great place. We want to be there, and we think Saudi Arabia will serve us well. When you look at success rates going, success meaning you started your business and it lasted for more than four years, it goes to 2%. You compare that to the U.S., it's 12% survival rate. To Lebanon, it's 20%. So you ask, why? And then you look at the ecosystem and you benchmark and you realize the following, that on education for entrepreneurship, we ranked 61 out of 66. On financing entrepreneurs, although we are a G20 economy, we are 44 out of 66. And when it comes to the regulatory environment and the ease of doing business, 59 out of 66. So yes, the youth want to do it, but they have to fail three or four times before they get there, so they have to turn 40 for their success. Do you want to comment on the 20-40 divide? Let me ask you first, is 42 old already? Absolutely not.  But what we see is, I can tell you from my experience, we hire a lot of very young people, like 20-ish, and I think there are two main reasons why these guys are more successful than others, than older people, and I'm 33. I think number one is, they have less responsibilities. If you have less responsibilities, you can take higher risk. And to do something in entrepreneurship means to start something, not to go into an existing successful company, though the risk is simply higher. And you need to take risk to be an entrepreneur. Karim founders were at McKinsey doing good money, so they went out, they were working in a shitty room, and so it's a risk. You don't do it if you have five kids. Maybe you do it, but I think that's number one.  As a younger you are, you can do lots of nights, like either party or work. And as older you get, it's like harder. And if you look at a lot of companies, a lot of scientists, you always imagine scientists are gray hair, long beard, etc., but that's not true, right? Like Einstein again was 24, 25 when he formulated his Nobel Prize theory. All big mathematicians, most of them did their major work under 30. So if you look into science, you have this. If you look into sports, you have this. And if you look into entrepreneurship, you also have this. So there is some drivers, there are exceptions, there are great exceptions to this rule for sure. But yeah, it's like you have to take this time. So don't go on mentoring lessons. Don't go and let everybody tell you you have to learn if you're under 30. It is a time to build great things. It is a time where you have the highest probability to build a huge company and not to learn. It's not the time to learn, it's the time to learn when you're like 16, 17. So use this time. Don't wait like for the older guys to tell you what to do. It is simply the time to prove to everyone else that you can do something huge. Even, yeah, I think the only exception is maybe politics because then you need to network a lot, be a lot in these meetings. People know you, so you need to be old and stuff to be successful. But I think for business, et cetera, I think you have to do it when you have the most power. Well, Macron is a disruptor in France, so that worked for him although he's doing it. So we still have five more minutes and I'm going to, I don't think we're going to have more time for questions. If you have comments, very quick ones because I want really to just end with one question for everybody to answer. So Karim, if you have a comment, yeah, very quickly please. Karim Sagir, Aajman University in the UAE. I have worked in different countries in the region including Lebanon, Tunisia, Egypt and now in the UAE and they have been dealing with students a lot but more importantly with parents. And, you know, many people talk about Silicon Valley, it's very inspiring, et cetera, but the way people are educated at very early stage, even before going to school here, really people, I mean kids are scared about failure and I think there are very few NGOs who are working at that stage, you know, primary schools so that to show people what innovation means that it's fine to fail once and then I think we need much more of this in the region even before the schooling or at the primary education. The second command is many parents force the students to choose the classical jobs like medical studies or law or engineering because of the lack of scholarships and because the students are very dependent financially of the parents. It's basically the parents finance the studies which is not the case in the US or in the Silicon Valley. So these are just commands that the parents maybe should be educated more and before the students or before even going to the primary education. If I could just comment on that, I think it's a very relevant point because and this is what we did when we have our demo day. So at the end of the accelerator program, I know you attended it. One of the things we made sure is that all the teams, so His Highness attended the demo day, Sheikh Abdu'a attended the demo day. We asked every entrepreneur to bring their parents and ensure that they were there when they presented in front of His Highness because we really want to show that this is a viable career path. So I agree it starts from home and this is part of what Shara'a does as well is we actually start our courses when they're as young as 12 years old because I can't come at 21 and 22 and say, hey, you shouldn't be afraid of failure. It's too late then. As you said, it's a culture that starts from the home and it starts when they're very young. So one question to all the panelists. What is one word, one skill that you'd like to see more of in the context of leadership in your business or the ecosystem in which you work? Paula, start with you. Inspiration. Inspiration. Good. Najla. Collaboration. Excellent. Iyad. Sabar. Endurance. Patience. Endurance and patience. Good. And fahd. Innovation by risk-taking. Excellent. So ladies and gentlemen, please join me to give a, really, I mean, this was a stellar panel. And excellent, excellent questions from the audience too. So thank you very much and enjoy the evening. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.


It has been an interesting week to say the least in the crypto markets. We had yet another opportunity here to buy the dip again. Ethereum has continued on setting new all-time highs every week. Also, we were all reminded that there's a coin called Ethereum Classic and that it actually exists. Dogecoin in the news again. Of course, setting new all-time highs this week at 69 cents. Cardano finally waking up here after what seemed like would be an eternal slumber. But our main focus here today is going to be on Bitcoin retesting the $60,000 level. As you can see, it's been tested so many times. And we're going to go over different possibilities of what could happen once we get there. Stay tuned. Guys, turn on the post notification bell as well so that you're notified as soon as we post videos. All right, guys. So it's been a pretty up and down yet flat week overall since Monday. As you guys can see, we pretty much started the week exactly here. So on Monday, when I did Monday's video, we're pretty much at the same exact price. We're around 58,000. We're again at 58,000 today right now. And after that, we've gone up to 59 and we've gone as low as 52,948. So it has been a crazy, weird, up and down week where price just kind of, you know, it's been it's been consolidating. It's gone really nowhere since Monday, right? If you have traded the actual, you know, chop choppiness of the price, then you could have definitely made some profits. I know that with the bot that we've been working on, it lives off of this choppiness because this is what it does. This is what it makes profits off of. So the bots did really good this week. But I mean, if you look at the pattern, you can see that we're grinding higher. We pretty much have set up some sort of bull flag here on the, this is a daily time frame right now. You can see if you just kind of draw that line there, right? That's where we continue to get rejected. And that's right at, that's right around that 55, 58.5 area, more or less. And then if you look here, this is actually ascending, right? So if we draw a line like this and connect it from the bottom of this breakout, basically, you can see that we have an ascending support going up here and then we have a flat top. So this is basically a flat top pattern. So like we said before, for a flat top breakout, it is a bullish signal, right? It is a bullish pattern. And you're supposed to buy the first candle that breaks the flat top. So that would pretty much mean a break out of this area. And that's going to be around the area where we're in right now. Really, we need a candle above it to test that 60k range. So a breakout out of this flat top pattern should take us up to 60. And then there, you know, that's going to be a whole other story. What we will need enough momentum breaking out of here to continue up. So if we get enough momentum out of this pattern, we can definitely see a potential break above that 60k, which could lead us back to our previous all time high. Now, in the event that we don't break out here in the next few days and we break downwards, then we can be seeing levels around here where we're currently where we basically tested already this week around that $54,000 range. As you can see, there's a support here that's, you know, it's held up here, it's held up here, it's held up there, it was rejected there. So this is a very strong level here at that 54 range. Below that, then we're looking at $52,000 if we were to, you know, continue dropping down. And then below that, you guys already know that $50,000 to $48,000 range is where we got that bounce last time. So those are the supports we're going to be watching in the event that we do not break out of this pattern and we break down instead. In a theorem, guys, we're pretty much just continuing on the way up. We did get our first daily red candle here after about nine or 10 green days in a row, right? It couldn't be green forever. But we did get finally our first red candle here. Then we bounce back the day after that.  And then today we have another basically indecisive doji here that's green. And we're seeing kind of a similar pattern here. We've been rejected twice here now at that around that $3,600 level. So it's turning into somewhat of a flat top. It's not as much as Bitcoin has. You know, it's been rejected multiple, multiple times here. Just hit that area once and then almost got to it again, but we got pushed back down here today. So if we do continue and break out of this, I definitely expect us to hit at least $3,800 to $4,000. That's going to be my next target here. My main target is obviously $4,000. It's only a matter of time, guys. I imagine possibly by next week we'd be at $4,000 already. So it's just a matter of when, you know? It's not a matter of if at this point, it's a matter of when. So we should definitely be at some point breaking out here and hitting that $4,000 mark. Like I said, Ethereum has a lot of promising potential coming up. They have the upgrade in the summer. It has the DeFi and NFTs. Both those projects are behind it and are built on its platform. And it just has so many things going on, guys. It's definitely a great project to be in. A lot of institutional investors now are going a little bit away from Bitcoin itself and more into Ethereum because Ethereum has the bigger upside at this point as far as return. As you guys can see here on the week, it's returned 19%. On the month, it's returned 45%. In the last three months, it's returned 131%. In the last six months, it's returned 383%. Year to date, if you bought on January 1st, you've received a return of 379%. And then in the last 12 months, we've got a return of 786%. So it's a lot, right? So a lot of institutional investors are switching over. We've been hearing a lot of news that they're putting money into Ethereum. So this is definitely a project that I believe could be hitting $10,000 by the, once it's all said and done here, right? In the next few months. Now, of course, there's always potential for the price to go down. So in the event that the price does go down for any reason, we're definitely looking here at 3400. You see that it's kept the price up on two different days here. The next levels after that is going to be 3200. You can see here we had some support here, some support here. And then the next main level after that is going to be, of course, 3000. That's a big, big psychological whole number. We don't expect the price to go beyond that. Also it has this Fibonacci level here, the 23.6% Fibonacci level there, which should be also help hold that number there, that price there at 3000. So in the event that we have any type of pullback or consolidation to the downside, those are the levels that we're going to be watching. So far we've covered the analysis on both Bitcoin and Ethereum. And next we're going to jump into some trade setups that we will be watching over the weekend, over the next two days. So make sure you get out your pencils, guys. It's time to jot down some notes and some areas to possibly enter some trades here. If you guys are enjoying this video, make sure to smash that like button for me, guys. Please, please, please. I appreciate it so much. If you do not like this video, look on the recommended videos on the side. Look for someone else's channel and dislike their video. Okay, take your anger out at them. I'm sorry I couldn't live up to your standards. I apologize, but dislike their video, not mine. If you guys are new here, make sure to subscribe to the channel, guys, and turn on that notification bell so you're notified as soon as we post a video five times a week. Guys, so I'm having some technical difficulties and I'm unable to share these trade setups with you guys unless we all hit the like button at the same time. So on the count of three, we're all going to hit the like button. Are you guys ready? One, two, three. Alrighty, guys. So the first thing we're jumping into here is Bitcoin. As you guys can see here, you can see more clearly now that we zoomed in a bit, this flat top pattern that I'm talking about. You can see we've gotten faked out a few times here and it looks like we've been faked out yet again. So the trade setup that I'm going to be looking for here, the first breakout entry that I want here is definitely going to be above 59,000. I'm trying to, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to avoid these fake outs. So like before my entry was at like 58, right? I was able to ride it up to around 59 and I made some profits. When it went down, I put my entry again at 58, but it faked me out and it dropped down. So I was like, okay, this time I'll put my entry at 58.5 and then what did it do? It went up, it triggered my entry. It went up a little bit and then it dropped back down. So now I'm going to set my entry above 59,000, right? You guys can use 58,000 as well. That's the thing is that's exactly where this line is where we've been getting rejected a lot. So it is going to be probably consolidation there. So I'm trying to avoid the consolidation and enter above it. So I think 59,000 could lead directly to 60,000 and I want to make that $1,000 profit there. That's what I'm trying to catch. So I'm taking profits on the way up to 60,000 and then my second entry is of course going to be above $60,000. That's going to be my very, very next entry there. I do think we will hit that $60,000 mark. You know, Bitcoin just got to stop playing games and let's just get to it, man. Let's get to work. In the event that we go down for any reason, like we randomly did for no reason at all during this week just because Janet Yellen was talking, she's always talking. She's always against crypto. I don't know. Nothing has changed. Why does the price go down when she talks on that news? Like that's nothing new, guys. Come on. In the event it does go down, then we're probably looking at entries back here at 57,056, so 56,000, it would be around 56,500. The thing with 56 here, we will be breaking out of this ascending support, right? We're also breaking this Fibonacci level support. So a break of 56 could possibly lead us back to 55, right? 55 would be that next level after 57 that I look for for a bounce entry. And then after that, I'd be looking at 54. So those are the levels I'm looking at, right? 57, 55, 54. Those are the three levels I'm looking at. And remember that we enter these on a bounce entries. We don't enter them on drops down. So what does that mean? For example, here, when this dropped down, you don't want to enter while it's dropping like this. You wanted to enter when it was bouncing back up. So you would have entered here. You would not have entered there. I hope that makes sense. Any theorem, you guys can see how it's just slowly grinding up, slowly setting up higher highs, higher lows. And it's just grinding, man. It's grinding. I think that we're going to see some sort of breakout soon to the new highs. We probably should be hitting, I would imagine, $4,000 in the next week or so, possibly sooner. It just depends, right? We've had, we've already had big moves. So there could be some consolidation due here. But the way he firms been lately, it's a possibility that it just continues up and just doesn't care, right? It doesn't matter. It's just going to go up. So the entry that we're going to be looking for here is above $3,600. That's that all-time high. So we're looking for entries above that. That could lead us up to around $37,000 to $3,800, possibly beyond that to $4,000, which is my next main target for Ethereum. So that's pretty much what we're watching for here. That's going to be the main trade we're looking for, if for any reason it comes lower. We'll be taking, we're happy to take entries at $3,500. We're happy to take entries at $3,400 as well. $3,400 is going to be the more main level. If you pull up the daily here, you can see it a little bit more clear that $3,400 has acted as a very nice support here. So $3,400, you could do $3,500, just risk less. $3,400, I feel a little bit more confident in. After that, it's going to be $3,200 and then $3,000. Those are the levels that I'm using. Remember, as bounce entries, you don't buy when it's dropping. You buy it when it's bouncing back up. And that's it, guys. We have done it. We've completed yet another week. We survived another week in the cryptocurrency market. I have now survived for five years in this market. I still haven't gone broke. I've only got richer. And I hope you guys have been doing the same by following this channel. Thank you guys so much for tuning in this week. If you guys miss any of this week's videos, you guys can see them here on the page. We did an update on BlockFi and why we're leaving BlockFi. We did a two-hour stream where we spoke about a bunch of different outcoins. So if you guys are outcoin traders, I recommend you to check this one out. And yesterday, we dropped a video on Dogecoin, on its possibilities of going to a dollar. We explained the fundamentals and the story, the origin story behind Dogecoin and what could potentially happen this weekend with Elon Musk going on Saturday Night Live, the Dogefather himself, and why it could potentially mean a move up to a dollar. So thanks, guys. I will see you all next week. Be safe. Make profits, as always. Peace and love.


Advancements in chemical, medical, cosmetic and plastic producing industries have had positive impacts on agriculture, health and human life in general. However, these advancements have also resulted in the release of large amounts of chemicals into the environment, often with detrimental consequences for ecosystems. One way to combat this pollution is through bioremediation, a process whereby microorganisms such as fungi degrade contaminants. Fungi are especially effective at breaking down complex organic compounds, making them ideal candidates for remediating environmental pollutants. Terrestrial fungi have been studied extensively in relation to micro-remediation, but there is growing interest in the potential of fungi to remediate pollutants in aquatic environments. This paper will compare terrestrial and aquatic fungal taxa and their roles in micro-remediation. It will also explore how fungi can be used to break down pesticides, pharmaceuticals, plastics and heavy metals, as well as discussing potential applications of micro-remediation in real-world scenarios. This article was authored by Annika Vaxma, Simon Guerrero Cruz, Puja Ghosh and others.


He said, he said, when I was young, there were some things that for me were very important, and there were other things that didn't matter at all. Then he said, now that I'm old, and as I say he was in his seventies, now that I'm old, those things that seemed very important to me then don't mean so much now. And the things that didn't matter at all have become the most important things of all. And in that context again, I think when we're younger, at least I speak for myself, and I definitely speak for myself, big thrust was publications, results, get things out, research, funding, push. But gradually I think progressively over the years, I find, while these things are important, that they have a place. And the challenge is to make sure they don't take first place. Because if they take first place, life is out of balance. In the last analysis, and I'm not sure how some folks in the university might respond, our primary objective here is not to do research. The university is not a research institute. It's a training place. It's a place where people come to think and to learn and prepare for the future. And research is a means to accomplish that, but it's only a means. It's only one. It's for many others. So I think the end of the day, especially when we're younger, is to try to analyze, what are we really making our priorities in life? What are our priorities? Because that's what will demand our attention. And we have to be careful what these priorities are. And as life goes by, I think perhaps naturally we'll become maybe better aware of what's really important. But the sooner we can realize that, I think the better. And as a little aside, when I left academia to go to industry, it was in a sense a turning point. Because when I was in academia, I had this desire, well, I want to have the top steel making group in Canada, which was a very self-centered position. And it was becoming all-consuming.  When I left university and went to industry, it was a totally different environment, a totally different set of goals and objectives. But it helped me to get rid of that perspective where work had become my God. And I say that deliberately. Work had become number one in my life. And that was my God. When I came back to academia, I did come back with a different perspective, having spent time in industry. And I think looking back, that had a big influence in how I then subsequently worked with people. People far more important than papers and relationships between people, far more important than results. Not to say that papers and results are not important, but to try to get a perspective that most important of all are people. And that within the university really is what we're involved in, is people. I used to say a little bit, kind of like heartedly. But which do you think? De Fasco's motto was, our product is steel. Our strength is people. De Fasco would say, lovely motto. I used to say here at Toronto. Our product is people. Their strength is steel. But the emphasis is on people. I think I would stop on that.


I'm Jason Farman. I'm author of the book Delayed Response, The Art of Waiting from the Ancient to the Instant World. We can imagine shifting our perspectives of waiting from something that's detrimental to us as robbing us of one of our most valuable resources to thinking about it instead as something that's valuable. Technology gives us the opportunity to fill every second of a day, and the end result of that is a really overworked, busy population of people who don't have downtime, and wait times in contrast are really essential toward productivity, toward actually achieving the good life where instead of being completely overwhelmed and using every second of your day towards some goal of productivity, instead wait times are essential toward any kind of notion of innovation and productivity because you need the pauses in a day to innovate, to think about new things, to give yourself the time and the pause and the reflection to do things differently. So I think we have to imagine ways of resisting some of the impulses that are introduced by our media to use every second of the day, and imagine that that's not actually fulfilling the goals that we hope it does of being really productive people and living our fullest lives. Instead waiting I think offers a lot of opportunity for that.


Live from the MGM Grand Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's The Cube at Splunk.conf 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsor, Splunk. Here are your hosts, Jeff Kelly and Jeff Frick. Hi, welcome back. Jeff Frick here on The Cube. We're at the Splunk.conf 2014 user conference. The fifth year of the user conference, about 4,000 Splunkers, customers, partners, and people looking to learn a lot more about Splunk are here at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. I'm here with my co-host, Jeff Kelly. Yeah, I'm Jeff Kelly with Wikibon. And we're joined by Stephen Sorkin, the Chief Strategy Officer at Splunk. Stephen, welcome to The Cube. Thank you for having me today. Absolutely. Thanks for having us here at the show. What's your impression of the show so far? You've been with Splunk quite a long time, so you've been to all these shows, I'm guessing. I have been to all the shows. I've been at Splunk now for almost nine years. And so I've been to every single user conference. And I think that Godfrey mentioned that our first user conference, which was, I believe six years ago, had a hundred and change. I think you said like 175, I think was the number. Something in that range, and it's grown and grown and grown. Last year and the year before, we were at the Cosmo, which is just down the street. And we outbrew the Cosmo, and we felt that last year. And here we have a lot more space, but we're filling it out nicely. It's really exciting to see all the customers and the partners and the partner pavilion and the whole ecosystem that's being built around Splunk and all the different problems that people are solving. So let's jump into that a little bit and talk about the ecosystem, because clearly that's all modern software companies today. You've got to have an ecosystem. You've got to really appeal to the developers. So talk a little bit about kind of where you are in that step and kind of some of the new things you're working on. Well, we've had the idea for quite a while of having contributed content to Splunk. First through Splunk base and more recently through AppStots Splunk, which allows our customers and our partners to contribute content for the benefit of the whole community. And one of my investment items over the next year and over the next few months is to really help jumpstart that and get far more high quality content. So right now we have about 600 apps up on AppStots Splunk.com and in the near future we're going to launch a certification program which is going to enable developers in the community to show that their app is high quality, that it's well supported, that it follows best practices and so that we can take those apps and really bring them to our customers and say these are the apps that will help you get your job done much faster. So how important is it to Splunk's future growth to develop that developer ecosystem versus, you know, Splunk creates their own applications and then you've got your customers creating applications. How important are the customer applications to your strategic growth? The crowdsourcing model appears to be critical to almost every software business now and so for us there are two factors that make it especially important that we have this ecosystem. One is the limited bandwidth we have. There's only so many hours in the day that Splunkers can be working on cool things in the platform and their second is the subject matter expertise. So we have a partner conducive consulting out of Austin and they know the healthcare space really, really well and they've built a HIPAA compliance solution that they're marketing on top of Splunk. That's not something that Splunk as a company would be able to build out the understanding either of the details of the technology, the specifics of the technology or how to take that type of solution to market. So we need partners to help us bring in more data into the system to make available through our premium apps like Splunk for Enterprise Security, Splunk for VMware, Splunk for PCI compliance, Splunk for Microsoft Exchange but also to extend into the long tail of interesting use cases that if you go to the sessions here at the event you see customers talking about but we need to make it reproducible. So who are some of those customers? Are they the big ISPs, the Accentures of the World, Deloitte's Boston Consulting Group? Smaller mom and pop consulting shops, what's the demographic like? I think that there is a mix. So the way that we often think of our technology partners are they're the pure technology partners that are building a device or service like the Amazons of the world or the Cisco's of the world that are contributing to our community to help their customers and our customers understand their technology better but then there's also the third parties who have expertise in a specific technology. As an example we have a partner out in Norway that has built a very popular app for Cisco IOS the operating system that runs their routers and they have detailed knowledge from the services that they deliver to their customers and they understand that by building on top of Splunk they can make their life easier in delivering services and they can establish a reputation for understanding the technology in great depth. So Steven, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the journey from being really kind of an application-focused company to really supporting a platform and a community to build on that platform. It was funny, Godfrey on their earnings call talked, I think one of the guys asked him you used to never say platform, you were a zealot about never saying platform and you fessed up that it was part of my thing because nobody buys a platform out of the gate, right? You've got to be an application company that solves a specific problem and then over time hopefully you can morph. So talk about you've been here for a while and now you're the strategy guy. Talk about that kind of transformation. Before you're an application company you're most often a tool company so if you rewind eight or nine years Splunk was very much a tool for IT people and we still remain that for many of our customers. We help customers solve fairly generic problems in their complex IT environment. I know that you guys spoke with Eric and Rob a few years ago and I'm sure that they talked about that vision and that journey at first where they wanted to give software to IT people to solve their most urgent problems that the traditional technologies weren't solving. Over the years we realized you can do even more with this underlying technology so let's not call it a platform yet so that's back when we and we will call it a platform by the end of this journey. So as we morph from a tool to the app, when does that kind of take? To the solution so that's when we launch things like Splunk for Enterprise Security which was I believe first called the Enterprise Security Suite which was a collection of many techniques to solve the problems with a dedicated go-to-market strategy where we were able to say to customers specifically this is how you use Splunk for security and we're still doing that. Now it's becoming a platform and the important distinction for a platform is when people start building on top of it and building on top of it in areas that the original platform vendor or us would not have imagined. We wouldn't have imagined New York Air Brake building a solution on top of Splunk for the 18,000 locomotives that they have service contracts on to be able to say here for every given train route here's the driver who's done the best job either by time to destination forces exerted on the train, fuel cost, adherence to the safety regulations so that they're able to provide that guidance to the locomotive operators and save a billion dollars in fuel a year. That's not something that we would have imagined. It's not Rob's vision when he... But that's what a platform does is it gives you the ability to take data and make it useful in many different ways and hopefully there's a killer app in there. But the potential got you and I thought you were even going to go back another step before tools if you don't kind of architect it as a platform even though you're going to deliver a tool or an application it's hard to then move to the platform status because you haven't set the foundation. So did they just do a great job at the beginning? Did you do some major re-architecting along the road? How did that work out? I think it's best to think of technology as fluid. There is not one perfect architecture and over time you take what works and you change it to suit your needs. So back when I started we could bring in data at modem speed. And then over the years... It's a little box for all the young people out there. Exactly. That makes kind of screeching noises. They're like a fax machine. They don't know what that is either. Then over the years we were able to bring in data at maybe DSL speed and now our largest customers are bringing in hundreds and hundreds of terabytes of data a day and making that evolution does require changes to the underlying technology. And so I would argue the counterpoint which is it's important not to worry too much about the perfect architecture upfront. The most important thing is to get something in front of customers as quickly as possible and you see that time and time again in the modern enterprise. So in our keynotes both Coca-Cola and GE Capital discussed how they use Splunk to deliver applications significantly quicker. And that's partly an automation process but it's also a philosophy of getting the bits out and then learning from the bits that come out and then iterating later. So let's talk about kind of future roadmap. So we've talked to a number of your customers on the queue over the last couple days that have talked about all the value that Splunk's delivering and we've kind of asked them to kind of compare it to the old EW BI world. And Godfrey kind of put up that slide yesterday in the keynote showing the old architecture in the EW world versus kind of the new architecture with Splunk at the center. Splunk I've noticed you're careful not to position yourself as competitors to that BI space yet we're hearing from customers that they see it moving in that direction. How do you look at that and do you feel like you're crossing over into that more mainstream BI space? I mean clearly you have bigger ambitions than just log data analysis. I mean analytics everywhere was a term we heard Banshee about yesterday. How do you view your relationship to those more traditional tools? I think the important thing is to realize the essential difference in the type of data that those tools are ideally suited for. They work best with structured data that fits well in a relational database and I don't see us replacing those technologies for that type of data. On the other hand the world has changed in terms of where data comes from and the agility of the enterprise and of small companies. So when you look at the type of data that comes out of devices, that comes out of modern services, that comes out of mobile, that comes out of web scale offerings, that data does not fit well in the traditional model. The traditional model requires that you choose upfront what you're going to collect, how you're going to collect it, how you're going to store it, how you're going to structure it so that you can run some typically finite set of queries and families of queries. On the other hand our philosophy is collect all of this data that just doesn't fit in those other technologies and make it available to everyone in the enterprise. So absolutely we're going to take the data and make it relevant across the business whether it's in the IT organization to optimize their operations, whether it's to the security organization to make sure that systems are safe and secure and you see in the news how important this is again and again and again and I do not foresee this stopping anytime in the near future. And then what's really fun and what's really exciting for us is when you take the same underlying data that you used for the operational questions. It's operational, machine generated data, text with timestamps and apply it to a business problem like you saw with our customer Domino's Pizza where the initial use case for Splunk was to keep the IT lights on and the systems running because that's their biggest cash register. But their IT folks realized that they knew about the success of marketing campaigns before the marketing folks did, before the data landed in the enterprise data warehouse. They delivered the reporting to their marketing colleagues who realized this is a gold mine for understanding our business and optimizing our business in real time. Well what's interesting is maybe the way to frame it is not that Splunk is starting to cross over into the traditionally DWBI world but that those players are trying to cross over into this world. You're seeing companies like Teradata through partnerships with companies like Hortonworks and their acquisition of Think Big Analytics trying to get into this Hadoop space to be able to run analytics on all this unstructured data. Absolutely. I think they see where the future is and they're trying to get there and they've got the classic innovators dilemma around their cash cow is the traditional world and they know but they know they're on the wrong side of history. They don't want to compromise it. And what's important in Godfrey's slide and what we truly believe and I'm sure that Todd said it earlier today is search is the dominant paradigm for this type of data. When you look at a SQL statement and the expressiveness of SQL, sure you can do it but it's very difficult and with SQL it's natural to look at one table, maybe a handful of tables if you know how to join them. But in real life in the world people do not know how to combine these types of data up front and you need to use a much more flexible paradigm for retrieving the data and pulling the data from all the different sources that are relevant to making the decision and then putting it together. The search paradigm is one obviously that people understand. Google has made that ubiquitous. Absolutely. So we're running out of time but I did want to ask you about, again speaking of innovation, you know, Splunk being a public company now. So you've got pressure coming to you from shareholders of course. Absolutely. So you need to satisfy Wall Street but you've also got to reinvest in the company to continue to be innovative. How do you balance that as the Chief Strategy Officer? How do you look at that challenge? We're a technology company. It is not an option not to reinvest in innovation and we continue to grow our product development and other research and development groups within the company at a very healthy rate. It's certainly higher than most other companies that are public and so eventually we're going to have to leapfrog ourselves and there are going to be new paradigms that we're going to introduce for interacting with the type of data that our customers have in the system. It's going to be a very exciting few years ahead of us. So Stephen, we're getting the hook here. We're short on time. So I'm going to give you the last word. You've been coming to these things now for five or six years. What's the bumper sticker that people should drive away with Splunk.coff 2014? It's the best way to learn about how to accelerate your Splunk deployment. There you go. Learn everything. So thank you very much for coming on. It's my pleasure, Jeff and Jeff. Chief Strategy Officer for Splunk. He's been Chief Strategy Officer for a couple of years, but he's been at Splunk for nine years, which shows that he's excited. He gets up in the morning and these are great and exciting times to get after new challenges. So I'm Jeff Frick with Jeff Kelly. You're watching theCUBE. WordSplunk.com will be back with our next guest after this short break.