Hi everyone, I'm Katrina from index ventures, and I'm so happy to see you all here I think the builder studio is a great concept and So I'm really looking forward to tell you a little bit more about how we at index think about rewarding talent over the next 30 minutes and so index ventures and has been around for 25 years and just as long we've been really thinking about Compensation and how our portfolio companies should think about compensation and rewarding talent and so 10 years ago Dominic our VP talent of insa and of talent and insight who was actually supposed to be here today But unfortunately couldn't make it has started to put together a database and benchmarking on employee options and how to reward employees and And we've been helping our portfolio companies on this ever since and then five years ago actually decided to open-source it so because we wanted everyone in the European and also frankly in the global ecosystem to benefit on some of the benchmarks that we've put together and So over the next 30 minutes I just want to walk you through a little bit of the general concepts how we've been thinking about it and Hopefully you can take away something for your own company Briefly about index so we were started 25 years ago. We're a global fund headquartered in San Francisco in London and Our multi-stage fund investing from a million to a hundred million euros in ticket size So from the early stage to the growth stage Thematically we are very generalists So we've been investing both in consumer and B2B enterprise companies back in companies such as Personia in Germany Roblox add yen super cell here in Finland Figma and Robin Hood in their seed rounds and Continue to do so and as part of the launch of our original seed fund earlier this year. We've revised our Option guidance program to really look at how should you think about it at the early and the seed stage? Already and that's what I want to take you through today So what we've seen is there has been a tremendous change in the fundraising landscape over the last couple of years, right? And that's not to say that fundraising is easy But what we've seen is with the influx of capital what's really become a bottleneck is human capital And so there's like many dimensions to think through this is like How do you attract talent when you only have limited amounts to pay? How do you retain talent with other companies have deeper pockets? How do you motivate talent if you can maybe not deliver exactly the same benefits as others? And how do you align talent when people come from all different avenues and geographies and We've really seen two avenues to do that So the first one Nina has already talked about just now and that's mission and culture and that's something that you as founders are thinking through every day and that's really your superpower because That's what that's why people are frankly joining you right like they want to like work on disruptive ideas They want to have an impact. They want to follow through on the mission that you're building And so that's something that you're thinking through every day anyways already but the other component of Superpower that you have is the financial upside that you can provide your employees And so even if you maybe can't pay the best salaries on the market You have employee options to let them participate in your journey and hopefully provide them upside in the future and so that's What you can do through employee option plans and I'm gonna walk you through a little bit kind of the tenants that we've seen there and What's been really interesting is if you compare the Europe Europe and the US and employee options It's been striking to see quite a big gap Historically, so the US has usually started out with an average of 13 percent set aside for employees Whereas Europe has historically started around 10 and then an interesting curve that you've seen is that over time The US companies have actually increased their employee option pools. So as they raise more funding runs They didn't just top it up to make up for a dilution that they've been incurring But they really increased the option pool to give more Shared to their employees and so at kind of a late series D round They were roughly at around 22 percent that was allocated to employees Whereas historically five years ago in Europe. We've seen that they were around half So what happened in Europe was we started with around 10 percent of an employee option pool And then rather than increasing it it stayed flat and it was literally just topped up to account for a dilution And so when we crunched the data again this year, what's been really great to see is this that there's been a tremendous shift more to the US model where European companies still start around the same Entry point around ten percent, but then have also adopted that model that they increase their option pool over time Which in our view has been really critical Now you're gonna ask why is there still a gap to Europe? But why have we also come closer to close it? And there's really four avenues that we've seen that have made an impact here the first is government policy So the UK and the Baltics and also France have actually made an Amazing progress when it comes to how they tax employee options and employee Incentivization programs and so they're they've like in the Baltics in the UK and in France we actually now have better standards than we have in the US and On the other hand though and most of the other European countries There's still quite a lot of room for progress and we continue lobbying for that actually and I'm gonna tell you how can you? Can help us with that in a second, but we Index actually created this note not optional campaign where we've put together benchmarks that and best practices to promote These programs and favorable legislation with countries that haven't made that change so far But with kind of that like unfavorable regulation that still produces part of the gap Secondly, we're still working all together. I think on a mindset shift So I think investors if they've been around for a long time They've seen the value of incentivizing employees and bringing and how core that has been to bringing key talent early on and What we've seen is that now also with founders there's been a shift and this is not to pick on you in the audience I'm sure this is top of mind for you already But I think it's a hard trade-off when you know that like maybe five percent of an additional option pool will Like dilute you and like your financial upside in the company And what I just want to encourage you all is that when we had index ventures look at early-stage companies the almost most important thing next to you as founders is your ability to hire and so when we back early-stage companies one of the key success factor that we've been seeing is like what's the caliber of talent that you've been able to attract early on and So I just want to encourage you to in your mindset be open and generous to pay a little bit more in terms of Employee options when there's people that you really want to bring in because it will make a difference Not only in the success in your company, but potentially also in your fundraising success Thirdly, we've we've already seen a change in risk appetite as you all know for sure is that often you need to walk Employers really carefully through what does employee options that even mean what does that mean financially? What why should you choose that as a component next to your salary and what's been very interesting to see actually is that? Where there's been more positive outcomes. We've seen more appetite to be rewarded in Employee options and so for example in the UK where we've seen the most number of successful exits The there's been more of an appeal of employee options because I think there just needs to be more successful examples that This is worth something and this is not just something to decrease your salary But this is this means something right and so there also I'd encourage you all in the audience to keep on walking through your Employees what that could actually mean what does that mean at different valuations and I'm going to show you an example in a second And then lastly, I think there is also just a lack of data And so when you don't know what the baseline is and your employees don't know what the baseline is then It's also hard to find the right setup and with kind of open sourcing all of our benchmarking in data We hope that we were able to contribute a little bit to that Now most of you or many of you might be early-stage founders And so you have the opportunity to really right-size your ease up and you have the opportunity to set it up right? From the get-go in a correct way and so what we recommend you there So the gray line you see kind of how it used to be in Europe in 2016 the red and the black line are what we recommend You today and there's really two things that I want you to take away from that first Ideally already start higher than the 10% we've seen that Technical companies might even want to start as high as 15% because as you know key technical talent is so hard to find So you want to set apart a little bit more equity to bring in that key talent and then be ready to increase it Over time rather than having it stay flat so that ideally kind of I mean at a late stage Where you might already be thinking about an IPO your employees own around 20% of the company What I would also mention next to kind of that difference between more like technically oriented companies versus More kind of business model innovation oriented companies is that if you're a solo founder We've seen that it's helpful if you increase your option pool even a little bit further roughly by 2.5 percent To make up for kind of that you can bring in even more key talent into this So I mentioned it already But if you want to play around with it and think about what's the best strategy then you can go actually online and look at our option plan where you really per stage per Profile per geography per business model can get Recommendations around kind of what salary might like might be the average what option plan might be the right one to pick for and so I'd really encourage you to play around with it It's comprehensive data from all across the world that we've been trying to put in the most ux friendly format possible But I've brought a little example With me today to just walk you through how you can think around that so in that quadrant You can see we usually tend to calculate Option grants as a percentage of the annual salary Which for example say that if you have a senior attack person that you want to bring in You might pay them around on average a hundred twenty or a hundred twenty five thousand euros And we've seen that then for example an average for that is to give them another eighty five percent of their annual salary Option grants which would roughly translate into a hundred thousand euros And so that's the broad concept like how we've been thinking around that now Again, there's like a couple of points that you want to look at first of all that It depends again on how strong your technical DNA is and if there's really specific talent say for example Also in crypto or so you might want to increase that a little further to get them into your company but also we've been seeing a risk premium for like the first one two three hires by Them joining you so early. They might ask for being rewarded for that in I mean additional option grants from a percentage perspective and so you see kind of that the more senior that talent gets also the like Heavier that option component should be which naturally makes sense as they like really should share kind of in The willingness to drive you to success Then kind of how that would look like potentially at post seed So we've calculated this now really for the early stage is say you've made 14 hires and first and I should actually say one We've seen that on average You would give away around seven percent of your cap table to early stage employees post the seed round so that say like if you have a average valuation of 18 million a 16 million post post your seed round that would translate and roughly at 1.1 million in euros and You see kind of how that's been allocated and that there is like a heavy kind of Weighing towards early stage hires and technical hires What that you then want to do next and again, that's something that you can find online But is to help them think through what that actually means now you've Allocates it around a million euros in value pre seed or at seed stage to your early stage employees But what does that actually mean? And so when you then help them calculate it through Including dilution you can see that for example for that senior technical hire that we were speaking about you gave them a hundred thousand euros in stock options now if you reach that One billion dollar in valuation that suddenly translates into 3.6 million of value for that employee alone right and I think if you help them Think through that and help them paint that future picture and what like you're all striving towards that can be Immensely powerful and so whenever you discuss employee options with your employees I'd really encourage you to map that out and tell them hey look This is what this means and this is like what we're trying to get do and that it will be really really meaningful which in turn then hopefully it helps you to You know make the the value of employee options really clear and make that a strong component next to the salary So then kind of now we've talked through how the ease up should look like and what it should roughly amount to we always encourage you to set it up as early as possible Because the advantage of it being that there's no room for misunderstanding It's a lever for you to bring in key talent early because it already exists and there are no insecurities around it and It's frankly also usually easy there in Europe to set it up right from the get-go When you can still take like a template and you have like a clean setup, etc But we do understand that that's not always possible so when there is no way for you to set it up at the precede stage and Or when if it's like a monetary topic Then there is a couple of aspects that I would like you to take away that you can think of when you only are able to Implemented later and so first and foremost the key is that you're then very clear about kind of the Conditions of that employee grant So you want to make sure that you clearly align on is that pre-value is that pre-round is that post round because that will Obviously have an effect on dilution You will ideally want to back date the vesting to the start date of the employee so that that employee is not punished for you only installing an option plan later and you want to Be sure that you really know down everything that's been discussed and agreed on so that there is like no Misunderstandings when you actually set it up. So key takeaway here set up your employee is up as early as possible and then when you There is like I mean we have a book where you can read all of that But I wanted to mention that as well kind of what is a couple of key things to think about when you think about Setting up your ease up first and foremost The concept of vesting and you're all familiar with vesting typically you see a one-year cliff with 25% straight line vesting year-of-a-year so a four-year vesting schedule overall One thing that we've been seeing more and more and that we'd encourage you to think about is actually back loaded vesting So that maybe in the first year only 10% vest then 20% then 30% then 40% The reason being that in kind of the competitive talent market that we are in today Retention is becoming so important that you want to have some Lever to encourage retention Beyond the mission and culture that you're building but so we've been seeing that more and more Secondly strike price with the strike price, which is the price at which the employees can actually buy their options then we Encourage you to go as low as possible We know that that's not possible everywhere and the UK and in the Baltics. It's possible to set it like Arbitrarily to like your desire, but it does vary by country and so if you don't have the option to Formally set it like as low you can always think about a phantom share program Which effectively is like a mimic option program, but is really a bonus and so there there's no strike price you can just Arbitrarily set it to the levels that you want to What is important about the phantom share program that I would also encourage you to think about is that? There since there is no strike price at which the employee then buys the options and maybe has some skin in the game you We've also seen people thinking about capping the upside when an employee leaves So you want to be generous there, but if an employee leaves you could think about for example capping The upside that they get from the options that like 2x 3x 4x the valuation that they've been leaving it so that they're really Rewarded for the work they've done But then not necessarily participated in all the like Upside that has been created potentially when that employee has left already Thirdly is levers so we encourage you to be generous there as well and only use bad lever clauses if Someone is terminated for cause the reason being all your former employees will be out in the wild and talking about you And so you want them to leave with the best feeling possible you want them to be your references your Advocators and you want them to speak positively about you as a company and that's just much more rewarding when you like Basically allow them to leave kind of with upside rather than like them leaving with a bad taste So would encourage you about that as well What a lot of you have been probably thinking about or hearing about when it comes to key talent is accelerated vesting So the idea that when you as a company get bought the like shares of that of specific key hires vests fully and so that they don't need to stay like under that new Ownership and and what we would encourage you to think about is to limit that as much as possible Because it's really like a poison pill for the potential acquirer You have to think about it that way the company that Wants to buy you buys you partly because of the talent that you've built up And if they see that the key talent that you've been bringing on is suddenly fully vested They know that there is a high risk to leave and there is probably additional financial Effort required to have them stay because you likely need to like set up a new option program that incentivizes to them Stay so I would be very careful in and handing out accelerated vesting terms You obviously want to be consistent in The clauses and the requirements that you go give out in your grant schemes because people talk and the last thing You want is that somebody finds out this person is alexa accelerated vesting in this not or this person has gotten this So you want to be as consistent as possible Which we know is hard when you really want to get this one key hire But just to encourage you to stick to that principle and then lastly communication is everything so You want to What we've actually been seeing is really really helpful is that you have own if you have ownership for all so that Anybody in the team has at least like a small stake in the business Because what that allows you to do is to address everybody in a joint forum rather than saying okay Like let's say half of the group is gonna meet and we're gonna talk about it You will like empower everyone as owners when you fundraise you can celebrate it and say hey look there is upside for you You can just kind of be inclusive of everyone and celebrate as one and so we encourage you To think about just handing out employee grants that literally everyone in the organization And the other part in communication is to my point earlier that you kind of really walk them through the concept of what that means And what this is worth and so what we've been seeing is really helpful there is using cap table software that lists kind of the grants companies like Carter or seed Legals or others that not only help you to like Have the overview, but that often like visually allow you to show to your employees. This is what this means. This is what This will turn to if we reach this valuation This is what the new fundraise now means to you So and would really encourage you to think about that So with that I'm actually already Almost at the end of my talk and you can if you thought this was interesting You can really go down the rabbit hole on our website and go through all these resources So as I said, we've wrote a book about rewarding talent specifically Which you can find online which goes through all the concepts that I've just explained We've actually also written a book about international expansion to the US and International expansion to Europe which go in depth through concept what you want to think about maybe when it comes to employee incentivization When you expand internationally and my colleague Sophia is actually going to talk about this tomorrow Then you want to play around with the option plan where you can really fine-tune like what geography what stage what? Function you want to hire for and what the average for this Like company and role will be and then as I mentioned on the outlook I would really encourage you to sign our Manifesto for better employee ownership regulation and government policy in Europe So if you find that on our website it's the not optional campaign and we continue to be pushing in all European countries to get to best practices as we've Seen it being adopted in the Baltics in the UK. And so I'd encourage you to take a look at that So with that, I'll leave you to it I'm happy. I think we have time for maybe one or two questions, which I mean Dominic my colleague is probably much better suited to answer but I'm happy to give my best at it and Yeah, just be proud of the companies that you're building we at index are we've never been excited We've never been more excited about the startup exists ecosystem in Europe We can't wait to see what you guys are building and we hope we get to back some of you. Thank you


Welcome, quick picks. I'm your host today, Brian Fonseca. Today, we're going to be talking about American League division winners to win the American League West. We're going with, no surprise, the Houston Astros. Minus 170 favorites. Carlos Correa left the Houston Astros, now a Minnesota Twins, but Houston does have a lot coming back in Alex Bregman, in Jose Altuve, in Jordan Alvarez, in Michael Brantley, etc., etc. Go up and down, that's what it is, and Justin Verlander is going to be back this year after missing last year through the Tommy John surgery, so keep that in mind as well. They're going to be picking on teams in their division, could probably get back to 95 wins or around that as they did last year, so expect them to have a strong showing in the American League West. In the American League Central, we're not sticking with all favorites, but we are going with the Chicago White Sox, minus 210. They're the favorites. There's reason why, because they're very good. Very similar to the Astros and for similar reasons why they should repeat. Tim Anderson and Jose Abreu, both MVP candidates. Eloy Jimenez, Yoan Moncada, Yasmine Grandal, you have a lot of guys coming back. Luis Robert, who is a rising star, I believe, with the Chicago White Sox.  They're going to be picking on teams in their division as well. Thought about the Minnesota Twins, gave them a look because they have Carlos Correa now plus 500. Couldn't quite get there. I think the White Sox are two-loaded in the American League East. We're going with the Boston Red Sox at plus 600, yes, despite the fact that they have the second longest odds to win this division. This division is going to be a dogfight again, right? Another year of Rafi Devers. Another year of Xander Bogartz, J.D. Martinez. You added Trevor's story. Not really too worried about him post-course field. And you have Nathan Nevaldi at the top of your rotation, fourth and Cy Young voting last year.  So expect the Red Sox to be competitive. I wouldn't be surprised if they made a move between now and the trade that line. A splash you want to bolster that roster as well. So keep that in mind. So good luck. That's all we have for Quick Picks today. Remember, go back and check out our National League one from a couple weeks ago. Bet with your chest and do it responsibly. Take care and good luck.


So I wanted to welcome everyone to the New America Foundation. I'm Thomas Gideon. I'm the director of technology at the Open Technology Institute. OTI, as some of you may know, is an operational think tank that brings many disciplines together to collaborate on improving access to and control of open technologies. In supporting one of those disciplines, the one directly tasked with the research and development of open technologies such as the Commission Wireless Project, I especially appreciate the purpose of this event and this event series, this wider multi-city, multi-continent series of bringing people of different backgrounds and experiences together. My team's unofficial motto is, not even spaceships are built in a vacuum. The technologists at OTI work alongside planners and researchers, advocates, and organizers to ensure that the technology they build serves local needs as we find them out in the world. Third Monday is an event series in more than nine cities now. I think the 10th or 11th just came online. And as I said, multiple continents, three at last count. And it strives to support similar close connections between local activists and technologists. Each city brings its own particular character into the mix. Here in DC, the realms of activists and technologists often overlap with that of policy advocacy. Our speaker this evening, Catherine Marr, director of strategy and communications at Access Now, knows this better than most, working very much as she does directly at this intersection. It's my pleasure to welcome her here to discuss with us work that Access Now along with EFF and Privacy International are leading with the support of hundreds of NGOs around the world and applying human rights principles to communication surveillance. Welcome, Catherine. Thank you so much for that kind introduction. I'm delighted to be here to introduce the international principles for the application of human rights to communication surveillance. I'm very much here as the representative of a group that is far greater than myself, that includes literally hundreds of organizations that have come on board as signatories in support of these principles, as well as dozens of drafters who contributed to the process at hand. With all that we have recently learned regarding the scope and scale of government surveillance at home and abroad, there has never been a more urgent time to address the question of fundamental rights in the context of ubiquitous digital communications. Here in the United States, we have heard subvences put forward pertaining to the legality of a variety of surveillance programs under United States law and their impact on US citizens. Whether these surveillance programs are legal in the United States is very much a matter to be determined. I look forward with anticipation to the outcome of a variety of pending legal challenges, filed by many partner organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. However, we can be much clearer on the fact that these programs are likely in violation of international human rights principles, including those enshrined in international law. Even if the rights of US citizens are protected by oversight and due process, the Obama administration and congressional leadership have been freely acknowledged the fact that the targeting of foreign nationals is a key component of these programs. This intrusive blanket targeting infringes on these universal human rights, the right to privacy, the right to free association, and expression. And while the United States seeks to settle issues pertaining to the constitutionality of these programs, there is a whole other body of international laws to consider, including Article 17 and 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the United States is a signatory. If you look around the world, virtually every national constitution and international legal framework enshrines the right to due process and privacy in some form. In the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, this is described as prohibiting arbitrary and unlawful interference with privacy and that everyone is entitled to the protection of this right. Similarly, the US Fourth Amendment talks about unreasonable search and seizure and the need for warrants issued on the basis of probable cause. So in October of last year, in 2012, in Brussels, a group of more than 40 experts in technology and with backgrounds in industry, academia, the legal sector, and of course civil society came together, forming the basis for what is now known as the international principles on the application of human rights to communication surveillance. The intent of this original gathering was to offer clarifying guidance around the access to data and content in the context of law enforcement. But as the process continued, the discussion necessarily widened to include questions related to the national security state and surveillance practice. The principles, the outcome of this discussion seek to put forward an evaluative framework for assessing concepts, such as when is surveillance arbitrary? When is it unreasonable? And how does surveillance take place in a way that is grounded in international law and jurisprudence? They're intended to provide clear and pragmatic guidance for governments to respect the fundamental rights of digital users while engaging in efforts to protect the security of all citizens. By clarifying the processes by which access to digital data occurs, the principles also seem to seek to assist policymakers to evaluate whether current laws and regulations comport with international human rights obligations. The process, which took nearly a year, was shepherded by a committed group of 15 civil society organizations. Together, they analyzed more than 60 texts of national constitutions containing articles or other language related to communications privacy, including the constitutions of the United States, Peru, Germany, Kosovo, South Korea, Moldova, Japan, Vietnam, Rwanda, truly a massive global undertaking. As well as international human rights law and jurisprudence, such as the European Court of Human Rights, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and various different articles ranging from the American Declaration of Rights and the Duties of Man to the Arab Charter on Human Rights. The process, which finished in this July, came out with 13 clear principles. The drafters had to confront some significant questions around choosing language that met the needs of the global community while being relevant to national frameworks, deciding whether or not metadata should be included as protected information and determining issues such as how specific the language of proportionality should be. At the end of the process, three core organizations, including my own, as well as Privacy International and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, emerged as coordinators to help build awareness, secure signatories, and push for the adoption and implementation of these principles in practice. To date, the principles have more than 215 signatures from around the world, including human rights organizations, legal departments of universities, and independent media groups. This includes 20 signatories from the United States, as well as OpenITP, the host of us here this evening, as well as FreePress, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and Internews. This is very much civil society's effort to proactively engage with policymakers and other stakeholders in protecting the fundamental rights of all people. So I wanted to talk a little bit about the principles themselves. As I mentioned, they were nearly a year in development. They included 15 core civil society organizations and are drawn on the basis of more than 60 different constitutional frameworks. The outcome, the 13 principles, have been endorsed by the 215 global signatories and the 20 US global signatories. Now the content of the principles, there are 13 include legality, which is the idea that any limitation on the right to privacy must be prescribed by law. That is, in practice, any surveillance that is conducted by law enforcement, intelligent agencies, or other government-affiliated institutions must be clearly spelled out in the plain text of the law so it is accessible and foreseeable to the public. That means that the public is aware of the way, the scope, the procedures, type, and duration under which the state may use, and the relevant law that authorizes that surveillance. They must have legitimate aim. That is, laws should only permit communication surveillance by specified state authorities to achieve a very legitimate aim that corresponds to a important legal interest. That is, a compelling state interest that is one that is so important, such as the protection of public safety, that it outweighs the individual rights of the users. Justification for this surveillance must be spelled out in law and can be conducted only in the furtherance of these previously specified legal interests. A very relevant example from the news that took place over the course of this weekend is that one of the journalists associated with some of the disclosures that we know around the NSA programs that have been in the news recently, Glenn Greenwald, his partner was recently detained while passing through international transit on the basis of an anti-terrorism law, which was the basis for his detention. Now, whether that law in practice is directly related to that detention would be something that would need to be spelled out very clearly with regards to legitimate aim. Necessity. That is to say that the information sought can only be, or the surveillance can only be undertaken for which surveillance actions can only be undertaken when there are no clear other means of acquiring the necessary information sought. And when the information to be acquired is of vital importance to addressing the issue at hand or vital to the investigation. Adequacy. Any instance of communication surveillance authorized by law must be appropriate. That means in practice that the type or form of action with regards to the surveillance, sorry, for surveillance action undertaking must be strictly adequate. It must go no further than what is required to obtain the relevant information. Proportionality. Any, it must, surveillance, excuse me, surveillance is a highly intrusive act. It directly interferes with the individual right to privacy and has deeply problematic impacts on the right to freedom of opinion, expression, and assembly, which are the foundations of democratic societies. Therefore, any surveillance must be proportionate. It must weigh the benefits gained from acquiring the information against the severity of the intrusion on the fundamental right of the person affected. Competent judicial authority. That is to say that there must have a judge that is independent from the other branches of government who's familiar with the issues at hand and has the authority to decide these matters. Determinations related to communication surveillance must be made by a judge that is impartial and independent. Due process. States must guarantee and respect the individual's rights by ensuring that lawful procedures that govern interference are properly enumerated in law. That is to say that the principles must be applied in a procedural manner that is consistently practiced and clear to the general public. User notification. Individuals should be notified of any decision around their communications. Currently, there are many practices in place by which governments have access to user communications through third-party providers. And those third-party providers are gagged from actually disclosing to the user that their communications have been accessed. User notification is a clear part of the principles and an important component of notification so that that user can seek right to remedy or redress. Transparency. States should be absolutely transparent and clear about the scope and use of their surveillance communications techniques and powers. This is a very easy one. Just like the legality requirement that requires that citizens be able to understand what the law authorizes, states must be transparent about the procedures, scope, type and duration of surveillance that they engage in. This means disclosing when surveillance has occurred and under what statute or law it has occurred. Recently, the Center for Democracy and Technology based here in D.C. was involved in organizing a letter that was signed by many of the companies implicated in the NSA Prism Program as well as a number of civil rights in the human, civil society and human rights organizations in calling for greater transparency from the U.S. government regarding the scope and extent of its national security programs. Public oversight. States must establish independent oversight mechanisms to ensure the accountability of surveillance practices. At the moment, surveillance is a practice that takes place in the dark. It is important that there is public oversight to address misconduct and rein in abuses. This could take the form of an empowered ombudsman or oversight board that sits outside the three branches of government such as executive, legislative and judicial and examine the way that surveillance laws are adopted and implemented as well as bring cases on behalf of citizens. Integrity of communications and systems. This is a critical point and while it may not necessarily be clear with regards to its link to international human rights principles, it is about defending the networks at a fundamental infrastructure level in order to prevent rights violations. Surveillance and monitoring capabilities such as deep packet inspections and backdoors offer the opportunity for systematic abuse. In particular, backdoors into networks weaken network integrity as a whole making the network inherently insecure for all users by creating additional vulnerabilities that any bad actor can exploit. A good example of this here with regards to communications in the United States is the proposal for the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, second version, Kalea II as its colloquial known, that would propose mandating that commercial service providers such as Facebook and Skype incorporate backdoors into their platforms. These platforms would work or these backdoors would weaken the security of these platforms as a whole, impose cost on providers and rather than narrowly targeting specific users who are the targets of investigations, broadly expose all users to potential surveillance. Safeguards for international cooperation. In response to the changes in flow of information and with regards to communications, technologies and services, states increasingly need to seek access to information in the law enforcement and national security context from providers that may not reside within their own borders. This is absolutely part of the process of, this is absolutely part of due process and a critical component of a number of investigations, many of which are entirely legitimate. Unfortunately, at the moment, it's unclear, it's often unclear rather, the processes and mechanisms by which states cooperate with regards to information sharing. Within this exchange of global digital information, it is important to have clear and consistent ways in which countries access and transfer that information, such as mutual legal assistance treaties to facilitate this communications transfer. This allows for greater due process, a record of information sharing across states and a specification or and should include a specification that in the context of discrepancies between state standards that the higher level of protection for the individual applies. Finally, safeguards against illegitimate access. States should enact legislation criminalizing illegal communication surveillance by public and private actors. We've seen many instances of abuse by public and private actors and so the law should provide sufficient legal or sufficient civil and criminal penalties for illegal surveillance, protections for whistleblowers and avenues of redress for those affected individuals. Anyone who accesses digital information without the procedure set out above should be penalized and those whose rights are violated should receive retribution. These are the 13 core principles and they are available at necessaryandproportionate.org. Now, they launched in July of this year, so just over a month ago and as I mentioned, there are more than 200 different signatories to these principles. The next steps forward this September include presentation of the principles at the UN Human Rights Council in mid-September at a side event and the various different coordinating organizations involved will be urging the UN Human Rights Council to adopt the report of special rapporteur Frank LaRuse, recent report on surveillance and human rights, as well as integrate these principles into a binding resolution at the United Nations level. At the US level, we know that a number of organizations are seeking to integrate these principles into pending legislation regarding national security surveillance and we expect that organizations around the world as signatories will be doing the same. Thanks. So I wanna borrow a little bit more of your time before we open up to the usual discussion amongst ourselves. That's really the focus of Third Monday. I know this is a bit unusual. Before that, I would like to give you a chance to ask Catherine some questions about her work and her presentation, but I'm gonna exercise moderator's prerogative and ask a few questions first just to unpack some of the things that you talked about, some of the things involved in her work. Starting with really, if you could speak a little bit more about the driving force behind the formation of the principles, so maybe what some of the expectations of the NGOs that have been leading the development over the span of time that this has been developed, what it is that they thought might happen with those principles, how they might be put to use in some way. Sure, so the formation of the principles and the initial impetus for this group of organizations getting together was actually very much in response to what's known as the UK Snoopers Charter, a bill that had three major components that would have created new power for companies to collect specific information, create a system for a public body to have access to that information and make changes to the regulatory authorities within the UK that would have been able to access information for surveillance purposes. So Privacy International, which is a UK-based organization, convened a group as I mentioned of 40 different organizations to come together with regards to an understanding, trying to create a better understanding of international law, and from that, or better understanding of the various different principles and actions currently at play at the time in 2012, and begin to sort of create a framework by which organizations, both in civil society, but also the private sector would have clarity around the way that they engaged with law enforcement agencies. This process led to the creation of principles. These principles have certainly a precedent. I mean, you can look to 1996 in the creation of the Johannesburg principles on national security and human rights, for example, as an example of when civil society has been able to come together, create a set of principles that then become integrated into the basic understanding of the way that we conduct all sorts of different national security activities, surveillance activities, and the like within the context of human rights law. And so I think that the real idea with regards to the drafters was how does this become an international norm? How does this become a touchstone that people can refer to? How does this become something that is an effective component within sort of the existing digital rights and human rights space? I wanna come back to that before I turn questions over to the audience. But I also wanna fast forward a little bit to where we are now and what is no doubt on many of the attendees' minds in terms of the mass surveillance that's been, the story of which has been unfolding here in the past several months. And there have been a lot of parallel efforts around this, the Stop Watching Us campaign, the letter from Best Bits Internet Governance Coalition to the, I'm gonna resist the urge to go to the acronym here, but people will recognize it who work with the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board and of course you made a reference to the other joint letter. So if you could talk a little bit about perhaps how those bookends of the act in the UK, the circumstance here maybe informs the fact that you have been working on this up through the release in July. You're still working on this in terms of socializing this to relevant government bodies and agencies to achieve that touchstone that you articulate so well. What is the story in between? How has the work on this been responsive to the latest revelations? So I think this is interesting. As I mentioned, the principles initially were designed to deal with law enforcement requests. And that is to say, the sort of run of the mill every day, the law enforcement bodies approach consumer service providers or ISPs and request information, whether that be metadata or content data about an ongoing investigation. And over the course of the year that these principles have been developed, certainly more recently since the revelations about some of the NSA and GCHQ programs, the drafters of the principles went back and said and sort of asked themselves the question of whether there would need to be existing or modifications to the principles in order to address some of these concerns about national security. What I found so fascinating about the process is that the drafters all agreed that in fact the communications principles that have been set forward within a law enforcement context held up to the national security context, which I think speaks to the fact that the principles are universally and broadly applicable, but also that some of the existing secrecy and justifications around broad permissions with regards to national security are perhaps unjustified if these principles could equally apply within a more conventional law enforcement context as well as the national security context. So fast forward a little further out going back to those expectations. Given what you talked about in terms of the launch of the principles in July, the work being done since some of the points of harmonization that you touched upon with work elsewhere in the human rights space, what does the world look like with that keystone, that norm, that international norm with those principles in place? What does that look like to the technologists, to the activists, to the policy advocates, a world war or maybe 6, 12, 18 months further on from this? I might even go further than that. I think that the creation of international human rights norms, as we know from past experience, is something that takes a significant amount of time. I made reference to the Johannesburg principles from 1996. Now, those are principles that have certainly gained attraction, not only recently, but recently with regards to some of the revelations that we know around programs such as these, but those principles are now 1996, 17 years old, is that right? This is a process that we anticipate will certainly take some time. The, I think the end goal or the sort of midterm goal at the moment is this UN resolution that I made reference to. I think that would be supported very much at the international level because many international groups do see the UN as a key arbiter of rights and an excellent place to petition to in reference to. Over the long term from discussions with members of the coalition, I think that the objective is that these principles will become so well socialized that any sort of proposal with regards to legislation on surveillance will necessarily have to refer back to these 13 core principles as legislatures and other bodies consider the implementation of surveillance at a state level. I think that as an activist or a human rights organization, this is an incredibly useful tool. As a policymaker or legislator, these provide guidance so that when you are drafting potential legislation, if you're looking to reform existing protocols or legislation, they become a very useful test. And certainly I reference the sort of network and communications integrity. As a technologist, I think they provide wonderful guidance for what it is that we should anticipate and hope for with all communication systems, which is complete network and system integrity without the inclusion of backdoors or other forms of interference. Great, I think that's an interesting picture to look forward to on a longer timeline. Although we'll see as these things accelerate, hopefully. The experience that you've had adapting with the recent events gives you some experience in some point of triangulation, perhaps future events and testing. It sounds like in a good constructive fruitful way, testing the principles, anticipating what might be coming next. So I promise I wouldn't monopolize Catherine, so I would like to turn over to the audience for questions. We do have some volunteers with mics in the audience. So if you'd hold your question until the mic comes to you, since we are live streaming and broadcasting this, so all of the audience at home can hear you as well. Daniel Burninger, VCXC. You didn't mention the internet. So the NSA goes back to the 50s, which is an entirely different world of communication. Are there any bright red lines that you see? Is there anybody support sort of a John Perry Barlow Declaration of Independence? Actually, you can't go there sort of thing. I think that that is a great question. We don't make reference to the internet and that's for a variety of reasons. We make reference to digital communications, certainly. I think the expectation is very much that the modalities of communication will certainly change going forward. If you look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is a document that dates to the first part of the last century, what you'll see is that, particularly with regards to articles on the right to free expression, they actually don't make any specific reference to a mode of communications. And I think that that's something that we very much look to adopt with regards to these principles is if this is to become a touchstone document going forward, it needs to anticipate whatever forms of communication we might see in the future. I don't know about the bright red lines as sort of the declaration of cyber independence, but I do think that there are certainly groups that are out there looking at those issues and it's useful to have a whole spectrum of organizations and sort of positions on the matter. This is very much designed to be a collective understanding within a pragmatic framework that is a tool of guidance for policymakers, but also is a tool of defense for human rights advocates. Any other questions here in the front? Soren Dayton, the one that surprises me the most is, in some sense, the user notification. If you take the analogy to, say, law enforcement, phone tapping, there isn't really a notification process, as I understand it, and I could very well not understand that, but I'm also struck that in the European Parliament's sort of reaction to this, they included user notification in their early July amended motion that was led by a whole series of people in reaction to the first wave of stories out of the Guardian and the Post. And so, one, can you explain a little bit more of the context to the user notification? And two, I've always been struck that the European Parliament, in particular, because it doesn't really have any security apparatus associated with it. I mean, none of the European institutions do. That's the first place that something like this could really come to at least a vote in a parliament without some of the other pressures, and could you comment on that? So user notification, as I mentioned earlier, is very much, along with transparency, understood to be the touchstone for the beginning of redress with regards to rights violations. If you don't have access to information about the fact that a rights violation has occurred, it's incredibly difficult for you as a user to be able to seek any form of remedy with regards to that violation. On the fact that it's included within the principles, as I mentioned, the principles themselves come out of a survey of a variety of different bodies of international law, international human rights tools, constitutions, and so we do see discrepancies from state to state. It's very much something that's preference within a European context that you might not have here in the United States as a sort of core point of action. I take your point with regards to notification with an ongoing wiretap, for example, that would certainly interfere with the process of an investigation. When we talk about user notification, what we're often referring to is the removal of issues, or the removal of tools such as gag orders on companies with regards to disclosing the fact that this sort of request for data has actually occurred. We know that particularly here in the United States, national security letters, for example, have been used, that have tied the hands and the voices of companies with regards to their ability to disclose that any form of such information grab has happened, not even necessarily to the users, but to that specific user, but to users as a whole. And so we really want to make sure that there are provisions in place for these different companies, whether they're private sector actors or service providers, to be able to disclose and provide that degree of transparency to their users, even just so that users can make an informed choice about the services that they engage with. One question about your note status. You know, I don't, I'm happy to follow up and give you my email address afterwards and I've got colleagues in Brussels I'd be delighted to ask. Hi, Kevin Bankston, Center for Democracy and Technology. Thank you for having this event and I know that the principles were in process long before the NSA revelations, but it's very auspicious that they debuted at this time, particularly when there's been very little in the discourse about it, about the rights of non-U.S. persons. I wanted to highlight a couple of things that have been mentioned already. First, spinning off of your comments about transparency, a joint letter by a variety of companies and civil society organizations demanding more surveillance transparency, which is still open to signers at CDT.org backslash we need to know, but more importantly, I wanted to highlight something else that Thomas mentioned, which is the joint letter to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which went public, I believe earlier today, that staff from my organization and New America and Access and dozens of other organizations worked on and have signed, trying to inject that discussion into the debate over NSA surveillance and in particular get the P-Clob to consider the rights of non-U.S. persons and the human rights of everyone when preparing its report on the NSA programs. And so I just wanted to highlight that and the fact that because the deadline for those comments is not until September 15th, that letter is also still open to signature by organizations and by individuals via the Best Bits Coalition at bestbits.net backslash P-Clob, just because it's so fun to say, P-Clob or Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. Thanks. I think we had a question here and then we'll get to the folks on the side of the room. Yeah, George Lyle from Internews. I just had a question about perspective. People have been talking about NSA and spying at least since World War II and it really started to pick up steam in the 70s. So today, is it a matter of governments are truly doing more spying or that the spying has gotten three times easier because of advances in technology? I'm unfortunately not a historian of surveillance. I would suggest certainly that what you can draw a distinction with regards to the NSA is spying on foreign governments and foreign governments as targets, which was historically their mandate and purpose and the sort of increase and diffusion of the collection of information with regards to private individuals. I think that that is an evolution that we've seen with regards to intelligence agencies at a global level and that's in response to a variety of issues. Certainly the emergence of non-state actors as a sort of primary narrative concern within the national security community. As opposed to with regards to whether these intelligence agencies are doing more spying, I think that there is certainly an argument that's been articulated that addresses the fact that the cost for spying or the cost for surveillance has plummeted precipitously with regards to given the advances in technology and the ability to do massive data storage and to conduct the sort of three hop graph analysis that the NSA and other, certainly other intelligence agencies have the ability to do. And so if you do have decreased costs and increased ability, yes, I think that it's probably fairly safe to say that the amount of data that is acquired if not the collected under NSA definitions with regards to interpretation or analysis has certainly gone up dramatically. We had a question on the side of the room, right there. Hi, I'm Chris Doughton with the National Democratic Institute. Now that these new principles are out there and being promoted, how would you suggest that civil society on the international stage get involved? How can they help promote this either domestically or as an international collective effort? Well, there are 215 civil society signatories. We would love that to be 500, 700, 1,000. The signatory process is open to all. I mentioned that it includes everything from human rights groups to independent independent media groups. So it really is open to a broad variety of individuals. And so if you and your own work or any member of this audience works with organizations that are looking or would be interested in participating, by all means. Thomas raised the question with me earlier about whether these principles would ultimately evolve in some way. I don't necessarily know that something like that is on the table now, but by participating as a signatory at this current stage that would open the door for such organizations to provide input going forward. Within the domestic context, the signatories and the sort of coordinators of this campaign to receive more signatories have a variety of guidance as to how organizations can go to their legislators and their policy makers and use these principles as a tool in their setting of policy in the domestic context. And certainly at the international stage, the more support that is afforded to efforts at the human rights council level, the more likely there will be success with regards to a resolution on human rights and surveillance. And I think that that's something that we're really looking forward to. The previous report by a special rapporteur Frank LaRue on human rights and surveillance failed as with regards to being adopted into a resolution because it did not have full support of the members of the human rights council, including the United States, it declined to endorse fully the report partially in because the report actually made specific reference to the foreign intelligence surveillance act. This all was prior to the recent NSA revelations. So gaining that universal support, ensuring that that goes to a resolution, that's something that the international community is extraordinarily well positioned to do and would encourage that sort of participation. And of course afterwards, I'm happy to provide any of my contact information and my colleagues as well as the other organizers as to how we can provide that direct assistance. Hi, Griffin Poiz from the Open Technology Institute. You mentioned as part of the 13 principles, the formation of an independent court to actually overlook sort of this surveillance, whether it's broad spectrum or more tightly enacted. Would that be something closer to the Hague? Or would that be something like a more independent FISA court like as we have now? That's a great question. The principles are not prescriptive in the sense that they don't put forward the idea of an international court. The idea is very much that oversight at the judicial level, competent judicial authority should be integrated into all decision making around access and collection of data. So that would happen with regards to individual requests, specific warrants and the like. The idea of having an independent sort of ombudsman, which is I think the other thing maybe that you're making reference to, is the idea that that would be an independent entity that has sort of a, has a sort of longitudinal perspective that understands the history and the context of surveillance as it occurs within the national context, but is also independent of executive pressure or legislative pressure and could provide the sort of as act as an advocate on behalf of citizens, be able to potentially file a case on behalf of those citizens, would really depend on the specific national context, but the principles are very much designed to be reflective of a national or domestic context as opposed to trying to create some sort of additional super national body. Back to the perspective question. So in 1971, Cointel Pro ended in the United States and then three years later, we had the Privacy Act of 74. Is there any chance in this country, I think the one surprising bit for me, is there sort of political energy to do something similar in this country? I mean, I can't speak to specific legislation. I will make note of the fact that ever since the revelations were the guards to NSA spying, here in the United States, we've seen a variety of different proposed legislation put forward, including the Amash Kanyers Amendment that recently went to a vote that actually failed by just almost insignificant number of votes, very much tied to political leadership issues here in the United States. And with the legislation that we've seen put forward, aside from the Amash Kanyers Amendment, I think that there are things that we've seen that are very much in line with the way that the principles would seek to reform surveillance practice as to whether we'll see anything like a renewed church committee that is empowered with the authority to fully investigate and provide transparency around ongoing actions. It's absolutely a hope of mine and I know that in speaking with the international community, it's a hope as well. I think that Kevin from CBT made excellent reference to the fact that ongoing activities and discourse have focused very much on the rights of U.S. citizens and so any form of action at a congressional level would ideally include a narrowing of the scope of surveillance, not necessarily on the basis of national affiliation but on the basis of reducing the overall amount of information acquired and analyzed which would have significant impacts with regards to reducing the number of innocent non-U.S. persons who are also subjected to surveillance by these ongoing programs. Any other questions? All right, then I guess it's just left for me to thank Catherine once again, both for the presentation, a deep dive on the principles, your patience for answering my questions, the fantastic questions from the audience, although no doubt folks recognize some of the names of organizations as being those that are working alongside on these principles and it's then just left to turn over to the rest of the evening at this point in terms of there should be some residual refreshments, well, I hope, on the back table and along the backside there and I would encourage folks, we have the space for another hour or so for folks to make introductions to themselves. I'm happy to facilitate a group introduction all around with the folks that are here, although you've heard some speakers that may have sparked your interest that you wanna talk to more based on the questions that they put forward to help advance the discussion. Thank you again so much, Catherine. Really appreciate it.


In this episode, we will take a closer look at how to craft a good introduction and a good method section. For the introduction, imagine your head right now an inverted triangle. Now what I mean by that, basically the top edge is a broad beginning to your introduction, which means that you will bring in the background information of your research topic. Now how do you do that? You will do that by talking about what have been done in the field before. Some of this could be your own studies if you already have been researching on this topic for a few years. This is fine, but be careful not to have too many self citations.


Jim Rogers, looks like we are getting closer to a tax deal and a vote. Are you a buyer here or is this a sell the news event for you? Well, I'm not a buyer here. Daniela Stocks have been going straight up. I don't like to buy straight up. I would buy Japan, for instance, and China, both of which are down a lot and if America is going to continue going up or turn into a bubble, they're going to go up more. And I know, Jim, you always tell me you do not own a crystal ball, but if I asked you next year at this time, where do you see U.S. equity prices? Daniela, you should watch KITCO. They know all these kind of things. I don't. I would expect that they will go up for a while and then go down by this time next year. If I knew, Jim, I would be a much wealthier person, but let's talk the Bitcoin bulls out there now who love to say it's the end of gold and the rise of the cryptocurrencies. Like gold is scarce and Bitcoin is fixed, so it's actually better in that sense. How do you see it? Well, first of all, Bitcoin might be fixed and we're not really sure, but we think if they say it is, but even if it is, there are going to be lots of other cryptocurrencies. Daniela, there are already over 2,000 cryptocurrencies up from none nine years ago. So there are plenty of cryptocurrencies. So do you think it's a smart move for people to sell their Bitcoin and buy gold here? I've never bought a Bitcoin, so I wish I had. Everybody wishes they had. I'm not selling any of my gold. I'm not buying gold. I'm sitting and watching. I'm still waiting for gold to go down so I can buy more. In your career, have you ever seen anything like the Bitcoin fever that we see going on? Well, I've seen fever. There are plenty of bubbles that I have seen in my life, and I've certainly read about many, many, many more. This one is a little strange because at least when the dot-com bubble was around, those were companies had said they had businesses and would have sales, etc. Back in the late 60s, when there was this gigantic bubble with computer stocks, the same thing. So I've never seen a bubble. I've read about the tulip bubble back, you know, 300 or 400 years ago, but even the tulips. They supposedly had a purpose and a use. I've never seen something quite like this. So Jim, as we're about to start a new year here, how is Jim Rogers' famed investor preparing himself? I told you, I'm buying shares, still buying shares in Asia. China's down 40% from its all-time high. Japan's down 50% from its all-time high. The Japanese government is doing unbelievably everything it can to get stocks up. It's not good for Japan what they're doing, but it's good for me. It's good for people like me who own shares. So if you want to, anyway, I prefer to buy Japan, which is down 50%, to America, which is making all-time highs. Jim Rogers, wishing you happy holidays, always good chatting with you. Likewise. Don't sell your gold. And thank you for watching. We'll have more for you as part of our Outlook series.


Hello, everyone, and good afternoon. We are back with more of theCUBE's live coverage of Forward Six, UI Path Forward Six. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host and analyst, Dave Vellante. We are talking about the future of work here, really. This is an exciting- These are- It's a real house, Rebecca. It's my jam, it's my jam. And I'm really excited about this next session because it's about the life sciences. We're talking about the future of hyper-automation at Merck. I want to welcome to our show, Sonny Kosak. He is the associate director, software engineering manager of hyper-automation at Merck. Welcome, Sonny. Thank you, thank you very much. And Grant Harris, he is the director of consulting services at CGI. Thank you very much. So, let's talk about, I want to ask you, Sonny, first of all, because you are relatively new to Merck. You've had a long career in financial services, have recently moved over to Merck. How are you bringing what you know from financial services about automation and the journey that organizations must go through to automate their processes to Merck? Well, yeah, that's a great question because, you know, the exciting part is I get to bring all that industry knowledge I have within automation. So all the technology, all the different tools, all the best practices, they translate right over. And then it's exciting for me because I get to learn a new industry, I get to meet new team members and we have some new challenges. But really what we're trying to focus on the process. Once I know the process, I know the business language, now we can talk about what tools can we use to automate that. And so thus, I get to learn a new process but processes are the same. They use same type of servers, the same type of hardware, same type of tools. So it's a very easy transition at this point. Yes. Yeah, I think, you know, the fact that they're both regulated environments where it kind of goes hand in hand that you have to be very extra cautious about people's information, all of the data that goes back and forth. So I think that they really lend themselves well together as industries. But the business drivers are different, right? Yes. But you're saying a lot of that is sort of opaque, I guess, from the compliance pieces, right? Very much so. And my job here isn't to drive the business, it isn't to worry about compliance, it's to meet with the business, understand the process. If you can explain to me your process, if you can tell me your steps, tell me your pain points, tell me your goals, then I can take a figure out and I can go create a solution and design it using tools. Maybe we use RPA, maybe we use a homegrown microservice, maybe we use AI, maybe we can use OCR. Those tools apply to any industry, any process. So again, I just need someone who can speak business language. If you can talk business, I can understand, we can automate. What role does data play in that whole process? Well, data is critical, right? Cause it's the lifeblood of all the automations, right?  And everything we're talking about is data points. This becomes even more important when you get to generative AI because you're not so much worried about algorithm and models, you're worried about procuring that data, fine tuning that data, feeding it into that AI model. And then those results you could take and we can automate and extend on. And that's why we really love UiPath because it helps us automate both ends of that AI which is taking that data to new heights, right? To be purpose. Is a lot of time spent up front figuring out whether it's data quality or where data is or what the single version of the truth is or what's been done? I think that a lot of that goes into it as well as determining what the value is going to be both to the business as well as what the cost is going to be. Is it going to be XYZ life cycles? So are you going to be able to maintain this for a number of years or is it something that where it's just going to be a one use robot? Where there's still value in that but your ROI is not exactly the same. So how do you balance that? The balance, the benefits to the business against employee impacts, their job security which of course is a big question on a lot of people's minds is people worry about AI coming for their jobs. How do you calculate that and think about that both in terms of real hard numbers in ROI but also in terms of the messaging to employees? That's a fantastic question. So to David's point, you spend a lot of time up front understanding your data, understanding your model but you understand the process. How complex is it? How many pain points are there? How many decision points? How many labor hour, how much labor hour goes in there? Is there compliance involved which now you have risk mitigation which you need to worry about? Compliance and audit issues. So you want to try to keep those costs down. You want to keep the labor costs down but you also want to bring value to the business. So the way you do that is that analysis up front very much as David pointed out and then you can calculate and put those numbers into hard numbers and you take that calculation, take it to your finance department, have them validate. My numbers close, are they right? Are they wrong? And then once you get into production you look at the actual savings and compare that to see how close your calculations are. But yeah, it just takes time and some due diligence. No shortcut. And Merch for building that out for a number of years and they have a quite robust process where they're both calculating the value up front and then bringing in to see does it actually equal why? So were we able to save the proper amount of money with this? Were we able to save the proper amount of time? And I think that that's definitely a key as far as how the business is going to view what the processes are going to be able to do for them. And it's a pretty straightforward to get to the value or is it a little art and science? Because I'm sure there's debates, a little double counting going on sometimes. There's a few pieces that I am maybe a third of it that's a science and the two thirds it's an art and it's just a matter of asking the right questions at the right people and really understanding kind of the numbers underneath the numbers. But again, if you give that due diligence and you look for it, you can find every process, every business group operates a little different, they have different details. You just get better of asking those questions and you tell them what you're looking for and they can often lead you down that path for you. You don't have to solve the problem for you, you tell them what you're trying to solve, they know their numbers, they know their business, they can help you figure out that calculation and they want to. And part of that, I mean, certainly subjectively they can say, take that away, I'm in trouble, I need that, so okay. But there's so many dependencies. And a mapping from infrastructure, applications, the business processes, the external ecosystem and it's essentially your job to build that mental map. Well, we have a large team to help out and what you're talking about is process engineering. And so process engineers come in and they help us fully understand from end to end, not just the process, the steps, but all the systems, the access to the systems, the cost of each system, the cost to support. So you have a large team of people to help you figure those answers out. It's your job to make sure, are they asking the right questions, they got the full thing, and can you present it so that the financial people will respect your decisions. Right, so you got to translate it. So you essentially set a baseline and then try to figure out, okay, when we make a change, what's the business impact going to be in terms of however you want to measure it, productivity, revenue generation. Right on the head, yeah, you got it, yeah. And then, like you said, the most important part is you have to defend it, right? Well, and I think that the experience goes to that where as the models are built up over time, you get more and more experience as to how do we evaluate things on the beginning so that your numbers at the beginning more closely align to the numbers that you're getting at the end of the project. Are you able to come in with, hey, this is best practice, this is what's achievable, kind of a little mini benchmark, or maybe you've got data that you can share. Here's a range of likely expectations. Is that sort of part of the art? Yeah, that's absolutely part of the art. And when you're working with these automations over a period of time in each of the individual towers within Mark or within any organization, they're going to be different. So not every manufacturer is going to be able to save the same amount of money on a certain process, but you do have that overall background and the more data that you're able to build up on what you've done in the past and how that's really achieved the ROI, the better you're going to be in the future as far as calculating that information. How do you handle it when there's a, let's say it's an influential business line manager, maybe here she's a P and L manager, has a big voice in the company, drives a lot of revenue, maybe a lot of people working for them, but there's, and there's like a pet process or application that's not getting a lot of usage. So you know, the value might not be there or if we did this, it would drive more value and more people could touch it, but that influential individual is like sort of holding on to his or her territory. You're smiling, you've seen this before, right? There's beefdoms in every organization.  So if you can explain it and you could show them the numbers, sometimes they just back away. If you explain it and they show them the numbers and they still justify it, it's their job. I'm going to make the best application I can, the best solution they can be offered, but ultimately it's their decision. So it's my job to offer all the data so they can make the best decision possible and then let them justify it. That's the only way to handle. Change is hard and a lot of people are resistant to it, of course, but my question for you is, where are we in all of this transformation? I mean, you're here and you think, oh, the future of work, it's here, everything's different, everything's automated, we're using AI, but there really is, and there truly is a sense that things are changing and we are on the precipice of all of these revolutionary technologies. So where are we in the sense of how much is automation and AI actually changing the way people do their jobs, the customer experience, and the way the enterprise operates? Well, probably the first biggest change that I would list is the way that the business interacts now with IT. We have a very close relationship with these automation projects because we're having to come together to understand the process and the solution and we take them along the journey with us. So first of all, you have a much tighter collaboration, there's a respect for both. Now, as far as impacts on the business, once you start getting wins for them, they start coming up with ideas and all this is making your company more efficient, it makes it more scalable, it makes it more productive, which all that leads to not just better numbers but a better customer experience, products get to the market faster, so you can't speak enough about the productivity gains that you come across. Whether it's hard numbers, whether it's better products, whether it's faster products, and it's just continuing to grow, the tools are getting better, the people are understanding it more, the business, we're getting more of them creating citizen development, right? With them creating automations themselves. So it's an unbelievable change the business has embraced and it's better for everyone, everyone. And I think when you take a look at it, America as well as a lot of other companies, they started out with the RPA, hitting the low hanging through the swivel chair jobs where it was just something that's really easy to do, but then when you get further down, once you knock all of those off, you have to figure out, going more into the hyper automation route, where you're looking at not just structured processes, you're starting to look at unstructured processes and developing solutions that would really be able to benefit within those processes as well. It's so true, Rebecca's question, like how far along are we in that sort of hyper automation? I just, you know, Isaacson spoke yesterday, I just finished listening to and reading, I go back and forth in his book, and it was something in there, it was Musk's kid who asked him. He had a lot of them. One of them, I know it was X or Y or whatever. Asked him, how come the future doesn't look like the future? That was a pretty interesting question, it's true, right? Read about, you see all these sci-fi movies, anyway, but hyper automation is the future, where you're completely transforming the organization. I mean, we're starting to see glimpses of it. IT and business have a much tighter relationship than they did 10 years ago. So where are we in hyper automation? It was in your title. As I would say myself, I would say we're somewhere between toddler and adolescents. Right, I really would because I think we got a long way to go. A ton of growth, we have come a long way. And if you look back five years, you look back a few years, it's a great jump, it's tremendous. That change has been impactful, but we're just beginning. I think what we will see in 10 years, 20 years, we can't imagine, we really can't. And it's going to impact so much more, the businesses are going to leverage automation everywhere. Maybe we won't have jobs, so. Well, as the mother of adolescents, I can't wait until my AI starts rolling its eyes at me and stop acting as though I'm disgusting at every moment. So my question for you about life sciences, because this is the thing about AI and the future of AI. It's so, the use case for life science is so exciting and so impactful because it could really speed up drug development and the accuracy of our research. Where do you see it really affecting how drugs are developed and how actually medicine and care is provided to the patient? Yeah, when we talk about faster to market, coming from the financial industry, everything I was doing was to make the internal processes better, to make the banks more money. Here we're seeing products that actually get to the market. We're seeing better vaccines, better pharmaceuticals. We're seeing an impact and coming out of COVID, this is something that really kind of drove me towards in this way and I'm so happy to get into the life sciences industry. It's an impact that just makes you feel like you're giving a better impact into the world and to human life and you can't translate that to dollars, right? Right, right. Has there been anything here in particular that has caught your attention? Any surprises, anything that you'd like to see UI path do that could really make a difference in your business? The thing I'm most excited about coming out of here will be is the autopilot and the potential that it could bring not just for coding but for testing and I really love to see testing. The more you can test your automation, getting to the point with data, the more you can test that, the more you get, the more stable your production is, the easier people can sleep at night, the more relaxed your team is and then thus you have better products that you can develop, right? So yeah, autopilot society. I think that the closer relationship with SAP is absolutely brilliant and as we work a lot with SAP and a number of our clients, it just makes a lot of sense because when you're going out and touching applications outside of SAP, there's not really any great tools and some of the automations that you can build and that we've built in the past work brilliantly within SAP, pulling in some of the disparate data and making sure that you have a good end to end process. It's interesting because there was such a long period of time when you talk to SAP's customers, they really wanted this, you know, they were looking forward to it and for whatever reason it didn't happen and then boom, all of a sudden. Yeah. Somebody must have knocked the UI path and SAP heads together and said, guys, fix this problem and there's a lot of potential there. Really is, absolutely. You've talked about the rise of citizen developers and that is something that we're hearing a lot about at this conference and other conferences like it. Will that affect the skills needed in life sciences and other kinds of roles where we are seeing this rise of citizen development or are they truly non-technical people learning technical skills? 10 years ago, I would say it's not really feasible, right? It's really such. The more RPA has gotten mature, these platforms has gotten mature, UI path has got co-pilot. I think we're there. I think we have citizen developers who are creating attended bots, right? They're not creating the really complex processes. They're using their laptops or desktops and they're automating repetitive tasks that they understand and they know and they don't have to be super technical. They don't have to go through compliance things. They don't have to do security testing. They don't have to do all this other development tasks that you would normally to deploy into production. They could do it on their desktop. They could test it on their desktop. They can run it. And so absolutely and with autopilot, it becomes that much simpler with recording. So absolutely, I think we're there. I think they could do it. And so in a couple more years, I think we'll almost have as much citizen development as professional development now where you want to coin it. Have you guys seen use cases where the AI heard around the world sort of nipped at the heels of the traditional RPA business, but at the same time, created new opportunities for platforms like UI path to further add value to organizations. You know that Yin and Yang of, is it a tailwind or a headwind? Yeah, so that's a thing. And then it's almost like there was a great talk this morning on where AI has gotten to the point where it's passed human productivity, right? In many use cases. So, and that speaks to that point. And then it's going to get to a point where AI surpasses human intelligence and that it's a better alternative, a better approach. And that's that singularity moment where we approach. Yeah, right, Ro, indeed. So let's be careful what we ask for and how far we get down there. It's a very interesting proposition. I think that with a lot of the robots that are developed now, there's still a trust issue. You still need to have humans in the loop to make sure that the processes that are coming out of the black box actually make sense. So, you know, when I look at it from both sides of the business, the LLMs as well as the RPAs and any of the AI's that are out there, it's making sure that humans are still in the loop because there are still a lot of issues that are not necessarily solved with any of these, where you need to keep people informed with their analytics, you need to keep them informed with their reports and you need to make sure that things are just running on an ongoing basis and that a program upgrade or anything like that is not, you have to have a break fix out there, so you have to have those self-healing robots. How far away is the day where that human in the loop, maybe doesn't go away, but becomes less critical for the reason you talked about? Yeah, when I'm looking at human in the loop, I personally, I think that it's still a couple of years off because there are certain processes where you can definitely remove people from the loop almost immediately, but when you're looking at fully removing humans from the loop from a lot of different decisions, I think that there's going to be a certain level of trust and regulation in a lot of different industries where somebody like the FDA is going to say, maybe you shouldn't really be doing that. One of the examples we often use years ago, four or five years ago, maybe even more, Gary Kasparov, the chess master was on theCUBE, and he was telling us that the IBM supercomputer beat him, and he's so competitive, he started a competition. You know this story? Started a competition to have humans and computers compete against the supercomputer, and the human plus the computer always won. And he would have competitions every year, and so you'd have the best human plus computer teams. And I personally hope that stays around for a long, long time. I like to drive. Well, I'm not sure about that, but that may actually go human out of the loop, but to your point, I really do think human in the loop will always be there. I agree with Grant completely. Even if it's to the point, whenever I automate a business process, I tell them, we can reduce headcount, but I don't want to replace it. I want someone to know what's going in and at least someone to come out. If they're not in the middle, they need to do analysis, right? They need to do high value work. Somebody could take that and make that even more valuable. Now, there are some prescriptive steps where we can get rid of humans altogether where they just, you feed it the data and it comes out a hundred percent. But you know, I would like to keep driving too, but I just, there are cases where I see both, but you're always going to have humans in the loop, right? We got to have something to do. Yes, but here is my huge question right now, because we know that we are in the era of remote work and we know that Gen Z, the generation that is really starting their careers, not working in an office, at least as regularly as we all did, frankly, when we were starting our careers. So they're not getting the mentorship, the education, shall I say, of being in the workplace and knowing how these processes work and here's what we need to know. So the question being, how knowledgeable is that human in the loop going to be? Even a few years, does that at all? Do you think about those questions at all or? I worry about mentorship the most, but when you think about the educational processes and look as into it, Gen Z is a digital natives. So they've been growing up learning, their education has been online from a very young age and they've been able to adapt to those different ways of learning. But I do think that there's definitely a gap where people of our generation used to have mentors that you talk to on a daily, weekly, monthly basis so that you could have the guidance as to why are we doing this process, what is the necessary information? And that's definitely a gap where we need to continue to try and fill it in. Some of the return to work policies that are really aimed at making sure that people are just meeting each other, talking to each other, having the interactions face to face. You just can't replace that. Stuff's important, exactly. Well, Sonny and Grant, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, it's been a great conversation. Thank you so much. Thank you guys, really appreciate it, thanks. I'm Rebecca Knight, stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Forward Six. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage.


Interpol's Anti-Corruption Unit plays an essential role for our 190 member countries in the area of anti-corruption, crimes in sports, and asset recovery. As a response to the internalization of asset movement, Interpol hosts the Global Focal Point Platform as a network of anti-corruption and asset recovery practitioners. The Global Focal Point Platform does not replace the Mutual Legal Assistant, but is just an instrument to facilitate the sharing of sensitive information among the anti-corruption experts. After today, more than 100 Interpol member countries and more than 200 focal points have joined the initiative. Furthermore, the Anti-Corruption Unit actively supports capacity building in the framework of the Global Program on Anti-Corruption, Financial Crime, and Asset Recovery. The program was launched in 2012 and has led to the training of over 600 anti-corruption investigators and prosecutors. The knowledge that have been gained from these our global programs by participants have been shared with other investigators and officials in their home agencies and countries. And these have translated into improved coordination of anti-corruption investigations and resultant recovery of stolen assets. Taking financial resources away from criminals is a main tool to sustainably fight organized criminal networks. But the seizure of assets can be very challenging for investigators as technological development and innovation facilitates the moving of financial assets around the globe. In the modern era, corruption of financial crimes are interwoven. In almost every corruption investigation, there's some aspect of financial crimes such as money laundering. Following the flow of illicit funds and eventually seizing those funds is critical in suppressing any criminal network. These crimes are committed in the syndicated, sophisticated, and transnational manner. In some cases, the victims are deceived to disclose their personal data, which will eventually lead to financial loss. Financial crimes unit will continue working hand-in-hand with all member countries to fight against transnational, social, and Indian fraud. One of the major aspects of almost every criminal network is the ability to mask suspects' true identity, whether that's counterfeiting security documents or other means. The country with currency and security documents branch provides forensic and operational support to law enforcement agencies investigating country with currency and document fraud. One important initiative is Project S-Print that brings together the law enforcement community and security printing industry. The goal of Project S-Print is to prevent organized criminal networks from sourcing the equipment and materials that could be misused for counterfeiting. In addition, a major part of the anti-corruption unit works on protecting the integrity of sports. One focus is on match-fixing and another focus on performance-enhancing drugs, generally known as doping. Today Interpol remains the only international law enforcement organization dealing specifically with doping of both professional athletes and amateurs. It's about protecting the integrity of public authorities, the private sector, and sports competition. It therefore aims at protecting the trust in the societies of Interpol's member countries.