Hi, ddweudio. My name's Nicole Keene, I'm the creative programmer here at V&A Dundee. Unfortunatley, one of our co-convenants for today's event, one of the curators of plastics we're making our world, Charlotte Hale, is unable to join us today. So I am taking over, welcoming you. So welcome. Welcome to everyone in the room in Dundee and welcome to everyone joining us online. It is so exciting to have so many of you tuning in from all over the world. For those of you who are in the museum, I hope some of you were able to go and see the exhibition in that private view time before you came into the auditorium. And I really hope you enjoyed seeing it. Plastic has shaped our daily lives like no other material, from packaging to footwear to housewear to home goods, through to cars and architecture. It is a symbol of carefree consumerism, but also of revolutionary innovation. It spurred imaginations for decades. And today some of the dramatic consequences of the plastic boom can be seen everywhere. But plastic has lost its utopian appeal. Never has it been more important to understand the 150-year history of the material. It's essential yet superfluous, life-saving yet life-threatening, seductive yet dangerous. The exhibition was produced and curated by V&A Dundee, my colleagues here, by Vitra Design Museum and partners in Matt Lisbon, as well as curators from V&A South Kensington, and it examines the history and the future of this controversial material, from its early origins when it was intended as a sustainable alternative to natural resources, right through to its meteoric rise in the 20th century. Today's symposium brings together some of the thinking that we explore in that exhibition, with the Paul Mellon Centre's multi-year project, Climate and Colonialism. And my colleague Sharia is going to discuss the day in more detail and that in more detail. But I just wanted to say that I'm really excited to have a host of international researchers, designers, artists, activists from all over the world joining us to help us think through some of those ideas together. Today's symposium has been developed in collaboration with all the brilliant folks at the Paul Mellon Centre, and I just wanted to wholeheartedly thank all of my co-conveners, Sharia Chatterjee, Charlotte Hale and Laurie Bassam, for their fantastic ideas and support in pulling together such a brilliant symposium. And finally, before I hand over to Sharia, I just wanted to thank all the teams behind the scenes at V&A Dundee and at Paul Mellon for helping us pull off such a brilliant and ambitious programme. So without further ado, Sharia, do you want to join us? So thank you so much, Nicole. My name is Sharia Chatterjee, and I'm head of research and learning at the Paul Mellon Centre. I want to echo Nicole's thanks and warmly welcome all of you here in Dundee and all of you joining us online today. And hello. So most of us in the room have just walked around and seen the show, yeah? Great. So, and so today's conference, as Nicole has said, is in collaboration with V&A Dundee and the first event of the multi-year climate and colonialism research project at the Paul Mellon Centre. Rather than going into kind of a lot of detail about the project, I'd sort of point you to the Paul Mellon Centre website, and so look it up, find ways, there are lots of ways to participate and we can talk more. So for now, I just wanted to give you a little behind-the-scenes view of why we wanted to have this conference in the first place and some of the thinking and context behind it. You may have wondered what the relationship is between plastics and colonialism and, for that matter, climate. We think about plastics, climate and colonialism as sets of interconnected and contingent elemental, material and socially extractive processes and relations. While the exhibition provides a nuanced point of departure and provocations, the symposium today really seeks specificity and so through the talks, it will explore the complex life worlds of plastics and the geological and human temporalities that plastics inhabit and also instigate. Do things become obvious as you walk through the show? Next door. Plastics change how we think about scale and time. I have some images from the show that are not very good because I took them on my phone yesterday, especially for people online who haven't seen the show. So just as you entered the exhibition, as if Cannes film installation, Calpa sets the tone, taking us back two billion years to visually recreate what the proliferation and ubiquity of plastics has meant for the world's ecosystem since the discovery of oil. Plastics are clearly a geopolitical issue today, but as the first section of the exhibition so clearly shows, the search for plastics has been geopolitically charged from the very beginning, from the 19th century. Ivory and natural rubber extracted from Britain's colonies introduced materials that were malleable, strong, decorative and useful in different ways. The History of Natural Plastics, Shellac, Ivory... Sorry, there we go. Torto shell horn reminds us of the multi-species relations, processes of extraction and exploitation of resources and indigenous labour networks that these early materials were implicated in. They were shipped and sold along trade routes established under the British Empire. The very same routes over time have become sites of new exploitation, a synthetic plastic waste is shipped from the UK to former British colonies for their disposal. In the exhibition, for instance, we've seen some examples of gutter perchaw, the purified coagulated latex obtained from palakwym gutter trees, which are grown primarily in Southeast Asia. In the 1840s, gutter perchaw was found to be a useful natural thermoplastic which revolutionised global communications in the 19th century. It was used, really, to insulate underwater telegraph cables. After the first international cable was laid in 1851, communications networks developed quickly and the demand for gutter perchaw escalated. Grown in areas such as Borneo and Sarawak, which were part of the British Empire, the latex was not easy to locate and collect and it was mainly indigenous collectors who had the knowledge and skill required to bring it from the forest for trade to the outside world. The other problem was that there was no sustainable way to collect the latex. The tree needed to be felt first and then incisions were made into the bark. This meant that the whole enterprise was not only difficult and dangerous but also highly unsustainable. The gutter perchaw trade, unlike other colonial commercial ventures, was not part of the plantation system of production and the tree had disappeared from Singapore by 1857 and was quickly disappearing elsewhere, causing huge damage to rainforests and ecosystems. Although not reliant on the plantation economy, indigenous communities were used by elite landowners and merchants and became sucked into a global market system that ballooned and shrank. As British conservation mandates came down on the conservation of gutter trees and other more efficient means of extracting sap, we developed and set which set into motion its own destructive trail. The British raced ahead of other European powers and submarine telegraphy in the 19th century, thanks largely to its monopoly on gutter perchaw.  Let's cut to New York in 2015. A fiber optic cable snakes along the ocean floor in the Caribbean strangled by algae tapped by the NSA. This is a photograph by Trevor Paglen, one in a series built around the NSA scandal and the surveillance state. Many of the undersea routes identified for submarine telegraphy have continued to be applied with new types of cables, plastic cables, carrying ever denser streams of data. The media makes our world. It is how we communicate, represent, entertain, understand the world even. But media, as Gaitan Iheka writes, are equally tethered to social and ecological degradation in Africa and elsewhere from their production, distribution, consumption and disposal. Plastics are part of our lives and bodies at a scale that ranges from the most intimate to the broadest of the broad. Microplastics are part of our bloodstreams, tampons, diapers, furniture, building materials, airplanes, space exploration, digital infrastructure, communication, out of breath. It could go on. So it is also, as the exhibition suggests, a pharmacone having functioned in our society as life-saving remedy and toxic poison at the very same time. So you'd have noticed that the exhibition ends on a hopeful note, introducing us to new sustainable possibilities for bioplastics. So some of the questions that come up is how do we make sure not to reproduce colonial logics of production and consumption as we go forward? So, coming back to today, having taken you back in time, we're going to be thinking trans-historically across time and space, processes of extraction, lived experience, art, design and public policy. And we have a fantastic line-up of speakers to think with today. I think I had more slides. But the day is divided into sessions that are about an hour long, with short breaks in between for people to stretch their legs, get coffees, teas, both here at the VNA and in your homes and offices if you're joining us online. As you will see on the programme, we have some programme sheets for those of us here and it's on the website for those of us online. The talks are all quite short and are really meant to spark conversation. So we will have some time for questions for most of the panels, not all the panels, as you will see. And we ask our online audiences to type their questions into the Q&A box and my colleague Bailey Card will read them out. Thank you. For those of us in the room, raise your hands and we'll do it the old-fashioned way. Thank you and we can start the day. Hi again. I'm delighted to be chairing the first chapter of this symposium today and I'm going to be joined by two, frankly, fantastic people to kick the symposium off. First up, we have a brilliant human whose research, practice and writing and thinking all speak so fantastically to the themes of today. Heather Davies is an assistant professor of culture and media at the New School in New York. Heather's work draws on feminist and queer theory to examine ecology, materiality, contemporary art in the context of settler colonialism. Oh, I'm saying so many words today. Her most recent book, Plastic Matter, explores the transformation of geology, media and bodies in light of plastic saturation. Heather is also a member of the synthetic collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars and artists who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes. Together, Heather is, today, Heather is going to be sharing some thoughts about inheritance, transmission, barricade. So, welcome, Heather. Thanks so much, Nicole and Shria and everybody who's put this on. This has really been an amazing event. I'm so looking forward to the conversations throughout today's. I'm so happy to be here. So, I called my talk, I called my talk, Inheritans Transmission, barricade to illustrate briefly, sorry, I'm just also going to put my phone on just to make sure I keep to time. Forgive me, I should have done this a second ago, but if you just bear with me for one minute. Great. Great, I just don't want to make sure we keep to our schedule. I called the talk, Inheritans Transmission, barricade to illustrate briefly three different ways of framing the relationships between plastics and colonialism that I've been thinking about and that came out of the body of work that became the book. And so, these are really conceptual schema. They obviously don't speak to kind of a lot of the nuances and difficulties of dealing with plastic in specific local contexts. So, just to kind of like say that, but I really hope that they provide a way of opening different kinds of ways of thinking through what does it mean to like live in this world that is so saturated with plastics and where did it come from? So, in many ways, the question of Inheritans, if you're at all familiar with my work, you may have heard me say this before, but part of the reason why I came to this work was because my maternal grandfather was an executive and an engineer in DuPont for his entire life and helped to develop some of the synthetic fabrics and also the plastic milk bag. And this is a photograph of my grandmother in her very stylised 1950s kitchen in South Carolina. As you can see, there's like, just like numerous plastics all around her and she sort of helped to prototype that milk bag. But part of the reason why I feel like it's important in these kinds of contexts to talk about this is because of the ways in which, as Shria was really indicating, there's a kind of consolidation of privilege that happens for different types of people through the kind of embodiment of plastics.  Like part of my educational privilege, my kind of consolidation in kind of a middle class household, like the inheritance that I get through the power, through the processes of settler colonialism and our relationships to my ancestral lands which are here. So it's interesting to be back here. You know, all of these things, I think, really consolidate around what I would call plastic as a kind of infrastructure of whiteness. And what I mean by that is not to exclude the ways in which other people benefit or are harmed by plastic or the kind of consolidation of those two things, which is really more often the case, but rather to show the ways in which the kind of racial project of whiteness in tandem to the racial project of colonialism is really working through this material as a kind of infrastructure. The other reason why inheritance is a conceptually important term for me when I think about plastics is that plastic is not something that we choose at this point, right? It's not like we get to choose whether to live in a world with plastics or not. And of course, obviously our interactions with plastics are very divided by class, right? Like those of us who have more wealth are able to access materials that are less petrochemically saturated than those of us without, with the exceptions of some folks who live off the land, obviously, but in most cases around the world, this is now the ways in which it operates. And so the question of what we, plastic is therefore not something that we choose to live with or not, it is a part of the world that we will inherit and will obviously be there for generations to come and the sort of futurity of plastic is completely unknown, I would argue, but it's clear that it's going to have these kind of generational impacts. One of the other things that I think is really important about thinking about the relationships between plastics and inheritance is that as plastic has radically reshaped the world and our relations to it, the question, even the question of how plastics may be modifying the world speaks to what Jacques Derridae calls the aporia of inheritance. That is, we cannot know because the questions we ask and the environments we are in are already saturated and determined by plastics presence. Therefore, we're so, in other words, we're so saturated by the ability and we're so conditioned by the ability and affordances of what plastic means in the world through everything from communications, technologies to the ability to travel to the global circulation of food and products that in some sense, the kind of questions that we ask about plastic are already determined by what the global saturation of plastic has already meant. And I think that this is an important kind of conceptual apparatus for understanding our position and relationship to this broad set of materials. So again, for the philosopher Jacques Derridae, inheritance is always in the making as it works through us. I use the word inheritance also because it refers to how structures of privilege and power are passed on again as Shria was kind of talking about the kind of consolidation of empire, the use of plastic as yet another one of the, or protoplastics as yet, another one of the kind of tools of empire, the consolidation of particular kinds of materials in order to consolidate and build up the wealth of Great Britain at the expense in many ways of the colonies. So as a term, inheritance is still primarily used both legally and informally to speak of property relations. Inheritance is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as the quote, succession to property, a title, office, et cetera, a coming into or taking possession of something as one's birthright, possession, ownership, right of possession. So inheritance as a right, a possession, and property indicates how Western modernity conceives of intergenerational time, right? And I think that thinking about that in relationship to plastic helps to make some of the ideological investments in what this material is and how it emerges in the world, not just as a kind of, you know, I think that the pitch that we're often given is that there was this necessity for certain kinds of objects and therefore plastics were created to fill a gap, right? I think in many ways when you go back and actually do the kind of archival research, it was in many ways the sort of opposite, right? It's like, it's that in fact, there was an ability to be able to make these different kinds of materials and then markets were created out of them, right? And what I'm really interested in is like, what is the drive? What are the kinds of sort of unintended or maybe unexamined ideological investments that go into the creation of that kind of a material to begin with? What are the fundamental kind of understandings of our relationship between materiality in general? What is our understanding of our relationship between nature and culture, for example, that Western modernity has really embedded? And here I think thinking about inheritance as property rather than as skills or as ways of being assumes a naturalized relation to capital and to colonial extraction. And it is about the ways in which filial relations, patriarchy and race unfold across generations, most often consolidating rather than redistributing privilege, right? And I think that plastic is one of those examples that really shows us how this functions. So then of course there's the question of like what do we do with these inheritance, which is I think part of what the exhibition is really trying to get at, right? It's like so if this is now the world that we live in and so many brilliant thinkers in this room today are really trying to get at, it's like how do we not just keep this heritage alive or but how do we kind of relaunch it otherwise? What are the possibilities for improvising with it or for doing something else with it? So the next, oh sorry, this is another slide. I'm sure you've seen all these kinds of things in many places. So the next way to think about that I've been trying to think about plastics and relationship to these three conceptual categories that link it back to the kinds of histories of colonialism and specifically from the context that I'm from, from Northern North America, to think about settler colonialism and my own implications in it as a settler on those lands is also through the kind of concept of transmission. So in some ways I wanted to have a kind of differential concept that allows us to both talk about the ways in which plastic can be this consolidation of privilege, the ways in which it's shoring up certain kinds of privilege and especially I think in kind of racial or colonial manners. But also I wanted to be able to talk about what are the ways in which we might think about waste colonialism as a kind of transmission, right? And I think that often when we think about waste colonialism we think about the end product of plastics, where waste goes, et cetera, in the world. But I think that for my thinking one of the things that's really important to emphasise is the production processes rather than the end processes. So this is a very famous petrochemical refinery that's situated next to the Amdoong First Nation in Sarnia, Ontario. And it's part of Canada's Chemical Valley. So transmission as I describe it is the differential impact of plastic pollution. So the ways in which sort of the flip side of the consolidation of privilege, the flip side of the consolidation of inheritance as something that allows us to build up wealth, allows us to have increasingly kind of easeful lives, right? And when I say us you can enroll yourself in that us or not as you think that you are globally positioned and I think that at this moment in time it's not actually so easy to differentiate between what we call the global south and global north based on the kinds of ways in which economy, et cetera, circulates, which isn't to say that those categories aren't conceptually useful at the same time, but to also complicate them a little bit. You know, as Patrick O'Hare was reminding me yesterday in relationship to his really important research on Uruguay. So transmission describes the imposition of plastic, right? It's legacies on multiple peoples, largely racialized and poor people who deal more concretely and often in an embodied fashion with the intergenerational effects of plastic and who are often not responsible for its emergence or proliferation. So transmission considers not just waste but the potentially harmful aspects of plastic that include its production, especially in relationship to things like benzene or vinyl monomers. So transmission refers to the ways in which plastic permeates every and all aspects of life on earth, but often without the consent of those people and other beings who are most affected by it, right? So transmission of plastic describes one of the aspects of dispossession and the undermining of health and well-being of communities. In many ways, you can really see in a place like the United States or Canada the kind of continued use of plastic as a mechanism of settler colonialism and as a mechanism of the ongoing after life of slavery, right? Because plastic is transmitted on to people and land without their consent and it often renders the land itself so toxic as to become in some cases completely uninhabitable as in parts of Louisiana, for example. I mean, one of the other problems with these kinds of chemical transmissions is that they are not uniform or entirely predictable. So they may skip generations or pass over a particular person and therefore it's difficult to kind of trace in the kind of cause and effect logic that we like for being able to kind of talk about the relationship of chemical harm. Chemical harm obviously doesn't happen in that kind of a way and so therefore talking about transmission I think is really helpful borrowing it from the terms that are being used from media studies to be able to show the ways in which transmission is obviously not always just like a direct process, right? It's like, you know, there's always noise and interference in the process of transmission and therefore that mean that certain bodies and certain people might be shielded from the kind of chemical effects of living close to or in proximity to very toxic environments and yet at the same time other people will be massively affected, right? So transmission is uneven in the ways in which it can be, it cannot always be easily mapped. As I said, it can skip generations, show up as undefined ailments and also aren't recognized by the kinds of cause and effect logics that we underscore how we think of industrial harm and that obviously is exacerbated by things like cocktail effects where these chemicals are not just happening in a kind of laboratory situation but are of course interacting with everything else that is already in our environment. So transmission, as I propose it, is not meant as a kind of other side of a binary to inheritance but more like a dialectic where they merge into each other and are not necessarily so clear cut because I think a lot of us both benefit from and are subjected to the kind of transmission of plastics at the same time but I wanted to be able to have a kind of conceptual differentiation in order to be able to do things like attribute blame or attribute responsibility, maybe blame is a bit of a harsh word but attribute responsibility, attribute, and also be able to talk simultaneously about the ways in which this particular set of materials is often an imposition even if it then becomes a useful imposition under certain circumstances. So the final... Oh, and this is one of the examples of a community that has been undermined by particularly PVC production but this is Mosfill in southern Louisiana and the photograph is taken by Courtney Desiree Morris whose maternal lineage is from this place and it's one of these examples of a community that was completely a thriving community for generations, hundreds of years, a primarily black community that has been undermined and rendered toxic to the point at which most people were forced to leave. So you can really see the ongoing mechanisms of colonialism through the production of plastics in the examples of these really horrible cases of environmental racism. So the last way in which I wanted to think through the kind of links between, conceptually links through the links between plastics and colonialism was through this notion of barricade. So transmission works only in relation to the idea of barricade, I would argue, right? You don't get an idea like you can just transmit the effects of chemical saturation or chemical harm onto other people without some kind of logic that assumes that the people doing this are somehow going to be safe themselves, right? Where some bodies are supposedly shielded from the harmful effects of chemical saturation. But I also think that when we think about plastics, one of the things we really think about is this kind of idea of plastic packaging or in this case the kind of wrapping of an entire house with Tyvek where plastics often used as a kind of shield or as a barrier, right? And we think of it as this kind of protective coating that we can then kind of interact with the world in a way that feels safer, in a way that feels like it's less subject to kind of processes of death or decay, in a way that like literally shields ourselves off from the world around us. And of course, into some extent this is true, we saw this all in relationship to some of the uses of, for example, the really important uses of masks during the pandemic, in the ongoing pandemic. But we can also see the ways in which that ideology of barricade is part of what is the underlying condition of the proliferation of plastics to begin with. We can also see this in sort of very ironic or absurd fashion. So the ways in which, for example, art historian, Kirsty Robertson talks about petrochemicals, or sort of petro textiles, which are paradoxically used to keep oil workers safe. So oil workers who work on, this is a hazmat suit made for children by the artist Marina Serco. But Kirsty Robertson talks about the ways in which often oil workers are meant to wear all kinds of protective clothing themselves made out of different kinds of synthetic materials that are then saturated in flame retardants. Again, another petrochemical in order to shield themselves from the potentially harmful effects of their job, which is working in the oil industry. So you can just see the layers and layers and absurd layers upon which we're using oil to protect ourselves from the chemicals and the hazards of oil. And I think that within this kind of logic of the barricade, there's what Rachel Lee calls the fiction of comfort. So this claim is, and she says, I'm just gonna quote her, my claim here is that this border wall thinking, this thinking that allows us to believe that if we can somehow shield ourselves off, we will not actually be subject to the effects of the harms of plastic exposure or the kind of separation of warfare chemical exposure from everyday domestic industrial exposure. That this not only is a fundamental misunderstanding of the actions of chemical toxicants as they wend their way through ecological systems, through soil, surface, groundwater, air and bioaccumulation and non-human to human species dwelling in those spaces. But more importantly, she says that it offers a fiction of comfort for elite subjects of the global north. That fiction of comfort involves imagining themselves geographically protected from the toxicant spillovers and secondary contaminants that will occur over there in some foreign country or foreign territory to foreign bodies, to bodies that don't look like mine and not also here in the homeland, which of course is a completely mythological way of thinking. Like it's not like the chemicals themselves actually have this kind of understanding of the ways in which human geographies are constituted. But of course, at the same time, there obviously is a way in which these kinds of chemicals are intentionally used as means of dispossession and means of ongoing settler colonialism. So in some ways, I think that what's really important in the kind of logic of the barricade is to both understand the ways in which it actually does function and the way that it simultaneously breaks down under the conditions of the ways in which chemicals actually do saturate the world and flow through the world. But I think it is this fiction of the possibility of sealing off that creates the violence of plastic as it becomes so widely dispersed. I mean, I think that if we fundamentally really believed that any chemical we put out into the world was gonna come back into our own bodies, that we would have a radically different understanding of what it was acceptable to put out into the world, right? So just briefly to conclude, I just wanna say that one of the kind of openings there then would be an opening to a different kind of material ethics, which becomes possible when we take seriously, for example, what Stacey Olimo has called transcorporeality. In other words, if we refuse the fiction of comfort and understand that whatever harms are put into the world will come back to haunt us, to inhabit our bodies, to inhabit generations to come, in opposition to a kind of individual, liberal environmental greenwashing that promotes either a kind of nimby politics or a politics that stresses consumer redemption. So thanks so much. The next person that's gonna join us is Alia Fareed and she's a Kuwaiti Puerto Rican artist who works in film and sculpture to give visibility to not commonly recognized histories. I saw Alia's exhibition in lieu of what is in Basel last year when I was there for the opening of our exhibition, Plastic Remaking Our World, which was at Vitra before it came here and then goes to Matt in Lisbon after. I was really struck when I saw the exhibition by the really clear connections between unpacking colonial histories through materials, through thoughts on water as a political actor in the Arab region, and I left with an understanding of plastic as a really key enabler to the weaponization of water as well as a facilitated to the access of this basic human need. And these ideas really resonated deeply with the ideas that we explore in the exhibition in trying to unpack the kind of complexities in the promise and the problem of plastic and how that impacts people across the world. And that is why I was so keen to have Alia here with us today and I'm so excited to have her here with us today. Before she joins us, we're just gonna watch a little bit of a snippet of one of the films that she's made, which is a part of the wider body of that series that I saw in Basel, but I actually haven't seen this film specifically, so I'm quite excited to see it. So if we get that film up and then when that's finished, Alia's gonna come up and join us and present. Dweud me nhw? Bech semyr yw weith amr. Yb haes sawb? Ynna, chythu'r un. Chwad, tawel sylwyd. Bech mech sef. Mech sef? Dwi'n mewn i'n baid. Ymwad. Ymwad? Parad. Tadad? Ymwad? Chwad. Shyn? Chwad, chwad. Chwad? Mewn baid? Yw agwb. Olla. Chwathur bewyd, fasawd. Yn dweud? Baid? Na, na, gwnna. Chwwyd? Chwyd, chwyd baid yw a chwyd. Chwyd? Chwyd. Chwyd. Chwyd. Chwyd. Chwyd. Yn dweud? Chwyd. Chwyd. Chwyd. Chwyd. Chwyd. Chwyd. Chwyd. Raibad hefyd. Yn dialectw IH. itha bhe 축 meeca. Bonjour, Cheyenne. Teni i bwyswch ygoel. Yn falwch gade unrhyw bod eutol hut oed. Tharaetol chem a gdoedd. Itha gade unrhyw unrhyw! Yn tydd eich chi? Haen, ship..... Haen, Haen.... Haen.... Minwmaill yn rhaibwb. Haen .... haen....... Mae'i sbos, mae'n sbos. Mae'n bwys wneud. Mae'n fathio. A wneud, mae'n fathio. Maeín fathio. Haen.... Haen, Hadell Haen. Haen.... haen. Be siar. Be sabaith. Zamel. O, rhaid i'n gwylltwb hefyd. Maen nhw'n teisach. Be hydi. La, sami, sami. Sami? Maen nhw'n teisach. Rhaid i'n bwys mewn haleis? Rha? Rhaid i'n bwys mewn haleis? Rhaid i'n bwys mewn haleis? Sami? Rhaid i'n bwys mewn haleis? Rhaid i'w borders? Benark. Ben-reib? Ben-reib. Ben-reib.部wys mewn haleis? Abdu Lhasyad. Gys mewn haleis? No. 그렇죠a felly mor. Ho tourism? Have a little boib double handk Up-Down. Boib? No. Hawnch. Mae tu chi'n zenereth i eisell y gwaith. Rhaid diodd nith 당신yni. Na nith? Gyfwyr yma? Cyfwyr yma. Cymru? Gyfwyr yma. Cyfwyr. Cyfwyr a gyfwyr? Mae hanes yn ei ddod i'r cwymru. Mae hwnnw i'r ddod i'r cyfrannu'r cyfrannu? Mae hwnnw i'r cyfrannu? Mae hwnnw i'r cyfrannu? Mae hwnnw i'r cyfrannu. Mae hwnnw i'r cyfrannu. Mae'r brach yn ddim yn ymwneud. Abydd. Abydd. Aziz. Aziz. Aziz. Mae'n mawr hynny. Ffaluwch. Ffaluwch.


or laws that we have in place and have for decades, there's a real problem with enforcement there. We can get to this issue related to power and representation and someone's ability to really stand up and try to enact or to call in the rights that on the books are ours, but in practice, we don't see. And I think that's a lot of what's behind the uprisings that we're seeing in the street. People keep saying, go through the system, follow the system, follow this complaint, do this, do that, and nothing happens. But that's because we have things on the books, but the way that they actually play out and actually work in real life, there's very little teeth behind that at all. So I think we really need to change the way that we structure policy and the way that we enforce those laws and policies.


Morning, everybody. Nice to see you all here today. This is actually the first time Michael and I are on stage together. This is quite cool. It took us almost 10 years to have a presentation together, but this time we thought we're going to do this talk together. So Michael and I are both co-owners of the AMAZEE Group, and we're going to tell you a story today, which is a lot of the history of AMAZEE, how we grew from one to seven companies, and also some of our learnings we had along the way. We're going to try and keep some space for Q&As. We might talk a bit too long. We're going to try and keep it short. Please interrupt us with questions. If you have any, if you want to hear anything more, otherwise we'll just go and start through and tell you, first of all, a little bit about our history. So where does our history start? It starts in 2007, 10 years ago. 10 years ago, Gregory, my husband and I founded a company called AMAZEE AG. We had the goal to build a social collaboration platform. So we wanted to build something that was kind of Facebook meets Basecamp, a platform provided to the world, a freemium model, earn money with it, a classical web startup at that time. We found an angel investor, and then we had to build that platform. But of course, we didn't know how, because my husband's a lawyer, and I'm an accountant, and we both didn't have any technical knowledge. So we did find an agency to help us. We did the classical outsourcing thing, and we found a great agency in Romania, and that's actually where we met Vossi, who's also sitting here. Vossi was actually the first developer to work on our platform. At that time, it was Drupal 5. And that was our first touchpoint with Drupal, but it was also our first agency-client relationship. Only that we were the client. It was very interesting. We learned a lot along the way, and it was intense. And then 2008, we launched that platform called Amazey.com. We got connected. So coming from a bank and a consulting firm, we weren't connected in that web space. So we really went full-on. We went to Silicon Valley, met people. We went to conferences. We signed up for awards. We did the whole startup thing, and we did it with lots of enthusiasm and also with some success. So the media liked us. We continued to promote our brand, but we actually haven't launched anything really significant. It was an alpha version in May, and then it was the beta in September. And we put a lot of hope in launching that beta platform in September 2008. We launched it at a conference in New York, and it didn't go that well.  They didn't go up as much as we hoped they would. And that was actually the first feeling that it might not turn out exactly the way we planned for it. So that was in September 2008. We continued 2009. Our betas out. People are using it. We have some really happy users, but we just don't have enough. That feeling sustained. We're not having enough people sign up, and we're not having enough people convert into paying users. At that time, we were eight people in our company, which we had to pay. And our money was slowly running out. So 2009 was a crisis year, and we thought, what are we going to do with AMAZEE? How are we going to continue? We redid our pitch deck. We tried to find investors, but we weren't that classical venture capital case. We had kind of a social mission with our platform, and we weren't scalable enough to provide that big, big, big vision that they were looking for, the big money. They always said, oh, yeah, it looks good, but come back when you have x amount of users, or when you have x amount of paying users, and we just didn't get there.  We had to lay off those people who weren't willing to work for a minimum-existence salary. And we continued three or four of us. And then in mid-2009, I remember very well, I was at Boston with a group of Swiss entrepreneurs. I got that email from Urs, who is our CEO in Zurich now, at that time asking if we would be willing to do a white label of our platform for the company he was working for at that time. And we were thinking about white labeling and customizing our solution earlier, but we always had that vision to become this big platform. And so we decided not to. But of course, if money gets tight and things get rough, you reconsider things like that. And so we did. And it was the best decision ever, because we did three white label platforms in six months, and we were really happy. We felt that what we're doing is valuable. We were earning money, feeling good about it. So that's how we slowly turned into becoming an agency, because we built customized solutions based on our platform. We had a double life at that time. We were still promoting Amazing.com. Amazing.com was our main website, and there was this little sentence in the footer saying we actually also built customized solutions. Contact us. But that was it. We were still hoping that Amazing.com would take off, but it didn't. And so we made a quite bold decision mid-2010 to relaunch and to say, Amazing.com is going to die. This is not going to work out. We want to be an agency. We're going to out ourselves. We're not the cool startup anymore, but a classical agency-building website based on Drupal. And that's what we did in September 2010. So almost exactly seven years ago, we launched Amazing Labs. Then that was the best decision, because we were already profitable in the fourth quarter of 2010, and work just came flowing in. So it was really the second type after the foundation of our company where we had this big boost. The second real hype that started, we started building up the team from there. Then what happened next, 2013? So 2010, Amazing Labs as the brand was born, and 2013, you see Amazing Metrics there. Now, what did we do? We wanted to introduce a new service. We had one large client asking for more web analytics, SEO, SEM services, and we were thinking of how we can offer that and how we can also promote these services on our website. And the more we thought about it, the more we thought it doesn't really fit together. What we do with Amazing Labs, being designing and building websites, doesn't really fit completely with the kind of branding and services that we would want to provide for web analytics and SEO. So we decided to spin that service out. We decided to create a new entity for it, a new brand for it, and hire a new CEO to run and build up that company, which we did in 2013. And then it took like a year to year basis. So 2014, we started Austin. Now, how did that story come? We had two freelancers working for us already since 2009 and 10. Those are Catherine and Andrew, who were based in San Antonio. We tried to get them to Switzerland. It didn't work because of permits. And then we thought, okay, if we can't get them here, maybe we should go there. And then we tried to evaluate other cities and see does it make sense to build something in Texas. We thought San Antonio, maybe not, but Austin is really cool. We always evaluated our locations based on is there a good university there? Is there talent there? Is there a creative circle in that area? And do we think it's kind of cool enough for us to be there? So we decided to open up an office in Austin. They moved to Austin and we also hired a CEO from day one to run and build up the company. Next year, Cape Town. So story of Cape Town is a personal one. So Greg and I spent a long summer in Brazil in 2000. That was 2013. And we didn't have any social really interactions there. So we spent a lot of evenings with Khyperinias and thinking about life and our future. And we actually decided that we wanna change something and move away from Switzerland and move to South Africa and raise our children there, at least for a time, because Gregory's half South African, half Swiss. So we made that personal decision that we wanna move to South Africa and we tried to justify it with some business decision. So we moved there, we checked out the scene there and we saw that there's a very vibrant, very fun community of triple people there and we decided to open up a business in Cape Town, which we did in 2015. To that, Cape Town, the move was fantastic and the start of the company there was great as well. We found a really, really good core of enthusiastic, creative, good developers who helped us build the company. And it was a big success as well. It was the first company for us to break even and even pay back the initial investment that we made. And it still is a great success. We'll still talk about the development of the Cape Town office a bit later. And then came after Cape Town 2015, we have a MAZIO in 2016 and that's what Michael will tell you about. Thank you. Yeah, so at that time, at 2015, we had roughly 35 people all over the world already and we had three offices and they all served local clients. And one of the hardest issue for us, being a Drupal agency in countries where there is no specific hosting provider, like in Cape Town, you can't find anybody that knows really how to host Drupal. We had to invent our own. We had to build our own hosting solution that was able to run in Switzerland and you can imagine Switzerland banking, a lot of things have to happen in Switzerland. There are actually laws that prevent data to leave Switzerland. However, that exactly works in the internet is not clear, but that's what the law says. So at least the solution is to put the server there and interestingly, actually, if you wanna host a website in Cape Town, don't host it anywhere else than in South Africa because sometimes the internet to South Africa is just gone for five minutes. The internet in Cape Town still, or in South Africa still works, but the connection outside is gone. So you need servers there. So we had to find a solution and since we actually started in 2008, when Amazey.com the first time appeared, we hosted ourselves. We never were really proud of what we had, but we felt there is no other way. And so we started to implement that team more. We created an individual team, the Amazey Labs DevOps team that built hosting solutions for ourselves and we worked very closely with our developers and we basically built our dream tools that we liked with automated deployments and Docker-based and things like that. And then I think it was in Drupal.com Barcelona. I gave a technical presentation and during the presentation I gave a demo where I synchronized the database from the production site to my local. I changed something, I pushed it up during the presentation and everybody asked me afterwards about the tools that I used instead of actually the topic I gave about. And they came back and just like more and more people like in Switzerland, Drupal grew and more and more client or more and more agencies that at the beginning said that Drupal is never gonna take off. They now came back and said like, okay, I need also Drupal hosting because my clients wanna host in Switzerland. So long story short, we got a lot of people asking us, can you host? And so in actually end of 2015, we decided, let's try. We didn't know if it worked. We wrote a small business model that showed it could work and in 2016, we created a shadow bookkeeping within Amazey Labs Zurich to try Amazey IO out. And so we didn't wanna create a new company yet. We didn't wanna go to all the burden of start funding a company and investment. We just wanted to make sure does that thing even make money, does it work? And so we hired already a CEO. We hired additional team members and we started in 2016 throughout that year to really figure out if it works and it worked. And so then actually in 2017 now since this year we are our own company and do hosting all over the world with a completely remote team. So that's how we ended up with Amazey IO. And the newest thing this year is called GMT or all our teams have short names like SOS, LTS, DDG. And so one of them is called GMT and GMT is the global maintenance team. One of the things that Amazey Labs went through over the last year, we completely switched our way how we work. We went from a more water folly somehow maybe a child thingy process to actually real scrum means we have two weeks prints. So we define at the beginning of the two weeks we define what we wanna work on and then we work on that for two weeks. The problem is clients call you and clients say, hey, can you change please that front page? Can you move that block down to the bottom? And we said, yeah, of course, this in four weeks fine because the sprint just started and there's nothing going in that sprint and the next sprint starts in two weeks and you get it tilt down and they're like, what? And so we had a lot of issues with that and especially in the past during that water flow HIV thing you could call Michael at five PM in the evening and I did it like it wasn't a problem. We were small, we had to find ways how to do stuff very fast and so these clients just were hoping that they can still like get stuff done very well and we realized from a team happiness that's not good. If you just changed the time or changed the process every morning and the priority we reshuffle that every time that's very bad for development teams. So that's why we implemented scrum but we had to find a way how to how can we make the clients still happy. So the idea of creating an individual team for only maintenance was always there. We initially tried to have the regular scrum teams like maybe separating one day or just like some story points are reserved but honestly that never worked. So then in 2007 when we decided, okay, let's actually do it. Let's create a team that is completely remote that is preferably 24 hours online that works in can ban instead of scrum but only works on really small things. So this is how we have now Amazelabs GMT which has people almost on every continent now that provides maintenance services. So after the website has been built by one of the Amazelabs teams, it's handed over into the GMT and we do that. So that's where we are today. We are right now I think 58 people with more than from more than 13 different countries and we have people from all over time zones. So you can imagine there is quite a lot of things that we do and all these things bring a lot of challenges. So now what we wanna do is show you these challenges that some of them we're facing still today, some of them we face in the past and yeah, how we approach them and Downey is gonna do the first one. Thank you. So challenge number one for us was how can we grow but protect our existing business? So Amazelabs from 2010 was really successful and for us it was important to sustain this core because it was the backbone of our success and it has to continue to be the backbone of it. So we decided from the start that whenever we create a new service or add a new location, that we wanna create a new company for this. So these are the two ways of how you can generally diversify either in the service area or in the location area. So we had Amazelabs branching out to Austin and Cape Town, obviously location and the services that we diversified were Amazemetrics with the online marketing and Amazio with the hosting. So why own entities? Many other companies decide to do it differently. For us, there were several reasons that came together. Some are fact-based and some are emotional. One is that not all areas of the business run smoothly all the time. Even now, if we look at the past year, if we look at this year, we always have some entities that are great, great performers and we always have one or two that are shaky and not doing great because of several reasons. Now we wanted to make sure we don't jeopardize the success of the well-running companies, of the well-funded companies, of the profitable companies by creating some funky project that might pull the whole company down because they're hardworking people in the successful business that wanna be able to get their salaries, get a bonus. They're shareholders of that company who want to get a return. They're individual shareholders in those companies who contribute to the success of that company. If we come up from the holding with this crazy new idea, it's like Michael, Greg and I sitting together at the table and saying, let's do amazing space next year. Then we could jeopardize the success of the whole group if we do that and that's something we wanted to prevent and we thought the easiest prevention is by creating an old legal entity. One legal entity can go down by itself but the rest is still intact. What's also nice is that, so the profits that were generated from the well-running business, we were able to reinvest into the new companies. So we did continue to fund AMAZY with our own money but we also were able to take the profits and reinvest them into our new cases. We also were able to help each other out. If one company is a bit low on cash, we could draw from the other one and we can just make sure that we help the weaker or the building up companies with the ones that are stronger. So it ended up that we're actually only these 58 people but we have seven companies but it was a clear decision to do it that way and we don't regret it and it's a strategy that we continue to follow. We believe that each company needs a known CEO who takes responsibility for profit and loss statement and also is able to become a shareholder of that entity but doesn't necessarily become a shareholder of the whole group. So diversification is one of those ways how we approach that growth. The other aspect of that growth and how to protect the existing business is focus. We believe that generally following one strategic goal per entity is very important. That we succeed if clients know why they book us. If clients know what does AMAZY Lab stand for? What does AMAZY IO stand for? We don't wanna be that shop that serves everything and everybody but actually doesn't have a focus and no unique selling proposition. So we made sure that every company stands for something and that that company is able to focus on it because we just believe that there are different skills needed from a team who runs a service agency providing design and development then for a company like AMAZY IO that develops a product that is scalable. So our common denominator of all those entities that we build was the decision that we're gonna create an entity if the project works out, the decision that we're gonna hire a known CEO to run that company to make sure that we protect our management's capacity and increase it with new people. So running seven companies is actually then the next challenge. The complexity that comes with multiple companies is not to be underestimated. There are financial resources required. Each of these entities needs to be funded. In Switzerland, for example, we funded every company is a so-called Octiengesellschaft that needs to be funded with 100,000 Swiss francs. So that's the first step, it needs resources. You also have to think of shareholder agreements. Who owns this company? Is it just the holding? Then it's easy, then it's just Michael, Greg and myself. But as we said, we also wanted the CEOs to be part of it. We want them to have a clear incentive to grow that company and to become owner of that as well. So it needs contracts. It needs thoughts about giving away equity and how much and all that. So it needs a bit of a legal and financial brain behind all this structuring. And that for relatively small amount of people that we have. Also, all of these entities need accounting, need legal advice. They need their own contracts with clients. They need their own terms and conditions. There's a lot of cross-billing happening between the entities. There's increased overhead costs out of that. Some companies need to be audited separately. So just the administrative managing of these companies is not to be underestimated. Now, what did we do or how did we do it? We believe it needs good operational people if you want to run a structure as the one we have. You need someone who's capable of having the oversight of all these entities and having them under control. If you have a group of people who's shy of creating contracts, of doing accounting, then this is surely not the best model to run. Then you just wanna have one entity and grow it as big as you can and keep that complexity really low. But because we had these people, we weren't shy of it. And we said, for us, it works. It is in line with our strategy. So let's just do it. Let's just deal with it. Let's just deal with this complexity and do it. So our factors, as I already say, each entity has a CEO manager who's responsible for money, team, clients. So there's a high degree of independence of all those entities. But to kind of keep that complexity somehow in borders, we thought about what can we combine? So where is this independence not required? And that's where I wanna get back to Cape Town. So Cape Town became more and more of this service center. So we started hiring people in Cape Town who did combined work. For example, accounting and administration. We have one team member in Cape Town who does the salaries for all the entities. She does the accounting and supplier accounting for all the entities. She's learning about Swiss law. She's learning about South African law. She's learning all these different things, but it's possible because she has her mindset focused on the accounting part of our group. And we also have people we hired in Cape Town to work for the online marketing team of Amazing Metrics. So we do body leasing out of Cape Town as well. So we think of how can we use these hubs or how can we use our existing structure to bring things together that fit together? And that is mainly administration, legal, but also internal design and development is something that we can provide in-house from one location. So finding out what should be differentiated and what can be combined is something that has been accompanying us all the time. And we believe there needs to be independence when it comes to financials, to team, to clients, but not when it comes to administrative support functions. Also, some things that need to be united is branding. It's not that every Amazing Labs entity can do whatever they want with the Amazing Labs logo. It's not that Austin can all of a sudden come and say, we changed the Amazing Labs logo because we think it has to look different. Doesn't work. So branding and some of the marketing is also something we have to provide as a central service. Another thing that became very important for us is finding out what kind of synchronization meetings do we need across the group. So we created these teams of POs, of product owners, of front-end developers, back-end developers, designers, CEOs, and all these have different meet-ups when they come together across the entities. So there is, for example, a PO meeting that happens across the entities where all POs meet and exchange knowledge, knowledge, status on projects. We just wanna make sure that the knowledge is transferred and that we don't repeat mistakes because there is a high degree of individuality among those entities and the people who run these entities, we have to make sure that we sync. We have to make sure that not every entity has to make the same mistakes again. So we try and have these meetings. We have a CEO catch-up where all the CEOs of the entities meet where we just talk about critical things and how we can improve on those for the future. So finding those synchronization meetings among the same skill group or among the same kind of management group has become very important for us. So those are some of the steps how we manage that complexity that does exist. Now what does that complexity bring as the next? So here's just a view of the branding because we have the different brands. So the AMAZEE Group, AMAZEE Labs, AMAZEE Metrics and IO. So even to create a banner representing us and our identity adds a bit of complexity because you can't just put one logo there. So yes, the complexity also leads to culture and communication difficulties or differences and Michael's gonna speak a bit about that. Cool. Very early we realized at AMAZEE that having different cultures together is quite, is a very important part that you understand what is your culture and especially in a remote team and different locations with different backgrounds, you cannot just accept culture. We really feel we need to strive for culture. We need to make sure that the culture is infused into teams. One of the things we do is we eat lunch together everywhere and all the teams do that. So every office has a big enough table for everybody to get lunch, come together and eat together. That was something that we never created. That was not something that we decided when we started AMAZEE Labs, this is one of our main culture things. It just happened somehow. It happened over the years. But when we opened the next office in Austin, we realized that these people that were already part of the culture in Zurich and now work in the US, they were expecting that. Somehow for them that was the AMAZEE way. And like the new CEO that came in, which was not part of the culture, we suddenly had clashes in between because they maybe had another understanding of how a day should look like. If you walk into an AMAZEE office, almost everywhere, it's super quiet. Everybody has headphones on, listens to music, but there's not a lot of talking. And a lot of times people come to us and say like, do you even communicate? And then we say yes, but there are specific times like during lunch. If you walk into lunch, there's a lot of talking, there's chatting about projects, about weekends, about people getting tickets in Vienna last night, and things like that. So there is these on and off times. And I'm not saying that every company should do that. That's us, but it's just important that this is understood. So one of the things we do during hiring, we're not only doing skill checks, we're also doing cultural checks. And we do that with inviting the people into the team. Usually if we hire somebody, they come for at least half a day, lunch included, or better, even a whole day, to come into the team and work with the team for a whole day so they know how we work. And we ask them, is that the environment you like to working? Because it could be not. And then it's perfectly fine. That's not a bad or a good thing. It's just not the case. And so cultural checks is during hiring is as much or maybe sometimes even more important than the skills. Because the skills, you can teach somebody. Like at Amazing Labs, everybody learns JavaScript right now because we do decoupled. But if somebody is not used to a specific culture, changing them is very, very hard. And the other thing is also it needs leadership. The leadership needs to bring the culture, needs to exercise the culture. The easiest way to change the behavior of a team is to change your own behavior first. And the team will follow automatically. So one of the things we learned with hiring completely external CEOs that bring their own culture with that this didn't really work for us. So after Amazing Austin, every other company that got created, somebody of the management of the leadership team of that new company has been part of Amazing for at least a couple of years. So that person can bring in the culture. Like if you look at Cape Town, it was Daniel that started the team. At Amazing IO, I'm part of the management team. GMT was started by somebody that was working for us for a couple of years. So it's always coming out of the existing one and bringing that culture back. And the next thing that we really think is especially in communication, you need to allow communication. We have a lot of different time zones, a lot of different people. And the easiest way is to talk about things. So what we use, we use Slack and we are 58 employees and we have 512 public channels. Don't ask me what they're all about. I'm maybe in maybe hundreds of them. But just allowing people to have discussions, to have, there are cat video channels. There are, I don't know, there is like talking about tacos where the only allowance you're on is to post in a taco emoji whenever you have a taco. Things like that. But it's really important because you bring so many different cultures together that have different understandings and allowing them. And the next important thing, we not only do that with our employees, we do that with also our clients. At the lower screenshots you see, we have 58 full members, these are our employees, but we have 225 guest accounts. And these are friends sometimes. These are clients. These are people from the community that we work with. We really want also to communicate open with all the peers. So a lot of times we have project channels for each of the clients. For each project there's a channel where the deployment messages goes in, where the team discusses, and the client sits there as well. The client sees what's going on with the team when they struggle with a deployment or something the client sees that. And that maybe sounds weird at the beginning because then you see, oh no, the client sees what's going on, but the client at the end is also important to understand. And the next time they will ask, how can I make a deployment happier? Or things like that. And we had cases where we had very bad deployments and the client walked in the afternoon and brought lunch for the whole team. Unannounced, completely unannounced, but they saw the team is working, they're trying to fix it. And so the client realized, there's no way I can help in coding, but at least I can bring lunch. And of course the other thing is, being a lot of teams in a lot of different places, we have channels where everybody's in. So this was just recently, we have a lot of Amazee babies born this year. And so this is how it's like channel looks like. So in the morning we had the announcement of that there was a new Amazee baby born and you see what's happening. Like there's... Oh, he's here, the father's actually here, Mustafa. So he posed the picture of his Amazee baby and you can see all the people coming in and having fun and it's just important that that goes on. So like myself, I'm for example, I'm in the Cape Town channel. I'm very, like maybe I'm only once or twice in Cape Town actually with the team, but being in that channel, I see what is going on. And that's very important because yeah. The next thing obviously, and you not only have different communication ways and cultural ways, you also have completely distributed teams. So one of the most important things we learned, even though you have distributed teams, it's very, very important to make sure that these people meet at least once a month. So one of the things we do, we do a monthly briefing where everybody or the whole world meets together. It's one hour and all of the companies inform each other. So it's just going how it's going on, what's going to happen, which amazee babies were born, which like maybe new employees and things that happen. So it also should be fun. It's not only like reporting numbers. So we have things like highlights of the last months. Like in Austin, one morning we walked in and the whole office was flooded and things like that. And we bring these things to the other locations as well. So this is a screenshot of everybody in the China. You see the three hops that we have in Zurich, Cape Town and Austin and all the other remote people. And we just meet, everybody has their video on so we can really see each other and we just update another. Another thing we realized what Donny mentioned before, if a new amazee comes in, it's not just they need to learn about one company, they need to somehow learn about six, seven companies. And that can be somehow very complicated. So one of the things we did, we have an amazee handbook. It's a handbook with roughly 50 pages that explains every employee, the history and the individual companies, the owners, where we came from and stuff like that. Because at the end, we don't want that everybody can give a picture about the history like we do because we lived it, but we want at least that everybody understands what are the different companies because clients start to mix up with us. Like they sometimes talk about amazing labs when they talk about amazing IO and then they talk about amazing metrics and now there's GMT, what the hell, things like that. So the more that your employees know, the easier they can also bring that because your employees want to talk to your clients. And so that's important. And another tool that we use is called bamboo HR. So from an HR point of view, we look at the whole thing as one big company. There's one HR tool that tells you who is working where, new people that joined, who is out. I can see who is out for all the companies. I maybe don't need to know it, but sometimes it's good to know that like there is a public holiday in Cape Town and now everybody's gone. Like how do you know that? Because it's another country you never lived in, but you can see it in the tool. And we can see there who's joining, who is out and stuff like that. The other challenge that we faced or that we still face are time zones. Very early from the beginning at AMACY when we had Katherine and Andrew working from San Antonio, which is seven hours behind Zurich, we had an issue of time zones. It was very hard for us to communicate between, but we also used them very well. We had multiple times that the client asked us something in the Zurich evening if we can change something at a design. We sent it over to Andrew. He worked on it during his regular day, sent it back in the next morning. The client had his updated design. Something that they never experienced before because they only worked with local teams. So time zones can either be very good or can of course be also very bad. So one of the things we do is every time we have meetings, we have meeting notes because not all the ways people can be part of all the meetings because of time zones. So use time zones cleverly and they can be a big advantage and there are also tools that help you. One of the tools we use is called space time and it tells you who is working at which time and the employee can actually define their own time. So it's not defined by the company or by that every team has the same working hours. Every employee can put their own working hours in there that they think that they're working and you see interesting things like we have people that work twice a day that have a specific break of two or three hours in between but that allows you to see like should I even try to contact that person on Slack now? Like myself, I'm traveling between all the different countries and so people are confused always like in which time zone I am. People can go in there, I think I can see it here. So that's what we do, that's the challenges so Dany will shortly wrap up the whole thing. So overall learnings or what did a company us over this whole journey of the last 10 years? One, and this is maybe a bit counterintuitive but actually what we did all the time is following our heart. Sounds a bit cheesy but it's true. We really, we looked at new projects, we tried to create new companies that make sense but it didn't happen at the board table. It's not that we sit down and think, oh this is a very rational decision. All the decisions we made, they somehow came naturally or around an opportunity. So amazing metrics came from, oh we actually have this client who wants something, is this something we should explore? Let's think about it. Amazing Labs Austin came out of, we have these two awesome people in our team, we can't bring them to Switzerland, how can we make them stay happy in our group? Okay, let's create a company around them. Amazing Labs Cape Town came because Greg and I just wanted to live in South Africa. They're all reasons that are somehow very personal but also based on an opportunity. And maybe it just helps to make this all a bit more relative in terms of a lot of things that happened are random. And it's something that accompanies us over the time and I think it's gonna continue to accompany us over time. So the spreadsheets to justify a decision, they do happen and we create those but we actually often create those after we've made up our mind. So some number juggling and so it comes after the kind of the hard decision. That's just our way of doing it. Then be flexible, don't plan too much ahead. I mean I don't know who still is in a company who has a three year plan but our strategy goes maximum for a year because everything else is science fiction. I mean who knows what's gonna be in three years? So we have one year plans for the companies and we even change those five times. So we are very flexible, we try and adapt to our environment and we're quite fast. So we just try and take things, sit together, speak about them, make up our minds and move on. Very flexible, fast because the world just changes all the time. And the last really important thing is people are above everything. We're in a service industry and all the services that AMAZE Labs provides or AMAZE Labs IO metrics, all the AMAZE group companies are people based. Clients come to work with us because they think we're professional but because mainly they like speaking to a person. They like speaking to the project manager and are happy to work with that person. They won't come back if the people we have are not likable. The same things with the team members. I personally don't wanna work in a team with people I don't like. I can spend my time better. So it's become very much a philosophy for us to say with every new person we hire, is this a person we'd like to have a beer with or a coffee or whatever it is? But just is this a person we like to spend time with? And if not, then we're not gonna hire that person. Even if that person is a genius and could bring us very far, maybe that person could help us become more profitable, could help us become more successful, we don't do it. We want to be happy in our jobs, not our job to rule our well-being in a bad way. So in the end, we believe that the right people sharing the same kind of vision will bring us where we want us to be. And the ambitions for the amazing group are we want to grow continuously, we want to be successful, but actually we just also wanna be happy in our everyday work and we hope we can find more people who share that vision and who are happy to be with us. And here just some pictures of some kind of get-togethers that we had. We had our 10-year anniversary today. Today, no, not today, this year. And we all came together in Cape Town to celebrate that, which was amazing, because it was the first time the whole group was together. And we hope to have more such meetups because it needs personal interaction, not only slack interaction. And last but not least, we're hiring. So please come and talk to us if you're interested. And you can talk to Michael when it's about amazing IO. You can talk to me if it's for amazing labs and amazing metrics. You could also talk to me if you're interested in online marketing. And now we still have some time for questions and answers. So please raise your hand, feel free to shout if you wanna ask something, contribute any of your experiences. Also to sum this up, we're not saying we're doing things right. This is just the way we do it. And maybe it's a bit inspirational for one or the other person. Thank you very much. I think it was important to be honest. It didn't help us at all in building the platform. And the first platform that we built was actually not good. And I think that was the reason. So a lot of people would have done better than we'd. But we weren't shy of creating the business. And we weren't shy of growing the business. We weren't shy of saying, okay, let's create a company in the US. And so it helped us just to be confident with legal aspects and accounting aspects. So it did help. But I think another composition of people could have made us just go in a different direction. Maybe Maze.com would have been successful if we were both designers and developers. There's a lot of services provided between companies. And we do. We buy and sell services all the time between companies. So because in that element when I showed you, we wanna try and reduce the complexity where we can and combine things. For example, the person who does the accounting is based in Cape Town, hired in Cape Town. And we charge her services to the other group companies according to a specific percentage. The percentage we use is revenue-based. So we say each company has a revenue percentage to the whole group. And according to that percentage, we spread kind of these group services out to the group, invoice them, have contracts for that. But we also have services for clients. So if there's a big client in Zurich that needs more support from just Zurich employees, they can get help from Austin or Cape Town and we cross-charge these people. So there's a lot of cross-charging involved and that has become more and more intense. Of course, in the past year, because every year we created something new and there's always one more nod to connect lines with. Does that answer your question? Yeah, it is. But we believe it's worth it. It's also something I mentioned. It's not for everyone, I believe. But for us, it makes sense because it helps us follow that vision of having a high degree of individuality in those companies, own leadership, own teams, own clients, but still have the benefits of the group. And it's a good basis to grow. We can grow all of these entities quite far because they all have kind of an infrastructure that's running. So if we do wanna become bigger, we have a very good foundation to do that. It might be overkill for now. A lot of people think that. I don't blame them for that. Yeah. Of course, there are numbers that tell you these things. There are, we look, we try to listen a lot to our clients. Like so all the new companies, a lot of times come out of demand. So we don't just create something because we feel like I would really like to have a hosting company. It's always like listening to clients, listening to the teams, hearing them. And so it just, it then happens in a way that you think about it, you think about maybe more, you think about it over wine or in the dinner. Like it's just that idea that slowly grows and gets more and more interesting. And then at one point you feel like, okay, now I actually wanna look at it. And then of course you can create spreadsheets, you can create business models, but to be full honest, it's always a hard decision. It's always something, do we feel we have the capacity? Do we have a team member that really wants to do it? And I think that's the most important thing. Every time we created something we gave that flag to somebody and said, go and run. And that has been very successful. To give it to a person or a team and they then can do it. And you as like the owners, you can be supportive, you can be coach and mentor and help them. But especially now with seven companies, as three of us, we can't be involved in all the decisions anymore. So you also need to find ways and do it. But the decision at the end is coming from here. There is not like a spreadsheet that is either green and red and then you do it or so. Yes, so all companies are engineered to be profitable. There is no entity that has a pure R&D focus that we say it's fine if they're just break even. All the entities should be profitable with what they do. If we see that one of the company, or for example, the Cape Town team has a more service orientation. So they're not as profitable as if they would be only serving to external clients and charging high rates. But we still have a minimum amount of margin that we want to create there. And we believe that the services we provide within the group also have to allow us for that margin. Because otherwise as an individual entity, we would have no reason to exist if we're not profitable. Now what happens if we're not profitable and not all entities are always profitable? Don't get me wrong, we had a few very successful cases where we were profitable very quickly. But we also had cases where it just took longer. And then we sit together and say, what are we gonna do? We were thinking that this thing is gonna become profitable in a year, now it's not. Then we have the option to transfer funds from the other group entities and provide loans just to give liquidity. Or we can bring an injection from the holding where we bring in more money as owners and say, okay, we're gonna put in another 100K and fund this company because we believe that within this other 100K it will become profitable. So it always depends on what the horizon is and these are the things we do discuss at all the board meetings. We look at the horizon and see, okay, how's this company doing? Do we need liquidity? Do we need funding and make up our minds how that can work? So either inter-company transfers or funding from the holding which is in the end from us owners. Does that answer your question? Not automatically, but they have the option to. So we are happy if the CEOs want to buy in. They don't get it for free because we also have to pay our share as the owners. So we don't wanna give them something for free that we pay but they can buy into a very good kind of price. So if they want to become owners of that local entity they can become a minority shareholder. So the shareholding is that by default each new entity is held by amazing holding. That's the holding company. And if there's a CEO who would like to become co-owner then that person can become a minority shareholder of that individual entity. So then that company has maybe two shareholders, the holding and that person. No, we don't. So the holding is owned by Michael, Greg and myself and some of the individual companies still have the CEO or another partner actually as a shareholder. We allow everybody that has like a leadership position to buy themselves in into the company. And so, but it's really the decision of the employer themselves. Do they want to buy into the company? But important is they can only buy into that company that they are actually working for. And it wouldn't make sense if now suddenly an amazing labs employee is part of amazing IO because then they start to work with them and things like that. So that's, and also there's nobody that can have shares of the holding at least so far not. I cannot imagine having one company honestly. Like it doesn't, for us we see, specifically from the branding point of view, it makes so much more sense to have individual brands for individual services. Like we have a long history of amazing.com being a platform that you can go and create a project and at the same time, we try to also sell websites. So you cannot imagine how many people came to us and said like, I heard you're building websites but I went to amazing.com and I created a project there. Do I get a website now? It's just, it was so confusing. And so I think just from the branding point of view, it makes sense to have individual ones. And at the very beginning, when we started amazing metrics, it was the first company, it was the second one. We had no idea if that's gonna work. Like we had no, the owners had no experience in market, in online marketing, like there was nothing. And so we could not say like if our business models work, we just saw demand from the clients and we had some employees that have more experience than us. So we had to find a way, how can we protect the amazing labs that was just coming out of that long history of amazing.com, not making money and finally was a bit profitable so that that small plant, how do we protect that? And the only way that we saw was to create a complete legal entity that if that thing explodes, we as the owner just lost money but none of the employees is affected by that. Yeah, just to add to that, I do believe that a single entity can become more profitable if I'm super honest about it but we were not willing to take that risk. So for us it is diversification that counts for us because we believe it's more sustainable and it's more of what makes us sleep okay. If one company's not doing well, we still have five that are going well and it just somehow we rather have a constant return over the whole group and slowly grow the whole group than putting everything into one big bucket. And what also what you can't do if you have one entity is you can't create that model of the individual shareholdings. So if you have someone who runs one aspect of the business, you either have to make that person full on shareholder of the whole company or not. But what we do is we have that segmentation within our group. So but I believe if it's all about profit, I think you could also decide to go full on into one case but I think the risk of failing is higher. We've never pitched as amazing group yet. This is actually also the first time I created a slide deck with the amazing group logo. The amazing group logo is not something we really put out there. It's becoming more and more important but not towards the outside. It's not that we haven't ever pitched together. It's like in Zurich, for example, Urs and Evelyn, the CEOs of Amazing Metrics and Amazing Labs Zurich, they have gone to pitches together and they pitched their services but always with Amazing Labs and Amazing Metrics. It's not the group that comes into that comes into view. We definitely try to combine services. Like if you have like we have clients that have one contract with Amazing Labs and they get services of I.O. and Metrics at the same time. So we try to make it as easy for the client to not have like three contracts, especially if you work with very big companies. Like sometimes it takes a year to sign a contract and so you don't wanna go through that again and again. So you funnel then services through the other companies but we always try to be individuals and say, hey, that's actually that service, that's that service, yeah. But combining makes a lot of sense. Like we do that a lot. Like every Labs pitch has I.O. in there. Like it just makes a lot of sense because the developers that's the only thing they wanna use and also for the client to already have something but they can extract it. So like I mean, Labs has projects which are not hosted on I.O. So we try to follow an idea of let's try to use all the same tools and if you realize it's not working, it is allowed to branch out. Like everybody uses the same Chira, for example. We have the same Confluence, we have the same Slack, we have the same HR tool. The CRM we're realizing is very different. Like I.O. for example is the sales works completely different and so the CRM for example is split up between different companies which is a pain sometimes because of course it would be awesome to see if a client comes in there that they're actually client over there but it's really in figuring out what makes more sense but the process for example are so completely different with the sales follows and everything that the tools cannot even handle that. Like with Bamboo HR you should have seen their support team realizing how complex we are and like getting us in there that a person is hired by a Macy Cape Town or Macy Labs Cape Town but works for a Macy Labs Zurich they never saw something like that. So we figured out ways. So a lot of times the tools cannot even handle our complexity and they makes easier to split up. Hmm. I don't think anyone in your company wants to run that right now. Maybe in 10 years we'll see. Yeah it's a big topic right now especially in Drupal 8 like we're in Drupal where we're learning a lot of new things with either like React as I mentioned we're all learning now React and I think it's going back to the communication so making sure that the people actually can they know who else in the world is also working on the same tools so who can I ask and probably having a bit more a strategic approach to it because like if you do if let's say you do a training of something in one company the other ones could profit as well. So there can be ways to either do it at the same time if that is not possible in time zones record them and let the others watch it or like if we buy an online course the other ones can also use it. But I think it's just something that has to be done that not like just everybody tries to figure out the same problems again and again and again but I don't think you can prevent that. Like when we started at the very beginning when we used Drupal 8 there was one team that wasn't Zurich every day and we just during lunch we talked about the weirdest things we just saw and now that's not possible anymore. So like having these sync meetings is an important thing and documenting and somehow also a bit accepting that you cannot prevent the two people in two different time zones will face the same issue and will figure it out themselves. But I think the important thing is then to actually use that because not every solution that somebody has is the best always. So bringing these people together and saying, hey, how did you solve it? How did I solve it? Maybe we can find a way for the future. It depends on the country in Switzerland they're all octane gazelle schoffeln which is I don't even know what it's limited, the equivalent of a limited and in the US and in Cape Town there it's the equivalent of a limited liability company. Yeah, good, I think our time's up. Thank you very much for your attention and enjoy the conference.


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People throughout the world recognize and praise the heroic efforts of Cuban doctors in combating the coronavirus. Everywhere, except in Washington. Last month, Republican Senators Marco Rubio, Reed Scott, and Ted Cruz introduced a bill that aims to punish countries which accept Cuban medical missions. Washington accuses Havana of earning money by exploiting and enslaving the Cuban doctors who work abroad. Senator Reed Scott claimed that Cuba now uses the coronavirus pandemic to make a profit at the expense of these doctors. He said that any country that requests medical assistance from Cuba is supporting human trafficking. So now the Trump administration and the Republican Senators are threatening to sanction countries that receive Cuban help to combat the pandemic. Many see the proposal as an attack on the national sovereignty of poor countries in the Caribbean and Africa, where international medical cooperation with Cuba has been in effect for some time. During this pandemic, we have seen how hundreds of Cuban doctors wearing white robes, masks, and carrying flags arrived in countries where COVID-19 was wreaking havoc. They landed in 38 countries of Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe, and the Middle East, where they set up field hospitals to tackle the pandemic. People all over the world recognize and applaud their efforts. The U.S., however, is determined to undermine this noble initiative. In September of last year and again this year, the U.S. State Department described Cuba's international medical missions as a form of human trafficking and modern slavery, a legend that the island government abused workers and profited from their work. This response is not new. It's actually kind of an obsessive compulsion on the part of Washington. In 2006, George W. Bush put into effect the Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program, providing Cuban medical personnel with incentives to defect when working outside of Cuba. When Obama came to office, he put a break on the long-standing and obsolete policy towards the island, but now cold war nostalgics are back in force and demanding reinstatement of the program. The U.S. claims that the Cuban government pockets more than 80% of the salaries that the Cuban doctors receive from their work abroad, but the word that the U.S. should be using is invest, because the money that is earned from the program gets allocated to the Cuban healthcare and education systems in which future doctors receive free education. Furthermore, doctors enroll in these missions voluntarily and they can also leave voluntarily.  The argument that the U.S. and corporate media use is that these doctors enroll in the missions only to earn a little more money outside of what they receive inside the country. This statement is misleading, if not intentionally deceptive, for several reasons. First, it ignores the fact that humanism is the underlying principle that motivates the doctors who feel a sense of honor. I became a doctor in my country based on a principle of humanity, a principle of being patriotic and being human is the most important thing there is. It may be hard for some of us here in the U.S. to fully grasp this mindset, since individualism here reigns supreme. But let's not forget that in Cuba healthcare is not commodified. Health is not seen as a way to earn profit. Cubans are taught that work is dignifying and think of themselves as a collective. They have a sense of solidarity and internationalism. But for argument's sake, suppose the Cuban doctors decide to carry out a mission abroad only because they're seeking economic opportunities. What is the problem with that? Those in the U.S. who hold work ethic dear shouldn't have any qualms about this. Indeed, millions and millions of people throughout the world relocate for the same reason. The truth is that Cuban doctors take pride in helping people, not only inside Cuba, but also abroad. I suppose I and Rand's most fervent admirers will have a hard time understanding this. Well, of course. Who works just for the heck of it?  Doctors in Cuba are seen as heroes. Every night at 9 p.m., a plaza erupts across Havana from windows and over-valconies. If you ask a kid in Cuba, like, what do you want to be when you grow up? They will say things like neurosurgeon or cardiovascular surgeon. And in Cuba, that is not an impossible dream. Second, accepting a mission abroad, it is an opportunity to gain experience. Treating patients with conditions they wouldn't see in Cuba. In fact, when Ebola struck Africa, there were more doctors volunteering to go than had originally been calculated for the program. I had a conversation with Dr. Joendry Ferraz. He's a Cuban doctor who served in Venezuela and in Brazil. In that last country, he got married and decided to stay. This is what he said. I agree. If I agree, I say no, I agree. After that, I went to Valencia to do an evaluation of my work. And when everything is ready, they tell the doctor, for example, in 15 days you're going to leave for Venezuela. As in my case, I said, in 15 days, you have to go to Venezuela. If there is a problem, you tell me if you don't want to go. If you don't want to go, you say, yes, I agree. I'm going to Valencia. But I've never been forced to go to Venezuela. I've never been forced to go to Brazil. You don't go out because you really have to be a doctor. Not to be a Cuban doctor. To be a Cuban doctor. And because it's part of the world where you have to go. For Cubans, saving lives is a form of patriotism. So how come you're supporting this? These people are slaves. They're not slaves, they're patriotic. I am patriotic. I love America. I'll live in a bunker. I'll fight for this country to the day I'm gone. Oh really? So can you please wear a mask so you can protect yourself and others?  In contrast, for the US government, patriotism is killing people, dropping bombs and destroying cities. Ironically, the way they do this is through the military. And current recruitment practices for the armed forces and the maintenance of personnel once recruited can be seen as forced labor. For example, once somebody begins their military service, leaving the military is no easy task. Soldiers could get court-martialed and serve time in jail. With stop-loss orders, soldiers who reach the end of their enlistment can be involuntarily retained and transferred to a standby reserve. And all this charges procedures halt it. In contrast, Cuban doctors can leave their mission voluntarily, as was the case with Dr. Joandre in Brazil. Furthermore, in the US, although enlistment is voluntary, the number of people from the lower socioeconomic classes in the armed forces is disproportionately high. In the 1960s, the US economy flourished and that is precisely why there was a need for conscription, especially in the light of the Vietnam War. Now, there's no need. Since the economy had been so bad that for many young people, the military is the only available option. When Washington politician and pundits claimed that a typical Cuban doctor goes abroad to earn more money, even when he or she has all basic needs and those of their families taking care of, they completely ignore the fact that the US military recruitment benefits enormously from widespread poverty in this country. So when they tell you that Cuban doctors are slaves, just tell them, at ease, soldier. Don't share this video, you parasites. Don't listen to her. If you like the video, please share. If you haven't, make sure you join Danny Glover, Tom Morello, Mark Ruffalo, Oliver Stone, Noam Chomsky, and many others and sign the petition to award the Cuban doctors the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize at cubanobel.org. 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