Hello everyone. I'm Luke, COO of SoCAP and it's my pleasure to welcome you all today. Thank you for joining from wherever you may be and for spending the next hour with us. I just want to say a big thank you as well to all of our panelists, whom we'll be introduced shortly for sharing their time and expertise with us today. And a big thank you as well to World Education Services for generously sponsoring this conversation and making all of this possible. There will be time for some Q&A at the end, so please drop your questions in the chat or in the Q&A feature as you have them and we'll get to them towards the end of the hour. So, without much further ado, I want to hand it over to Smitha Das, who is an impact investor at World Education Services and our moderator today. Thank you so much, Luke, and thank you to UNSoCAP for hosting this session and creating the space to explore investing in employee ownership models to build generational wealth for immigrants and BIPOC communities. I'm Smitha Das, I lead Impact Investing at World Education Services or WES. We are a social enterprise that's been around for about 50 years doing credential evaluation services for international students and immigrants coming to the US and Canada. In 2019, we spun off a philanthropic arm to advance our mission through philanthropy and through impact investing. And so I'm excited to share the stories of a few of our investing partners, Todd at APIS and Heritage is joining us as well as Allison, we just approved an investment last week into Project Equities Employee Ownership Catalyst Fund and also a co-investor at Thaddeus who is at Living Cities. So hopefully this will be a good conversation to kick off a good year of SoCAP including an in-person session and convening in the fall. But we're really excited to bring this community together to talk about employee ownership models, the nuances between the different structures that Allison will talk us through, as well as how we can use these structures to both build wealth, but also build power through democratic governance structures. And so at WES, this is really key to how we think about impact, we're thinking about reimagining the building blocks of wealth. And as we think about historically how communities have been able to generate wealth, it's been typically two levers, one owning your own home and two owning your own business. So today we'll dig deeper into owning your own business and how we can democratize access to that as a way to generate generational wealth. So I guess with that, just to give a flow of what is to come, we'll start off with inviting Allison to share a little bit of an overview of employee ownership, but getting into some of the language, the nuances between the structures. There's a bit of alphabet soup when it comes to employee ownership, so we'll try to deconstruct all of that. And then we'll go into some examples through what Todd and Allison are doing on the ground, as well as invite Thaddeus to share the investor perspective as well as from WES's perspective, and how we think we can be deploying catalytic capital impact capital in a pretty flexible blended way to advance these models. And finally, we'll of course turn it to you all for first in Q&A and thanks to the SoCAP team for monitoring the chat for us. So I suppose with that I'll just stop there and share, let Allison take the wheel and share more about employee ownership and help us get some grounding there. That would be wonderful. Thank you. And if we could pull up some slides. Thank you to SoCAP. Thank you, Smitha, and to World Education Services for hosting this conversation today. My name is Allison Lincoln and I'm the co-founder of Project Equity, we're a national nonprofit organization with really a single goal which is to expand employee ownership, really to benefit employees and to create this kind of wealth building that we're talking about today. So people can flip through actually the next slide and then the following. Great. So what do we mean when we say employee ownership? Well, it's it's a proven but frankly little known or a little understood business structure in which a broad base of employees owns the business where they work. So when we're in this conversation today when we're talking about employee ownership, we mean a structure that gives all employees who meet basic criteria. You know, maybe they've been with the company for a certain period of time or you know work work a 30 hour schedule or 20 hour schedule or something like that, the opportunity to become owners of that business. What we're not talking about is stock options or stock grants which are typically available only to management or management or key employee buyouts. These can be great. They're just they're just different in some key ways. And next slide here and as Todd likes to say and I'm co-signing on employee ownership is a burgeoning asset class. And so the goal of our conversation today is really to help investors understand more about what this asset class looks like. The impacts it creates, why it is especially relevant now, and the range of investment opportunities. So next slide, just at a summary high level, the benefits of employee ownership to fill way more than this slide. It is one of those things that when people really get their heads around it, they start nodding and they say, oh yeah, this just makes sense. It seems like it's positive from all perspectives from all angles. So employee ownership creates stronger businesses, creates high quality jobs for employees with better pay and benefits, having a voice in key decisions, owning the assets of the business and owning assets is of course the only way to build generational wealth. As for the local community and economy it retains locally owned businesses retaining that, you know, all important local spending and local spending multiplier keeps wealth in that community versus having absentee or corporate ownership or those benefits of ownership accrued to people who don't live there. And it also reduces wealth concentration. Next slide. Why, why now why is employee ownership so relevant now and I feel like I've been saying this for years, and the reality is that it just keeps getting more and more relevant. Next slide so the great wave of baby boomer retirements known, dubbed the silver tsunami is real, nearly three million businesses with employees are at risk as the baby boomers continue to march towards retirement this represents an estimated out of every two locally owned businesses with employees so these businesses need buyers however you go to the next slide we know that selling a business is not easy. So according to a leading national business worker platform only 20% of businesses put up for sale ever sell. In other words we have this big, you know, supply and maybe not enough demand for purchasing the businesses play ownership can can address that. It's especially challenging for business owners, given that their kids are not taken over the family business anymore. So, you know, these are real issues that that employee ownership can help address. And then if we go to the next slide. So, add to that, and this is really from a mission perspective where the conversation is focused on today. The challenge from from a worker perspective, right we know the storyline people who during the pandemic we started calling essential workers, when actually they've always been essential workers live teetering right on the edge. So, I won't read the stats on this slide, but we know that income equality in the United States is shocking. But the fact is that wealth and equality is even more shocking. And this is the gap that undergirds at all that really holds people back, it is so hard to overcome if you're in a low wage job. And that was just a little bit of improvement can make a tremendous difference in people's lives. Now, looking at this through the racial lens. It's the challenge is just even greater altogether so racial income and wealth and equality, frankly underpins the core of what is broken and presents our biggest need. Employee ownership is proven to address the income gap and help build intergenerational wealth for workers of color. I'm going to share a couple of stories from companies that project equity has helped to transition to employee ownership to kind of share what we really mean about this. For the next slide, we've got a slice of New York that based in Silicon Valley to pizza shops with over 30 workers if you could click the down arrow. They've distributed over half a million dollars in profit to its workers over two years. And by the way, they also did great during the pandemic because they came together and quickly and multiple times revamped how they did business to meet the ever changing landscape for restaurants. So, so this half a million dollars in profit was right before the pandemic hit so you can imagine the value of having that extra question during that time period. And on the next slide we've got Sarah Vegas again if you could kind of click through the animation here. I'm Sarah Vegas of Niles pie. So she was one of the founding worker owners at this bakery and she shared tells us great story of her first profit during check which was over $9,000. She talks about this being the biggest check that she has ever received now she's worked for food service for her whole career, which is a notoriously challenging sector whether because of the low wages or the lack of schedule. The schedule variability, job stability, you know she showed up at multiple times actually at her employer with a sign on the door that says we're out of business you lost your job sorry. So, so for her, she also happens to be a single mom. You know she sat down with her, her son he was 11 at the time and talk to him about the impact that this this big check was was having on their family. And you know, invited him to have a conversation with her about what they should do with it. So, you know, big, big effects both financially and and otherwise, but this would have been a 30% increase over, over a $15 minimum wage, just to put put that into perspective. So the, the, the point is that the conversation is not about whether employee ownership delivers impact. Instead, we're really focused on how we get more of it so that its deep impact can be spread further. And in our conversation today, the focus is on the role that investors and capital can play in creating that impact that we know employee ownership really delivers on. Okay, so briefly I'm going to go through just a little bit about what employee ownership transitions are about we go to the next slide and then one more. So, so employee owners so this is a broad base of employees were basically everyone who works there has the opportunity to be an owner. And when we transition the business we're talking about taking a successful profitable legacy business and selling all or sometimes part of the business into a vehicle that is owned broadly by those employees typically through a stock or asset sale. And most of the business is, again, I'm going to use the word typically a lot because there's lots of variations as well but typically debt finance can do equity. In some cases, and that debt is assumed by the business, not by the employees employees aren't taking out loans or asking their rich uncle, you know, a lot of them don't have rich uncles right money other mattress isn't involved here. The business is taking out the loan and paying back the out of the operational cash flow over a period of time. Now employee owned business is typically led and managed similarly to how it was prior to the sale so that in ensure some stability moving forward. So we still have a CEO or general manager we still have a management team right. And what is new is often a structure for governance of the business. So, there, there can be a layer of governance put in place. It has employee representation on it. So depending on the employee ownership vehicle members of the board will be elected from the employees, or they may represent employee interests. And then on the next slide here to that alphabet soup that Smith it was talking about. This is just a summary of the three most common forms of employee ownership structures in the United States there are others as well. But from left to right here we've got employee stock ownership plans or ESOPs which is the one that people are most familiar with it's the largest in number. The ESOPs are a trust vehicle, and it provides ownership through company shares held as a retirement asset. And these then that grows over time they're highly tax advantaged because the federal government wants more employee ownership, but that tax advantage requires compliance with tax and retirement laws. There's of course a cost to that compliance so it's really only a fit for companies with roughly 40 employees or more. And these forms work for for any size smaller all the way up to very very large and worker coops themselves include represent representative governance in the form of a board primarily composed of employee owners, elected by the full base of employee owners and it provides wealth building through annual profit sharing payments. And then the third one on the right here, the EOT stands for employee ownership trust has a little bit of both it's also a trust vehicle on the board includes the trustee of the EOT and may include employee representatives as well. And the EOT provides wealth building also three annual profit sharing. So, with that, I'm going to pass it back to Smitha to kick off our conversation. Thank you Allison for for walking us through some of that language as well as the different types of employee ownership structures. I think it would be helpful to just get into some specifics so I might pass to Todd, and have you share a little bit more about your model at APIS and heritage, particularly how you're embedding a racial equity lens into the employee ownership structure. Excellent. Thank you so much Smitha and thank you to the SOCAP team for creating this opportunity for us and good morning good afternoon I know SOCAP has a global audience so good evening good night and get tomorrow to the folks who may be watching right now. My name is Todd LeBret, I'm co principal of APIS and Heritage Capital Partners. And we're, you know, I'm excited to share with you, the way that we look at employee ownership as a as an opportunity for impact for workers and communities as well as for investment. And the main tool that we use we are a sponsor of Legacy Fund One, which is what we see as our kind of reimagining of capitalism and entrepreneurship that really pulls together the long standing tools of broad based employee ownership, as Allison was just describing specifically the models of the ESOP and the co op together, and directing it as Smitha was referring to, to the communities where we know there's the greatest opportunity for wealth building and the greatest need for wealth building, which are our communities of broad communities. So essentially, you know, what we do is we're essentially a mezzanine debt fund, and we live really at that that intersection of best in class, private credit private equity, and the world of ESOPs and co ops. And basically what we do is we buy great small closely held businesses, and we convert them into great, you know, small or medium size employee owned firms that do, you know, a variety of things, one, that outperform their peers and Allison great gave some great numbers and statistics a few more shortly on how employee owned businesses, when done the right way can outperform their peers that also distribute the fruits of that outperformance to their workforce all that all the outperformance isn't just being captured by a single person, or a small family but actually it's distributed broadly amongst the workforce. And three, there's some really good things for communities and states and cities, in terms of anchoring jobs, anchoring companies in place, and, and really getting away from some of the, some of the, the worst practices that we've seen in the world of investments and private equity which is stripping companies out pulling out cash flows, moving companies outside the communities that help build them and support them. As we always say, you know, an employee owner is not going to fire themselves so that they can move their company, you know, move their company overseas or move their company out of state so a lot of benefits all the way around. I also stated before, 50 years of stagnant real wages for working Americans, you know, the 40 years of decreasing wealth for the bottom 50%. And as we always say, you know, a common term in the black community when America gets the cold black America gets the flu and brown America gets the flu. And this is, that's the saying pre COVID so I'm sure we could change it say black and brown America get get something a lot more serious in the flu, when there are wealth issues in this country. In the reason why we love the ESOP model, as our legal structure as our tax structure is that there's there's 50 years of legislative history and tax history on ESOP as a model. And it's actually the lesser known cousin of the 401k and functions very similarly to 401k that invest just in the in the shares of the company that's connected to the ESOP, almost 7000 ESOPs in the US, and a lot of folks don't know this but a 100% employee company in an S corporation structure pays $0 in federal corporate taxes, and in 44 out of 50 states pays $0 in state corporate tax or it's deferred, similar to the way that that the tax benefit can be deferred in a 401k. And this is this kind of kind of a tax benefit that's also can also happen in co ops, as well, such as chapter T of co ops. There's a similar tax benefit that really creates an interesting investment opportunity into these models as well, because you will have to understand that all things equal employee on companies will have better cash flows, purely from a tax standpoint, but then from an actual operational standpoint, the alignment of interest between the workers who are now also owners who are now if done the right way are thinking about like owners thinking how their day to day job and operations can contribute to the bottom line of the company to the success and the long term viability of the company. So these things create that, you know, 8 to 11% faster revenue growth, 8 and a half percent profitability increase, and up to 75% productivity games, and significantly less turnover of workforces which, as we know today is is key to keeping a business alive and successful. So these things that you see employee owned companies in the research shows create a great investment opportunity from the impact side and I'll close out quickly from the impact side. Some really good research done by the National Center for Employee Ownership, as well as Rutgers and several other organizations out there show that the benefits to be specifically for workers of color is really powerful. And looking at workers of color age 28 to 34, the median household net worth of an BIPOC person of color, compared to their peer in a non employee owned firm is 79% higher for the employee owners, their medium income is 30% higher for employee owners, median job tenure is 36% higher, and employee owners are almost three times as likely to receive other kind of ancillary benefits like tuition benefits from their employer and their employers as their non non employee owned peers. So again from a from a business side and from a worker side outcome in the community side, you know that the case for employee ownership. We think is really clear and as all of us on this call are doing we're out here as evangelizing the model, these models as something that needs to be more pervasive in this country to help address some of these issues. So I won't go into a ton of details just just briefly again kind of how we invest, we invest in what we consider essential essential service industries in the lower middle market so we're looking for companies are between one and and $6 million and EBITDA that are in industries such as landscaping commercial cleaning mechanical contracting so your electric your electricians your roof is your plumbers, elder care and home care food processing childcare waste hauling industries where where really your workforce is is their interaction with the customer and they're kind of frontline nature of this workforce, making them employee owners getting them on board with the mission of the company is going to have huge impacts for for quality of service provision for your customers and can make a big difference. We're also looking we're only also looking at companies that have at least 40 workers kind of referencing back to what Allison was saying about size of companies that work best with the ESOP model. And we also only will invest in companies that have at least one third of their workforce, being BIPOC workers and across our portfolio, at least 40% of the workforce needs to be BIPOC BIPOC workers. To say this we're kind of coming up on the edge of our, our first two transaction closes right now. And we're looking at about 200 workers across the two companies, and with at least about 75 to 80% of those workers being BIPOC. So while we set the floors at 33 and 40% what we're finding when you look at these industries and certain areas of the country is that you can get significant significantly more impact and impact significantly more workers of color. And our goal across our portfolios to have the average worker in our portfolio be able to retire at the end of the career was somewhere between 70 and $120,000, just in their ESOP account. And statistically across the US, the average employee owner has about $140,000 in their ESOP account, plus another $90,000 in a diversified account such the 401k. So I know I've thrown a lot of numbers and a lot of statistics at you all want to give you guys a taste of us and kind of what our focus is and we can get into some of the details of how our investment product works if that comes up in the Q&A, but really excited to be here and be on this panel and share with you guys what we're doing so I will then I will now breathe and I will pass it back to Smith. Thank you so much for, first of all, just echoing Allison's argument for employee ownership I think where Thaddeus and I kind of come in as investors it's the business case the impact case around employee ownership is established these are not new models they've been around for a long time. So my question is kind of why haven't they taken hold. What is the role of investment capital to demonstrate some of these newer models newer ways to invest in employee ownership transitions, and also scale them over time and so I think that would be a really interesting conversation but before we go to the investor perspective I, I want to get Allison a chance I saw a question in the chat around new businesses and the way you can perhaps use some of these models to set up an ownership structure and Todd mentioned East stops are typically for larger companies around 40 employees and above, but some of the other models that you were mentioning co ops and employee ownership trust perpetual purpose trust could be used for smaller organizations and I know at Project Equity you're pretty agnostic to working across these different structures so I'm curious kind of could you share a little bit of the nuance of when you use different types of ownership structures for which types of businesses and if you even an example. Yeah, absolutely and you know I taught it just love hearing you talk about employee ownership and I would love to see every everyone's faces because I would imagine you know everyone was nodding bigger vigorously. As you were talking and that's that's kind of our goal here is we're trying to get you nodding vigorously about employee ownership so that you're excited to learn more about how to have an impact to make more of it so. So yeah when we when we look when we're talking with a company and kind of looking at what employee ownership form might be the best fit for them. One of the first passes we do is size, you know, if you're not 40 or more employees, then then we got two options for you otherwise we got three options for you. Three, there's other forms as well so more than three sometimes but so that size threshold is important if you're, you know, let's say you're a 50 or 100 employee company, you could be a co op you could be an EOT you could be an EOT then the next question really becomes you know, it's all about the goal right so if we're talking about we can do we can do independent transitions we can do more acquisitions where it's less about the goal right it's about buying the company and then turning it into employee ownership but if we're talking about an independent transition where the company remains independent and we're supporting capital and then it becomes an independent employee owned business after the the transaction happens. It really is about the goal, you know, the goal from the perspective of the business owner and from the perspective of the employees. So one of the things that comes up with ESOPs for some business owners is that it's not sort of perpetual in nature. Employee ownership trust uses the perpetual purpose trust as the structure.  And they don't want to sort of risk the potential of an ESOP being acquired. But by another company having that employee ownership component be dissolved there are ways to address that and we can get into that maybe in another another webinar. So that's one of the considerations and then, you know, the worker co-op as I noted has a has a governing board by the employee owners built right into the structure. So an off the shelf ESOP doesn't require it, but you know what Apes and Heritage is doing is they're combining the two. So yes you have that governance structure. You can build a governance structure into either the ESOP or the EOT, but the worker co-op, you know, it's already built into the structure. So for companies that really feel that they want that to be a priority, they're often really drawn to the worker co-op model in order to accomplish it. So it's not about, you know, it's not about like one is better than the other. And it's also not necessarily I have to pick only one, right? You pick elements of the different structures and you can combine them to make the employee ownership that's going to be the right fit for that group of people and that particular transaction. Yeah, I think that's a really important point that not all employee ownership models necessarily build power through democratic governance that in some models like the ESOP model, it is a choice. And so that was definitely something we learned in our diligence with Apes and Heritage Capital partners, their intense, their intentionality around it, their partnership with Democracy at Work Institute and how they bring in the individuals of the co-operative model into ESOPs. I think Todd, your experience in the worker ownership space speaks to that. And I know that's something that resonated with ADS too. But so maybe I might pass to you and just have you share why you invested in project equity and what brings you to share the ownership models at large. Yeah, I'm happy to jump in and give you that of our lens as to why we ended up as an investor in project equity. And first of all, thank you guys for having me on the panel. Super excited about this. I should probably start like this is how we got into effective investing. We have two, the Living Cities has two, like a family of investment funds. Fund one we opened in about 2008. That looked originally to focus on sort of affordable housing, scaling CDFIs and social impact funds to pay for success. Then we opened up our second fund in 2015 to kind of carry forward that vision. But in 2018 Living Cities went through a firm-wide pivot to focus on ratio equity and inclusion. So that meant sort of changing the investment basis of the fund pivoting it to REI as a means of cutting that lens across our entire business model. That is to the tail end of our commitment period for fund two. We're looking to, as well as provide some financial support for diverse fund managers who have the spirit of access to capital market. We wanted to look at various vehicles of wealth creation for BIPOC persons and communities. The idea that not everybody would invest in the private equity or VC fund, but there are certain there are a couple of different vehicles that are more tangible to end users and a broader base in users. So what kind of drove us to private project equity? And this is probably going to be a lot more what Allison and Todd have both hit on. They're focused on the majority and majority low to moderate income workers and the prioritization of companies that have a majority BIPOC workforce that really aligned with our commitment to serving communities of color. We had a wealth creation thesis around that centered around home ownership and owning where you work, where you live as a means of creating wealth and project equity. We kind of found the number of different channels. It also offered an opportunity for people to own where they worked. And that was a massive amount. That was a massive point of generating wealth that we weren't thinking about when we did our thesis shifts. So we're kind of very happy to run into Allison's new project equity. Our biggest sort of what stood out in the diligence and continues to stand out as having been in this deal with the project equity for a bit now. We definitely believe that small businesses are the backbones of local communities. And to Allison's point earlier about the demographic aging of baby boomers without succession plans, what happens when a business owner isn't turning the keys over and the reins over to the to the Normally, what happens is that a larger government from another area comes and buys his company and they take all the wealth creation out of the community. We view employee ownership as a complete natural fantasy of this and to keep up with the community and also to generate individual wealth with the NRI focus. Thanks for that. I think it's interesting you were touching on the different types of capital that you're looking to pull to deploy Allison you mentioned this to there's kind of a range you can invest in funds that are doing employee ownership transitions or building this space. Through debt through equity. I see a question in the chat around the role of grant capital. So I'm curious like maybe we'll start with getting into the specifics because you both have funds Allison and Todd that look very different as investors in both. And so it just kind of tests us out west to be really flexible with the types of capital we deploy into funds that are doing employee ownership. I'll mention for direct investments and employee ownership there's also a variety of ways you can invest. For example, just with worker cooperatives you can invest in through debt, but you could also invest through non voting preferred stock and other kind of quasi equity structures and so I feel like through my journey through employee ownership I've been learning about more and more ways to invest in a more non dilutive way and so I'm curious if you could also share the reasons why you structured your funds the way you did as well as kind of where you see the role and to the question in the chat for grant capital because that's something we also are certainly looking to blend into our approach. I can I can go ahead and kick us off with that. As far as kind of how and why we structured our product the way we did you know the question of the employees on the firm but you're trying to get in outside capital how does that work and Smith I think you did a great kind of summarizing kind of high level how that works. How we invest in companies is we use a mezzanine a mezzanine instrument that has of course debt like features to it, but also enables us to get warrants in the firm so we are able to take advantage of equity upside specifically equity upside that that we were able to help facilitate by investing in the firm so our warrants actually run kind of side by side with with the equity that the owners hold in the trust or the worker owners holding the trust. So if the worker owners have not built any wealth in the trust, because the performance of the company hasn't, you know, the company hasn't grown, then our warrants are also worthless as well, whereas if we help grow the company while we're there, our warrants will grow so so we believe and I think one thing that employee ownership really really speaks to when I when I was a when I was in grass school he always talked about that the costs that are associated with having misaligned interest in organization so the investors want one thing that the executives want another thing, the employees want want something else. So all those costs that are associated with that and we believe that investing in a model where everybody's interest or profit properly aligned, including including ours as an investor and our investors as investees as well as the executives work force helps eliminate a lot of those those those misalignment costs, all that to say we we invest using a mezzanine instrument, because it's our goal on day one to have 100% of the firm owned by the workers in the trust. So I think that's important just from, you know, telling the story of employee ownership and what it's about from actually letting the workers know you are real owners of this company, but also going back to some of those tax benefits. Those tax benefits are connected to the percentage of the company that is owned by the workers. So it's important for us that 100% of the equities in the hand of the workers, because then 100% of that tax benefit applies. If 50% of the hand of it was in the hands of the workers, then 50% of the benefit apply so again we see an alignment between the interest of investment and the interest of the workers and making this 100% employee owned. And so yeah that's kind of how we get the investor investor debt into the company at what we we know and believe is a properly kind of risk adjusted return where you get that that debt like piece and that equity like piece. So quickly to the actually had typed a long answer out to the, to the role of philanthropic grant funding so I won't say it, but I'll, I'll have answered it privately somebody I'll drop it in the chat, and I'll let, I'll let Allison jump in. Awesome. Yeah, so from from project equities perspective so the employee ownership catalyst fund. It's structured since an evergreen debt fund, and we structured it really to bridge the real capital barriers to employee ownership that we've seen in our work over the last 10 years.  So the banks going to look at you like you got three heads because you know they're not used to dealing with 50 owners. They're like well who's going to sign the personal guarantee like whose house is going to be on the line like if, and that's, it's just, it's just a different model and approach. We want to get to the place where you can't walk into your bank and your bank knows what this is and that the SBA loans. Somebody noted a question about SBA loans that the SBA loan guarantee programs can support all of the models of ownership. We're not there yet. We're working on it. We're not there yet. So, so the Kavos Fund is by design structured to be flexible. So we can put out capital that is debt. We can put out capital that is equity. We can do revenue or profit based financing. So really maximum flexibility. We can provide working capital alongside the transaction. We can do working capital actually before the transaction to help to help with the cost of getting this set up, you know, for companies coming out of COVID cash flow is always king but it's like really super king now. So, so, so, you know, flexibility is, is the name of the game. And, you know, ultimately, we are, we have structured the fund to with an aim to maximize the money that stays in the employee owners, you know, hands. So because the end of the day that's why we're in this work. So this is impact first capital it's long term patient financing. I think the other thing that I will will sort of comment on is, you know, different capital fills different needs. So, you know, catalyst fund impact first filling this gap in the capital market. One of the most exciting things that I've seen in impact space and entrepreneurship in the last year or so was was a quote, actually that was was came out of came from a pension fund that invested in a San Diego company that that transition called Taylor guitars, and the pension fund was quoted as saying something like, we chose to invest in this employee ownership transition, because it is low risk. And I saw that in writing somewhere and I was like, hallelujah. There is there is perceived risk of employee ownership because it is unfamiliar. And, you know, will will send you the tone of the case for employee ownership that has all the data points in it. All the studies right. One of the ideas is that that you know what Todd has been talking about and what you know the sides that I shared like that increased employee engagement, you know when done right the magic happens when you got the structure and the ownership culture. So when you've got those two components really working together. This is something that is low risk. Demonstrating really to investors that this that employee ownership is an investable impact when that truly delivers impact, you know, not just today. It's not a one time impact we're creating this employee owned company that's going to deliver impact into the future and over the long term. So yeah. Thanks for that I think I'll just add from the West perspective. There's also a variety of different ways you can invest in these types of funds so Allison mentioned she structured her fund as the evergreen debt fund, which has three tranches there's the senior note the junior no and a grant grant tranches well and then for Todd it's more of a traditional closed fund LP GP type structure which looks like a private equity fund. And so there's different types of investments and also types of capital we can deploy as a flexible impact investor program related investments mission related investments depending on on the risk appetite and the strategy and so just to say as we look at how do we crowd in more investors and different types of investors there's as Todd thinks about fun to three I mean he's already starting to talk about how do we get more. I think capital and just more kind of traditional sources of capital to scale, and because the numbers we're talking about, you know, are still relatively small in regards to the funds that you both have but in regards to the opportunity. And so just as we think about you know what's the role of maybe catalytic capital to demonstrate the model work with first time fund managers that then can take their track record and run with it. That's definitely something we're thinking a lot about at West, both in regards to the types of structures we want to demonstrate in the market so I think Alison the way that you're being really flexible with your model Todd with the unique approach you have to ease up blending it with the ethos of a co op if you will, you know, there's ways that I think we're looking to learn via you to see what works, and what could be scaled, but also thinking critically in what type of investment capital makes sense. And I'll just mention that grants are definitely part of the equation to increase capacity. As we look at some of the teams that we're working with perhaps there's grants that we can do for fellows and we're exploring this with a couple partners to think about adding extra capacity on on teams, so that we can support approximate leaders to join teams build that track record alongside these incredible fund managers, and then maybe spend off future funds. So we're thinking about different strategies and trying to be creative about ways to blend the types of capital that we have at West to try to solve the problems that we see with kind of the fund managers from a capacity constraints to, of course, the market and where we see the need for demonstration so I'll just kind of add that from from the high level of the way investors can engage in these types of funds but I don't know if they just you have anything to add there otherwise and happy to start taking some questions in the chat I'm seeing some good activity. So what I'm going to add is, we saw a very big need in the market for people to take personal risks. And so we, as our chief had our investment thesis evolved and we see our fit in the market, being willing to say we're willing to take the first and continue. We'll also put you through an institutional process as well we're not like on the foundation and offer grant capital that can be forgiven. We have investors in our funds that expect to get the money back so we have to maybe can't yet we can't call us we put our investor capital at risk so that kind of forces us to have a very institutional lens of how we approach diligence. Our biggest wins are when we come in with a decent size commitment relative to our fund hold limits, and then that's able to galvanize other capital parties, even with bigger markets to deals or trades that we're in. And we do we love doing that and love sitting on those calls with potential investors, co investors that are going to follow us into into the open. And like I said, they were really happy about the ownership model and looking to do more of that out of our third fund Great. And anything else time Allison before we pass to audience for questions. I'll jump in with one of their kind of just to share with with the audience about like that. There are different approaches to creating employee ownership and and the breadth of early investment opportunities can align with those so you know I talked a little bit about this idea of an independent transition, which is one approach, the company become employee, it becomes employee owned remains independently owned throughout kind of the investors and acquiring the business at any stage. And there are other approaches that start with acquiring the business in order to get that transaction done quickly, and then pretty immediately transition or at that time transition to it to employee ownership. And there are there are yet other approaches that acquire the company kind of more like a private equity firm might acquire it and hold it, you know, perhaps to tune it up operationally or tune it up, say environmentally, and then after some period of time exit, exit the fund to employee ownership. So, so that's another just sort of way that employee ownership approaches can differ. And you know the great news is they all end up with an employee owned company. And they can have different, the capital relationship and investor relationship can be different in those different scenarios. I'll add on top of that before before we get to the Q&A and I, I'm not going to take more than 60 seconds, because I have so much to say so it's going to be really really brief, but kind of kind of like four things as a as a field. So in our country, utilizing employee, we have to do one we have to and I think organizations like it's a heritage and project equity and investors are doing this is we have to bring down the cost of capital for this transaction and the way you bring down the cost of capital. And if somebody has a detailed question we can talk about that a little bit more is by de-risking the model is by taking all the perceived risk, which is much higher than the actual risk so if you look at the default rate on again just using ESOP because there's a lot of data the default rate on ESOP loans is significantly lower is less than 1% significantly lower than even like the SBA kind of requirements are but again there's not a lot of SBA funding for these loans a lot of traditional organizations and finance and banks don't don't finance these loans so we have to de-risk it then we have to make it more accessible and start to see you know our goals that one day you won't need to impact funds to do these conversions your local bank or your local CDFI will be able to finance, you know, most if not all of these sorts of loans so we have to bring down the cost of capital. I use that most of my time on that something quick, we have you have to invest in TA and technical assistance. So we partner up with the democracy at work Institute, which is a national nonprofit that that incubated APIS and heritage capital partners they incubated the funds a really interesting story about how philanthropic dollars and nonprofits can help create organizations that are that are investing in the in the traditional impact markets and traditional markets, but you have to invest in the technical assistance of the workforce and helping workers to transition their thinking to workers to worker owners, helping them build that that confidence and that skill set to understand what's going on in the company the way an owner would to get a lot of the benefits that that employee ownership brings to companies that you get a cool retirement account that you get a statement for and you get you get paid out when you retire. That's great, you know that's a positive, but to really get the business benefits you have to do the training and the technical assistance and that's why now is is our partner. You have to if you don't focus on racial equity and workforce of color is not just going to happen. It's not a part of your investment thesis and your investment criteria, then you say you're going to you're going to help deal with the racial well gap is not going to happen if it's not built into the model. And then finally a Smith a reference which is a fellowship program we're working on with the West. We're at the very beginning of this of this asset classes as Allison alluded to now is the time to get your diverse, your diverse players and all senses your diverse finance professionals your diverse board members your diverse CEOs that you may need to bring in. Get those folks in now at the ground floor. So as this continues to emerge and grow the field will be diverse from from the very beginning we won't have to kind of try to catch up on the back end. That was more than a minute sorry about that. I'll stop right there. So I'll answer a couple real quick so I'll include in the chat to the question about how you can learn more about West funds and applied to these funds we try to be as transparent as possible about our impact investing priorities. Grant making priorities on our website and also have an open call for ideas so that's a great way to get in touch but I'm also on LinkedIn and you can reach me there. I was being available. I saw a couple questions about that. I'm Allison, I'll say yes. We were happy to share but they also have project equity and a business heritage have great resources on their website and project equity has a case on employee ownership that they launched last year so we can maybe include that PDF as well which goes a little bit deeper. So there's a question here about from Scott Moon in the chat about any thoughts on how to incentivize or drive additional founders to consider the ESOP model. I'm curious, Todd, you're kind of in this right now looking to get a couple deals out the door as within your first fund and more to come so maybe I'll pass to you to answer that one. Smith, can you repeat it for me one more time. I was. Yeah, so his question was about you know what basically founders seem interested in the succession. They're driven by legacy objectives financial liquidity but any other thoughts and how to incentivize or drive additional founders to the ESOP model. No, that's right so I'll tell you kind of kind of our take is there there are a number of frictions to transitioning your business to employee ownership that don't exist in other forms of transition. I won't go into all of them but kind of one of our big thing, one of our big things is our goal is to make selling to your workers as easy as it is to sell to some private equity firm, or to a strategic buyer, or to a competitor, all of who we see many in the business. I don't want to do this, but I don't, you know, there's nobody in my family that pass it off to take this business over. So it seems like I'm stuck between all these rocks and hard places, because I know what's going to happen if I sell to my competitor or to this P firm or to a strategic. And they know what's going to happen to their legacy and oftentimes it's going to happen to their workforce. So really addressing the frictions how can we make it as fast and as easy to sell the owners as it is to these other options is what we're dealing with. Part of that is liquidity. So in the ESOP world, ESOPs are traditionally heavily financed by a seller's note. The owner is financing a lot of the acquisition capital, and every owner can't do that. And every owner is not willing to do that, especially when you look at, you know, black and brown communities where you may have had a successful business. That doesn't mean you still have a ton of wealth. The wealth may still be tied up in the business. So the idea that you're going to, you know, you're going to put a loan for five or seven years and not get you up is not, is not possible. So our fund is we're bringing liquidity to owners, like they would get in a P transaction or strategic transaction. So that's, that's one of many. Some of the costs in figuring out how to do the transition. I know that goes into our due diligence that goes into project equity as part of your process of figuring out there's an investment and so we take that off of the owner's plate. So, you know, figure, you know, knowing where all those are and addressing those with the investment and how you're investing is how you can get owners to really open their eyes. Even once they figure out they like it, we can say, hey, you can like it and we can help you do it. Well said, I'd love love exactly to absolutely postline and everything you just said and I'll just add one other thing which is awareness like the first pieces. Nobody knows about employee ownership. And if they do they may like not really understand it or have misconceptions. And so we spent a lot of time on awareness and we actually have a brand campaign for employee ownership that we launched last October with some peers in the field is called EO equals employee ownership equals.org is the website, really to focus on those business owners who who aren't already Googling employee ownership right we want to get more people who have heard about and have positive association with it, because that's going to open up the top of the much bigger as well. And so, I think we answered the question on Svalon so I might skip to to a question more about the history so is there a history of having employee ownership corporate structure combinations that can work long term. For example, a company set up with employee ownership for primary business, which then holds subsidiaries or partner firms with traditional corporate structures. So curious if you could share some of that background. I mean I can talk about what we see in other countries. Yeah, certainly there are small examples of this in the United States of acquisitions happening and there is is more of sort of an interest and an effort to support employee owned companies to do acquisitions that is that is happening right now. But in other countries, we absolutely see this and you know that the sort of best known example is in the Basque region of Spain is called Mondragon, which is essentially a, you know, a corporate entity that is made up of all employee owned companies and a company with one manufacturing business and now I can't remember off the top of my head but you know tens of billions of of dollars in in euros in revenue, a year across, you know, 200 plus businesses that all exist, sort of within this employee owned structure. So absolutely there's that that is is a is a model that happens, and and is one that we'd love to see more of in the United States as well. I'll add to that there's a lot of innovative things being done with with employee ownership and and traditional structures. Employee owned businesses, ESOPs are are have been shown to be really powerful also M&A and acquisition tools so the ability for these firms to acquire other firms, partly because of some of the amazing benefits that can be given to the owner of the selling company that are out there that make their offers really attractive. This mix between between employee owned and not employee owned subsidiaries. And they very well paid lawyers out there, who I'm sure, if they haven't already figured out, they will figure it out if you ask them. We know, we know a lot of those lawyers and those attorneys to be really good work around the space so, so we're happy to connect folks up to folks who could get really really innovative with structures that to achieve the goals. Before, before we wrap I'll ask one more question from the chat which is around, and can you speak to earlier stage or organizations speak to see capital channels available for for profit organizations are looking to build an employee ownership. So, so yeah the question if the question is about startups. I might refer folks to startup co op as a wonderful, wonderful resource. I know that they, they do a lot of really amazing, you know, technical support and community building. And I believe they also have a fund, you know designed to support startups. So if it's really more about companies that are established and are trying to dip their toe in the water, and, and learn more about what this could look like maybe get started with a small portion of employee ownership. You know, they're, similarly there are, are wonderful funds you know including the play ownership catalyst fund that are designed to, you know, to help with that CDF is a number of CDF is that are have loan funds to support employee ownership. So there's a couple funds in the space in addition to start co op like I see a group and looking at good scout capital that are looking at earlier stage organizations that might be interesting to look at there. But I know we're basically at time so I'll pause the questions there so sorry we didn't get to all of them. Just to quickly wrap up. Thank you so much for all of your time and engagement in the chat during the session. I look forward to continuing this conversation in the socap community, and, and using Todd's language, developing employee ownership as a robust asset class. Well on our way, but certainly need more co conspirators so hopefully this session just inspired you to join us connect with us and and work with us to expand opportunities for for employee ownership. Thanks so much. Thank you everyone.


And now we will come to the keynote by Claudia Comito. And I'd like to introduce Claudia. Hi, Claudia is working in Yulich. And she is going to tell us about building of the Helmholtz analytics framework and the making of heat. Now, I don't really know a lot about what these things mean. I hope you're gonna tell us. But it sounds very interesting and Yulich is a supercomputing center in Germany. So it definitely has to do a lot with high performance computing, big data, and all these nice things that everyone talks about. So Claudia, welcome to your pysons. Thank you for giving a talk at the keynote. And I think we can now go ahead and take it away. So let's hear the screen. Right, and I'll go off stage now. And I'll stick around, take notes of the questions, and then we can have the Q&A five minutes before the end. All right, thank you. Okay, thanks a lot for the introduction. And thank you so much for inviting me. I really cannot put into words how astonishing it is for me to be talking at Euro Python. My background is actually in astrophysics. I only switched to scientific computing three years ago. The last thing I expected was to be invited to Euro Python. Anyway, I'm glad you don't know much or probably nobody knows much about these projects because yes, I'm going to tell you about it, about them. What's interesting is, and I didn't quite realize at the time, but this project I joined in 2018 was a pretty impressive exercise in getting researchers to talk to each other. And those of you in academia know that it might be difficult to get researchers to talk to each other, even if they're working on similar topics in the same building. So in this case, the goal of the project was to get completely different research groups in different scientific fields to work and eventually adopt a common product. So I'm going to tell you about this. And in general, I think the project was quite successful, but sometimes I realized some of the things that made the project a success could easily have gone completely in the other direction. So I'm going to try and take these things apart a bit and look at the many ways that we were good and some of the ways that we were lucky. Okay, let's get started. Of course, you can't escape this, but interweaving to all of this is of course my personal journey out of fundamental research and into data science and not just like after my PhD or my first postdoc as most researchers do, but at a relatively senior age. So let me say a few words about myself. First of all, I'm originally from Italy. I studied astronomy in Bologna and moved to Germany about 20 years ago to write my PhD thesis on the molecular content of star-forming regions. And well, as things turn out, I never left Germany. So in fact, I've been a German citizen now for over 10 years. Everything considered, I worked in astrophysics for about 18 years. So that's including my PhD. So at first with the high altitude telescopes for the Max Planck Institute for Radiostronomy in Bonn and later with the Herschel Space Observatory data at the University of Cologne. And well, I didn't really, it wasn't very obvious to me at the time, but I think I was already at the time more interested in the technicalities of data acquisition and processing rather than in the analysis itself or in doing the research. So I often found myself in interface positions between technical people, as we used to call them and the astronomers or the users as the technical people called them. And of course, I had been using Python and NumPy for data calibration and data analysis for all of my astronomer career. So I thought in 2017, I thought I was quite good at it. And in hindsight, I am so glad I had no idea how much I didn't know before applying for this position at the Ulish Supercomputing Center. What I didn't know in my last years in fundamental research was that I had been living in a pretty unhealthy combination of bor out and uncertainty, job uncertainty for a bit too long. So, yes, I didn't come to realize the connection between those two things and boredom and uncertainty until later, but it's only recently that I've started to think of projects or tasks in terms of boredom versus perceived safety. But anyway, a good place where everybody tends to be or would like to be is there. And of course, safety and boredom will mean different things to different people. And actually this plot would need a time axis as well. Even the same person going through their different life phases will have very inhomogeneous perception of what it means to be to feel safe. And in my twenties and thirties or early thirties not being bored meant being able to tinker with telescopes on some oxygen-deprived mountain desert and being safe meant taking the oxygen bottle up the stairs even if it weighed a ton. So I think it is a widespread phenomenon at least from my Eurocentric perspective that we tend to associate job safety with boredom when we are younger. But later in my career, I realized that for me, at least for me, boredom on the job was actually inversely correlated to safety. So the less job safety, the more I felt pressure to take on tedious, resource-intensive tasks that I thought would make me indispensable and would give me job safety, but it doesn't work that way. So I guess what I'm trying to say in so many words is if you ever find yourself in that upper left corner on the boredom to safety plot, feel free to start thinking about an exit strategy. Yes, so I was lucky. My exit strategy materialized then as a job offer, as a data analyst at the Eulish Supercomputing Center in late 2017, and then I was hired in 2018 as a generalist kind of technical user representative kind of person within the Helmholtz analytics framework. And you can already tell at the time, I didn't have much idea what I was getting myself into. So I'm not sure how many of you are actually versed in the German publicly funded research landscape, the Helmholtz Association. I'm going to tell you a bit about it. It's the largest research organization in Germany. They're mostly focused on engineering and life sciences. And of course computing, high performance computing, big science, big data is research infrastructure. So it's a glue that keeps it all together. The interesting thing I found is that the Helmholtz Association doesn't fund single research institutes. They focus on cross-center research programs. So large cross-discipline projects are already the norm within the Helmholtz Association. What was new in 2016 was called for proposals for the so-called information and data science incubator that was initiated explicitly to fund outstanding research projects in the general field of scientific big data or big science, as you want to call it. Okay, so the Helmholtz analytics framework was one of the six projects funded in the first incubator round in 2017. And the focus was on tackling big data challenges in applied science and life sciences and providing a generalized toolkit for data analytics. That would be then within this framework co-designed by scientists and developers. So let's see, here's a quick panorama view of the actual use cases.  So I only understand the use cases very superficially, but we have an earth system, we had an earth system science use case. They are working on modeling the interconnection between landmass, water bodies, atmosphere, and like every other use case here, dealing with massive simulation volumes, massive data sets. We had some atmospheric science, so modeling the effect of climate change on stratospheric ozone. We had two neuroscience use cases. The first one was more imaging focus of trying to disentangle the genetics from outside world effects on the human brain. And we had some aerospace or rocket science kind of use case. And this picture represents the aircraft design via high precision simulations. We had structural biology, trying to identify protein structure by machine learning based on very few bits of information. And again, we had so the second neuroscience use case that uses statistical analysis of huge time series of fire ignorance to figure out what series of triggers actually corresponds to actual connections in the brain. Anyway, the problem is common. The data are very large. They're huge. They need high performance computing. They are also using similar methods for dimensionality reduction. So that's where our tool heat comes in. So the idea behind this is now in very simplified terms. Let's put together a few compute heavy research projects from different fields, assign them a single group of scientific developers. They call us information experts. Have to get used to that. So I see if the mix can come up with a general toolkit that can serve first the use cases and then later the academic data science computing community at large. So the buzzword here is co-design. And I'm not going to get into the details of how the several research teams were selected. You can imagine there was some politics involved, but the fact is that as you have seen in the previous slide, the final selection of eight research topics was quite a bit more heterogeneous than anticipated. So all of these use cases had three things in common. They mostly dealt with monolithic multi-dimensional arrays. Their arrays were too large to be loaded in a NumPy and the array. And yes, of course there was agreement on the programming language of the toolkit. Otherwise I wouldn't be here, I guess. But otherwise, some of the use cases only, I mean, quote unquote only needed to be able to perform distributed basic operations. So maybe they have already a NumPy-based tool, for example, that's using mostly or calling mostly linear algebra statistics manipulation operations. And they want to be able to run this tool on memory distributed arrays, which you cannot do with NumPy or yeah, on big cluster or including on GPUs. And most of the use cases adopt common machine learning algorithms for labeling, for example, like K-Mean, Scikit-learn, K-Mean, Scaniers, Neighbors and so on. But some of them needed something a bit more complex like a singular value decomposition, principle component analysis. And I mean more complex now, at least from a parallel implementation point of view. And finally, a subset of use cases, especially those dealing with the medical imaging involve neural networks. So, right, fast forward three years later. And now you know why heat or Python library heat looks a bit like a distributed tensor library in an identity crisis. So there's a basic operation, NumPy-like part. There's a parallel machine learning part that's more like Scikit-learn. And there's a data parallel neural networks part that is more like PyTorch. You can distribute PyTorch neural networks training with. So I'm going to go very briefly into the heat, the basic operations part because it's the foundation, right? And yes, so as I said, heat adheres strictly as possible, at least in the basic operations to part to the NumPy API. The greatest difference, the greatest difference being that when you wrap your data in a heat array and we call it D and D array for distributed and the array, you can specify the split argument which defines the axis along which your array will be distributed across the available processes. So each process will only load a slice of the data. You don't have to worry about single node memory as long as you have enough processes to load your data on. So here's a bit more of a visual representation of what the split argument really means. And locally, so the local data objects are PyTorch tensors. And so process local operations are PyTorch operations and that covers of course process local efficiency. Thank you so much, PyTorch. And Igor execution covers GPU support and differentiability of the arrays. But the main thing with heat is that the D and D array is not treated as a set of separated slices. It's a monolithic entity. It's treated as a monolithic entity by heat operation so that whatever heat function you're calling, of course, if we have implemented it, but we have a lot of them. So whatever function you're calling, it's parallelized under the hood. So the needed communication layer is via MPI and MPI for Py and that's basically what the heat developer's job has been to provide this parallelization under the hood. So I'm not going into more details. You can check out the library on PyPy and GitHub. I wanted to hear, I wanted to talk more about difficulties and the good luck really we had within the general framework. Yes, so the biggest hurdle we encountered was for sure hiring developers for an academic research project. This is really quite difficult. In fact, the DEF team, the heat DEF team is to this day always and permanently understaffed. So I'm sure at least from what I'm hearing from the research, other similar research projects we are in touch with pretty much every scientific development project runs into the same problems. You can hire scientists, turn developers who are usually at least in the beginning of it like slow developers or you can try to hire professional developers but first of all, they're not going to be willing to be underpaid in academia for more than a few months, maybe a year and the second, you do need to then have some intermediate figure or several figures to interface the developers brains with the scientists. And also this is quite anecdotal but my experience is at least in my former community scientists were really highly skilled that's a software development still will shy away from scientific development roles because they feel they might jeopardize their scientific career. And so I guess I'm coming back to job safety. Scientific developers need job safety, job safety of course, like everybody else I would say but this is really a category of scientific generalists that has it really tough in a specialist-dominated research world and unless they switch out of academia really early they also has it quite tough in the or they might have it quite tough in the software development industry because they were not trained as software developers or software engineers. Okay, so anyway, sorry about cats. Within the Helmholtz analytic frameworks we ended up with a pretty heterogeneous group of scientists. So with different levels of experience and different levels of expertise really. In the team we have one computer scientist, two informaticians, one neuroscientists and five physicists but the five physicists including myself are from the most disparate branches of physics so we are really like not the same species I think. I forgot to ask my team about for permission to use their pictures before I left on holiday on a summer break. So I hope you can tolerate the cat emojis to replace our pictures. That's the German part of my brain playing safe with privacy. So these are the core developers plus a few brilliant minds who have contributed less code maybe but many ideas especially at the beginning of the projects. I want to mention Marcus Goetz specifically. He's at the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology. He's been leading the heat development pretty much from the beginning basically just out of his PhD. Really, I cannot speak highly enough of this talented young leader. If you get the chance to work with him, take it. I also want to mention Daniel. Daniel Cochlin who started out in Ulish has now moved to Karlsruhe as well. He's certainly our most prolific developer. He almost single-handedly hammered out the linear algebra module and the data parallel neural networks module among many other things. And then I want to mention Charlie Debus who's in my opinion, one of the most brilliant minds on the team and she's unfortunately one of the most brilliant minds of many teams. So the time she devotes to heat is less and less but you can really thank her for a lot of the parallel machine learning implementation within heat and for a lot of the communication layer the really tough abstract MPI stuff. And then I want to mention Philipp Knechkes and Kai Kreisek. They have contributed maybe less code but the bigger ideas among other things they have been working on MPI for Torch library that I forgot to write here but you can look it up. MPI number four Torch that will eventually be merged into heat and allow for distributed automated differentiation. That's a really big thing. And then we have our continuous integration gods Björn Hagomaya and Michelle Tanava. And Björn has also taken on a lot of the coordinating between the developers, well, most of the coordinating I would say between the developers and use cases. Okay, so what I want to mention here really is is how well the team got around this. I think it was unavoidable. This initial calibration of recalibration of the group dynamics. It's a group in which seniority and experience don't necessarily match. I mean, for me as a senior staff scientist it wasn't that obvious that it would work so well. So we were bound to have culture clashes from coming from so many different communities but really for me coming as basically a senior beginner in parallel computing and you can tell from our code base it's not just me. I mean, most of us aren't professional developers but no matter this is really a group in which it felt always from the beginning it felt okay to make mistakes to, even low level mistakes, basic standard library Python questions when you mix people from so many different backgrounds that's really a good environment to have. And I have to say we also, at least the scientists on the team, we also understand users' needs in a way that I think a team fully stuffed with professional developers probably couldn't. Of course, they would produce the library in one third of the time, but okay. So, well, while preparing this talk I had almost forgotten that roughly one third of this project was run under pandemic conditions. And if I look back at all the progress we made in the last year, it almost looks like for us as a distributed remote team it was sort of in the beginning it kind of felt like business as usual. In the last year and a half our ePaper was accepted that IEEE Big Data 2020 that was a really big thing for us. We went through major code overhaul we kept implementing new features to support the use cases. We kept submitting pavers and presenting heated conferences. We wrapped up the Helmholtz analytic framework this spring quite successfully I think. Eventually we were quite surprisingly we were approached by Intel developers and that started a collaboration with them. I could go on. There were also a few things that didn't work so well. I mean we kind of lost touch a bit with some of the use cases needs and we were too slow to respond to inquiries from new users but overall I think we had a very productive year and a half and of course as I said it helped a lot that at least the heat developers started out as a distributed team that collaborates asynchronously anyway that shies away from unnecessary meetings. I mean we are totally meeting lazy but I don't want to brush the strain of pandemic operations under the rug. In fact I mean I tried to put together a slide that would effectively convey this strain for the last year and a half and I think I failed. This slide does give me a bit of anxiety but not as much as we had really in the last year. We went through the whole spectrum of loneliness to being overcrowded. I have three kids, everybody on a video call at the same time and less interruptions and some of us were worrying about the next career step and so on. It was really quite a strain that I don't want to as I said I don't want to brush it off so easily. I should get my kids Hawaiian shirts. I just realized yesterday while I looked for the where are my pants Lego guy. Anyway what worked was sometimes I think the fact that some of us started out pretty clueless about what we were doing and the landscaping which we were operating. I think that cluelessness was actually one of the reasons why we kept going. I mean speaking for myself I didn't stop to wonder can we really do something different or even better than dusk and cupai and so on. Now I was learning all the time. I was learning new things. I was solving and like everybody else on the team we were solving difficult abstract problems that in the beginning at least we weren't used to. Each of us could find something low bored on high safety to do because the skills on the team were so heterogeneous. So I like to think that we had a very forward looking management in place when the heat developers team was put together. I also kind of know that a lot of it was just was luck or let's say enthusiasm on our side. So anyway we ended up with a toolkit that at least some of our use cases are some of our use cases are actively using for their applications and that allows them to carry out the data analysis that we're just weren't able to do before. And that's especially true for those use cases who are lucky enough to be able to hire dedicated developers for this project. That's for example, I want to mention the Terrestrial Systems Monitoring Use Case where that was the earth system modeling that I mentioned earlier that hired Daniel Coaklin at the beginning of the project. They hired Daniel first and he's probably contributed the most lines of code to the library and a lot of features. And then later they hired Ben Burgart with currently our main source of bug reports. So thank you so much, Ben. Yes, a similar fate was also for the second neuroscience use case who I'm supporting and importing their non-pay tool to heat and they can now run some statistics that they just couldn't do before. So finally, well almost finally, I have two finalists here I think. I want to mention for my point of view, the greatest lucky term, even if it sounds funny to say it like that, as far as I'm concerned, early on in the project, one of us, probably the most meeting lazy, Phillip, suggested to replace our bi-weekly video call with text meetings on our Matamos on our chat. I just cannot overstate the impact that text meetings had on my onboarding and even later, being able to research on discussions that were going on during the meetings, but it just wasn't able to follow in real time. That was just awesome. Even to this day, I go back to discussions that happened two years ago because I now remember other was something, but now I understand it and maybe two years ago, I didn't quite understand all of it. Also, it saves us a lot of time because students joined the developer team for a limited time, but they join all the time and then they leave, they have access to all the information, the previous discussions to links. Really, I think any group having regular meetings and heterogeneous skillset should consider switching to text meetings. And again, this probably known fact if you are in software development, but in academia, it's not that obvious. So, and finally, I want to mention, I already mentioned it earlier, but one major lucky turn was being approached by Intel for a possible collaboration for their one API. And this was recently at the time where when the Helmholtz Analytics framework funding was about to run out and further development, heat further development was, I mean, we knew it was going to go on, but we didn't quite know why. I mean, how, we knew why, we weren't sure how. So of course, having an industry leader interested in what we do makes it easier to secure more public funding. I'm not really into the tiniest details of the collaboration, but they are openly contributing to our repository so you can have a look there. Okay, so now room for improvement. Okay, this is more of a, I mean, if I could do it all over again, thought experiment from the development point of view, I think the main thing that probably slowed us down and that we could have handled better even within our boundary conditions is that the roles within the team were a bit fuzzy. I think it was justified in the beginning because we all had to find our place, but maybe they wouldn't need to be so fuzzy now. So to be sure a lot gets done, but it's mostly on a volunteering basis. So this tends to crystallize and of course, in the sense that developers would take on a task or maybe the implementation of a feature or whatever fixing a bug, then they are sort of the implied default person for that piece of code for the task. And obviously the workload distribution gets really skewed really fast. And also people end up specializing. We don't want that. Of course, I know if you have a software engineering background by now you're probably thinking, oh yeah, these are the basics, right? We learned that in the first semester because I mean, nearly now I want to mention this kind of insight is what Italians call discovering hot water. And this is totally not the same as reinventing the wheel. So if you need a nice new idiom, keep this in mind. However, I think one of the main features of data science projects within research is in fact that they are somewhat depleted of software engineering skills. So for those of you that at some point will find themselves putting together a bunch of scientists to produce software, be prepared, they might be absolutely or vehemently against cram, but at least establishing some kind of rota from the beginning, especially for the more tedious tasks might be a good idea. It's not just about distributing the workload, of course, it's in a small, especially in small teams, you want everybody to be able to do almost everything. And of course, boredom needs to be distributed. I think you see I have a boredom theme here and I also found myself a nice little niche role within the team for that. Okay, within the entire framework, again, if I could do it all over again, the one thing I would definitely change and where I think really we could have done better is I think the developers should have been more proactive in supporting students and early stage domain scientists. We kind of assumed that they were getting in touch with us if they had questions and problems, but I think the hurdle for them to create GitHub issues to then keep pulling at our sleeve to get their issues solved. At that stage of that scientist's career, it was just too high and it was just a low safety, high boredom activity that in the end it didn't happen. So not as much as we expected. So if I could do it again or maybe in the next phase of the project, I would certainly set up some kind of dedicated support channel for students for early career scientists and certainly keep more of an eye on the student timelines because they really have tight deadlines, deadlines. Okay. Ah, yes, I think I'm almost done. So, no knowns, no knowns and no knowns. Let's see, I think I've mentioned our known knowns already. The ongoing work is working on parallel singular value decomposition more complex machine learning algorithms than we have now. So, SVD, principle component analysis and optimization of data parallel neural networks training. And there's ongoing work, as I mentioned, on distributed automatic differentiation. We have this just started ongoing Intel collaboration which we hope will continue. So, no knowns. These are projects that we are kind of trying to get started and mostly deal with dissemination, heat dissemination beyond the Helmholtz analytics framework use cases. Of course, we would like other scientists to try the library as well and to use it if it helps them. So one group we are in touch with recently is our local earth system data exploration in Ulish. It's Martin Schulz and Felix Kleinert. Then we have a possible kind of up in the air collaboration with the universe and matter, big data, big science projects. That's a German call for proposals. It's a pretty big thing where we started to work on. And then of course my fixed idea I mean, that's literally up in the clouds and above is maybe at some point eventually to send heat to space. Okay, of course I'm not a knowns. Who knows, your use case? I mean, if you have something interesting that you want us to work on, get in touch or if we can help you in any way, get in touch. Github would be the best for that. And I would like to thank, well, my management first of all, that's Daniel Malman and Björn Haggemaier from the Federated Systems and Data Division at the Ulish Supercomputing Center. Daniel is the division heads and Björn is a team lead. They hired me in 2017, they gave me safety, they gave me time to figure things out, to learn all the, well, apart at least of the things I needed to learn. I don't think I'm done that yet. Yes, and they gave me hard stuff to do. That was, they really put me in that nice green square where I wanted to be and Markus Goetz also tolerated quite a bit on my cluelessness, especially in the beginning. Very gracefully, very graciously. And then I would like to thank our student contributors, Lena, Ben, the two Simons, Jakob, Luca and Fabriz and I hope I'm not forgetting anybody. That's certainly, I'm thinking more that came in and went. Students are really the better coders in this project. So I really enormously enjoy working directly with them because I learned so much. And of course, they also learn a bit of the scientific perspective. Also, I want to mention, I'm not sure that I could have switched to data science so late in my career, I mean, in my 40s, without Coursera, without the fantastic Python 3 deep dive. That's Fred Baptiste and also a great resource for to understand parallel computing and message passing interface is the EPCC online class that I've linked here. I don't know if I will send in slides later, I suppose. You will have the links there if you're interested. And I think that's it. Thank you so much. Thank you very much, Claudia. That was a very inspiring talk and thank you for all the insights that you gave in terms of how scientific projects are run. And I think that's an area where not many of us can actually relate to because most of us were probably from the software development industry and there, of course, things work a little differently. Also, I think that most of us will probably work in smaller projects, not these big ones, not like between institutes spread across Europe. So that's very interesting. We have lots of questions. I'm gonna just ask a few of those. I'm gonna post the rest into the breakout room and I would like you to join the breakout room after the session. So, one question that got a lot of, feedback was this one. You mentioned text meetings. It's a new concept for me. And what does it actually comprise of? Well, that's surprising because I thought it would be kind of common, especially in software engineering and software development. Well, we have a Matamos. I'm not sure, it's a chat, right? It's like kind of thing. And we have different channels where we discuss. We are in touch pretty much all the time, but we have a dedicated channel that we call optimistically sprint meetings. Although our attempt to scrum has, you know, crashed really fast, very much in the beginning. But anyway, the channel name is SAID. And every two weeks, at a given time, we meet in this specific channel and we all come together and discuss things that are going on. I especially like it when we talk about things, not so much about, you know, this is what I've done. I don't care about that. It's on GitHub, right? What we care about is what problems we are running into where we kind of think we need help or we are getting stuck distributing issues. That's what the boredom master does usually. Distributing issues that have been there for a long time and nobody takes them on or planning the next release, this kind of stuff. So we kind of join in this specific channel. We try to all be there at the same time for maybe half an hour, one hour. And it works really well because the discussion is there to read, right? For people who can't attend or if later you want to go back to it. Right, I can very much relate to that.  So not very often. Absolutely. Next question is this one. Do you have any, do you have some ideas on how to best retain technical people in science and give them the career path and recognition? So you mentioned some of that already in the talk but perhaps you can go a bit more into detail. Well, my main idea would be guys, you know, universities cuff up those permanent positions because if you don't get publications because you're working on software and if nobody even knows you exist because they use your software but they might have never met you really. It's really tough, right? So I think there needs to be, it needs to be more like front and center on group leaders or professors minds that these people need more safety, right? More of a job safety. I, unfortunately I don't have, I don't have solutions but I think science is a bit of a big, it's a big field. So in fundamental research, it's quite difficult especially in Germany, you don't have this middle level permanent positions. You either become a professor or you're on a three year contracts or your life basically and in applied science. For example, I was, I'm totally grateful and lucky my position has turned to permanent this year but that's because in applied science and where I'm working, there is a real competition with the industry. So I mean, we just leave after a while if we don't feel safe. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so another question here. I'm just gonna do one more question, very quick one. Someone was asking where the job offers are listed. Obviously, we have people interested in maybe J.C. and the Helmholtz. Yes, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm going to post the links in the breakout room. I think that's a better solution. Right. So, right, so to wrap up, thank you very much again for the talk. That was very interesting and. Thank you so much. I hope you're going to try the library. Yes, of course. I mean, we haven't, I didn't put up any questions about the library. There are questions about the library. Of course, I'm gonna copy all the questions that I have noted into the breakout room chat so you can then discuss them there on J.C. So thanks again. Okay, thank you so much. It was great to be here. Thanks, bye-bye. Bye.