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cryptswahili · 5 years

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Peter Todd on the Essence of Bitcoin

Audio interview transcription — WBD068

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Peter Todd. I use Rev.com from translations and they remove ums, errs and half sentences. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

You can subscribe to the podcast and listen to all episodes here.

In this episode, I talk with Bitcoin legend Peter Todd. We talk about the essence of Bitcoin, why it worked whether other attempts at digital currencies failed as well as key topics such as fungibility, lightning and why other projects are scams.

https://medium.com/media/ff83f743006e77b61bf2549648386e0b/href

Interview Transcription

Interview Date: Saturday 26th Jan, 2019

“Anyone who understands economics and finance and how markets work will be a maximalist because it is more efficient to have one currency than a bunch of ones.”

— Peter Todd

Peter McCormack: Hi there, Peter. How are you?

Peter Todd: I’m great, thanks.

Peter McCormack: Thank you for coming on the podcast. I’ve wanted to talk to you for quite a long time. I followed a lot of your work. And, one of the things that really stood out for me is when I went on your blog, and not only did I not understand the content of your articles, I didn’t even understand what they were about.

Like there’s a certain level of technical competence that I think you have to have to kind of understand this work. And, I then read about a story that you were emailing Hal Finney and Adam Back when you were at like 15?

Peter Todd: Yep.

Peter McCormack: I’ve got to ask about this. What’s the background? How does a 15-year-old start talking to Hal Finney and Adam Berk about Hashcash? What’s the journey to that?

Peter Todd: Well, the great thing with the Internet is, no one knows that you’re dark, and even when they do, they don’t care. And I mean, if you go back far enough, as a young kid, I watched a lot of Star Trek and thought the ideals of democracy and freedom of speech, they’re all said and well and good.

And, my dad’s an economist by training. So initially, really early on, I got interested in the freedom project, which is a decentralised censorship resistant publication network. Long story short is, it lets you make a website that no one can take down, lets you publish.

And I thought, “Oh! That’s really cool.” And, got interested in it, did a little bit of work on it. So actually, first time I kind of worked on creating an exploit, was actually against Freenet. The work I created a tool to go and map out the interconnections of different nodes, so those are all well and interesting.

But, I think the big issue with Freenet network, was, as I was thinking to myself, “Well, obviously the next step is you need decentralised money. Just being able to publish your thoughts isn’t enough. Political movements need money. Take a look, political movements for the marginalised, the poor.

If you’re a rich person, you have the way of funding the things you need to fund to make your political movement happen, whereas the poor don’t have that. We are often kind of talking about it in reverse, the rich will gain politics, and so on. And, reality, I mean you can’t kind of stop that. But, for the disadvantage, you definitely need that option to be able to move money around. You need to be able to without surveillance.

So, I think long story short is, somehow or another, I wanted upon a mailing list, the Blue Sky mailing list, which if I remember correctly, it was advertised on the Freenet mailing lists. So, I signed up, we started talking about stuff, and I spent a lot of time trying to invent Bitcoin, and like many people completely failed at it.

And, it’s really interesting looking back and seeing just how wrong I was, in almost 180 degrees offset what was the right answer. And, a lot of people, I think, had that experience.

Peter McCormack: So you tried to invent a Bitcoin?

Peter Todd: Yeah. I was one of many, many people trying to create decentralised currency. And, really failed at us.

Peter McCormack: What was version?

Peter Todd: Well, I think … I mean, I didn’t have a proposal, ’cause I realised all my thoughts on it weren’t going to work. But, I think what I caught so wrong was I had thought about Hashcash in terms of the thing that controls the creation of money. And, that’s not actually an important thing. The creation of money is not the important thing. It’s preventing double-spending that is.

The creation is just a onetime event. Allowing money to be moved consistently, and accurately without double spend, is actually the critical thing. And, unfortunately, because I tied proof of works to the creation so tightly, I never really came up with the concept of, “Well hang on.” No, no. We tied proof of work to the changes in the ledger, to make sure it’s difficult three or at the changes.

Peter McCormack: Right.

Peter Todd: And, my thinking on my kind of solution where we have some kind of decentralised database, how do you do that? I don’t know. It can be attacked, it can be civil attacked. And, I just constantly shot down ideas, and could never figure out, how do you make this work, when the answer was juts so simple. But, it was 180 degrees opposite what I was working on.

Peter McCormack: But, I’m guessing you’re saying it’s simple ’cause the answer was Bitcoin, right?

Peter Todd: I mean, literally someone could have sat down … Like honestly, it’s to the point where one tweet from the future, saying how Bitcoin works, would probably have been enough info for me to have created Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: But, what is the key, the one key element then?

Peter Todd: Using proof of work to make changes to the ledger difficult. That one sentence, I think, encapsulates the key part of Bitcoin that we were missing back then.

Peter McCormack: So, it’s more the game theory than the code?

Peter Todd: I don’t even … The point is, I don’t even think the game theory part is a really critical thing. Like, absolute core of it that you must have is tying proof work to changes to the ledger, to make it expensive to change. You could probably have Bitcoin without even a financial reward. It would still work far better than any of the crazy ideas people had come up back then.

Peter McCormack: So, the Bitcoin white paper comes out, you’re obviously are aware of it, you read it. Is it obvious at the time or?

Peter Todd: Absolutely.

Peter McCormack: Oh, immediately you could?

Peter Todd: Yeah. For me, I believe I read the Bitcoin white paper for the first time, like late 2009. And, I remember, you know when I read it, I was like, “Oh, shit! I should’ve thought of that.” It was actually, for me, it was opposite many people.

For me, I read it, and this is obviously gonna work. And, only later did I come up with reasons why it wouldn’t.

Peter McCormack: Right.

Peter Todd: Whereas, for many people, they read and think, “How would this ever work?” And then, later they’re convinced it does. But, I’d been primed, ’cause I’d already worked on this and tried very hard. So, when I saw it that’s … It just was so obvious to me. “Oh, I was wrong. This was the missing piece”

Peter McCormack: How, as a 15-year-old, do you make the leap from realising that there is a need for money to finance certain projects and things, to it must be having to be a decentralised type of money that doesn’t already exist? How do you make that leap?

Peter Todd: I mean, the idea of e-money and cypherpunk stuff around that was not exactly like an unknown concept. I partly even read Sci Fi stories at the time talking about that. The notion of credits is really sort of a common term in Sci Fi stories. I mean. it’s just …

And also, money itself has a property. I mean, sure, it’s issued by the government, but paper money I can give to you, and no one can stop me. The idea that money would have to be controlled on transaction basis is this very new thing, pushed by big companies who want to go make money off this, and Law enforcement who would like to surveil everyone. This is the opposite of how money should work. This is not the status quo.

Peter McCormack: So, this Bitcoin worked then, or is it working?

Peter Todd: I mean, in terms of doing what money should do, it’s a hell of a lot closer than say PayPal. It’s a lot closer to what PayPal was meant to be. I mean, people who started PayPal wanted to create censorship resistant e-currencies. They didn’t have the tech to do it, and they didn’t have the legal frameworks to get away with it.

So, they didn’t. But, that was the initial concept with PayPal. So, Bitcoin’s a lot close to that. I mean, Bitcoin has scaled boldy problems. But, the core thing of what Bitcoin does is much closer to that than alternatives, certainly closer to things like Liberty Reserve, which of course got shut down.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I guess there’s always been the centralised problem, right?

Peter Todd: Yeah. Centralisation kills things if they have adversaries. Often centralisation’s way to go. I mean, I have approached it myself, called Open TimeStamps, which is absolutely centralised. There are four calendars of the Open timeStamps system. I run two of them, two other people run another two.

It’s a centralised system. But, Open TimeStamps doesn’t really have adversaries in this way that Bitcoin does. And, no one’s going to profit by shutting down Open TimeStamps in the way you would with Bitcoin.

And also, because Open TimeStamps relies on Bitcoin for the truth of the timestamps, the central third parties on a position to fake things.

Peter McCormack: Okay. So, I wanna … I should’ve asked this at the start. I love asking this question, ’cause it’s so simple. And, the first time I heard it was when Epicenter asked Adam Berk, and it also blew my mind, just hearing it set out. So, I’m just gonna ask you again. What is Bitcoin? The answers are always different as well.

Peter Todd: Well, I’ll give you a different answer.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Peter Todd: Which is, Bitcoin is a shared data structure, that we make artificially expensive to change, by destroying energy every time we update it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. I’ve heard that one like four times. No. I’m joking. Yeah. I’m only joking. Okay. Okay.

Peter Todd: Bitcoin is an elephant, and it’s pink with like little spots.

Peter McCormack: I love the energy angle. So, you’ve been around since the start, right? It’s 10 years and-

Peter Todd: Not quite.

Peter McCormack: Pretty much.

Peter Todd: I mean, I’ve known about Bitcoin, since nearly the start. But, I actually got more active into it a bit later. And, the reason is, I mean, relative to many other developers, but the reason is because when I first learned about Bitcoin, well, I’d just started a new job at a crazy startup. And then, I was crazy enough to then also try to do a physics degree, while I was at the startup. So, I didn’t exactly have a lot of free time.

Peter McCormack: But, I mean, I’ve gone through the exercise of going through old mailing lists, and old Bitcoin talk forums. And, there’s a number of names I recognise. A number I don’t. And, I’ve seen you in there commenting and talking. So, you were there like pretty much since the start.

Peter Todd: I mean, I started working on this stuff full time 2014.

Peter McCormack: 2014.

Peter Todd: Which is a lot earlier than many people.

Peter McCormack: But, having been there, through the whole experience, how do you take it all in, because even though you knew it would work, there’s a difference between knowing theoretically it would work.

Peter Todd: Well, remember, I thought it would work.

Peter McCormack: You thought it would work?

Peter Todd: And then, I started realising, hang on, this isn’t as good as it sounds.

Peter McCormack: Right. Okay. We’re going to come back to those things. But, 10 years on is still exists. It holds billions of dollars in value. At one point, hundreds of billions. There is the talk of ETS. We have futures. We have so much happened. Did you foresee all this?

Peter Todd: I mean to be perfectly honest, this it doesn’t really surprise me that much. I mean, you always gotta be a bit careful. I mean, your memory of what you thought five years ago can be a bit vague. But, I don’t think if you’d asked me that many years ago, would it? Could it get to where it is now? I would have said no.

I think I would have said, “Yeah, I mean, this is plausible. It is an obvious utility. Digital gold is obviously useful. So, if things don’t fail and it continues to grow, I mean, surely could get to this point.”

I think the more interesting question is, well, how big could it get? And, I would actually put relatively small limits on it. We’re not gonna see … First time I bought Bitcoin, I bought it for 20 cents of a Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Right.

Peter Todd: And, I tell you, that was the best financial decision of my life. The worst financial decision of my life was only buying $20 worth.

Peter McCormack: Hold on. What is that? That’s like a hundred Bitcoin. Yeah. But, we won’t have hindsight.

Peter Todd: But, the thing with that is looking at how that grows. I mean, how many zeros is that times? Call it 10000 times growth or whatever, depending on what price you pick. We’re not going to get another 10000. The world economy is too small for that. We’re not that far away from having more money in Bitcoin than in the US dollar and gold combined.

Yeah. That’s if I remember correctly, it’s like a hundred X. That’s pretty … That’s a lot smaller than 10000X.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. But, I’m not convinced you care that much about price beyond the wider kind of a PR [inaudible 00:12:17] and brings people into the system. I don’t think you’re that. I don’t see you as somebody that is incentivised by the price.

Peter Todd: Well, I mean price is a funny thing, ’cause people often say, the price doesn’t matter. And, that’s definitely not true. Bitcoin security model relies on it being valuable. There is no getting around that. And, it probably would not work, if the price was said a thousand times less. Someone would probably attack it for kicks and giggles.

Peter McCormack: So, you were saying you started to look at the reasons why it won’t work. What were the main issues that you found, and where the things you attempted to try and break?

Peter Todd: Well, really, like the one big thing for me was when I realised, “Oh yeah. Scalability really matters, and this stuff doesn’t scale.”

Peter McCormack: Right.

Peter Todd: I figured that out, you kind of says embarrassingly late. But, in terms of like how long I was looking at Bitcoin seriously, fairly early. From the time I started looking at Bitcoin seriously, to when I realise this, and how important it was, we’re probably talking like three or four months.

And, that was while I was at a startup, doing a university career at the same time. Simple truth is, I just didn’t pay that much attention to it for quite a few years. And, when I realised that, well, I got very active and tried to solve this problem. And, also importantly got very active in debating people who thought it wasn’t an issue.

Peter McCormack: So, were you debating Rodger?

Peter Todd: Oh, he wasn’t around but around then.

Peter McCormack: Like you were going about earlier, okay. So, who would be debating this?

Peter Todd: Gavin Andresen, and actually literally debating Gavin Andresen on Bitcoin talk forums was probably the thing that got my name up there.

Peter McCormack: Right, okay. Because-

Peter Todd: There is a thread on Bitcoin talk where I disagree with Gavin Andresen, and it just spiralled.

Peter McCormack: And what? The disagreement was what? Block size?

Peter Todd: Exactly.

Peter McCormack: Okay. What did he want?

Peter Todd: His viewpoint was, yeah, he can … If I remember correctly, his exact viewpoint was you can have an unlimited block size. And, that was just such an extreme position. I laid out, very carefully, why this did not work. And, it wasn’t the first time there’d been a disagreement on that, but at least for me personally, that was the timeline when, “Hey, this is Peter Todd, the guy who disagrees with Gavin Andresen on this. And, these seem are a good point.

That’s really why my name got known. And, things just built on there.

Peter McCormack: But, there are different reasons why … Well, people give different reasons for why a larger block size won’t work. Some people I’ve heard discuss it because it doesn’t scale in computer power, ’cause of nodes.

Peter Todd: Remember, the notes Gavin’s view there was an unlimited block size. He thought the incentives were such that miners would voluntarily restrict the size of their blocks, even though they could make the biggest blocks if they want. And, I laid out basically with a bit of math and game theory why this is a bad idea.

That wasn’t even like a bigger picture. It’s just this is broken, because miners can do this when they create a bigger block, they’re going to push out the competitors. That’s kind of the arguments in a nutshell. And, the simple reality was, I was right on that. And, that’s just so well supported by academic research since. And, Gavin was just dead wrong.

Peter McCormack: And, has he ever come back and said, “You were right”?

Peter Todd: Nope.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Peter Todd: I mean, there’s a reason why he’s no longer involved in Bitcoin in any real sense. He just wasn’t competent enough to do it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. There’s probably more than one reason as well, right?

Peter Todd: Supporting Craig Wright was probably not the best move. But, all that stems from the fact he just isn’t that competent at what he was doing.

Peter McCormack: And, I guess it requires a certain level of competency to be able to work at that level. And, it doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of people at that level.

Peter Todd: No, definitely not. No. Most programmers in general, do you not have the capability to work on this stuff, because they don’t think it adversarially. It’s a tough thing for people to imagine. Most people are just not used to imagining, “All right, what are the bad things that could happen?”

Whereas for whatever reason, I, and a few other people, are good at that. I’m quite happy to imagine all the ways people could screw people over.

Peter McCormack: What do you make of Luke’s ideas around a smaller block? Is it 300K?

Peter Todd: I think his technical arguments for that are good, but I think he doesn’t understand the social side of that, which essentially makes it impossible. And after all, I mean, let’s face it, Luke is a crazy evangelical Catholic. He has very, very, very strong beliefs that are ultimately driven by very strongly held principles.

He is, to us, an evangelical crazy Catholic. But, that comes from him having very well defined beliefs and very strongly held principles. And, the logical conclusion of that is his belief system.

And, I think what Luke … I’m not even sure I could say that he fails to see, ’cause he may very well understand this perfectly, but you know why Luke would say something like that is, he has the principles, and he takes it to his conclusion. Whereas the way I’d put is, “Yeah. I mean, he’s not wrong, but it just ain’t gonna happen.”

Peter McCormack: Right. Okay. Where do you envisage the block size being in the future? Do you think it was gonna stay as it is, or do you think at some point there’ll be a change?

Peter Todd: Oh, I think it’s plausible actually for the rest of life of Bitcoin, we’re not going to see another block size increase. And, the reason why I say that’s plausible is ultimately things lightning and whatnot work pretty well. And, what would it be right now? Like 15 transactions per second or something is actually a fair amount.

And, the way people use Bitcoin, like after all, for Bitcoins be wildly successful, it doesn’t necessarily mean that people are actually making payments on it. Bitcoin as a store of value can be an incredible success story.

I think the bigger threat we would have is actually Bitcoin’s inflation schedule, ’cause in the long run … And, this isn’t a short term thing, but this is like 10, 20 years down in the future, there might not be enough inflation to pay for security.

Peter McCormack: I just wrote that down, actually. So, I’ve got a couple of questions about that. So, if it’s just a store of value, and there wasn’t enough Bitcoin being moved around for fees, and the mine of rewards have dropped, that’s a huge risk for the security of Bitcoin, right?

Peter Todd: Absolutely.

Peter McCormack: And-

Peter Todd: But, that’s a risk like 10, 20 years in the future. That is a very long time. And, by then, who the hell knows what the risks are?

Peter McCormack: But Peter Todd thinks adversarially, and I think that goes into the basket of things that you probably are thinking about now.

Peter Todd: Yep. Well, let me look this way. If I were able to go back in time, and redo Bitcoin, ’cause of course, I am Satoshi as is everyone else.

Peter McCormack: I’ve read it. I’ve read you invented Bitcoin at 12.

Peter Todd: Yeah, yeah. If I was able to go back in time and create Bitcoin from scratch, I would have made it have a perpetual say 0.5% or 1% inflation rate.

Peter McCormack: Okay. That’s controversial, for some people.

Peter Todd: I’ll put it this way if you can’t afford like a 0.1% or 0.5, or even a 1% inflation rate, what the fuck are you doing with your life? It’s 1% a year. So what?

Peter McCormack: So, who have you discussed that with? And, like you don’t have to name names. But, have you discussed that with people? What’s the general reaction? Because there’s no reason for that not to be introduced in the future, right? I mean …

Peter Todd: I think the general reaction is … Well, first of all, Bitcoin right now has what a 4% inflation rate. We’re a long way from any of this discussion being relevant. So, I think the general reaction right now is, it's pushing it to the future. It’s just not a discussion worth having right now.

It’s drama, and of course, you look at my twitter account, and I don’t shy away from that. But, most of the development community wouldn’t really wanna touch the issue. And, I think they’re right. There is no reason to touch this issue until it actually matters.

Peter McCormack: What about if Lightning Network is hugely successful? And, people stop using the base chain, because Lightning is fast, and it’s cheap, is instant. Could we get to the point where there’s no argument to use the basechain, because Lightning is as trusted as the base chain? Do you see what I’m getting at?

Peter Todd: Well, I mean, Lightning security model is riskier than the base chain. It just doesn’t … Lightning, there’s a good reason to use it beyond scale. I mean, Lightning has much better UI experience. But, the simple reality is the Lightning security model is more dangerous than Bitcoin itself, assuming that you’re able to wait for confirmations.

Under certain cases, Lightning can actually be much more secure. I mean, if I go pay you with Lightning, the security of that payment from the point of view of being reversed 10 seconds from now is far better than the main chain ever could be. In effects, it will be better probably what an hour or two into the future.

But overall, if you’re making big payments that aren’t time sensitive, main chain has better security. On the other hand, this idea of Lightning taking my transaction fees, that’s not unique to lightning. Tons of things do this. Exchanges do this. Probably the most payment volume that happens is actually on exchanges. Liquid side chain does this as well. Liquid takes transaction fees away from the main chain.

There’s no end of things that take transaction fees away from the main chain. And, the inflation arguments I would give is very simple. It’s, well, make sure you always have this mechanism to ensure that the chain keeps marching forward.

Even with transaction fees, you actually need this for a kind of subtle to game theory technical reasons. The simple reality is, Bitcoin without an inflation subsidy has a much worse security argument than Bitcoin with an inflation subsidy, even if you have transaction fees paying for things.

Peter McCormack: I haven’t heard you talk about this a lot though, right? So, are you waiting? Is it a case of priorities? Deal with what needs to be dealt with now? And, you’ll bring this up in 10 years?

Peter Todd: Yeah. It’s just isn’t relevant for literally like another 10 years or so.

Peter McCormack: What about 10-minute blocks across the solar system though? When is that going to be a precedent? I read that.

Peter Todd: Well, yes. I did a talk, actually. I believe the title of the talk was a solar powered space miner. Yeah. Solar Powered Space Pirates, a Threat to Bitcoin. And, the simple answer to that is yes, if space travel becomes cheap enough that big mining operations are operating far enough away from earth that the speed of light gets people out of consensus, yeah, Bitcoin’s fucked, and we’ll probably have to increase the block control.

Peter McCormack: And, say are you general evil?

Peter Todd: Yes, I’m a bad person capable of love.

Peter McCormack: Okay. Outside of Bitcoin, ’cause other Bitcoiners are very Maximalist in nature. But, I have seen you talk about Zcash and a theory. Like, what’s your position on alternative coins and alternative currencies?

Peter Todd: Well, the thing is, I’m not a Bitcoin Maximalist. I’m a Maximalist. Anyone who understands economics and finance, and how markets work will be a Maximalist because it is more efficient to have one currency than a whole bunch of different ones. That’s just not a controversial opinion. And, it’s a controversial opinion amongst scammers who want you to go by their ICO.

But, standard non-scam driven, economic thinking, this is not a controversial opinion. This is how the Euro got created. And, there are certainly downsides to not having multiple currencies. The one world currency thing has a lot of very real economic problems. But, they’re not problems that apply to things like Bitcoin.

For digital payments in a decentralised environment, it’s just natural to end up with one coin. Whether or not it’s actually Bitcoin, who the heck knows? But, Bitcoin’s technical design and sort of technical ethos currently are definitely the most suitable for being the one currency everyone uses.

That’s just a matter of like simplicity, reliability, of disinterest in making deep dangerous changes. And, there’s just … Conservatism is a good thing for that store of value. It’s just a pretty obvious set of combinations that mean Bitcoin’s kind of the default there.

Peter McCormack: But therefore, is it good to have competing alternative currencies?

Peter Todd: I mean, it’s not going to hurt things. But, for the most part, the competing alternative currencies are scams.

Peter McCormack: Every single one?

Peter Todd: Well, some are more scammy than others.

Peter McCormack: Is Ethereum a scam?

Peter Todd: Ethereum is a funny example, because the way it was launched, and the way it was promoted, that’s much more of a scam than any of the surf currency itself. Had Ethereum, for instance, been launched. I mean, it’s hard to kind of come up with an example of where this would be possible.

Let’s suppose, hypothetically, somehow launch Ethereum, where it was just an add on to Bitcoin, where somehow the people behind Ethereum were making money off of it. This isn’t really technically feasible, but let’s assume for the sake of argument was. It would still wind up being a scam, even without a separate currency, because they were advertising things that they knew would not be possible.

Ethereum is just a bed of lies if you will. And, I think it’s very unfortunate, ’cause it also means a lot of academics, because they can get grant money from this, and because Ethereum is easy to experiment on. I think it’s pulled down ethical standards of academia.

And, it’s just an unfortunate position to be in. And, this is also … I mean, maybe a good way to explain this is the private chain side of things. Well, some of that’s perfectly reasonable. A lot of the more grandiose claims made are effectively scams. And, it’s sort of a new interesting category of scam where it’s not like we’re directly ripping people off, but rather were lying about what our products can actually do, and we’re getting away with it because it’s security.

And, in security, well I can sell you a magical rock that keeps lions away. How do you know it doesn’t work? There are no lions around.

Peter McCormack: So, what are the main claims for Ethereum then that you think of false?

Peter Todd: I mean, it’s a funny one, ’cause it’s tough to pin down because the main claims were designed to be vague. Claims like this is a world … A great example is the world computer thing. What does that actually mean?

When you start thinking about any reasonable interpretation of it is, no, this is total bullshit. But, it’s presented in a way which is vague enough, it’s tough to argue against. You’ve got to play pin people down on what does a world computer mean? What’s it actually computing?

Now, you ask a normal person, I think, “Oh yeah, computations done somehow on Ethereum.” And, it’s no, that’s not how it works at all. Your Ethereum node redoes the computation. It’s not a computer, it’s a verifier, whereas the sort of general way of building consensus applications I push is client-side verification, which is quite explicit.

Yes, we have this big dataset that your computer verifies. And, other people don’t even have to verify the data. They don’t even necessarily know what it means. They may never even have a copy of it. But, if I want to convince you that something’s true, like I just sold you a house, I give you the data to prove it’s true, and you verify that data yourself, and you come to a conclusion that yes, you now own a house, or no, I’m trying to defraud you.

That is a sane way to talk about block chains. A world computer is not. A world computer is a pie in the sky scam material. And, even Vitalik, I mean he’s kind of admitted, “Well, the world computer stuff was a bit of a red herring.” I’m sorry. The moment you say red herring, and please go and invest in my thing, you’re probably scamming someone.

Peter McCormack: I don’t get the feeling he intentionally scammed somebody.

Peter Todd: You know about his quantum computing thing?

Peter McCormack: No, tell me.

Peter Todd: Well, just prior to Ethereum, he was involved in a quantum computing scam.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Peter Todd: And, essentially what the scam was was they would do simulated quantum computing that would somehow be better than anything else. It just didn’t make any sense. And, his claim is, “Oh! I kind of young, and just had higher hopes for it. That’s all.” No, you weren’t that stupid.

First of all, you were like 19, at university. You knew what this was. You knew this was bullshit. Yeah. The guy’s got the mind of a scammer, basically. He’s got the intentions of a scammer.

He’s very clever about it. He’s not someone who is careless. He’s not someone who gets himself clearly involved in a scam in the way that you can prosecute. But, he’s pushing dishonest stuff. I mean, that’s what scammers do.

Peter McCormack: So, ETH 2.0, I’m guessing you’ve read some of the specs.

Peter Todd: I mean, it’s one of those things where he just go put up a whole bunch of complex shit on the wall to try to be resistant to criticism. I think I believe Greg Maxwell was the one who deserves credit for this. But, he’s pointed out how the general approach of Ethereum crowd is, they put something out, it gets shot down because it doesn’t work. So, rather than go back and fix the problems, they make it more complex.

And, if you keep repeating this, eventually you appear to be secure, not because you’ve actually created something secure, but rather, you’ve created something sufficiently complex, it’s just too much work to criticise.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. I mean, I’ve read James Press, which is medium posts recently looking at ETH 2.0. I don’t know if you saw it.

Peter Todd: I might have.

Peter McCormack: I mean, the only thing I could think of when I was reading this is, “This just seems an insanely complicated way of creating a distributed database.” I was written about sharding, and then I was reading about state rent, and that certain things would be on chains. And, I was just thinking, “What’s this for?” I just can’t get my head around it.

Peter Todd: It is designed to be sufficiently complex that you can’t criticise it. Now, on the other hand, if I wanted to explain to you how Open TimeStamps works, I could do that in a morning, including the part where I explain how hash functions work. It is dead simple.

If I wanna explain to you how my proof Marshall Project works, I’d probably have to go spend the afternoon as well. This stuff is designed to be dead simple. I mean, this is why, on my twitter profile for a long time, the pinned tweet was, “A blockchain is a chain of blocks.”

Peter McCormack: I knew that was coming.

Peter Todd: Yeah. Blockchains are not complex things. People try to make them complex things, so they can go sell stuff, or in the case of academic skill, write papers and make them relevant. But, they just aren’t that complex.

Peter McCormack: Yup. And, they have one purpose. Like, Jimmy talks about this a lot. The blockchain has a really good purpose for Bitcoin and money. Nothing else really. And, I’ve tried-

Peter Todd: I actually disagree on that.

Peter McCormack: Well, that’s good, because I’ve tried to be open-minded, and tried to kind of just be as open-minded as a can say, “Okay. Is there something else here?” Like-

Peter Todd: You’ve gotta remember because I define a blockchain is a chain of blocks, I would actually have the viewpoint that, “Yeah. Blockchains are worth adding basically anything.” I mean, the moment you have a data structure, where you even wanna create a backup of it, it might as well throw it blockchain in there so it can update and ensure you have a complete copy.

My Open TimeStamps project, it’s a centralised system that creates timestamps, long story short. Well, one issue with it is if the central servers go down, you want to have a backup of all the timestamp proofs they made. How do you make that backup? Well, currently, you go and go through this HTTP, RPC, restful protocol, total box standard stuff, and he just download one after another.

How do you know that your copy of the back up is the same as mine? Well, obviously you gonna add hashing to it. Well, how are you going to add hashing to it? Well, why don’t you go and make updates, and have one update hash another? Oh, what do you know? We’ve created a blockchain.

Peter McCormack: Indeed a blockchain, yeah. Okay. So, I met with Zac Prince of Block Fight, and we have a long chat about Bitcoin. They do crypto back loans. And, it’s a market that makes sense. But, he also said, it doesn’t make sense when they’re Lending money, say to Argentina, that if you’ve got to lend out Bitcoin because it’s volatile.

He said it makes sense to do a stablecoin. A stablecoin is built on Ethereum. So, whether it’s a scam or not, the fact that people are building things that people are using, how do you sit with that?

Peter Todd: Well, so the point I’d make there is, the stable coin’s built on top of Ethereum. From a tech perspective, that could actually be the right decision. And, the reason why there can be the right decision is, yeah, I mean the infrastructure is there. We know we can throw together something. It doesn’t work as well as it could. But, the tooling’s there, we can get it done, push it out the door.

I’ve literally told clients of mine, “Well, you actually might want to build this on Ethereum, ’cause alternatives don’t exist yet.” We know they can exist, but the effort to actually make it work hasn’t been done yet. And, in all equally, I’d say the stable coin idea is just an obvious no brainer.

You might want to have exposure to this currency. Why wouldn’t you want to have some nice digital way of doing it with a well-defined trust relationship? It’s just not a complex thing to talk about. It has very obvious reasons to, in much the same way like having an ETF, it makes a lot of sense for certain people.

Now, having an algorithmic stable coin, where you try to do consensus, decentralised magic to keep the price stable, there’s a pretty good reason. I think those are impossible. It’ll never work.

But, a trusted stable coin, where you have a central issuer, who you have legal mechanisms to ensure that you get your money back, yeah. I mean, why not? Hell, in some cases, a stable coin that’s actually a total fraud can actually make sense. If I’m a trader, and I want to temporarily move out of a position into a stable thing, and then move into another position, even if the stable coin is a total fraud, and there’s no US dollars or whatever backing it, it can still be useful for me as a trader, because my risk of the stable coin going belly up, and the fraud playing out maybe less than the risk I have of not moving my currency, not moving my assets into that stable currency for whatever reason I needed to.

Peter McCormack: I only see the two use cases. I see Bitcoin and a stable coin. That to me is pretty much all I think we need, personally. I mean, you probably can think of some great other examples.

Peter Todd: Well, if you’re talking about money, and things related to money, I think you’re a lot more right than people would want you to be.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. Well, do you know why? Because other people want to invent other uses for blockchain, ’cause they want to monetise it. And, other people want to shoot down stablecoin-

Peter Todd: So, I guess the way I’d put it is, if there’s a money component involved, I think you’re ultimately right. If there’s not a money component involved, and we’re just trying to do something related to some asset or some data structure, which for a reason we what consensus over, I mean, yeah, block chains basically always make sense.

But, that’s because of blockchain is just a chain of blocks. It is not rocket science. I mean, I love the example GET. People say, “Oh, but then is GET a blockchain?” And, my answer is, well yeah. it’s basically a blockchain. It doesn’t quite precisely match the linear chain of blocks in how we use it. But, why GET is a set of hashed things in a direct acyclic graph is essentially the same reason why Bitcoin is a chain of blocks.

I want to make sure that my copy of the source code on my computer is the same as your copy. That’s why Bitcoin is blockchain. That’s why GET has something nearly a blockchain.

Peter McCormack: What about privacy coins? Obviously, I’ll see you tool more about Zcash than-

Peter Todd: Say proof of what?

Peter McCormack: Privacy coins.

Peter Todd: Oh, privacy coins?

Peter McCormack: Yeah. So, I’ve seen you talk about Zcash more than, say, Monero. What’s your position on privacy coins?

Peter Todd: I mean, they make a lot of sense if they work. The only reason I want to talk more about Zcash that Monero is Monero has less wrong with it.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Peter Todd: Monero definitely could, in theory, have less privacy than Zcash. The underlying idea of what Monero is, it certainly has the potential for less privacy than Zcash. But, the Monero people have just done a competent job implementing something with very little drama, and the people behind it all seem pretty ethical. And, there’s very little criticised about Monero.

Peter McCormack: It’s the only other crypto I hold. I’ve got Bitcoin and Monero.

Peter Todd: Yeah. I mean, I hold essentially trivial quantities of Monero and Zcash, enough to use on occasion. But, in theory, Zcash should be better. Its privacy, the potential for privacy’s much better.

Peter McCormack: Is that ’cause it uses Zcash nodes?

Peter Todd: Exactly. Yeah. The difference is, in Monero, your payments might’ve come from immediately one of say 10 different people, and then of course you know a hundred and so on, whereas in Zcash, the moment you do a payment, if it’s a shielded payment, you’re now part of this big anonymity set.

What’s wrong with Zcash is sort of all the implementation details and sort of the people behind it.

Peter McCormack: Wow! So, I interviewed Zooko last week. And, one of the most important questions I think I put to him is I said, “Is a Zcash a company?” ’Cause that’s what it feels like. It feels like it’s a company.

Peter Todd: Yeah, it is, effectively. And, the reality is the way they do … The way they will do Zcash is very explicitly centralised. And, they kind of try to put fake leaves on edge. But, probably it’s a company of a few different people with really dubious ethics. It’s just …

I mean, it’s kind of fortunate, ’cause it’s a scary thing to have. The best privacy tech out there, for that type of use case, run by people who will lie to you.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. And, I’m not surprised that it seems like [inaudible 00:38:40] brothers have a preference to Zcash. It didn’t surprise me.

Peter Todd: Yeah. Well, the thing I think with it is, people in that kind of sphere, they would rather work with people who are not totally ethical. I get the sense this is why Coinbase and Zcash kind of seemed to get along, because they kind of see eye to eye on, “Well, we’re not going to strictly tell everyone exactly how this really works. We’re happy to Futz with stuff.”

I mean, when they did the trustee set up. The simple reality is they botched it. And, rather than just come and say, “Look, here’s where we made our mistakes. Here’s what we’re going to do better.” They just lied. They said it was multiparty set up in. And, the reality is, it wasn’t.

It was intended to be, but due to technical failures, I don’t think you can make that claim. In the Bitcoin world, I think had that happened with the people behind Bitcoin, they would have said, “Look, we screwed up this, this, and this. We’re going to fix this next time. Here’s the timeline where we roughly wanna do it. Here’s why this isn’t necessarily a big deal, et Cetera, et cetera.”

Had Zcash has simply done that, I think Zcash would still be a success. But, that’s not the way they think. They think, “Well, shit, we got to have good PR on this. We’ve got to preserve our money coming in.” And, after all, I mean, they get a ton of money from Zcash. They have incentives to hide flaws, because that’s her income, whereas in the more long term view, would be, “Well, all right, we might lose some money in the meantime, while we lose some market confidence. But, the longterm effect will be people will actually trust us.”

I don’t trust Zooko not to lie me.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. I’ve got to say, I trust Ricardo a bit more.

Peter Todd: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: You’re a big fan of Ripple Coin, right?

Peter Todd: Well, I think Ripple’s wonderful idea. You mean Ripple, the original concept to like peer to peer payments, right?

Peter McCormack: I’m on about Ripple Coin.

Peter Todd: Yeah. That’s remarkably scammy.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Peter Todd: It’s interesting. So, I, at one point, worked for R3. And, I should be careful what I say here, cause there’s probably NDAs, and they’re a bit … They are not very happy with me. But, long story short, I think what I can say is, initial was working as a consultant, evaluating other coins, and other systems. And, I think their business plan there was let’s just go buy something and let’s package it up and sell it to banks. A perfectly reasonable thing to do, act as middlemen.

Well, they had me analyse Ripple, ’cause at the time, there was a lot of interest among banks. And, I analyse it, and said, “Yeah, the centralised system obviously.” Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. For banks, I think, that would have been fine.

Of course, I soon found out, they weren’t saying it was centralised banks. They were just flat out lying about what it actually was. So, when I did a big presentation in front of most of the world’s major banks and representatives from them, they’re like, “Wait, Ripple’s what?” ’cause they’d been lied to.

And, ripple these days, I don’t actually get the sense that’s true anymore. I get the sense that Ripple, the company, has become much more reasonable. But, Ripple’s tied to currency, and they don’t have any ability to get rid of this currency, which doesn’t really … It isn’t needed for technical reasons.

So, I think they’re putting in a very awkward position where there’s rabid fan base of big holders, essentially.

Peter McCormack: Very strange group.

Peter Todd: Yeah. Very, very strange. And, I would not be surprised if … Like as an example in Twitter, you say something about Ripple and the XRP troll army comes down on you. I would not be surprised if, for the most part, that sort of army of crazy people is actually not that involved with Ripple, the company selling things to banks. I don’t think that that dumb.

But, they can get away with it. There’s no mechanism for Ripple, the company, to actually extract themselves from the currency. Like it or not, they created the currency. They own a big chunk of it. They can’t get away from that. And, I mean this is one of the real dangers of creating coins for services. You might get tied to a coin that’s pointless.

Peter McCormack: Well, that’s why I call it Ripple Coin. I never changed from Ripple Coin, because I think it’s important for people … It was like with Bitcoin cash becoming BitCash. The alternative name, I think, was important.

I always call it a Ripple Coin, because I think people have to know, they have to know, it was created by the company. That it wasn’t a gift.

Peter Todd: I mean, it’s worse than that. I mean, last I checked in government, I haven’t looked very recently, the consensus was still controlled by the Ripple company. You can’t get away from the fact Ripple’s architecture is centralised.

The XRP community can say all they want. “Oh, all you know, it’s just nodes. You can go pick a different set.” Well, yeah. I mean, I can go pick a different currency. Unless you and I agree on the same set of nodes, the reality is we’re not looking at the same currency. And, that was really all my paper was.

I just pointed out. Yeah. Obviously, if you pick a different set of central nodes controlling the consensus than me, we can get out of consensus, and all hell will break loose. Thus, the only sane thing to do is pick the same set of servers for control of consensus.

Peter McCormack: One thing I do want to ask you about is because I think one thing, a lot of other alternative currencies have managed to do, whether it’s right or wrong, but by design have been able to create an incentive structure and financial incentives for developers.

Bitcoin is still largely voluntary, or there are some contributions in different ways. I know you’ve had a contribution. But, it’s-

Peter Todd: My point is not voluntary in the sense that developers go unpaid. It’s voluntary in the sense that the currency itself isn’t directly paying developers.

Peter McCormack: Of course, yeah.

Peter Todd: But, the reality is there’s enough money floating around for developers get paid, even total screw ups like me.

Peter McCormack: Are you still working on Bitcoin?

Peter Todd: I’m not working on Bitcoin core. But, I am working on projects around it like Open TimeStamps and Proof Marshall. And, I’ve had surprisingly good success getting paid for that.

Peter McCormack: I guess it depends on who you are though. And, the reputation you’ve built, you can be funded. But, when you say there is funds available for developers, I mean, how do they go about receiving funds? How do they do it?

Peter Todd: I mean, it’s kind of like anything. You do a bit of work, you show that you’re competent, and you find someone who’s interested in paying you to do more work. If you’re competent, and you prove that, the simple reality is there are ways to go get money. It is not the hardest part.

The hardest part is getting to the point where you’re confident. And, the things that us, even in coins which have developer funds, getting money out of those developer funds is surprisingly hard.

Peter McCormack: Right, okay.

Peter Todd: Like Zcash is a great example where the Windows clients for Zcash we’re completely unmaintained because Zcash wasn’t giving them any money.

Peter McCormack: Okay. So, ’cause I sort of say would Luke put up his patron, and I supported them. It just feels like there should be almost like something he shouldn’t have to worry about.

Peter Todd: How? I mean, the simple reality is, having funds in these coins is not a magic solution to that either. Yeah. The bigger problem is more you getting to a position where you’re doing interesting work that’s getting valued. And, if you’re able to do that, and actually contribute, getting that money is not that hard.

Peter McCormack: Is there enough developers coming through? ’Cause we talked earlier about enough of the kind of biggest and brightest minds who can really think adversarially or think outside the box. But, are there enough developers coming through who can we just work on more simpler tasks?

Peter Todd: The impression I get is mostly yes. But, the interesting thing about this is like Bitcoin core itself, that actual core software, I may not be very popular saying this, but I think it’s true that they’ve got good enough developers, maybe a little too many.

Bitcoin core itself doesn’t necessarily need to change that much. And, it can change on a somewhat slower basis than it has. I mean, it’s not really a big concern. The more interesting thing is like all the periphery infrastructure around it. Things like libraries that actually work are well documented and so on.

And, that’s not very sexy work. So, that may actually be the thing where we need more money put into. But, when you look at other coins, which should do over funds, they don’t do a good job with this either. So, it’s not like this is a magic solution that’s proven to work. This seems to be more a solution which has proven to make the people founded the coin a ton of money.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. I spoke to Brian Bishop. And, I think he says something along the lines of, “It would be great if some parts of the cost start to become compartmentalised, ’cause it’s kind of a big sprawling mess right now.” Is that correct?

Peter Todd: Oh, yeah, yeah. The fundamental like Bitcoin core architecture is not, I think, how you would do it these days. I think in the context of when it was created, it was probably the right decision to make. Do this very simple thing, which one person can create, and one person can comprehend, and it’s just one code base that’s very easy to review. But, for what we want it to do now, it’s probably not ideal.

On the other hand, I mean, people often think, “Oh! Bitcoin core doesn’t have this feature. It’s terrible.” Well, so what? Just turn on Bitcoin core node, grab the data from it and do whatever you need to do. What do you need to do? Do you need to have an index of transactions? Just follow the blocks and index your transactions. It’s slightly less efficient. But, so what?

Peter McCormack: Even if people who kind of want the base change essentially ossified. Is that the word they use?

Peter Todd: Base protocol is pretty stable. Not quite as stable as say TCP/IP. But, it’s reasonably stable. And, equally, so has the stability of TCP/IP held back the Internet. I don’t think you’d make the case at all. If anything it’s helped it by having the simple thing that works, and you can build on top of it.

Peter McCormack: I wanna ask you a bit about the work you’ve been doing. But, before that just one kind of … I’ll say one final question. I haven’t got through hardly anything here. This has been great. But, I do want to ask you about your views on fungibility, because in doing my interviews, I’ve kind of had two different perspectives.

There are some people who do want fungibility on the base chain. But, there are some like Saifedean wouldn’t. Saif’s view is that we want to say a completely transparent based chain, so we can ensure nobody is operating with say, fractional reserves. Where do you sit in that kind of field?

Peter Todd: I think his viewpoint is technically ignorant there. You can definitely have … I mean, as an example, ideally, Zcash would be completely non-transparent. In reality, it’s nearly entirely transparent, ’cause you’re actually using the shielded transaction features is hard and discouraged.

But, in theory, Zcash could be completely shielded. And, even then, it’d still be easy to be transparent. The better argument to make there is all the technology for privacy on base chains is potentially dangerous.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Peter Todd: Yeah. Example being, with Zcash, you have that trusted set up. A trusted setup could easily fail. Implementation bugs could easily cause it to fail. In fact, the fundamental Zcash library, the thing that verifies transactions, just prior to release, they found a bug in it that could have allowed a moment of inflation. And, that’s not even like a trusted set up failure. It’s just a simple bug in it.

And, it’s not an easy bug to find. You really got understand math in very deep detailed find something like that, because you’re relying completely on the math to protect you from inflation. Whereas in Bitcoin you’re relying on stuff you could explain to a drunk art student. Speaking about a fine arts degree.

So, I’m a little bias there. I liked this level. But, that’s useful, ’cause it means tons of eyes can see this stuff. When Bitcoin had this some recent inflation exploit-

Peter McCormack: CV bug.

Peter Todd: Yeah. Had that actually being used, chances are alarm bells would have gone off in tons of places, because people are looking at, doing the math, figuring out how many Bitcoins are in existence. Does this number make sense? Any idiot can do that. It’s not hard. For Zcash to do that, you need to re-implement all Zcash nodes. And, it is a nightmare.

Peter McCormack: So, I guess you’re keen on some form of fungibility, but do you … Are you keen on it, say as a side chain or some kind? Like how do you-

Peter Todd: Well, I mean, Lightning adds that. Any add on to Bitcoin that’s scalable will naturally have better fungibility. And, the reason is, to scale, you have to distribute less data to less people. It’s just not possible to create a scaling solution that doesn’t at least add privacy to some adversary.

As an example, Coinbase. Let’s suppose, well, PayPal. Let’s go really out there. PayPal, compared to Bitcoin, has better privacy against most adversaries. If I pay someone with PayPal, North Korean spies don’t know what I did.

Obviously, the US government probably has a full copy of everything. But, most of my adversaries now do you not know that I made that payment, and have no way of knowing. That is categorically better than Bitcoin from that narrow perspective.

If my adversary’s US government, totally different discussion. But, PayPal scales. And, the only way it could scale is by reducing the data available to the bad guys.

Peter McCormack: Okay. All right. Look, we’ve done a lot here, but I do want to cover some of your work. So, when I spoke to Jack Ma, he was like, “Peter’s really busy working on Proof Marshall.” I don’t know anything about it. Can you tell me, what is Proof Marshall?

Peter Todd: Well, all right. So, first of all, my simpler project is Open TimeStamps. And, Open TimeStamps proves data existed in the past. The problem with Open TimeStamps is it doesn’t prove anything about whether conflicting data also existed. An example being, I sell your house. I give you a sign digital document saying, “I, owner of 1234 Main Street sell it to you.”

What you don’t know is if I already sold that someone else. Proof Marshall fixes that problem by … It’s a library to create data structures where you have consensus over. And, what consensus means there is simply, in the definition of selling a house, all the possible places where I could have put that data, you now can see. Thus, you can rule out me selling the house to someone else.

And, how do you do that? Well, you throw in a whole bunch of Merkle trees and hashing. This is … I mean, what’s hard about Proof Marshall is that the strategy for the implementation is effectively taking pointers and abstracting that concert.

Pointers are such a low-level fundamental idea in computer science that just … The low-level mechanics of actually implementing this is challenging and tricky to do well. And, you get a lot of issues. Like, if I’m giving you a math proof that now you own this house, I want to make sure that even if the code or writing that application isn’t that careful, that math proof won’t, for instance, use up all the memory in your system.

Turns out that’s actually a hard problem. It’s not a hard problem for like Bitcoin level reasons. And, this is an economics problem. It’s just, it’s a tough thing to implement at a computer science level, or maybe I’m just not a very good coder.

Peter McCormack: So, what’s your status? Where are you at with the project?

Peter Todd: About two weeks, for sure.

Peter McCormack: All right. Is that this week?

Peter Todd: No. I mean, truthfully, it’s something where I’m always thinking, “All right, I could finish this in two months.” But, two months later I say, “Oh, yeah. I didn’t realise but this isn’t this.”

I mean, as an example, the first version I had, for how it would represent, how it would obstruct a pointer, made the assumption that you always hash the data. And, I did a bunch of work in that, and I was, “Oh, yeah. That doesn’t actually work. That causes other technical problems that, long story short, this doesn’t work.”

Another example was I had this … My most recent implementation had a thing where when you took the data, in processing, and deserialised it, you would make a copy of it. And, I naively thought, “Oh, that’s not big deal. Make a copy of it. It’s all well, and good.” Of course, I go through the adversarial think, I was, “Oh, shoot. Because I made a copy of this, now my API doesn’t have a good way of assuring I don’t run out of RAM, ’cause all of these extra copies.”

So, I had to effectively redesign it so that all the data can be operated on directly. If you’re a programmer, the term I would say is the serialised version of it is identical to what you would process in main memory. Thus, you don’t have to make a copy to process it.

And, this is all like very much in the weak technical stuff. But, to make a robust implementation that works well, you have to solve these problems. And, it’s just hard. And, because it’s still at such a fundamental level of design, having two people work on it once, it’s very challenging.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Peter Todd: ’Cause if I make a change, I’m usually changing how any of the code works. And now, if I have a partner working with me, suddenly everything they’re doing is broken. Maybe if I was sitting next to a guy in an office, this might go faster. But, it’s just not there. And-

Peter McCormack: It’s a one-man project.

Peter Todd: Yeah, yeah. For now. But, if it works, it’ll eventually work, and long store short is it’ll be a nice library to write consensus applications, to do all kinds of things you want. As an example, you could even implement GET and Proof Marshall to just have a good way of making sure you and I have the same copy code. Certificate Transparency is another example.

When you go to a website, the certificate that proves your talking to the computer you think you’re talking to, like your bank, for instance, that are published in a blockchain. The people who create certificate transparency, of course, hate the term blockchain and probably would strangle me if I said this in front of them. But, the reality is the data structure is effectively blockchain.

In proof Marshall, you could do things like that and … All right. You can do them now, but it’s just a lot less work when you have a library that just does it for you. It’s like … I mean, SQL databases are like this.

Sure. Prior to dimension SQL, you could, in theory, do anything you do with. It was just so much more work to get there.

Peter McCormack: I think I’ve kept up with about a good 50% of today.

Peter Todd: Well, it’s enough to do a 51% attack.

Peter McCormack: Well, yeah. I do wanna do that. I wanna 51% attack. We’re just going to have to do another one another day, ’cause there’s so much more wants to talk to you about. But, there is a couple of final closing things I want to talk to you about. One is just a bit left field.

I’ve noticed you tweet quite a bit about journalism. Why does that get to you so much?

Peter Todd: I think this really comes down to … And, I’ll say straight off, this is an example of not staying in your lane. This kind of phrase going around, stay in your lane, only talk about the stuff that you’re supposed to do professionally, and so on. And, I really don’t care what that for Twitter.

And, a lot of that gets down to, what does it take to have a society of the functions? You have to have people agree on basic facts around the world. And, I think the reason why I’m critical of that, same reason ultimately I’m critical of many scams in the crypto world, where people were saying things, but the projects just aren’t true, and polluting the ecosystem of ideas with false things.

And, unfortunately right now, we have a big problem with journalism where, first of all, it’s not very fun. It’s not well funded. It just isn’t that money to actually pay journalists to do their job properly.

I have quite a few friends who are journalists, and I see this every day. I mean, the timelines they have to operate on are ridiculous. There’s no way for them to do a good job given how fast they have to put out articles with how little help. And, on top of this to make money, you wind up with all kinds of dark practices, like clickbait.

And, when you combine that with the very ugly political landscape of the US, you get really ugly things like Covington, where I think it’s pretty fair to say major media organisation are, “Oh, this is a great story. Fits our narratives really well. We’re going to get a ton of clicks on this. Let’s rush published before anyone else does.”

And, the rush to publish is a really big deal. I’ve been told, directly by people managing media organisations in the crypto space, that collectively people like me are a huge competitor to them, because I can tweet faster than they can publish, and literally minutes matter in this stuff. If they’re not first to publish, they will get less clicks, less views, less money.

It sounds so stupid, but this is the truth of it. And, that pushes a cycle that just doesn’t allow for good research and good work. And, unfortunately, there are no easy ways to stop this. Maybe one of the solutions could be more use of defamation laws, and life moves on. But, there are very like very, very real risks to this for freedom of speech.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. I mean, my last interview that went out yesterday was Andrew Torba from Gab.com. What do you think of Gab? I mean, the content is tasteless. But, do you agree that …

Peter Todd: I’ve never actually looked at Gab’s website itself. And, I’m kind of sympathetic to them. I mean, I think organisations like that should be able to exist. I think the fact that they’ve been deplatformed from payment providers is a straight up antitrust issue. And, they’re not the only example of this.

I mean, the fact of the matter is companies like PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, are able to restrict freedom of speech very effectively. Not as effectively as they could without safe things like Bitcoin. But, the amount of control they have over what content gets produced is very scary.

Where deplatforming ends up is people being able to restrict speech, because they can say, “I don’t like what you’re publishing, and we’re going to cut off your money.” And, you can’t, for instance, do journalism without access to a flow of money to go pay people to do stuff.

And, this is a very, very real issue. What Patreon has done is scary. Now, as a libertarian, I’d say Patreon itself, I don’t have issues with them cutting off people. What I have issues with are the payment providers who have now said, “Oh, you’re trying to compete with Patreon, we’re going to cut you off as well.”

That’s where I think this crosses the line. It’s getting very scary as a society. So again, do I support Gab itself? Whatever. Let them do what they want. But, do I support fighting back at why Gab has a hard time running a business. That’s what matters to me.

And, I’m just not that concerned about people spreading hate on the Internet. I don’t think that’s actually a big concern for society. Particularly when we go see the left’s doing exactly the same thing but in a different context. There’s no like clear moral high ground here. And, obviously, if the left can do this, and society hasn’t collapsed, it’s not necessarily such a bad thing.

And, in some ways that kind of thing pisses me off more ’cause I definitely identify as liberal.

Peter McCormack: Well, yes I do sometimes. But, I was saying to Andrew that like politically, I’ve got no idea anymore where I am, because I’m finding so much to dislike about everyone. But also, there are these certain conservative things I do like, and then there’s a kind of liberal things I like. And, I’m just so confused. I don’t know where to position myself.

Peter Todd: I mean my entire adult life … I live in Canada. My entire adult life I’ve voted for the Liberal Party, which in Canada, the Liberal Party’s what the name suggests. It’s the Liberal Party.

These days I’m not sure I identify with them anymore. I’ll probably still go on voting for them because they’re the best of bad options. But, yeah. And, I think part of it too is like many of the social issues I do care about. Like freedom of speech, and gay rights and so on. A lot of that’s actually kind of solved.

Abortion’s legal in a lot of places. Gay Marriage is legal. The things that I cared about, we solve those problems.

Peter McCormack: Through free speech.

Peter Todd: I mean just through like the way politics moved. The Conservative party’s eventually, “All right, fine. We’ll go along with this.” And then, probably isn’t … At least in Canada, it’s probably not going to get reversed. So, now it’s like, “Oh, do I need to go vote for liberals again? I mean, the things that we’re fighting for gut solve, the things that they’re now fighting for, I don’t agree with. It’s a very strange situation to be in.

Peter McCormack: I think we could do a whole show on this. All right. Just to close out. We’ve had 10 years of Bitcoin. So, we look back. Looking forward over the next 10 years, what are the key things you would like to see happen? And, what are the most important things, not just in terms of code and develop it, but just overall for Bitcoin? What’s gonna be important?

Peter Todd: Well, I’ll give you a very specific answer, which is the things I’m working on with client-side validation like Proof Marshall I think are critical to moving this stuff to the next step. Getting past this narrative of all we need some Ethereum chain, where everything’s in one place, which we knew just doesn’t work.

I think smart contracts are actually really useful. But, they’re not useful done in the way Ethereum people want to do them. It doesn’t work technically. So, yes, this is kind of very narrow answer. But, this is the stuff I’m directly working on. And, I think that’s a very fruitful ground for making new and interesting things.

Beyond that, I mean, I’m sure the Lightning crowd, and so someone will do great work in making payments better and so on. But, on the store of value stuff, just not screwing up is enough to make that possible. So, that’s kind of my answer there.

Peter McCormack: Great. This was utterly fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on.

Peter Todd: Thank you.

Peter Todd on the Essence of Bitcoin was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

[Telegram Channel | Original Article ]

#cryptocurrency

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seoexpert332 · 4 years

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Will iTunes Radio Be Able to Compete in the Music Streaming Industry?

Throughout the 21st century, Apple Inc. has been a publicize leader in the technology world by all the time releasing objector products that are simple and simple for anyone to use. If you promenade vis--vis the landing field for two hours, I can guarantee that you see iPad users between the ages of 3 and 93. Apple has built its empire by developing bold new products that are two years ahead of the competition. But Apple has recently approved to become a tardy entrant in the music streaming industry, the fastest growing form of music listening. The company announced upon Monday that iTunes Radio will be launched this fall as radio streaming performer for all Apple products.

Strong ground of Competition

acim spotify

Apple faces a lot of competition in the music streaming field. Pandora Radio is currently seen as the publicize leader for web radio streaming. Pandora has been perfecting its instruction service, media player, and user experience for the last 13 years. The company was reported to have greater than 150 million users. unusual key artiste is TuneIn Radio which offers users more than 70,000 global radio stations from all continent. Many tech heavyweights are getting operating as well. Facebook united later Spotify which allows users to search directly for artists and songs through a catalog of nearly 20 million songs. Users can furthermore share playlists, listen to radio stations, and set happening feeds that say Facebook links what tune you're currently listening to. Twitter has then talked approximately starting a music facilitate that suggests songs for user; Google just announced Google appear in Music every entrance ; and the list goes on.

Will iTunes Radio Be Successful

I think that iTunes Radio will be a deed report for Apple. though I'm not used to Apple coming into the sports ground as a second mover, I subsequently what they're behave here. The iTunes addition pioneered the sale of digital music in imitation of it opened upon April 28, 2003. It is now official as the biggest music vendor in the world gone a catalog that consists of greater than 26 million songs. Apple's iTunes heap already has a larger database of songs than established names in the music streaming arena such as Spotify. back the new trend for music fans is to hear to music from large libraries rather than purchasing individual songs or albums, why wouldn't Apple associate the radio streaming field?

My Reasons for iTunes Radio's Success

Sure Apple is copying the competition in a ground that's already filled when every tech giant imaginable. But unlike Google or Twitter, Apple has been delivering incredible products to music fans for years. The iPod revolutionized the way I listened to and stored music. I don't know anyone who never owned an iPod at some point. Even people who granted to acquire the Microsoft Zune nevertheless bought an iPod. And iTunes has been the best media player and library software before its initial pardon in 2001. Apple iTunes Radio is going to be a mixture of the best qualities of all the current music streaming stations. The more I do something music in my iTunes library and use iTunes Radio, the more personalized the experience becomes. This is perfect because all of the music that I have collected this with decade is already stored in my iTunes library. subsequently iTunes Radio, I can choose any song in my music library and it instantly builds a station all but it. Plus, Apple is creating adaptation features where you can govern the bank account surrounded by discovering additional songs and playing the hits. I am a big aficionada of the playlists built by iTunes Genius fittingly I trust that Apple will build or use similar software for iTunes Radio. unorthodox advantage that iTunes Radio offers is the endowment to purchase and download tracks that I've hear to directly from the iTunes store. all I hear to upon iTunes Radio gets stored in my chronicles therefore following I in fact when a song all I have to reach is tap buy, and the track is instantly bonus to my iTunes. How awesome is that! I have listened to fittingly many unbelievable songs on Pandora that I want to shortly download and add to my iPod, but never get the inadvertent to.

In Closing

The deserted two Apple products that I own are an iPhone 4S and an iPod Classic, appropriately I'm not one of these diehard Apple guys. I just think that they know what they're perform later than it comes to the digital music industry. I can't look Apple overthrowing Pandora at the summit of this field, but they will utterly thrive. Apple has a extremely mighty customer base and does a good job of creating brand loyalty. I predict that many people will convert to iTunes Radio behind it comes out in the Fall.

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zipgrowth · 6 years

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MOOCs are No Longer Massive. And They Serve Different Audiences Than First Imagined.

MOOCs have gone from a buzzword to a punchline, especially among professors who were skeptical of these “massive open online courses” in the first place. But what is their legacy on campuses?

MOOCs started in around 2011 when a few Stanford professors put their courses online and made them available to anyone who wanted to take them. The crowds who showed up were, well, massive. We’re talking 160,000 people signing up to study advanced tech topics like data science.

The New York Times later declared 2012 as the ‘year of the MOOC,’ and columnists said the virtual courses would bring a revolution. But in the rush of public interest that followed, skeptics wondered whether online courses could help fix the cost crisis of higher education. Was this the answer to one of the nation’s toughest problems?

The answer, it turns out, is, no. Actually these days you don’t hear much about MOOCs at all. In the national press there’s almost a MOOC amnesia. It’s like it never happened.

But these courses are still around, and they’ve quietly evolved. Dhawal Shah, founder and CEO of Class Central, has been tracking MOOCs closely and steadily ever since he was a student in one of those first Stanford open courses. Shah is our podcast guest this week, and he argues that MOOCs are having an impact, but mainly for people who are enrolling in MOOC-based degrees, where they can get a credential that can help them in their careers without having to go back to a campus. Of course, that’s a very different outcome than the free education for the underserved that was originally promised.

Subscribe to the EdSurge On Air podcast on your favorite podcast app (like iTunes or Stitcher). Or read highlights from the conversation (which have been edited and condensed for clarity).

EdSurge: MOOCs were once headline news around the world and now you hardly hear about them. How would you describe the state of MOOCs and where are things going?

Shah: Yeah, they might have fallen off the big newspapers and the public eye. But they've figured out a monetization model. They might not be profitable but they're making a lot of money. Udacity itself announced that they made 30 million dollars last year. So I think they're grinding it out there. More people are using them than at any point in time before. They're making money and now they are looking forward going into the online degree market and the corporate learning training market.

So that’s where the energy is now, in so-called MOOC degrees?

Yeah, so one of the biggest challenge for an online degree is acquiring users. Finding the students who would want to even pay for their degree. And that's what MOOCS have. They have tons of users. They have a competitive advantage over traditional players. Because they have the students, all they needed was to build a product. And it took a while. I think there are 22 new online MOOC-based degrees that have been announced so far.

Does that surprise you at all? In the early days, the same founders of these MOOC providers, like edX and Coursera, were saying that these were going to be for the masses and they're going to free and reach people who don’t need to pay anything. And what you're describing is low cost but these are degree programs. It's sounding more traditional in some ways.

It is but I personally am more excited about it. Because a lot of these degrees, not all, they release the content for free. So in that sense, the quality of free content is going up because now they are going to create these courses for degrees, so it's just not one course for people who are online and one course for people in a university, it's the same course.

What motivates colleges to stick with this? Is it marketing for their other programs? Is it for philanthropic reasons? Or is it to change university teaching?

I think it’s all of them, and marketing is definitely a big part of it. I think it's still new, so colleges think that if they get in now they might establish the degree and maybe capture the market early.

I think it's a bigger advantage for smaller universities than the bigger because they get to sort of undercut the big players. For many colleges, they might be locally well-known but not globally. They get a chance to reach more users plus it's good money if it works out.

What about the students? Who are the people who end up taking these MOOCs?

It's extremely diverse, the ones who end up paying for them, usually it's people like me who are out of the education system and looking for a promotion or a new job.

There's an entire group of people where just one dollar is too much—they only want free. But, there's another group of people where if they are charged $900 or $1,200 bucks, it’s not a big difference (and they’ll pay either). And then if you know the outcome could be getting 5 percent or 10 percent increase in salary over a lifetime, [you realize] you recoup that money very quickly.

So are the people getting the most out of MOOCs and these new online degrees the same students who already know how to do well in college, and may already have degrees from selective colleges?

People can sign up and look at the videos, [but it can be hard to learn with those on your own]. In the earliest days of MOOCs, which had large communities, [it was easier for students]. The community provided the support and the encouragement. Now, MOOCs are no longer massive. The community engagement is not there, so that makes it more difficult [for many students].

But community isn't really a feature that people sign up for. The reason people pay is the credential. So unfortunately community has fallen down the priority list of the designer of these products. Some, like Udacity, do have a smaller community for paid users. They have a Slack community, for instance, and they have [resources like] mentor support and can see how they're doing it. Generally, though, that’s just for paying students, not for the free students.

MOOCs are No Longer Massive. And They Serve Different Audiences Than First Imagined. published first on https://medium.com/@GetNewDLBusiness

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dorothydelgadillo · 6 years

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HubSpot vs. Drift, Featured Snippets, and More from Bob and Kyle (The IMPACT Show Ep. 52)

In this week's episode of The IMPACT Show, Bob is back and he brought special guest Kyle Bento along with him.

There are some fun facts scattered throughout this week's episode, including:

what to do when you work yourself out of a job,

how to crush it at deep-sea diving, and

the truth behind a crowd-surfing bear.

Just in case you missed us live (or if you want to relive the magic), you’ll find the episode’s show notes below as well as the recording.

Enjoy and make sure to share!

Like what you saw? Make sure to subscribe to email reminders and give us a review on iTunes.

Have feedback or questions? We’d love to hear it. Comment on this blog or email us at [email protected]

IMPACT Updates

Getting to Know Kyle Bento

You’ve probably seen content Kyle has produced, but you may not know his full IMPACT journey. Kyle came to IMPACT three years ago as a Business Development Rep. He admits to having built enough efficiencies using HubSpot to reduce his workload. The coolest thing he built using the HubSpot CRM? A lead-scoring model to identify leads that were not only interested in what IMPACT had to offer, but were a good fit.

With his automation working behind the scenes, Kyle’s next move was to Behind the Screens, building out IMPACT’s video brand and setting up the in-office studio.

These days, Kyle is the emerging technology guru who keeps all of us in the IMPACT community on the cutting edge.

You can meet Kyle in person at IMPACT Live (in Hartford, CT, August 7–8), since he’s both the production manager and a speaker. (There’s a crazy amount of tech happening at IMPACT Live, you’ll have to check it out!)

Happy Birthdays!

Not only is it a birthday weekend for both Bob and Kyle, but we’ve got several Gemini birthdays to celebrate this month in the community. Happy birthday to Emma Sepke and Frances K Bowman!

HubSpot Partner Day in Australia

Bob is speaking at Partner Day in Australia! This is a new program HubSpot is rolling out, with the Global Partner of the Year (that’s IMPACT!) speaking in Dublin and Sydney for their International Partner Days.

Bob will be leading sessions on “What They Never Taught You about Growing Your Agency” and a fireside chat with Adam Steinhardt, CEO of The Kingdom.

What Marketers Be Talkin' 'Bout

Where we go over what you're saying in IMPACT Elite.

IMPACT Elite crossed 3,000 members! We took a little time to celebrate. Check it out in IMPACT Elite.

Know someone who would like IMPACT Elite? Invite them!

Our Third Community Hangout

We had our third community hangout last Friday where we talked about all things agile marketing. We talked about scrum, transitioning to agile, productivity and more. If you missed it, you can join us again next Friday at 2:00PM ET. We'll be talking about what to do when you fall behind in your marketing.

What's Crackin' in Elite

Elite Member: Devon Leah Hicks posted, "Just booked my tickets, flight, and hotel for Impact Live 2018! Anyone else from Indianapolis going?!"

Will we see you at IMPACT Live this August? Let us know in Elite! If there’s anything keeping you from going, let us know! We’ll help. We want you there!

Inbound in the Trenches

This is where we talk about what we’re doing and what we’ve learned lately right here in the trenches.

HubSpot vs. Drift: Conversational Marketing

Kyle shared that comparing these two systems is like comparing a Lamborghini to a Ferrari—they’re both incredible. It’s really about what is going to work best for your specific needs. IMPACT has used both Drift and HubSpot Conversations. (Right now, we’re using Drift.)

Here’s what Kyle loves about Drift:

A top-notch user experience. When we’re talking about conversational marketing and creating ChatBots, it’s all about how that bot communicates with the person on the other end. Drift is optimized for solving for specific product use cases and by doing so, it creates a high-end experience for your customer.

The development pace is insane.

Individualized targeting. There are limitless options in terms of who gets shown what and exactly how the bot talks to different people. With conversational marketing, the goal is to create unique 1:1 experiences, and Drift does this extremely well.

Drift has announced an integration with Vidyard. If you’re chatting in Drift, you can record a video in Vidyard and then drop it right into the chat. Live video takes live chat to the next level.

And here's what he loves about the HubSpot product (which is in Beta right now with a release date of August:

As you might expect, it's incredibly well-integrated with everything else in HubSpot. If you're already using HubSpot, this is going to fit so nicely into your toolkit.

The product is super flexible from a mod-building standpoint.

HubSpot is rolling out a product called InBox, which is more than just a live chat tool on the web. It's a global communication center that allows you to manage messages and communication across different apps.

Bob summarized that we should all be using messenger bots — period. If you're already using HubSpot and want to get started with conversational marketing, HubSpot's product is going to be your best option. If you're a conversational marketing power user and you need more advanced features, then you might want to go with a HubSpot Connect Parter, like Drift, and then integrate it into HubSpot.

Facebook Is Removing Trending Topics

Facebook said, "We’re removing Trending soon to make way for future news experiences on Facebook. [...] It’s currently only available in five countries and accounted for less than 1.5% of clicks to news publishers on average."

Bob shared that Facebook will most likely come out with a solution that will both let users see what's trending while keeping them on the Facebook platform.

What does this mean for marketers? Facebook and Google no longer want to be a channel that drives people to your website. They want to keep you on their own platforms. You see this with video, where native video is far out-performing YouTube videos shared on Facebook.

Featured Snippets

Bob and Kyle shared that IMPACT has seen its volume of monthly visits decrease. As we've been digging into this, we've found several reasons, but featured snippets seem to be the biggest "culprit."

Featured snippets are those "answers" in position zero on a Google search — those descriptions in a little white box at the top of your search that will give you an answer without the need to click away from Google.

Not only is this pushing our results down on the page, but it keeps people from clicking into an article to get their answers (these are called "no-click searches").

Kyle shared that while IMPACT may have been ranking first for a keyword, other articles that are now better optimized for featured snippets are getting that prime position and pulling traffic away from us. It's up to marketers to start optimizing for featured snippets and paying close attention to how this affects traffic.

Kyle did point out there's good news: in just the past few weeks that we've dug into this and started optimizing for featured snippets, we've seen some significant (and positive) changes to the way our articles rank. We'll be sharing the solutions and strategies we've found in our upcoming content and at IMPACT Live.

We would love your comments. What did you think of the show? Let us know in Elite. Make sure you never miss a show or update by subscribing at impactbnd.com/show.

Join Us Next Time!

Next week, we’ll see you on the third community hangout on FRIDAY, June 15, at 2:00PM Eastern.

We’ll be back in two weeks for the IMPACT Show live on Friday, June 22, at 11:00AM ET.

Until next time...get out there and make it happen!

from Web Developers World https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/hubspot-vs-drift-featured-snippets-kyle-bob-impact-show

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lesliepump · 6 years

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Podcast #146: Practicing Law as a Legal Technician (LLLT) in Washington State, with Laura Genoves

In this episode, we talk with Laura Genoves and her experiences as one of the first Limited Licensed Legal Technicians in Washington State. We also discuss the differences between a legal technician and a practicing attorney, including everything from education costs to how each can practice.

Laura Genoves

Laura is one of Washington State’s newest form of Legal Professionals, a Limited License Legal Technician and has a solo family law practice in Seattle. Laura is excited to be on the cutting edge of providing affordable legal services to those who otherwise might not seek out legal assistance.

You can follow Laura on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Thanks to Ruby Receptionists and Clio for sponsoring this episode!

Listen & Subscribe

To listen to the podcast, just scroll up and hit the play button (or click the link to this post if you are reading this by email).

To make sure you don’t miss an episode of The Lawyerist Podcast, subscribe now in iTunes, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast player. Or find out about new episodes by subscribing to our email newsletter.

Transcript

Speaker 1: Welcome to the Lawyerist podcast, with Sam Glover and Aaron Street. Each week, Lawyerist brings you advice and interviews to help you build a more successful law practice in today’s challenging and constantly changing legal market. And now, here are Sam and Aaron.

Sam Glover: Hi. I’m Sam Glover.

Aaron Street: And I’m Aaron Street, and this is episode 146 of the Lawyerist podcast, part of the legal talk network. Today, we’re talking with Laura Genoves about her experience as one of the first limited legal … Shit. Limited licensed legal technicians, LLLTs, in Washington State.

Sam Glover: You can just say triple LTs.

Aaron Street: Yeah, or just legal technicians.

Sam Glover: You’ll find out that that’s just fine.

Aaron Street: Triple LTs, LLLTs.

Sam Glover: I think we’ll clear it all up soon.

Aaron Street: Branding.

Sam Glover: Today’s podcast is sponsored by Clio Legal Practice Management software. Clio makes running your law firm easier. Try it for free today at clio.com.

Aaron Street: Today’s podcast is also sponsored by Ruby Receptionists, and it’s smart, charming receptionists who are perfect for small firms. Visit callruby.com/lawyerist to get a risk free trial with Ruby.

So Sam, I think it was two years ago on this podcast, which is a crazy thing to be able to say, that we’ve been doing this long enough that I can say something happened two years ago, but I feel like it was about two years ago on this podcast that we were talking about LLLTs, or whatever.

Sam Glover: Pick one and go with it.

Aaron Street: I put forward my thesis about them, which is that a whole bunch of lawyers around the country are all up in arms about this new limited license thing and how it’s going to be the death of the profession. I think to a large part, almost everyone who hates the concept hates it because of some stupid version of protectionism, where they think it’s going to ruin what it means to be a lawyer or where they just don’t want anyone threatening lawyers or something that I think is pretty dumb, because it’s not focused at all on what’s best for clients.

My thesis is that … At least has been up until today’s conversation … has been that it doesn’t really make sense because the structure of the economics of LLLT, triple-

Sam Glover: Legal technicians.

Aaron Street: Of legal technicians is that they’re going to have to run solo small practices just like a solo small lawyer and that they’re going to have education costs not quite as high as law school.

Sam Glover: Actually, there is only one difference in cost. You brought that up before, and you’re totally right. She has to pay malpractice insurance. She needs an office, all those things. The only difference is the education cost, which is considerable. That’s it.

Aaron Street: Sure. Student loans cost a lot of money, but student loan costs are not the driving function of a lawyer’s billable hour, and therefore the idea that structurally this can offer a different price point for consumers to access legal services just doesn’t really make sense to me. But all of that said, I’m really excited to hear from Laura so that we can prove or disprove my theory.

Sam Glover: I am, too. She and I absolutely talked about that angle on it. The one thing we didn’t talk about, which is I think maybe worth raising now, is she pointed out to me before we started recording that she can’t charge as much as a lawyer. Even if all of her business structure, overhead expenses, even if the economic model is the same, she said, “You know what? We’re not lawyers. We have a hard time convincing somebody to pay anywhere near the same price that they would a lawyer, but that doesn’t mean that there’s a sustainable business there.” I think we’ll hear more from her about what she thinks that means and why she’s optimistic. Here we are.

Laura Genoves: My name is Laura Genoves, and I’m a newly licensed legal technician in Seattle, Washington.

Sam Glover: Hi, Laura. Thanks so much for being on the podcast today.

Laura Genoves: Thank you.

Sam Glover: By legal technician, you mean the awkwardly named you’re an LLLT.

Laura Genoves: Yes. The official name is limited licensed legal technician, and a lot of people have referred to them as triple LTs, but most of those in practice are calling themselves legal technicians or even law tech is another one I’ve heard.

Sam Glover: I’m so thrilled to hear that, actually, because it has been so awkward to try and use that abbreviation in speech. So legal technician it is from here on out. No more triple LTs.

Laura Genoves: Okay. Legal technician works for me.

Sam Glover: You were licensed about a year ago. Is that right?

Laura Genoves: No. Actually, I was licensed in May of this year.

Sam Glover: Oh, wow.

Laura Genoves: I got my order from the Supreme Court of Washington. I just launched my practice in September, and I’ve got my office and I’m seeing clients and working as a solo.

Sam Glover: Very cool. Let’s back up to the beginning of that and talk about what a legal technician is and what does that training look like. How do you get your license and that sort of thing?

Laura Genoves: Okay. Well, a legal technician is someone who is licensed. Currently, my understanding is many states are looking at this, but I believe Washington is … We’re the pioneers in this.

Sam Glover: Absolutely.

Laura Genoves: It’s someone who’s licensed by the state. We’re overseen by the bar association, and we have to have a minimum associate level degree. However, I have a bachelors. There’s a core education, which are 45 credit hours at an ABA-approved program. There’s a listing of courses that are necessary. We also get a practice area education, and currently our practice area is in family law. These classes are done at the University of Washington Law School, and they’re done online so that everybody across the state can participate. They’re real time online classes that you have to show up. For me, they were Tuesdays and Thursdays evenings. Also, you need to take an exam. There is a core education exam, which is the paralegal core competency exam and a professional responsibility exam. Our RPCs parallel the attorney RPCs pretty closely.

Sam Glover: You do have your own.

Laura Genoves: We do have our own, yes. And then we also have a practice area exam, which is like a mini bar exam administered through the Washington State Bar. The third piece of it is the experience. We need to have 3,000 hours of substantive law-related experience, which is about a year and a half full-time.

Sam Glover: Yeah. That’s a long time.

Laura Genoves: It is, and you have to be supervised by a licensed attorney, and they have to sign off. They have to sign a declaration saying that you did do 3,000 hours of substantive law-related work.

Sam Glover: So like if you were interning with an asshole, you’d want to get out of there, because they might just not let you go in the end.

Laura Genoves: You know what? Actually, there have been people whose attorneys have not signed off on their hours, which is a little bit tricky. So I think that’s something that triple LT board … Oh, here. I’m saying that again. The legal technician board is looking into in terms of making it mandatory to have the attorneys sign off on hours that are actually worked.

Sam Glover: Yeah. I could see that being a problem where you basically have a private lawyer just vetoing the legal technician’s schooling.

Laura Genoves: Right, right.

Sam Glover: That’s a problem.

Laura Genoves: I think the idea is … I think what the legal technicians who are in training have learned is to be up front with that right at the beginning and say, “Hey. I’m in this program. I plan to complete it. Here’s what the declaration looks like. Are you willing to sign off on this?”

Sam Glover: Yeah. Okay. So you take your mini bar exam. You do your supervision time under a lawyer. It’s only after that that you get your license.

Laura Genoves: Right. You have to actually … In addition to that, there’s a background check that has to be done. I got fingerprinted and …

Sam Glover: Okay, wow.

Laura Genoves: Yeah. There’s also a character and fitness piece. You have to submit that to the bar actually before you even sit the exam to make sure that if you were to pass, that you are someone who is able to practice law.

Sam Glover: Around the country, everybody’s biggest concern is whether or not they need to report that they used to smoke weed on their character and fitness exam. I assume in Washington, that’s no longer an issue.

Laura Genoves: You know, I really couldn’t speak to that, but …

Sam Glover: All right.

Laura Genoves: … seeing as it’s legal in our state, I don’t know how they would come down on that.

Sam Glover: Now that you’re licensed, what can you do?

Laura Genoves: What I am allowed to do is I can assist clients in terms of moving their family law matters forward. Specifically, I can do child support orders. I can do child support modifications. I can do dissolutions, legal separation. I can do some domestic violence action.

Sam Glover: If somebody came to you and wanted your help drafting a dissolution for the two spouses, you could assist them with that. Can you negotiate it?

Laura Genoves: I can assist one of them. Obviously, I can’t take on both people as my clients. That would be something that wouldn’t … Any attorney couldn’t take on people who potentially have opposing interests, but I’m not an attorney, obviously. I’m a legal technician, but it falls under the same RPCs that I really can’t do that.

Sam Glover: But you could assist one side, and you just talk to them, or can you negotiate with the other party or the other lawyer as well? Or the other legal technician on the other side?

Laura Genoves: I am prohibited from negotiating on my client’s behalf. That also falls under the attorney purview. What I can do is I communicate through that my client. So my client could say, “Well, my former spouse or my soon to be ex-spouse says this or his attorney says that.” It’s a little bit of a pass through.

Sam Glover: Coaching?

Laura Genoves: A little bit of coaching, and I state that clearly in my engagement agreement that that is my client’s responsibility to communicate with me whenever they get information or whenever they get communication from the opposing party, because technically my clients, as far as filing documents, their pro se. I have to sign every court document with my license number and my signature, but the client is really pro se.

Sam Glover: Interesting. You are able to have ownership in a law firm or have your own firm, which is not technically a law firm, and legal technician’s firm.

Laura Genoves: Right. Under our practice rules, it’s APR-28, if anybody really wants to take the time to look that up. I can’t remember specifically which section that is, so don’t quote me on that. We can either share a firm with an attorney, and those two people would come to some sort of agreement, or legal technicians could own a firm together, two or more. I know of two who have started their own firm together, and they are working to help clients. Or like myself, you could hang out your own shingle and work as an independent legal technician.

Sam Glover: So then what does your firm look like? I assume it’s an LLC or PLLC or something like that.

Laura Genoves: It is. It’s a PLLC, and I have to set up an [inaudible 00: 11: 22] account, just like an attorney would. I use practice management software. I don’t know if I can say which one I use.

Sam Glover: Yeah. Which one do you use?

Laura Genoves: I like Clio. That’s the one I’m most familiar with, and that’s what works for me. I have my clients sign an engagement agreement with me that clearly outlines the work of what I plan to help them with. Part of my job, too, is screening clients, because I really have to make sure that when someone works with me, that they understand what I can do for them. If something moves beyond my scope of practice, it’s up to me to explain to them why I can’t continue to help them and recommend that they see a full service attorney.

Sam Glover: The way it’s … You’re doing limited scope representation in the same way that lots of lawyers do it. It’s just that you’re not necessarily the one limiting the scope. It’s regulated to be limited by the state.

Laura Genoves: Right. It is regulated. The thing is, though, that it is always changing. There are things that are pending to see if we can expand our scope slightly in terms of being able, for example, to go to court with a client. Not to speak on their behalf, but to be there to help with procedural issues. One example I can think of is someone who had not gone to a hearing with their client, and the client was asked if they wanted to continue it. Of course, being there pro se, she said, “Oh, yeah. I want to continue.” Then she didn’t understand what happened when it was moved two weeks later, because it’s that terminology that someone who’s not in law would not understand.

Sam Glover: Oh. She meant I want to go ahead and do it.

Laura Genoves: Yes. I want to keep going is what she thought, but it meant continue it as to a later date. One of the areas that might be changing in our scope is being able to go to a hearing with a client just to be able to explain procedural things or to-

Sam Glover: An advocate in the courtroom.

Laura Genoves: Right. Say a commissioner might come up with a ruling on what’s going on in that hearing. To be there to help write that up so that the client understands how what has been said gets translated into documents for the court that are enforceable and that type of thing.

Sam Glover: How do you describe what you do in your marketing? What is the concise way that you would explain to a prospective client what you do and maybe how you distinguish that from what a lawyer can do for them? Or does that just always have to be a long conversation?

Laura Genoves: I was just going to say, “Concise? Hmm.” I am working on a way to make-

Sam Glover: What’s the billboard version?

Laura Genoves: Well, I think the billboard version is give me a call, and we can talk about it, because I think I really need to assess the client’s needs and what I can help them with before I decide to sign an engagement agreement with them. I also can explain to someone that, “Hey, I can help you up to this point, and if you’d like, you can see … I have attorneys that I work with. They can guide you in this other part that I’m not allowed to help you with.” For example, division of real estate or QDROs. I can’t help a client with that, but I can refer them to an attorney to do that.

Sam Glover: You just refer them to an attorney, or do you get the attorney to help with that piece of it and keep the client? I guess I’m wondering do your clients have a tendency to have to go to an attorney in the middle of the representation for something else, or just to leave you and then go to an attorney?

Laura Genoves: Well, most of my clients are working people. Most of my clients are people of middle means, and yes, there are some in Seattle still, believe it or not. I work evenings and weekends even to accommodate some of these working people. Money is clearly a concern to them, so I think that they want limited expense with an attorney. I think if an attorney gives me written instructions, I can do some of the work myself as long as I have written instructions from an attorney.

Sam Glover: Let’s take a quick break to hear from some of our sponsors. When we come back, we can dive into money a little bit more, because I’m really curious to hear your thoughts on that piece of how this all works out on a practical level. So we’ll be right back.

Aaron Street: Imagine what you could do with an extra eight hours per week. You could invest in marketing your firm. You could spend more time helping clients in need, or you could catch your daughter’s soccer game. That’s how much time legal professionals save with Clio, the world’s leading practice management software. With Clio, tracking time, billing, and [inaudible 00: 16: 01] management are fast and easy, giving you more time to focus on what really matters. And Clio is a complete practice management platform with plenty of tools and over 50 integrations to help you automate daily tasks, such as document generation and court calendering. See how the right software can make it easier to manage your practice. Try Clio for free today at clio.com.

Sam Glover: This podcast is supported by Ruby Receptionists. As a matter of fact, Ruby answers our phones at Lawyerist, and my firm was a paying Ruby customer before that. Here’s what I love about Ruby. When I’m in the middle of something, I hate to be interrupted, so when the phone rings, it annoys me, and that often carries over into the conversation I have after I pick up the phone, which is why I’m better off not answering my own phone. Instead, Ruby answers the phone, and if the person on the other end asks for me, a friendly, cheerful receptionist from Ruby calls me and asks if I want them to put the call through. It’s a buffer that gives me a minute to let go of my annoyance and be a better human being during the call.

If you want to be a better human being on the phone, give Ruby a try. Go to callruby.com/lawyerist to sign up, and Ruby will waive the $95 set up fee. If you aren’t happy with Ruby for any reason, you can get your money back during your first three weeks. I’m pretty sure you’ll stick around, but since there is no risk, you might as well try.

Okay. We’re back. Laura, one of the things that I’ve been trying to figure out is how a legal technician can afford to be cheaper than a lawyer, because we hear that a lot, that legal technicians will help close the access to justice gap. They’ll help increase the access to justice by lowering the cost of getting legal help. All of that stuff, I get it and it makes sense. Cost is certainly a factor in why it’s hard to get justice for some people. But most of lawyers’ expenses aren’t tied to the fact that they’re lawyers, right? You still have to have an office and so does a lawyer. You have to have malpractice insurance. So does a lawyer, although maybe yours is less expensive. I don’t know. You need practice management software. Most of the overhead that a lawyer has to bear, you also have to bear, and yet many lawyers are not making a killing doing what they’re doing. I’m wondering, how can you charge less? How does that work? That’s a good question.

Laura Genoves: Well, I’m trying to figure out myself how it’s going to work exactly. I think the primary thing is I am not under a huge amount of student loan debt, number one. In order to get all of the education component of becoming a legal technician, I would say that … Including fees for taking exams … it probably is about ballpark $12,000. When you’re talking about that versus eight, 10 times that amount-

Sam Glover: It’s a factor of 10. Yeah.

Laura Genoves: Right.

Sam Glover: At least.

Laura Genoves: Number one, I don’t have that component to deal with. I do, like you said, I have malpractice insurance. I have to maintain my license with the bar. I have overhead for rent and blah, blah, blah, but I’m hoping that it’s really through volume. I talk to a lot of clients. I plant a lot of seeds, and I’m hoping that that’s going to help me. In the future, I’d like to move to a flat fee model once I get a sense of how long it’s going to take me to do different components of what I can do. Child support, parenting plan, that type of thing. Kind of move to a flat fee model, but I’m not there yet.

Sam Glover: I guess in theory, limited scope might mean more predictable, in which case, you can potentially automate it. You can use document assembly. You can quote flat fees. Yeah. Maybe it’s easier for you to find efficiencies in the way you work than somebody who’s doing beginning to end style of representation.

Laura Genoves: Exactly. We have a great resource, and I think many bar associations do. It’s law office practice management. It’s LOMAP, is what we call it here at the Washington State Bar. They’ve been invaluable in really helping find some great tools and resources for automation. That’s really been something that has been my goal.

While I’m not as busy as I would like, the time that I’m not, I’m really doing a lot of that work to make sure that when it does happen … Because I’m sure that it will. I’m confident … that I’m ready to roll and hit the ground running.

Sam Glover: I realize you’ve been doing this for just some months now. How’s it going? How’s business?

Laura Genoves: Actually, business is going well. I was actually kind of surprised. When I tell people about what I do, it is hard to do an elevator speech. I think of it as very tall building, because it’s a little bit of a mouthful, but people are very excited. I work in a private office in a co-working space, so there’s a lot of networking that happens within the co-working. People are very excited. I’m going to do a presentation with the group here. They have a lunch and learn thing that happens once a month, and I think a lot of-

Sam Glover: Are you in WeWork or Industrious?

Laura Genoves: It’s one in Seattle called the Riveter.

Sam Glover: Oh, cool.

Laura Genoves: Yeah. It’s an independent type of office share environment.

Sam Glover: Because legal technicians were brought about in part because of the movement to try and work on access to justice, do you feel like you have a sense for is that working?

Laura Genoves: One factor that’s been difficult is the bar association hasn’t done a lot of promotion of legal technicians, because currently, there are only 25 of us that are licensed to practice across the state of Washington. We live in a fairly large state divided by mountains. My sense is that if people really get the idea that there is a less expensive alternative to just basic straightforward family law problems, that there won’t be someone to serve them in their county.

Sam Glover: I suppose the bar’s interests in marketing legal technicians is maybe a little bit conflicted, which makes me wonder. What sort of reception have you gotten from the bar? From lawyers, from the association in general? What does that look like?

Laura Genoves: Well, I would say for the most part, the Washington State Bar has been really supportive. We’re full members of the bar. We pay a licensing fee every year. Some of the county bars have not been as receptive, which is a little disappointing, unfortunately. I’m working. I’m trying to do a charm campaign to get the King County Bar to allow me to join them. I paid my dues, and then I got it sent back to me, which is a little sad.

I think there have been lots of attorneys who have reached out to me to find out more about what we do and the opportunity to work together. I think those are the attorneys that I like to work with. They will get referrals from me, and they send me referrals. In some ways, if people really were to take a look at the program in general and the niche that we do fill, frankly, it’s better for them to work with someone who has a guide versus working with a pro se party. That’s a tough ethical line, sometimes, how much communication you can have with a pro se party, an opposing pro se party. I think attorneys who know how the program really works, I think would be surprised that we fill an important gap.

Sam Glover: I almost feel like you’re a doula for divorce case, like for divorcing spouses. There are no OB/GYNs who went out of business because of the doula movement. Lots of people want doulas, so you’re like a divorce doula.

Laura Genoves: Well, kind of. I don’t know what we’re giving birth to, but sure.

Sam Glover: Before we publish this podcast, make sure divorcedoula.com is available.

Laura Genoves: Well, in some ways, too, it’s like a nurse practitioner role, as well, because if you have a sore throat, you don’t need a surgeon. You can go in and see the nurse practitioner. They can give you what you need, and then move you on your way. But if it’s more complicated and they think that there’s more of an issue, then yeah. You get referred on to a surgeon or someone who can take care of that issue for you.

Sam Glover: You can call yourself a divorce coach if you’re uncomfortable with doula.

Laura Genoves: Yeah, although divorce coach, I think that’s a different role. We have those here, too, and I think that’s a little bit different. But yeah. I see what you’re saying. I like divorce doula.

Sam Glover: What’s the future for the legal technician program? Is there talk of expanding it in new practice areas or letting you do more besides what we’ve already talked about? What’s in the future?

Laura Genoves: Yeah. There actually is a committee of the bar association that is looking at expanding our practice areas. They’ve looked at several different ones. They’ve looked at estate planning, and I think that was not something they wanted to pursue. They’ve looked at landlord/tenant, but what makes that one difficult is if people can’t really afford to pay their rent, they really can’t afford, unfortunately, to have paid legal help. They’ve also looked at immigration. So they’re looking at areas of greatest need and then moving forward, so it’s a work in progress. I think it’s something that will continue to evolve. It’s our job as pioneers in this new legal profession to keep on top of that.

Sam Glover: Well, let’s say that happened. Let’s say they opened up immigration or real estate or something like that. Do you have to go back to school and do it over, or is there just a practice area module that you can take to expand your license, basically?

Laura Genoves: That’s exactly it, Sam. It’s just a practice module. It’d be another set of classes through the University of Washington, once again. All those classes are taught by other law school professors in our state. For example, when I did my practice in family law, we had professors from Gonzaga Law School in Spokane. We had a professor from Seattle University School of Law. It’s kind of nice, because it really is a cooperative effort.

I feel it’s exciting to be on the cutting edge of this new legal profession, because we are providing licensed, trained help to people who really need it. I have to note that almost all of legal technicians that are currently licensed do some sort of volunteer work in terms of working in legal clinics or … I’m actually leading a committee to form our own legal technician legal clinic, which will be in south Seattle hopefully soon to be able to help people with specific things, like parenting plans or child support worksheets. It’s really exciting to be on the cutting edge.

Sam Glover: Very cool. Well, thanks for telling us about it today. I really appreciate learning more about the legal technician program and about your practice. Could we call it a practice?

Laura Genoves: Yeah. It is a practice.

Sam Glover: Or your services?

Laura Genoves: It’s a limited practice, but yes, it’s a practice.

Sam Glover: Well, thanks. It’s been really helpful. I know a lot of us … Practically everybody knows about the program, but I’ve really enjoyed getting to know more about it, specifically in the context of your work. Thanks so much, Laura.

Laura Genoves: All right. Thank you for having me.

Aaron Street: Make sure to catch next week’s episode of the Lawyerist podcast by subscribing to the show in your favorite podcast app. Please leave a rating to help other people find our show. You can find the notes for today’s episode on lawyerist.com/podcast.

Sam Glover: The views expressed by the participants are their own and are not endorsed by Legal Talk Network. Nothing said in this podcast is legal advice for you. This transcript was prepared by Rev.com.

Podcast #146: Practicing Law as a Legal Technician (LLLT) in Washington State, with Laura Genoves was originally published on Lawyerist.com.

from Law and Politics https://lawyerist.com/podcast-146-practicing-law-laura-genoves/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

#Legal #law

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cruzfelixofficial-blog · 6 years

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Best places to repair your iPhone screen in miami

You step off the train and start heading for work. You pull your iPhone out of your pocket to check your email and, just like magic, your iPhone slips out of your hand and onto the train platform. As you bend over to pick it up, you notice your iPhone’s screen is shattered. The first thought that pops into your mind is, “Oh no! Where do I get my iPhone screen repaired in miami?”

In this article, I will be showing you the best places to get your iPhone repaired. I’ll tell you about the best local and mail-in iPhone repair options, so your phone will be as good as new in no time.

Before You Get Your iPhone Repaired

No matter where you choose to have your iPhone repaired, make sure to back up your iPhone to iTunes or iCloud first. All sorts of things can go wrong during the repair process, and while it can be easy to swap out a broken part for one that works, it’s usually impossible (and always expensive) to retrieve data from a fried iPhone logic board. Whatever you do, back up your iPhone first.

Your “Official” First Stop: The Apple Store

If you’re accustomed to following the rules, you’re supposed to stop by the Genius Bar at your local Apple Store whenever you have a problem with your iPhone.

Apple technicians (called Geniuses) at the Genius Bar will diagnose your iPhone for free and check your phone’s AppleCare status to see if the repair is covered by warranty. If your device is out of warranty, Apple will offer to repair your iPhone for a fee — but there are exceptions.

When Won’t Apple Repair My Phone?

If you’ve ever repaired your iPhone before at a 3rd-party store or replaced any part of your iPhone with a non-Apple part, Apple Stores will not repair your phone or even offer a full replacement — you’re on the hook for a new phone at full retail price. A second exception occurs when the device is very old. Sometimes devices older than 5 years old are classified as legacy or vintage, and Apple won’t repair them. In either case, you’ll either need to replace your iPhone or find a third-party who’s willing to make the repair.

Are Apple Store Repairs Worth The Cost?

Though getting your iPhone repaired at the Apple Store can be expensive, it’s generally worth the premium. This is because you can be sure you’re getting original parts, certified service, and warranty coverage. All Apple repairs are covered by a 90-day AppleCare warranty and are generally completed while you wait, so you’ll have your device back the same day.

Before You Go To The Genius Bar, Do This!

There are Apple Stores in almost every major (and not so major) city worldwide — find your nearest store here. I highly recommend that you make a Genius Bar appointment online before heading to the Apple Store to ensure that someone is available to help you. You can also locate Apple Stores and make appointments through the Apple Store app for iPhone.

So, Apple wants to charge you $200 (just throwing a number out there) to replace your broken iPhone screen, but the phone repair shack at the end of the block will do it for $75. This may seem like an incredible deal on paper, but many of these shops don’t guarantee their work and aren’t affiliated with any established company, so if something goes wrong, you’re out of luck. Additionally, many of these repair shops that use non-Apple parts that void your iPhone’s warranty completely.

With this in mind, I generally do not recommend going to a no-name local repair shop when you need your iPhone repaired. Sticking to the Apple Store or other corporate-backed stores is usually a good idea because their work is covered by warranty.

#1 option will be dr phone fix

At some point we have all felt the feeling of being lost, and disconnected from the world when our phone gets broken. Some of us are so attached that we feel our entire world is crashing down, there is no reason to panic; because most damages on iPhones are repairable at an affordable price. We understand how important your device is to you, as there are people who rely on their mobile phones for work. We live in a world that is busy and always in a rush. To get to places, to finish work, to get home, to get chores done, there is no aspect of our lives we do not to rush through. Understanding that need we offer you a 45 minutes waiting time, we got you covered. So we can have you walking out with you newly fixed phone. A rushed job does not mean we have not taken our time to perform a proper job, we assure you that a professional technician will have taken all the time they need to perform a perfect solution on your valuable device. There are 164 million active mobile devices in USA, and just about 64% of them are Apple users in 2016. Making it the most commonly used mobile phones in America. As the number of Apple users have increased in the past years so has the number of customers looking for repairs. Most of these electronic repairs are basic such as screens replacement for a shattered glass and sometimes they are a bit more technical like battery replacement, charge port replacement, water damage and other repaired needs. But nothing to worry about, as we have all the solutions for your needs. We do not wish to damage your phone just even a little, so we have all the right tools for any model phone. Which is a crucial part during your service. The right kind of tools is what we rely on for a job well done. It is important to understand that every electronics device requires different tools, as they are build differently. Many experienced professionals make such basic mistakes and end up ruining your phone. But we assure that we are professionals with experience and equipped with the right kinds of tools. At Dr Phone Fix & Repair we are focused on same day repairs, fast turnaround and quality parts with 90-day warranty on all of our services at competitive pricing. Which is why we have an online system set up for you all ready to go. If you know exactly what kind of service you are looking to get, for instance your screen to be replace then you can easily get a quote from us; or even look around for the perfect product to look at the prices before heading out to a store. We offer services on almost all models and at an economical cost at all of our stores.

#2 option will be ubreakifix

iPhone Repair

Looking at texts and pictures through a broken iphone screen can be frustrating but you shouldn’t have to replace your entire phone just because one part is damaged. uBreakiFix was founded because of a broken iPhone and although today we can fix just about any electronic device, we still consider iPhone repair service our specialty.

Whether you are still rocking the iPhone 3GS/G, iPhone 4/4s, iPhone 5S/5C or have the latest iPhone 6/6s or iPhone 7 or 7 Plus, you’ll get a high-quality repair for the most reasonable price around. We have the skills and expertise to tackle any problem on any model of iPhone.

Most Common iPhone Issues

The most common iPhone repairs that we see are cracked iPhone screens and damaged LCDs, but our highly trained techs can repair virtually any cell phone issue, from, water damage, headphone jack replacement, home button repair, battery replacements and more. No matter how carefully we try to take care of our devices, accidents will happen and that’s where we can help.

iPhone Water Damage

Has your iPhone accidently taken a swim and started acting funny? Water damage used to be a death sentence for iPhones but our thorough deep cleaning can reverse the damage in most water damage cases if we get our hands on it in time. The next time your phone is exposed to water, skip the rice bath and bring it right to one of our stores. The faster we can diagnose it the more likely we’ll be able to stop corrosion from forming.

Let uBreakiFix Service your iPhone

We’re confident in our repairs. If your repaired device seems to be having issues, bring it back to uBreakiFix right away for a warranty diagnostics. We will be happy to take a look and replace any defective parts that were used during the original repair.

We have hundreds of locations across around North America so no matter where you are there’s a good chance that there is a uBreakiFix location near you. We understand how inconvenient it is when your iPhone breaks. We want to get you reconnected faster and for a lower price than anyone else. Stop in any one of our locations to learn how we can help.

#miami #iphonescreenrepair #iphone #screendamage #ubreakifix #drphonefix

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ramialkarmi · 7 years

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Clippers owner and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer reveals how he became the world's happiest retired billionaire

Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft and owner of the LA Clippers, may be the happiest retired person in tech — or even the world.

He met Bill Gates in college and joined Microsoft as the 30th employee. Now, he lives an enviable (and well-deserved) life full of late morning rises, golf, yoga, sports games, philanthropy, meditation, and walks with his wife.

"What I found is I control my time, I can pick and choose what I do," Ballmer told Business Insider US Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell on her podcast, "Success! How I Did It."

At first, Ballmer tried to stay as busy as when he was Microsoft's CEO. Now he's found a slower pace is better.

"I had probably been retired about a year and then I said, 'This is nuts, I don't have to recreate the pace with which I used to work,'" Ballmer said.

"I get up, I walk with my wife, I have a chance to reflect and meditate, work out. I usually don't get any place until about 10 in the morning ... Work some, hit some golf balls late in the afternoon. It's cool to be able to control my time and still be involved in fun and productive activities."

Ballmer bought the LA Clippers in 2014 after Donald Sterling was forced to offload the team following the public release of a racist recording. Ballmer is also involved in philanthropy with his wife, Connie, and they launched USAFacts.org, an initiative that shows how the government spends money on local, state, and federal levels.

In the wide-ranging conversation, Ballmer and Shontell discussed:

What Ballmer's days are like now that he's retired

How Bill Gates recruited him to Microsoft as employee #30

What the day of Microsoft's IPO was like, and how he celebrated

How difficult it was to run Microsoft while Bill Gates was still around

What really happened during the infamous chair-throwing incident with the Google engineer

How he dealt with the rise of all the FANG stocks while he was at the helm of Microsoft

What it was like to leave Microsoft after so many years

How he bought the LA Clippers in the midst of the Donald Sterling controversy

Starting USAFacts.org to increase transparency about government spending

Ballmer's career advice for anyone who wants to become a Fortune 500 CEO

You can listen to the full interview here:

Subscribe to "Success! How I Did It" on Acast or iTunes. Check out previous episodes with:

Box founder and CEO Aaron Levie

Robinhood founder and CEO Vlad Tenev

ClassPass founder Payal Kadakia

DropBox founder and CEO Drew Houston

Following is a transcript of the podcast episode; it has been edited for clarity and length.

Becoming the happiest retired billionaire

Alyson Shontell: We're so happy to have you with us here, Steve.

Steve Ballmer: Thanks for having me — really appreciate it.

Shontell: The first thing I wanted to ask you about is my colleague Julie Bort recently sat down with you and she says you are the happiest retired person in tech. So tell me what it's like to be you right now. What are your days filled with?

Ballmer: The No. 1 thing I would say about retirement is you get to control your own time. I probably went into retirement maybe a little anxious, certainly not knowing what I was getting into. I didn't think about exactly what I was going to do until the day I walked out the door at Microsoft, and what I found is I control my time, I can pick and choose what I do, and I found three things that delight me in addition to just having a lot of fun, playing golf, doing yoga, stuff like that. But I'm also working on the Clippers. That's a serious investment of time. Part of that's going to games. I'm going to say it’s fun work, if you will.

I'm working on a project we call USA Facts, which is a project to pull together government numbers in a kind of 10K-like format to try to provide better integration of government data and better transparency. Then my wife and I have a philanthropic focus on kids in the US who are born into circumstances where they may not get a real shot at the American dream.

Shontell: I'm going to ask you about all of that, but first, let's go back into the very beginning. From what I understand, you were a pretty shy kid and you grew up in Michigan.

Ballmer: Yeah, I grew up in Detroit, and when I was 8 years old, my family moved to Belgium for three years, which actually was kind of a nutty thing back then. My dad was an immigrant, spoke a bunch of languages, so Ford sent him over there, but it was like being in an isolation chamber. You know, very little English TV, Europe was really still coming out of World War II, and it built a global perspective that I think was helpful. Grew up middle-class and then developed an interest in math and numbers, which has been a core strength, I would say, of mine since.

Meeting Bill Gates in college, and how Gates recruited Ballmer to Microsoft

Shontell: You were the Harvard basketball team's statistician, you beat Bill Gates at a math competition at Harvard, so I think a math whiz would be a justified term. So one person that you met when you were at Harvard is Bill Gates, who you would have a long career with. What were those early days with Bill like?

Ballmer: We met early sophomore year. We were living on the same floor in our dorm, and we had a mutual friend who lived in the middle. He said, "You guys are both crazy, unusual guys, you would enjoy each other." So he introduced us and we became good friends. That was the year he started Microsoft. It was a friendship from the start. Classes, math, economics, a lot of talk about business. Not that I knew a lot about it, but there was some mutual interest and then when he started Microsoft, he'd come back when he was gone and talk a little bit, be involved in some Harvard activities. I remember a long walk we had here in New York one time. We were way uptown, maybe in the Plaza, and we walked all the way downtown and back, and he was just telling me and explaining all about Microsoft and what was going on and some of the small things like managing the office and getting furniture, and I said, "Oh, you ought to hire somebody like my mom — that's kind of what my mom does at her business," and by the time I got hooked up at Microsoft, Bill had this great lady, Miriam Lubow, who did all that stuff. Those were fun times.

Shontell: You joined as employee number 30. What was your interview process like? Was there even an interview? Did you just call up Bill and say, "Hey, like can I come on full time?" How did it work?

Ballmer: Kind of the other way around. I worked a couple years at Procter and Gamble. Microsoft was going and then I was back at Stanford, at business school. The summer before, I went to business school, I had come up to Seattle to visit Bill when the business was in Albuquerque and I was at Procter and Gamble, so we had stayed in touch. I was getting probably April-ish of my first year in business school, and I was trying to decide between investment banking and consulting and I got a call from Bill and he said, "Hey, you know, we're kind of looking for a business person. Yeah I know you're in school, too bad you don't have a twin brother." Blah, blah, blah.

So then, it became clear to me what the hint was. I was supposed to take a trip back East to visit all these companies and I called him back the next day and said, "Hey, Bill, maybe I'd be interested." I flew through Seattle on the way back and nobody could believe it. But I decided to go and Bill and I had a deal. If things didn't work out, he'd fire me at the end of the summer or I could quit at the end of the summer. For the first month or so, I'd say we both wondered whether it might work. And then we hit a rhythm and quickly thereafter I bought a house and that now was 37 years ago, so a long time.

Early days at Microsoft as "Chief dishwasher" and an "office" that was Bill Gates' couch

Shontell: You made it long past that first month —

Ballmer: I did.

Shontell: Which is great to see. So remind us all what Microsoft was like in those days.

Ballmer: The year I arrived in June, and the last year for which we had filed taxes, was $2.5 million in revenue. Then the first year I was there, we got to $7.5 million in revenue. The company was already in hardware and software.

People focus on the software side, but we had a product called the Z-80 SoftCard, which plugged into an Apple II and made it into a CPM, which is an old operating-system machine. About 30 employees, kind of helter-skelter.

When I got there the first day, there was no office, no place to sit. And Bill said, "Oh, you can have this corner of my couch in my office." So we pushed some papers aside, and I sat down and sure enough my office was sitting on that couch until I could carve one out of the office going forward. I became the chief cook and bottle washer, I would say, accounting, HR, and pretty soon thereafter, some folks from IBM came to talk about what would become the first PC. Bill wanted somebody to sit in the room with him, I was probably the guy who could best wear a suit, so to speak. For IBMers, you needed to have suits, so I became also the IBM account manager pretty early in my stay.

Shontell: So a lot of different jobs. As any fast-growing startup, you wear a lot of different hats.

Ballmer: I think my title was assistant to the chairman or something like that.

Shontell: So assistant to the chairman to CEO. It’s a pretty incredible rise. What do you think are the most important things you did over your first decade there that set you up to become the eventual CEO?

Ballmer: You sort of glamorized my path. I kind of came in as a No. 2 guy. Bill Gates and Paul Allen were both founders, and there was a guy named Vern Raburn. I didn't ascend very far over time; I moved from No. 2 to the top job.

But the first 10 years, the two things I would probably highlight: One, I really set up the recruiting system, particularly college recruiting. The lifeblood of any tech organization is its talent. I'd say that was, to me, one of my pride and joys and very instrumental in the company's growth because we needed that huge influx of talent to drive our agenda and stay up with the industry.

The other thing which was a major focus and very important was managing the IBM relationship. That really got us into the operating-system business. That was the foundation on which we defined the PC business.

I'm going to give you two more. I ran the Windows development project. I got in and managed to get Windows into the market, which I say was a very important thing in the company's history. And we did go from a partnership when I joined, to a corporation, and the corporation had stock options, which was an important recruiting and attraction tool. At the time, the notion of giving out stock was there but certainly alien, particularly to these college recruits.

Shontell: So talk to me about the IPO day because I believe you owned about 8% of the company when it went public. What was that day like?

Ballmer: I don't really remember it terribly well. Two things I do remember about the day: We had moved into our new campus, I think the same day maybe, and one of the guys who had been with us — he actually predated me as a summer intern — was a friend of Bill's from high school. There was a sign he put up that was sort of neon-y that said it was IPO day, move into a new office day, I think, if I'm remembering this correctly, and maybe it was his birthday, maybe he didn't put it up but it was his birthday.

I remember that and I remember going out for drinks afterward with my then girlfriend and being slightly celebratory, and I don't remember anything else about it, frankly.

Bumping heads with Bill Gates and learning to be a CEO

Shontell: IPO day is not exit day necessarily. From a business perspective, business certainly goes on and then you've got a whole other suite of people to please with your public company.

I wanted to talk to you about your first few years as CEO. It seems like it was a little bit of a challenge because Gates had huge shoes to fill — it’s his company that he cofounded and he was still around. So what were those first years like really running the company?

Ballmer: I would say there were four things that were important or interesting.

No. 1: I did take over at the top of the dot-com bubble. Microsoft's market cap may now be where it was back then — the stock price is certainly over — but it's only in the last couple of years. So I took over at exactly the peak and it was really hard to show fine stock performance from there.

No. 2: We had to really resolve our issues with the Department of Justice and the EU. People forget that was a big issue at the time.

No. 3: I had not really run any product development except that small stint on Windows, and so building relationships and thinking about how I interact with the product development side, even with Bill as "chief software architect."

And then Bill and I had to go through a rough patch to figure out what it really meant that he had asked me to become CEO, but he wanted to stay around sort of working for me as "chief software architect." We got through what I've called the bumpiest period in about a year and a half, two years, but it was bumpy. But I don't think I felt really like CEO in full until Bill chose to leave the company in a full-time sense in 2008.

Shontell: And what were some of those bumpy things? Because I think I've seen you say you figured out eventually how to manage Bill or you're not quite sure if you ever really realized how to do it.

Ballmer: Well, I never really managed Bill. Forget the “figure out how to do it.” We changed the nature of our partnership and I think that was important, but it was still a partnership as opposed to my CEO-ship. When it came to technology judgments, Bill really drove that stuff, I would say. The bumps were: Nobody quite sure what it meant. You'd get in front of a team meeting — am I supposed to lead that meeting? Is Bill supposed to lead that meeting? Is he following my lead? Am I following his lead? That's a transition. When you're in a meeting, am I supposed to guide the meeting? Do I look like the final decision maker or not? We had to get through a lot of bumps like that; I had things I had to evolve, Bill had ways in which he needed to evolve.

The infamous chair-throwing incident that never happened

Shontell: And one thing you touched on is that you did become CEO right at the peak of the dot-com boom, and then the next 10 years were totally insane. All of the FANG stocks right now, you saw either launch or explode during those 10 years. Microsoft had been the main player and then all of a sudden there's all this competition. So what was it like watching Facebook rise, watching Apple kind of come from the ashes into dominance, Google come from obscurity and actually not even exist into full bloom?

Ballmer: At the time, each and every one of those things hurt me in the sense, "Oh, we should do this, we should have done that." In a way, that was the most naive view I had. There's no reason why one company should have every idea in every category. The world's not going to work like that. But that was my thought process at the time and I probably allowed myself and our company to get a little bit too diffuse in its thinking. But it did — oh — it wounded me. Facebook's not in the same business as Microsoft, not really. Apple, a little more competitive still. Google, more competitive still. Amazon, because of their AWS web services, more competitive still.

Shontell: So about Google, you're obviously a passionate person, which is great for rallying people up and getting them pumped. Sometimes, I'm sure, in management, you had to keep it in check a little bit. There was that famous story of your engineer leaving for Google. Can we talk about that chair incident? What happened that day?

Ballmer: Oh, it got overblown. Mark Lucovsky, who was the engineer, I had worked with for many years. I think the story was that I threw a chair, that's not right. I shook —

Shontell: So you never threw the chair?

Ballmer: No.

Shontell: Oh my god — OK we need to set history straight.

Ballmer: I kind of shook the back of the chair. I mean I shook one, I'll cop to that, so to speak. But I never threw a chair.

Shontell: OK, the legend goes that he told you he was leaving for Google and you were like "Ahh!" and threw a chair. No chair thrown?

Ballmer: I said, "Mark, come on, you should stay." And then I kind of rattled — "Come on, Mark." I was rattling the back of a chair — I didn't pick a chair up and throw it. I'm not even sure I'd have the strength to do that.

Shontell: Sounds like healthy passion then.

Ballmer: I think it was healthy passion.

What advice Steve Ballmer gave to his successor, Satya Nadella

Shontell: You've called Microsoft your fourth kid; you were breathing it for 34 years. What was the process like when you realized that your time there was coming to an end and that you were going to have to figure out what the next phase of your life was going to be?

Ballmer: OK, first let me say, winding up Microsoft was about Microsoft. Other than having a big sense that I'd like to own a sports team, I had no plan. I was really focused in on Microsoft. When you say the final time, I actually think of the period starting in 2008 when Bill stepped down.

My focus over that time was really getting us started in the cloud. We did and I'm highly pleased at the progress Microsoft's made. There's something I wish we'd started earlier or different. We started what's now our Azure effort. Probably would have done that slightly differently. What's now Office 365 was really moving. We really dove further into the hardware business. We doubled down on Xbox, we started our Surface product line — I think that's terribly important today to Microsoft's real presence with the consumer.

We wandered around still a little bit in Internet services, search being the focal point. But there was some wandering. We built, though, a good technology base, which the company is using today. Really it is the foundation for the AI pool, so I think we made great progress and moved in some important and interesting directions. I feel really good about that.

I also feel really good about the fact that my successor was somebody who worked for me. I had been out scouring for potential successors, talking to the top people at Amazon and Apple. When it came time to actually make the transition, the board knew about those candidates, and the best candidate was somebody, I had identified early and we had given good jobs and who's just an amazing talent and is doing a fantastic job.

Shontell: Tell me about the rise of Satya Nadella.

Ballmer: I remember going with him to Bentonville, to sell to Walmart, and that's really when I said, "God, this guy is very talented." I can't tell you exactly what year that would have been, but it was 14, 15, 16 years or something like that before he ascended to CEO status.

I just thought he was a really smart, really talented guy, and plucked him pretty soon after that to start running research and development in our business applications division, our dynamics product line. He did a great job, he moved into leadership for that whole business. We needed him on search, put him into the search business. He showed amazing maturity. Eventually gave him running our server and cloud business and he just kept doing great job, great job, great job, and boom, he's doing a great job now as CEO of Microsoft.

Shontell: What advice did you give him as he was going to be coming in as CEO of Microsoft?

Ballmer: He quotes this and I'm sure he's right: I said, "You've got to be bold, but you've got to be right." It turn out that being bold and being wrong may be the worst place to be. The most important thing in leadership is actually pointing people the right direction. If you should be zagging left and you send people down the right, that's the biggest failure a leader can make.

Finding a new identity after Microsoft ("The Good Wife is a good show!")

Shontell: What were those first few months like after you stepped down from being CEO of Microsoft? You seem to have binged a lot of "The Good Wife," and played a lot of golf, but what was that transition period like? And did you have to find your new identity? Because people's identity gets wrapped up in a business when you've been there so long.

Ballmer: Yeah, I had to find my new identity. I also had to find my new pace of life, frankly. Both of those things. I had actually done the binge-watching over Christmas, because we delayed the announcement of Satya as my successor, or delayed the selection, and I said, "I'm not going to start new projects when I'm going to get replaced in a few weeks we're going to announce them."

The binge-watching was kind of fun, though. “The Good Wife” is a good show. So I retire and then the question is, what do I do? I made a trip to New York fairly quickly. I met with the commissioner of the NFL and the commissioner of the NBA and said, "Hey, I'm interested in sports." I signed up pretty quickly to teach a class in the fall on leadership and value creation at the business school at Stanford.

And I was trying to keep busy. I'm glad I don't have as hectic a pace now, but that seemed to me to be the right thing to do. I was trying to be the best Microsoft shareholder. In a sense I was trying to track Microsoft almost as carefully as I tracked it when I was CEO, but I didn't have all the data. I was busy doing all of that and then come about April, my son called me on a Saturday morning and said, "Dad, this Clipper thing with Donald Sterling — that team's going to be available for sale."

Shontell: Smart son.

Ballmer: I had looked at the Milwaukee Bucks; they didn't want to sell to me. I had asked the commissioner who I should get to know. There was nothing that seemed like it was going to sell. The Sterling thing comes, my son gives me a call, and then that really gave me an outlet for the work.

Two other things got me going in that period of time: My wife said, "OK, it's time, dude. You’ve got to get involved in our philanthropic stuff." I wasn't sure I wanted to do that in retirement. Not that it's unimportant, but she was doing a fantastic job. She said, "No, no." I said, "If we just pay our taxes, we're going to help the old, the poor, the sick," because her focus had been child welfare and opportunity for children and she just growled and — not growled, she's a very nice lady but — "Come on, we can do better than that. You know, the government doesn't necessarily do all of that stuff and our money doesn't necessarily go there."

So I kind of said, "OK, well I'm going to dig into this and really have a conversation,” and what I found is it was very hard to find that data. That's what led to the USA Facts effort. It came from stimulation. Now it turns out what we've learned, my wife and I together, is philanthropy can be helpful, but it mostly is a change agent for government programs. No philanthropy is really going to solve the issues of providing opportunities to kids who are born in unfortunate circumstances. It's just not going to happen.

I also made a trip to DC. I'm not sure what I was thinking but I visited a bunch of politicians and I said I had had this conversation with my wife about, “Just pay your taxes and believe in the government to take care of this.” And these two guys looked at me and said, "You can do a lot better to help people than the government's going to do." And I was kind of taken aback. These are two US senators. Out of that, I dedicated myself to working with my wife on our philanthropic efforts and I understood that the point of the philanthropy is to work in partnership with government.

I had probably been retired about a year and then I said, "This is nuts, I don't have to recreate the pace with which I used to work." And that's where I sort of calmed down, managed my own time. I get up, I walk with my wife, I have a chance to reflect and meditate, work out. I usually don't get any place until about 10 in the morning unless I'm on the road here in New York or doing something like that. Work some, hit some golf balls late in the afternoon, it's cool to be able to control my time and still be involved in fun and productive activities.

How to buy an NBA team and beat out Oprah

Shontell: That's amazing. I'm so glad that you're enjoying yourself. It sounds like the life that all of us hope to eventually have. One of those steps that I wanted to talk about more in depth is the Clippers. It was not easy for you to own the team and, like you said, you met with the commissioners and they were like, "Eh, there's not much available." Then all of a sudden, this Donald Sterling scandal happens where there was this tape of him coming out saying these racist things and he got eventually pushed out and there was this opportunity to buy the Clippers but you were not the only bidder. Oprah was interested and Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle was interested. What did you do to eventually be able to own the team? What were your negotiating tricks? I hear you buttered up Mrs. Sterling quite well. How did that work?

Ballmer: Well, it turned out the most difficult thing was actually figuring out how to get involved in the process. I didn't know Shelly Sterling, nobody was quite sure who was selling the business. I was talking to the commissioner, but things were very vague because, while they had banned Donald, Shelly and Donald hadn't stepped up to agree to sell the business and then she eventually gets involved. There was no obvious banker to talk to, but I knew Michael Eisner from Disney for a number of years and a lightbulb went off.

The Eisners have had season tickets to Clipper games for years, right next to the Sterlings. So Michael Eisner made an introduction for me to Shelly Sterling. He called me on a Saturday morning, 7 o’clock. He says, "Call Shelly Sterling right now at this number, she'll be available for your call." She said, "Well, what's your number?" Then she said, "Ah, it's OK, why don't you come see me?" So I went down, had a meeting with Shelly. I actually brought my brokerage statement, I never ended up showing her but a friend of mine had said, in some businesses, they want to see whether you can really afford the asset. I got through that without actually showing her the brokerage statement.

And then I met with her lawyer again later that evening and the process was really to try to ensure that I bid an appropriate amount of money. What I learned later, the fact that I was a sole bidder was of importance because her lawyers knew she was going to go through a set of legal wrangling with her husband over this, and they wanted a buyer who they could count on to stay with them through the process and they were worried about groups of buyers being tougher to do that with.

So I know there were at least three other bidders, two others who got bids in. There was a local Angeleno, there was a group that did include David Geffen and Oprah, and at least rumored, there was a group from the Mideast. I knew what my walkaway price was. I had actually told her lawyer, I wasn't a great negotiator. I had told them, "This is what I'd like to pay, this is the maximum I'd pay and, oh by the way, you have to understand, I don't want to look stupid in front of my wife for being a guy who dramatically overpays." But I, I laid it out there, I wasn't trying to be some tough, get the last 3%, 5% out of the deal, I just wanted to own the team.

Shontell: Of course.

Ballmer: And that was my negotiating approach. And then I had to hold on for the ride as the Sterlings went through their legal wrangling about whether Donald was competent to participate in the management of their trust.

Shontell: I remember that. And also, at the time, it sounded like you structured it like a venture-capital deal where you had a valuation on the team, and what you were willing to pay. No one had bought a team for $2 billion within the NBA before, but now it seems like you set the bar and other teams would be that valuable at this point.

Ballmer: Yeah, I think the thing people miss is in a business sense you'd say, it's not sort of a fluid market. Assets are limited, figuring out what the price is in that kind of calcified market is hard to do, and particularly in LA. LA and New York are different places. No matter what else is going on, buying land is more expensive in LA, and buying basketball teams is more expensive in LA. The baseball team the Dodgers had sold for about $2.1 billion, but they also had a lot of parking and they owned their stadium, so what was the right price for the basketball team? I knew exactly what the right price was: whatever the other bidders were willing to pay, plus some percentage.

Shontell: Do you have a perspective or an opinion on this conference debate within sports? You own a team that is in the west conference where some of the best teams in the NBA are, and then in the east, you've got LeBron and the Cavs, but not quite the competition that there is in the west.

Mark Cuban has been very vocal about his opinions on it and how he thinks you should just scrap the conference thing altogether, rank the teams, seed them. What's your take?

Ballmer: I think, you know, fans expect to have some notion of you know A versus B. You have it in baseball, you have it in football, you have it in basketball. I think it's fan expectation. There's some energy about that.

The west does happen to be stacked these days versus the east, but at the end of the day, whether you come from the west or the east, presumably the process leads to the best team being crowned champion of the NBA. I'm OK with that. We're in the west, OK, it's tougher, OK, bring it on. We'll do our best.

At the end of the day, it doesn't matter where you are, you've got to beat the most important guys in the NBA in order to get to the championship. I wouldn't change it. I am but one owner with one voice. That will be determined in an appropriate way. As we move forward, the commissioner will lead that process. I'm OK with the way things are today.

Giving back by arming the world with facts

Shontell: I wanted to touch one more time on your philanthropy and your USA Facts and just make sure people understand what that is and what you all are doing, because you're doing a lot of work here in the United States. Some people do their philanthropy outside; a lot of what you've been focused on is here.

Ballmer: Well, USA Facts is an effort to pull together government data in a comprehensible form so that citizens, if they want to, can understand where money comes from in the government, where does it get spent, and what kind of outcomes. And we've taken a very business-like approach. We said, “Let's do this like a 10K.” No projections, very factual, no third-party data. In this case, we've used only government data to report.

We use the Constitution as our organizing framework. Businesses need to have segments. Well, the segments for government in the US are established in the preamble of the Constitution: establish justice and ensure domestic tranquility, promote the general welfare, provide for the common defense, secure these blessings for ourselves and our posterity. And you can put education and health and a number of other things into that framework.

I'm proud of what we've done. USAFacts.org, or you can follow us on Twitter at USAFacts.org or like us on Facebook, you have all of the options. I was delighted with the initial interest, 750,000 visitors across every state in the US, almost every country in the world. If you look at the activity now, it's come down some. We need to continue to push on our end to talk about how important the facts are. We just did a new poll that found people actually care about the facts. They are distressed with the fact that people with different beliefs actually have different facts. Let's get everybody on the same page. I'm excited about it. I guess you call it a philanthropic activity except we don't take any tax deductions for it, so it's just something we go do.

On the flip side, in the rest of our philanthropic activities, we focus exclusively in the United States. We'll support our alma maters and local things in Seattle, but what we focus in is a lot of kids, not all people born into poverty, what's their ability to move up economically? There are some kids born in the US who have very little opportunity to move up by a circumstance of their birth. What other kind of supports can you provide for parents to help those children? What do you do in the school systems? People talk about making the schools better, that's important, but a lot of the reason why it's tough to work in schools is because there's dysfunction elsewhere in the kids' lives. Parents are homeless, very hard to do your homework if you're in a single-family home, if there's no childcare, if you're hungry. Those things wind up being very, very important and so what we try to do is support not-for-profits that work in these areas, we believe deeply that an integrated approach in a community and getting the community to embrace it has great potential.

Advice for the next generation of Fortune 500 CEOs

Shontell: Final question: You've had a long, impressive, awesome career that I think anybody would feel so lucky to have. Looking back on it, if you're giving advice to someone who's just starting theirs out, what's the best advice you can give if someone wants to follow in your footsteps?

Ballmer: A few things. No. 1, find something to do that you're passionate about. If you're not passionate, I can't imagine how anybody can get there. There are two kinds of people. My son will tell me this, "Dad, there are people who live to work and there are people who work to live," and I respect both of those things. But if you're trying to have a career, you're going to have a little bit more live-to-work in you than work-to-live. So passion.

No. 2, evidence that in hard work, evidence that in good thought and good thinking — but be lucky. I know Microsoft's a talented company, we have very talented people. I certainly felt like I worked hard and had some good ideas as did Bill Gates and Paul Allen. But if anybody says there's no luck involved, I don't believe that. There is some luck. There's no, what was it, George Bernard Shaw? "Man and Superman."

No, there are people who are willing to work a little harder, willing to be a little smarter, and still don't have success. And some people do and there's a luck element that distinguishes those. I'd probably highlight those things: hard work, good ideas, and put yourself in a position to get luck, if you will. I think that that's very important.

Shontell: Thank you so much, Steve.

Ballmer: Thank you. Real pleasure to be here — I really enjoyed it.

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podcastification · 7 years

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Podcast Setup For Beginners. Seriously, Anyone Can Do This [Ep #68]

Subscribe to Podcastification | Contact the PFT Team

If you’ve ever wondered how technical and complicated it is to get a podcast setup - I’ve recorded this episode to simply say (and demonstrate) - not very. Seriously.

I think anyone with half a brain and can follow instructions can easily set up their own podcast, begin recording, post it on the internet, get it submitted to the directories and be LIVE within a week. It’s not a promise because it depends on you, but I’m confident it can and does happen. In fact, I’m confident it WILL happen because of this episode. If it does happen for you, I’d love to hear about it.

Your podcast setup doesn’t have to be technically complicated.

I know it’s the tech stuff that intimidates most people when they think about starting their own podcast. But the getting started part is really not as difficult as you imagine. It’s simply the unknown (which often looks bigger than it really is) that is making you feel that way. You can do this. I know you can. I’ve done it three times simply by following tutorials I found on the internet - and here’s the cool thing - I’ve learned how to do it without those tutorials and am able to teach YOU how to do it now. Which is what I’m doing on this episode of Podcastification.

Do you have a message or body of knowledge or form of entertainment you want to get out there?

Why not start a podcast? I want to help you do it - on this episode. And there’s absolutely nothing in it for me - except the satisfaction of knowing that I was able to help you. So start at the beginning, pause, take notes, use the resources listed below, whatever it takes to walk you through this step by step - DO IT. You can have a podcast up and running by the end of the month. Granted, it will be basic - but it will be YOURS. You can do this!

The highlights of this podcast setup episode

[1:37] Why I think I can teach you basic podcast setup for free - and be just as effective.

[2:35] The importance of having something valuable to say - and what that really means.

[4:03] Before you setup your podcast you need to know who it is you are talking to, specifically.

[6:52] Determining the equipment you’re going to use to record.

[11:54] How you can determine topics for your episodes.

[17:58] The most frustrating part of the process is the actual recording.

[22:15] What is a media host and why do you need one?

[27:02] Getting your new podcast submitted to directories like iTunes (Apple Podcasts).

[31:58] If you’re podcasting and nobody hears it, did you really say anything?

[38:21] And finally: how do you record someone else in an interview format?

Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History

Audacity

My microphone - ATR 2005 (also mentioned - ATR2100)

www.AudacityForPodcasting.com (my course)

Gimlet Media

Libsyn

Blubrry

Pinecast

Amazon S3

INSTRUCTIONS for how to get into all the directories

Apple Podcasts (formerly iTunes)

Stitcher Radio

Google Play Podcasts

Podbean

Spreaker Radio

Fiverr

Connect with me…

Carey(AT)PodcastFastTrack.com

On Facebook

On Twitter

Check out this episode!

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mikevrivera · 7 years

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How female founders fare on Shark Tank Australia

International Women’s Day (#IWD) is here again and there will be much discussion on gender pay gap, the lack of women in leadership, and the continued unconscious bias against women in many areas of the work landscape.

What of the gender experience for female founders and business owners?

Many women choose to start their own business for a sense of freedom and to remove themselves from the bias in the workplace.

I know I did — sick of the lack of flexibility in corporate life — wanting to be both a parent and have a full and interesting career, I started my own business when my children were two and four.

My own journey has not been without its challenges … but that is for another time.

I found myself in the fortunate position that I could become involved with the startup community including many initiatives to amplify women founders. I was one of the first to put up my hand and participate in Scale Investors (investing in female founders), Heads Over Heels, a female founders support network, and I’ve contributed to many others from Springboard, EY Winning Women, University of Melbourne Business & Economics Alumni – Women’s program and others.

The reason for listing these out is that there is no shortage of effort — yet sometimes I wonder if anything is really happening. Yes, we need more role models but is there just as much bias when it comes to women founders as their employee counterparts?

I read with interest two articles about Shark Tank US’ bias against women, which led me to ask the question are we just the same here in Australia?

I know when I was asked to do the show I said, “I won’t be a token woman”, and the producers said, “absolutely not — we want balance on the panel too, half of the founders will be women”.

So Janine Allis and I chose to be role models for all entrepreneurs, not just women.

An implicit bias

This is what is being reported about the US show: Mashable – “Shark Tank funds fewer women than men, with less money”.

Like in the real Silicon Valley, the odds are stacked against women who appear on Shark Tank. Far fewer women appear on the reality show, and companies fronted by women receive dramatically lower valuations than their male counterparts.

Companies founded by men received an average valuation of nearly $US1.7 million, while companies founded by women received an average valuation of just over $781,000, according to data compiled by Shark Tank superfan and Rock Health founder and chief executive Halle Tecco.

Bustle: How Does ‘Shark Tank’ Treat Female Entrepreneurs? From Investments To Off-Hand Comments, The Answer Is Complicated

Eighty percent of products presented by women on Shark Tank fall into stereotypically feminine categories, such as home décor, cooking, cleaning, food, fashion, beauty, or products for children that are often related to motherhood.

The products pitched by male entrepreneurs tend to be more diversified, running the gamut from technology to fashion, to fitness, to food and everything in between.

As such, 44% of the products they pitch would fall into categories traditionally regarded as feminine, while approximately 41% would be regarded as stereotypically masculine industries, and nearly 15% are neutral products (is casting responsible for this?).

Even so, being a parent is more closely tied to the identity and the businesses of the female entrepreneurs on Shark Tank, so much so that if they are mums, that’s usually one of the first things we learn about them.

These women have even come to be referred to as “mumpreneurs” by fans and the media. I haven’t seen anyone use the term “dadpreneur” yet.

(Now I have blogged about this before – don’t get me started on the gender language.)

The Australian Shark Tank executive producer is a wonderfully successful female executive producer — there are plenty of women in our production team. The head of programming at Network Ten is a very accomplished senior female and I see many others in the ranks over there.

So how does Australia fair when it comes to gender bias on the show? For the full table head here.

I have reviewed the data of all pitches for the first two seasons, not just the ones that go to air but all 100 pitches, and this is what I found. (For the first season, I did not have the figures on mixed pitches).

There are significantly fewer women appearing on the show (about half that of men). The good news is women are more likely to get invested, however, on average it will be for much less and what they ask for is about 22% of what men ask for.

I believe there are lessons for both genders in the table. The men often put ‘ridiculous’ valuations on their businesses (which can greatly skew the numbers).

My favourite film right now is Hidden Figures, and if you have not seen it, please do.

You will see that the answer to the above is not for women alone. We will continue to do great work. It is a community issue — but it takes someone making a stand and saying ‘this is ridiculous’.

I’m proud of my male co-sharks. I have seen them do deal after deal with female founders in ‘traditionally feminine businesses’ — I can report on that after season three airs.

Not only that, they have consistently and persistently stood up to founders who don’t take Janine or I seriously — or give us the respect that is commensurate with the role we play. As Steve pointed out in his blog post: Don’t call Naomi Simson Darling.

I could explore this topic for a very long time — there is no easy answer. But what I do know is that we are in it together and we need to call it when we see it.

Shark Tank returns to Network Ten later this year.

This article was first published on NaomiSimson.com.

Naomi Simson is the founding director of Australian online tech success story RedBalloon and Redii. She has written more than 1000 blog posts at NaomiSimson.com, is a professional speaker, author of Live What You Love and Ready To Soar, and is one of five “Sharks” on Ten’s business reality show Shark Tank.

Follow StartupSmart on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and iTunes.

The post How female founders fare on Shark Tank Australia appeared first on StartupSmart.

from StartupSmart http://www.startupsmart.com.au/news-analysis/how-female-founders-fare-on-shark-tank-australia/

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dorothydelgadillo · 6 years

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Coordination and Communication Lessons (The IMPACT Show Ep. 45)

In this week's episode of The IMPACT Show, Nick and I talk about our time together at IMPACT HQ, all these live broadcasts we've got going on and how we do it, what's goin in in Elite, and so much more.

We went live at our NEW time this week on Friday at 11:00AM ET. Next week we will actually be live on Friday at 12:45PM ET (yes, different again) so mark your calendars and let us know what you think of the new day and times.

Just in case you missed us live (or if you want to relive the magic), you’ll find the episode’s show notes below as well as the recording.

Enjoy and make sure to share!

Like what you saw? Make sure to subscribe to email reminders and give us a review on iTunes.

Have feedback or questions? We’d love to hear it. Comment on this blog or email us at [email protected]

IMPACT Updates

Reflecting on our time together at HQ

Now that we're back from our team week in the office we took some time to reflect on how it went and what we learned. If you're part of a remote culture, want to be, or want to build one - here's what we thought.

Shout out to Natalie and Carolyn on our team who helped plan activities and meals throughout the week. They made sure these things were on our calendars and we had all the information we needed to make these events fun.

We had a great time but Nick and I also discussed how trying to squeeze this week in created some tension. Trying to balance getting your necessary work done while still having fun is hard. It's also tough to balance the "purpose" of the week between spending time together as a team and strategizing (which sometimes creates more work!) and spending time having fun getting to know each other.

Shout out to Zach Basner and George B Thomas for the amazing video workshop they hosted during our team week!

My key takeaway from our team week was that a week is surprisingly LONG at the end. I think if we shorten it to a couple of days and condense what we're doing we might be a little more productive. The team put a TON of work into preparing for this week, gathering feedback, and making adjustments. And we sure do appreciate that!

"Make adjustments. Go get it energized. That's good advice for life, too" - Ted Mosby

How are we coordinating all of these live broadcasts we have scheduled?

From webinars to scheduled shows to surprise Facebook live broadcasts - we've got a lot going on. While using our content calendar in HubSpot is great, for production management I knew I needed something more to keep myself on track. As I'm scheduling some more live conversations in Elite I needed to be able to glance at what we already had booked and when. I created an event calendar - I just knew it was what I needed so I did it and shared it with the team. It's that moment of knowing you can't wait for someone to do something for you - if you need it done then make it happen.

I was just re-reading Kaitlyn Petro's post on "23 Marketing & Sales Leaders Share the Best They've Ever Gotten" and I read one by Ann Handley. She said:

The best bit of advice I ever got was from my driving instructor (Henry) when I was 16 and learning to drive. He told me "Poke you nose out. No one’s going to invite you.”

This is exactly what I mean. Don't wait for things to come to you - make them happen!

Remote Life: Video Tech Update - Nick and I wanted to share our tech setup since we get a lot of questions about how we do what we're doing live.

Kyle Bento helped me get set up with some great new gear including two Emart table top photography studio LED lights with tripods with Haoge 7" 180mm soft white diffusers. I also have a Logitech HD C920 pro webcam on a Neewer 14 inches mini travel tabletop tripod. Microphone update to come next week!

Nick shares his lighting setup, microphone on an arm, and the fact that he's still sticking to the good old Mac built in web cam!

Lessons from Our Latest Webinar

We got our webinar follow up out via a HubSpot email this week! I think this will make the experience feel more like IMPACT and as we progress we'll be optimizing this more and more. I'm so proud of the team for hustling to get that change made in time. If you got that email let us know what you thought.

Our webinar was with Oli Gardner and he talked about 3d (Data-Driven Design) which was a fantastic presentation.

Our next webinar is on April 12th with Larry Kim who will be talking about hacks to master chatbot marketing! Save your seat today:

HubSpot User Group Updates! (HUGs)

This week we hosted the New Haven and Chicago HUGs on Wednesday and Hartford on Thursday! Marcus Sheridan spoke at the New Haven and Hartford HUG meetups and we did something similar to Website Throwdowns at the Chicago HUG.

What Marketers Be Talkin' 'Bout

Where we go over what you're saying in IMPACT Elite.

IMPACT Elite is a community of now over 2,500 passionate inbounders looking to help other marketers (and sales and customer success people) succeed. We’d love for you to join us!

Go to impactbnd.com/elite or just search the IMPACT Elite Group on Facebook and request to join. Plus, join us LIVE and in person this August at IMPACT Live 2018.

Elite Member Mia Charette posted: "We get a ton of flack from our sales team when a prospect gets an email noted as "irrelevant" to them, but it isn't 100% marketing's fault. For example, someone downloads an ebook intended for personas a,b,c, but they are clearly persona d. they haven't provided us with enough information yet to say they are certainly persona d, so they automatically get enrolled in a workflow for persona a. [...] I swear some people just don't know how to fill out forms. Does anyone else run across this? How do you handle it?"

There's a great discussion happening on this post about sales and marketing alignment, setting expectations with your team, powerful automation and more. Check it out and add your thoughts in Elite. Elite Member Andrea Funk posted in Elite about personalized search results: "We have two cellphones next to each other googling the exact same search word. We get totally different results. On one phone we were first and on the other phone we were third. So how can I ever know what my Google ranking for a particular key word is? Do I only know in aggregate from Google Consel? Is Google showing me something different than someone else based on my what?" Of course there's a ton to unpack here and the Elite members are doing a great job of doing so on the post including Nick Sal's great response. Check it out in Elite.

Elite Member Highlight!

Shout out to both Kaitlyn Casso and Chris Marr who posted videos to Elite this week and took a step outside their comfort zones! Way to lead by example! Also, let's give a warm welcome to our 2,500th Elite member: Emma Sepke!

Shout out to Christine who answered Matt's question during the broadcast. Matt Golueke asked: "Hey guys, are you using BeLive.tv with custom format and/or graphics or a different live broadcast platform?"

Christine replied and said:

Inbound in the Trenches

This is where we talk about what we’re doing and what we’ve learned lately right here in the trenches.

The Sales Corner

Nick talked about how IMPACT is balancing wrapping up the quarter with how to translate legacy sales goals with some newer and more flexible metrics around new revenue streams as well as retention. We know there's value in relationships but we haven't necessarily had that as a goal that's part of how we're measured for success. So Nick is excited about that!

In my work lately we have been working on cleaning up our database. This includes needing mailing address information for Enthusem and other campaigns we're doing, contact data so we can register our leads with HubSpot, implicit information so we can segment properly, job titles to help with our personas, and so much more. I've spoken with 9 or 10 data enrichment solutions this week and have yet to find the perfect one!

Next Steps:

We have a very exciting IMPACT exclusive live conversation with Rob Dube on Tuesday at 11:00AM ET. Rob is the president of imageOne and author of "Do Nothing - The Hardest Leadership Challenge You’ll Ever Take." He is also a mindfulness expert, EOS practitioner, and his company uses HubSpot. We'll also be giving away 3 copies of his book LIVE during the broadcast! Mark your calendars!

Don't forget to save your seat for our webinar with Larry Kim on April 12th!

Next week...Nick will be live from PAXEast! We’ll also talk about our all hands. that will be that morning. We'll be live at 12:45PM ET next week - this cadence will continue for now so let us know what you think!

Most Fridays will be at 11:00AM ET and once a month when we have our all hands calls in the morning we'll bump the show to 12:45PM ET and do a little bit of a monthly recap.

We would love your comments! Feel free to send us an email or comment on the Facebook thread.

If you really liked it, please give us a 5-star review on iTunes and subscribe to updates for the show.

We're going to IMPACT Elite to ask what you want us to talk about, so jump in on the post there.

Join Us Next Week!

We'll be back again next week at another *NEW* date and time: Friday, April 6th at 12:45PM ET. Mark your calendars!

Until next time...we'll see you in Elite! Don't forget to stick your nose out there.

from Web Developers World https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/coordination-and-communication-lessons-impact-show

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dorothydelgadillo · 6 years

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Hit Refresh: Radical Transparency

We’re back with another episode of our podcast Hit Refresh. You can listen on iTunes, Soundcloud, Stitcher, Overcast, our site, or wherever you get your podcasts.

There’s an informal movement among tech companies to practice a new brand of radical transparency where they share everything from their revenue, costs, and even salaries, with everyone inside—and at times outside—the company.

The hope is to give employees more information, and a greater sense of control over themselves and their work. In this episode, we cover how we practice transparency at Skillcrush and speak to tech CEOs Josh Pigford and Bea Arthur to find out what it’s like to bare your (company’s) soul to the world. Bottom line: If you’re looking to change careers, you should demand transparency wherever you land next. You deserve it.

Please let us know what you think of the podcast! We’d LOVE it if you could write us a review on iTunes. We’ll read every single one!

*****

Radical Transparency Transcript

Adda Birnir: I guess I do want to take a moment at this point to talk about cash flow, and you know I spoke to the marketing team about this and I wanted to make sure to extend this to the whole team. There’s been a lot of anxiety and sort of, just like stress, and you know I want to take a moment to talk about the months that were cash flow negative. We’re always looking at like are we trending up or are we trending down, right? And so you know, if we’re starting to trend down, that’s bad and we want to like move it back up. But, in the greater context of the business, it doesn’t mean that the business is in danger. Just to really put any concerns to rest: Obviously I try to be very frugal as a company and really don’t want to overextend ourselves, but we have money in the bank. Even if we made no money, we could run the company for at least a few months. We’re so far from that happening, um it’s not a realistic concern and um, yeah.

Okay. so let’s talk about September, how much money did we make? Echoes.

Does anyone have any questions?

Act 1: The Idea

Instrumental theme music.

Adda: This is Hit Refresh, a podcast for anyone who’s stuck and needs a fresh start. I’m Adda Birnir, a self-taught coder, educator, and CEO & Founder of Skillcrush—an interactive learning community that teaches total beginners the tech skills they need to get into better, higher paying careers with real mobility.

Twice a month, we talk about what it look likes to work in tech and why I think that learning tech skills is the single best career decision any forward-thinking professional can make.

But when I say working in tech, I’m not talking about moving to Silicon Valley, or getting a computer science degree, or magically transforming into a young white guy wearing a hoodie and coding all night. Because at Skillcrush, we know that tech is for EVERYONE.

* * * * *

This week we’re talking about transparency. There is an informal movement among tech companies to practice a new brand of radical transparency where they share everything from their revenue to costs and even salaries, with everyone inside—and at times outside—the company.

How transparency is practiced varies wildly from company to company, but the hope is to give employees, more information, and thus, more sense of control over themselves and their work.

Chances are you’ve experienced the opposite of this.

I know that before founding Skillcrush I worked for a number of companies where I never knew the whether the company was sinking or sailing. In fact, the closest I came to experiencing so-called “transparency” was an open office structure that allowed me to see the CEO at his desk with a worried look on his face, a look that I saw get worse and worse in the weeks preceding a round of layoffs. And when I got laid off, the only warning was a particularly long management meeting the day before.

Almost everyone I know has a story like this.

In this episode we’re going to talk about exactly what transparency looks like at Skillcrush, and at some of our favorite tech companies, and what it can mean for you as you consider a career in tech. So in the spirit of transparency, let me lay out for you what transparency means to us. In practice, transparency means that every team member has complete access to all of our topline revenue and cost numbers. It means that weekly team reviews—where we go over how each team performed that week—are open to anyone, from any team, if they’re interested. It means that our company goals and roadmaps are available for anyone to look at at anytime. And in most instances, we ask all members of the team to participate in the creation of those goals. And it means that our salaries aren’t a mystery to anyone in the company—even mine.

So why should you care? I’ll tell you! You should care because of what transparency can give you: the feeling of being respected, valued, and the knowledge that your job is safe. Information combats anxiety, and if you’ve ever had anxiety about where you stand at a company, transparency is the answer. Transparency goes hand in hand with including more people in the decision making process, and holding higher ups accountable. Transparency means a seat at the table.

* * * * *

The most radical way we practice transparency has do has to do with salaries. Now, there are companies where you can actually look up every person’s salary, like the social media platform Buffer. They have written extensively about their salary formula and publish a table with every single person’s salary on their website. This is not how we do things at Skillcrush—we don’t make individual people’s salaries known to the public. That’s something that we as a team would have to vote on and all of us would have to agree to it. Instead, we simply have a formula and a set of salary tiers that we’ll cover in more detail in a bit, that in most cases, allows employees to guess each other’s salaries within $5-$10 thousand dollars.

We weren’t always like this: We used to do the traditional method that, even at the time, often felt completely arbitrary. And over the past few years, as my staff grew I became increasingly uncomfortable with how salaries were getting set. As we made more money I found that I was paying new staff higher salaries simply because I had the money to give them, not because they had particularly better qualifications. It was as simple as if you asked me for $70,000 in 2015 I probably agreed to pay you that. But if you had the misfortune of asking for $70,000 in 2014, you were probably stuck down in the $60,000 range.Honestly, it makes me feel terrible to even think about it. And for a while, I lived in fear of my staff talking to one another about their salaries and discovering the ridiculous disparity. I was also rewarding people for being tough negotiators whether or not being a good negotiator had any impact on their job.

Alright, so now it’s time for real talk. Here’s the deal with negotiating: First of all, no one has an objective “worth.” Your worth is based on context and depends wholly on the revenue and profitability of the company and what your contribution to the bottom line is. And pay inequity is everywhere, meaning that people doing the same or similar jobs are not being paid the same amount. This is for a number of reasons—gender, time of hire, negotiating skills—you name it. But they all pretty much fall under the category of unfair bias.

When it came time, I was always negotiating one on one with each staff member, creating a dynamic where I was the miser refusing to open the purse strings. This all came to a head about a year ago when I had two particularly difficult experiences negotiating. In both situations, they wanted way more money than I could fairly give them, but they didn’t see it like that, and they both left the company. And after that I was like screw this this, Skillcrush needs a transparent way to handle salaries and I want everyone to be in on it, including future employees.

After the break, my Director of Operations Caro Griffin will be explaining in detail how our salary tiers work, and what it means for our employees or employees at other tech companies with similar models. And to be transparent, I think it’s pretty damn good…

Scott Morris: When you’re juggling a busy life on top of a 9-to-5, how do you make a career change fast? Skillcrush teaches you everything you need to launch an exciting, creative career in web design or web development. We’ll show you the secret to making money WHILE you learn tech skills, all in just about an hour a day. Today is all about radical transparency—and we want you to get a chance at the security and respect that comes with being kept in the loop. We’re giving away our free ebook, the Beginner’s Guide to Landing a Junior Development Job. Just head over to skillcrush.com/juniordev (all one word) to download your copy. That’s skillcrush.com/juniordev.

Act 2: This Is How We Do It

Adda: Our solution was one that didn’t have a lot of models at the time—salary tiers that not only put everyone on equal footing, but also make it possible for everyone to basically know how much we all make (including me). In the public sector, salary tables are the norm, but in the world of small tech startups when we were first trying to find a solution…not so much. Our producer Haele Wolfe has the story.

Haele Wolfe: So, when I asked our Direction of Operations Caro Griffin for the intel behind Skillcrush’s salary tiers, why we use them, how she feels about them, she got right to the point…

Caro Griffin: This is just the way we do things.

Haele: . . .but was clear that that it didn’t happen overnight.

Caro: The way that we handle negotiations, salaries and wages kinda happened in…evolved over time in a couple parts.

Haele: Like Adda mentioned earlier, company leadership realized that some people had been hired years prior, and that they were underpaid. At the same time, the company was growing, and they wanted to bring in new people at market rate. And, they wanted to do in a way that didn’t involve bias, which we see as being a huge issue in the workforce as a whole. Remember Ellen Pao from our last episode? She brought up this crucial point:

Ellen Pao: If you look at women, like the reason that they’re uncomfortable negotiating is because they get penalized for negotiating. So of course they don’t negotiate.

Haele: So, for all the reasons Adda and Ellen have outlined, Skillcrush wanted to minimize negotiation and make it a fairer process in general.

Caro: Negotiation is hard. It’s stressful for so many people because no one teaches you how to do that unless you go seek out how to do that and it’s like stressful and like there’s so many things tied to it you know it’s your livelihood and especially if you’re excited about the job and you don’t want to ruin it and everybody handles it differently. Yeah it’s an unnecessary anxiety and you’re rewarding skills that you don’t need for the job so why should we reward for that skill unless we were hiring for it.

Haele: This also became a conversation around our company values, and the kind of environment Skillcrush should foster.

Caro: I think just also from a moral standpoint I don’t agree with negotiation like this? We feel like people shouldn’t have to negotiate like we should just give them what we can give them and they can decide if that’s right for them.

Haele: So, Caro did some digging and saw that there weren’t tons of examples out there…until….

Caro: I read this great article by Molly Graham about salary tiers and this kind of model for like establishing up front what your role should pay and then how to go about hiring people at those rates and communicating to them that you don’t negotiate. I love like everything she has written. I’m like…all of it has radically changed my thinking about some things, including salary tiers!

Haele: To give some context, Molly is a Silicon Valley executive, and current VP of Operations at the Chan-Zuckerberg Foundation, where she works on strategic plans and operations to help other execs hired to lead programs in education, science, policy, and engineering. We’ll link to her article Caro is referring to in our show notes.

Caro: It sounded very straightforward and very fair and very in line with our values as a company. And also from a practical standpoint it seemed like something that would save us a lot of time and energy and like strife. I was like, “I don’t know if I should share numbers when I talk about this,” but I think it would be great to share our salary tiers.

Haele: This was the basic premise of what the whole management team implemented: If you are a full time employee at our company, you start at a baseline of $55,000 per year. Then, we have specific levers that add on that increase salaries by 5-10 thousand per lever, including factors like how many people you manage, how many skills you bring to the company, or how long you’ve worked at Skillcrush. The idea is that this tries to remove subjectivity, but as we’ll cover in a bit, there’s only so much we can limit. It also means some intense transparency among our staff—everyone can likely figure out exactly how much their coworker makes using these levers. To change over to this plan, we needed a transition.

Caro: We released these tiers and realized that a significant amount of our employees were being underpaid and I’m comfortable sharing that I was one of the ones that was the most off based on the tiers, so I kind of got to see first hand how that worked both as someone who put that together and as someone who was financially affected by it.

Haele: As Adda pointed out to me, this was a kind of heroic effort on Caro’s part to negotiate up on behalf of everyone on the team, who were, in general, underpaid.

Caro: We basically made a list of everyone and how much they were off from their current rate to what the tier said they should be at. And then we looked at the differences and the people who were the most off got paid. So like the person who was the most off got paid enough to get them to the same difference that the next person that was off. So like if one person was 10 grand off and the next person was eight grand off then the first person got a two grand raise and they were both eight grand off and then they both got raises until, you know. And so it was like incremental in that way. And we dedicated a certain percentage of our profits every month to raising those people up until we all got up to where we needed to be. So, it was kind of fun. I got raise every month for like several months and Adda was like, “Don’t get used to this!! Here’s your raise again!” It was like, via Hipchat, “You’re up again! You’re up again! Haele: You’re like, “Great, thanks, love you, bye!” Caro: Yeah, “K, thanks, Love you, bye!” Like, that’s such a Skillcrush kind of thing!

Haele: The salary tiers also give us an idea of what’s to come, which is typically not available in most companies. You sort of wait and hope for a cost-of-living raise, and maybe ask for promotions?

Caro: As an industry like a lot of people say they like “but there’s a lot of opportunity for job growth!” Like as an excuse sometimes and it’s like no you can look at our tiers and if you move into a manager position you can expect to make X more and if you stay with the company a year you’re going to get an X bump for longevity. Like it’s pretty you know it’s a decent road map of how you can grow with the company and what you’re compensation would look like.

Haele: The system also helps to even out the discrepancies that can occur between roles at a company. This is a particularly rampant problem in tech—and something I can speak to personally. At a major tech company, I’d get paid half of what junior developers make. Instead…

Caro: I think one of the things that I’m most proud of with the salary tiers is that it reduces …it dramatically reduces the gap between technical and non technical talent. And it’s something that I see a lot of startups do. I will not name names, but I was recently looking at an Angel List profile for a company that was going to pay a junior front-end developer like $90k and they were going to pay their Operations manager 35. Um… and this is a New York based company and I was like, How do … Haele: I was going to say hopefully they’re not living in a city! Caro: No it was a New York based.. New York City. And I was like how can you pay anyone $35k in New York City much less a manager and then expect the junior engineer to make three times as much. And it was just very like, I’m sure there are non-technical people making fair wages there and good wages, but that tells me right there that I don’t have a real seat at the table as a non-technical person. And so I think like, that’s something I really appreciate about ours, is that I do think it’s like we value everyone’s roles and everyone’s contribution to the company and I think our salary tiers speak to that.

Haele: So this is an attempt at making professional life a little easier, a less stressful. But, like I said, it’s not a perfect formula. According to Caro, we still have to refine our skill tiers to make it less subjective, better define middle management, and make adjustments around international employees. We need to address the difference between supervising work and being a manager—one gets you more money and one doesn’t—and we need to add some new levels to our org chart to accommodate our growing company. And new levels mean new tiers, new levers to pull, and new considerations. I’m looking forward to the all-hands meeting where we decide on what that looks like, together.

Act 3: What Does This Mean for You and Me?

Adda: So, what are other companies doing with transparency? Is there such a thing as too much transparency? And most importantly, what does it mean for the people working at those companies? I spoke to two fellow entrepreneurs who both practice their own brand of radical transparency.

Bea Arthur: Yes! My name is Bea Arthur and I am a licensed mental health counselor and three-time startup founder. Currently my latest project is The Difference which is a machine learning mental health startup. Josh Pigford: OK, cool, so. I’m Josh Pigford, founder of BareMetrics, we do revenue analytics, amongst other things. We help businesses grow is really sort of our focus.

Adda: I wanted to talk to Josh and Bea because each of their types of transparency is a little different than how we do things at Skillcrush. They both are very open about their companies externally. In Josh’s case, that means that you can literally see Baremetric’s real time revenue on his company’s site, and in the case of Bea, it was about writing extensively about her company’s closure. I wanted to know what inspired them to share these stories and numbers with everyone, and how it has impacted them, their companies, and their staff.

Adda: Yeah I mean I guess that’s my big question for you, is like why do you do it? Like I’ve read blog posts of yours that are very like, vulnerable and they expose a lot. Like what it is that…like why do you put yourself out there like that? Josh: So writing for me is like start up therapy. So like, it’s most of the writing is not coming from a place of me like an authoritative,like “Hey here’s what you should do.” I don’t know what I’m doing, so I’m writing it so I can figure it out. Bea: Yeah it’s so funny, people are always like, you’re so brave, you’re so brave. I’m just, I was really going through it. And, the best thing that happened, the best best thing that happened when the company closed was the so many people reached out to me, people that I didn’t even, people that were more acquaintances or people that I never met in person, and were like, this happened to me, I know what it’s like, it’s gonna be okay.

Adda: But there is risk involved in this from CEO point of view—and one that has an impact on my employees future security.

Josh: Like, if we were today to broach the subject of making all our stuff public and it had not been, I don’t know that I would choose to do that. Um, at this point, because it’s super risky.

Adda: At the top, you heard me announce our monthly numbers to our team….but you’ll notice that you didn’t hear me announce the actual number. As you might imagine, given that this whole podcast episode is about transparency, we had A LOT of internal discussion about whether or not to include the recording of the actual numbers. In this clip, you will hear me debating this question with Director of Operations Caro Griffin, Director of Curriculum Chelsea Jennings, and Director of Marketing Hilary Fetter.

Adda: So I should’ve like thought about this a little bit more ahead of time, but basically we’re doing this episode about transparency and I guess (sighs) the big question is how…cause I know we’re transparent internally, but I guess the big question is like how transparent should we be externally? Hilary Fetter: How does it hurt us? Adda: The question I’m trying to ask is I’m trying to ask is why would we do it? It’s a general practice of transparency like “Okay, we’re going to put it all on the table” because I think there is something very strange about we are transparent but we hold this one piece of incredibly crucial information back. You know what I mean? Chelsea Jennings: Yeah, I was going to say, I agree, I think it aligns with our company values that we’re practicing internally but why not do it in a more outward facing way that’s still in alignment with who we are and what we do and who we represent. Caro: Salary tiers in particular I’m all for sharing, because I think we wouldn’t have salary tiers if someone else hadn’t shared their salary tiers. And I guess from a revenue standpoint I’m a little bit more like, “Whatever!” I guess move would probably be yes but I don’t have strong feelings necessarily either way. Hilary: Um, cause I was struggling with like okay in terms of my question of what detriments would it have is if we were going down the path of like thinking about some sort of acquisition, is it bad that we had laid all of this on the table early. It would be a part of any due diligence conversation that is had, but I don’t know if it would turn people away or bring them in like “Holy shit they’re really profitable” because it’s right on the edge. Chelsea: It could be like yeah, “Hey that’s impressive!” or “Oh my god, they’ve been around for how long and that’s all they’re bringing in?”

Adda: So we went back and forth, trying to figure out what the line is between practicing radical transparency across the board but also protecting our company’s future, and our company’s employees, and eventually decided….

Adda: Okay so I guess I…my inclination is not to share revenue. But yeah I guess the bottom line is that I’m worrying about unintended consequences that I’m not aware of basically that’s my fear. And it feels like it’s one thing—I do readily tell people in person all of the time and I will continue to do that, but there’s something about putting it in a podcast forever and ever and that seems really scary.

Adda: Of course, two days after this conversation, I remembered that I’d actually shared our revenue numbers on a different podcast! So if you really wanna know, go check out Whitney Johnson’s awesome podcast Disrupt Yourself. BUT—telling you numbers or not, internal transparency is still key to our company. Everyone from our most senior managers to part time employees has access to our revenue and are actively informed of our numbers each month.

SO, what does this mean for tech employees? This is all well and great for CEOS, but also, who cares about CEOs? Here’s Josh again.

Josh: Um, I mean, to some extent I feel like the employees we have are, in part, because of the transparency. They also know what they’re getting into like up front, there’s not this thing of, I don’t know anything about Bare Metrics. Well like, it’s all out there. It’s like, understanding how people work, and the transparency thing is like a very sensitive knob to adjust when it comes to people on your team. You know when you have a low month or a slow month the team, like, that affects them. You know? Adda: Right. Yeah. I mean, sure, certainly. Right, I mean, you’re talking about the psychology—I mean, I will say that I have this issue with my team. Like, there was a month where we were cash-flow negative just a few months ago, and it was the first time we had been cash-flow negative in awhile, and I had a bunch of people worried about their jobs, and I was like, it was funny for me, because a lot of those people had been around a year ago when it was cash-flow negative like month after month after month, and I was kind of like, “Guys! You guys have such short term memories! Do you remember when we lost so much money, so many months in a row? And you’re still here! You know what I mean? I didn’t let you go!” But that was an interesting—you know what I mean, it was a reminder that I really have to like, put everything in context, because like, it’s obviously like, does that conversation trickle down?

Adda: Another problem we encountered when putting this episode together is how to show the view from the other side of the table—from what would be your side. Lauren Lang is a member of our sales team, and was in the meeting where I explained that everyone’s jobs were safe. She spoke to our producer Julia—because hey, how transparent could she really be, having to talk to me, the big boss?

Lauren Lang: I would totally be comfortable with Adda hearing any of this. We had some lackluster sales numbers last month, and morale was down. We were feeling kind of bummed, and on top of that, we felt kind of unsure of what we’d done right, what we’d done wrong, and didn’t really have a sense of like, how serious it was. So, were we in trouble? Was the company going to have to start laying people off? And, in our daily sales department meeting, which Adda, our CEO, always attends, she sensed our tension and she pulled up the latest P&L spreadsheet right then and there, and walked us through it to show us that, as a business, we were totally solvent, and okay. And that was just such a relief. It was more important to her that we felt united as a team and felt like we were gonna be okay.

Julia: Look, we’re not just trying to get in with the boss. Like we said, our salaries come from a formula—it’s not like she can deny me my yearly raise, it happens automatically. But what we are getting at is that for people like us who work in an industry leading the way in transparency, it’s everything.

Lauren: So, to me, professional transparency is the idea that people do better work when they’re fully invested. And they can’t be fully invested unless they know what’s going on. So being transparent means sharing information that requires a certain amount of trust and good faith in your employees, but also demonstrates respect for their intelligence and commitment to the company.

Adda: I’m happy to hear what Lauren said! And, yeah, Julia’s not getting a raise for that segment. So, transparency is about giving employees tools and abilities to decide for themselves, and to hold bosses accountable to do right by their employees. Transparency is a growing movement in tech companies, especially among smaller startups.

And there’s a lot of reasons for this trend, but I think one major factor is that techie types are all about data, and transparency is about giving information to the people who need it most: the people on the ground making the decisions.

My own motivation for being transparent is moral—yes, but also largely pragmatic: I need to delegate, and how could I possibly delegate while withholding information my employees need to do their jobs? And how could they do their jobs well if they felt like they were standing on quicksand?

Plus, telling the truth is sanitizing. Being transparent holds me accountable to my employees in my decision making. Sunlight really is the greatest antiseptic.

So yes, we’re transparent about material things like goals, and revenue, and salary tiers, but we also try to practice honesty in all aspects of the business. Everyday. Even when it hurts. And I think for you as someone who might be interviewing or researching potential new employers, this is what you should expect and demand.

You deserve the respect and security of knowing what’s actually going on. You deserve control. You deserve a seat at the table and you deserve to have all the same information everyone else has.

And you should be able to hold higher ups accountable to their decisions.

To quote the GREAT Barbra Streisand: Truth is everything. I love the truth!

Haele: We’re produced by me—Haele Wolfe—and Julia Sonenshein. We’re edited and our music is composed by Arlen Ginsburg. Our art is by Monalisa Kabos. Kelli Smith and Scott Morris read our ads. Huge thanks to Bea Arthur and Josh Pigford for their critical insight, and for leading the way with transparency.

Shoutout to our whole crew at Skillcrush—especially to Lauren and Caro for talking with us, and to the leadership team who let us crash their meeting. We love you.

You can find us on itunes, Soundcloud, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and PLEASE leave us a review. We read every single one. We also want to let you know that we make so much more content that can help you move forward in your career—whether you’re a total tech newbie or navigating your new skills on the job market. Come hang out with us at skillcrush.com/blog for articles, worksheets, guides, and even comics. Our newsletter is awesome, so be sure to sign up. See you in two weeks.

Kelli: Thinking about a career in tech but not sure where to start? With The Break Into Tech Career Blueprint, you’ll work with a career counselor to design a custom learning program to prepare you for an amazing and rewarding career—whether that’s launching your own freelance business, working full-time for a busy tech company, or buzzing in from the beach as a digital nomad. Visit skillcrush.com today to chat with a career counselor and see why learning tech with Skillcrush is the answer for your next career move. We’re giving away our free ebook, the Beginner’s Guide to Landing a Junior Development Job. Just head over to skillcrush.com/juniordev (all one word) to download your copy. That’s skillcrush.com/juniordev.

from Web Developers World https://skillcrush.com/2017/11/29/hit-refresh-podcast-radical-transparency-transcript/

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