Transcripts For CSPAN2 Key Capitol Hill Hearings 20240622

Which is a country that is working currently. And so, one of the major issues for about the process has been the cndfde ruling party created the wing for its Political Party to sort of act as sort of its a very militarized wing of the Political Party and they act as goons essentially. Based on they strongarmed people into behaving in a way that the party wants them to behave. They dressed as policemen and basically initiate violent confrontation with the protesters in an effort to have everything spiral out of control. So that is somewhat of an extreme example although with a lot of the rebel movements that are very active in eastern congo and in the Great Lakes Region there are other forms that are equally extreme. Where i think that becomes attractive to the youth to join is again we are talking about those that dont have much in the way of opportunities otherwise and we are also talking about political systems in which resources are very concentrated in the political system thats not a very diverse economy in the most immediate way to get access to resources on the meaningful scale is through political activity and four the more disenfranchised youth the only way to do that is to sort of have the militants engagements. What does that mean for the future for people that are a part of this movement to come back and serve in Public Office in an ethical or a non corrupt way. I suppose that really depends on what unfolds after this conflict. But i think one of the major challenges and transitions is how do you bring these actors where this is something jessica can speak to the line between the victim and perpetrator is the word because these people can be seen as both. How do you bring those people back once the stability has returned and the goal is to move forward from that kind of situation. I will make two quick comments. Sounds similar to bangladesh where the universities are very much run by folks from adults, grownups who are part of the party rather than having their own platforms and associations and so there is a lack of control. Now ive lost my second point. I will come back to it when i remembered. Do you want to add anything about the coming back . This is a huge issue and it relates to the escalation of conflict to the topic of the radicalization and how you attempt to bring those that have been fighting back into a more democratic process and this is something isis is struggling with in many of the countries that we are working in in the reintegration of young men and boys. Its an enormous challenge. From the gender perspective we are very concerned about how to address the issue of whats more exciting, running around with your boys with an ak47 or sitting around town Hall Meetings and having conversations about politics. Its not so easy to make that transition and shift in a society thats been unstable and unsafe for so long and so that is a key piece that we are concerned about. This has come back to me. We cant treat them as a monolith. People are individuals. They come to this for their own reasons some of which are very different. I just want to recount in anecdote ive been following. Ive been following very closely the protests over the Garbage Disposal issues there and recounted by somebody that i follow. They are perpetrating violence and the majority turned against them and was trying to get them to be arrested were to have the forces take them out. They are engaged with them and Start Talking about some of the issues and along the course of the day they became their biggest allies in preventing them from becoming violent so there is the sense that engagement of young people on the personal level can make an enormous difference. We talked about some of the challenges, some of the trends. I would like to ask if we could come to some of our programmatic examples. The programs are designed to address the challenges and it would be nice to hear a little bit about what we are doing. If we think about some of the things we can do to address the challenges, one of the first things i would say is that we do need to focus on building the civic awareness and a civic mindedness especially among the youth and maybe even targeting a younger audience than we typically target. Not only voting age but a slightly younger grade school or secondary school level. This is something that we are hoping to be doing in tunisia we are going to be working with the ministry of education which we need to work with the authorities to introduce Civic Education in the School System itself. We hope to be working with them to introduce the ideas of voting. We will be doing the voting simulations and introducing ideas of the Civic Responsibility and that the concept related to democracy etc. Its extremely important to introduce this at a young age primarily because when people grow up with a concept of democracy, they have the different expectations. I think right now in the middle east and north africa people are still trying to figure out what democracy means as it has an impact. Where people that are in democracy have Higher Expectations and work within the system. Some of them are saying that they were not trying to topple democracy. They were trying to work with them and they had expectations of what democracy should offer them. So to bring people up with these concepts early on would have higher dividends and a higher impact on the system. I also think that in our programs we do support the groups and try to empower individuals as well as the Civil Society organizations into some examples i can give in the work that weve done with the youth group that we hoped over the twoyear period build the capacity and skills to monitor Campaign Finance and advocate on issues of importance around campaignfinance and also in libya we worked on the program that not only helped the young women to understand the concepts related to democracy and civic awareness but also helps to give them skills and allow them to be in the public sphere. They gained some skills and capacity to be able to take what they learned and use it in the internships to god and many of them went on to take the positions in places like the prime ministers office. We hired one of the Staff Members and we had some that he joined the staff in the commission so giving them actual hard skills they can translate into the work is important. Finally i want to mention one of the things i says does is mainstream youth activities throughout its program. This is the way that we can most sustainably introduce the programming into the project. Its the citizenry and the countries that we do need to think about and when we are designing things like Voter Registration projects. But also making sure that the government is able to take the youth concerns in a constructive way to facilitate consultations in a dialogue. I think a lot feel their voices are still not heard. They are still not being consulted. They do not have decisionmaking powers and one of the things i says can do is facilitate some of these consultations and dialogue. This is the kind of thing that we are hoping to view with those democracy for him in the future where we will be connecting the groups with the government and Opposition Council as well for increased conversation. Thank you. You illustrated classic problem of the tension between wanting to effect change from outside the system versus engaging in the institution. And young people sometimes have a difficulty navigating that transition and they are passionate about the issue but passionate about not wanting to engage in what is seen as a corrupt or ineffective body. So the programs that can help build the links tend to be sustainable and effective. I think in some sense all of the work isis does which is aimed at building a strong and sustainable Democratic Institution that delivers on, delivers what they are supposed to deliver within sort of the economy and society i think is one of the key aspects of promoting engagement in general. I think its almost meaningless to talk about engagement if there isnt some sort of a working government with which to engage if there isnt a link between the eventual resolve that comes from it. So in that all of the work has an engagement complement and hopefully one of the end results. With that said, we do specifically work with the youth in the programming and in africa we do have one great example of is just starting in a very sort of a focused project. Basically it is in kenya and we are doing a youth survey. Basically i think the idea is that it was going to address the sort of low rate of registration among the youth so its going to start with a survey to get an understanding of why they are in such low numbers and from there there will be a Civic Education campaign thats going to be designed to get more of the youth to register. Then along with that there is also going to be working with the minister of education and the institute of the Curriculum Development and the commission to develop a secondary school curriculum, basically the civics curriculum which is kind of rare in Africa School curriculum thats focused on civics and how to engage appropriately with government institutions. But until now our engagement of youth in africa has been more mainstream into programs and into the Voter Education because thats something that we do a lot of an africa. Theres a huge need to spread information about how to vote and why to vote and why as a democratic system is sort of ideal system for africa. So the way we do that for the most part theres actually a couple of ways. One of them is to work directly with the youth organizations in the delivery of the civic and Voter Education so we are tapping into the networks and systems that already exist to reach out to you. The other is to make sure that the civic and Voter Education is happening where they youth are so that when we do that facetoface Voter Education we make sure that the partners are going to schools to do it. Anyway they might sort of gather finally as developing the messaging and the media that sort of appeal directly so thinking of the radio shows that appeal to you or comic books or song contests that are a get out the vote party on the street kind of thing. Is that upholding the right as a citizen to cast a ballot. For electoral dividends were done as it was getting close and it was done in tandem with more substantive civic and Voter Education. I think the goal and they were quite appreciated and quite visible. The goal was more in the drc and the day of the elections could be pretty tense and there was the fear that there might be incidents of violence, so it was to create that atmosphere were to promote that atmosphere right before the elections just to help get out the vote. So, i wanted to make one quick comment about the nature of the violent extremism in the Different Countries and i think that its worth noting some of it is domestic into some of it is international so in the form of radicalization there is a number of activities that are similar across the regions with some i wanted to highlight so the training that we were going in the countries where the violence is localized where its domestic and in those areas we have a Training Program that people against violence and weve been successful bringing in the Younger Party members to train the young local leaders members of Civil Society organizations who come to the training to learn ways they can be involved that dont include violence. So understanding how violence affects the electoral process and understanding the type of process but it can become involved in that dont use violence and how to lead a peaceful rallies. We also build other types of skills beyond this reconciliation including the debate in and the advocacy skills, so filling the gap of skill building. In afghanistan for example we have a debate and then go on to debate internationally. In some of the places we teach islamic democracy in its an opportunity to explore ones faith and relationship to the Democratic Values and in all these cases is to equip people to talk about the things on their mind in the idea they already have but to provide the vocabulary and the resources to articulate this to other audiences. Another area we are involved in is the civic Leadership Camp and this is something we do in most of the countries we work in with the philippines and they are for people to come and have that sort of intensive Civic Education experience and then go on and actually do things in their own communities. It can be anything of interest so that might be waste disposal, it might be clean water initiatives, it could be this having discussions about the levels of violence in society bringing together the groups but things dont often come together to have these discussions. And maybe i will leave it there and answer some of them in the next question. Just a quick followup. The issues the students are addressing are the projects of the students design or are they barrel designed by the students and thats the key. Its awkward to set up here and talk about this when youre not a young person that but we work with local organizations and it comes from the students. They purchase a paid into there is no point. It goes down to sort of exploiting or manipulating the youth to support other issues that are not coming from themselves. There are things we would like to touch on in the audience questions. The interesting points in the comment i would like to go back to those and see if we can delve into them a little bit more. You talked about some of the barriers and i would like to follow up now and ask you what solutions are available. Before i do that i want to take a pause and acknowledge that today is wednesday and on the hill this is an important day. They wear red on wednesday so i tried to find some read this morning in my closet. I want to speak to went to speak to this issue for a few minutes i think its a great thing they are going to continue to wear red on wednesday because this is an issue thats happening around the world constantly that they are going to school and their parents assume theyre going to learn and that they dont come home. Im not an expert in nigeria that i did live in northern uganda for a long time and a similar incident happened in 1996. Similarly there was a mounting support for not the global scales but maybe if twitter existed it would have helped and in fact i was in uganda when the last girl was returned and it wasnt in the same year it was in 2009 so quite some time afterwards. So dont give up on that campaign and lets not forget about those girls and other boys and girls that thought they were leaving for school in the morning and are now in captivity for armed violence. Apologies for that advertisement, but i think its an important one to acknowledge. Isis prioritizes inclusion as part of the democracy and governance work. We understand that not everybody can participate in the same way whether thats when in, then, persons with disabilities, the lg dt communities. We are looking for ways to reduce the barrier and find a pathway to participation. So far the work with our young women and girls it was mentioned the womens leadership project that we have and we are doing this work around the world and i just want to say that isis does have similar projects and teams that we address but they are tailored to the unique experience of the girls and women involved in those particular countries. In libya most of the women are educated. They go to school and some have advanced degrees but then they go home. After the spring many are outside of the home for the first time participating in the resolution. Then after the resolution they went back behind the walls again of their homes and so this leadership project targets those young women and included in the internship to say to help support and that doesnt mean you just go home but i also want to mention the fumble and how we are learning in this experience. We do recognize and support the fact that for young people we need to create an enabling and supportive environment that involves family members. But we did not anticipate that as we held a training there would be so many husbands and brothers shoving up for the leadership training so this is something that the programs have quickly found that come to support their young girls living outside their homes. Isis is learning from a different context this is a critical piece. We must support them and in fact in our iteration beyond the initial training we are including the men that are supportive of the women to participate in the trainings and we are sort of not just accidentally providing meals but convening them to say what is it that is important about leadership a quality and why are we all gathered here today. Then in burma there were many involved in the womens leadership training that they were very focused on the Community Peace building. That is the thing they wanted to get from the leadership skills. So the program was more tailored to that. I think matt talked about the Voter Education and this is important. We we surveyed data from around the world that says women consistently lack the information about how to register to vote and how to participate as candidates etc. So the campaigns aimed at young women and girls is critically important to inspire interest. Theres there is a Great Organization called running start but focuses on providing a pathway for young women to politics and one is that the tenure is important to the Political Leadership so the longer that you are in power that higher up you go and women tend to start later in life after theyve had families, etc. So that means they are junior when they come into an elected position so this is to inspire them to start earlier and to continue. And at the critical piece is we need women and girls participating in political and electoral processes between also need them to leave those processes. I come to the youth where it is a sort of general inclusion perspective and so all of the programs ive been involved in served both girls and boys. Its refreshing and needed to have a discussion about the particular Education Needs and support needs. Thank you for those comments. There is one other thing i would like to explore before we move into the qanda period. We are shifting gears a little bit but i feel like in the context of this discussion its something that needs to be raised. Often the Information Communication Technology social media are discussed in the same breath. Much has been made in the role of social media and recruiting the young people to the extremist movements and so forth and i would like to ask the panelists whether the technology and social media have a role in engaging to do the exact opposite and if you could maybe share your thoughts about that and perhaps give an example if it exists. They had a big part to play. We saw with the social media and interactive for the revolution in 2011. One is to upload them to talk and to talk about the experience as it happens on the ground. But we also see the internet being used as a tool by the organizations that are highly skilled at using such tools for the recruitment and they target people by creating games and providing content in different languages like arabic and farsi and there are games that simulate defeating your enemy going on war missions. So the opposite. This is a tool that can be used to reach the women that cannot leave their homes. They can do it in their house in the computer with their smartphone. This is one of the ways that you speak with each other. The bond with each other to create the social identity online. Just as the internet can be used for that i need to be thinking about how we can use it to further the Civic Engagement and Political Engagement to counter this kind of content as well. It can be a platform for the positive engagement. So, while discussing Civic Engagement might not be as interesting as the propaganda thats out there we certainly need to be thinking about how we can incorporate them to create the venues where you can bond with each other and share ideas and have discussions in the platforms where they can find entertainment which perhaps advances the idea of the Civic Engagement perhaps through media celebrities, videos, music games. And indonesia we are working to create a game that would teach young people about democracy but also to remind them about things like registering to vote and how they would register to vote. Theres been a campaign to get young women and others to register to vote and this can be done much easily if they can do it online and it can also be used to engage people to make sure they are out there and voting. We can use the internet to create ambassadors on the social media for change for propagating ideas relating to the Civic Engagement and democracy. Are there any recommendations for what can be used as a tool or leveraged in places of low Internet Penetration i know this is an issue that weve talked about in the office. And i think its important to bring up here. I dont know that i have any real sort of suggestions for how to successfully use the social media in places that have a low Internet Penetration. But i do think that the technology of course has a Critical Role to play and its one of those things that is more true for the youth of van the broader population where the world is becoming increasingly technological and the generations are sort of more comfortable, more responsive to the technology. The one thing that i would say is that although technology does play a role, its not a Silver Bullet to solve the problems and i think that just like with all of the Development Programming we need to be careful and keep in mind the fact that the Technology Based programming might technologybased programming might have on the people that dont have access to that. In most countries those for example that have access to the internet are fairly middleclass and the most disenfranchised to begin with. They are the ones that are somewhat engaged. So you just have to be careful when using technology that you are not reaching those people that are already somewhat engaged in further disenfranchising those that arent so that runs through the development in general. It may be seen as innovative and thats the solution to all of the problems. I look forward to the day that we stop talking about technology. Im definitely not an early adopter. We meet people where young people already are. They hold the debate over skype. We reach out and organize events using social media. Its whats happened to reach people in the more remote areas, so this is already happening. And i think that as we have had some innovative discussions within our organization to talk about what do we do once they are more pervasive and we can access the technology what do we do when the robotics are a part of our life and so we will also engage those tools when they become a reality as well. Can i Say Something quickly in addition to the robot babysitter said robot babysitters that he once suggested i think thats the good news from the gender perspective on social Media Technology youre seeing in the global surveys from Different Countries. There is a quality at using social media among young people which is a good thing and an opportunity. The bad news is that traditional gender problems persist in a place like nigeria we are seeing the usage of young men and women on social media and facebook, twitter etc. But when we ask the question would you support a woman as president , the numbers are worse. Im not sure what thats about what it means we have to do some of the longterm cultural work to address the energy and participation of Women Leaders in the political and electoral process. That is a particularly powerful points to pause and open up the floor for questions. So before we do, thank you again to that, jessica and julia for all of the comments that have helped frame the discussion. We will open up to questions in the audience. The microphone is in the center so if you have a question please make your way there and if you would please go ahead and introduce yourself and share your affiliation and let us know whether the question is directed towards the specific panelist or if i can exercise my right as the moderator to assign. It seems common to all the panelists in each region the Civic Education provided that happened to live in the countries where the government is unable or unwilling to provide it themselves seem to come up in a lot of your discussions. Are their Success Stories that you can provide for the Civic Education programs which have now been adopted either by the government or by schools or have just begun to spread on their own. Thank you for that question. Do any of the panelists i think that is one example of that. In some places they are able to work with the universities on the Seminar Series and we engage on that as well. They ran a very longstanding Civic Education campaign and its also made with the minister minister of education. So its very exciting for us. You talked a lot about the great programs that you all due around the world. I was wondering if there was anything but that the policy can do to help promote this engagement. Excellent question. Thank you. I mentioned the social Media Support for young women and girls around the world and these types of things are extremely important but i think that just continuing to invest in these programs and making sure that we look at this specifically weve talked a lot about including it in our programs and targeted support. Weve talked about the negative and the positive and that is exactly right. The title of this event and the radicalization i hope and i think the panelists have done a pretty good job of sort of moving away from the youth themselves and explaining that destructors they are attempting to respond to and work with are failing them in a lot of ways and i think the government pressure into government by federal pressure in some of the countries we are working is important so is the continuing pressure to make sure that destructors are responding to the needs of the community and not just photography to support the continuing power. I would also like to add i think that it was useful to remember that democracy takes a long time. There have to be a lot of investment made so it isnt something that will happen overnight. In the environment it hasnt always been conducive for them to adopt and learn and build their skills is something we need to keep in mind and invest for the longerterm. The ones that are going to be coming up to build the civic democracy culture among them at an earlier stage will pay down the line as well. Thank you. Im with the Global Youth Coalition and i had kind of a theoretical or ethical question for you all. You talked about how we cant treat as a society so the question that i have in terms of the engagement that we run into is how do you engage one particular demographic in the monolith that is used for such a large demo in society and is that alienating another . And is that the risk of another group of engaging. It reminds me of a story that i was in northern uganda having a town style meeting and we were engaging the youth and how important it was in the marginalized. This older man turned to me and said i needed to be engaged as well. So it wasnt his place recovering in the 20 year conflict where you can always point out and they kept categorizing. Then you realize you do have to address all these issues and an gauge the entire community. Whether that is because they all need assistance and access to the process that we are talking about or the support. As i mentioned we talk about engaging the young women in a conservative society in north africa we do have to involve the family. And we do have to make the case to them of why this is important to everybody and that is critically important. We cannot sort of only focus on a particular segment of Society Without including everyone. But the targeted the targeted support and programs specifically aimed at different cohorts is imported as well and needed. I think that comment started with a quote at georgetown and brookings and he also said when you are looking at the youth into countering violent extremism one important thing is to target for groups that are at the highest risk thats where you get the sort of biggest impact on this space. I would say yes its an interesting question and one that the implementors need to be conscious of. A lot of times you cant just makes the groups mix the groups together. When we have workshops have to say we are going to involve the youth and people with experience and have men and women sometimes it isnt the best strategy sometimes its important before you can actually merge them together so thats something to keep in mind depending on the context that you are in and the type of social responsibilities you have towards your participant. Thank you for the presentation. I have two questions into the first goes to people that work on the africa issue. In terms of local solutions or citizenship skills how does it work and practical grounds like for example when the organizations arent Strong Enough or if the government wouldnt be able to accept the International Promotion to the country and also i have to raise a sense of hope that has been discussed earlier when the sense of hope is minimal and they are limited in the political supports the first question. The second one im kind of curious to know how your Monitoring System operates in terms of output and impact indicators especially again im going to repeat the fact in many of the countries as complicated into different factors im going to raise one issue which is most of the time many parties right now especially in this age they are very hesitant to accept International Promotional support on this issue so if you could talk a little bit about that. Thank you. We do work in a lot of fairly difficult environment in which the government are not necessarily receptive to the kind of assistance that we are able to give them. I think in practical terms how it usually works, isis does have the weight of the Community Behind it, so there is some support that comes from their end in many cases we wouldnt be able to do the work that we do without that kind of support. The more broadly speaking, isis tries to when working with these situations tries to identify where, basically tries to focus on what we can accomplish and what we can do. So i think it is mostly the strategy that we employ. We also are very much technical experts, so when we approach the work that we do from that perspective, it kind of we basically have International Best practice that we can sort of rely on and that sort of is an entry point to working with organizations that might be a little bit skeptical of international assistance. In terms of working with a sort of promoting and encouraging the voices of the youth to be considered by government authorities, again it is a long game so the support that we can give to the organizations that are already working in that space and systems that are already existing, there are a lot of countries in which there are these sort of indigenous dialogue processes that are focused on the youth and the extent that we can sort of support those and build their capacity to sort of engage with the government to on some level understand. So its by the sheer weight of numbers that there are as a way the way that we can approach this in the longterm. In terms of the question im not sure how to answer that one. I had a comment about that one. Very quickly in some cases i would argue that it is a solution particularly in the cases you mentioned where it is sort of lacking. I think we look at that very much in terms of providing examples from other countries where the work within that country submitting the heroes and opportunities that do exist. Just example where we are working in west africa, you know, we do provide Technical Expertise on issues related to democracy and governance that is driven by the agenda of the people that we are working within the local settings and so, did the womens leadership training and they say we are going to thank you for the leadership skills and for the advocacy skills. We want a gender quota. Thats what we want. So what was what they wanted to do with the skills that they developed and i think that is an important piece of how we are doing this work. I just have to say we are busted on it. We are in the sector of International Development that is the sort of late comer to this issue. And to defend it for a second isnt so easy to measure the behavior change. So when you dig a well you can count on this village and its much harder to say ive changed ten minds in this village but that said, we understand this is critically important to putting the value on the work and seeing the needle move. So there are a lot. We have a very progressive and Strong Department in a measure and they are working on the quantitative aspect. So a good example is as an anecdote that was floating around the whole way. We introduced the Civil Society to the commission for the first time and he was in the groups from all over the country in burma and they never met with the Civil Society before or with women but when it came to the section of the report to the donor this wasnt captured, so we had no way of saying that this introduction has sparked a whole new way of engaging between different segments of the society and so thats the key piece that looking at the qualitative side of things and picking up there is a body of knowledge on the side of things as well. But there are also specific examples we can talk to. This program she leaves in burma and myanmar weve done Similar Program in other countries and we can capture the number of women that leave the program and become poor workers. When it comes to the Leadership Camps we are rarely able to have the programs ten years down the road but were you able to participate in something outside of the program that we funded. Nobody can do anything that you cant prove, so this is something that we take very seriously. This is something that i would evaluate in the programs and set it throughout the panel that the Youth Engagement is the long game and how do you measure whether it was exhibition or exposure to the democratic principles and ideas and in one program or some other Organization Program and then you are a successful adult leader. But i see that we have two questions and so i want to make sure that we have time to address these. So please. Good morning everyone. Ima Washington Fellow from nigeria and i would like to say thank you for allowing me to be part of this Young Democratic briefing this morning. I want to make some comments independent question. They had the elections and we can see that we had a successful elections. Ive been working in the region for many years now and i want to know the specifics, the specific contributions of isis edit the success of the equal elections. Second, i want to say that the Young African Leadership Initiative has been reachable send in africa. Its in the Regional Center because it brings together a lot of young people that can be worked on or giving skills or contributing in the aspect of democracy and governance. I didnt finish my introduction. Im giving my internship now. I shouldnt be here ordinarily because im a physician but im interested in the growth and leadership and all these leadership issues. Thank you very much. Thank you. Not to put you on the spot, but im not very familiar with the project. I dont think i can speak to many specifics of exactly what they did in nigeria. I know that it was a real we do have a very Large Program and a longstanding one in nigeria and the recent elections were definitely sort of a watershed moment in terms of the supports to the Nigerian Commission and the democratization process. We have a few folks in the crowd i dont know if maybe somebody can speak a little bit more directly. I would be happy to connect you to the team if you do want more details about it. Isis has been working with them for a long time and we are definitely familiar with the program and we have partnerships with them. I think that its a terrific idea to sort of deep in the partnership and look at these Regional Centers as potential partners. That is definitely a great idea. Thank you. And the last question. I want to admire your efforts to make sure that the programs are culturally sensitive. I know that we see democracy as a universal idea and we are seeing it especially with the recent extension of suffrage to women in saudi arabia. But have you found it hard to divorce democracy from the western idea in the work and what kind of reception do you have come is come is a pushback or is it generally positive towards democracy . Maybe i can start with that and i would say we have had a lot of pushback in the region. Before 2011 and after 2011. It is hard. We think about democracy in a certain way but the rest of the world doesnt necessarily see democracy in the same way and i think that this realization is something that we have come to and it forces us to be more flexible in the way that we approach our programming so for example, we just did a recent assessment in syria and when we talked to people there was a strong reaction against the word of democracy because of people, whats happened with democracy in the region where people dont really believe in democracy, we see the survey showing that less and less people are concerned with the idea. They are not putting much value in the idea of democracy so there were suggestions and we have to learn how to adapt. So instead, talk about the citizenship and what does it mean to be a citizen in the country and what are your responsibilities as citizens . For us we have to be able to adapt and in certain contexts not use the word democracy and see what kind of language makes sense in the context and use it because we could still be in the end proponents of the same sort of concept just changing the terminology could make a world of difference in peoples receptions to what we are seeing. A i had been enriched by your comments, the comments of the panel here, and i do hope we can continue to have this discussion. I would encourage anyone here to reach out to your panelist or to try for injured or engage with us on twitter or other medium and we be happy to continue to discuss Youth Engagement ifes with you. In closing i would like to offer many thanks to jackson lees office, without whose support this event would not have been possible. I would like to thank the panelists to whom i am eternally grateful for a green to be a part of this discussion. Thank you. And, finally, i would like to thank everyone in the room for taking time out of their busy schedule to attend. Com and contributed to a lively discussion, and hopefully it will be fruitful in the future for all of us in our work in Youth Engagement, whether in the u. S. , abroad, on the policy or practitioners site. I look forward to remain engaged with you in the future. Thanks very much and have a wonderful day. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] a reminder if you missed in this event you can watch it anytime in the cspan video library. No, cspan. Org. This summer the senate aging to be held a hearing on Diabetes Research and funding efforts with testimony from medical professionals from National Institutes of health, university of missouri, and diabetes patients and advocates. They outlined the challenges of type i diabetes and urged for new treatment and enhancement and continued federal dollars. You can see that today at 4 p. M. Eastern here on cspan2. Live at seven, david by discusses his book. Hes at politics prose bookstore in washington, d. C. Live on cspan2. One of the five dead as storms in u. S. History. Tonight at eight, cspans 2006 tour of hurricane damage and recovery at st. Bernard parish in louisiana. You cant describe it. Thats your whole life gone completely. Nothing but cement left, and rubble. Not only your house but your whole community. All your friends and family, everybody is gone. Now its going to be a year later and you still come your family and friends you dont see anymore that used to see. How appealing. You dont forget it. You will never forget the rest of your life. I am relying on you. I know all this is state level, federal level and all other levels. I dont have been. I voted for you. They represent need on the local level. I dont know where else to go. I dont know what else to do. Thursday night, more from the atlantic conference in new orleans with craig fugate and dean decade and family. At nine we should president obamas trip to the region as most remarks from the recovery effort 10 years after. Hurricane katrina anniversary coverage all this week on csp cspan. Innovators, Venture Capitalists and members of the media gathered in a for the sixth annual Techcrunch Disrupt new york Conference Look at some new products and services in the Technology Start a portal. Conversations with Company Leaders from the socially network pinterest, startup that sells doityourself Computer Assembly kids an and a cofoundef a data storage supplier that was sold to Dell Computers for 1. 4 billion. This is two hours. Every author needs a proper incentive to travel miles and go somewhere and give a speech. No, which reminds of the wonderful definition of incentive. Pd east was a crusading journalist down in mississippi in the 1950s. He was progress on civil rights and always getting himself in trouble forced editorials, and he wrote what he knew was going to cause some trouble one day. So i think to start off your to say some words about Dave Goldberg . Yes. I think its awesome the way the Tech Community sticks together. And a moment of silence for date i think is very appropriate. Because it is a ceo who is a role model for all of silicon valley. Humble, a great leader, a great manager but better than that a great friend. And most important the father of two great kids. Like everyone here and intact im sure well all keep sherrill and david and the kids and our thoughts and prayers. Everyone should do something nice today in honor of david goldberg. Thank you. Sso to kick off, right, you wroe yesterday of a wide tech should be cynically engaged. You want to share a little bit . Not just cynically engaged although thats a big piece of the. I think people should be engaged in all sorts of efforts to help shape the world that we live in. People in the Tech Industry often think that they do that with the work by making products, by making companies. But i think increasingly the technology that we make and the companies that we build are impacting life come in good ways and in bad ways. And i think its important to understand those impacts and work with governments, local governments, work with philanthropy and other people who potentially can help mitigate those negative impacts. Are negative impacts. When i think about a lot of investment youre making five, 10 years ago, they were purely software products. A lot of things unseen today to intersect with the offline world, dealing with complicated areas like health and education and transit. And then jobs. One of the things that i see, for example, when a talk to robotics ceos that are creating machines that work is to make hamburgers or work in factories, ask them about implications for job market, they give me this look like thats really hard. Its going to be really hard for the Education System and the Workforce Development programs. What do you think their responsibility is when youre having as much impact . I dont think its just their responsibility i think its collectively the Technology Industries is possibility to give back, whether thats in terms of civic involvement or philanthropic involvement to help make changes that potentially can be better. And i think well talk more about it but i think things like education and education reform, i think things like housing, i think things like making sure that theres access, Internet Access for everybody or things like that economic great opportunity for everybody and a lifestyle that everybody can sustain are important issues. Technology is making these things harder. Therefore, we should work to try to what does that engagement look like though . You created you go out of your way, are found and she go and try to find the relevant people wanted to go to an organization like yours . Well, i think you should do what future fancy, as long as you get engaged. 10 years ago the Tech Community was a tiny percentage of any citys population. Today the Technology Community is a much larger percentage of the population of the community. So tech comment because of that, scott to get involved in the community. They are huge piece of the community. So in San Francisco we started as that city which is basically the tech chamber of commerce of San Francisco, and we had some issues that we cant resolve on the ballot. You move from payroll to gross receipts. Exactly. We got that behind us and we said okay, lets do the next most important thing which is Civic Engagement, volunteerism throughout San Francisco. And sv city circled the schools were any tech company in San Francisco, top the school at the principal of the school becomes the ceo of that principle tells the tech workers heres what i need done in my school. Not as think we think you should do this and this. The principal says i want you to monitor the kids when they leave school. I want you to help them read, whatever that is. Do you think, when i talked to San Francisco Union School District teachers, like, the fact that School Districts cant pay them like a living wage that allows them to be able to find housing in San Francisco, thats not a thing to voluntarily necessary sauce. We have to consider how we finance Public Schools in the state of california. When you think to circle the schools, it has a well intended effect but is it really like longterm solution . Circle the schools allows workers to get involved in volunteerism. Theres many other volunteer programs that other Tech Companies have started as well. The housing issue and income inequality is a separate issue that dealing with, set a goal of 30,000 housing units, onethird of them at least for low, middle income. What do you think the technology, when you look at Tech Industry leader, what do you think their roles should be in the conversations . I think the first thing is so that the Tech Industry leaders have the ability to educate and inform Civic Leaders about important issues to a lot of these Civic Leaders dont see a lot of the things that we see coming. And they arent getting out ahead of these issues in a way they should be. So they dont care about them enough. In the Tech Industry can say heres things you can do in your schools, heres things you can do about ubiquitous broadband, heres things you can do about housing, heres things you about transportation. Then i think at least local governments might start to make more enlightened investments and create more enlightened policies. So the first thing, the most important thing is getting into the conversation and educating them. When you look at new york cities workforce and you look at how the scale of the Tech Industry needs, it changes quite fast, like year over year, different languages you need to know. What does the system look like for effectively giving that feedback into the Workforce Development and Education Programs speak with when you think of Workforce Development theres really two big pieces. Its the students in the public School System and making sure youre teaching them the skills they will need for this century versus last century. And then theres the Adult Education peace, retraining, taking somebody who unfortunately didnt get that kind of education growing up. The second one is harder. I think its critical. You cant just wave off an entire generation. The teacher thing is k12 thats an easier thing. New york city this to a lot of interesting things there. The mayor is taking forever to get added one to get out in front of him on anything i dont want to be too specific, but what i can tell you this because of the Tech Industry is in a dialogue with the mayor and his team, i think this administration with a lot of really good things in that regard. We want to talk to you about housing. Its an issue ive written a lot about for techcrunch you know more i know. Its like everyday you hear a crazy, crazy story. Theres a chart that a friend, a Planning Agency shared, like to veterans has gone from 2646 other dollars over 10 years. I met a founder last week. Its just wild. What is the city, like 30 k. As a culprit i look at 1020,000 people moving to San Francisco here at a dont think its aggressive enough. Its definitely not enough. And delete is an unusual politician. He doesnt overcommit ed lee. Coming from zero to San Francisco was basically not addressing housing at all. So least hes planted a stake in the ground. Issues go is 5000 of the 30,000 issues, and that will happen. He wants to meet that commitment. In addition to that, however, he is putting on a ballot measure on the November Ballot for two at 59 housing bond that, 500 million with my which will hopefully create another couple of thousand units for low to middle income. This is important for schoolteachers, cops, firemen, but also entrylevel tech workers. Are faced with this very same issue. A lot of people make it sound like pakistan sympathetic to this. Know, this is a huge issue for tech. For every engineer that is hired, there are four support workers for entrylevel workers who have to have housing. We have to increase from 30,000 but at least we have a stake in the ground. How do you reconcile that change in the market with airbnb . It seems really hard. Its just the notion that airbnb is displacing ranters . I think theres a lot of underlying causes to the housing situation in california that go back over many decades. Airbnb could add pressure to that. I disagree with that. Even depend department in San Francisco has released a statement that says that an airbnb host would have to rent out their unit to an airbnb just 257 days a year in order to derive more income than just renting it out. And so the notion that airbnb is part of the problem, it is completely false. It is just a conjured up argument that the opposition of airbnb, people who dont understand the sharing economy have come up with. That database, the market rate rent only post about a little over 10 of the Housing Stock in San Francisco so theres a large swath of people are rentcontrolled or bank way below whatever the 3600 meeting is. There is a pretty Strong Financial pressure for them to be much more lucrative. Keep in mind, airbnb got started in 2008 in the city of new york. The founders nuclear during the financial crisis, and this is where airbnb got its initial growth in brand name. Because people in new york were going to be displaced and evicted from their homes and apartments if they could augment their income by renting out a room. In San Francisco the same thing has happened. We have elderly people who, if they were not running out of room in the home, would be evicted from their home or not be able to afford their home. So airbnb is contributing on certain cases if you have a mortgage to pay, what they think about caps from the number of days that airbnb rooms should be right about . I just think its a false ceiling. There should be no cap . Why should the government be involved in that . Whenever the government gets involved in things, soap and papepaper years ago youre telling us to get involved in the government. When i look at the right of a process in San Francisco sopa and pipa speed in the citys operating with are trying to sidestep market are operating off of it at the vineyard State Government has subpoenaed and whatever the San Francisco chronicle has this great off the site. That have a lot of actual transparency into how large a shortterm rental market is in San Francisco. What do you think about data sharing . Once again, i think the government doesnt have a right to send in some bureaucrat to examine the records of airbnbs hosts. We talk about the nsa. Now we have a municipality saying we want to inspect the records of your house spent but aggregate . Thats not the free enterprise. If it was aggregate, navy has reasonable. But this proposed proposition, they want every ounce updated about airbnb hosts speed and just for context, looks like airbnb will probably be on the ballot in november. It would be very interesting, very private. Private companies should not be forced to hand over data about their users. That is an invasion of privacy. On the other hand, if they did willingly hand over the data maybe they could resolve a lot of these concerns about airbnb that in this out of. Companys can use their data and by actively sharing their data to essentially make clear to people that the fears that have about his service are unfounded. So i would encourage companies to be proactive about sharing their data as much as possible without, i understand the issues about revealing specific data about specific customers, because then youve gotten in the wake of a trust relationship between a company and its customers but the more that accompany can disclose the date on and now ms. Aggregated basis, they can use that to make a specific case for the fact theyre doing something good or not. Airbnb has been disclosing. Just in the last week they disclose a whole bunch of new anonymized data about the impact in the market. Thats a really, what youre touching on, fred, is really interesting tension. Its also point out in los angeles as these Companies Get really, really large and have large sets of data about the users in the real world. The inside into things that affect public systems. When youre sharing data with the city of los angeles was about helping the city understand to manage traffic. People were using the app to go fondle the side roads and going in neighborhoods that were not on the traditional do you have a rule of thumb about what you are talking about is there a rule of thumb if you have a lot of did you should collaborate with the city versus not . We would encourage our Portfolio Companies to be as public with their data as possible. However, way you can take an individual user and share the data with the government because that user might speed all the time. So the user would feel that trust was violate. There is a limit to what companies can do without violating the trust that they have with their users. At the more that they can be public with the data on an anonymous basis within a outing any specific person i think is a very, very valuable. Spirits is one more thing away to touch on before we go because were talking a little bit about bashing one model youve been a big proponent of is the 1 by jamal. That is expanding in europe today. You want to talk about what that is . Yes. I think its very exciting that the pledge 1 is teaming up with the Robin Hood Foundation in new york to launch the 1 Pledge Campaign in new york. And what that involves is a ceo commits 1 of the companys equity and 1 volunteer time, and if applicable, 1 of the companys product to philanthropy. And this was the founding principle of salesforce. Com. Its been adopted i google, yelp, spelunker, many, many other Tech Companies. And want to bring that whole campaign to the city of new york, and that launches today. So we put our money where our mouth is. We have volunteer hours and pledging 1 of equity. Whats exciting is how do you go public, that 1 is worth come in the case of yelp, it was over 50 million, in the case of google it was half a billion. The company gets to decide what charities they want to drop and donate that money to get it becomes part of the culture of the company. I have two ideas. One which fit the three of us discussed backstage, the attorneys who service the startup founders, whether thats gundersen or cooling or wilson or work, whoever, theres lots of them. If they put this 1 founders of stock, to foundation, as an option that founders could just select right the very beginning when they formed a company youd see a lot more founders doing it. A lot of countries dont have to do it. They dont want to spend the money with paperwork but if it became something they could just add without any cost you would see a lot more founders doing it. Thats one thing, paula to the legal committee. The second is, its important that each city, Tech Committee creates some sort of volunteerism system. So that people who want to volunteer know what are the opportunities. I think a lot of the problems that people have with volunteering their 1 is they dont know where they can use their skills to the highest standard. Parks, going to schools and helping teach Computer Science is something thats a pet project of my. There are three or four programs in new york now to do that and we still have trouble getting enough Software Engineers to do that every year. Thats because they are not good systems like lincoln or indeed. Com or whatever to match people have the skills with nonprofits and other cos holidar positions that need those skilled. The other thing were doing for adopting the pledge 1 , we are asking all Venture Capital firms that when the ceo of your company as about pledging 1 equity in the firm says yes, we support the 1 pledge. Why we cannot do that that . We are asking them all to. Just making sure your. Many firms have already said yes, yes, yes. Thank you, guys. Thank you. [applause] all right. They keep telling me cannot stand too close in front of the stage. So this is good. For those of you dont know, our next guest and have a lot in common. She is not gay, but she does take a huge interest in women. She finds the series and brilliant just like i do. Jackson knows how to capture their attention, unlike iq. So please welcome to the stage Joanne Bradford of interest and our moderator, anthony ha. Thank you for joining us, joann. This is kind of fun. You guys made an announcement this morning that people can read but also in tech crunch. Com but to do that yet. Listen to us. What was the announcement speak with the announcement was we are building out the developer platform and were going to move to an open api. We are going to have it in a for loop oscillator like to get on the wait list, go to pinterest. Com and given what does. Were excited because we think developers can build everything from education disruption to vacation planning to meal planning to places you want to go and travel. So we are really excited to have a community to access pinterest and our 50 million pins and users and at based in private. You guys have had api is open to third parties before most on the planned a marketing site as opposed to the developers sites. We have two other apis that we announced last week. We have a content api that is used for publishing content and then we have an ad api that is used for buying promoted pins. The one we announced today is the most open and its for App Development and more broadbased developers. Your job is focused kind of on the business side and on brands and partners. You join pinterest back in 2013 and i think i was reading some of the articles that came out in the society basically that you kind of brought on to really accelerate and turn introspective to rip business. Was that sort of a air characterization of your role . I think was a fair characterization. I think prior to my joining, 15 in really 100 been focus on the consumer experience. With something we call quick intersperse which is idea at the expense that is more than anything else. And so when i got there we started to work on the promoted in product which is basically a pin that you can scale up with a little bit of media spending to get the other thing is that businesses are welcome on pinterest. The brands are very big part of what pinterest does. We spend time educating partners i have to think about interest, pinterest. I can choose some examples if you want spent why do we do that . I think with some slight we can go through. Who has never seen pinterest before out of there . No hands go up, which is a good thing. So this is an pinterest board and we just wanted to show you a couple of examples of people using pinterest help drive the traffic it so busty is a huge part of ours. To optimize the extensible and you start pinning, you get more options. Everybody should have mobile integration into what did you as a partner. Lets get to the next piece of it. This is written t cuts against e weather put a button on the photo. Pretty aggressive treatment with a button but it pays off big for them. So you can see how beautiful it looks but really its just about putting that by more people can easily do it from a photo. Which is awesome. The other thing everybody should have is with something called ridge pins which gives you date of when something is in stock at a price point on or if its an article, we have reached in as well as recipes. So this is awesome because i was just sitting backstage talking to someone and they said look, i want to know if its in stock and how much it is, if the retailer puts this in they can do. Thats a different functionality around how effective it can be for you. We neewhen you do all those this that gets a lot of information. They consider this to be the top two sharing tools for them. Such as some simple things, some brands can do. And then finally target has done an amazing job of building their boards and their presence. Just so want to give a shout out to do great work on pinterest. This is kind of the best case scenario. Defined most brands when you first dr. Tim clark ready, not that it looks incredibly complicated but there at that point . I imagine theres a lot of them who are pashtun pinterest, thats a huge do. What am i supposed be doing with that . To are either summon passion and the, just like im going to just do it, but now what it does is attack is a commerce solution. Attaches content teams, social media teams, media spending teams are its easy to do. Its lightweight and everything i just showed you is free. You can do all of those things and not spend a dime with pinterest. Anything if youd like to make a better and the skimmer you can buy some promoted pins. River which set of analytics which give you lots of impressionable what people are doing, where the pinning your stuff, where it came from, the other interest. We spent a lot time talking with people just had a ticket vantage of all of the things they can do on pinterest for free. When you talk about, you said thats all free. Is there any tension, when you came on, this is whats going to be paid, this is whats going to be free, or has there been some figuring out . I think we always think about the Business Model and whats the best thing for us in the longterm. And whats the best thing for pinner and the longterm. The things weve shown were determined that usually good for kind enough and. Like the price, is it in stock, people can make depends better, the prince can do better things. We think of those as helpful to pinners so usually those will be free. You do seem kind of tension in terms of welcome is brands can get utility out of pinterest without paying anything does that make it harder for you to monetize . Know. I forget a lot of places in Media Companies and a lot of large countries where theres a lot of tension between that. Like i said, a brand is welcome but its not like were going to stop a banner ad in the middle of the story somewhere. This is very mobile. Its very organic to the experience. You can promote attended is performing really well. So theres really that tension doesnt exist. We are pretty careful about the quality of promoted pins. And then we look very closely at the performance. So for us its all about the user experience. The earlier youre talking about this id when you came on, pinterest was at the stage of just having been focus on products and on user growth. I think weve seen a similar part with facebook and twitter, we have like so many eyeballs at a certain point its becoming a more serious conversation about revenue. Where would you say that pinterest is sort of in that transformation right now . We have been selling promoted pins for about a year. We have two offerings, possible click, and we have learned a ton from that and we will be refining those offerings as we go forward. We believe we have like a full solution for marketers, and we want them to think about, a full solution that we think about partners and helping them plan and our consumers think about the future and think of a more greedy and allies. That message really resonates. Is no marketer that has want to be involved in consumers future. People every day on pinterest plan wa weighted going to have r dinner, where they went on vacation, where theyre going to shop or buy. What films will look like, what their dreams and aspirations look like i had someone backstage to make, excuse me, i want to do i start a secret Engagement Ring board, just dont tell anybody. I dont know if shes going to be engaged but has a fiance or anything. Spent so you were not out her on stage speak was im not. I think shes laughing back there now. The good news is that a lot of women factor so you wont be able to figure it out. Thats clearly an indication of your future. My daughters are going to summer camp your i felt a board of summer camps they should go to the ones going to go up shop in San Francisco to take a laser cutting class and she picked it because i ended and she found it. Everyday people think about their futures, whether they are looking for fantastic handbag are looking to go on a vacation, and also going to believe it or not i saw the Northern Lights in iceland on pinterest. Im going there this summer because i was like thats cool, lets go. I took my daughter on a back road trip. I was inspired by that and it ended up there, and pinterest has a much longer sort of life with a consumer and most of the things. When youre searching its a little bit of a debate, i want this now. I wanted to answer. We think that pinterest is a much about your future and the like putting some creativity into it and moving forward, and we commit help people do maybe more fun things in life and maybe things the way they want to do them is unique and personalized. Marketers really seem to love that and they have the brands as part of it. In terms of what the markers are doing on pinterest now, are they at the point where they are spending significant amounts of advertising budget on pinterest, or is it still in the very experimental stage . We have many partners this year that committed a significant amount spend to us for the course of the year. That went from nothing last year to a significant commitment this year. Many have told us we are the only part of it made it up front commitment to because theyre happy with the engagement on the platform and theyre happy with the performance of what theyve been doing to they are also getting an early look at a road map. With a very aggressive road back for the rest of the year. That includes lots of fun things that im not going to tell you about today. So we are working on measurement, working on new product offerings. And so we are pleased with their commitment. And more importantly we are pleased with not just the dollar commitment but the commitment actually to the partnership. Weve seen people do marketing in store. So that a bunch of people that nordstrom, target, walmart, that are done in store promotion and has shown a significant sales lift because of that. Nobody else can really be a merchandising partner the people, and insights partner and a promoted in partner. The conversations are really amazing that we are having and the time, quality time were spending with the right people. I sold lots of media over my life, and never have the discussions been such an integrated level. So youre not going to tell you about the roadmap for the rest of the year but maybe we can sort of dropped some hints. Maybe you can talk about, are there areas of revenue that you see that maybe pinterest now Sees Opportunities for the future of . Theres a whole bunch of things out there that we think about in making the and more actionable. We think about targeting capability. We think about just this sort of three pillars of pinterest from a product perspective. The first one is discovered, that you can actually find things and visual search is very different than anything else. And then save, which is by the organizing principle and 50 billion pins have been saved to a billion board. Like 50 billion pages being torn out of magazine, put in place we can find them and your friends can see them. Thats pretty powerful. So we will work on the organizing principles on how you say that and then do come and do really comes down to can you go to these things. Well focus on those areas. You mentioned mobile. Can use anything in terms of our interest is in terms of mobile usage . We are about 7585 mobile usage and as. Of our total base. A couple years ago we decided this double down unbolted before got there. Within weeks of mobile usage had surpassed the desktop usage. And so we focused on that first and foremost. We ship everything for the. Rebuild everything for that. The desktop is still important but with numbers like that. We see people pinning at all hours of the day. The other thing is everywhere you go, if i were a pinterest tshirt out summer, people just stop you and profess their love for the product and profess their passion for it. Its quite amazing that ive never been involved in something where people just, just like i just love. And i always sort of called him on it and i say let me see your boards. They show me their boards and she should always true and you can find something amazing about them. I have a 16 yearold daughter edited to share real passio pasr woodworking. I thought she was taking because she wanted an easy a. It turns out she really liked loves woodworking and she built boards of it. Shes not going to do that on instagram for facebook on snapchat issues like its just too geeky. Pinterest is with a year and its a very personal and its about peoples expression and about their vulnerability of what he wanted to in the future spirit people have a real passion for it and its exciting to be involved speed people get quite excited when you walk around with a demand to tshirt speak with its funny, they love livestrong. It was a friend stood for something even after the bad part of lance armstrong, the site is still doing well. It was a community that was super passionate about it. Craft was one of their titles. To craft people, they were super passionate about cracked. People not crying in the streets. People crying in the streets when they see your pinterest tshirt speak with literally, people, oh, m oh, my god, i juse of pinterest. I sent people tshirts and theyve been really excited. Ive had people come into the office does it ever get uncomfortable . I did not is a i literally was in a city in the midwest, and it finally got to the place where i was like, people are so passionate about that you like okay, i got it. They are really, really, really excited about it. One other thing i want to ask about beyond revenue, what you see a sort of maybe the next big Growth Opportunities . Is international, more men on the site . Iua pinner . I cratered an account because i needed to do a demo something and literally every woman in the Techcrunch Office said gigi just create a pinterest account . I havent then anything fashion do you have any suggestions . What should i be doing. [laughter] so pinterest that anything youre passionate about, anything youre passionate about. So the idea started with a blog collection. When people in the collection we think they want to do is look at other peoples collections. Its what you do. Its the first thing to do and then you want to save more of it and do more of it. So that was really the principle of the. So if anything youre passionate about, whether its a hobby, an idea, a place, eating you think people will think im cool athletic, book board . Thats cool, right of . Absolutely. Comic book board. So if you like comics you can go find as many things on the topic of comics and collected and saved in and organize them and you can become like an influencer on the topic if you would like. Do have a lot of it on pinterest right now or is the procession of women factually accurate . In the United States were about 7030. Outside of euros it is the 6040. Worse countries that 50 50. Pinterest started as reaching out to mom bloggers and crafters around the world. Much like facebook start out with college students. We see the mix. What are your International Percentage in terms of total usage of . We have expanded the with offices all over the world. International growth is really, really a big focus area spent awesome. Thanks again for joining us. Thank you. [applause] we are of often one and on te which never happens. A plus for us. Our next out is pretty much a genius, theres a good chance you will not understand what is being spoken about on stage. She happened to sell the company ecologic for 1. 4 billion in 2008 from the middle of a recession. Are pretty much choose the biggest applause. Please welcome to the stage paula long and our moderator, ron miller. [applause] all right. So these are found his story and paul has had not one but two companies and she sold the first one for 1. 4 billion which is a pretty serious amount of money. To put that into perspective, i did some research and it was one of only 20 i. T. Companies in the last 10 years that sold for more than 1 billion. Thats pretty good company. So im wondering when you were going back to 2007 and selling the company, we actually looking to sell . Were buyers pursuing you . Who made that move . So this is sort of an interesting dance. If you go to fcc. Gov using the actually filed. Power as one was approved. We closed the papers with dell can get on sunday night and if we had not closed we were doing our roadshow on tuesday. So we were minutes away from being a public company. For 1. 4 is an impressive number. I like to think about it as a 50 to 9 raise, we were profitable. We had 4000 customers were happy. 98 Customer Satisfaction rate and were going to were going to go public. We had no intention of selling. When the numbers started coming and someone said i want to buy them for 500 million. Thats a lot of money. Thats a lot of money but if you look at our rabbit it was a lot of money compared to the revenue. The number got to be in it. Summit offers you something with a be in it you should think about it. You might want to think about it you might not get but you might want to think about. Thats what happened i think was michael dell, who is passionate about the company, passionate about the nation. Passionate about the product and they called me personally wanted to how they could make this happen and make us a great merger. That commitment from the company that was acquired as help to get a little bit. Was at the companies that were also teaching you at the time . Periodically companies would come in and to start to talk to you about buying you and this one, so we would rather die first debbie bought. They were just rude. Spin you dont want to tell us if it was . I cant type it is like being out of the hate. We had a bunch of offers answero the people looking at us as we went along. We were really focused on growing the company. We had never discarded and acquisition but we had not pursued either. When you went to the negotiation table with michael dell and the numbers started floating up over that b number, what was your reaction parks we like oh, my gosh, what happened without . I wasnt in the immediate negotiations. I was on product at the time to i would like all the country anyone here who is a founder they work all the time. I was at my sons, you know. We can for his freshman year in college and to clean and decent its over the b, should we dont . But im here with my son. So priorities. No, when you guys decide which what to do. Anything over a b seems like we should be having a discussion. I wasnt as engaged as i probably should have been. I was watching my sons material science experiment at cmu, learning about helicopter parents which was try not to be one of. I remember one point they called and asked a question i said i do not any other founders who can enter this . I got back sunday night and i started to be involved but it wasnt in the last nuances of the details. Maybe that was better you are caught up in Something Else at that point. You are ceo at data gravity and geoff sordello lot of high Level Management positions. As you just allude to you are ceo out the first company. How is it different being ceo of a startup as opposed to being equallogic to acting ceo for a couple of quarters. The company was going faster than my ability to learn all the roles. So i decided if i started another one, i feel passionate about the country, about how we are positioned in the market understand the business and the technology so i said i would do the ceo role but what i found it is in product you care about product and people. And ceo you can about people and people. Ceo is much more people driven job, both jobs are very focused on customer, much more people driven job than a product driven job. As ceo is a more daytoday pressure in terms of making sure that all the pieces are moving and working in cohesion . For whatever reason i felt that pressure as he found out equallogic. I do like the equallogic success was shared by a lot of people that if we failed it wouldve been my fault. So for me the pressure is about the same because youve asked your friends to join you and your responsible for their livelihood. Then youve asked people to invest in you. There are limited with Retirement Funds in college fund. So youre very responsive a for that money you took. And to make sure, you are affecting peoples livelihood. It feels like its a race but you are affecting peoples lives and by the decisions you make. So how does that fear of failure, how does that drive a founder of . I think it is a healthy fear. If any founder is not worried every day, in their focus on the wrong thing. You played chess and checkers at the same kind of you cant figure what your next move is and then also word about what am i going to do in six months or a year . Youve got to set yourself up for that. Its a lot of fun but theres a lot of responsibility so youve got to take it very seriously. So just going back to that sale for a minute. That was at the end of 2007. We were starting to get the first rumblings of a meltdown that was the coming 2008. A few the Mortgage Companies were throwing up some pretty big red flags, and you guys were navigating a billion dollars still in middle of all that the didnt have any impact on the negotiations that kind of economic climate, or did the Company Wants you and it didnt matter . We were in a market that didnt get as effective as others by the recession. So storage, data storage is something have to have. Nobody wants to delete the email. Everybody needed databases. If you were to look at the companies that were impacted by the recession, that david storch companies were not impact as greatly. I do know we were as worried about that. I think what we were thinking about was dell wants to get into this basis, so did two other firms were talking to us. Do we want with that kind of competition, or do we want to cooperate with them. We went for cooperation. So pq and waited, if youd waited six months to think it would have made a difference . Then everything just sort of fell apart in the economy speak with tv think about it, all three got bought for more than 2 billion. You could say we went to early. I dont think i think you have to decide what is a good point for you. I think some of the venture guys might say we went to early i think. Is just a balancing act. But all three of them were public at the time and all three of them experienced the did and came out doing just great speed and data gravity is your second, and im wondering is a founder what was it like launching a company, a second time . And just out of curiosity, as successful as equallogic was, knowing what you and your the second time, with the things you said im never going to do this if i get a chance to do this again . So launching the second type is pretty interesting because we had just, i didnt and started that succeeded and failed to success is more fun by the way. So when your students think what to do next when using this as my legacy. I just laughed are deeply was a home run, lots of happy customers, great culture in the company, could monitor exit for both the employees and investors. Then i say to yourself, okay, do i have an idea that is big enough books it took me a long time to find an idea that was big enough. Data gravity is going to change storage in a very fundamental way. Because right and storch doesnt he think about the data it holds. For security data privacy and just finding things, storch needs to about the data it holds. I was pretty sure i was onto a great idea. I got a great cofounder in john joseph i worked with at equallogic. The one thing i said i wouldnt do it is i wouldnt come as i started to raise money i would make sure that i picked the partners i wanted. I was very careful about how we went across, how are they going to grow the company, that we would really focus on making sure, equallogic, we were focused on customer. We doubled down with data gravity. Equallogic we rent aggressively but cautiously. Data graph i think the one thing we didnt do, we have no infrastructure at equallogic. When we started selling people manually putting in august, could put them in fast enough. Other than that its pretty much the same playbook. So when you sold equallogic, is 2007, the cloud was on peoples radar. Most people. There were not a lot of clout discussions. How have the Storage Market changed between the time you sold, and the time you started getting crowded in 2012 . I think theres a few things have changed. First of all equallogic was one of his compass those going to sell that everybody is doing that. We went of the first people who were doing all conclusive. Once he bought the property that all the futuristic now everybodys doing that. Cloud was a term in 2008 but nobody was really doing it. What you find is the cloud is a great place when the application and the storage are together