 Welcome to the untold stories of the hyperledger community, a monthly podcast in which we invite developers and leaders from across the hyperledger ecosystem to share why they're using hyperledger projects and why they're actively involved in the community. While there are lots of venues to learn about the what of hyperledger technologies, this show is focused on why individuals roll up their sleeves to help develop and deploy them. Each episode features an in-depth discussion with a guest who is helping to shape the future of enterprise blockchain and their journey as a developer and an open source contributor. Conversations will delve into topics such as why they got involved with hyperledger, why they're excited about the technology, and how they deal with the challenges involved in contributing to a large global open source community. My name is Ben Thomas and I lead marketing and communications for hyperledger foundation. Today I'm honored to welcome Sophia Lopez who has been involved in the hyperledger community from day one, first with IBM and most recently as president and co-founder of the company Kaleido who has been the main contributor of the hyperledger firefly project. Sophia, welcome. You've had an inspiring and unique journey and career path to date from studying engineering sciences at Harvard being one of the top 10 NYC students profiled in news days, New York's best and brightest to a 10-year career at IBM and most recently founding your company Kaleido. It's clear you've always been a natural leader. I'd love to hear more about your journey. What were the most memorable moments in your earlier career that have been instrumental in shaping it? Thanks, Ben. Thanks for the kind words. I think we all are have the capacity to lead in our own way. We all have unique strengths. We may have challenges that forged us in early formative years of our lives and decisions and paths we've taken which leads to where we're in a position to really uniquely contribute to the things we're passionate about. I guess in terms of memorable moments, I grew up in New York City. My parents are both first generation immigrants. We didn't have any relatives or family in the U.S. So just learning to find my own way around a big city at the time was not the safest place to grow up in. But interestingly enough, parents back then basically all kids were free-range kids. So you're an eight-year-old on the subway and going to the museum or finding your way all around the city with very little sort of supervision. I mean, that's kids kids are just out on the streets. But yeah, I think in my early years, really pretty captivated with reading and sci-fi and imagining what the future world could look like, how science could help enable new ways of living, interacting. And when I went into high school, I guess memorable moments there in that it was a school that just started letting, accepting women. It was an all-male school. We had a hangar with airplanes. So we did college courses, but we also fixed commercial jets. And I put in enough hours working on planes there that I was able to sit for the FAA mechanics licenses when I graduated. So I earned the FAA commercial licenses for airframe and power plant. My parents at the time thought all four of us could just work as avionics, technicians or mechanics. But I did want to go to college. So I had been working all through high school. I'd been working part-time jobs, but I was also working towards getting, figuring out how to pay for college. So ended up flying for 12 scholarships and I won seven and I worked, worked my way through college. I went to Harvard, studied engineering there. But I got my first taste of working for tech startups. It was out of necessity. I needed a job that I really enjoyed being the first employee for some of these companies. Some are still very successful today, which is great. And I always thought at some point in my life, I wanted to start a company. But I also felt it was important to gain skills, perspectives. So I, New York's very international. My high school was pretty diverse. People from all over the world there who are also first generation immigrants. So I ended up living different parts of the world for a variety of years and worked in different jobs and industry before going back to get an MBA, UNC, Chapel Hill, which is where I ended up doing a case competition with IBM as a sponsor. And then they offered me a job. So that's how I ended up at IBM down the road. Chapel Hill, North Carolina. That is correct. Yep. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. The first time I met you in New York recently, one thing that struck me was your infectious energy. In terms of your mindset, and where does your energy and entrepreneurial drive come from? Is it cultivated? Is it something you've just never thought about, always had or? Yeah. I think just having to be very much a self-starter growing up, figuring out how to earn money, how to make my way in a big city like New York. As I mentioned, I really loved reading and thinking about things. I really like helping others and connecting with others. So I think all of that ends up contributing to a certain level of bringing passion to what you're doing. Do you have a daily routine to cultivate that, or is it something you consciously think about? Well, it's interesting over the years, and especially I did a two-year MBA program. We talked a lot about different techniques to get to know yourself more. It's part of their leadership program because to be a good leader, you really need to understand yourself, your strengths, your blind spots, how people are wired. I think some of a person's baseline state, there's different assessments like Myers-Briggs, and you think about how do you process information? How do you make decisions? Do you think about terms everyone's heard of, like extroverted, introverted? Are you energized around others? Do you like brainstorming? Or do you like externalizing decision-making? Or are you more of an introverted thinker? So I think the energy level, I always thought I was introverted, but I realized after doing some of these assessments as part of the MBA program, I do love interacting with others, sort of helping move a group forward towards something, helping people individually as well. And that is something that energizes me. But some of these just get back to sort of baseline, I guess, genetic wirings. And then there's also environmental context where you, some things are reinforced, and you get experience doing certain things that lead to successful outcomes so you do more of it. So it's definitely nature as well as nurture. Interesting. Sounds like you mapped out your psychology early on then. No, not at all. This is more recently, just when I was going through the full-time MBA program. And then I spent a decade at IBM and is working with teams, working close, working with clients, delivering outcomes. You start thinking about how do you really position people to be successful? How do you bring diversity into how thinking decisions are made? How do you bring complementary strengths together? So just observing others and trying to help get to everyone, get to a better place, slowly pick up more and more observations along the way. But the journey never ends. There's always an opportunity to learn more. Indeed. Yeah. You touched on your journey towards IBM and you held many positions that culminated in leading the global blockchain platform offering. Tell me more about that. Sure. Yeah, I did. I came in originally in the strategy role then and I was in the software group, worked in sort of middleware division called WebSphere, worked in a product, marketing role. And then I actually wanted to see why, why do clients buy from us? And what problems were we helping them solve? I'm an engineer by training. I had worked in management consulting and other roles, but it never had any role that was a sales role. So I did the IBM's training. They have a summit school training for people within two years of their latest degree. I did that and really very rewarding working with CIOs, CTOs, you know, line of business decision makers, you know, all the way down to the engineers in the data center, really understanding what companies needed, how they could use our tech. I enjoyed that quite a bit. And when I moved into product management roles where you're the mini general manager of that business, having that holistic background across a variety of disciplines really helped quite a bit. And then, you know, so you're understanding all from what problems our clients trying to solve that are a unique problem. That's a pain point for them. They're willing to pay for a solution. And is there a market around that? What do you build? How do you bring it to market, pricing, packaging, et cetera? And then how do you sell it with your sales and marketing teams? Sort of a whole end to end life cycle. I realized I had across all my life experiences and different roles had gathered a lot of the functional skills to look at both strategy to execution for a role like that. And I ended up working at leading product management portfolios across different parts of the company. The last part of the company I was in where I had a large multi-billion dollar P&L was in the systems business. So mainframe hardware software services. And I specifically had all of the merging growth areas, so mobile analytics, cloud security. And I started looking at blockchain thinking, this is something that's very transformative. And it's a transformation that could go all the way down to the systems of record. It's not on the glass like some of the web-based apps and innovations over the years. And the mainframe is the system of record business. So you think about how can we take what we're good at and use that to help power the next generation of the ways companies are going to work together. So that's why I initially got involved with blockchain. And so I had that responsibility leading that in systems group. And there was another part of IBM on the cloud team that was obviously looking at it as well. So over the course of time of interacting, we basically joined forces and did a joint initiative between the two business units. And then I had executive ownership of that, those joint teams. And we had an open source lab that ended up contributing the code, open blockchain code that became hyperledger fabric. And the contribution was Solonix Foundation. We had a number of collaborators in the industry. So the name hyperledger came from one of the collaborators. And it's fun being just part of IBM in those early days when all of that was coming together. And then I worked with someone who's now my co-founder of Clido. We worked together. He was on the cloud team to launch the commercial products based on fabric. So we launched the IBM blockchain platform, which was the world's first managed service running nodes as a service, blockchain nodes as a service in the industry. We did that for about two years and really saw clients need a lot more to be successful than with the blockchain or Web 3 initiative than just running a node. Node is maybe 5% of a solution. So all the other layers you need of what's really the middleware for Web 3, we thought would be really important to offer plug and play, basically a big easy button for clients to adopt that and an affordable software as a service model where you pay for what you use, you pay more as you grow, you can easily onboard and scale. And that was the genesis of starting Clido five and a half years ago. So that's where we got here. Clearly that journey and that experience prepared you for becoming a co-founder. On reflection, were there any pivotal moments that impacted that decision to leave and jump into being a founder? Sure. I think what's important having worked in startups and certainly having worked very closely with our clients, putting yourselves in their shoes. People are looking to do new things, whether they're an entrepreneur within a big company, they're a line of business P&L owner, or they could be a startup founder. They need to show business outcomes and get to ROI when they leverage new technology. So if the new technology is going to take six or seven years to stand up and in the case like the trend stock exchange, they rode off around $200 million trying to get one use case into production, which didn't make it. Seeing down the road that if the technology is hard to adopt and people don't have the tools and they have to use armies of consultants who are building custom code for years, then those companies, governments, society is not going to get to the benefits of the transformative promise that these Web3 technologies offer. So I was very passionate about what Web3 could do and thought you really need to build a new company from the ground up that delivers these technologies in a form factor, a price point, a value point where people can successfully start new businesses, launch new products and services based on this technology. And was it a night or a moment with your co-founder when you were like, okay, this is it. We've got to do it. We have to do it. This is exactly what we need to do and want to do. Or was it more of an organic process? It's interesting. Anytime if you're a product management leader, you're looking at the whole business, you see what's working, what's not working, you obviously are someone who is looking at ways to operationally improve things, prioritizing where you get the biggest bang for the buck in terms of those improvements and areas of focus. And just pretty clear. When you get to a certain point at the two-year mark, really, I felt like I had done all I could within the certain sort of construct we were in to help people and really needed to take this new step in order to get to the outcome that the industry needs. You were an early pioneer in the blockchain space. Did you have a hard moment of realization or was it a gradual unfolding in foreseeing the potential of the technology? Yeah, that's an interesting question. I think because I had been working different parts of the company on lots of new areas of tech, as I mentioned, analytic space and AI and mobile and cloud, I had never seen a technology before blockchain where you just had this extreme level of interest all the way from the C-suite down into the data center. And it was clear there are different things captivating different audiences. An engineer might be really interested in the white paper or the yellow paper for Ethereum, whereas the CEO is thinking about how he could transform the entire industry ecosystem that they're operating in. But it's very, very proactive interest. People calling us, people with great ideas, really looking for the help, very passionate about adopting the tech, deploying it, scaling. That was pretty clear from the beginning. There was something special there. A lot of times when you're in a technology space and you're working with products, you're offering the market, there's a lot of push motion that you're pushing information and you're trying to drive conversations and reaching out to people. And this is, you know, it's all in bounds. And I'd say even five and a half years in is Kaleido, just the amount of people coming through our digital doorstep every single day, the biggest brands in the world. It's exciting, the people, all the things they want to do with the technology. And it's exciting to make them to be able to easily realize that potential. Fantastic. I wonder what's your why? Why do you believe in the power of open source blockchain tech personally? Well, I think there's a couple parts to that question. So, you know, there's the blockchain tech, which I think I've touched upon, just the transformative power it has and a lot of benefits of decentralization, a lot of the ways if you have, you know, global uniqueness with NFTs in enterprise setting, obviously, you know, people know about NFTs from digital collectibles, whether a lot of other ways you could use it, the ways you could bring industries together around getting to a shared view of the data, really working together around shared applications, shared business logic, you know, what that aligning incentives, whether that's through tokens or other mechanisms. So, really, it's this technology that for the first time lets companies work together in very collaborative ways with trust and transparency. And of course, open source is critical if you, you know, government's not going to want to deploy a solution that is closed source and they're locked into a vendor and they can't see the code. Think about security risks, software billing materials, optionality, future proofing choices. So, you know, open source really helps address a lot of those concerns and helps drive adoption. In terms of building Collider over the last five and a half years, aside from a clearly brilliant business strategy, what were the biggest challenges that turned into light bulb moments or key pivots, for example? I think this would be really interesting for other founders and aspiring founders out there. Yeah. I think when you start a company, it's good to have a vision that's broad enough to grow. From day one, we are always looking at, you know, in terms of what we do, we run best of breed open source, you know, web three open source that enterprises want to use. So built into that premise is we're going to be adopting new technologies. We'll bring new things on board as enterprises are see value in it. We're not religious. We provide flexibility and choice and that's with the open source tech we run. That's with the type of communities they might represent, you know, in the early days, there was more of a religious debate between private blockchain or public blockchain. And now we see those have really come together. And there's a lot of hybrid options or interoperability or app chains and other constructs, you know, in terms of flexibility and choice in terms of clouds. So we always felt you can't lock a blockchain project into just one cloud vendor. So offering flexibility and choice with all of, you know, the leading clouds for deployment options as well as hybrid and on prem. So providing, you know, geographical diversity for where we run, you know, security and compliance so people can decide where the data sits from day one. So building a technical foundation that had the right underpinnings for highly regulated compliant companies and industries and then a thesis as a company that we would be running the best of breed open source and that was going to change over time. And this is one reason why we're active in the open source communities and we've been contributors and maintainers because we run that code down, you know, those projects that we run down to the lines of code and if there's a bug in that community or there's an enterprise requirement, we're very active helping contribute that code, maintain that code base and grow it in the direction it needs to go in. In terms of the open source culture, I'm interested to know internally as a business unit and as individuals working together as a team, does your company reflect that? How does your culture internally work? Yeah, I think nowadays most engineers, people who are really smart, want to have an impact with what they do. People really enjoy working on open source. They feel like that's part of what's motivating for them career-wise. They like, we use open source tools for so much of what we build. So idea of also contributing back or actively helping drive an open source community is very appealing at the individual level as a technologist. And then of course at the business level, it helps our clients in myriad ways and I've laid some of those out. So I think it is an important part of our mission statement as a company and then that permeates into the culture as well. Sure. You have a wealth of depth and knowledge in the tech and enterprise blockchain and distributed ledger space. What are the biggest misconceptions that you see in terms of enterprise business adopting this new technology? There was a Gen 1 way of building. We saw people felt that a blockchain project, the enterprise level, was a blockchain with some smart contracts. And it's very difficult when they actually started building something that would replace an existing supply chain or a letter of credit or track and trace provenance, all sorts of use cases that were the initial ones that sprung up. Those are some popular first ones. There are many other layers that needed to be built and that this could include exchanging private documents between a select number of parties in a network and that could be because although it's a global supply chain, people have bilateral agreements around special pricing or sourcing. So there are elements that make sense to be public. There are some elements that are going to remain private. There's also GPR and concerns around putting sensitive data on chain. So how do you handle from a smart contract perspective, sensitive PII, putting data on chain in places like Europe where there's a right to be forgotten and the GPR. So there have to be other layers to the solutions. And I think people ended up building those same layers over and over again in a custom way with these armies of discoters. And it's very hard to maintain those. Obviously, those are closed source. They're expensive, takes many years to get time to value. Operating in that way, it's hard to learn from best practices in the industry overall, patterns of deployment, templates. So there over time, really, there was a shift to more of a Gen 2 way of building. And I think that's that Gen 2 way of building really incorporates a lot of the learnings and moves past some of the initial misconceptions from the early days. And in terms of advice that you give to other organizations about why they should consider getting actively involved in the hyperledger community or in any community for that matter that relates to open source code, that's important to them. What would that be? Well, I think it's important. It's important to the communities like hyperledger specifically for open source. When a lot of times in Web 3, of course, almost everything there is open source, but it could be the case that one company has a code base and they said, we open sourced it. And they just basically flip a bit on the GitHub repo and that could change from one day to the next. And you don't know what the governance is. How can someone else contribute to that? If you're relying on it, are you guaranteed it's going to be around? It's going to enter how to get support for it, do other people have skills around it? How is that community going to grow? Does it have a licensing model that makes sense? So if you're building on top of this open source, are you inadvertently giving away the rights to the IP for the things you build on top of it because it has a very restrictive license to it? So there's a lot of considerations around open source and obviously enterprises all know this, but just giving sometimes I think business leaders might not have as much of a background around open source licensing schemas or governance models. So walking through some of the considerations just in case that it's helpful to anybody. But obviously, hyperledger sits in the Linux Foundation. One interesting fact I learned last year about the Linux Foundation is that 90% of all the open source and production that enterprises run sits in the Linux Foundation. The Linux Foundation knows how to govern code. They have some of the most important communities there. So having the Web 3 community in the Linux Foundation that's a hyperledger community really removes a lot of barriers to access because anyone can join the meetings, contribute code. There's no pay to play there. It's open to everyone. And it's one single repository where leading projects that have gained traction in the industry and have advocates, maintainers, contributors are concentrated. So it's a really fantastic resource for enterprises who are looking to successfully launch Web 3-based initiatives. And in terms of another piece of advice to other business and technical leaders, I mean, obviously there are still challenges to adoption from shifting legacy systems and networks over. In your experience, what advice would you give to those leaders who are still trying to adopt the technology? Well, definitely, I think they should leverage a lot of these best practices and patterns of deployment that have emerged. Software as a service, as a delivery mechanism is an important way that they could start building the initial applications, whether that's proof of constant pilot, moving to production, moving quickly, leveraging code bases like Firefly, if you could mention that sits in the hyperledger community, has three quarters of a million lines of code. So it's open source and it's being used by industries, healthcare production networks, so some of the largest healthcare providers and payers, the largest insurance carriers, so property and casualty, life and annuity, reinsurance. Swift came to work with Kaleido and the Firefly code base as well for recent CBDC work that started last summer and 18 central banks and global transaction banks participated with that. They were able to, in a matter of weeks, start getting these central banks onboarded on an infrastructure that, when the gen one approach would have taken multiple years and tens of millions of dollars to build. So you really see 50 to 100 X better outcomes when you're leveraging these open source code bases and working with what the community is driving there to help power a lot of the really plumbing and infrastructure layers that need to be laid down for these projects and then companies and business leaders there, technology leaders can focus on the application, the value that they're trying to drive, the business logic, who's in the network, how do they interact. That's where people need to very quickly get to in order to get the value from the technology. So it sounds like the use cases is there, the ROI is proven, is it just a case of education now? I think you're probably familiar with Jeffrey Moore and some of his, they have a consensual book on crossing the chasm. So there certainly there are early adopters who are pretty far down the path at this point in terms of what they're working on and dozens of different initiatives. As you cross the chasm and the early majority comes online, there's this new resurgence of big brand in oil and gas or big brand in the payments. Payments is a little faster, but they're to adopt the technology, but there's a lot of corners of these communities where people were slower to adopt technology. They come forward and I think on the education front, what are use cases I should be thinking about? How can I move quickly? What are my peers doing? What sort of results could I expect? So there definitely is a role for that in the industry. What we try to do as Clido to help people is we have a digital funnel. You can digitally discover us, try us for free, build projects on our free starter tiers. Some startups have raised millions of dollars on our free starter tier. You're able to very quickly model out and build things and show that to your investors and they get the big hop. Oh, I see how blockchain is driving this. Digital assets are differentiating what you're providing here on this technology stack or NFTs, etc. And then you could just swipe a credit card and move up to a developer tier to a business tier and get your projects going. So just really removing some of that technology friction of adopting a technology make a huge difference in getting to the outcomes. So I think a combination of learning from what others are doing from a use cases perspective, getting your hands on the tech. And then of course, it's a rapidly evolving space, which is pretty exciting. The Web3 community actually is very cool community. Lots of people who have value and vision of how they want to do good in the world. And that's why they're in this community and trying to move it forward. There's a mix of people as there always are. So I'd say I'm speaking to the enterprise side of things in my last few comments. People who've known 15, 20 years about broken processes and the healthcare, for example, just knowing if you're eligible for a procedure, how much is that going to cost? Are you going to have any surprises about how much insurance is going to cover at the end of it? Even just more transparency around outcomes and procedures, recommendations. There's just so many ways this technology can be used for good on the enterprise application side of things. One thing we hear over and over again at High Bledger Foundation is that it's much quicker and easier to not contribute to the open source process, which is often true in the short term. You can take High Bledger's open source code and use it or modify it internally and do whatever you want with it. And you save time by not engaging in community discussions or going through the process of contributing back. What have you seen that really convinces someone about the need to balance time for development with time for engaging with community members and helping them become contributors? Thank you. The premise of the question is pretty interesting. I actually have not heard those sorts of statements made. I do believe there's a litmus test to are you really using software or open source software? If you're running it, you're managing it, it's integral part of your solution, you're going to end up contributing back to it because you're going to find things. All software has improvements. There's bugs you could find over time. There's new releases, things change. So these teams end up contributing back and then you're going to have some enterprise requirements. If you're actually using the software, especially if you are a vendor who's providing it as managed service to someone else or you're a cloud provider who's running this software, providing it as a managed or hosted service, they're going to be contributing back to the code. I mean, we as part of delivering Kaleido had contributed back to the Kubernetes communities at AWS, the Kubernetes community at Azure, just as part of doing the cross-cloud connectivity. When we initially launched, there evidently there were some gaps there because not many products spanned cross-clouds and created this one virtual network so all the nodes could talk to each other. I do think people doing meaningful things are involved with these communities. Could be a case where maybe there's some experimentation and someone could take a code base and fork it. But I think that would be shooting themselves in the foot if they're now off the train of continuous delivery and enhancements that communities going forward with and they're not participating or benefiting from that. You've touched on this a few times, but what was the reasoning behind contributing the Hyperledge Firefly project to Hyperledge Foundation? Was it a straightforward process? Was it something that you decided from the very beginning? How did that happen? Yeah, good question. When we initially founded Kaleido, we really felt that enterprises need a full stack of technology to be successful. We started providing that and growing more layers upon the layers that were really important. A couple of years in, we looked around and we saw hundreds and hundreds of projects at the ledger layer, the protocol layer, layer one in the public space. And a lot of those head tokens associated with them, there's a lot of excitement. So there's new ones every day that have something special they feel are offering. But when we looked at the layer of what companies need to be successful and governments and larger organizations that on and off chain type interactions and then just how do you handle data? How do you handle oracles? How do you create a token factory? How do you handle these digital assets and make asset tokenization easier? Those sorts of layers were not in the open source and we really felt for the industry to move together to where people are getting to the gen two approach and people are getting to successful outcomes that this needed to live in the open source. Because of our early relationship with the Linux Foundation and Hyperledger, we had a natural understanding of what that could offer and an affinity there. We did look across all the communities and tried to decide what could be a best home for the code. We approached Hyperledger and seeded the initial contribution. It was over two and a half years ago and it's been a great journey and very rewarding to see how quickly our communities grown and how successful people have been contributing to the code base, adopting it, integrating it into their production projects. As part of the Linux Foundation, Hyperledger Foundation shares the same ethos. All are welcome. We're a global open community where anyone can join and contribute. Over the past two years, although the numbers are still low, it's been encouraging to see the number of women working in blockchain tech increase from 8% to 12%. Many people are still unaware that there are now more women in leadership roles in blockchain and crypto than in Silicon Valley, for example. What's been your experience as a leader in the field in particular and what advice would you give to women looking to follow in your footsteps? Well, it's great to hear. I don't know where the source is for that data point. There are more women in leadership roles in blockchain and crypto than in Silicon Valley. That's the blockchain council. Great. Yeah, I love it. When you look at the future and technologies that are going to shape that, you certainly want a lot of diverse perspective, diverse viewpoints, diversity of thinking, diversity of cultures, backgrounds. I'm a big believer in diversity and I think there's been a lot of research from management consultants and research firms that have shown that boards that are diverse have higher return on equity, think it's 30% or more higher return on equity. Fundamentally, it's a diversity question. I do think it's challenging in larger companies. I've seen the dynamic where it's human nature. Someone who's very successful thinks they know what success looks like them and their set of skills, their way of thinking, processing, information-making decisions is something they look to coach others with. They look at signals and say, oh, this person's going to be successful. Sometimes it's very difficult to see someone who looks and acts very different to you and recognize the strengths they're bringing and why those are needed because you're not obviously wired that way, but it takes a discernment to realize that skill is needed and valuable and to really create a culture where those differences are welcomed and people get to leverage those strengths because I think there is a bit of a tendency to gravitate more towards group think and people are reinforcing what they want to hear. Sometimes we need to show we're very comfortable with what we don't want to hear, but we know we need to hear it. I do think this just gender is one form of diversity. There's lots of other types of diversity and even gender, obviously itself in recent years, there's been a whole continuum of ways people identify and how they describe themselves. I think there's a lot more awareness of a person's identity and how that can vary. You look at terms like euro, divergence and just differences in thinking is part of that. I do think this is a society that's really important for people to welcome the diversity, realize the value of that, and just anything an individual can invest the time in themselves, get to know themselves better. It's time really well spent and I think coming full circle to the beginning of the podcast when you talked about leadership, when you learn what's uniquely weird or different about yourself or these unique talents you could bring instead of hiding them and trying to conform or feel like someone else, really lean in to what makes you different and that's going to end up being your unique style of leadership that you can gift to others and bring to the world. So people should embrace that and double down on it. One perspective I have on that topic. Fantastic. Sophia, it's been a real pleasure. Thank you so much. It's been an insightful talk on Untold Stories Behind the High Pleasure community. Thank you so much. Thanks Ben. Thanks for inviting me. I really enjoyed it.