 Hi everyone, I'm Karen Bricker from Mountain View. I'm the Youth Services Manager, so I have the absolute joy of overseeing children's and teen. And then I also oversee outreach. And we are one of the libraries that still has a bookmobile. We have a bookmobile because Google bought us one. And we have a Google bookmobile because many years ago, I started taking the bookmobile to corporate sites. So in addition to going to senior centers and doing childcare centers and story times, we don't go to neighborhoods anymore, but we also go to corporate sites. And let me tell you, the Googlers are great consumers of tangible library materials, not just virtual ones. So I wanna tell you about Alligator Zone. And Alligator Zone is a different approach to working with the startups. So Alligator Zone is called a social impact venture. It is a venture of Silicon Glades, which is Silicon Valley and the Everglades in Florida. And what is Alligator Zone? It's a place where kids meet cool startups. Families have a chance to meet entrepreneurs and to be among the first to hear their innovative ideas. Oops, we're not even in, sorry. Okay, Alligator Zone. So Alligator Zone is a place where, again, as I said, kids meet cool startups. Families have a chance to meet entrepreneurs and be among the first to hear their innovative ideas. Their questions and suggestions can help entrepreneurs steer their projects successfully across the Alligator Zone, avoiding the issues that can sink startups. That's the whole idea of it. So kids and families get to participate in innovation in a unique and exciting way, and they really, really enjoy doing it. So how did this start? I didn't go beating the bushes for startups as Cheryl did. Instead, I got a phone call from a man who lives in Tampa, Florida. His name is Ramesh Sambasavan. You can see him, okay. And that's Ramesh up there. And he had actually done, he's an entrepreneur himself, and he had done, was working here in Silicon Valley as well as in Florida. And he has a couple of young kids, and one day they were in Miami. He was there on business, and it was raining really hard, and they were in a hotel room. And the kids were watching Shark Tank. And Ramesh looked at his kids, really engaged with this, and he thought, what if I took my knowledge of startups and entrepreneurship and brought it to a young audience? Because kids are really excited about new things. They have lots of questions, and validating those questions through this kind of program would be a lot of fun. And so that's where the kernel of Alligator Zone started. And actually it didn't start on the West Coast in Mountain View. It started in Sunnyvale with Liz Hickock. I don't know if there's anybody here from Sunnyvale. Okay, but I wanna give you credit, because Liz was the first program of Alligator Zone in Silicon Valley, was at Sunnyvale, and Mountain View was the second. So Ramesh called me up, and he said, I'm here to do a program in Sunnyvale. If you have any time, I'd like to meet you. And I was working on a Saturday, and I said, if you can get here at eight o'clock, we can sit down and talk. Do you ever have the experience where you meet somebody and they are so compelling, so interesting, so exciting, and they communicate their vision so clearly that you absolutely want to work with them? That's the way I felt about Ramesh. He is an energetic, exciting person who has this dream and is trying to spread it widely. And we're really happy to be part of it. So our first Alligator Zone was at Mountain View in November of 2014. So Ramesh has been doing this for about 15 months. And at first, the first couple of programs that we did, he came out from Florida. He had other business meetings too, but he was with us at the time that he was doing the programs. And the first one we had two presenters, that's his model, is to have two different entrepreneurs. And we had about 45 kids, eight and up, teens and parents. So now Alligator Zone is in 12 libraries in eight cities in three states. So we have Florida, California, and Pennsylvania. And libraries hold the programs anywhere from two to 12 times a year. Now what Ramesh does is he has the connections with the entrepreneurs. So he's making all of the contacts with the entrepreneurs. And what we do is provide the space. I do the flyers and the marketing for the program and we register, although he also does his own registration, so we put them together. And so it really takes, I would say, for each program I'm putting in at first maybe 10 hours, now probably five hours, and I'm in the room. And when Ramesh had talked about how difficult it was to come out all the time for as the program was growing, I said I'm happy to facilitate it. So I started facilitating it for us. So here is a slide. Renan Lachman is the founder of Play World. And Play World is the Netflix motto for Legos. So what they do is they have a website, you go on and you select the kits that you'd like to receive. They, depending on your subscription, they send you one kit and when you're done with it, you return it and they send you another one. So what inspired this entrepreneur was that he had kids and he had a house full of toys that weren't being used all the time. And he thought, what if you had this kind of churning of the toys, the kids would be really interested in it, you wouldn't have all the stuff to clean up. And what was interesting was when he presented, of course the kids were fascinated by it and they asked questions like, what if you substitute a non-real Lego piece? Well, what we get into trouble, we get a fine like you do at the library. What if you don't return all the pieces? And they are, they know whether the pieces are there. They think it's more trouble to assess a fine on someone than to simply forgive it. So it's interesting when you think about libraries and how much effort we go to when somebody has something or a piece of something that has not been returned and how much staff time goes into doing that. So I thought his model was very, very interesting. They have industrial washing machines, they put everything in bags. The kids had lots and lots of good questions about play and it was a very successful presentation. So this one is Dr. Alistair Hood and play of course had lots of appeal for kids. I wasn't sure that this one would have as much appeal. What it is is an app that allows you if you are a business that has multiple sites to be able to see what your fuel consumption is, your water consumption, your natural gas consumption, to be able to monitor your use of energy and see where you need to put your efforts to be more conservation minded. But the kids were fascinated by the metrics of it, how it worked, asked lots of questions. There has never been a presentation whether it was really kid friendly or not particularly of kid interest that the kids have not had questions. We've had to cut off the questions because they've been so interested in them. Then this is Panteligent and this is Umberto Evans and Panteligent is an app that helps you cook. So for people who don't feel comfortable with cooking, they have the pan, they have the app and they cook salmon that night and that was a big hit of course. It provides, the app provides recipes again. So there's a wide variety of the startups that have come to present at Mountain View. And the last one I wanna show you is Oddvisor and that's Mike Martin with Oddvisor. So this is advice in three minutes from experts. So you decide what the topic is that you wanna learn about and you get advice in three minutes through this app. And so the kids here were thinking, well, what would I need advice about? And they asked Mike Martin, would you ever do anything about bullying? That's an issue with us or doing homework or they had other ideas that they would like and Mike was very receptive to that and was interested in perhaps expanding Oddvisor into some other areas. So that came out through the kids' comments as well. So the other thing that we do is that we do an evaluation. And the evaluations have been very positive. The parents have been very positive about it. They have been positive for themselves because some of them are entrepreneurs or hope to be entrepreneurs and they've been very positive about the effect on their kids. And it's been fun for them to see how engaged the kids are and how many good questions. I don't think I've ever heard a really stupid question from any of the kids. Some of the adult questions maybe aren't as good as the ones the kids ask, but the kids have been wonderful about doing that. So we are gonna be doing a program on October 17th and it's gonna feature I think two very kid-friendly startups. One is Titanium Falcon and it is a gaming ring. So it's wearable controller for gaming. And the other one is going to be Dash Robotics. And so it is something that you build your own robot. You program your robot, but you play with it and the robot can evolve. So again, what we do as a library is the marketing, the space, we may serve as host and then we do that evaluation form and the tabulation. But it's, again, as I said, very expensive for Ramesh to fly out for all the programs and he's a problem solver. So he's looking for another way to handle this and what he's come up with is a student ambassador program. So through video conferencing and questionnaires and time spent with teens who expressed interest and their parents, so they're part of it too, Ramesh is preparing teens to do things like host the program. He's always had kids read the introduction that he had written, but they will host the program. They will take video, they will do video interviews of the presenters afterwards. They will take photos during the program and they will write blog posts about it. And he's tried this out at Sunnyvale and then at the Rinconato Library in Palo Alto is the latest one and will be the third one that gets to experience this. I love the idea of empowering students to take these kinds of responsibilities on. And so I think it's gonna save him time and money in coming out to California to other states, but I think it'll be really wonderful for the kids and the families too. So thank you very much.