 I have the pleasure of inviting Nancy Lublin, this founder and CEO of Crisis Text Line to join us, and Eric Gunderson, the founder and CEO of Mapbox to join us. And Nancy already did the mic drop. She did the mic drop before even getting on stage. This time I'm gonna sit in the middle. Yeah, yeah. Hi guys. Are you on? Yep, you're on. Hey man. So, hey, so both of your projects, I mean, you have pretty different projects that I want you to talk about, but they both depend on engaged communities that you probably wouldn't engage with without these little mobile things in our pockets. So maybe I'll start with you, Nancy, and maybe you guys can, I'm gonna try to stay out of it so you guys can bounce off each other because you guys are such shrinking violets for two of you. But Nancy, how dependent are you and how did you build this community that allows Crisis Text Line to be what it is? The community was the biggest surprise. Here, I'm gonna slide this way because I can't see a lot of people. The community was the biggest surprise of this. When we first built this, we really thought about the textures as our audience and we thought, I mean, we always thought that they would glob onto this because it's common usage, it's text. They know how to text. And that's the primary way people communicate. What we didn't expect was this community of crisis counselors to be as vibrant as it is. So when we first launched, we thought we would be the pipes and we put out an RFP to crisis centers to actually do the counseling, you guys should come in and sit down. It's okay. Oh, okay, or shrink, that's fine. Okay. Anyway, so. That's Jackie, you're gonna meet her tomorrow. Okay, cool. And so we launched with three crisis centers and then our volume went bananas and we quickly had six crisis centers and then 11 and we said, well, they're all really disparate. They're saying different things. So we tested like a magic 12th cohort where we scraped best practices and we trained our own crisis counselors and very quickly saw that they outperformed on every KPI. They were faster, they had higher quality ratings and they were volunteers. We weren't paying them and we were paying these other crisis centers. So we said, well, let's do that. So in 2015, we pushed those crisis centers off and we pivoted completely to our own crisis counselors who we trained. Is anybody here a crisis counselor? Hi, hi. Yeah, hi Sam. Thank you. So we have in the last, in just the last 28 days, we have almost 3,800 Sam's and so it's really vibrant community. People travel around the country to meet each other and it's incredibly diverse. There's about three dozen active duty military personnel. There's about three dozen deaf crisis counselors. It's, there's a lot who are rural. We have a handful in Dubai. It's really, it's pretty awesome. And Eric, you also are an incredibly successful young startup that also works with an engaged community of folks. Can you tell a little bit of that story and like, would you exist without the community that supports you? No, so I started, I started Mapbox with a group of developers that grew out of a project called Development Team. We're literally on the ground working with the UN, working with the World Bank, trying to help people tell stories with data. But you're working in these austere environments. There's no, there's no map to tell that story on and so much of data is geo. Well, the reason there wasn't any map in a lot of these places was because the people in those places couldn't make the map themselves, right? I mean, mapping used to be just a historically bit of very capital intensive process. So, you know, going back to 2007, you have this moment when digital maps weren't new. Right, we had these online. But in 2007, when the iPhone came out, the map started being drawn right around a blue dot. And this is a moment where the map starts forming around you. But the problem was, there wasn't any data to power that map yet. But there was this growing community, it was about, let's say five or six years old, called OpenStreetMap. And, you know, similar qualities to Wikipedia, where you could start going in and adding your house, adding your road, adding context about a neighborhood that you live in or where you grew up. This is an incredibly profound moment, where, you know, this is, everybody's looking back on this, being like, oh, this is, you know, this has been proven now. But when you and I first met, the idea of crowdsource data from a local community seemed crazy to many folks. And you start having this nexus of- It seemed a little crazy to me too, to be honest, but you talked me into it, so it made sense. I hope a little later in the conversation, we talk about how communities work with technology and how do you fund it from a sustainability standpoint. Jen was talking about some of the open data pieces and where the open source component comes in. I mean, the reality is to continue to nurture community, it's just like any kind of diet. You need a lot of support from different, diverse aspects. And so, yeah, no, it's been an amazing couple years, we're a combination of a really rich community and key investments from new satellite imagery to better sensors on the phone, all starts creating this amazing feedback loop. And the best thing of all is, you know, now in places all around the world, there's a map to help us make better decisions about where we live. I think that's incredibly profound. And you guys help fund that. So what's this year been like for you guys? I mean, I think for a lot of us, as I said in the opening, the last year has been a moment of reflecting on what did we get wrong? Were we overly optimistic? I mean, you guys both, I mean, Nancy, you work with like the most critical context people can be in in the course of their daily lives. How has this year been different or similar from the last five, the first five years of CTO? This year's been very busy. So I'm in the pain business and there's a lot of people in pain. I would count this year for us as kicking off an election night. So an election night at one point, were you on on that night, Sam? Were you on the platform? No, okay. One point in time that night we were saying eight times normal volume around nine, 10 p.m. It was ridiculous. And there was three groups of people, LGBTQ Textors and the number one word they used was scared. Immigrants and children of immigrants who were worried about being deported. And the third group was sexual assault survivors. I personally took a conversation with someone who had been raped that day who said, should I bother going to the police? Who's gonna believe me when we just elected a pussy grabber? So that was the beginning of a long year. Also things like you had major suicides in the last year, Chris Cornell and Chester Bennington from Lincoln Park who's a real icon for like a, your music journalist for a particular age group of feelers. And then I don't know if any of you watched 13 Reasons Why or know about it or have a kid who watched it. That was brutal. So I'm really fun at cocktail parties right now. And what one good thing though is sad liberals are great volunteers. So we have seen, we have fortunately because essentially we're a marketplace much like Kickstarter. We're hiring if you're looking. So we're a marketplace so I don't control supply and I don't control demand. And so demand has clearly been bonkers in the last year but supply starting with the election has also gone up. We've had tons of sad liberals who in addition to funding resistance things and thinking about running for office are also like I wanna volunteer and I wanna do something that matters. And so our volunteer numbers have also gone up and especially went up in the first part of the year. So it's been a very interesting year. I'll leave it with, it took us four years to the first 50 million messages back and forth. It's gonna take 10 months to the second 50 million. Before I go to Eric for your 2017 report, I'm still looking for questions. So at news challenge, hashtag news challenge if you have questions. Sorry, I didn't meant to do that earlier. Look, aside from the personal pain over. Seven for one, seven for one if you need it. I mean, there have been some amazing times. And one of the things I was not expecting on this is, how do you help add context, right? I mean, when I was getting developments, he started, the person I was starting with in Ward, we met literally protesting in front of Dick Cheney's house during the war, right? And so you grew up and you're just like, well, I've seen shit, you know? And now you have this incredibly idealistic group of people that you get to work with every day that actually grew up under one of the most amazing presidents we've ever had in our history. And I don't know, I just, I never thought I'd, it's been an interesting moment of feeling a little old. I mean, I appreciate you calling me young here, but like to actually try to add context. It's like you have a young startup. You think? Yeah, a young startup. To actually add context, I'll say, what's up? To folks, to help focus on what is so exciting. And for me, what's been so exciting this year, you've seen mainstream adoption of open data and open source at a level that's just exquisite. And I think what, you know, some of what we're seeing on the open data side is going to be the key ingredient for a lot of machine learning and artificial intelligence. And now to look back at a project that I started years ago, being even better hands with Ian Shuler and what developments he's doing. And you have new open data and new satellites coming out from NASA and how they're starting to process to be able to have better estimates of hurricane strength. It's just like, there's this amazing moment where what we've been building for the last couple of years is starting to hit a curve like this. Now the downside of hitting a curve like this, I think was brought up in regards to just some of the inherent consolidation that starts happening, right? Because whoever has access, I mean the way deep learning works is it learns from something, right? So whoever has access to that learning corpus is going to very quickly start accelerating. And, you know, I think we're at this moment now where some of the open data work that's been invested for years and years and years is starting to become a really powerful corpus for all of us to benefit from a level machine learning that can really help us out. Do you want, are you optimistic about machine learning? How are you guys incorporating it into your work? I'm optimistic about how we're going to use it. You know, we're going to use it to be faster and more accurate. That's what we're doing now. I'm creeped out by some of the companies who call us and want to train on our data corpus, right? So our corpus is really valuable. It's tagged by humans on both sides. It's an unstructured data corpus. It's all sentiment. Like, I don't fault them, but there are some creepy ass companies out there that you're all using every day that call and say things like, can we train on your set? Well, if you don't give it to us, we can get it other ways. Which is like putting me on notice. Would you like, I'll bet you're interested in outcome data, Nancy, like what happens to your textures afterwards. And I'm like, that would be nice to know. And they're like, well, we can give it to you because we can scrape it and tell you the last time they logged in with us and if they're still alive. Just give us all your mobile numbers. Kidding me? No, it is increasingly terrifying what is possible with random pieces of data. And we have this notion of PII. That's like, most of that is like a social security number or something. The more scary data is the stuff that's not PII, right? I mean, being in the location business, if you do not design your systems from an anonymized data collection standpoint from the start, things get freaky. So we are really trying to share best practices with other developers because anybody building an app has anything to do with location starts becoming that kind of vector. And if you don't talk about best practices of anonymizing data, a certain kind of encryption technology, and we're spending a lot of time talking about that in context of AWS because it's accessible. If you don't start sharing these best practices, you really open up a lot of different vectors of different apps. So it's so layered also because it's true. So we've got the mobile carriers have agreed to dump everything and to pull us from billing statements. But we're on AWS. We use Twilio and there's so many other things. There's so many other ways to get at our stuff. You're welcome. And then there's not common rules that's like, how long should you hold on to things? And how should automated scrubbing work? And I mean, there's just there aren't set practices. And I am also on the board of change.org. Change.org has an enormous data set that's very interesting, especially when you consider the amount of work that change.org does in Russia. And the Russian activists who have really relied on change.org. And I mean, lives are at stake. If someone were to get ahold of the names of the Russian activists who have uploaded some of these petitions, it's very sketchy. And yet there aren't common rule sets on encryption. I was really hoping that DJ was gonna be able to get this done when he was in the White House. Yeah, that DJ Patel was gonna be able to get this done during the Obama administration and issue a paper on here are best practices on privacy and security. I know there are a lot of people in the room who are working on this. We need like a Hippocratic oath. We need some common set of standards for what it means to carry a blue lightsaber in this space. You're teeing up some of the later conversations. Oh sorry. Good coordination, no. So Nancy, one question that came in from Twitter, from Erin, is do you have any sense of how participating as a counselor has changed the counselors? Or, and or, how does it change you? I have a 12 year old daughter. And so she looks at me all the time and is like, mom, your crisis text lining me again. So it's definitely changed the way that I talk. Here's a couple of tidbits. You never wanna use a why question. So questions that start with the word why are just, they're useless. You won't get good information out of people. It sounds kind of sending it's negative. Better questions start with how or when. The best words you can use are smart, proud and brave if you wanna make somebody else feel strong. There's sentence structures, all that kind of stuff. And so I was talking to Wendy Kopp about this. Teach for America, when it first started, thought that it was all about student outcomes. And what they've realized along the way is that actually the core members, something like 70% of them stay in education after their two years of service. And so they've done all these studies on what's the impact on having these tens of thousands of core members out there in the world caring about public education. So we talked to their evaluators and we're probably going to hire them or other evaluators to look at what's the impact of our crisis counselors. We've now trained 10,000 people in these Jedi skills. Second Star Wars reference. In these Jedi skills of empathy and cultural competency and having hard conversations who are now out there on military bases and in churches and cul-de-sacs. And they're real life people on two legs. And what's the impact? I don't know yet. So I wanna touch on what, and I don't know how much you're thinking about this, Nancy, but Eric, I know you're spending a lot of time outside of the US. As you think about the next 10 years, what are you learning from what you're doing in China? What are you learning about from India? What are you learning from Southeast Asia? And what is gonna, in terms of, Knight Foundation works and thinks locally about communities here in the United States. What should we be anticipating based on what you're learning, what's emerging? Yeah, one of the depressing anecdotes from the panel right before was talking about, as newspapers have come under increasing pressure, international reporting budgets have been cut. I'm in China almost every two months right now. I don't, it is, there's a notion here in America that things are done fast, things are done cheap. I'm going for a run in Shanghai, the sidewalks are perfect, the quality of transportation there, their bike share system in regards to dockless bikes is beyond last mile, their payment system in regards to mobile pay has created an entire banking sector for an unbanked. It's just like, the innovation is going to start getting imported and I don't think America knows that and that freaks me out. And I don't know, how do you share what you've seen over there, bit by bit? There's just like, there's a level of quality and honestly, there's a lot of aggressiveness outside the US and people putting their heads down and honestly getting radically more skilled and teched up than we are and I think it's going to be a very, very interesting next couple of years. I mean, we were in school, as Americans, we're taught we're special and I think that's going to be a very interesting moment when there's some cultures that are going to be proven to be more creative, more ahead, more advanced, getting more stuff done than we are. That's going to be an interesting point of passing the torch. Nancy, what do you look for inspiration? I mean like, you're a serial entrepreneur, you start a new thing every couple of years, like how do you decide what's next? I like solving problems and I never know what they're going to be. I mean, Crisis Text Line grew from the rib of dosomething.org, aria is here and I didn't think I was going to be in this space but it was compelling and somebody had to do it and so I did it and we're not done. I really think we should help a billion people. I think this is a global issue and so we're going to expand to 20 countries in the next four years. We're already training people in Canada and the UK and I'd like to bring this to other parts of the country where no mental health services exist and when there's no data because if we can create a global map, like if you go to crisistrends.org you can see what we've aggregated and anonymized for the US. It's pretty cool but imagine doing that for the world and this is where the technology getting ahead of policy is exciting because there is no unified or in some places there's no definition of domestic violence if you're married do whatever you want. There is no definition or common definition of what is a minor and so if the technology because we are working in fields and in systems, Jen Palka, because we do work in systems like this if we establish that and a universal definition of these things we can then have a global map of mental health and behavioral health and that'll be really exciting and can change a lot of things. So I'm bullish on the next four years. Having said that, I do have a side hustle already that I'm working on. Go on, time's up. Well, so I've got a side hustle I'm working on the side too. Yeah, tell us, can we all, by the way, I don't know how much more you're gonna be up here but tomorrow's your last day and this is crazy. Who's gonna return our phone calls? Nobody, because nobody else there returns phone calls. You're great. And we're, hold on, am I alone? Come on, has it not been? No, you know what I'm talking about. So what I was gonna ask Nancy was, as veteran successful startup CEOs, what are your, you both have built amazing teams. In the minute we have last, what's, what are your CEO hacks? Startup CEO hacks. We have lots of, we have lots of more junior, sorry, emergent executive directors here in the room. Sleep training, just start early. That's it, that's it, that's it. I remember, I literally remember the moment I was reading this thing, I was like, wow, Bill Clinton sleeps four hours a night. Do you have kids? Yeah, now, and it turns out, by the way, two plus two plus one does not equal five. Like apparently you can optimize to a point where it just becomes pretty brutal. But no, because the reality is if you want to do, if you want to do something and lead a team in the end of the day, it's your job to pick up the pieces. And you've gotta find the time to do that. Like it's, you've gotta be the one that takes care of the stuff nobody else wants to do and take care of the people when they fall down. That's your job. And it's just a level of work you put in. And there are all the typical things like hire people smarter than you, sleep is optional, the one touch rule when you open it, finish it. But I would say the best thing that I learned is, was taught to me by one of our supervisors. I will confess, I was afraid to be on the Crisis Text Line platform for like the first 18 months, almost two years. I just didn't think I would be good at it. And I was afraid that I would be too emotional. Like I cry at the Olympics when any skater falls down. Like I just, there have been McDonald's commercials that have done it to me. I mean like I just, I thought I was gonna be, it was gonna be hard. And we had a big spike and one of the supervisors slacked me and was like, you need to be on the platform. The community needs to see you here. And I went on and I basically haven't left. And I'm now in the top 10 crisis counselors just as a volunteer for taking conversations that I'm in there all the time. And it's made me a better CEO. It's made me a better mom. It's made me, I hope a better friend. I don't know, Aria can tell you, but. And I will never not eat the dog food. Like as a CEO, you have to be one of your top users. And you have to be in there. You have to eat your own dog food. All right, well with dog food, we're gonna take a 10 minute break and then we're gonna have the amazing Susan Crawford talking about the subway experience and the future. We'll be back in 10 minutes. So people on the internet come back and find us in about 10 minutes. Thank you, you two. Thank you.