 Good morning everyone. Thanks for coming in after really a late-night party yesterday. Today I'll be talking more about like the barriers and the opportunity that WordPress has created in WordPress Nepal community. That's so wonderful. I'm so privileged to be here and presenting in front of you all. And thank you all listeners who is listening to me in the live cast. Good evening to people in Nepal. I'm Sarkin Shrestha and I'm from catch internet. I generally do develop themes and plugins and you can follow me on Sarkin Shrestha. I founded a company called catch internet and where I now sells themes using cast themes. WordPress changed from me from theme developer to a tech entrepreneur and I have now co-owned various companies like theme palace, the WordPress Nepal boss and theme review.co. Basically I'm from Nepal. When I say Nepal, many people don't know where it is. So it's a tiny country, it's a landlocked country between India and China, the two big biggest country. So whenever I say Nepal and they always think it's a mountainous country and they say like, have we climbed the Mount Everest? And I said no, I'm from Nepal. That doesn't mean that I climbed Mount Everest. Only the Sherpas and the mountainous people climb Mount Everest. I'm a tech person. Okay, then next question is usually are you Buddhist? You are from the Buddha country. Then I said no, majority of people are still there is Hindu actually. That's why we follow Buddhism but not all people are Buddhists. So these are the questions I get as soon as I introduce myself. Now let's look at the barriers that we have is like we have a family oriented cultures like we have three generations living together like grandparents, parents and me and child and everyone is together with a good family. The good point is you get support when you need it. The bad point is like when you have an idea, when you want to do something new, then there is always like conflict of interest and you have to follow the whole cultural thing. So that's again the bad thing. You don't become independent at the age of 16. And the career choices basically in Nepal is like, okay, you want to be a doctor or you're going to do agriculture things. Otherwise there's not much culture career choices. So we are talked like that and we have lots of dreams. We want to be like artists or we want to be tech people or designer. Then they will say oh why you want to be a designer? Or you want to do art? How are you going to make your living? So we have to study education accordingly and our hate guts turning round and round. We don't have a startup culture. There's nothing called like a garage startup or like you start from your living room. But then when you say like I want to do a business to your parents, then they will say, do you have money to do it? I cannot give you that much of amount. In Nepal it's considered when you want to do a business, you need to have a lot of money to do a business, but it's just a misconception. Another misconception is that it's a tech generation, but then parents we live with our parents. That's why when we are doing a lot of computer things, they are thinking that you're not studying. You're just playing around. So don't play around. Just read your book. So reading book is only considered as like studying kind of thing. And when I say like I'm a computer engineer, then they will say, do you make keyboards? Do you repair my computers? And then the uncle and aunt will come and say oh gentlemen, can you come to my home and repair? It's been down since last week. So those are the things. It happens all the times and there's nothing called software engineer kind of thing. And my story is not much of different. I followed all the cultures things and went to study and then graduated MBA from Singapore. And I said, oh, my parents was really, really happy with that. Okay, that's great. You have done it. And I said, okay, I have done it. Then that was just the beginning for me. I don't know what to do. Then I came back to my home country. I loved it but then I study management MBA. So what I thought like, let's join an IT company where I can use my IT skills that I've been practicing from my grade eight, so that I can do it as well as management. And I joined this company called digital max solutions, which helped me a lot. They hired me as a human resource managers. At the time, this was the back in 2007. It was one of the biggest company in Nepal with 30 employees. But they were using custom PHP and custom software. So we are having a lot of problem and I was giving the opportunity to update this site regularly. But then I have trouble always updating and then I choose like, okay, let's do it in WordPress. Then the management team said, okay, how can WordPress do all the content management system? It's just a blog. Then I had to do it in my weekend time. I just converted this site into the WordPress. And that's how the story changed. The company started doing all the things on WordPress. Then luckily, I went to Australia, Melbourne. And there I attended WordCamp Melbourne in 2011. So that was the good thing. And I love WordCamps. I love attending WordCamps because that inspired me a lot. It has changed my life. It has changed whole lives of others. And it has changed lives of WordPress, Nepal. They were very welcoming. They were very charming. They were helping, exchanging ideas. There's nothing called competitions. So I said, wow, if I can simulate these things in the back in Nepal, then Nepal can build a good IT culture. I went back to WordPress Nepal. So in the same way, my friend, Tonya Morrison, was also in WordCamp San Francisco. And he came back and we three Chandra, Ucho and me founded the WordPress Nepal community in back in 2011, end of 2011. So we decided that we're going to do a WordCamp 2012. And we're so excited. But we don't know where to start. It was a humble beginning. And we were like only five or six people doing meetups in like cafes or restaurants. And then also meet up at home playing games and all the things. And the idea like, okay, let's do workshop in colleges like and then talk in colleges and all. So we started getting more students into the WordPress communities and telling more and more people about it. We use the social networking to expand our widen our market. So and then we were able to organize first ever WordCamp 2012 with 130 people on it. And that was amazing for us. That was life changing for us. And like everybody knew what is WordPress about it. And everybody started working on it. And there was new companies growing every year, everywhere companies were going, people working in WordPress is growing. And we continued WordPress meetup whether there is two people, five people, 10 people or 20 people, we didn't care about it. We continued like every last Sunday of the month is our WordPress meetup. That's it. And then we did that. And because of that, we have growing numbers of what people in WordCamp every year, like 2013, four in 15. And then we saw as we thought about like, okay, let's decentralize that we have already grown such a big amount of turnover in Kathmandu. Let's do it in all the cities. So we this year, we changed the name from WordCamp Nepal to WordCamp Kathmandu. And there was more than 300 people attending WordCamp Kathmandu. This was amazing event again. And so we wanted to transform that and we had like meetup in other cities like Birat Navar Pokhara and Chuton. We have already started that, which is also another great achievement for us. And now we have more than 5000 members in our group. And anyone can anyone from Nepal can join that. That leads to creating a lot of opportunities within the Nepalese horizon. You won't believe there are so many companies doing themes, plugins, outsourcing and all those stuff. If you say Nepal is just like mountain and then agriculture, but then it has changed the life. You can see the number of companies that I even couldn't fit in my big slides. These were all formed during the last five, five years. So these are all new companies and every year it's been growing and growing and every year it's been creating lots of job opportunities and all. So again, thanks for the word camp and WordPress because like it helps people to get international exposures and market like we've been selling themes and plugins internationally. Previously, we couldn't sell our product because we are like more of a landlocked country and in order to export, we used to export like handicraft, we still export handicrafts. But then it's very difficult process. You need to go from all the way to India, Calcutta, Seaport to export anything. So that's how WordPress made it easy to export our capabilities and lots of web solutions, online magazine blogs, international word camp and meetups. We are able to participants now. We are like six of them participating in word camp Europe and there are more people trying to come to word camp US. It also creates a lot of freedom to expressions and then because the WordPress is a platform where you can write a blog and there is a newspaper, online newspaper nowadays. Previously used to just focus on like government sites and government TVs and radios which is filtered out so we don't know what exactly is happening. So this is how WordPress has changed. Again, now anyone can easily build a website and change the life, change the informations and it's been changing the mindset of the people from last six years. Our parents are proud, even my parents are proud to say that okay, my son does WordPress work and he's been doing a good living out of it. So they probably says it's a computer engineers. We are keeping our youth back home. Previously, if you are a computer engineer or software engineer, you have to go to US, Australia or European countries to in order to work. But now we have lots of companies establishing and every year it's growing. We are able to keep our youth back home. That's again, another amazing thing that's happening and you can see people working here. That's why like now I'd like to conclude by saying that okay, it has break our social barriers, all the barriers that has been done. Now it's like WordPress changed the life a lot. It has created entrepreneurship. Now people are starting doing business from their garage or their living room, their kitchens, whatever they have. Just this is a laptop and then start learning from YouTube and Codex and all those things and they can start businesses easily. There's lots of job opportunities. Actually, I'm glad here to say that we have actually short days of WordPress developer in Nepal. We still need to train people when we are hiring. That's why it's lots of opportunity if you are in WordPress in Nepal. And there is a again, I've already told you there's freedom to expression and we have grown from like slow IT culture. There was no IT culture at all to the fastest growing article. So every year we have at least 10 good WordPress companies coming in and more and more. So thank you very much.