 So, hi everybody, my name is Anne O'Lachlan Bosman and I was an Epic Alarm in 2002 and that really began my journey into the business world. I was sitting in a seat just like you guys here tonight and I was actually just talking to my colleagues that when I was at Tufts, the word business wasn't even a part of my vocabulary. I was very much interested in international development and, you know, changing the world and I came from a history and Spanish double major, so I definitely did not have the background or what I thought to be the education to go into business but I still ended up there. And basically what happened was the theme of our global or of our Epic year was global inequities and this was 2002, 2001-2002 school year and I met a gentleman through Epic that was doing research on sweatshop labor and in particular the migrant labor phenomenon of Southeast Asia and I just really resonated with that topic and I really wanted to get involved and so I ended up writing a huge long paper about it in my senior year at Tufts and that when I graduated from Tufts I had no job opportunities and I ended up becoming a waitress so that I could pay the bills. I connected with this same man and he had an idea that he wanted to start into a business that would help solve some of the issues that we had studied together in terms of sweatshop labor and so I ended up working for him and starting this business that was an apparel company that provided an alternative to sweatshop apparel and that's what really got me started on having a passion for not only business but social enterprise and between that probably decade of my working in the social enterprise space it was barely just a thing. Back then in 2002 corporate social responsibility was hardly a concept let alone a readily understood concept or that people everyday consumers would have on their minds. So I was really excited to kind of delve into this area of how business could make a more immediate impact rather than some of the other jobs I was looking at in the non-profit world that were more about grant writing and advocacy and things like that. So I started in this very scrappy bootstrap start up, worked there for five years ended up working in the social entrepreneurship space for about ten years until I got completely burnt out and took a little bit of a step back and realized that I needed some of those business, that business education that I didn't necessarily get while I was at Tufts like financial planning and profit and loss management and things like that. So I ended up going to Babson College for my MBA and while I was at Babson I was also managing a small start up that was much less in that kind of global inequities environment and corporate social responsibility environment and it was much more in line with kind of what it was a hot new idea locally and moving more into the tech space. And when I graduated from Babson I ended up leaving that company and that's really when I crossed that threshold from kind of small start up-y changing the status code, changing the business as usual into a more traditional organization and that's when I worked at Harvard Business School in their department called HBX and Harvard as you know is one of the oldest institutions in all of America and their business school was founded over a hundred years ago and so this was a very kind of dinosaur-esque ancient school with very bureaucratic policies and HBX was working within that it's almost like its own little startup in the online education space so I worked with HBX and kind of helping them determine what does business education look like for them in the online space how can we leverage these new technologies and these new formats in order to still reach the school's goals and really help them progress as education is transforming in the digital age and I did that for for almost two years I would have stayed there a lot longer if I wanted to or if I could have but what happened was this the role that I have now at General Assembly the opportunity was brought to me and it was just too hard to to resist so I ended up jumping back into the startup world but it was very different because General Assembly is venture capital back so we have money and that feels really good and and I am now I serve as their regional director so I oversee all of our operations in Boston in Providence and like he mentioned earlier today General Assembly is really trying to help close what we see as this global skills gap where the digital age is transforming the skills that employers need their employees to have and Canada's these days aren't yet equipped with those those specific skills and and those skills are usually around coding data science data analysis these really high tech fields that have emerged in the last five ten years and education hasn't yet caught up to teaching people those those hard skills in addition to their soft skills so that's what GA does as well as help kind of diversify the tech talent pipeline really bringing some underrepresented minorities into that mix some people from different socioeconomic backgrounds that might not have college degrees or have access to this new these new jobs in these hot fields which are also very in demand and high paying so that's our mission at at General Assembly and it and it really helps fit kind of my theme of being mission oriented and having a social impact given even though I'm in the world of business and for profit revenue generating business and it is still very much you know kind of a global scale given the the fact that GA is a global organization even though I'm much more locally founded here and I basically got all the way through my undergraduate I was in epic global cities which was fantastic and I actually remember in 2008 I was planning to travel to Turkey to go to Istanbul and Yarbakir and compare how religion was impacting the realism each one of those places and parent contrast and that's when the financial crisis hit and the funds were done so first of all I never gathered it but it's great to see the IGL doing really well and you know after that I worked in US capital over a summer I was an intern there I was really excited about the prospects and is this great big building I was working with all these important people I got there and I was amazed that the systems they were using were incredibly antiquated there were policies and procedures that prevented people from getting their jobs done and it really turned me off of what was happening you know just one example was that I would get a bill from the congressman and I would walk from office to office and I would get signatures on this bill but before I did that I had to call each office and they wouldn't give you the phone number of the person you had to speak with I had to speak with the defense staff or an education staff or someone else so I had to call the receptionist in the office I called the receptionist and then if the person was in the reception would pass me on to the other person would get through all the phone conversations I'd walk to the office I'd get the signature would take me half a day to get all the signatures going from building to building because it's in the work of all these different buildings and then I would get back to the office and there would be a three-word change so I propose some very simple things can be the centralized contact list or the different ways we can make updates about getting all the signatures again and the answers I got were just hard notes without a lot of constructive feedback at the same time I was there and at these two guys who had just started a pilot program at Georgetown called the Compass Fellowship it was a fellowship to train college students to be social entrepreneurs and they were in social enterprise I got into social entrepreneurship at that point in time I didn't think it was a thing at all but at that point it was really kind of revolutionary and I love the concept I spent the summer working more with them than I did at the US Capitol and I ended up bringing that program to talks and ultimately affiliated with the IGL and the program was essentially a year-long fellowship where the first semester you focused on your personal growth what are your passions what do you like to do what are your goals in life and then the second semester was learning those hard skills you always need that combination of soft skills and hard skills so let's take all your passions and let's translate that into finance marketing everything you need to do to actually launch your own business and the end of the year the 15 freshmen who are in the fellowship and it was run by five of the classroom mentors then actually launched their own businesses in practice not everyone launched their own businesses but there were some really fantastic outcomes including about the speeches one example which is Jack Dermott who now works with panorama education but he had a really bad stutter growing up over time he learned to control it but he could cost him thousands of dollars and he had to travel two hours to see a particular specialist and get that treatment he built an iPhone app that did the same thing that a clinically trained doctor could do in listening to his voice understanding the different intonations making recommendations on how I could improve his voice and I was really passionate about working with these different people making that type of change and I absolutely loved the program so over the course of the next few years I expanded that program in Boston brought it to a few other schools and became the Boston Regional Director and we actually made a company out of this social enterprise and it's now called social impact 360 it's now at about 15 campuses around the country we have a national conference each year so I worked my way kind of leading national operations and then on to the board I was recently board chair and then after after a period of time decided it was time for me to step down that's the next leaders come in and run with it and at that point I was a few years into working at Arcadia which is my day job when I came in when I graduated so Arcadia health care solutions is a data aggregation and analytics company but it focuses in the health care space frankly I had no idea what I was getting into I did not do a good job picking a company I didn't really understand what I wanted to do I had you know thought that this business thing was cool and I recognized through what I did with compass that it could really help people but I didn't really know what businesses did or why I would want to be with them or you know his profit really they're they're soulful and what I learned at Arcadia is that you can't have really well-intentioned businesses that do really great things that is kind of the social enterprise model but there's a whole spectrum behind me so what I did at Arcadia and what I continue to do is I go into individual doctor's offices I work with them to understand how they interact with patients how they enter data into their systems and then I bring together the data from hundreds of different doctor's offices in the one platform on which we can do analytics to understand which doctors are treating patients well what are they doing that's treating patients well which patients are at risk from receiving the care that they deserve and where the cost in the system so there was one patient who went into the emergency room 562 times in one year that's not good for the patient that's not good for the taxpayers that's not good for our health care system everybody loses there in the second we identified it we could have someone actually go to the home of that patient and significantly reduce the cost to taxpayers and also improve that patient's health now it is the growing business we have venture funding so we have very specific financial targets that we need to meet and I think it's really important to understand you know the differences between for-profits and non-profits and in parallel to all the work I've done in Arcadia I have a non-profit track they started with what I did at Compass but over time it grew into joining the board of the Global Streets Alliance which is in downtown Boston it's rethinking urban transportation and it's really based on the the fundamental idea that when you walk out your front door every day based on where you are the type of infrastructure you have around you types of signaling and bike paths and cars and crosswalks you feel safe you don't feel safe you feel like it's easy to interact with people or you just want to keep to yourself and you want to put your headphones in and you also want to have access to every place that you want to go right can you get to this school and walk your children there can you you know go to your friend's house easily in a comfortable way all those things make a huge difference in people's lives and through that I also realized that well I really like what I'm doing at Arcadia and I still do I wasn't necessarily getting out as much as I needed to so I actually took time off I took four months I I got in the car with my girlfriend away and we drove around the country in a huge loop and the goal was to see as many national parks as we could went to 15 different national parks and I met a lot of people from a lot of different backgrounds and it really really opened my eyes to other aspects of what I could do I went to Georgetown I got an executive certificate in non-profit management and I actually built an analytics product for someone that I met it helps for organization evaluate social impact that she's able to provide to a fellowship that I saw really parallel with Compass so I always try to have different groups of people in my life different types of impact and business that I bring to the floor and have run parallel I think that works for some people other people just better to fully investing one thing but I find that I'm really able to learn from having these different work streams different groups of people in my life at the same time and a lot of what I found is really valuable to the business environment is understanding how different people treat the same the same problem and then taking ideas that people in one industry or one type of business don't necessarily think about and apply it to another room so I really focused on building technical skills throughout that process I have a lot of data integration skills I'm very familiar with what General Assembly does it's fantastic highly recommended but I think there are lots of different great paths in business the healthcare industry in particular I really enjoyed and I work a lot of educational institutions which started with Compass but happy to take any questions you have and really excited why are there so many successful big innovative companies why are they all in America why is Tesla and Apple and Facebook and you know all the Amazon why are they all in the United States what is it that creates that dynamic is it are they're not entrepreneurial people in other countries is it the way our capitalist system is set up what what is the catalyst for that why why is that distinction there but of course it's a self-serving question and the thing I'm going to say is that I think one of the main things is the capital markets in the United States of America that no other country has the breath of financing available for start for angel investors and venture capitalists and growth equity and private equity and buyouts and debt public markets and when you look at the fact that Tesla has never made a profit and has raised billions of dollars Facebook raised billions of dollars before they ever in a dollar of revenue what other country in the world has a system that provides capital to companies in that basis and I think that it's worth noting that a because we're in a state that is a senator who's very negative about financial services and I also want to just highlight for you that financial there are a lot of interesting things and a lot of good that comes from liquidity and capital markets to help support amazing entrepreneurs and people building businesses so that is a background how I get here because I didn't take a single finance course I didn't know anything about business I was an international relations major I studied abroad in China actually minored in Chinese in 1986 when people would point and stare at me when I went to when I was in China and I had an amazing experience at epic and what I really thought was I want to work somewhere like my epic class I want lots of people yelling at each other debating things that would be an amazing place to work and it wasn't easy to find that job but that was what I was interested in I was fortunate that because I had studied in China because I was interested in international relations I attracted some interest from the investment banks into their training programs and I thought just to try to make this interesting I would just tell a couple stories from different parts of my career and how I kind of got there but what I so I literally knew nothing about finance I was given an accounting book before I started I actually went to China over the summer because when I came back and told my friends about my studying abroad China they all wanted to go we went it was 1989 we had the Tiananmen massacre I was stuck in the country I thought I was never going to get almost gonna be fighting in the revolution fortunately we snuck out of the country on a boat and because they shut down the airports and trains anyway made it to the training program showed up I was out of 70 kids there were less than 10 that didn't go to Harvard Yale Princeton and so it was very intimidated and I just decided that since the and all those kids showed up and they said well when am I going to a board meeting and when am I going to be on a private jet I said how can I get you a cup of coffee can I make copies for you I'm just happy to be here and over time that allowed me to actually distinguish myself from the other kids with their their ideally degrees and but I got a chance to learn about private equity and learn about the investing I was advising them I was a junior person working on advising them and I started to see that our clients these investors were making a lot of the key decisions we were given advice but ultimately they were making the decisions and they were also living with the companies for longer periods of time we would give advice and go away we never know what really happened they were sort of really owning it and being part of it for a longer period of time and so I said you know that looks pretty interesting I remember my boss said that if corporate finance is a language then private equity is the poetry of that language I thought that was a good line so I decided to defer business school and I went to work at a venture capital firm I had been doing a lot of sort of more mature company stuff I thought it would be great to see venture capital and so I showed up to see what early-stage investing was like and I remember the first week one of the partners said to me Brad we're meeting with a biotech company went in this guy had been a professor at Harvard Medical School he walked us through he had the cure for cancer I mean what it was brilliant I mean he was diagramming on the whiteboard this is the cure for cancer we walked out of the meeting and my boss said to me what do you think the cure for cancer we've got to invest in this I mean it's unbelievable she said to me listen let's wait till the end of the week two days later another biotech company's come in professor comes in from Princeton doctor genius he's got a cure for cancer basically what I realize is it's really hard to tell which cure to cancer is gonna be the right cure to cancer and what I realize is that early-stage investing is challenging because there's a lot of unknowns you're trying to figure out what is what is the market up to you what is which product is gonna work it's very challenging so with that I got recruited to a very large private equity firm that did what you guys would think of as buyouts which is you know putting debt on more mature business is helping to drive efficiency and run them and I had an experience to do that I stayed there for ten years and I enjoyed it but I found that these mature companies I could only add so much value they were already very large they were very mature was a very dynamic and mostly we were you know making sure that they weren't defaulting on their debt and kind of generating cash for and I realized at that time that I really was much more interested in the combination those who I wanted the growth of venture and I wanted a little more data a little more information there that I could sink my teeth into to make my decisions and at the same time I didn't want to work with large companies and so I met a firm that specialized in growth equity growth equity is looking for companies that are the markets defined the products defined the business models defined but they need money to take the company to the next level so maybe they have 10 20 30 million a revenue they're growing 20 to 100% year and they need capital to take them to the next stage they need advice they need to figure out how to build the infrastructure to scale their business and we ended up partnering with a firm that might well as my old firm that did that they got very excited about me I got very excited about them and they invited me to open the New York office of their firm and that's how I got to FTV and so what we do is we specialize in investing in enterprise technology and services that are innovative solutions to make enterprises better and in financial services how do we make the provision of wealth management insurance payments any kind of financial service better and those are the two areas that we specialize in and we get to work with amazing entrepreneurs I have right now for example I sit on eight boards I have one in Shanghai one in India two in the UK and the rest are here in the US and they're all serving you know very either large enterprise markets or working with enterprises to sell products and services to consumers just to give you a sense our average portfolio company over the last five years grew at like 48% a year since 2012 and it's you know from my perspective it's extremely rewarding to see companies growing creating jobs and hopefully offering something valuable into the marketplace and what's nice is it's very fresh and each day is a little bit different and I get you know I think the little ADD in me appeals and finds it nice to see a lot of different things and you know I thought it would be worth just spending a minute on why it's life epic and kind of what their job is so I guess first in terms of what the job entails there's kind of four key things to think about one is you have to be analytical in terms of analyzing data about markets and companies their financial another is you have to be good at judging the people do you want to back them can you trust them so you're a little bit of a psychologist and making sure that you're backing a team that has the right values the right energy and enthusiasm discipline the third thing is you need to be a negotiator because you've got to you got to be able to negotiate a deal you got to be the kind of person who likes to you know who enjoys haggling for a used car or buying clothes on sale or whatever or going to a market in a third world country and haggling for that you know tourist item and then the fourth part is you have to have investment judgment you have to be able to put all that together and synthesize it so those are the key things to make a deal and then obviously over years when your hair is the color of my hair is you have a lot of lessons learned that you can impart to entrepreneurs to help them be more successful and more mostly telling them mistakes that they shouldn't make that you've seen other people and so that's what the job looks like and when you think about that investment decision and you think about me sitting with my partners debating whether or not we should make this investment and what price we should pay and what's going to happen to market which competitors are going to win it's kind of like an epic class it's a different topic but that's the spirit of what we're all doing is looking at the data looking at the primary research trying to make sense of all that information so that's uh that's a summary of what I do so I'll start there it's not necessarily how hard you work it's what you do with the time you have and how you devote your energy so that's that's all really important work-life balance is defined in many different ways so I really encourage you to take it to heart I personally when I get excited about an idea the next six hours are me sitting in front of a computer calling everyone I know and hashing it out a lot of other people I interact with have no idea they don't understand why what would compel me to do that right and then when I want to get away I take four months and I drive around the country so that works well for me I would not recommend it for everyone right so I would say it really is kind of up to you and your priorities in life change over time so I was really willing to completely commit to a company right when I graduated college and now I'm realizing at some point you know there are certain savings goals I have and I want to build a family so I really do think you can't underestimate kind of your life context and where you are at a certain point in time to what your life work balance should be I think corporate culture these days is embracing work-life balance you know as the labor market is getting more competitive a lot of the employers are trying to be more competitive in terms of what they're offering and how they're recruiting and so I know I feel we're in a phase led by some of the giants where you know benefits are a lot more attractive like they're trying to be a lot more attractive so you know flexible vacation time at GA we have no vacation policy you take whatever time you need things like that we're working from home remote work it's a lot more people are a lot more comfortable with it now and so I see it as being less of an issue now and in the next few years and it was maybe you know 10 years ago my my personal view of it is that I ran myself into the ground as I mentioned I started for companies in like I don't know how many years as many years it was a little bit of a disaster and then when I went to business school I was also running a startup at the same time so I had massive burnout and that was a big reason also that led me to HBS is because I wanted the 9 to 5 clock in clock out you know like just total opposite life that I had before which was 24-7 always on you know can never work hard enough and it was almost a reason why I didn't go to GA because I was like oh god start a world start a world start a world like I don't know if I'm ready but I can tell you that I was not happy inherently at HBS like when everyone literally clocked out and left at 501 and I'm still sitting there I was like come on guys let's where's that vibe let's go like I liked the family vibe that comes from kind of a little bit like a little bit different of a work culture but it doesn't have to necessarily come at the expense of your life and I think GA in particular is a really good company in terms of that and so when I did take that leave I was very pleasantly happy with the benefits and that's what kind of opened my eyes that like oh startups and companies in general I think are a little bit different now they're they're taking a lot more seriously to Steve's point that I think the understanding of productivity is a little different now leadership and management understands that you need that time away you need to rejuvenate you want your employees to have work by balance because otherwise you will run them into the ground and your company will not be better off for it so now I feel like a really bad boss finance is not a place for people who want work by balance seriously my team is probably ordering a dinner right now at the office and I worked you know when I started I worked 80 hours a week for the first two years and I loved every minute of it and you just have to make a personal decision what you want I mean I you know for me when I look at I wanted to find a job that I was so passionate and I was learning enough that engaged me like that I kind of thought I I was laughing because I thought I can't imagine learning any more in business school except they're paying me a lot of money instead of me paying them a lot of money this is great and I was just happy to learn as much as I could and I thought it was fantastic obviously as you get older and you take on more responsibility your time allocation and your the job description changes but if you're graduating college and thinking I want work life balance you're probably not going to love the kind of jobs that you get at the beginning of your career in finance and you know I think that again I think that the trade-offs about that is you're working with very dynamic high-energy people you're learning a lot you're very well paid for your time and energy and it's exciting but it is exhausting I mean I have a guy who actually a Tufts grad who I hired is an associate of my firm who this morning I got an email he sent it out at 1 22 a.m. we are trying to close a deal in the UK there was an analysis that was needed he got it out so that the people who are in London could have it first thing that's not going to happen often but it does happen and that so just trying to give you a sense for the spirit of that culture I mean you know look I think the question is how do you handle the mistakes you made I think you know when just early trying to think about things that might be relevant to you guys as you're starting your job I when I started my first week on the job at the very beginning of my career in investment banking full of enthusiasm excitement one of my bosses asked me to do an analysis over the weekend and with all my confidence I said I'll bet you a hundred dollars I get do it right by Monday morning and he said great let's do it and I literally had to work you know all weekend I worked you know a hundred hours and I brought it in I thought I got it to right and it was wrong and I lost the hundred dollars but the good part of it was he was really impressed that I made that effort and paid my hundred dollars and but I then had his confidence going forward and so yes I screwed up and I didn't do it right but I did establish that foundation with my what became one of my mentors so sometimes mistakes can also be positives I I was very ambitious when I came into Arcadia I learned some things right off the bat and we had our biggest baddest best customer just come through the sales process we were really excited about it there's going to be our first full-scale analytics delivery on a new product and I I requested to leave the whole product the whole project huge mistake it got to a point where when I should have had a full project team with a project manager you know a business lead a technical lead a number of developers regardless of how it was structured those are the general roles basically ended up short staffed and every time someone left the project I said that's okay I'll pick up for that person ended up working 90 hour weeks through the weekends ended up losing the customer it was it was a pretty bad situation I did get a free MBA similar to what you mentioned when you work hard you do learn a lot so I'm very thankful for that and the best news is that there are customers again so something went right over the course of that but I really didn't understand what I was getting myself into I like very directly led to a bad situation for the company and a bad situation personally because I burned myself out and at this point I can spot that type of situation from mile away but at the time I just didn't see it coming I'd say one of my maybe not my biggest mistake so the five years that I ran my own company I made so many we'd have to go out for drinks and like you know but yeah I'd say like the the most recent mistakes that I feel like I'm always about to make it again and again it's more like a leadership lesson in that they learned at HBS and now again at GA I have a lot of practice in that I hate politics and I am very very transparent and honest and I don't like playing the games and sometimes you have to and so I'm trying to understand that balance almost every day of like when to kind of put on the face and perform because it is my my boss at GA told me this and she's very right it's a performance when you're leading a team or a company or whatever and when to be but still be authentic and so I think I've made a couple of mistakes where I've been too honest too open spoke my mind through somebody under the bus and inadvertently and in a place like Harvard Business School I made those mistakes a lot like I told my boss there that was almost like I was stepping on landmines and she was like yeah you are and I was like okay great um and so but at the same time I didn't want to just keep my mouth shut you know so it's kind of like how do you raise a flag manage up or across in a non-political way that doesn't rock the boat so it's it's a tough it's a tough thing I think to really nail and I'm I'm still working on that myself even though I have all these years of experience it's still something that sometimes I'll trip up and I'll be too honest and especially when I have a team though they'll pick up on they'll pick up on it and run with it and the next thing I know someone on a global team is calling me being like I don't know if it's from your team and you're like whoops so yeah that's yeah I wonder if we're gonna differ on this one I would say and so I hire people a lot right like we hire and recruit so when I am looking for a candidate and somebody that I want to hire I always go with the person that has those baseline liberal arts skills and is the culture fit before the art skills because you can always train right like if you don't know excel but you're a fantastic all those everything that that brad said is on point you know analytical confidence innovative creative energetic like all these things that I want to see influence like how well are you at influencing it's really all those kind of like people skills that that I'm most interested in in terms of my team and it's that kind of just like just that confidence that that I would prefer because anything hard you can always train always so I don't know if you guys feel the same way but but I would also recommend to just take advantage of everything that Tufts has to offer because coming from general assembly you can walk down to general assembly and take that class at any time in your career but like the Tufts community the Tufts education everything at IGL is a little bit harder to to find out in the world um well you know there's a plenty of online options for some of those harder things but I completely agree I look for the people first that's the number one criteria in hiring I think that personally it's really important even outside of the job to no personal finance so that that doesn't mean you need to know advanced things so you should be able to build a balance sheet manage a budget those types of things similarly and it probably dubs up tails in with excel but I haven't seen a job yet where being able to do the lookups into the tables which are simple excel functions where people consider them advanced when they haven't used excel they're just incredibly important so I think if you can prove that you have a mind that's organized and you can you can structure your thoughts in coherent ways you can build a story when you need to you can communicate effectively with people all of those things are what I would look for in hiring hiring and if you have those I'm confident that you can pick up a database querying language or you can start working on software engineering and you can build out you know more advanced financial skills over time yeah I mean I think obviously part of it is what is it that you want to do if you have any idea that that helps to frame some of these things I think I guess the thing I will say is I didn't take any of those classes um I do think when I did finally start studying accounting I was like wow this is actually really valuable and interesting and I'm glad I understand it and so I think there are certain things you should say what are the skills that I at some point I want to acquire and when do I want to acquire I will say that um you know I think I read an article I thought was very thoughtful on the topic of computer science which is you don't have to be a great programmer but you need to understand enough that you can explain what you want or articulate it I think that I think that that is something that is good to have um I do think I mean I I very much worry about personal financial literacy in America and I think it is very good to have that as a baseline that everyone should understand finance enough um so I you know I do I do think that that is good but I will also say just on the hard skills point I remember when I interviewed for my investment banking job the managing director said to me every formula you need to know I can put on the back of a business card and that's really true you know it was very intimidating but the truth is it's not that complicated so I I think I would focus on some of the other areas and I would add one other thing which I'd be interesting your take on but one of the pieces of advice that I really took to heart when I think about start up and what it takes to build a business is that for the most part you're either trying to beat Microsoft Excel because you're trying to build data structures or you're trying to beat Facebook because you're trying to build a community and almost every startup I see out there at least that's trying to make money as its primary purpose is trying to be one of those two sometimes it's trying to be both at the same time and there are very few companies that actually succeed just at beating those two pieces of software