 My name is Casey Fenton, and it's a pleasure to be here with you today. And I've been spending a great portion of my life working on trust systems. But I'd like to share a secret. I've come here to share a secret with you all. And that's the secret of how I 3xed or I tripled the output of my company's time and time again using different systems, using trust and equity. But first, I'd like to ask you a question. Look around. I'm going to ask you to raise your hands. Look around. Look for somebody who looks trustworthy. Now, here's a question. Would you let that person hire you if you knew that person had a job for you that didn't pay anything and wouldn't give you any equity? How many people here would take a job for three years, work really hard, no money, and no equity? Not many people. Nobody actually, it looks like. Well, what if I sweetened the deal for you and I said, well, pay you just enough for you can get by, you can have just enough money to live. How many people would take that job? Raise your hands. Oh, you got a couple people here? Good. Now, I'm going to sweeten the deal even more. What if I told you that we're going to give you some equity now, but the only problem is this equity comes in the form of a stack of documents this thick and you don't know what it says and you're not sure if you'll ever really get the equity. How many people want that deal? Even fewer people want that deal? Is that possible? We have one person over here. All right. Now, what if I told you somebody just to the left or right of that person you were looking at has just now offered you another job, same job, same terms, except this time, the equity, you can see what it is, you know it, you can feel it and every day you can see it growing in a real-time dashboard. How many people would like a job like that? Maybe would that be more interesting? Okay, so some people would definitely like a job like that. So, this is the kind of question that I've been working on, but first, all right, so now we're going to tell you the secret. The secret to 3Xing your company or getting people to really kick ass and work really hard together, the secret is cooperation. You need people to be able to cooperate together. You need them to feel trust, you need to feel trust within their teams and then they also need to feel aligned. What does aligned mean? Aligned means that our futures are aligned. We're going in the same track so that down the road, if there's a payoff, we're going to be there together. So, what is trust? Trust is many things to many people. Trust means 20 different things. How do you care about my needs or can I predict who you are? My journey with trust began in a small town in Brownfield, Maine. You can trust people in a small town because you know everybody. But I was a very shy kid, but I wanted to get out and see the world. So, one of the first places I went was Egypt in 1997. Then I decided to trust some strangers and I trusted a local taxi driver who took me around and then took me home. To meet his family. But something interesting was going on in Egypt. There was no one in Egypt. A bunch of tourists had just been murdered and so the country was empty. And hanging out with the locals and having a good time and then talk turned to climbing the pyramids and I thought, that's cool. They said that can't happen anymore. You don't really do things like that. We talked about it some more. And then he's like, all right, I'm going to make a call. So he calls a friend of his and he says, all right, so maybe something might be possible, but you've got to meet at a dark alley over here at 4 a.m. I was like, oh, that's a live and die opportunity if I've ever heard one. Should I go and have the experience of my lifetime? Or should I go and maybe that's the last thing I remember? Or should I go and or not go and never, and always wonder what it would be? So I went and it was an incredible experience, climbing all over the pyramids and a story for another time. But it was amazing how when you trust locals, you know who to trust, amazing things can happen. My next experience with trust was with Burning Man back in 1999. And what I learned there was that when people are super cooperators, you can really trust everyone. And it was almost like a little super cooperation symbol floating over people's heads. And it was just a powerful experience to know what would a website be like if you knew who you could trust. And I started thinking about trust and the value of it. And it turns out that economists have, too, and they estimate that about 25% of the world's GDP is locked up in trust and control infrastructure. That means that if you're living here in Scandinavia, you, as you know, you probably don't need as many lawyers and you don't need as many bars on your windows. But if you're in Brazil, you might need a lot of lawyers and you might need a lot of bars on your windows. So it can drag your country down. So a couple of years later, another experience went to Iceland. And in Iceland, I sent like what any good entrepreneur would do is I said, hey, I want to stay on your couch. So I spammed 1,500 university students by hacking into the University of Iceland student directory and said, hey, Bjork, can I stay on your couch? And I had between 1,500 people said yes. I ended up staying with these random, their models. And remember, I'm super shy, so this is way outside of my comfort zone. I'm following them around all weekend long with mind blown thinking, at the end, this was so interesting. I want to travel like this every time. And thus, couch surfing was born. That's how, one of the reasons in which it started. And it was getting me outside of my comfort zone and me doing that minimal viable product and just taking a chance and trying. And I basically sent my profile of me, the shy kid from Maine to some people in the world saying, could you stay, could I stay with you? And it worked. And so that was really, really powerful, a powerful moment. And then we started having this other experience that started to show up. And couch surfers know this really, really well. It's the experience of transferable trust. Here's Emily, she has 20 positive reviews. She sends a message to someone saying, can I stay with you? And they're not home. They're like, but since you have 20 positive reviews, the keys are in the garden. I'll see you in a couple of days, have fun. And this happens every day on couch surfing all the time. That's transferable trust. And that is what couch surfing is built on. That is the backbone. And it grew and grew and grew and it was growing three times every year, especially in the early years. People are planning flags of couch surfing on Mount Everest. And it was the largest social trust experiment of all time, perhaps. People ask me then, they say, well, what does it take to build an organization like this? And I say, well, you really got to have the right culture. You can't have a culture where life sucks. Everybody's just surviving. I'm going to get you there. And you can't have a culture where people are just motivated by self-interest. Where it's this feeling of I'm grading, you are not. Everybody's gaming for themselves. You need a super cooperation culture where people feel like that everybody's great. We're doing this together. We're all in the same team and we're sharing information. When you share information, everybody has a complete picture of reality and you can scale decision making. You can distribute decision making. That's the only way you can do it. That's so key. But that's the macro. You can scale down a little bit. You get into the team level. What do you need at the team level to really kick ass? Well, you've got to have givers. Givers are your key. Givers, if they're all giving and working together and giving, well, good things are going to happen. You're going to 3x your output. But if you have any number of takers, that's not going to happen. Everything's going to fall apart. Everything's going to kind of come crashing down a bit. And matchers, matchers work well too. But the goal is you want everybody to act like givers. But it depends. It depends on do they feel aligned? It depends on trust. They feel a lot of things. And if they do, then they will. But you can upgrade people to givers if you have the right system. And I learned the hard way. In couch driving the early years, we converted from a non-profit to a for-profit, as some of you may remember. And we said, great, so we're going to get more things done. We can pay people more. And we're going to give people these stock options. But then something weird happened. People stopped, I think they stopped working in the same way. It became more of like this job a little bit to people. And I said, well, what about these stock options? They're creating alignment. We're all going to the same place together. And they look at me blankly saying what this thick set of documents that I don't know what it says, I don't know what it does, and I don't know if I'll ever get anything from it. That's not motivating me. And I was like, wow, that was incredible. So I started really learning about alignment. What is alignment? How do you create alignment? How do you inspire people to feel aligned, to want to go somewhere and work on something hard together, to cooperate, to overcome all of the pitfalls that, of course, are going to happen in a startup? And that's when I was like, oh, if you have alignment, it turns people into givers. So I didn't experiment. I was working on another company. And we said, well, what if we could give people, and they could see all of their ownership in real time. We made a spreadsheet and we said, you could see your ownership. You record your hours and there you go. Now you know exactly how much of the company you own today and tomorrow and the next day. That's pretty cool. People can see it. And they started like, yeah, I believe in it. People worked really hard. People were working so hard for this company. They're aligned. And that worked so well. We said, oh, I guess we've got to make this a product thing now, right? We've got to make it a real thing. People kind of want this. So we did it. And then now all kinds of other companies have started using it. And then people can see, like a back one, you can create pools and you can see how much ownership you have and all that stuff. And then you can see your ownership grow over time. But it's not really about the money. It's about the alignment. It's about feeling like you're respected. You're a part of it. Sure, money may happen. Maybe down the road you never know. But it's about being part of it. And so far in the last few years, we've had 35 companies in beta and 200 people working on it within the system and 100,000 hours contributed through the system. And people are seeing for every like million dollars they spend in the system. They're seeing two million dollars worth of output additional. So it's like you get two million extra dollars worth of output because you can use equity. Founders use equity in a way they never had before. You could get people to work purely on equity even. Really powerful. So I want you all to close your eyes for a second. Close your eyes and imagine. Here we are. It's five years from now. Five years and you're waking up. It's five years and you're, what is it like? What does the world feel like? And we're all out there. We're all out there. We're building our companies. And we can imagine there could be a couple different kinds of companies in the world. Maybe there's a kind of companies that kind of do it traditionally, do it the normal way. And they kind of have, they have the benefit of being normal and traditional, but then it's just like a job for most people working in those companies. But there may, there could be another kind of company, another kind of way. And maybe that kind of company is more transparent, is more, has a lot more trust. And people don't look at it just like a job. They look at it as something, they see the alignment, they feel that they are part of this thing. They have ownership. One of these models I think will outpace the other model in these five years. So wake up. Here we are. We're at Slush. Yay. And we're not there yet. We still have five years to do these things. So, you know, the choice is ours. We choose wisely. Thank you. Thank you.