 Hello, this is Tairua Sun from Brightline. We are here in conversation with Cynthia Yon from CafeX Technology. Tell us a little bit more about what you do at CafeX. I am the CEO of CafeX and as I like to tell my friends, the CEO does everything that the CEO doesn't want to do. So at CafeX it's everything from operations, finance, legal, HR, business development, marketing, all sorts of things. Excellent, excellent, thank you. And one thing that we see in Cynthia, of course we are talking about robotics in the delivery of coffee and you see many existing organisations that are in that field. Sometimes they are reluctant to adopt new technologies to help them deliver, let's say, a new customer experience. What do you have at CafeX that is allowing you to embrace these new ways of doing things? Well, it helps that we're a series A startup, right? So we're small. That really helps. And you were founded on the basis of innovation. You were just 35 people based right here in San Francisco. And of course when you're small and your entire company is founded on a new concept then of course it's going to be easier to embrace change. For larger companies like, say, the Starbucks of the world, what often happens is that there are very large entrenched interests in these organisations that make it difficult to adapt because if you implement a new technology or a new concept you're probably going to cause a lot of disruption to existing operations. And so very often what you'll see in larger companies is that they might have to create entirely new division or entirely new brand even so that they can actually implement some of these newer concepts. Excellent, thank you. And one thing, of course, when you have these new technologies or these new ways of doing things because people talk about the customer experience, how are you getting or how are you doing it so that you're giving that unique customer experience? Yeah, so there's this idea of like design thinking that was actually I think, I don't know actually if it was started in the Stanford Design School but there were definitely, you know, strong advocates of it and it's really about paying attention to your customers along every step of the customer journey. So we do that both in the sort of original like design process but also during our kind of normal operations we actually pay a lot of attention to customer feedback and how our customers are actually using our products so that we can continue to iterate on both the software and hardware solutions. Excellent. And one more thing, Cynthia, if you can help me integral it and basically having a better understanding the people, the human resources within companies you'll hear many times organizations say people are the most important assets. Yes. Yet sometimes when you start opening the doors or you're starting peeling the onions what you see is not necessarily there. Like you don't see people put at the center of your organizations. What do you do at Cafe X to put people in the center of organizations? That's really interesting especially since we're a robotics company right and there's so much conversation right now around like you know what is the impact of robotics going to be on a larger society both from like a social perspective but also from an employment perspective and so one of the things that you know we've done at Cafe X is really build our company around this philosophy of having machines do what machines are really great at the dull dirty dangerous and having people do what people are really great at namely you know having conversations like this for example or customer service. And so at Cafe X we actually currently staff all of our locations with people that we call coffee bar specialists and the idea is that you know rather than make coffee their job is now to actually educate our customers about coffee. In addition to a lot of these people being former baristas or hourly workers we actually help up level them so we teach them more technical skills for example how to sort of maintain and you know manage our robot but we actually also treat them much better than you know they might be treated in the sort of general service sector so for example we pay for like you know all of their healthcare we give them the same healthcare that we give our engineers we pay them you know much higher wages than you know is found to be common in the industry and we give them a lot of opportunities for advancement so I think to answer your question you know to really put people at forefront you actually have to treat them like equals and you know not just sort of treat them as numbers on a page. Great and again moving on the conversation here there are many technologies today I mean you hear about AI of course robotics you hear about machine learning you hear about big data, blockchain, all the names there. Which one do you think would have the most lasting impact or the most destructive impact when you look at the future? Well so first of all I love those words that you threw out they're kind of just buzz words and really sort of fancy words for statistics quite frankly. Math is nothing new I think what really is different is sort of the vast quantity of data that people have at their fingertips and one of the actually more interesting questions I think is not just you know how do you use this data but how do you choose not to use it so the idea of privacy I think is going to become increasingly important so you know there's a lot of talk for example around like income inequality and how are we going to deal with that I think one of the things that you know we will actually have to grapple with as a society in the next couple of decades is this idea of privacy sort of privacy inequality is privacy something that only the people who are wealthy can afford and you know will the masses be relegated to a life of like you know I guess you can call it complete transparency but essentially lack of privacy Amazing hearing blockchain when you say privacy No no no I mean blockchain is one aspect of it because it's kind of like anonymous transactions and what not but you know there's like some really interesting stuff in the AI space around adversarial attacks so this idea that you can try like you know full computer vision algorithms by well you can read it read up on it but it's actually really interesting I think it's more around how do you build companies and build technologies that take privacy seriously from the get-go as opposed to what we usually do by default which is collect as much data as possible I think there's going to be a space for companies that actually explicitly state upfront we will not collect all the data that we can because we value your privacy Okay so basically I get it and you say that of course there's the technology but not only the technology but what we do with it and also The social implications of it I think are incredibly important Collecting for the sake of collecting the data Which is very tempting I would say as a business People say okay I have this space I can keep it and maybe I can take all your data and I'm going to choose not to Good point Just in ending the of course one thing that I'll be interested in hearing from you What is the number one skill that you think teams needs as they have to as they're going through the implementation of the execution of strategies In this time of let's say disruption, digital transformations So if there is one skill that you feel that team needs to be successful what would it be? Super cliche but excellent communication skills Without communication you can't get anything done You can't transmit decision making, you don't have any information There's lots of confusion or misunderstanding or people getting upset at each other Really being clear and concise in your communication and saying what you think And having that being understood by everyone on the team I think is incredibly important Excellent, sincere Thank you for taking the time to do this Take care