 I'm Liz Stininger. I don't know how to change slide. There we go. Okay, so I work for a company called Least Authority. Our sibling company is Zcash. Least Authority was started by a guy named Zuko who also started Zcash. We work with Tahoe Lafts and with Magic Wormhole and some of you might know me from previously working at the Open Technology Fund. So that's the quick introduction, but I want to talk to you guys about for-profit companies within both the security space and also in the open source world and how for-profit companies can help us to achieve our missions that we have within the space. And yeah, so I think that it's, yeah, sorry. There we go. Okay, so I live in Berlin and I see graffiti like this every day. I'm not going to do a presentation on it, but I love seeing it. I think it is really great to see how this kind of, that you can see how it illustrates missions that people have. It's a way of communication that there's all kinds of ways that we can use art, that we can use different things in the world to get our different missions. And I think most people at this camp have some sort of belief that how society should be different and better and that I think that it's really easy for us to just complain about other larger corporations and how they're not doing things right and it's still good for us to put pressure on them to change things, but that we should also start companies ourselves to help further the missions that we have within the space. So if we believe that everybody should have the right to privacy, then perhaps we should build companies that have, give people the right to privacy in their tools. So, you know, I'll just, I don't know if the slides are helping much. I might go off of them. So how many of you are interested in starting a business? Oh, wow. Okay, cool. And how many of you feel like that's more difficult because of your, what your beliefs are? Or do you feel like you're, okay, a little bit, you feel like your beliefs can maybe enhance what you do with a company? Okay, so what's stopping you from starting a company? Okay. Those of you who want to, why haven't you? Yeah. Okay, cool. So what? Oh, he said he just started a company. I know you just left your, your left your current company and you're in the process of starting one. Yeah. Yeah, one of the things that I find you want to start one too? Yeah. Yeah, that's definitely a difficulty with like the transition of, of that. And I'm not sure that that's any easier in any other industry. I think it might be just one of those things. But I do think that our space could, we could talk about ways that we could make that transition easier for people. I know that, you know, it's, there's a lot of funding of tech here and, but maybe not so much of setting up the organizations to support that tech and the sustainability over the long run. So, yeah, I'm not a really good speaker. But I'm, I don't know. So what else did you all hope to get out of this? So you, a lot of people want to start companies and you're finding some challenges. But do you also feel like you wish there were more companies that you could be a customer of that supported the things that you believe in? Some shakes. Do I want to? There you go. No. Oh, I mean, what is the basic question? If, if you're finding a company normally, it has some commercial background. And there are a lot of companies which have good visions, good ideas, maybe good basic principles, however you call it. And then maybe one day you came to the point where you have to decide how can I still follow this principles? Yeah. Or do I have to go with the market or for example, do I have to take contracts from the industry or whatever you want to do? For example, if you take Facebook, all these guys, they all have missions, all these I found the nicest in something. Yeah. It's Google who says we are so good. And, or we are so brave. And, yeah, you can think about that now. And now my question to the talks here, what are you pointing to? And I read about that there are some people who say we want to make Google some kind of other kind of organization to make it more open, to make it more stable, to open the search engine for everyone and to get a better control of it. And I think this is quite a sustainable attempt. But the question is, can you do it with a financial driven company which has to work on an open market, which follows capitalistic rules? Yeah, I think, I mean, that's, it's a good point that it, that sometimes it seems like the missions, the things that we believe in are at odds with capitalism and profits. But I do think that if we work hard to be creative about business models, and figuring out, looking at some good examples and just talking amongst ourselves at sessions like this, we can find ways to not totally fall to it. And I think it also, I'll keep going through the slides, but it also comes down to, are you doing the business for just profit? Or are you doing the business because of what your beliefs are? And if you're doing the business for profit, then, yeah, you're gonna, your mission is gonna get put to the wayside. If you're doing it for something else, then the profit is just a tool, it's just a way to get there. And, yeah, there's things to consider to make sure that you don't get corrupted by that along the way. But, yeah, it's, it's really interesting, all these companies do have these, these missions that they have things that they believe in, they're not doing it just to make money. And yet, yeah, we're not happy with them. But, but we, but I think it's important for us to put pressure on these types of companies. But I think it's also important for us to start our own to to push things of where to we would believe in. And so, you know, what's good here is that we all use technology. And technology is a really, really powerful tool to change society. So if we do believe that certain people should have rights to things, then, you know, we, if we build it in technology, you're making a face. But if we build it in technology, then, then we can, we, if we build the technology with those, with those things in mind, then we can really help to shape society to be something more that, that we, that we want it to be. All that to say that just technology is not neutral, that technology does have an impact on how we, how we live. In fact, I caught some of Jillian from EFF's talk, and she was talking about the digital colonization of, you know, the social networks and how they put forth American ideals to other countries in their social world. And I, and I, it's great criticism. And but we should, we should also do that ourselves. If we want to push out our beliefs, then we can just play the same game they play. Anyway, technology is the product and the tool. And so these are just, this is just a good list of different ways that technology can change what we're working on. We all probably work on projects that are related to something on this list. And we do it because we have a purpose in mind that we're trying to do something better than what's out there right now. And this is the for profit part that that when we think about profit, we always think about the bad things like corporate surveillance and ad driven business models, and lucrative zero days and stuff like that. But yeah, for profit is something that it's just we need to think of it more of a structure instead of the actual, the actual goal. So profits do not need to equal success for a for profit business that we can redefine. I mean, it matters how we define success in the in the sense of in the sense of a for profit company. So again, like I said, profits are not the goal that profits are just the incentive to to build to build what we want and to to change to change the technology and the world. So I think it's important that we apply our missions to our business models, and that when we're thinking about how we're going to make money off of technology or how we're going to have that for profit business operate and pay for itself to even just be sustainable at the minimum, then we should be thinking about what are we incentivizing with our business models. And so like in the ad driven business, we're incentivizing the collecting of personal personal data from people. And that if we don't agree with that, then we shouldn't incentivize it with money. So I think we need to just start more discussions about what other kinds of models that there are. And so this is just some questions, some things that I think about are like, Yeah, what are you trying to incentivize? Are you trying to incentivize people to share their data for you to collect? Or are you trying to incentivize people to do something different? And what what is fair for people to be paying for and what is like what's acceptable for them to pay for? And this is especially important within the open source, the free and open source world, because, yeah, to some degree, you're not expecting them to pay for the software. So what are they paying for instead? Are they paying for the service? Are they paying for training additives to it? And then what should be free? And who should have that freedom? And I think that that's another thing that comes back to the mission of, you know, what are you really trying to achieve with what you believe in? So what do you want to give away? What do people deserve to have without pain? And what does that cost you to do that? And that that comes back to like calculating that out, figuring out that? Yeah, I think it depends. Well, it depends on the tech project that you're working on. So, and a lot of people do free and open software here. So a lot of times in the free, the free part is the software, right? So, yeah, that answers that question. Did you have a specific project in mind? My question is, people are already expecting free services? Free services? Oh, yeah, because, yeah. So the the reference to the companies that provide things like social networks for free and email for free and all these things for free. And that's definitely, yeah. It's not necessarily people expect services for free, but sometimes you just can get them for free. For example, I would love to use Google services. And they make roughly like $20 of my data. I'm willing to give them like $30, like they make a $10 profit, but it just don't offer service. So it's also like how the whole system is set up. People the option to pay. This is and that's also I mean, we have to remind ourselves that this is learned, that people learned that they should have these things for free. And that we can teach them that we can help to educate them that you are paying for it in a different way. And here's something different that you can pay for. And I think that, yeah, we just building those values in and telling people about what we value, like, so if you value that privacy. So, yeah. There are also companies that do believe that something should be free. I once worked one year for a startup that that had that made a five focus plug in and and and corresponding back end. That's what the goal was to allow children to go on the web in a safe way, curated by their own parents, rather than some anonymous editors, who might have completely different values. For example, with with with the other talk. And some people think violence, violence, seeing violence, okay, and sex is bad. And other parents might have the exact opposite idea. Yeah. So the philosophy of the company was that that that parents should be keeping an eye on their own kids into that use instead of, you know, outsourcing it to some company. And they probably figured out a different way to make money, right? No, they did not. Oh, they unfortunately went bankrupt. They had they had it was it was a really nice idea. And they wanted that they felt that it should be something that should be free. Yeah. So they need to need to figure out another way to make money. So they put focus on some fake family oriented social network thing that completely failed and they went bankrupt. So it's yeah, just I mean, even if you can free can be a risk if you if you don't haven't really thought about your business model. Definitely. Yeah. And I guess it's that's that's where it's a trade off. Sometimes maybe it's easier to take the the routes of collecting people's data and making money off of ads or something than it is to go throughout of, you know, doing something you believe in that giving people things for free. But I do think that with some good thought about like these types of questions and just good thought about like what other value does that technology hold that you can find other ways to make money off of these types of things and maybe the like it's interesting sometimes the customer that will pay isn't necessarily your person that you're looking to benefit from from the product. Sometimes there's other interested parties that are willing to pay. And then it becomes like an indirect benefit that people get something for free that you want them to have for free. Um, yeah, and, and that's yes, sometimes your your customers are just not obvious that because of the mission, it's really easy for us to get focused on, you know, this is what I want to achieve and maybe miss out that there's a wind, there's a side path or some sort of winding path where there's other customers that we weren't targeting that actually are willing to pay. And then we can still give away something else for free. But to give some examples is like consulting training, support services, subscription services again, and just looking creatively about who who would want this or could this technology be applied to somebody else that is willing and able and should pay. Yeah, so, and I think that goes into the last question of like, to what are your risks for corruption? And are your, are your incentives going to like expose you to other risks and stuff? So, keep air. This is so for I'll tell I'll talk a little bit about what I do with least authority. But yeah, we believe that privacy is a human right, and that security should be easy to use and accessible to everybody. And we think that while we do have competition with like free services and things that that we can work to educate people that privacy is important and worth paying for. But we do free and open software. And we would ask we ask people to pay for the service of convenience so that we can still stick with that belief that people can have that people could do this on their own if they wanted to. And that's just us. And this is the polar bear. This stands for the principle of least authority. So it's just a fun way of us trying to like reach more people that privacy and security doesn't always have to be scary and serious that that starting to learn about with about educating people about the value of privacy online. Did I skip the bear? Anyway, so to talk more about sustainability. I think that it's really important for us to sell like figure out these questions for the tech projects in our space, because of the long term sustainability and because people people need to live. When you're thinking about your project, you should think about the business lifecycle that it has. So at what point are you at what point do you want to be at what are your goals at those different stages and the incentives that you need to get through that. And I want to just I think it's really easy for us to say it's hard. So we shouldn't try to tackle it. But it's important to also remember that this is like not being not building sustainable companies within with our beliefs is going to it just there's there's negative consequences to it. So there there's ethical implications of this technology not being sustainable. We have a responsibility that the people who are using anything that we put out there is that's free and open that we have we have a responsibility to people who are contributing to it. And I mean, it's great the way that the culture has evolved that people have don't don't feel I don't know that that so the culture is great. But we still need to realize that there's implications to you know, maybe code not being updated but still being used by people. And that how we're handling personal data and things like that. And I also do think that by having more sustainable businesses within this community, we can also increase diversity in the field, because it's difficult to make a living. And some people and it's I think it's important for us to give a variety of options for how people can employ and make a living in the in the field. And if we're only looking at like project based stuff, or you know, the grant funding or something like that, then we're really cutting out a good population that could be contributing to these things, the things that they believe in, we should give them companies that they can go work for. So this is this is where I'm just wrapping up the slides part and we can keep talking. But I just wonder if we can make the majority of the world see the same thing that we all see here. So we come together at this camp. And we believe, you know, when we talk about things that we all shared interest and everything, but can we help the rest of the world understand this world? I think our missions can bring us together in a way that the money can't and that gives us. But we can use that structure of a for profit company to have a greater impact on the world to see through things. And I would just encourage you all to go beyond just criticizing the current companies that exist, but also build companies that do fit your ideals or join a company that does fit your ideals and yeah, think creatively about the projects you work on and how we can make them more sustainable. So yeah, just more Berlin graffiti because it's fun. Yeah, so do you guys want to chat more? You have a question? So for you, what is what would be the key advantages of finding a for profit cooperation instead of a nonprofit one? Yeah, why why are you talking about that? Not about cooperation? Yeah, I'm talking about for profit, because that's that's where that's where my heads at right now is like hacking the business world and trying to figure out how we can make the business world, like just changing it from the inside, I guess, because it's just it was really easy for me to complain about it from the outside. And it's like, well, and also to see how can I I'm interested to to make projects more sustainable and how can I fund everybody doing this good work and, you know, find I think that the also the work that is done by the projects here should be available to everybody. And they're not and that's not right. But as to why a nonprofit or for profit would be better, I think it depends on the project and it depends on like what your mission is and if you think that. Yeah, it just I think the answer is it depends to the answers that questions those questions before and thinking about like what you're trying to incentivize. Yeah, and sometimes a nonprofit is the right answer. I'm definitely not advocating for everybody to do for companies. I'm just trying to get us over realize that nonprofit isn't the only way to go and that it's it's okay to do for profit companies and not focus on the profit. Yeah, I'm always hesitant about that because what I like is is having a body that is somehow democratically governed and somehow, you know, formally constrained to a certain set of actions that could take which I would see in the nonprofit sector, but not so much in the for profit sector. But just because you don't see it there doesn't mean that it can't be done, right? Okay, so that maybe maybe there's lots of bad examples in the for profit world, but that's not a reason for us to not do for profit companies that again, it's like even the name of for profit is not quite right because you can it's just it's just a structure of an organization that helps you achieve goals, right? It's a collection of people trying to do something. And and profit is just a tool along the way to keep them going. So actually, what would be your definition of for profit and nonprofit? So what would be the dividing line? Well, I know that it legally it changes in different jurisdictions that there's different categories of these things. But I guess what I'm saying is that even in the for profit world and the for profit business structures that that you can still have some of those values be true, you could set up a company where things are more democratically run. There's and and maybe you should. I don't know. Okay, thanks. I don't know if I answered your question, but I guess there's not an easy answer to that one. Yeah, I think what you mean is a profitable organization with a good intention. Yeah, in mind mission driven is what some people say. Yeah, mission driven company. But that's not very specific, isn't it? I know it's not. And like I showed those like Google and Facebook and stuff, they all have they all have missions too. So they have missions that they really greatly believe in and they're doing good. And yet we criticize them for what they're doing. So and to open up the discussion a little bit, I think in the technology sector at the moment, the problem is that what was passed a good profit in the past was maybe three to five percent for American companies was 10 to 15 percent. Now a good profit is some 100 percent or even 1000 percent. And if you have a normal company like IBM, they make even 67 percent. And that's if you compare it to, for example, classic German values, as Deutsche Bank says, a good profitable organization. We are the best profitable organization in Germany because we have 24 percent for money, which is invested. And the problem is that this profit rate drives the company into a very, I would say it's like a tunnel. So you cannot do any more mistakes and you have to work with less people for most to get the most profit out. And there's a Günther Dück, he wrote a column or newspaper articles and he said, now the companies are like like a Güros, you cut away every piece, which is going to be black and there's nothing left behind because you want to reach the maximum of the profit out of it or you want to get the most profit out of it. And that makes it problematic if you come with your sustainable ideas and say there must be, we have to make good things. And for example, I work in a company and I say, we have to do, we have customers, the customer have problems, we have to solve them and they will pay us for that. But even that we cannot deliver anymore because our profit rate is so high that we have to reduce services, for example, for the customers and the customer, they laid in front of us and they say, please offer us the services because we cannot do it ourselves and no one else can do it than you. And we say, no, we don't have enough people, we cannot employ anymore and the whole model is not profitable anymore, for whatever reasons, because we are our stocks ideal now in the free market. And out of this consolation, resulting a lot of problems. And therefore I thought when you started the talk, all you would intend is better to do with a non-profit organization or some government driven organization. But then the later question is you're going to ask questions like, you want to bring back altruism or communism or things like that? They were not so bad in a lot of things. Yeah, I mean, to your point about for-profit companies having to constantly increase their profits and it being competitive, I think it comes back to, my answer to that would be like, for who are they serving? And in the cases of the examples that you gave, they're serving, they're publicly traded companies, right? So they have to serve their shareholders to make them profits. But that's not the only way to structure a company. You don't have to have, you don't have to do an IPO if you don't want to. I mean, especially smaller to small to medium-sized tech companies, that's not something that they need to be concerned about. Yeah, that is right, what you're saying. Also, if you do not do an, if you don't go to the real open market or if you don't go to the stock market, then you have some benefits or you can work in a different way, which do a lot of family companies in Germany, for example. But they have to live with a much less profit than other companies. And if you're going to the big ones, maybe that Facebook, Apple and all these companies are the big ones, no discussion about that, then the rules are slightly different than what if you're having your own small company but they recover everything. The rules are also very different depending on how you build your company, who invests in it. If you invest just your own time and you're the complete owner of the company, then you can do whatever you want with your profits. Your profits can be zero percent, you can just reinvest them all back into the company and do great if it's just you. So yeah, I guess it depends on how you structure it and how you scale and stuff. And so I think sometimes we see a lot of the big tech companies in the news a lot and they have lots of VC funding and then they have to respond, be responsible to the VCs and we all know VCs want to see like the unicorn come out and so there's a lot of pressure on the profits instead of on the mission and the beliefs and so I would just say for tech companies, that's something to be cautious about when you're considering building your company is just to take into account like what pressure does that put on you. Hi. I have a company that's just like what you're describing. Awesome. It's called Radically Open Security. Oh, yeah. I saw you did a talk that's kind of similar earlier today. So I'm glad you're here today. It's immediately after your talk. Oh, no way. Sorry, sorry, sorry for the advertisements at eight twenty in in the big the big tent and I'm giving a talk. It's called social social enterprises as a tool for activism. I'm going to talk about my very concrete experiences with a real company that was built on these principles. So if you guys want to hear a concrete story of implementing this feel free to stop by. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you for the plug. Yeah, I think so. I imagine somebody will stop us whenever it's time. You mentioned I mean part of the discussion goes about non-profit versus for-profit, right? Yeah. But even regarding some of your questions, I would say that even if you pay, if you deliver a service, which is at cost, right? You don't have to make a profit exactly is still charging. Now, obviously, if you run a business, you need to balance that out and the imbalance will at some point generate a profit if you survive, right? I mean, if it doesn't, you'll go bankrupt. If it survives, you'll generate a profit. Now, I think the discussion is not so much about profit or non-profit. The question is what share of profit is fair and how do you distribute the profit, right? And if you have a family company, I mean, the owners are obviously the beneficiaries. If you have a public company, it's the shareholder, right? And then there is a cooperative, for instance, where all the stakeholders are actually owners. Yeah, there's all kinds of structures. Yeah. And I think what is important for this type of business, and especially, I hope to hear that from you as well, there's profit and there's value, right? So if you don't do a for profit or you want to avoid this discussion, you have probably have to do a good definition of value. Now, the problem is that we define value in money, right? But there's other values than just money. Yeah. So and there's not, in my knowledge, a universal system to define values that is widely shared. I mean, some human values, but not necessarily economic values. I think, yeah, yeah. I mean, that would be an interesting question to try to answer. I would like to have a discussion or let's say, what do we call value when we talk about, let's say, the road to it could be for profit or non-profit. Yeah. But what is really value to people? Hi. Hi. I'm, I thought this talk was sounded really interesting. Unfortunately, I came just now because there was another one that I really wanted to attend as well. But and I didn't think that it was just going to be Q&A. But I think we have until 10 past eight. So there should be plenty of time to discuss. I think we have at least until eight. So, yeah. I don't really, I normally always have a question, but I think I can provide a relevant perspective. So I'm just going to. Yeah. Okay. So I run a VPN service called Mulvott. I'm one of the founders. I own 50% of the company and 10 years ago. So we started in 2008, but in 2007, I realized that, does this work? Yeah. I realized that in order to change the world, trying to convince individual people of my idea of a better world, it didn't scale well enough. So instead, I opted for what I call direct political action through entrepreneurship. And I. That's a good term for it. Thanks. I think that's a good mental model because if you have, I mean, there are so many ways to make the world better. Don't get me wrong there. I mean, starting a company is not at all the only thing you can do, but it's very attractive if you if you manage to make something profitable and then scale that up over time. So now we are nine people working full time and we have two more people coming in in September. That's 11 people working full time. And we have like both my co-founder and I, we have zero interest in selling it. We received four or five serious offers of acquisition. And we just plan to do this forever because it's fun and because we believe in because you're right and managing a sustainable company doing something that you believe in. Yep. And eventually due to economics or competition or something else, it might crash and burn. But at the very least, during no one can take ever take away from me that during a portion of my life, I funded 10 full time activists doing hopefully something good. And that's only one way to do it. I have I have friends that do it other ways. They run consulting companies. So they are senior consultants that bring in a lot of money. And then they hire people to do using they take out smaller salaries than their consulting salaries. And they take the excess revenue to hire people to do all kinds of activism. So and there are a couple of consultants that that in diverse fields and they just pull the money so they can hire one or two developers to build either an open source tool or it's a product that they envision and so on. And even if you don't want to do start a company or pull money as a consultant, you can still I mean, maybe maybe you can contribute the most by simply working in the job you're doing right now, but then also donating money to EFF. That's that's a fine way of contributing to to making the world better. And I think the most wonderful thing of all is that we are by far much more I mean, the world is much wealthier now. I mean, we're still dirt poor. People are dying in droves every day from very basic stuff, but we're still in a much better place. So I think that over time we can expect to to work less and less. And you don't have to make money with all the activities you're doing. In the first two years, I didn't make any money at all. I slept. I lived in my parents' house because it was fun. And not the living in my parents' house thing, but the working on my company was fun. And doing I have other friends that do they work 10 hours a week. They don't make a lot of money, but they spend the rest of their time doing activism. And so I think there are a lot of ways that you can one can make it change. Even if you can't make it immediately, another goal of mine was to be complication independent. And it took me 10 years to achieve that goal. But if you just reposition yourself over time, eventually you will be in a position to make a considerable contribution. I'm a complete bum, by the way. I mean, in terms of self-discipline and willpower and all that, but so if I can do it, I'm confident that anyone else can, basically. Yeah, that was my rant. Thanks. Well, thanks. It's good to hear another example. I just wanted to add, because of the question about the value and how do we define is it money or what? I heard a talk about an eco, which is the name for the currency where people, for example, plant a tree and then they get an eco for that. So that could be also a model to implement, like that you provide services for whatever, any kind of virtual currency, like a person planting a tree, or I don't know, a feeding a homeless person or something like that, that could be also scalable that you don't necessarily get the money for that, but you get people to do something that is valuable for the others. Yeah. Hi. Oops, sorry, guys. Hi, my name is Scott. I am one of the founders of a project. It's an activist project that uses entrepreneurship, I guess, in some way to find its way in the world. So it's basically a booking agency for activist speakers and our whole mission is to basically make sure that our speakers don't have to get crappy day jobs. So most of the people that we're working with are people who have very specific missions and what they're doing, a lot of them are investigative journalists. Some people are doing kind of culture jamming projects, things that just don't really have much of a business model. And so for the past 15 years, we've been helping to bring people who are doing these kind of very obscure and strange things, but bring them into venues where they could be recognized, everything from museums to universities to sometimes speaking at conferences and companies. And while we've been doing this, we've been operating as a collective. And so that's one of our missions, that we basically wanted to prove that you can actually have a consensus-driven business, even though we have formal titles based in the kind of hierarchical capitalist kind of template, it doesn't really reflect what we all do in our project. We're all equals. It's no utopia, we tend to fight it out a lot, but that's the whole thing. It's basically the thing that's at the core of also doing an ethical business is really putting in the work to communicate. And that's really the whole thing because we're all bringing in all different experiences, we're bringing in baggage, and just all these different types of things. And the one thing that I've found is the most crucial thing that I've learned of running this type of social-oriented business, is putting in the work to perceive of other people's perspectives and having your perspectives communicated as well and to accept that sometimes we might have multiple perspectives running concurrently that might seem like they conflict with one another and to respect that in ourselves and to respect that in other people. Because between two people, you might have six opinions about the same exact type of thing. And so it's worth it to actually put in the work to figure out how to weight those opinions in order to actually come to consensus. And the other thing that's very important if you're doing a, that I've found, at least if you're doing a consensus-based business or any kind of project, is to incentivize cooperation that basically when there's a conflict, when there's a conflict that arises which always will always build in an incentive to resolve that conflict and to always remain friends. Like that the goal, I guess I wanna leave with this, is that the goal at the beginning of the meeting, even if it's going to be contentious meeting, is to actually not leave the meeting angry at your coworkers, if you can, yeah. Yeah, I think that this is where it's actually an advantage to have a mission-driven company is because if everybody agrees with the mission and is driven by something deeper and some personal beliefs, then I think aligning people on the team sometimes is easier than if you're just paying them. So I have a quick question. So I think one problem I've seen in a lot of open source projects, I used to work at a big company and I work open source academic projects, is that often there are certain skill sets which are very hard to learn and something that capitalist companies are very good at is scalability. Typically distributed systems kind of work but also customer user scalability, that sort of thing. And that's something that seems to be a lot of open source projects unless they're kind of lucky or quite bad at. However, the problem that I've found, like many of my friends would work on free software projects, but then eventually they have kids and need actual healthcare or money. Yeah, you need something more sustainable. Then they work at Google and Google pays really well but also they learn a lot in Google. I mean they really learn a lot about how to make things scale but then that knowledge doesn't seem to come back ever. It seems like it gets stuck. That was the only thing we could do to encourage that kind of knowledge to come back and those kinds of people to come back at some point. Yeah, I think there's two things. Is one, we need to give them opportunities to be doing something similar with here. So where do they go after Google? If all their options are is to just work for a non-profit or to work for just project-based or do consulting then maybe they won't be drawn back in and so yeah, we would get more diversity and it would be a healthier place if they had similar options to Google here, I guess. And then as far as how do we do that, I would love to hear people's ideas of what do they need to make that transition from the open-source project to some sort of sustainable organization, whether that be non-profit or profit, that is there what you think is holding them back to make that transition. It's all the immigration status. So Silicon Valley does enslave a lot of people on H-1B visas but it's mostly money. So it's very hard with a non-profit sector. To pay- It's possible it's in the academic sector to pay people 100, more than 100K, 120K. That being said, that's entry-level wages going on in most of these companies right now at minimum really. And so I actually don't know how to solve that problem. Well, I think if we solve some of the problems about building sustainable businesses with good business models and if the business model is incentivizing the right thing and staying true to your mission, then maybe instead, maybe the profits can be used to pay people really well and give them those competitive salaries that they couldn't get in other structures within the space. And how we solve that problem, I mean, we just talking about it as a good start, like coming up with what we need to seed these transitions, like what's stopping people from starting companies that are helping them to explore business models. Yeah. Sorry, Kanaya. Oh, yeah. So my name is Kase. It's cool to hear all these stories on open source businesses. Maybe I add my story as well. So my name is Kase from Bokov and I am trading computer science by Informatics. So I worked for two years or so as, also as a consultant and yeah, you can make good money. But what affects me is that the open source stuff that we worked on was not great quality software and maybe partly because of that, it wasn't also used in enterprises. So that's why I started the high five years ago to become professional software support for open source software and bioinformatics. And everyone said, of course, how are you gonna make money? This is very difficult and it's not gonna work. But yeah, it's now more than 40 people and it's profitable, no investment. So this model seems to work and- It can work. But I think it's encouraging is that even pharma companies and hospitals, they see the advantage of open source software. Yeah. One thing I would like to bring as an extra topic is this book, The Master Switch, which talks about communication throughout the 20th century. How everything in the end got centralized. So radio broadcasting ended up being one company and movies ended up being Hollywood. The television is just some very big companies and the real question is how about the internet? Is the internet going to go the same way? Certainly that's how it's seen right now. It's just a few Silicon Valley companies. So as a conference like this, people like this, powerful enough to make maybe a European answer in a way to say, okay, instead of bringing everything centrally, we're going to make decentralized business models and internets. And those can still be profitable too. So I think it's just about eight o'clock. Is there another speaker at eight o'clock? Are you a speaker at eight? No? Okay. Well, if you guys want to keep talking, I'm cool. Does anybody else have any other comments or questions? I think how it started and how it ended is, I find it amazing because I saw a lot of questions. I'm right. How the conversation started? Yes. And there's a lot of points open and I, for myself, have to sleep about it. I would appreciate if you can do a follow-up. Maybe someone else is interested and will come back, even in a small round or so. Because I think with the tendencies we have at the moment on the market and all the question here to internet and to decentralize it or centralize it and things like that, that's rather interesting. And with the internet I came with, for example, you have the small European filmmakers who do really good films, but they do not get much money out of it. That's kind of parallel, I came in my mind. But the topic is quite huge. And the question when I see your presentation is where to focus or where to make a battle how to specify the point or what you want to work out. And you're pointing to tech business all the time. I think it's a little bit more general. It's not only in tech business, because open source is one part. It's famous in tech business, but other business as well. And similar models maybe to compare them. Yeah? Thanks for holding this conversation down. I don't feel like there's enough of these conversations in particular for for-profit companies that are basing their work in open source technology, such as yourselves and some of the others in the room. And I think that's a 20-year challenge. So I, you know, it's just- 20 years. We're going to fix it this year. No, but I do- I should talk more about it. Yeah, and so any of that conversation, plus one to following up 100 more times over the next 20 years to continue talking about how we can figure out what we figured out today. I just wanted to, I think one thing I think a lot about is in response to a comment made about, you know, trying to figure out how to streamline or make more efficient or better the business models to try to compete potentially with traditional for-profit wages. I don't think we can ever do that, at least not under the current model. I think we can pay people really well. But I think, you know, when your value add, I guess I would add an, and also I think the thing that's most important is not to try to compete necessarily in monetary ways that you probably can't under the current like ad-driven or like other markets that might go against many of your sort of ethical and value-based underpinnings for a for-profit. It's more of, I think, like figuring out a good way there was a person who said it before. I would love to learn how to figure out what's a good way to create like a set of values and mission that you traditionally see only existing and non-profit organizations. But graphing that onto your traditional sort of for-profit structures and sort of making that the value add. I do think that there's sort of a competition for people. There's no lack of individuals who can do the really good work that a mission-driven for-profit can do. But I think there is not enough people that are sort of willing to take the plunge or the jump to go over to something that's mission-driven rather than profit-driven. And I guess I would just say anecdotally the thing that I've seen has been convincing more people to make that jump hasn't been comparable wages. It's been a clear articulation of like what your values and vision are and understanding how working for this company is gonna advance this bigger world thing. And they are willing to forgive a lot of salary and benefits and perks if it's very clear that those values and principles and mission are sort of being well articulated and that there's a history demonstrated of like following that commitment. So I would say yes to totally figuring out how to make it better and comparable wages and make better business models, but also I think that sort of org dev and culture stuff too. Cause that's ultimately I think the sort of people we want working with, some side comments. Yeah, it's both. I mean, there is a big sell to being a mission-driven company that people can be a part of that mission and they can contribute to it. That said, I do think that we just have to be careful not to take for granted that people are willing to give up some pay for that. Because I do think that like if we want to have, if we want to see this become bigger then we do need to be competitive on some fronts, especially when it comes to people who are maybe the breadwinners in their family, they have to support other family members. They're not gonna have that luxury of foregoing some salary and people need, and so we need some good, sustainable for-profit companies that can give them some good competitive salaries and all the benefits that they need and sponsor their visas. Yeah. I can only, I can share how we do it. So we were not established in Silicon Valley, we have an office in Gothenburg, Sweden. So we would not be able to pay Silicon Valley salaries but we can pay market salaries for Sweden. And salaries there are already pretty high compared to the rest of Europe. Then you have a competitive bar right there. Yeah, but I would also say that what I think that we lure people in or we convince people to join us for a variety of reasons and we basically, when we have the first interview with them we tell them that we're not interested in selling this. We want to reinvest all of our profits into just making it bigger and solving more problems. And we also have told all of our employees that if you find a metaphorical button that solves the problem and blows up the company at the same time, we expect you to push the button because that is our exit strategy or whatever you would call it. But furthermore, I would add that we also offer flexibility and I think that the- It's a good thing to mention. That's very valuable to people. Yeah, so there are several of our colleagues that I don't think we would have convinced to join us if they hadn't had the opportunity to work from home or set their own schedule or- We're getting a signal, sorry. Yeah, okay, yeah. I'll be happy to talk about this more after. Yeah, but if you wanted, but you're right, flexibility does, it's another value add. It's a good thing to mention. Well, thank you everyone for hanging out with more than an hour of your time. Much appreciated and I hope that this helped you all to think about things and I'm happy to continue the conversation. Maybe next year we should do a panel of for-profit businesses to discuss this some more. Cool, thanks everyone.