 I'm pleased to introduce the Chairman and CEO of Michael's Strategy and also the trustee of the Sailor Academy who was noted in your program really knows firsthand the freedom and opportunity that debt-free education can provide. So with that ladies and gentlemen please help me welcome Michael Sailor. Thank you Jeff. I'd like to see you all this morning this afternoon. No still this morning for 60 seconds. Made it just in time. Jeff asked me to share a few thoughts on the credentialing economy and especially developments in an industry and the way employers are thinking about credentials and recruiting and and jobs and the types of jobs that are being formed in the modern economy right now. My my day job is I run MicroStrategy which is an enterprise software company and we have about 5,000 enterprise customers all around the world. So last year I circled the world about six times and I you know I was in Tokyo and I was in Beijing and Honjo and I was in Paris and London and Chicago and New York and San Francisco and everywhere I go I meet with about a dozen large enterprises so companies like there might be Facebook or Amazon or Citigroup or Emirates Airlines or Toyota they make cars their media companies their governments and I always ask them what is on your agenda in the coming year and and it gives you a broad based feel for what's on the minds of most industries and most and most employers and I guess I start with the big picture. If you look at the technology firmament the mobile wave and the cloud wave are driving an extraordinary avalanche of digital transformation and the mobile wave really in essence means everybody's got a smart phone in their pocket and that's a computer and on that computer I can place any piece of software nearly friction-free. Apple just announced that they got about a billion iOS devices and just last week they announced that their newest iOS operating system shipped to half of those devices in two weeks so you know if you look at the stock market when the mobile wave was written right in 2011 2010 we talked about the implications of a world where Google and Apple and Facebook and Amazon could put their software on everybody's phone and change the way people make decisions. Since then those four companies have emerged as four of the five most valuable companies on the face of the earth. All of the cynics and all the critics think oh well this doesn't make any sense I mean Apple can't be the most valuable company on earth there's never been a company as valuable as this it's a dangerous thing to buy the stock. What they miss out on is the observation that doesn't the reason Apple is the most valuable company in the world is because it's the company in the world most capable of creating value and there's never been a company in the history of the world that could create value as rapidly as Apple and that statistic is the great example which is in two weeks I could ship a new product or a new service to 500 million people with a variable cost of nearly zero. There's never in the history of the world been a company that could ship a product to 500 million people for zero and do it in two weeks. In fact there's never been an example of a company that could ship a product to 50 million people and if you roll the clock back 20 years you couldn't have shipped the product to 10 million people. So we live in an incredible new world where you can ship products and services to hundreds of millions of people very rapidly and of course the big obvious beneficiaries have been the Googles and the Facebooks and the Apples and the Amazons but they're simply the most visible indicator of a trend and the trend is toward the dematerialization of all products and all services to the extent they can be dematerialized and we're all familiar with camera dematerialized but of course you know if I take my watch and my Apple watch three third times the charm normally the first times a toy the second time doesn't quite work third time starts to work this is the truth with many things in life that's why the English language idiom third times a charm the third iPhone started to work the third Apple watch is starting to work when I double tap this I get my credit card and you know a watch is a crappy interface for building spreadsheets and it's actually a crappy interface for looking at spreadsheets but it's a pretty good it's a pretty good device for holding a digital token or a digital credential this happens to be a digital credential it's a it's a financial identity it could be a political identity it could be a student identity it you know it could be my scuba license you know it's like I well on the subject of credentials I I still have this little soft spot in my heart because 18 years ago I learned a scuba dive and they actually anybody scuba dive in the audience yeah some people you know you get your little now a certification and you got to have this card and if you ever want to go to any resort anywhere else and go scuba dive and they want to see the card so I went through the scuba dive in class and then I was all excited they gave me this paperwork and they said well you have to mail this into this registrar and they'll send you a card and I got the paperwork and then I put it somewhere and then I lost it and I never mailed it in and so now every single time I go to a resort anywhere they always ask me for this card and I always think oh no I can't scuba dive anymore and it really makes me irritated but it's but I can't help but think gosh if we lived in a modern network world I could have got my certificate issued maybe they could have put it on the blockchain by the way and then it would be sitting in a in a trusted verified environment and I would never have to worry about losing that stinking card which has been the scourge of my existence I'm it's like one of the things I'm embarrassed about you ever lose something and you're really irritated that you lost it well so I lost that one thing and I carry it with me but back to this issue right so I got a wearable device it's got a credential on it I can use it to buy a coffee what's going on in the economy well lots of profound things are going on the economy like number one thing is is Apple a bank and what's the relationship because because this is a visa credit card issued from Bank of America sitting on my wrist but it turns out that there's company that can actually rewrite the way that credit card works and ship it to 500 million people and do it over the weekend and that's a pretty profound thing now a lot of people have noticed that and that's driving the digital transformation waves so every enterprise on earth is thinking what's your digital strategy media companies need a digital strategy you know and we see it for example and it's they're good aspects of it and bad aspects of it like like for example when you look at your newsfeed the other when I look at my newsfeed Facebook or Twitter whatever they try to figure out what I'm going to react to and they actually spoon feed me based on my biases and it's a really great monetization strategy they make a lot of money but I actually find myself now enjoying looking at a physical newspaper because the newspaper doesn't know what I want to read and I might discover something and an unbiased something like I see stuff in the newspaper that never comes to me via Facebook or Instagram or Twitter because it doesn't know who I am and so this idea of edit edited content or a flat unbiased newsfeed you know is a is an old idea made new again right it might be regulated back into the digital marketplace I am you know I can't help but think though that this is having a big impact on a lot of people I meet with healthcare companies in healthcare they're thinking about how do I implement predictive algorithms to figure out who to let out of the hospital and who's going to recover and what the treatment ought to be in the area of insurance it's also it's also a lot of intelligence in the area of banking in the area of retail in the area of manufacturing there's a demand for two skill sets that are exploding one computer science and we want developers we want to hire everybody's hiring host of developers how do I put a thousand developers into my insurance company I have them all start to build custom applications to react to regulatory requirements or to seize market opportunity or to put a mobile app into the hands of my consumers and the second demand is data science computer science data science and that's really more leaning towards statistics statistical algorithms what is it that the customer wants to buy what is it I should sell them how should I present my product where are my risks etc the amount of demand for data science and computer science is just exploded and partly it's exploding because most of these enterprises there they're no longer satisfied to build an application I used to be oh I've got six projects and I'm gonna hire 10 people in each of the six projects and we're gonna work on that for three to six months now the rage is federated analytics and federated application development and by that it means means I'm an insurance company I want to put in place all of my standard securitized customer data and I want to hire 500 developers in 27 different departments and I want them all to work on 37 or 192 different things at the same time and I want to hire 500 analysts who are data scientists and I want them all to work on a different thing every day and so you're seeing a thousand people that are launching 500 projects on top of enterprise resources at the same time as fast as they can and this is a trend you see in retail you see in banking you see in government you see in media just about every industry and so it used to be you know when I was at MIT we numbered the courses they were like one through 21 right and I had a degree at 16 that's aeronautical engineering and 21 was was humanities and engineering and I thought well you know I've got one out of 20 degrees but it turns out that now the computer science area is becoming half of all the degrees and the data science is exploding so as the world dematerializes you know the the number of let's say conventional science conventional math Isaac Newton and men's calculus what is 1776 or something you know and it used to be that was a challenge a hurdle we had to get over if the master calculus you don't really need that many people to master calculus anymore you've got a calculus engine you just plug the engine in and so we're we're automating out basic science and basic techniques like that on the other hand there's some things you can't automate out yet we haven't figured out how to automate out the creation of new software and we haven't figured out how to automate out the statistical risk analysis so so what should I do and why should I do it that's you know if I was giving advice to a you know an 18 year old today and they said should I study statistics or should I study calculus I would say study statistics study study risk and probability because you're going to need that in so many different areas and you know so what do we do and what are what all these customers do if you want to build applications you're building two types of applications applications that extract insight that help you make a better decision and then applications that let you take action right this is a it's a it's an old theme you know micro strata sorry MIT's code of arms it says men and monies Latin for mind and hand and they've got a scholar and they got a blacksmith on their shield right and so that goes back a long time the general idea is I need to be able to think and I need to be able to do well that's not any different today in the digital economy people want to think what should I do and then how do I do it now if I can if I can extract the five items you're about to buy or you want to buy that's analytically interesting there's a big that's this field of data science but on the other hand if I deliver them to a propeller head analyst at the end of the month I'm just a critic I just explained why everything screwed up and why you're losing money and going out of business in a very articulate fashion I need to put the five things you want to buy in the palm of your hand when you're about to buy the sixth thing in order to monetize one of the first five things right Amazon does that well Facebook does that well you could argue they do it too well if you take YouTube you know if you if you decide you want to study videos on on how to do weightlifting while intermittent fasting you know and sleeping four hours a night YouTube will serve you up 1900 of these videos right it's like and you would think the world consists of you know intermittent fasters that are weight lifters that have opinions about whatever ketogenic diets and that's all you will get I you know I started watching chess matches online and YouTube serves me up every chess match in the history of the world with a running commentary each one 20 minutes long I could sit and spend the next 2000 hours watching chess commentary on YouTube right we've we live in a world of plenty and and there's too much of everything right Netflix is generating infinite million hours of video we've got you know I sometimes I row on a rowing machine right and you ever row on a on an erg machine and it tells you how many watts you're actually rowing and if you can get to 200 watts you're quite the athlete and that means if you do it for an hour that's 200 kilowatt hour 200 watt hours that means if you did it for a day that's a kilowatt so if anybody in the room set and generated all the energy they could in a day that's a kilowatt a kilowatts 12 cents you know and there are people 12 cents the value of all your energy is is a penny an hour maybe and by the way there are people talking about solar energy that's going to drive that to a couple of cents you know and so a hundred thousand years ago right we didn't have enough energy right you spent your entire day running around today if you're the friar later boy in McDonald's you have $9 an hour which means you have more energy at your disposal than Augusta Caesar right the most powerful person on the earth 2,000 years ago in fact you know like I you know used to be 20 horses 20 horses seems like a lot right if you ride a horse but like it's nothing now so we have infinite energy we have infinite mechanical energy we have infinite entertainment energy nine bucks gets you 40 million songs what which songs you're going to listen to right $9 gets you a million hours of Netflix $0 gets you a million hours of YouTube you know the there's a guy in Croatia and he basically sits on his computer and he creates commentary of chess games for a living and he has a chess channel and he's got I don't know every time he posts he gets like 75,000 people watching his television show he makes a living giving a commentary of chess games right like it's an explosion in stuff now um what is that what does that mean for a business well when we hire people we want people that can code or create content that's one thing the second thing we want is we want people that can QA it or test it so we want people that know how to break it and it takes a lot of creativity to break things the third thing is we want people that can market it marketing is like it's a you know amazing thing you know when I grew up if someone called you sugar that was a compliment and if someone called you fat that was an insult and it turns out today in the world of modern organic nutrition we now understand that sugar is not really good for you it's toxic and fat is actually pretty healthy for you and so marketers at some point figured out how to make a good thing bad and a bad thing good and they're still doing it today right in fact it's more important than ever to be able to market things so how do you communicate to people every single company on the face of the earth struggles with this issue because there are so many choices right I mean all these people creating this content it's like now how am I gonna market it to you how do I and by way marketing when I'm marketing to a consumer right is traditional marketing but then you get to the next challenge which is which is regulatory compliance how do you convince the governments to support this thing so the politics of it and politics are becoming more important everywhere regulatory drivers right well for example it's it's as of two weeks ago it's legal to gamble four weeks ago it wasn't legal to gamble except in certain places right the Supreme Court just made a pretty momentous decision it's going to change you know the lives of if not hundreds of thousands millions of people and we're gonna see probably these programs you can sit and watch a hockey game and you can bet on whether the powerplay is gonna score or not score on your iPhone right depending on what state you're in and how it works politics is pretty critical right for example let's take uber uber is a good idea and and people think they'll say well that was a good idea wish I had that idea well the truth of the matter is lots people had that idea right actually having the idea was the easiest thing other people think well the secret to uber is they could create the software well not really creating the software wasn't the challenge either lots people created software that worked what makes uber uber well they were able to raise 25 billion dollars okay that actually is pretty interesting how do you actually convince or persuade people to give you money right the world is a wash and money there's there's so much capital out there I think there's you know hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars looking for any idea so one of the challenges how do you persuade someone to give you the money after that then uber is big because they decided they would spend it all right and and that's interesting of just raw aggression if you want to actually spend 20 billion dollars and then waste another billion dollars every 12 weeks that's interesting yeah because they're basically still giving away a billion dollars of subsidies every quarter it's interesting because number one someone made a decision they'll just go ahead and spend a billion more than they're they're making and number two they they made the decision that they'll be able to raise more money and they seem to be doing fine right the world's being changed by people making those risks now the last piece that's interesting is that uber happens to be breaking the law and half the jurisdictions they do business in right and that that's very curious and getting away with it okay now you know once upon a time we had online poker and you know and that was kind of illegal and and it was interesting and popular until the feds started dragging the executives running these websites off of their planes at dollars airport and jailing them and so is uber is uber gonna continue or not continue and the district attorney of New York could change this you know the trajectory of that entire business and a heartbeat or maybe you know in Miami it happens to be illegal some places there's 18 different municipalities in Miami 18 different mayors 18 different police forces they're not hundreds but thousands of not tens of thousands of interesting municipalities so when you think about marketing we're not just marketing to convince you to trust our uber application and get in our car we're marketing to persuade tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of powerful actors to allow us to make that service available right Airbnb is in the same boat by the way it's illegal to rent an apartment in Miami Beach and yet Airbnb is got a thriving business renting apartments right now politically like how do I feel about that well I'm not sure how I feel about it but what I'm sure of is if you're in business today you have to be able to persuade people of your point of view and sometimes it's persuade consumers sometimes it's persuade people to drive for you sometimes it's persuade regulators not to jail you sometimes you know like a classic example right is when I was in when I was in college we didn't have we didn't have access to so much medicine and there was no such thing as Adderall okay and so interesting enough you know I went to MIT and I had I had stress right it's difficult getting through college with people that seem to be smarter than you that are better prepared than you you know so one week I thought I had a nervous breakdown and I didn't want to get out of bed and and the response was not to give me medical care the response was someone an upperclassman came and he shook the base and get out of bed and go back to work you know you'll be fine and so someone kicked me and I went back to work but somewhere between now and then the Shire Corporation invented Adderall Adderall is you know there's there's no need for it except if you have a hard time concentrating by the way I still have a hard time concentrating okay I know you know like how many people in the world have a hard time concentrating that's like the human condition so we invented disease you know called the temp attention deficit we invent a drug we patent a drug and then we sell the drug and then we well nobody wants to buy the drug so we market the disease but then you know then we sell it to some people but a lot of people in the middle class can't afford the drug and the lower class can't afford the drug because it costs $10 a day if I want to sell you a $400 a month drug I need to find a way to subsidize it so you know the great marketing here is I make it legal I roll a universal entitlement to free health care I then give you access to doctors then I co-op the doctors then I prescribe the drug then I give you the money from the taxpayers to buy the drug and then I convince your parents that if you have a hard time concentrating at age six you probably need a drug the result today is 14 million Americans have a prescription to Adderall and the Shire Corporation just sold for $64 billion to Takeda and 4 million kids have a prescription to Adderall and they didn't make that decision they just got diagnosed as having a hard time concentrating and of course when I was growing up every kid had hard time concentrating I was the I was the most successful person in my school I was voted most likely to succeed and I was universal and I was considered of one characteristic which I was really good at concentrating but I can't concentrate so the summary here is very interesting which is if you can market stuff you can actually convince people to buy it you convince governments to make it legal you can get a patent on it you can even convince the government to subsidize it and then you can turn the medical establishment and the university establishment and maybe even convince the parents of junior that they should actually give it to their kid right I grew up in a world where a day without orange juice is like a day without sunshine okay orange juice is like pure sugar but I grew up thinking orange juice was healthy and not only was it healthy it was very important for me to drink it it's classic marketing so you know there's a lot of interesting political implications of that but here's the most important thing from a credentialing point of view so we need people in business that can build things can can assess the effectiveness of things can market the things and then we get to finance and legal and work on the finance and legal aspects you know if you look at the biggest the biggest retailer Amazon you know they're currently shopping for you know headquarters to or HQ to or something like that I think there's a 75% likelihood they'll come to DC here even though it's only three of 20 different choices but it's pretty obvious that if you're going to sell anything or get in their business they're going to need to support the FAA the FDIC the FTC the SEC fill in the blank just about every regulatory agency and if they won't just need them to do business in the US but they're going to need them because let's take GDPR the GDPR didn't come out of the US GDPR came out of the EU so at some point the Europeans or the Chinese are going to actually slap regulations on these businesses and when they do they'll need the State Department and foggy bottom in order to protect them and so you know the logical thing to do is drop a few billion dollars on Washington DC as an insurance policy I'm I'm always flabbergasted right people write these stories about big companies lobbying and they go like well they're spending 15 million a year lobbying like that's a lot of money if you had 600 billion dollars at stake 15 million is not a lot of money right 15 million is nothing right it's like it's a rounding error if you had 600 billion dollars at stake you would think that you would drop six billion dollars as an insurance policy so I I think that it's pretty clear DC is going to be the most powerful city in the world in the 21st century it is the center of empire and and one of the reasons why is because English is now the predominant language the US law is the is the primary law the banking system the dollar is the primary currency all of these things are creating massive liquidity and and they're driving this digital transformation and there's just a couple of regulators in DC that could decide that this cool trick I just do with my watch makes Apple a bank and if Apple is a bank that changes the entire dynamic of what the Apple computer corporation can do and when Amazon ships you your bottle of Adderall does that make them a medical provider and are they on the hook for the misuse or the use of that or not right I mean because it's a very fine line between being a 64 billion dollar public pharmaceutical company and being a drug dealer it's a very fine line right and that and but and that line gets drawn here in the city actually and it gets redrawn every day you know as of a month ago the view was it's illegal to gamble right it's illegal to have a new Jersey can't have a law that makes gambling illegal and then two weeks ago that changed right it's very fine line they throw you in jail on one side of the line the other side of the line is just an entrepreneurial opportunity now I'm getting to the to the meat of the manner credentials well we live in a world where we're digitizing everything so we need digital skills the skills are evolving rapidly you hire people today that know data science we want them to know are and Python we don't need them to know the calculus of variations right we need them know are and Python you know it used to be if you knew fact that was really cool we sit around we're like well you know in 1976 somebody did something or other now I sit with like 20-somethings and I'll start talking about stuff that happened in 1980s and as I'm talking they're like typing on their phone like well actually no that was 1975 like well you know I think that's such and such bad at 294 like no actually about a 287 you know and knowing anything is now not that valuable because your teenager can like know it better than you can know it you know just playing with their phone it's very irksome right it's very irksome right sometimes we play a game just type any question into the Google right and the Google gives you the answer like I don't recollect it like that you know you could now here's an interesting point right you could have a PhD in fill-in-the-blank history you know but a 16 year old with the phone is probably got a better recollection than the PhD in history because the 16 year old with the phone is tapping into the Google which is actually pulling the statistically proper answer based upon 97,000 other PhDs opinions and so the market is just awesomely frighteningly powerful and some things matter and some things just they become they decay there's a half-life on this so certain things we want and you know we want us that talent to be fresh so our credentials are they transparent are they precise and are they relevant or are they stale so we we hire I guess a thousand people a year so I and I and we try to do smart recruiting we've actually got a product called smart recruiters that doesn't and I actually approve every single person we hire in the company and I do it from my phone here and you know and when we do it I don't have time to interview everybody but we must interview 10,000 people a year right we probably sift through 10 to 20,000 and so it used to be I would I would interview 30 a day or 25 a day and that's like a heroic thing but but you know you know you don't win wars by dying for your country you win wars by making the other person die for their country and nor are you successful in business by working hard you're successful in business by making other people work hard for you or making systems work hard for you so that heroic idea of working really hard got replaced with a new idea which is we actually apply diagnostics we call them ABCDE we give people an analytics diagnostic and a rating and we score them from zero to 100 and it's like the math version the SAT and then we give them a B rating which is business diagnostic and we score that from zero to 100 and you know the business diagnostic is you know do you understand how to get along with other educated adults and persuade them of something right and so we're testing to see whether or not you can sell anything or whether or not you can persuade someone of something then we have a C diagnostic it's coding and we check to see if you can write code and obviously not everyone needs to write code but if you do need to write code we give you the diagnostic and then we have a D diagnostic it's design and in our case we check to see whether you know how to actually create a software design that displays information in a clear fashion you know there's a way to put information in front of someone that's very elegant concise succinct transparent and there's another way to put information in front of people that's jumbled confusing noisy ambiguous and we want to see whether or not you lean 10 toward the better or the worst way and the E the E diagnostic is English okay can you actually master the English language now there's a we don't have a a universal set of credentials that we can go to from third parties that we can tap into but there's nothing particularly unique about these five diagnostics and I would say just about anybody in the digital economy trying to find people that could that could create any kind of application would want to do the same thing so I would guess that whereas we interview 10,000 people a year probably this is relevant to a hundred million to a billion interviews a year we do it ourselves because it's better than not doing it and it takes like half an hour per diagnostic so if you would put 10,000 people through it is 10,000 times two and a half or 25,000 hours of testing now the result is we get complete liquid transparency so when someone wants to hire someone we want to hire a such-and-such in Shanghai or software engineer in Warsaw I'll glance at my phone and I'll look at everybody's got a resume and they've all got something right everybody writes something and now you can't really be sure of the something there's 10,000 institutions I don't know any of these institutions and certainly I can't form an opinion I just look at the diagnostics and in one second I can I can take the measure of how well they'll fit now it's not a hundred percent perfect it's like it's an 80% match I can get to an 80% conclusion in one second and yesterday I rejected some one person I never met my entire life bang you like and I rejected it from six levels up because they were fairly average or mediocre and their analytical skills and I thought if there's no point in us hiring an entry-level consultant that was mediocre in that and that world might as well move on to the next one because and why well I can see the stream of the hundred people we previously hired from the same jurisdiction and they're all maxing out right like I can I can see exactly what they're going to be able to do and how fast they're going to be able to do it and it helps us to figure out what kind of roles to put them in I I can't help but think that we're on a cusp of an explosion in in credentialing because at the point that you actually create a public credential and there's nothing secret here right like public coding you know public data science by the way ABCDE is the basic you know we've also got an F and a G you know what F is French because if you're in France trying to sell the French you need to speak French but I'll tell you another secret if you speak English someone that lives in Paris that chatters you in French sounds like they speak French well but that doesn't mean they speak French well right you can't tell the difference between someone that's nearly a literate in French and in French versus someone that's actually extremely erudite in French so we I'll evaluate people in French and German and Mandarin you know in the major languages and Portuguese and Italian now here's an interesting idea wouldn't you think that the Italian government has a vested interest in being able to certify that you speak Italian right I mean wouldn't they be the number one beneficiary of that so if you're looking at technologies right we've got we've got infinite cloud power we've got infinite mobile power we've got new technologies like blockchain that allow you to upload a distributed ledger that's not that you can't tamper with right and everybody's trying to make that work for Bitcoin right it's like can you actually distribute decentralized money you can't tamper with but but you know credentials are like money like if you're a doctor you know can you scuba dive by the way when there's 20 people on my boat and I'm about to take them scuba diving there's massive risk and liability to me if they can't scuba dive I don't want them to die when they're underneath the surf so as soon as you go to that digital credential you can evaluate and certify someone in less than a second we have them we have a product and micro strategy and we issue digital credentials to the enterprise so we'll plug into the enterprise it's like if you're an employee that's a credential if you're a vendor that's a credential if you're an IT administrator that's a credential if you're qualified to move a million dollars around that's a credential so we issue these credentials put them on a phone then we turn them into transponders so if I issue you all a credential I can then take my phone out and I can scan the room and in 500 milliseconds I can count the number of people that are Italian speakers or our scuba instructors or our registered nurses or you know fill in the blank right who who have mastered analytics right who can who can design something so the 20th century world is I show up with a resume and it takes six hours of interviews in order to assess whether the person is a good fit and you know what we're wrong half the time 50 percent of the time like like I reject people all the time based upon oh they got a great resume and they interview well okay I'm I'll lay out interesting statistical observation right where where the apparent is the opposite of the actual if I'm not good at my job for example if I was incapable of building software but I went to a good school and I interview well I'm actually more likely to be looking for a job all the time so it's an example where where the person standing in front of you that interviews well of course they interview well because they interview a lot and they have a good right and they and they have a good resume because they had to dust it off because their resume goes with the interview and you know and then people come and they're like well we need to hire this person because you know they're like this cloud expert out of Amazon and then I look at the assessment I'm like well it looks like they're enumerate like they they haven't mastered English and they can't add and so they don't seem that bright like oh yeah but you know they had this experience at IBM and Amazon like well show me the resume well you know they got there for a year and they got pushed out and they got there for a year and they got pushed out the reason they have that great experience is because every other institution pushed them out because after they got in they couldn't do the job and so the interview is not a good representation of what you can do I mean everybody's biased and the resume doesn't really help that much either and and here's the other thing right like the institution doesn't help that much because this is like classic real estate problem you know um if I have a good house and it's priced fairly it will sell in five days if I have a crappy house that's priced fairly it will stay on the market for three years and if I have a good house that's priced to double the fair price it will stay on the market for a long time so if you look at a thousand listings ask the question how many listings statistically are actually a good house at a fair price you know the non-statistician thinks oh I looked at five houses and I picked the best of the five and I made a good decision well actually but the statistician says well statistically no more than five out of one thousand listings are actually a good house at a reasonable price because a crappy product at a bad price is going to sit on the market 100 times longer and so the statistical weighting of bad product in front of your face is going to be 99 percent garbage and one percent good uh and yet a non-statistician tends to think hey I found the best one percent well the best one percent means that you actually found just something right so having that's why statistics is so important and that's why credentials are so important when you when you um get to uh true liquidity and credentials and I what we're doing is is not the most efficient thing right we're wasting thousands and thousands of hours testing people when you get to um true liquid credentials you get to a network effect and instead of taking six hours to make a decision by the way it's it's six hours and if if I live in DC and I'm trying to hire someone in Warsaw you're talking about spending five thousand to ten thousand dollars in order to make a decision that takes about six weeks that's only 50 accurate so when I get to liquid credentials right at micro strategy our strategy is well we've reduced that down to the point where instead of taking five thousand dollars in six weeks maybe we could reduce it to like one week and five hundred dollars but at the point that the Italian government issues an eye rating that tells you whether speak Italian then someone shows up and instead of taking 30 seconds to apply for the job or 30 minutes to apply for that job they take 30 seconds a lot of people by the way they don't want to apply for a job if it takes them two and a half hours to apply right or three hours they get turned off by that so in a world where it takes 10 000 people three hours each that's 30 000 hours of impedance what happened if we just put those credentials in the public domain right and the University of Europe right there's there's no national jurisdiction on on being able to think clearly right it could be and by the way a billion people speak English so we could issue a standard credential to all billion people so if you actually start to put an array of standard credentials out there and I think that probably 24 to 36 credentials would probably cover 80 percent of all the hiring so it's not that many you put an array out there then someone is looking for a job could take those credentials post those credentials on the network and instead of applying to and this doesn't help my company at all right makes it harder for us instead of applying to uh six companies in order to get a job I could actually post my credentials online and apply to 600 000 companies simultaneously to get a job right and so we'll actually end up with a very different liquidity what if what if you're just a smart person living in Dubai right now and you wanted to apply to every company in America at the same time right well as long as they're heterogeneous in their approach you can't do it but uh at the point that you have a common set of credentials you can so we talk about currency the dollar is 83 percent of all the trades it's a common currency English is a common language TCP IP is a common networking protocol the rise of certificates for TCP IP you know uh has uh resulted in a worldwide web and a network I think that uh we are we are still in early days with regard to creating uh liquidity of human talent but uh all the technologies are there all the motives are there there are any number of organizations that have an incentive to do this it's what I you know when I uh you know talk about the sailor academy I say you know that the easiest thing was creating the course where not that it's easy but it's the first thing create the content the harder thing is to market it even if something for free it's hard to give it away uh and then the hardest thing is to work through the politics of it you know and the accreditation but uh that's where I think you guys are all doing great work and we can all do this together if we can start to just break this down bit by bit and it might be a win at the state level it might be a win at the federal level it might be something as simple as getting a you know national scuba diving you know credential uploaded as we start to see those liquid credentials come online I think there'll be an avalanche and it'll be bit by bit we'll break this down and and when we get to the point where you can uh uh acquire your credentials electronically and then post them electronically that's going to create the greatest opportunity for humans in history of the world because at that point anybody anywhere can apply for not anything can apply for everything and you're going to have you know for me I'll take my little company I would hire 1,000 people in the next 48 hours all around the world if they can hit our credential requirements right we have we have that much demand companies like google facebook the rest they hire 100,000 instantly if they can find the right people they might hire a million people instantly so there's a massive opportunity to to spread jobs spread wealth uh spread prosperity if we can break down the barriers and the impedance and the restraints uh to that progress and I think uh we're all working together to do that here today and so I want to thank everybody in the room that's actually made investments and credentials and is working on either the technology or the marketing or the politics or the legal aspects of them because they're all important and uh hopefully we can do good things together in the coming year