 And then to our Watchers and Planning series, and for the end of the month of February, our career month, we have various channels for you. Today we have the Urban Tech Startups channel, and I will briefly introduce Stephen Larrick, and then he will kind of just take it away. Stephen is the city's success lead at stay, and has previously been Urban Planner himself, for the city of... Central Paul's Road Islands. Central Paul's Road Islands. So with that, let's welcome our Urban Tech panel. Hello everyone, thank you so much for coming. My name is Stephen Larrick, I'm the Olympic Senate of Mormon Instruction, and I'm so thrilled to welcome you to today's panel. I'm going to be your moderator and facilitator and guide for the next hour and a half. And today we're going to be tackling a theme near and dear to my heart, a theme that connects technology and planning to questions of governance, money, power, and influence to data and data collection, issues of privacy, and at a macro level to questions about the future of cities, and ultimately who gets to decide that future. This theme, of course, that connects to all these topics is that of the rise of the Urban Tech Startup. For me, this is a conversation that I'm excited to be moderating, not just for professional or academic reasons, but this is a conversation that's personal to me. One of the words, as when they mentioned, as a city planner, getting my start at the city of Central Falls, Rhode Island, this was a small post-industrial city hit hard by the financial crisis and facing extreme fiscal hardship. During that time, we worked with Urban Tech Startups to help out. When I worked at the sunlight foundation, leading our city's team as an open data advocate and advisor to city halls across the US, my work focused in part on helping city halls make sense of new data sources and new technological realities often shepherded in by Urban Tech Startups, often not necessarily on the timeline of the city officials I was advising. And for the past year and a half now, after working at the intersection of city making and technology in the public and nonprofit sectors for nearly a decade, I myself have made a jump and now work at an Urban Tech Startup. It's called Stay. I'm our city success lead and I support API management and civic data collaboration projects with local governments across the country. Before we dive in to introducing our panelists, I want to preface this discussion by saying a few words, probably uncontroversial words for urban planning students like yourselves on city making. So city making, by which I mean the production of urban space both social and physical, is and has always been multi-lateral. This is not new. The public sector, the state has played a role in governance, creating policy, planning, all the works projects, building housing, and infrastructure and in governance, private sector developers construct the physical realities on private parcels in the city and the private sector as a whole produces jobs, goods and services that make urban counties more. Non-profit organizations in turn provide human services and programs, advocate for change, and they support art and culture, all of which connects us to a city's sense of place. When increasingly in the past decade or so, we've seen the emergence of a new city making actor. The urban tech start. And so the question before us today is, how does the urban tech start fit into this ecosystem of city making actors, this multi-lateral process of city making? Today we're going to, here are our panelists for today. We're all gonna help kind of address and explore these topics. And today we're going to explore this broad question of what does it mean, what does the rise of the urban tech start mean? Both in literal terms, what's the real lived experience of city officials and the folks working in urban tech startups? What are the real projects and in a nuts and bolts sense? And also if you're right, what are the implications morally, ethically? What are the implications for governance? What are the implications for the future and who gets to decide that future? So to kind of sum that up, I want to give us kind of a north star for our conversation today. And that is the question you see before you. What is the evolving role of urban tech startups in serving urban communities and shaping urban policy and space? And what should it be? And we couldn't have a better panel of experts to help us navigate these complex issues. So without further ado, let's start it up. No pun intended. Here are our panelists. I'm gonna tell you who each panelist is in a few brief words. And then I'm gonna prompt them with three questions. They'll have three minutes each. No strict timekeeping, but three minutes each before I take you off stage to tell you a little bit more about themselves and their background before we get into the conversation. Those three questions are, how did you get involved in the urban tech startup world? What is your company's work or mission? And then how does that mission of your company or how does your personal background relate to today's theme? So we'll take it one by one. Starting us off is Nusha and I'm going to putry this. Gailie? Perfect. Nusha has a background in architecture. She had previously worked as a researcher and instructor at the Sensible Cities Lab at MIT. It is now the president and co-founder of BioBot Analytics. She is the only founder on our panel today, so she's gonna be representing an important perspective. And with that, I will kick it off to Nusha to briefly tackle those three questions. Yeah, well, thank you so much for having me, Wednesday, and I'll start by talking about what the mission of BioBot is and then sort of how I got involved, kind of my path and then end with the last question, the third one. So BioBot Analytics, what we do is we develop technology to extract information on human health from sewage in order to map population health in cities. So if you think about the fact that our urine has a lot of information on our health and wellbeing, our doctors are looking at it all the time, we adapt urine and stool analysis to look at city sewage, so essentially being able to understand the health of entire cities and communities to be able to respond to public health threats and public health emergencies. So the mission of BioBot is really a future where we don't have public health emergencies, and this is a very timely issue right now, but where we don't have public health emergencies sort of creeping up on us and that we're able to catch them before they become epidemics and be able to have coordinated government response before they become epidemics. So I started working on BioBot about six years ago when I first went to MIT. I trained as an architect, I studied architecture in Canada where I'm originally from at the University of Waterloo where I did my undergrad and then in my master's thesis work I started to really focus on the urban scale and understanding how we can leverage digital technologies and sensors in order to build more resilient cities and communities. At the time I was specifically focused on climate change resilience, coastal resilience, sea level rise, et cetera. And then with that work, I came down to MIT because the Sensible City Lab is a group within the School of Urban Studies and Planning where they do a lot of that research and on my first day at the lab I met who is now my co-founder. She was a PhD student in computational biology that was essentially looking at the science and the technology behind measuring human viruses and chemicals in sewage. Had no idea whether there would be, like what the implications of this would be for urban management or urban design, but just from a technical perspective I was really excited about that question. And so we started working together for about three years on the research, the foundational research. Started the company three years after, so now that's two years ago. Went to Y Combinator, did the sort of traditional startup tech startup route, raised some seed funding and now here we are deployed across seven cities in the US today. And so how I think we fit into this broader conversation of urban tech startups and what position they should take. And this is actually a question that we grappled with a lot. When we first started as a company we felt that we had two routes that we could take as a startup, as a tech startup working with cities. One is a little bit more of like an aggressive route which I would say companies like Uber and Airbnb have taken which is let's just deploy in the face of regulation and sort of deal with the consequences later. Raise a whole bunch of venture money for example and be able to buy our way out of a lot of the kind of hurdles, regulatory hurdles that we face. We very deliberately chose another route which meant slower growth for us because we wanted to really align ourselves with the cities that we were working with and specifically with what the government wanted. Yeah, I'm happy to dive into that later but just a little bit more. Thank you so much, new chef. Next we have Matthew and again, probably I will butcher it. Go for it. We shard. Hold on. Two for two. From Remix, he's an account executive at Remix. Matthew, like you, has a background in urban planning. And prior to that he kind of got a start in the tech world working in financial software at Bloomberg LP. Decided he wanted to make a change and kind of get more cynically involved. Got his MEP from Hunter College in transportation with a focus on transportation. And now he works at the transportation technology startup, Remix. So I'll hand it over to Matthew. You can say a little bit more about those three key questions which if I'm remembering correctly are how did you get involved? What is the mission of your company and how do either of those things relate to the theme? Cool, well, hello everyone. Really excited to be here. I'll start with kind of how I got here today. So, you know, Stephen mentioned my background. I started really the first almost decade of my career working at Bloomberg LP, mostly on software and doing really client facing stuff and sales account management. But about I would say midway through my time there I realized that I really didn't like finance and that I wanted to do something else with my life. And I sort of picked urban planning because it really was the convergence of sort of a lot of passions, whether it's policy or cities or transportation, how people move. And so I decided to go back to school for a master in planning at Hunter College. And it was out of Hunter College that I realized that urban planners really don't have, you know, the wealth of resources technologically that folks in other industries do like finance. And so I was able really to see this contrast between the resources that folks in finance have to solve problems and the resources we have and sort of got me thinking, well, what sort of careers are available in technology to really support urban planners? At the time I didn't really, I couldn't really find any companies that were really doing that. This was about five, six years ago and sort of the small startups, urban tech startups were still starting to emerge. And I thought I was gonna just join an agency or a DOT or something like that. And then I happened to find Remix. And Remix really is the convergence of technology and urban planning, really all of the work that everyone does in this room. And so a little bit about sort of what we do. We're a platform for bringing the transportation picture together for transit agencies, but also departments of transportation. And so our four co-founders got their start at the Civic Nonprofit Code for America five years ago. They were paired with a bunch of cities and they decided to work on this prototype where you could essentially draw a line on a map and plan bus lines basically instantly. And so they worked on this for about a year. They weren't too sure what they were gonna do with it after the program. But then all of a sudden, overnight, word sort of got around the internet and Oregon Department of Transportation reached out to them and they said, where can we send the check to buy the service? And so that's kind of how Remix was born. And really over the last five years we've grown to work with about 325 agencies and cities across the world. And really our mission is broadly speaking to make more livable cities but more sort of focused. It's really to provide transportation planners with the resources they honestly really deserve to be able to plan safer or more equitable and accessible cities. And so I take I guess a little bit more narrow view of urban tech in planning and transportation kind of given my two backgrounds in that I think there's a real role for tech companies to play in supporting transportation planners and doing what they do best, which is planning cities, reaching out to communities and really understanding what folks need to build better cities for everyone. That's great, thank you. And I think we're seeing already some kind of building up of themes here with this kind of distinction between urban technology that supports government versus urban technology that disrupts government. Maybe we can talk about GovTech versus urban tech. It's kind of broader umbrella. And I think we're also seeing something that might be a helpful lens for the conversation, which is the different scales that urban tech is not in line with. We have smaller companies like Stay or Biobot that are working with under a dozen cities. And then we have startups that are further along in their journey. And how many did you say Rubix is working with now? We're 325. 325 globally, great. So excited to kind of introduce our next leg of the panel who arrived just in time. Sorry. Were you having curve issues? I don't know how you got here. It's my own fault. Your own fault, okay. I have trouble finding it. I feel like we have this sort of startup issue of we gotta integrate campus map data with route planning at the end. There you go. I'm trying to enter off of Amsterdam. So next on our panel is Don Miller who is the head of policy and partnerships at CORD. Don brings a really unique perspective and background to this panel. As in addition to myself, the other panelists who has worked directly for municipal government at the Taxi and Lousine Commission for the city of New York. And something that is remarkable about Don's in terms of connection to our theme for today about Don's perspective and experience is that during her time at TLC, she was heavily involved in regulating some destructive urban tech startups, namely Uber and Lyft and TNC is generally here in the city of New York. So I think Don's got this perspective as someone who's worked on both sides of this equation. Prior to working for TLC and prior to joining CORD, Don received her as background in public administration with an MPA from Princeton and a BA from UVA. And Don, you missed it, but what we're doing is every panel member is answering the same three questions as it means of introducing themselves to the room. Those questions are, how did you get your start in urban technology? What is the mission of the company you work for and how does your background in urban tech and or the mission of your company relate to today's theme? Great, thanks everyone for coming today. My name is Dawn Miller and I've been interested in planning for a long time. I was lucky enough that my undergrad had a program so I got to minor in urban planning and undergrad and was kind of on this path for a while. And when I went to grad school, I was kind of sitting in New Jersey like watching a lot of interesting urban policy coming out of the Bloomberg administration and was very interested in going to work for the city of New York. I was kind of looking at the agencies you might imagine, DOT, city planning, DEP, and then got a call from TLC, what's that? And kind of the rest of the rest was history. And it was always kind of an active regulatory agency, but there was definitely the greatest focus on the yellow taxi industry. Then obviously that changed when Uber and Lyft arrived and so it became actually a super exciting place to be where kind of every opportunity and challenge that hits the country, hits New York biggest and hardest. But New York was uniquely positioned that we had such strong regulatory authority so we were able to really design of kind of a lot of first of its type regulation because the world was still figuring out like what does it mean to regulate these companies? And as you may imagine, it was extremely contentious. There was a lot of litigation, there were protests, there were, I don't know, crazy PR campaigns and all of that stuff. But even behind the scenes in those one-on-one meetings with the companies, there was a lot of like not speaking the same language and things that could have gone better than they did, but for the approach that the companies took to the issue that I think was partially a function of, especially in their earlier days, not having as much staff who had a policy planning or government background. So I kind of had it somewhere in the back of my head that the next thing I might wanna do would be to make those conversations work better. So then when I was actually at the point, you know, I was at TLC for nine years. So when I was at the point where I was ready to leave, I was kind of looking at a lot of tech companies and was very kind of choosy about the ones I would want to work for, because I think I knew so much about what they were really doing in a way that you don't, if you're just, even if you're like a voracious news consumer, you don't know as much as if you're kind of in the trenches of these conversations. So I wanted to join the tech side, but at a place that really aligned with kind of like my personal values and missions and companies like Remix, I came across at TLC and I started to see there's this kind of set of companies that I think are doing things that are supporting the work of cities, which is ultimately representing the people and having worked on ride hailing and taxi, curb space issues were an increasing issue in terms of safety and congestion. And so that was kind of what brought me to court. Court is in online form to help cities better manage their curb space because it's always been an issue and a contentious issue in cities, but it's gotten that much worse with ride hailing, with e-commerce, with micro mobility and with the realization among more and more cities that car parking isn't always the best use of this valuable urban space. So we provide data collection and analytics tools and then programs to help cities more actively actually operate and change the behavior of drivers, especially fleets on their street. How does this relate to the topic? I don't know if there's anything more to say. I think I was on the government path my whole life. I just cleared a major in polysine when I was 12. So I think I did not have a lot of background in business or understanding of, I knew these were startups, but I didn't really know why they did what they did and how that related to their business model. So I think that's information that I gained over a time that helps me kind of has helped me understand why some of those tensions exist. I don't have the magical solution, but it helped me understand why government and its pace of change is often incompatible with the pressures that people running companies based on venture backing are facing from their investors. Thank you so much, Don. I think again, building on some of the things that we've heard here in the conversation already, we have this idea of incentives that can be aligned with the public interest as well as incentives that are misaligned with the public interest and what's the role of regulation and kind of correcting that gap. And speaking of those incentives, thrilled to introduce our final panelist for today, Liz Sisson? Sisson. Sisson. Sorry to mess up here. Two out of three young men. Who is the COO of UrbanHus? UrbanHus? Urban Dunn? UrbanHus. UrbanHus. Investor. Liz represents the investment and financing side of things as UrbanHus is an investor in the urban tech startup ecosystem. And I think we'll bring that critical perspective to the conversation. Prior to joining UrbanHus, Liz has a background in public policy and specifically leading local initiatives across the country at the Roosevelt Institute, a think tank. Liz is also consulted for local government around a variety of issues, including environmental issues, et cetera. So I'll hand it over to you, Liz. Thank you. To answer your questions. Yeah, thank you all for being here. You did a great job with the background. Yeah, so I started off my career doing some consulting for transportation and environmental through state governments. I ended up at the Roosevelt Institute doing some policy research. I loved policy. The 2016 election kind of messed me up a little. And sort of took a few steps back in thinking about sort of impact and change and sort of what happens when you have a lot of resources and sort of how that, how you can carry out change with a lot of resources. So I think similar to a lot of folks out on the stage, I sort of wanted to give the tech space a try and thinking about how when tech is implemented without someone that understands policy, doesn't understand marginalized communities, doesn't understand like long term, how dangerous that could be. So I sort of wanted to get an insight and see what happens with venture capital and what happens when you make investments in technology that a lot of VCs frankly don't have that knowledge. So I joined Urban House about three years ago. Like I said, we're a VC group that invests in urban tech. So we focus on food, water, waste, energy, transportation, built environment, CIVDEC, GOVTEC resiliency. I think I got them all. And so basically any city functions, we don't do healthcare and we don't do education. We do feel like those are definitely government responsibilities. So we also run a startup accelerator called UrbanX and that is in partnership with BMW Mini and we invest in the same spaces that I just noted. Slightly smaller checks and we work more intimately with the startup. So it's a program for five months and we help with product market fit, we help with regulatory issues, we help with product, we help with fundraising in the hope to get all of those teams to a seed, seed plus series A investing at the end of the program. The mission for us is it started as, it is right now a common theme is combating climate change and thinking about how cities play a huge factor in climate change, not just causing it but also the mitigation side of it as well. And thinking about ever increasing urbanization and the issues that happen with density and sort of how can startups work alongside the government kind of going back to what we were just talking about. We are not the VC that wants to fight against, we're the VC that wants to work with. But how can startups sit with the government to figure out all of these issues? So yeah, I mean, I don't think I have to explain any more about how this pulls back to urban tech because that's literally all we do, but yeah. Thank you so much Liz. And full disclosure, Stain was a graduate of UrbanX as I believe was CORD. CORD was an investment outside of, okay and Remix as well, or no, okay. Didn't want to make things awkward but wanted to get things out there. That said, that doesn't mean I'm gonna not hold Liz's feet to the fire. We are not investors in this day though. Before our time. But as I mentioned, so we're seeing some other key points that I think can help inform this conversation, including this idea of kind of what's an investment thesis and how does that play into how startups grow and the types of things that we see as apps on our phone or the options that we have as consumers or that our governments have as civil servants. I think it'll be really great to kind of have this interplay between the startups represent here and someone on the kind of the investment side of things as well. And then finally, one thing I'm noticing is everyone here seems to work for a company that has this, let's work with government rather than disrupt government approach. So we may have to think about how to play devil's advocate at certain parts of this conversation. Speaking of the conversation, oh, and hello everyone, my name is Stephen Larick. I'm monitoring totally fair that I answer the same three questions that I post to everyone else. I said a little bit about my background but I think my first foray into urban technology was academic. I did a capstone project on what at the time was the IBM Smarter Cities Challenge in Providence, Rhode Island. Really interested in what is this? It turned out it didn't seem to be a whole lot but there were some interesting ideas being explored. I wrote a thing about that, how it related to the LeFev, you guys know. And from there I became a city planner. As I mentioned, we were a really under-resourced department. And so it was really helpful for us to form partnerships, whether that was with our local Code for America Brigade in Rhode Island or globally called Code Island. Or whether it was with technologists who came in as interns and helped us digitize our zoning map for the first time. Or we published our parcel data as open data for the first time. Or whether it was with full-on specific technology startups who helped us map and inventory our real property portfolio and put it online as a map that supported ideation from our scissors in terms of, hey, we all own this together, what should we do with it? From there I started working at the sunlight foundation where I led our local government team that was specifically focused on supporting city halls through an initiative called What Work Cities, funded by the Bluebird Planter piece. Sunlight was kind of doing civic technology before it was called that. We had a bluebird non-profit that also had a unit called Sunlight Labs that was kind of working both in ways that were antagonistically holding government accountable, as well as in ways that were meant to support the important public interest work that government does. A lot of that antagonistic work was work that was supporting journalists in terms of getting access to information. And after eight years working in the public and non-profit sector, in 2018 I made a leap and I started working for STAY. I think at the heart of STAY's bet is this idea that with the rise of urban technology has also risen in asymmetry of power and maybe I should say of information technology and as a result in asymmetry of power, at least a shift in the power dynamic and how might we empower government with the infrastructure needed for a more level playing field as kind of the different sectors navigate this new world and kind of need to play their core functions of governance, et cetera. So I'm gonna be bringing that perspective to how I moderate this panel. And I think the first thing I wanna put out there as kind of a value is that panels like cities offer something to everyone, if and because everyone contributes to them or whatever their vote is. So what I'm saying is let's make this participatory. As the moderator I hope I can be a good representative of your intellectual curiosity, but if there's something urgent that sparks from the conversation, raise your hand and we'll see if we can get it incorporated in. Actually, you know, show of hands, who here has a background in urban planning? So what I'm saying is all of you have something valuable to add to this conversation, so don't be shy. We will have a dedicated time at the end of the discussion for audience questions, but like I said, let's make a participatory. And now that we've done the background, we're gonna try to also keep it free-flowing and organic. We just kind of went down the line and everybody introduced themselves, but conversations don't work that way, cities don't always work according to plan either. So we're gonna jump around and I'll try to help fully nudge and jump into direct. So here we go. I wanted to start us off kind of with an existential question, which is what is urban tech? What are we talking about when we talk about urban technology and urban technology startups? And what is it not? And I think this is important just to start the conversation with a common understanding of what we're even talking about. So I wonder if anyone on the panel has, I don't wanna spend too much time on this. I do, I wanna get it out of the way. And I wonder if anyone on the panel has a thought of what it is, and then I'll wonder if anyone on the panel has a different thought of what it is and isn't. And I know Liz that you had kind of chimed in about this idea early on as we were kind of ideating on this panel. Yeah, let me work backwards and say what it's not just because I think probably people have a good idea of what it is. So I think there's a lot of misconceptions about what urban tech is in saying that it's startups that are working or technology that is working to sell to government. And we always try to break down that misconception that all startups are selling to government in urban tech. That's not true at all. Actually, I think only 20% of our portfolio sells directly to government. And a large portion either do direct consumer, B2C, B2B, B2C. Can you say what those stand for? Oh, sorry. Like business to business or business to consumer as opposed to selling to government. There's a lot of reasons why that is. There's a lot of reasons why that's the makeup of our portfolio. A lot of it is in a venture capital world you have to get returns in a lot of times selling to government. Or an idea is that selling to government is slow and just harder to get through and long sales cycles, yada, yada, yada. My idea is, you know, my personal opinion is selling to government is wonderful because they're a sticky customer and once you're in, you're in. But so, you know, I think for us, it's just thinking about all the different verticals that I just talked about. Food, water, waste, energy, transportation and how you can sort of use technology to either make those areas more efficient or completely disrupt what is already existing. And so, you know, that's sort of the philosophy that we take for us. You know, when we think about sort of impact in urban tech, for us, we're not impacting investors, we're mission aligned. You know, so impact meaning like we don't, unfortunately we don't actually care about like if we're taking away jobs or creating jobs, which is unfortunate but that's sort of the distinction I like to make. But for us, we want to see positive impact in about 100 cities in five years. And that's sort of how we think of like, can this technology scale to 100 cities in about five years? Through all of the B2B, B2C, B2G, all of those different areas. Anyone else have anything to add or subtract from Liz's overview of what urban technology is? Yeah, I mean, I'd add, because I had this conversation recently with somebody and the way that was helpful for me to think about it and I think there's so many definitions of what can be urban tech, but it is a technology that has a significant impact or an impact on our experience of a city. So for example, I would classify Uber as urban tech because it has fundamentally changed the way that we commute or that we travel in cities. I would probably classify like Airbnb as urban tech because it fundamentally changes the way that I travel and experience with new cities. I would also classify like a smart water meter as urban tech even though I personally might never interact with it but it is fundamentally changing something about services in a city. Now, yeah, I think that's just, that's one way of thinking about it as well. And I agree just to underscore that comment that most urban tech startups don't actually sell to government. We're one of the rare companies that sells directly to government and even when we speak with venture funds or anything that focus on gov tech or urban tech, it's still, it's very clear to us every time that the fact that we sell to government is like an asterisk next to the company. It's not normal for the entire kind of their portfolio or anything. Yeah, and I think this idea of who is the customer is a critical one and I think, again, to kind of represent the bias and the perspectives of those on the panel, I think do all four of us here representing startups work at companies that are primarily B to G selling to government. And so I think that's, as Liz, you pointed out that's only 20% of your portfolio that you consider urban tech. I mean, I would say that if you were to look at all urban techs, if they're venture backed or not, I would say a lot of them do sell to government and the idea of disrupting government or helping government is critical. But the venture backed world is much more limited for the reasons I said and that VCs, fundamentally either don't understand government, don't understand procurement, they don't understand pilots, they don't understand how these things work. Therefore they're afraid of it, therefore they won't invest in it. I mean, at the end of the day, VC gets their money from limited partners and you have to pay back your limited partners, you have to think about like, can this actually be a major win? Can this make me a ton of money? I think that narrative is shifting because there have been some startups that are sort of breaking down those stereotypes and I think investors as sort of climate tech, so making that as like a part of urban tech, I think technology that is helping come at climate change is a lot of corporates and a lot of banks are coming out and saying like there is an economic opportunity when it comes to climate tech. So I do think over time those barriers have been broken down, so I think people will be more open to it but there is still that sort of the hesitation to work with government. So as we think about what urban tech is, I next want to think about what is the opportunity presented by urban tech? So what are the potential benefits here? For one, there's money coming into urban communities in a different kind of way. There's a financial vehicle through which urban challenges are trying to be addressed. And so I guess I had this question of does the rising tide of more money in the ecosystem, does that lift all ships, including the ship of city government? Or does more money mean the pace of, does more money in the pace of urban innovation is faster in the context of a startup than it can be in government? And is there more opportunity for different kinds of impact when facing big public challenges in a startup than in government or what is the distinction between the kinds of opportunity for impact that might exist? I'm happy to jump in. I mean, I know, I don't think that it rises all ships. I think a lot of the technology is for people that have access to technology anyways. I would say marginalized communities are completely left out of the conversation when it comes to urban tech, frankly, and I think a lot of that is because of venture capital and how it's fundamentally flawed. It's shitting on my own industry, but policy long first, VC second. So just to be completely honest, I don't think that it's there yet. I hope that it will get there. And I think if government was more of let's say an investor or made it easier to work with government with a lot of technology, I do think that it would be more beneficial to more communities, but right now, no, I don't think so. Okay, so we have kind of the opening salvo, cynical view, and all of us here do this work presumably at least in part because we're trying to do good in the world, what kind of good are we able to do in the world given the types of organizations we work for? I have some. I'll take the optimist to you for a moment. You know, part of my portfolio when I worked for city government was our IT department, and there's a lot of challenges to doing IT work in government. There are recruitment and retention challenges. There's a lot of different stakeholders who control how developers may develop, what kinds of standards they have to go through. They're dealing with a lot of legacy systems that are very hard to get rid of and budgetary quirks that would like blow your mind. So I think it's very hard in government to develop quickly and so I think that is a place where private sector software products can come in and do something that is difficult for government to do directly. I think government is rightfully and naturally skeptical at times because they have had traumatic experiences with getting kind of stuck with vendors who did not perform well. And so there is this kind of skepticism that it looks intriguing, but what is this gonna mean in two years? Are you gonna jack up my prices or are you even going to exist if it's a startup? So I think there's a lot of opportunity to provide tools to planners that they don't have today and but getting them in their hands is a challenge. And actually building on that, I'd love it if you could maybe point to some of your work at CORD, I'm thinking in particular about the surveil tool and cities that maybe are mapping their and digitizing CORD regulations that might not have done that or not for the existence of CORD. Right, something I learned was that very, very few cities have a digital map of what their curb space looks like. And then maybe they have a database of signs, but translating that into a quantifiable information to say in this area, I have this much space devoted to this use is something that is actually quite a hard programming task to do. And then next step to communicate that out to drivers and mobility companies by an API is something that just didn't really exist. So but it's certainly something planners are very interested in knowing more about. So I guess that's one of the big pieces of value we bring is that there are these developers who are able to work very quickly if they need to buy a thing, they buy it like that to add to what they're doing. It's just like they're just able to do things differently to build a tool that ultimately makes it easier for planners to do their job. And speaking of making it easier for planners to do their job, now I know that's a big part of the run from Matthew and I know that's a big part of what you focus on at Remix. Do you have anything to add to kind of the opportunities that being able to provide a software as a service product to your government employees? How do you think about the impact that you're able to have? Yeah, I mean, I think the reality is in planning as in any space where you have practitioners or specialists in what they do and really understand the landscape and know how to make decisions and understand the impacts. There are not necessarily gonna be experts in computer programming. I think that's a reality for government, for private companies. And so really the opportunity from a technology perspective is that tech is really good at building software. And so there's an opportunity to really support governments from the perspective of they're just not gonna have the time or the resources to build the sort of programs that people who focus on those sorts of things can do. And I think that's really where a company like Remix comes in where we really focus on building tools that are extremely specific to the work of transportation planners. And we really go to painstaking lengths to understand and empathize with what they do. So that way our product reflects what their actual needs are. And I think that's a real key to sort of being supportive from a private sector perspective for governments. Yeah. And I personally find that this, I mean I think that the issue you raised Liz, of who just is assigned, who gets to participate, who benefits. You can I explain my cynicism on maybe a little bit more? Yeah, no, no, no. Because I think this question of equity and access, particularly when we're talking about urban technology, is a critical one. So yeah, if you have additional thoughts on that. Yeah, I mean if you look at where the money is going right now, which that is one indicator, right? But I'm just gonna say where a lot of VC money is going. And a lot of it, let's say, is going to solving housing issues, right? So a lot of construction tech is huge right now. And you talk to a lot of people that are building construction technology, they will actually use the narrative that by saving money for these construction companies, these developers, that it'll make housing cheaper. And I think that is to me a fundamental narrative flaw to say that because you're saving construction companies or developers money that people can A, have access to that housing and that it's making it cheaper for them. And I think that's sort of what I mean by like, who is this actually benefiting? The story that you're telling versus who is ultimately benefiting. Absolutely aspects of SIV and GOV tech are wonderful when it comes to fundamental government. But I think the other side of it sort of going back to my earlier statement of like B to B, B to C versus B to G. I think a lot of the B to B, B to C is yet to sort of trickle down in using that loosely. But sort of like, who is this really benefiting? So that's sort of where, from my point of view who I'm seeing, who we're potentially investing in. I mean, another big part of it is like surveillance and facial recognition, which is a huge part of the conversation. Who is that benefiting? Who is that hurting? There's a lot of BCs that don't have that conversation of like, you put facial recognition out there, like who's that hurting? They think of it as like selling to law enforcement, we're gonna solve so much crime, but they don't understand like social justice issues or racial issues in cities. So I'm just thinking of it from a VC policy perspective that a lot of times this technology could also be hurtful in addition to being beneficial for some people. Yeah, absolutely. And Nusha, I would love to hear your thoughts on this idea of kind of data collection and surveillance of vulnerable populations. Obviously, it's hard to imagine a type of data collection that feels maybe more invasive to folks than something like collecting human waste data. How do you navigate that narrative or how do you work with government in a way that assuages any concerns around PII, around surveillance and surveillance capitalism? Yeah, so that's a huge topic. Before I get into it, I just wanna add that. I think you're absolutely right where you're saying that we still have to figure out how a lot of these like B2B and B2C urban tech companies are actually trickling up and benefiting the entire society. So for example, take Uber again, going back to Uber. It's an urban tech, you can classify that as urban tech, but who is or which economy is Uber really benefiting? Is it benefiting the city as a whole? I mean, there's studies now that show that public transportation is not being used as frequently as it used to and it's being replaced actually by Uber. Well, what does that do when you look at emissions and things like that? So it might be benefiting certain individuals and making their transportation costs cheaper and more accessible, but as a whole, yeah, there's still a lot to be seen there. I think that's such an important point and I think it really ties into what you were saying Liz about this idea of narrative and being skeptical of the narrative that's being told and who's telling it and why they're telling it. Certainly with TNCs, there was a narrative and a claim even that, hey, we're gonna reduce the number of vehicle miles travel, we're gonna reduce the number of cars on the road. We are going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and Don, I'm gonna table it, but we're gonna come back to you later because I do wanna hear from Nusha about collection of human waste data, but this idea that how does the government or how do we collectively, as all those multilateral actors in the city, how do we scrutinize those messages and bring something like empirical evidence to test a claim like that and say actually, that's the opposite of what we're seeing on New York City streets. Anyway. Yeah, so when we first started or when we first launched BioBot, we knew for sure that we wanted our first product to be for government and we wanted to sell the government and we wanted to work directly with municipal government. Why? Because, well, first of all, that was kind of the thesis that the entire company was founded on, like to better urban environments, but also government controls access to wastewater infrastructure and we knew that if we wanted to maintain that access, we sort of needed to build a product that they were on board with. So we asked as many government officials and public health officials as we could, what's your biggest public health concern? If I can give you any sort of human health data to make your job easier, what is it that you care about? And across the board, we got information on the opioid epidemic or opioid drug consumption, heroin consumption, prescription opioid medication consumption. Public health departments in the US are spending 80 to 90% of their time working on this specific, like only this one issue with like 10 to 20% of the time working on all the other public health issues. So there was a lot of, we found that there was need for a lot of support there. And when we started digging more and more into sort of the data that they currently use to guide a lot of their opioid response strategies, we found that there was this clear gap in the data. We found that the data, first of all, was really only looking at overdose deaths. So at that point, it's a little too late. So you're solving yesterday's problem today. So that's how geographically, I mean, at best they would spatially map overdose deaths and then deploy, you know, let's say if it's heroin deaths, then they're like, let's deploy needle exchange units. If it's prescription opioid deaths, then let's deploy educational programs, et cetera. We also found that overdose deaths represent less than 1% of individuals who suffer from substance use disorder and that they tend to skew towards low income, low income populations, transient communities like homeless people. And so that had become sort of the face of the opioid epidemic because the data was limited and more sort of focused on that group of individuals. Whereas we found that wastewater presented this opportunity to actually be very democratic in its assessment of who is actually the population that is consuming illicit drugs or prescription opioids and can use help or support and benefit from a lot of these government services because it might not actually overlap perfectly with what we're seeing with the overdose deaths. So that was our hypothesis going into it. And when we launched with our first city customer, that was exactly what we saw, that the heat map that we were able to put in front of them was completely different from the heat map that they had that looked at the overdose death clusters. As a result, the city sort of reevaluated all of their opioid response outreach based on this kind of new heat map of consumption that they saw because number one, those people are still alive in the heat map that we're putting in front of them. And they geographically were targeting their response more. In this one city, for example, it was prescription opioids, we were able to tell them was the big problem. And so they sort of scrapped all of their heroin, educational campaigns and needle exchange programs and focused everything on educational campaigns around prescription opioids and setting up prescription medication drop off units. And in that kind of six month period of time that we ran our pilot with them, they had three times as much engagement with the city services as they had previously. Because previously, again, they were getting a lot, there was a lot of like nimbyism in the community. This isn't our problem. This is homeless people coming from the city next door, that big city over there that are overdosing here. So from us, we see it really fundamentally this perspective that sewage is democratic. Everybody contributes to it. It doesn't matter how much money you have, your voice is not like bigger, your voice isn't louder in wastewater because your house is bigger. And or we essentially can provide the same services to everybody in every part of the city, regardless of what typical people live in. Now, when it comes to issues of privacy, number one, it's been very important for us to spend quite a bit of time like educating government or the public health departments that we're working with on the technology that we're using and the limits of the technology, so what it can do and what it can't do. So for example, telling them that the data that we're generating is de-aggravated. It can't be de-aggravated anymore. So it's inherently aggregated and anonymized. You can't, if we're collecting leaders and leaders of sewage that represent 25,000 people, there's absolutely no way to then de-identify that and be able to understand this is coming from X person or X building or X household. Number two, things like that people don't know that I didn't know until we kind of got into it, less than 1% of DNA that you find in sewage is actually human DNA. 99.9% of the DNA is DNA coming from plants, bacteria, other animals, et cetera. So even that human information is so small and then obviously we have pages and pages of contracts that stipulate that we destroy all human DNA, that we don't even look at it. As a company, we don't sample sites that represent fewer than 10,000 people to kind of maintain that level of aggregation. And I guess it's always important for us to go back to that initial sort of mission of ours, which is to leverage our data to disrupt public health. And public health really operates at that community level. Public health is not about providing services to one specific household or one street. It's really about that kind of community scale. And so as long as we remember that, then we're always kind of designing our service and the data that we're generating around that. I think that was a really helpful deep dive into what you do and some of the challenges you think through with respect to privacy. And I think kind of there's this great opportunity to serve and support public health and epidemiology. I'm curious, you talked about thinking long and hard about how you protect PII, those types of commitments you made. I'm curious what that process was. I'm curious, do you work with police departments? Have you considered it? Would you work with the DEA if they were interested in seeing where people using their topics? Yeah, so when we first started, we were really nervous about even talking to police departments. I think we just, we also didn't really understand what police officers and what police departments do. I think that was the problem. And I think most people probably don't really understand. And you just assume that it's law enforcement, like pushing, incarceration, et cetera. What we actually found out, because we resisted reaching out to police departments and talking to police departments. And organically, our first customer involved their police chief and their police department at one of the early meetings. And we actually found out that police departments across the US have become de facto sort of social workers. Most municipalities in the US don't have public health departments. So it's been the police departments and fire departments to some extent that have taken on the burden of responding as social workers to the opioid epidemic. So not arresting people or convicting individuals of drug use, but rather checking up on overdose victims like a day later, a week later, encouraging them to enroll in therapy, et cetera. So when the police departments first started showing up at the table when a mayor's office would bring them in, we were a little skittish, but then they made it very clear that they weren't really interested in our data, that they kind of know, they know what's happening where, in terms of overdoses, like the overdose data is available and they're really only focused on that overdose community, not the consumption community. And so it just turned out, we discovered after a while that there just wasn't really a need for us to work together. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, from my own experience, I remember it was kind of data from the police department that kind of caused my mayor to work with the fire department and every member of the EMS and the fire fighters had an arc on them in certain areas as a result, essentially, of that back-in-time map that you described. So kind of this idea that there are multiple roles that are played by those departments, but I think it is an ongoing challenge like who's gonna use data itself as neutral and we can't always foresee the ways it's going to be used. And so this is certainly a challenge faced not just in the public sector, but in particular in the private startup world where there might be a lot more incentives to collect a lot of different types of data that haven't been introduced in the context of city hall where things might be avoidable and might move from department to department. I do wanna get back to this idea of the narratives told and I don't know if there's anything you wanna share on that issue we tabled earlier, Don, about kind of your experience pushing back against a narrative of public benefit from TNC's. Sure. Yeah, I mean, I think they entered communities with a lot of claims about positive impacts they would bring. Some of them I think are true, like I think that they have made a positive impact on driving. But there's a lot of claims they made without a lot of backing. Things like, we're talking about reducing emissions, reducing car ownership, being supportive of transit and that data, now that it's increasingly becoming available, is showing they aren't true. So I think as people who are maybe considering careers or just kind of interested citizens, I think you just remember like mission statements are cheap and most people don't fact check the claims of these companies with the kind of vigor that government is typically fact check when they make such a claim. So really think about like the source of it, what do they actually have to back that up? Why are they saying it? And did you ask for data when you were on the city side? Yeah, so that's a really big piece of this and maybe a good example. So we created regulations to require data reporting and I'm a little bit like, I'm specific on my semantics because I think a lot of the companies use the term data sharing as if it's like, nice, like I should share with you, but it's up to me. The share gives, I have a three-year-old and you try to tell them to share. But if this is transportation data about who's using the streets and it's impacting all of us, I don't think it's about sharing. I think they should be required to report data to the government. You know, New York City, like I said, had a very, you know, good starting position that we already had strong regulatory power. Most cities did not in fact, these companies went state to state to state and got state legislation passed to preempt cities and take away their power to regulate or to get data reporting. And as we were rolling out our data reporting requirements, the companies fought back really hard and all of a sudden they were like the defenders of privacy in America. And they, you know, had made friends with, made donations with, got channeling the board of a lot of convenient organizations who were rolled out to them speak on their behalf about privacy issues and to kind of without specifically lying hint that we were asking for things and doing things for things that just weren't true. And so I think that's one of those examples when there is a company coming out with some kind of strong social position that they're the defender of your privacy. Think about why they're saying that. They are mostly concerned about their competition and how their competition can view or not view what they're doing. And so it was really a business concern was what was really driving that activity rather than a concern for individuals' privacy. And just Google it, there's a lot of evidence of the ways that those companies internally were certainly not protecting privacy. So I think just be a skeptical consumer of claims made by companies and think about who's their real customer, what's their real incentive. Are folks on the panel in the room familiar with the mobility data specification or the current legal battle between Los Angeles and Uber around essentially this very question of what needs to be reported? Folks familiar? Someone on the panel wanna explain what's going on with the mobility data specification? I can talk about it. Basically from very high level, the city or LADOT would like to basically have unlimited access to Uber's data and essentially be able to manage mobility in real time. Not unlimited. Yes, but have pretty much a lot of control over sort of that information. And so they're kind of sparring with each other in terms of who should have access to that information. Yeah, and maybe I'll add a little bit. So Stay Does is a data partner to a few cities that have eScooter programs. So the mobility data specification is a standard by which data reporting is required of operators we don't have them in maybe in New York or we don't have them in New York yet, right? But eScooters have been rolled out in a number of cities as obviously as a shared micro-mobility service. And in many cities, the permit requires a certain level of data sharing. And so kind of there's a very interesting back and forth right now between again, kind of the privacy world that's very concerned about the idea of government having access to trip path data from an origin along the urban grid to a destination with timestamps of each location. You know, all of this is anonymized, but a specific location and timestamp is uniquely identifiable, if not personally identifiable. Versus governments that are working on use cases that they say are really valuable for using this type of information, for instance, one use case that we support in the city of Louisville, Kentucky at stay, their permit requires that a certain amount, a certain percentage of that fleet of vehicles be what's called rebalance dropped off in the morning in lower income communities in West Louisville. And so they have this permit requirement, but how on earth could it have any teeth if they cannot see in real time have the vehicles been dropped off in those neighborhoods? And so helping to kind of build the infrastructure and the tools for government to get an alert, okay, this is the percentage of the fleet that's in this neighborhood at this time, and that make that recurring so that if anything's amiss, James in Louisville can call up Bird and say, hey, we're gonna dock you for this, or hey, this is, do this better next time. That's the interplay that often needs to happen and that sometimes can't happen without something like data sharing or data reporting depending on who you're talking to. Yeah, and I think just to add, I call the avoidance of data reporting the long game for the avoidance of regulation because if the government doesn't have the data to monitor what's going on or to even do a study of how much our Uber driver is actually making, are they making the fortunes you promised them, then those things cannot be regulated. If you don't have the data to know that I'm letting drivers drive 14 hours straight, then how can you set a regulation stopping me? So it's really about a lot more than the data, it's about the avoidance of regulation altogether. And because if you make a regulation without the study, they sue you and say you didn't have enough information to make that regulation. So without it, you're kind of in this, you're stuck but that's advantageous to companies that don't wish to be regulated. We can have a whole panel just on kind of the data component of this potential for collaboration or antagonism between startups and government. I mean, I think a lot of times the question comes back to like why do these startups do this? Like of course there's like that they need to like grow fast and like break things and whatever but I think a lot of it you do have to follow the money, right? Like if these startups have huge injections by soft bank and their expectation is to grow like enormously in the next like year, they make bad decisions. And so your suggestion for people to like look at mission statements, I would say also look at who's giving them money and sort of their expectations for growth. I think we have this expectation that like if you have a lot of money, you have to go really fast. You have to break things, but I think going back to like who that helps and who that hurts is like really important. So if you're gonna start a startup or if you're going to join a startup in the urban tech space, I just encourage folks to look at like follow the money, see who the investors are, like who their LPs are and how that impacts decision making on the startups level. Well, despite my impassioned plea at the start of the conversation, we haven't had much audience participation yet. So I do want to open it up. How long are you on a time on a day? Well, we have, it came in about five minutes, so it's like, okay. Great. So I really do want to open it up to the audience to get folks to bring their own experiences to this conversation. Or not, that is. Yes. And it just reminds me of the last comment in that regulation is how do we, how can we regulate something we don't know? And taxis and cards and how can we regulate for centuries without big data, right? And whether that be through network, can't be all, I think it's pushing back and I'm doing for people to be used to the people or in that way. And so how precisely can, how can you all in the sector identify and communicate the biases that using data as a form of participation that the form of voice has inherent in the structure of the mode? Yeah, I think that's a great overarching question for a lot of these conversations. What are the inherent flaws and problematics of working with data? What do we miss when we take a data-driven approach? And sorry, to rephrase. I'm not going to say the flaws, I don't want to say that everything is lost by it. Sure. I think there's so many examples of things that are picked up, but the way things work is often this is an important part of what they do. Sure. What responsibility is amity in the context of working with this to describe the method of how it works? Or is that unrealistic? That's not how it is dealt with. So just to, we're sort of in this position right now, and I liked your point that things like cards and transportation, et cetera, have been regulated for a very, very long time, decades and decades. We've had regulation around these things. Wastewater data is not regulated. So we work in a space that people ask us a lot, like who owns sewage? Does the city own it? Do the people who it has come from at some point own it? Do they own it when it's in the pipes on their street? At what point do they lose ownership? Like none of these questions have ever been talked about or worked on. So we're really the first. And we recognize that and one thing that we're doing is that we want to lead these conversations and actually bring them up to regulators, both within, let's say, like state we're working with a couple of states at the state legislation level and then also in the federal government. And so what that process has looked like for us for the past year has been this huge education component of educating government officials on what this data is, what it looks like, what it can tell us, what it can't tell us, how we get it, where we get it from, et cetera, et cetera. And then encourage them to start thinking about inevitable regulation of this information because today Biowox the only company doing this. But if we are successful in demonstrating the value of this data, specifically the monetary value of this data, like we're not gonna be the only company doing this for much longer. And we would like to think that we're mission driven and that we want to build a product that's for public good, but the next company that's looking at wastewater data might not. So on our side, that's sort of what it looks like. We actually think about this question a lot. What more can we be doing or what else can we be doing to kind of think about regulation? So yeah. Yeah, I don't know if this directly gets at your question but I think this idea of metadata and kind of documentation is key. I know that one of the things that we, for example, we work with a few different local governments, including the state of Rhode Island under transportation to help them work with data from ways. And that's a data source coming from a third party that's crowdsourced and that's very different from the official source of data coming from the traffic management team that's keeping track of accidents on state highways. And so when we bring that data into the same system and we're integrating it and standardizing it on the same schema, it's really important to have that prominence of where did this data come from? How was it collected? What does it mean? What does it not mean? And so I think one of the big things that, I think the good news about working with government as a client is that they have a good incentive to care about a lot of those things too. They don't always have the resources to employ best practices. But that's kind of been an incentive of ours. I think we've heard a lot of desire from our government clients to have better tools for keeping track and documenting where did this data come from? At what points has it been transformed? Why was it transformed in that way? How was it collected originally? And to have that kind of natively in the product. Yeah, a piece of feedback that I hear from cities is that they have companies come to them with some kind of data or tool, but for proprietary reasons, they don't wanna pull back the curtain and tell the city the methods that they used. But that's very hard for a government person to make use of that because the people to whom they are accountable, whether it's their boss or the community meeting, rightfully want to understand the methods behind the analysis that they're being asked to make decisions on. And so I understand certain companies might have their reasons where they like that, but it's definitely an impediment to them getting certain cities, probably especially larger, more sophisticated cities to kind of sign on. I mean, and personally, that's feedback I've given to my team where sometimes they feel like our product development team, sometimes they feel like we have good defaults. We're going to avoid the fire hydrant and avoid the bench. I'm like, what does that mean and how can the city person know exactly what that means and change it if that's not exactly what they wanna do. And you don't want like a spaghetti software where there's like a setting for everything, but I think for settings that impact the planner's ability to explain her methodology, like that's kind of complexity well spent. I also say that cities have been collecting their own data for a very long time. And so one of the things that we do at remix is we really just try and take the data sets that cities spend a lot of time collecting ready, whether it's demographic or information, traffic counts, turning movement counts, all that sort of stuff they collect. And we really just try and help them visualize it in a way that's more meaningful to really just draw conclusions a little bit more quickly and help tell a narrative around why they're doing the things that they're doing. So I think we've had a lot of conversations about a lot of this new data coming in, but there's also been data being collected for the longest time. And cities also need help with getting that and making it more accessible as well. Other comments, questions, stories for them as well. Can I get you all to say sort of where do you see urban tech going besides the fully optimistic? I wonder if you like that one sort of vibe but also the sort of the dangers of it and what problems might your envisioning that will come up? My biggest thing is sort of surveillance and facial recognition that scares the shit out of me. I mean, I think we see so many startups that are interested in this space and have really cool technology that is so freakishly accurate as far as identifying criminals, let's say, how you want to define criminals, but that freaks me out. And it's been a big thing on our team. I'm so deeply against it, but there's a lot of people that see the benefits of it. I will also say that this is where the sort of selling to government or not selling to government comes in as well. There are a lot of startups that say, well, I don't want to sell this law enforcement, I'll sell this to Disney. I'll just have Disney. And so then it becomes, talk about data, then it's like, okay, you're talking about a private sector owning all this data. They're scraping the entire internet, Facebook, Instagram, wherever. That's what freaks me out. The Daily had a really good episode on this actually, I think last week or whatever. And that's urban tech, right? So then it becomes a whole security, public health thing that freaks me out. That's an area I would like to, frankly, just stay away from and someone to say, absolutely not. We cannot do this, but it's already there. It's already happening. So basically, what are we gonna do about it? You know, I think building on that idea that it's already there, I think one of the problems and concerns that we think a lot about is in a way similar to what you were describing, Matthew, we are often helping governments work with data systems they already have. But increasingly, we're kind of seeing this, and we're also trying to empower government to be more of a counterbalance to large surveillance capitalist firms that are now operating in cities or in public realm in certain ways as a countervailing force. But I often see there's kind of this, almost like impossible choice. I don't think, I don't know if you read The New York Times' Privacy series or often personal location data, for instance. I don't think we all got together and consented to the creation of a massive repository of its personal movements and visits to various establishments. And we kind of, but it's there. It exists in the world. And you can buy it from a data broker. And so we kind of have this choice of, government, I think, has this choice of, do we participate in this? You know, if this is going to exist, is the highest and best use of it to use a term for planning to cite the next panel I've read or is it to solve a public health challenge? So given that it exists, should we participate and use it, even though we have the moral misgivings about its existence in the first place? Or can we put our head in the sand and kind of pretend it doesn't and let that asymmetry between the expertise about urban space that the private sector has continue to grow and that gap continue to widen between the private sector and those that are supposed to be keeping the private sector in check. And I don't know how to solve that problem. So that's what keeps me awake at night. I actually really want to participate in all of these new technologies. They're actually very interested in the facial recognition technologies or the self-improvement of the tax vulnerability of the technologies. If they only had the information and the resources to use them properly, I think that there will actually have a lot more enthusiasm that you would expect or want this kind of government and that's in the U.S. kind of... Yeah, it's interesting. I think we see a lot of variance, I think sometimes tracking the level of government and jurisdiction, sometimes just place to place. The city of Austin, for instance, doesn't. They could require the share of the U.S. data. They do not collect any individualized pass of scooter movements in the city and that's because they've made that commitment to kind of limit what they can see and I found this to be very interesting. Can I answer here the opposite side what I'm excited about though? I'm super excited about a lot of energy startups and also micro-mobility. I mean, I would say talking about climate change, there are some really cool companies out there that are helping buildings reduce emissions and there is some cool stuff out there. So even though I feel like I'm being extremely pessimistic on this panel, there is a lot of cool stuff that I'm excited about specifically in energy and transportation. Okay, we said something to get folks interested. No, I want to ask something that's so much energy-related actually though we've talked a lot about the data sharing concept around this is kind of the somewhat related question of the consent to it. And it feels like a particularly difficult question in the urban areas. You can travel around the answer place or something, there's data that's being collected about the data you're talking about or what not. I've entered Google's new smart city there but Toronto, what do you guys think is the path forward for dealing with questions about consent to a lot of these these kind of data collection questions? And especially informing people about it or what not. I have some thoughts but I don't have any immediate reactions to consent to informed consent, consent in public space, collection of data not in public space. I don't know the answer but I think something we might not have a complete consensus on that makes it hard is where do we have an assumption of privacy? Thinking back to my criminal justice class where when you're in an Uber, do you assume that as a private space or not? And I don't think we've figured out on the street. Should you assume your conversation or your face is private or not? And I think that informs what types of rules we want to put in place. But we can't assume everywhere is private but maybe if we want more privacy then we feel we have today. It's not even to say what is a private space which I was a little way too good at. Right, there's case law to some point on that but it's gotten more complicated than it was before but there were a lot of these cases early with whether you could use heat sensing guns to detect someone growing plants in their house and whether there was an assumption. How far could you go on that assumption of privacy in a home or a car and things like that? I'll give one example. I think that is a complication of around kind of consent in public versus private and then maybe speak to one without endorsing but speak to one example. I know I'm in an attempt to kind of address some of the issues that you're describing that actually comes from the Keysight Sidewalk Labs project in Toronto. So the first is when I was a transparency advocate at the Sunlight Foundation, we were very much on the side of when you're in public space, like say you take a photo, like we were used to police officers for instance saying hey you're not allowed to take a photo of us in public space and saying actually the law says public space, there's an expectation that your image can be captured and now there's a lot of discussion around okay that was one policy regime in a world that predated facial recognition, is this still the regime that's relevant to our conception of what we mean by it's okay for your image to be captured? But I think this idea that like who can privacy benefit? When does privacy benefit those with more power? When does it benefit those with less power? I think a lot about this idea of surveillance in the bottom up access to information versus surveillance and when can urban tech maybe empower the former? The other example I'll bring from getting the exact acronym but maybe some of the room knows, there's an effort as part of the Keysight Project in Toronto to prototype and pilot a set of iconography, essentially almost like nutrition labels or warning labels to compliment urban sensing. And so they're these kind of like hexagonal, the colors mean something, the symbols, there's symbology to it and there's a digital and a physical component to it but essentially the idea is wherever sensing technology is deployed in public space how can we make sure that A, there's data about, metadata essentially about okay what type of sensor is this, what is it collecting? Is there a way, in what ways is this data limited? Is it kept forever? What is it used for? As well as a digital, so that someone can query that data set as an open data as well as like a physical representation of that. You know, something that someone might notice when they're walking across the sidewalk and there's a traffic cam on the light pole. I think it's called the digital public realm, is there a no? Yeah, it's interesting, I think we're at the early stages of this. I wonder if there, you know, we generally think of nutrition labels as a good thing and certain requirements around disclosure from the FDA. But I wonder when they were first being developed if there was criticism of that as co-optation of the narrative and doing something small at over the placate. And I think that's the kind of conversation that's happening right now. Yeah. Okay, let's take one last very question because I know you were waiting. And this will be kind of our final word. So, you know, whatever this gentleman says, just, you know, employ your political skills to warp it into your closing statement. Sorry. I didn't know we were trying to learn something. In Europe today, we have a lot of integration with urban tags and their IPOs, like reward, Uber, et cetera. How does influence your work and how do you think it is influencing the scenario? Great question. So, IPOs, how have IPOs that may be not gone as well as expected influenced the context in which we all try to do our work? Great question. I think it boils back down to like inflated valuation. Really? It's like what is the value of these companies? Again, back to my earlier comment about SoftBank writing big checks and what that does to companies. I actually think like growing slower with thoughtful VCs and being very intentional about like what you're actually building is great for startups. I think what it's done for us and our investors is like okay, how are you guys going to avoid like these messy exit strategies, right? It's always the question like, when you invest in a startup, how are you gonna make money off of it? Like what is the next strategy look like for these fine startups right here? Is it M&A? Is it IPO? So, I think it created sort of like a household understanding of what urban tech is and what it can do. And like I think a lot of people didn't originally associate like Airbnb and WeWork with like the name Urban Tech. So it did that I guess, but there is still that negative connotation but I think their outliers, the majority of urban tech companies are doing really interesting and thoughtful things. And I think their exit strategy is to be determined but from a VC perspective, we ask you to think about your exit strategy but like also like focus on what you're building right now. So it's like, I don't think I'm fully answering your question but it's something that we consider but it's also not dictating our everything because they're very specific, soft bank circumstances in a lot of those companies. Yeah, I mean I'd add for us, going back to your earlier point about also being mindful of like how, let's take for me specifically as a company, how are we financed? Because a lot of those companies found themselves in those situations because they had these like growth metrics again that were coming through from their investors or the type of capital that they chose to finance themselves with. So how are we financing ourselves? And we've been so intentional about like slow, thoughtful growth and it actually closed a lot of like VC doors to us because our growth metrics just weren't the same as you know a traditional VC in Silicon Valley would expect of a startup. You know I'll always put remix in its own category. I think remix has grown phenomenally well with metrics that are just like, you know most tech companies that you see but for us was very different. And yeah, I mean it's not public yet and we're kind of in the last stages of closing around the financing right now but are the lead investor that we're working with has patient capital. And what that means is their LPs don't expect a return within I think it's 10 years typically or something. Anyway, so their return kind of timeline is much longer so they can invest in, their fiduciary duty does not preclude them from investing in companies that might have a longer time to return a profit. And one more point that I'll add is we did have an option at one point of just raising enough capital and self funding deployments for example in let's say a dozen cities. Whether or not they wanted us to do it just we don't take any money from the city we self fund, we generate like a shitload of data and then we go and sell that data, find the highest buyer or the highest bidder for that data and that was a path but like we very deliberately did not wanna take that path and so that slow growth is what we ended up with instead. I think also the typical VC structure is changing and I think people are more open to project finance and debt as well that doesn't dilute your company and you can grow for like a deployment you can get someone to give you money instead of taking a fraction of your company. So I think that sort of the traditional VC is changing and I think a lot of it has to do with the IPOs that sort of blew up. From the remix perspective I would say operationally it hasn't impacted us too much. I mean the scale of like an Uber and Airbnb is just so many magnitudes larger than what we do. I would caveat that and say we were fortunate that in the very beginning we found a really great product market fit and some of that is just chance sometimes and so that's been a real boost for us in being able to go out and do other things we wanna do and then I would just say that it's really important that the people who are running the company and who report to these boards are steadfastly aligned on the mission and really pushing back on some of the growth metrics and it's not an easy thing to do because I spend almost a decade in the financial world when people get into investments and it can tend to get lazy and you really have to push back on sort of some of the metrics and I think there are more VC companies that are willing to diversify their portfolios to have that. One big theme in finance that I saw was sort of sustainable investing and it was a very, very small part of the financial world in terms of the number of assets but there were financial firms using it as a vehicle for CSR, PR for their companies and so I do think there are opportunities for startups to find those kinds of companies who are willing to wait a little bit longer because there is a potential CSR impact for them down the line. All right. One quick thing, I'm still kind of, I'm probably the most novice here in terms of understanding the VC world and business but I was considering opportunities in the space six months ago and things I looked at, like just to see if they matched my comfort level where like how many job postings did they have? Was it like 100 or like 10? And that can kind of be an indicator of like the style and approach of the business also somewhat to some extent the phase that it's in but that kind of thing can kind of help you see the style and figure out maybe whether they have fast money or so many expectations and you can evaluate do those seem realistic relative to the government or whoever they're trying to work with? Like are you going to join a place that you think is naturally gonna have butt heads or that's like planning to work at a pace that is reasonable and compatible with their customers? All right, I think we'll close on that practical advice on how to evaluate urban tech startups you might consider working for. So so much to cover so much was covered here today. A lot, this is a conversation that I think it's important that all of us stay vigilant in not just having once but continuing to have. We could have talked about procurement we could have had a whole panel on Keyside and sidewalk labs. A lot, there's a lot to uncover here and a lot of this is so new that it's still being shaped in terms of how it fits in with regulation with urban democracy. And I think all of you in this room I think if we could give you a call to action get involved whether you're making your voice heard on how you think the future of cities should look whether it's working for an urban tech startup whether it's working for a city that's navigating this brave new world. So thank you all for coming out and I think we're gonna stick around.