 rest of these points and we will go through them and I will hopefully answer everything that you have in mind ok. So, ok next anything else? How did we start? Next question surely you had something in mind when you came here? How to do event planning? The business model. So this is actually the easy part it is damn simple you charge people that is it. Anything else? Ok. Growth and challenges. What else? Yes. So how do you make this a software powered system? Ok so I am going to add this extension of this question how to do event planning and how does the software help? Right. Anything else? So let's start with this set ok. So I think this is a good set of questions to start with. The first part obviously is what is Hasgeek about? Now before we get into this I am assuming that if you guys are thirsty you know that you can help yourself there is coke out there the glasses out there so feel free to help yourself. We didn't bother to get tea and coffee because if you guys are going to be pretty hot outside anyway so I don't think anybody wants a hot drink at this time. Ok. So what is Hasgeek about and how did we start? Now Hasgeek is been around since 2010 but the ideas behind Hasgeek have been around for much much longer. It is something that is in fact been in the making I would say for at least about 15 years and obviously 15 years ago I had no idea that I would do something like Hasgeek. You know that is not how it starts. It is more of the influences build up over a long period of time and for me one of my earliest influences was simply getting online. So this was in the year 1996 and I discovered that there was something called a bulletin board. Now this was pre-internet. Before we had internet access. Now internet access has been generally available to the public in India since 1995 although it has been available to research organizations since about 1989 when Nicknett and Arnett started up. They have been around for a long time but obviously you know general public access. VSNL started doing public access in 95 onwards but it wasn't until about 2000 that most people actually had access to it because it was just unaffordable back then. So my first experience with the concept of online started with something that existed outside the internet called a bulletin board system and this was at a time when even telephones were really hard to get. You know it was a time when if you wanted a landline you had to wait about seven years to get your landline connection because that was a backlog. You know that VSNL did not exist at that time. It used to be simply the department of telecom and they were obviously extremely inefficient at handing out connections so their backlog ran several years at a time. So at the time when I got my first telephone connection at home which obviously was not my doing but my parents doing. I discovered that there was something called an electronic bulletin board where somebody else in the city who had a telephone at home had connected a computer to a telephone and you could attach a modem to your computer and dial their computer and your computer was now talking to their computer and instead of talking to a human you were typing to a computer and obviously it's not very fun because nobody on the other side is a machine but you could write software to host the connection which would take a message and pass it on to the next person who dialed. So in a sense this became a chat room where only one person could be online at a time but it could leave a message for the next person to read. So it started with that and obviously it was quite fascinating because at that time there were probably three or four hundred people online in Bangalore. It was an extremely small community and an extremely diverse community. So I was a student, I knew someone there who was a wing commander in the Indian Air Force and used to just hang out in this spare time. There was some other guy who was a ham radio operator who had some interesting computers and therefore was online. There was a guy who was a priest in Kodaikanal and he used to dial long distance to Bangalore which was pretty expensive but he used to do it because he has nothing else to do sitting as a priest in Kodaikanal. So in general it was a bunch of completely random people like this. And one of the things that we learned back then was you could talk to someone that you have nothing in common with and still have a nice conversation and learn something from them. Now this is not something that normally happens in society. If you go to college you talk to your college mates, you talk to your lecturers. So there are very few opportunities that you get where you're in communication with someone who has nothing to do with your background and yet you're talking to each other and it's not unusual that you're talking to each other. So that was an interesting experience for me. I spent about three or four years online like this before so many people started getting online by then that it was not normal to be talking to a stranger anymore. Back then it was something that was so fascinating that you do it just because it was so fascinating. These days being online is not considered fascinating at all. I mean if you don't have a Facebook account there's something wrong. It's not like it's an exotic thing to have. So that was one of my early influences. The second thing was the Linux movement. Now Linux as you know dates back to 1991 but the ideas behind Linux go much further back. It comes from the history of Unix itself and one of the more significant milestones of the GNU project starting from 1984. 1991 Linux. 1996 something interesting happened in India which was PC Quest put Linux on the cover of their magazine. They bundled a CD along with the magazine which was again an unusual thing to do for a magazine in India at that time. And by the late 90s there were Linux user communities around the country. You know what's called a Linux user group. So there was a Pan India group called Linux India and there was a Bangalore Linux user group and a Chennai Linux user group and a Mumbai Linux user group and a Delhi Linux user group and so forth. And by about 2000 each of these groups had a few hundred people in them. So you know the online world had started growing really fast by that point. And one of the things that all of us had in common was Linux was a pretty unusual thing at the workplace. So if you went to your workplace and said I'm using Linux from a desktop everybody's going to look at you and say what the heck is that and what kind of an idiot are you. Okay. And between the 96, 97 to 2000 period it started seeing a transition where it was okay to be seen using Linux and you are not some kind of random weirdo. And by 2000 it was okay to say that even your servers run on Linux now that you're transitioned over to something new and remarkable. And the Linux user groups became the support community where initially you had this weirdo who's doing some random things with computers and nobody seems to know whether you're wasting time or not until it turns out that what you actually had was a very valuable skill and now everybody's moving over and today it's fairly well known the Linux is by far the most popular server OS. It's also the by far the most popular smartphone OS but you don't recognize it as such because you know it as Android and Android is Linux. So something that was a fringe phenomenon in the late 90s is now so mainstream that people don't even recognize that they're using it. You know pretty much everybody in this room has a Linux phone in their pocket. You don't think of it as a Linux phone. Okay. So that transition was made possible because of those communities which were a place where you did not feel like an outcast just for doing something new. You instead became a support forum for something that was so new back then and is now just mainstream. So that was my other influence and the Linux user groups in India started essentially meeting every month as a way to just talk about what they were up to because this was a time when a web chat did not exist. Yahoo messenger had just come out and that was the first instant messengers that was mainstream. You know there was IRC much before but most people did not use that either. There was no video chat. There was no Skype. There was no voice calling. The only way to talk to someone was a phone call which was very expensive or to come out and meet them in person which was actually cheaper. Today it sounds very weird to say that coming to meet someone physically is cheaper but back then that was the case. You know that online communications were much more expensive than travel. So Linux user groups used to essentially meet almost every month sometimes even more frequently and just talk about what they were up to and obviously there's a value in face to face interactions that is not easily replaced in any other medium. The phone call does not have the same level of interactivity that a face to face conversation has. So clearly you get a lot more done when you're talking face to face. So the monthly Linux user group meetings eventually started becoming larger and larger until obviously you have to split the groups and say that the South Bangalore guys meet separately from North Bangalore guys because there's just so many people and you can't coordinate your timings and so forth. And in 2000 the Bangalore Linux user group decided they will do an annual meeting where they will invite people from across the country to come. And that became known as Linux Bangalore. Eventually it became known as fostered in and fostered in ran for 10 years and during the time it became to be one of the world's largest gathering of people interested in open source software. So it became a fairly important landmark event in the year and it became one of the four big largest events around this topic around the world. So there used to be a well known circuit for people working in the space to show what they built. You come to Bangalore in December. You go to Australia in January for Linux Australia. Then you go to the CCC event in Germany in I think March or so and then there's somewhere else in the U.S. at some other point in the year. So there were four big events that became the landmark to come to and obviously this is unfortunately somewhat forgotten piece of the Indian technology industry history. You know that they used to be something that was that remarkable. So yet another influence. In the mid 90s something else happened with the way these gatherings were conducted. And that was what's called Bar Camp. So O'Reilly which is a book publisher in the early 2000s realized that they had a problem with the way technology was advancing. In that it was advancing too fast. And one of the things about publishing a book is that somebody's got to write the damn book. And it's not easy to write. You can't write a book in two weeks and publish it. It usually takes about one year to produce a book. Now the problem is if it takes you one year to publish a book and today you heard AngularJS is hot. And you say okay let's publish a book. But it takes you one year to do that. Next year it's going to be something else. And your book is now too late to the market. So you really have to know really far in advance that next year certain topic is going to be hot in the market. So let's start writing a book now. So when they had this problem their approach was to say let's just find a bunch of smart people. Put them in a room. Let them talk to each other. We listen to what they're saying to each other. And if you think that sounds interesting let's go make a book about it. And hopefully what a few smart people are saying right now will be something the whole industry is saying next year. Okay. Now the Linux user groups have already proven that this model works because what was a fringe phenomenon in the late 90s with some upstart new operating system that had smart people. And look at what they do. This will be what they call these people the alpha geeks. So previous notions of understanding social development tend to refer to an alpha male. That someone who is so dominating over the people around them that they become the leader. And in this case they defined what's called an alpha geek and said this is the person who is doing something in technology that others will copy eventually. So when they started doing that a bunch of others looked at this and said hey you know what this is a nice idea. But if it's already private event and we are not invited then obviously it's not nice. So let's just do one more thing ourselves. So already this event was called friends of early camp or foo camp. And foo bar is a fairly common term used in programming as a temporary name when you don't have a proper name. So when already did foo camp next year a bunch of guys said let's do a bar camp. And that's how the name came. It has nothing to drinking. It's just bar in response to foo and foo means friends of early. So bar camp started in 2005 and instantly became a worldwide phenomenon. People around the world started doing it. So we did the first bar camp in Bangalore in April 2006. Bar camp is now in its 13th or 14th edition. Next weekend is the Bangalore edition of bar camp again. So it's been around for a fairly long time in Bangalore. It's grown quite a few things we did at bar camp. Notion that the way community over the past decade has led to a few problems because along the way you started getting too formal. Remember that the first Linux user group meetings where bunch of outcasts essentially talking about what they were up to. And when you go from there to being something that's world famous then there's a whole process involved in how does somebody get to be a speaker. And how does somebody get rejected from being a speaker. And this was something that had started to bother us that this whole system of who's allowed to share knowledge had started to become a little too formalized, a little too bureaucratic and created power figures who essentially were power figures just because they decided to control the setup not because of something they were actually doing that was making them a leader in terms of the technology. Bar camp became an opportunity to say let's just turn this around and say that there are no such things as speakers anymore where instead going to have a setup where anybody can be a speaker. Just put your hand up and say I'm speaking. If you get an audience around you, you're done. You're a speaker now. So it started from there. And the bar camp in Bangalore turned out to be phenomenally successful for something that was a free event by 2007 which was just one year after the start. We had an event where 650 people came to the event. Okay now most commercial events can't really attract that many people into their venue. You know it's incredibly hard to convince 650 people to come to one place and bar camp did that without even telling them what it was about. The whole point of bar camp is that there is no agenda. You come there and you decide if you want to speak or listen. So if you are doing something right where you don't even tell people what it's about and 650 will come and say okay I want to be part of this. Clearly you've got something great going there. And so while we were doing bar camp one of the things that kept bothering us is as a completely volunteer run event the volunteers kept changing every addition because it's obviously stressful to organize an event. You know you can ask the construct guys. I bet you guys really don't want to think about doing an event again for the next few months after you're done with this. It's extremely stressful. So one of the things that happened with bar camp is the volunteers keep changing which means the next generation does not know what the previous generation knew because there's been no skill transferred. Because it's not a formalized system it's essentially just a bunch of guys saying that they'll come in and volunteer. So by the end of 2007 I started noticing that if we only paid someone to essentially be the bar camp organizer and say you just keep doing this and let this be a job. So it's not something that is so high stress because you're doing it only on weekends. Then the institutional knowledge remains and you can just do a better event the next time because you don't make the same mistakes again. So that was the idea that I had while looking at bar camp and we tried floating it with the community to see if somebody would take it up and just say that I'll be the person who does this full-time and that didn't really work out. So I spent a few years looking at this realizing that we could do these events better only if there was some continuity and in 2010 I figured look if nobody's doing it I'll do it. So that was the point I said okay let me now do this and that was Hasgeek. That's where it came from. That we start with the notion that events ought to belong to the community but there's got to be somebody with some continuity just so that the institutional knowledge does not die with them when they leave. And so we came from there. So what is Hasgeek about? It's damn simple. Get people in technology to share their knowledge and help others learn from them. As straightforward as that. Now this is where you get to the business model and say if somebody is going to be a full-time organizer how is he getting paid? So this is extremely simple but maybe not immediately obvious at the face of it. You get paid in two ways. You buy a ticket when you come to the conference. It's what you guys did with construct. So clearly you're willing to buy a ticket and the people who organize construct get paid salaries out of that. So part of the money goes into that. Now that's one simple way. Unfortunately it doesn't make a lot of money because when you do this everybody is going to look at you and say the only way to get a decent salary is if you charge more. But how much will you pay for your ticket? If the ticket was 10,000 rupees for construct you would obviously not come for that. You'd think three or four times before you came. But what happens then to the person you put in charge of essentially running these events who has no career growth because they're not getting paid more as their experience grows. Then it becomes case of then you just have to do a lot more events or you would sell a lot more tickets which again does not work because there's limited space in this venue. You can't just say that instead of 20 people you'll have 200 people sitting in this room listening to me because there's no space for that. So there's a limit to how many tickets you can sell. There's a limit to how much you can charge per ticket and therefore there's a limitation on how much you can grow and how many people you can pay by doing this. But what you can do instead is realize that there is value to people beyond just selling tickets. And that is in the fact that there are people also interested in advertising to your audience. But you have to be careful about how you do this because the people in this room none of you here are here to listen to an ad. That's not what you're after. You're here to listen to something about what I do and see what you can take away from it. So the trick now is to say how do you bring advertising into this picture in a way that actually works for the audience. And that is the business model we figured out. What we realized is that quite simply some types of advertising are high value, some types of low value and in general high value goes where you're after somebody who is very hard to target otherwise. Now for instance who are interested in computers. It's damn easy. You put a signboard on the road they'll see it. Because in a city like Bangalore, almost everybody is interested in computers. If you're interested in people who know about AngularJS and build websites that are single page applications, now you're talking about something extremely nuanced. The average person on the road doesn't know anything about this, doesn't care about it. So what happens then is that for an advertiser, the traditional route of advertising is a waste of money because it's going to the wrong audience. So what you need now is to filter your audience that you advertise to and essentially say that I only want to talk to people who are interested in this very specific topic. The problem is how the heck do you get these people? How many people in this room even know what AngularJS is? Three of you guys, right? So if I now start getting into a lecture about AngularJS, three of you will make sense of it. For the rest of you, it's just over your heads. It's a waste of your time. If I start talking about something you don't care about. So what we learned in this process of saying let's do something like bar camp is that in fact doing something like bar camp is a bad idea because when you do an event that has essentially no agenda and it's fantastic so long and so well but it is not great for someone in the audience who actually wants to go in depth. You know if you want to learn about a topic and you're not interested in the introduction, you actually want to go really deep into it to an expert guru level. You will not get that in an event where it is full of people who don't care about the topic. You only get that in an event where it's people who are very specifically interested in that. And you notice that this is basically what we do. On the homepage of ASGEEK there's a list of events that are coming up and if you look at this one, it is Redis Miniconf. This is going to be sometime in the middle of April. I'm not settled on a date yet. Now this is about a very specific topic. Redis is a server that is used for managing a cache in web apps. It's an extremely specific topic and it's something that there are probably only about three or four hundred people in dialogue to understand it. And when I do an event that is just about those three or four hundred people, a foreign advertiser who is interested in the topic, it's extremely high value because it would cost them several lakhs to target those people the traditional way. So they will very happily give me half of that money and say I've got 50% off on my normal expense for the advertiser. But for me as an organizer, I got paid a lot of money that I would not have got otherwise. For someone to just put a message saying that, hey, if you're interested in this topic, we are also interested, please talk to us. As simple as that. It's as simple as putting up a banner like this. So that is quite simply the business model. Identify topics that are high value and not addressed elsewhere and do an event around it. So pretty much everything that's in our agenda is fairly similar to that. This is a superset of that. It's slightly more generic. This one is about big data. It's one of the larger big data events in the country. And there's more that will not announced yet because the dates are not up yet. So that targets what is Hasgeek about and how to do, what is the business model. Now let's talk about the other part. How to do event planning and what software is involved. So this is known as slightly tricky part. There are multiple parties involved when you try to do an event. There's someone who's speaking. So that's me in this case. So when I come into a room like this, I'm expected to come in with the existing knowledge of the topic. And I'm expected to be sharing that knowledge with you who presumably don't have this knowledge. That's the implicit relationship here. That the speaker knows something. The audience wants to know it and therefore they hear. But my expectation from this event is different from yours. You've come to learn. I've come to teach. Why am I teaching? Am I getting paid for it? Most likely not. In this case, certainly not. So now there's got to be some reason for me to come and speak. And this is your traditional problem when you find a speaker. That it's somewhat easy to find an audience because there are all kinds of people interested in all kinds of things. But it's not very clear what's in it for the speaker. Either you pay the speaker, which is traditionally what's done, and this just becomes a source of income to go speaking around the country. Or you make it something that's a different kind of opportunity for the speaker. Now the usual excuse when you don't pay a speaker is to say we're giving you exposure. That we're giving you an opportunity to learn how to speak. In my opinion, that's bullshit. That doesn't work. There is only one valid reason for me to be interested in speaking, which is that the audience challenges what I'm saying. That I'm going to learn something from the way the audience questions what I'm saying to you right now. And if you don't ask me a question, it means I wasted my time. So that's the simple reason why a speaker will come in. That this is essentially validation for what they're thinking. Not exposure, not experience, learning opportunities or anything else of the sort. So this was one of the first learnings that there's a certain way in which you target someone who's coming in to speak. Okay. And that's not the end of the deal. There are still two more categories of people involved. There are the sponsors. Somebody's got to pay for this and ticket money alone does not pay for everything. So there's a sponsor now who's essentially coming in to advertise to this audience. And there's there's their own set of expectations. And there's a fourth category, which is the people organizing this event. An organizer may expect to get paid may not expect to get paid. When you come to volunteer at an event, you're not coming there to the expectation of getting paid. You're coming there to the expectation of learning something from this event or maybe getting a free ticket. So the fourth categories involved now are the speaker, the participant, the sponsor and the various logistics providers. Somebody is providing catering, they're providing food, they want money for the food as simple as that. Somebody is providing a venue, either they want money for the venue or they want something else. In this case, this venue is not getting paid for the fact that you're here. If you go to a commercial venue like an auditorium, the auditorium will expect to get paid for being there. So there are different expectations based on why you're doing this, why you're doing an event. So what we learned is each of these four categories has to be addressed in a different way. And you can't address all of them at the same time. So now the difficult category to address in what we're doing is actually the speaker. Because you want someone who's really good at that topic and is going to share some advanced insight, which means it is not an intro level talk, which means they have certain expectations of what they're getting out of it. So what we did is we started most events essentially tend to invite a speaker to come and speak. You know, the simple way to do an event is to say that let's, we know that there is certain person in this company who is the head of technology who's done some interesting work. So let's go invite him to come and speak. And then we'll build an audience around him. What we realize is that it's got to be the other way around. So as you can see, it's got the same set of tabs that you saw on the first side. But this is the speaker's website. So what it does here is invites a speaker to say, if you want to speak, this is where you tell us that you're interested in speaking. So if you, for instance, want to talk about readers, I think there are three proposals over here. So let's see who's interested in talking about readers. Okay, or there are four of them now. So what you got here is someone from Flipkart saying, let's come and talk about how we do it. Now remember that a company like Flipkart traditionally does not come and tell the world saying this is our website works and these are who can copy us. No, it's stupid for them to do that. So why are they doing it? Promotion for whom? Hiring? Hiring is obviously a goal. What else? So is it not unsafe to give away preparatory knowledge about how you actually work internally, smart enough to give away, to not reveal? Actually, they reveal more than most of us realize. So, but here's the thing, okay? So I mean they're very clear, okay? It's a very detailed overview. It's not an intro. They're basically saying that we will expose the guts of how our operation works. They're not alone. You'll find a lot of companies like this and all the different events where they essentially open up about how their entire internal system works. And it comes for a very simple reason. What these guys at Flipkart are doing? They're looking at Amazon and saying how do we ever get to be at that level? Remember Flipkart is not the world's greatest e-commerce website. They're looking at something else and saying those guys are doing really well we want to be like them. So the simple reason this exists is about saying I'm going to open up and hopefully be told that hey, it's not that much worse than what Amazon does. It's as simple as that. They hear for actual validation. This is not about recruitment. This is about saying if I tell you how my system works, will you tell me if it's good or not? And that is a critical thing to do with the speaker. That if you want a good speaker and you want him to actually open up, you create an opportunity for them to actually be validated on stage, which means you cannot have an intro level talk. It's got to be addressed to an audience of their own peers. So that's things that we did when we target and say that first of all you create an event that is extremely specific and for an advanced audience. And second you make it a mechanism where essentially being validated by your own peers in other companies. Obviously this is not the way most people think of it. Some people tend to still think of this as being intro level talks. So you'll see for instance one of the other talks down here. Now this one is slightly more advanced, beginner level, because this is about say you know the first one down there offloading heaviness of web apps to reduce queues. Now this is clearly saying that this is how you do something as the normal way of doing something using this technology. On other hand if you look at this one, now here's somebody else saying hey this is how I built my product and this is how it works. So what this guy wants is obviously validation from someone like Flipkart. And then saying that somebody else who's going to speak at his event is slightly more advanced than me. So tell me if my setup is good or not. This is what you do with speakers. Now when you start doing something like this, it's not that hard to convince someone to travel across the world to come and speak at your event, because they're no longer thinking of this as I'm going to foreign country to give them Gyan, but rather I'm going there to see if those people also think the way I think. So this is entirely something that passes over the heads of most audience members. As an audience member, you come there expecting to be told something. You don't come there thinking that I'm going to challenge the speaker, which is okay because that's how most people in the audience think. What you need to deal with the speaker to make this thing work is and essentially says that I spoke about how my company's technology works and I gave away something important and there were 50 people in this audience and at the end of the day we all went home. What happens next? Now that's not satisfying again. To give away knowledge, it requires preparation. So if somebody spent a few weeks preparing for their talk and then came and gave it away and then another day is over, it's lost. You know it's a wasted effort. So one of the things that we did is we learned that we had to in fact record video for the event and in fact I am recording and streaming this right now so anybody who's online is watching what we're doing out here. But what we also did is we started archiving videos of everything that happens at our events and we made sure that this wasn't Shadika video quality because that's what you get when you try to hire a cameraman. We tried doing this earlier trying to hire people to come and do video production and what they usually do is produce really crappy videos. And we had to set the bar and say that that's not acceptable. It's got to be a video that you can actually watch. So I'll try to show you what I mean by that. Now unfortunately my internet connection right now is really slow so it may or may not load on time but I have a local copy I can show you. So if you go to hasgeek.tv you'll see a list of events that we do. So the most recent is rootconf which is coming up but there's a series of run-up events happening around it and the last big event we did was called MetaRefresh that was a couple of months ago. Sorry it was just last month. And my internet doesn't work. So let's see if I have a local copy of the video. So let's start with one of the talks. Let's start with this one. Okay fine. My name is Michael. I am a developer at Yandex. I also teach JavaScript, Node.js and other web technologies and write about them. And if you miss Yandex is a major search engine in Russia. It also provides a number of web services and mobile apps. And today I would like to talk about components. Oh and if you like naming them. Okay so I don't know if you guys noticed. His lights are visible. You can always see what he's talking about. His audio is perfectly clear. There was a bit of his from the way he was holding his mic and that's something he corrected for. So if I jump into the middle of it you'll notice that the audio problem is clean. So it turned out that it was just the way he was holding his mic and he had to move it a little bit and then the audio became clean. Now this is not easy to achieve. It's in fact so incredibly hard that there are probably like four or five people in this country who know how to do this properly. And it's something that we learned the hard way after a lot of trial and error. It's not that hard to actually do once you know how to do it. It's about knowing what fails. That is a critical part. You know if one thing goes wrong the whole thing fails. And it's about knowing exactly what can go wrong among the few hundred things that you need to do to make all of this work. So what we got in this situation here is a video where you can actually watch it beginning to end because you can see always what he's talking about. You can hear him very clearly and you can hear the audience when they ask a question. So it's not like the audience is a whisper in the background. The audience member is holding a mic and speaking up and it is perfectly audible throughout. So doing this now essentially means that anything this person shared on stage is permanently recorded and available to anyone to watch later on. Which means now that you created an opportunity for somebody's knowledge to actually be shared on a large scale. And this guy came all the way from Moscow to talk here. So he's not even the typical American circuit where you say bring someone from Silicon Valley to come and talk. This is in fact coming from somewhere else that we normally don't look up to and say what are those guys in that country doing. In fact this man is from Yandex which is a fairly large search engine in Russia. They're considered the Google of Russia because they figured out how to search in Russian which is something that Google has been a laggard on. It's a bit like trying to do search in Hindi. Now in India that's normally a use case but in Russia it turns out that it's actually a use case that local language search is an important thing. Yandex has built up the market over there and therefore they have a bunch of things that they consider themselves being a little more talk about how we do local language based computing that we have out here in India. And therefore it's important that you listen to people like this. But if you were speaking in Russia, he would be speaking in Russian. You would not get an opportunity to hear this knowledge being shared in the English language. So that's one important thing that you need to create this opportunity for someone to share their knowledge and it doesn't matter where in the world they are. You've got to figure out how to make it financially viable for them to come to India and do this. So the simple fact of organizing a very focused event and convincing participants and sponsors to pay for it means that you can afford to now bring in someone from somewhere else as long as they are something worth sharing. Because we essentially create a mechanism for people like this to exist. Because otherwise I've never known about someone like this. So this website is where we archive everything. It's all up there. You can look at the videos over there. So what I showed you was up here. And every single talk at the event is archived over here. You can watch the full video. It's all perfectly watchable, very clear audio and so forth. Now one of the other things that we learned is this particular format where you put somebody on a stage and say talk to the audience is also somewhat high involvement. That to talk for 45 minutes requires you to make a preparation in advance and requires you to go through this entire process of saying let my talk get selected. And there's a whole category of people who simply can't put up with this. They would rather just do something. So one of the other things that we learned again is that there's this entire opportunity in people who simply want to do things and maybe learn and teach by doing rather than by talking. So when we started doing these events, we started organizing hackathons adjacent to the events where we'd say one week before the event on the previous weekend, we just get sit in a room and do something related to the main topic of the event, but with no agenda. You just sit there and hack. And then we realized that this was actually a good idea. So we built a website for it. So this is one of our websites. It's just called Hack Night. It's a public website. Anybody can use it. So you'll see a bunch of events that are nothing to do with us. This is Save the Hacker Hackathon and Fresh Desk in Chennai. There's aptly by someone I'm not sure who this is. There's Microsoft Ventures doing something there. Kayako in Gurgaon was doing an event and so forth. So some of these things, if you look at this one, for instance, Aaron Swartz, as you know, was a hacktivist and he committed suicide last year. And after that, we had a Memorial Hack Night at the end of January, where we basically picked up a few of his projects and worked on them. So what we had here is a bunch of people who said they're going to do stuff and propose the list of things that they wanted to do. And they said they will do this. And now in this case, if you look at what happened here, three people said that they're going to do something about the election data. If you know, for instance, with elections coming up next month, to vote, you need to have your name in the voter list. Okay, but finding your name in the voter list is not easy because the website is very badly designed. So it's fairly hard to go search for your name in the voter list to see if you're actually eligible to vote or not. So what a couple of guys decided is they will pull this data off the government website and make a searchable archive of it, where you can simply search for it. And there's something actually achieved in the night. So three guys, not three actually, just two of them, Arun Dargavan and Kashyap, basically sat overnight, built a search engine that would pull down a PDF file from the election commission's website and extract the text from the PDF file, keeping track of its layout because if you notice the way the PDF file is laid out, it's a printable PDF file. So it's got three cards in a row and about 10 cards, totally in a page. And what they did was built a PDF scraper that would look for a particular position and therefore you know that this is the voter's name and put them into a search index which you can then query against. So fairly non-obvious method of doing it, but they managed to achieve this. And then it became, it got picked up by somebody else who was filing a PIL in court against the election commission saying that you guys make it really hard to, for people to look up whether their names are in the voter database and especially it's for the disabled. If you're blind, the PDF file is useless because it's really hard to find your name in it. So which meant that it was not accessible, it was essentially going, it was not friendly to the disabled which meant that it was essentially impinging on your voting rights and therefore somebody filed a court case and then this project became reference material to say that technically this is why you have a problem. So that's one of the things that happens when you essentially get people to sit together and do something. Now most hackathons tend to be set out as basically saying that my company has a new product, let's promote it and therefore you get a bunch of people to come to our office and do something. And that's not great for the participant because the participant is not here for giving you free labor. What the participant is here for is doing something that's of interest to them and you need to be creating opportunity for them to do something useful. So we set out doing this format and as you can see it's resulted in a lot of events so far. This website has been around for about one and a half years. You can see how many events have happened on it so far and most of these are in Bangalore. Some of them, this one is for instance run by Bessemer Venture Partners. You can see how many people signed up for this. So that list just keeps going on and on. This is a small number here. I don't think you can see it clearly but essentially 314 people signed up for the event and came through. So these are fundamentally it. One other thing that happens a lot when you do something like this is somebody is going to look at this list and say, hey, it looks like you have a lot of smart people here. I want to hire someone. Can you tell me which guy in this is good for me? At this point you have to say sorry but I don't know these people. I mean just because you said I'm coming to your event, got to be a little irritating after a while because people would keep it. Somebody is listed on your website. He must be someone you know. And so we figured that eventually we should just tell people to help themselves. So we built this website. So most of you have seen this. Most people think this is our business. It's not. This is a way to tell people to get lost. So the numbers that you see here are something that is not visible to you if you go to the website. It's something that I get to see as an admin. And what it says is who's applying for what job. So in this case for instance 10 people have seen this job so far. Two of which said let me look at the instructions for how to apply but zero of them applied. In this case five people opened it and eventually one submitted an application saying I'm interested in this job. And because this is new it will be fairly low numbers but as you go down you'll see that they tend to get much more applications. So this yeah somebody here has had 27 job applications. So clearly he wrote something that convince people to say okay let's apply. So I have no idea what in this is so appealing that 27 people decided to apply for his job but they did. Those are my stats which say that a lot of those applications came by on the first day itself. It could be fresher. That's very clear reason. You know no qualifications required let's go apply. Okay somebody asked for an entrepreneur. Yes lots of applications again. Yeah this company posts a lot. We don't know who this is. Yeah well it's working for them you know so I mean think of all the money saved on recruiters if you got them all for free just because we said get lost. So this is something that I like to call as overflow value that if you try to monetize every single aspect of what's going on in your ecosystem eventually you'll be a bottleneck and what you should do instead is let that value go directly to the and take from the top of only what you're adding on top. Now in this case what happens with this is this company clearly saving money from the people they're hiring through us without paying a recruiter. Fine you know I don't care about taking the 10% commission but what's happening instead is all of these people who applied and got jobs are going to think well of Hasgeek and say I got a job here next time I hear this name I'm going to have positive feelings in my mind and I didn't do any labor to get you know feel ripped off that people are not paying me for using this website. What's happening instead is anytime somebody says Hasgeek it's a oh Hasgeek and suddenly they feel good about it. Okay and then it becomes easy to say buy a ticket to my event. Okay because when I say you know here's a ticket and it's going to cost you three thousand rupees I can't reduce it so will you take it. People tend to say yes because they feel good about the fact that there is something else is getting that's really valuable that's free. Okay so that's one of the key things about how to do event management that you've got to make people feel good the moment to hear about your brand and the unfortunate thing about organizing events is it's not free. Whether it's a sponsor or a participant they are paying for it in one way or other and at some point your relationship with them is going to feel all about the moment you mention your name it's about okay give me some more money now. You know this is the problem that we have anytime I send an email out saying that hey there's an XT1 coming up for somebody opening that email it's all about oh shit I would spend more money now. That's not a good way to be talking to your audience so you need to counter that in whatever way you can. For us it's about saying the video is free if you miss the event it's okay you can still watch it and it's really high quality you get the exact same experience that you got sitting in the audience. You just said you're getting it late you're not getting it in real time when everybody else is talking about it so that's what you're losing by not paying you're not losing the knowledge itself. So that approach is essentially our marketing strategy we don't advertise at all. We are entirely dependent on the goodwill that comes from giving away stuff for free and the brand recognition that comes from that at which point I just have to say here is your deadline if you don't buy today the price goes up and then people just buy. So what else can we talk about? You've seen we're talking about how to do event planning. I haven't really spent much time in software but I hope you guys realize that these websites are not static. They're essentially powered by software and all the software that we write is open source so if you go here you'll see every single line of code that powers every single one of our websites. It's all there. At which point a bunch of you guys may be thinking and say that sounds stupid. Where is your IP if you give it all away? So who's thinking that right now? This is a question that I tend to get a lot. People look at this and say wow your software is entirely open source then what do you sell? It's essentially every single one of the projects. Now what this essentially means is we're taking a bet that the actual value in what we do is not the software it's in the usage of the software. For instance if you look at this and say that it's not the software that powers its website it's in the actual software that there are people posting jobs and applying for jobs means that my actual value is a domain name not the software which is why you can say happily take it use it do what you want with it because I'm not giving you what's actually valuable to me which is my traffic. So now the consequence of doing this is if you look at this software for instance this is something that's evolved over time this is how we created a mechanism for people to apply to speak at an event and it just shows up elsewhere. So the Python community runs an annual event what does this look like? It's our website they're not alone you know so there is this is a community event running Calicut once again same software they run our website the goproject once again runs on our software the failcon which is coming up in May this year once again runs on our software so what you can see happening here is because we decided that we will monetize from our events and give the software away for free the idea behind how to do an event is now being adopted by other events so what happens here is that just because we came up with an approach and saying that this is how you should organize an event and here is a software that lets you do it and it's free for you what happens now is other events across India are saying okay let's also do a workflow is entirely within the software so it's easy to get started and just say that let's adopt this so what happens in this idea spreads is you essentially created a cultural artifact that says this is how you speak in public this is how you organize an event and what happens then is that next time when I say my next event here is the submission funnel nobody's going to come and question me and said I'm too important to do this you should invite me now when we started off with organizing events this is exactly what used to happen that you know someone who's done some good work but they will not come unless they're invited and this is a problem that plagues most event organizers that your celebrity speaker will not come unless he's invited because he's used to being invited and what we've done is flip that over and say you're not good enough if you don't propose like everybody else does so this is how you transform a country and say that it's one thing to say you're running a business where you run an event and make money it's another to say that we teach you that this is how you share knowledge if you're not doing it like this you're doing something wrong that is your problem if you expect to be invited because everybody else expects you to say that you will speak so fail cons using it go projects using it first made is using it by cons using it and if you look at even ruby con from other events they use their own software but it essentially works in the same principle so that's essentially it about software there are a few other things that we do that are somewhat behind the scenes because once you get to the actual event things tend to be tend to go haywire if you don't control the flow and make sure that you are accounting for people properly when they come in because if you let people come in without a ticket so you need to say that ticket then you need to also enforce the fact that people are coming in have a ticket and that they paying for it and you're checking them when they come in in a way that does not feel like you're basically saying strip search and show me your idea and whatnot and you got to make them feel good about the fact that they bought a ticket and came in so we run a bunch of software that's based around that and that's in fact what you'll find if you go up and look on github so there's a project here called people flow which is essentially our attendance tracking software there are bunch of these things like this as you go in we also notice it's really painful to sell tickets because once you get beyond doing a simple event there are a bunch of systems you've set in place in terms of when your tickets come through and so forth people flow is the software that you use to sign in at an event that keeps track of the fact that you present at this event and it came back the next day and so forth unfortunately I don't have a setup working right now because it's entirely offline it is not a web based app because you never depend on internet connection at an event so it's something that runs entirely on our own laptops and I do have a laptop somewhere in his office that has it set up but it's not set up right now to show also you notice this project do attend is a site we used to sell tickets unfortunately it's not the best website it's just something that we have automated to quite a bit of an extent now one of the things that you learn as an event manager is if you sell tickets at a fixed put off the purchase decision into the last minute because making a transaction is painful especially with the stupid payment gateways so what happens then is that everybody is going to think of this and say yeah it's painful I'd spend five minutes going through his entire form and whatnot I will do it tomorrow and it just becomes tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow until the last day and as an event manager this is a cause of stress because if you do not know how many people are coming you cannot plan for your event and the only way you know if somebody is coming or not is the body ticket so what you have to do is incentivize this and say I know it's painful but do the damn thing and the only way you can do it is by raising the price so what you have to do is raise the price at periodic intervals and tell people if you miss this deadline I'm so sorry but you're paying more now and just be militant about it saying that sorry no discount it's your fault if you didn't buy so now the problem with doing this is usually you learn that there's a schedule at which you need to do this people tend to discuss an event when it's within the radar in a certain manner now most people for instance start thinking on Monday about what they're doing on the weekend which means that if the event is on Friday and the best time to close a sale with them is on Monday because on Monday morning they'll go to their office talk to their HR and say will you please pay me if I go to this event and reimburse me and what not that will not happen on a Sunday it will only happen on a Monday so what happens then is that Monday is your deadline for buying a ticket Tuesday the price goes up if you do it on a Monday morning instead you'll not get that sale you have to do it on a Tuesday morning so these are things that you learn as an event manager the problem with this is every time you do a new event now you need to go back somewhere and program this into the list of tickets you're going to sell and the date on which the price goes up and doing this manually is just damn painful so what we did is wrote a script that will go set up a new event on a third party ticketing website and create the schedule of dates on which prices change create standard discounts that are given to speakers and so forth and so on so that's part of the software that we use without this it just means more people so I believe we are running out of time it's five already our software is entailing python software is entailing python so we have run out of time I didn't notice it as a past five already all right so that's mostly what we do in terms of software in terms of growth and challenges the obvious growth path is do more events which is not scalable you just can't say I will hire more people and do more events because that means your profitability is not going to improve it is just going to be level the other way to do this is to say help others do events and you notice that's what's happening with all the other websites I showed you that a whole bunch of other events are now saying that they will do events on our format using our software and our process for automation and so forth which then means that you can also sell them something else further down the line and the one obvious thing to sell someone is a sponsorship you know because one of the things that we offer to a sponsor is because there is a clear process by which the event happens I can show you what you got for your money I can show you exactly how many people came to the event how many people were in the hall when you had a speaker on stage how many people looked at your booth at the venue because we use electronic badges and so forth so when I'm able to give metrics of this sort anybody who uses the same process I can sell a sponsorship on their behalf and that is really where we expect that we'll grow with that once we have finished convincing people in the country to do things the way we do it then you can see then we'll also do sales for you because now we have data that you can sell no I believe we are still in a very small fraction of the potential for this in the country far far more than what we are addressing far way more than the supply okay so I was looking at some papers recently on how this works and it turns out that now look at what's essentially being sold to a sponsor here is a sponsorship and the sponsorship is different from an advertisement in the sense that in an ad you get to speak you have a voice and a message that you can convey to a participant in a sponsorship it is just your logo associated with somebody else's event okay so the market compared to the advertising market at the same time the global size of this market is in several billion dollars yeah and we are talking about a few crores of current reality in India which means that there are probably like hundred times the growth opportunities that are already existing and not being used in this particular format we are eight people I know we started off with the first year it was just one person so the first year was just one person that was just me the second year it became four or five people and now we are eight people I mean that's the whole idea right see it's already being used by us not yet one of the reasons why we are in technology is that the way in which this industry behaves is very peculiar which is that there is almost no commonality you know that my interest in technology is going to be different from yours because I'm interested in a very particular set of tools that I use for my day-to-day work which are different from the one where my Python based software the number of the interest in Flask is very small a whole bunch of others will be interested in something like pyramid a few others will be say that I will not even use Python I will use Ruby on Rails or Django or Node.js or something else so what happens here is that this is a market which is fragmenting at an exceedingly faster rate and therefore the only way to make this work is for instance if you want to do a startup event there are only so many events you can do that are about funding after which you're repeating yourself again in technology that does not happen that there's just infinite variety and it keeps expanding so which means that the way you grow by doing technology events is by doing a lot of small events the way you grow by doing something else is usually about doing a few really large events you know the business model changes because of the topic you can it's got nothing to do with the rest of the tools it's just yes absolutely absolutely so for one it's open source you can download it and use it yourself but people flow in particular requires hardware because that's how you track people moving around but there are hardware stations located around the place at which you interact and so it therefore it's more of a hardware play than a software play so we have our own hardware but it's commodity hardware it just does stops or laptops so it just requires a lot of machines to make this work no nothing proprietary it's all commodity hardware we really work hard at avoiding anything proprietary yeah I charge for tickets we've been charging for tickets from as early as we could it's a publicity bar not a financial bar so any other questions or you guys want to move on to the next stop if you feel like having a drink this coke and sprite out there and disposable cups so you can walk up with them and have them on the way