 Spring Meeting Creative Workforce Solutions is the title of today's event. But before we start with the event, first of all, I'm Peter Hood, Chairman of the CD80C Board. I'd like again to welcome you all here at the beautiful Norwich University on this, I think, beautiful Spring Day. Vermont has never looked more beautiful than this morning, driving down from Montana. We are, you can see the camera over here. We're streaming live on Orca Video today. That's a new thing for us. And within a few days, if any of you are interested in going back and reviewing anything you hear this morning, this presentation and this whole program will be on the Orca Video website. So our speakers can review their presentations and critique themselves. Hopefully you'll be so interested in what they have to say that you'll want to hear it again. I hope so. A couple of thank yous. First of all, Sam and Jen, without whom, obviously this program would never happen. Thank you guys for all your hard work putting this together. We have Joan helping us out this morning and Casey our summer intern. So if you get a chance, please introduce yourselves to them. So without our sponsors, this program would not be possible. And first of all, a big thank you to Norwich University for this beautiful space. Our Gold sponsor, National Life of Vermont. We're going to hear a little bit from them in a minute. And the other sponsors are on the green, whatever you call them, things that are on the table. But I'm going to read them out just quickly. Carol Ellison, Creative Workforce Solutions, Hickok and Boardman Insurance Group. I've already mentioned Norwich, Noel W. Johnson Insurance, Northfield Savings Bank, Nikon Coatings, Onion Rivers Forts, Orchimia, Rock of Ages, and Redstone Property. Thank you all, one and all sponsors for your support of our program. Tim Shea is here from National Life. Tim, just to say a few words. Thank you. So Tim Shea with National Life Group. I work in facilities as well as the purchasing. Just here to represent National Life Group. Again, extend thanks to Sam and Jen for putting this on. And National Life certainly is happy to be the sponsor of this event as well as having for quite some time representation on the board with central economy economic development. And outside of that, certainly happy to be able to take the time to represent National Life, help support the local economy. We try to do what we can through our foundation and through the support of the local businesses with whether that's the procurement of the goods and services or the many hundreds of thousands of dollars that we try to influx within the community, Vermont primarily, with the work of the foundation. So, thanks to you all. Thank you very much Tim. And again, thank you from National Life. We're very happy to have Greg Woodworth on our board. So without further ado, I'm going to introduce our first speaker, Matt Dunn. Matt has focused his life's work on bringing together the worlds of entrepreneurship, service, and politics. Elected to the Vermont House at the age of 22, he served seven years before joining the Clinton administration as director of AmeriCorps Vista, overseeing 6,000 full-time people working in the fight against poverty. In 2002, he returned home to Vermont and was elected to two terms in the Vermont Senate. Outside of the legislature, he worked in the high-tech marketing and before joining Google was the associate director of the Rockefeller Center of Dartmouth College. At Google, Matt supports the company's local corporate social responsibility activities in 30 communities where Google has an office or data center, as well as helping our larger corporate partnerships with the nonprofit and public sector. Matt lives on a small farm where we grew up in Heartland, Vermont, good job, with his wife and three children. But without further ado, Matt. Thank you. Thank you. And I'm delighted to be here. This is a very long haul, and I have slides that may have small writing, so I'm going to try to explain what's going on here as we go, but please let me know if you can't hear or things don't make sense. I was asked to talk a little bit about how to infuse creativity into economic development, and what I'm going to do is try to blend what I talk about frequently on a national front about Google and innovation and technology and the internet and economic development in Vermont from my time doing things in the legislature and working with many of you here trying to figure out how to create jobs for the next century in the Green Mountain State. I'm not sure if that combination will work, but we're going to give it a try, and then hopefully Matt Pussy, my friend, will save me with a better presentation afterwards. So, I don't... That's it, right there. Look at that. There we are. The presentation thing here. Where is it? It's right there. How do you... Got it. There is a guarantee that if you are... There's a guarantee if you are the Google guy making the presentation, your tech will not work, so I will give you that warning up front. So, I want to start off with one of the... One of the experiences I had in Vermont in business and in working on economic development just to kick this off. And it was two things that happened. One was, I worked in the 90s for a company called Logic Associates. We were a vertical market ERP company based in Wilder. We grew to 120 employees, and we sold the company. And we sold the company for twice our revenue. And we were literally in, on the shipping deck, clinking beers, celebrating the sale. And I got a crisis phone call from the government saying, oh, my God, what happened? What can we do to stop this? And it was an interesting disconnect because we were there celebrating what we felt was the success and the perception of the time in economic development was that that was an emergency, a disaster, and how something had gone terribly wrong. The second thing that happened was that Hinda Miller and I, a entrepreneur herself, and she and I arrived in the state, and I'm trying to figure out how can we look at economic development differently from the perspective of state policy and the legislature in our position as senators. So we went around the state, we were talking to all kinds of experts, some of you here in this room, about what could the future of economic development look like in the state of Vermont? And we got a presentation from, you know, one of the, there's really three economists that people listen to in the state of Vermont. And I'm not going to name which one this is, but they gave a presentation on the state of the economy in Vermont. And they had, one of their presentations was the map of Vermont. And what they did is they had a great nation from blue, sorry, from red where there were lots of jobs to black where there were very, very few jobs in the state of Vermont, very few Vermont jobs. And what it showed was the upper valley, the area that I was from and representing as black. And I, and I looked at it and I said, you know, maybe you have your data or I'm kind of curious what that is because in fact, in the upper valley and specifically in the Hartford area, we have the lowest unemployment in the state. Why is that black? And they said, oh, you know, the upper valley is kind of a problem because yes, they have a lot of jobs but those aren't Vermont jobs. And I said, really? So why is that? And they said because those are jobs that are in other states. And I said, so the job that I have is the associate director of the Rockefeller Center, Dartmouth College. Is that a Vermont job? They said, no, no, that's a New Hampshire job. And I said, well, my friend who's an associate editor for the New York Times Upfront magazine that does it out of wire rejection rents a space there and is in New York one week a year. Is that a Vermont job? They said, no, no, no, that's a New York job. So this was an interesting thing to sort of think about which is the idea of what is a Vermont job and what is not a Vermont job. I would say I was very happy with the job that I had and my friend Georgia was happy with the job that she had. And it started as thinking about how we have to look at the economy a little bit differently as we're moving forward. So I'm going to talk a little bit about technology if I can get the link to work and that's not it. I'm going to pop out of So one of the things that I think is important to recognize is how fast the internet is growing and what's happening on it. And what this very clever infographic which I found yesterday which usually can pop up gives you a real time, this is something that was just posted a couple weeks ago a real time look at the amount of information that is moving on the internet right now. Very shortly if we haven't hit it already there will be 3 billion people online. Up from 5 million about 6 or 7 years ago. So there's a huge increase in the number of people who are online. And there's also this huge amount of information that is being able to be utilized over a period. And what this is is a live counter given the current metrics of people who are tweeting people who are uploading video or watching video on YouTube, the number of searches that are taking place and all these other things, Yelp and Foursquare and other kinds of things. The statistic that I find fascinating is that there is now 100 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. Now I'm not a mathematician but since we don't erase any of it you can just imagine what that looks like in terms of a jump. But what it also means is all of this is happening without regard to geography. All of this kind of information exchange because it is in many cases in two directions and there's over 2 million emails that move every second in each direction as well as all of these other kinds of interactions that are taking place from wherever in the world to wherever in the world in real time. So the question is how does that happen let me see if I can get the PowerPoint back and pull it up and the answer is cloud computing. This is something that's come about really in the last 10 years although it's really taken off recently where the ability to actually do technology and to be able to have computing power is no longer isolated in places where there are visible computers on site which used to be the case. It is actually because of things called data centers. This is one of Google's data centers it's in Hamina Finland it used to be a paper mill for newsprint in fact we bought a bankrupt paper mill for newsprint and turned it into a Google data center it was not lost on the media of Europe at the time but it does what happens is all of the computing power is able to be really distributed place whether it's here or in Iowa or anywhere else and so no longer are people limited by what they have at their business, at their facility at their desktop, at their university the amount of computing power that you have is essentially unlimited not only in storage the ability to upgrade but also the ability you know what I refer to as technically as chunking power but the ability to actually do routines of computing that used to be limited to very very uh uh asset rich organizations or companies who knows what this is anyone know what this is so this is what's called raspberry pot and what cloud computing has done is it's also not only allowed for the computing to take place elsewhere but it's allowed devices to shrink in terms of their size and their cost this is a computer it retails for about forty dollars it has a USB port it has an ethernet port and it has a connection to your screen or to your laptop and for that amount of money you're able to access the largest computing power ever available to anyone in the history of mankind but for that amount of money so as that is beginning to decline the ability to access information is also changing dramatically and this is a I use this picture there's a number of ironies in this but I won't go into them but what this means is that an individual who is in a child in Africa with access to a not very sophisticated smart phone now has access to all of the information that was available to the entire Reagan administration and that's a fundamental shift because if information is powered and the ability to utilize information in order to do innovation and change and technological advancement and entrepreneurship it is now being distributed to anywhere in the world and while I have a picture here of a child in Africa it could also just as easily be a child in the Northeast Kingdom because at one point in time the constraints that we had as Vermonters was our world nature was the limitation of the library that we had in our school or the ability to access information in the big city of Burlington or New York and that competitive disadvantage was a real thing and it no longer exists what also has happened is that communication has changed who here remembers when you used to stress about long distance calls remember that when you used to think about and I would be told to get off the phone that it's a long distance call that's a very concerning thing calling someone on the phone is now free and not only is calling someone on the phone free video conferencing is free as long as you have a Gmail account you can have a video conference in real time with people all over the world this is the Jane Goodall Institute for board members are literally all over the globe they have their board meetings online it costs them nothing except for just having the original camera that's in their laptop we did a project just recently in Vermont where we donated video conferencing equipment to libraries across the state because they are able to use Skype to hang out or other tools to be able to have video conferencing throughout the library system but also throughout the world and so those entities can then become portals to conversations and communications across the board and what it allows for is some interesting entrepreneurship to happen and this is a I believe a good central Vermont company some of you may recognize my friend here Steve Finchden also a recovering legislator in Vermont and Steve started rebuilding an airstream because he loved rebuilding this airstream and some of us can get into that and he needed a couple of parts and they didn't exist and so he found a machinist I think in Springfield from the machine tool capacity that was there and he said oh sure I'll make you those parts and while I've got the lathe on I'll make you an extra 50 because it really doesn't cost that much more so he got an extra 50 parts and he was like huh I wonder if there is some market and he posted the parts he posted it online and he sold it in 48 hours he said to himself huh there might be something here so he started an entire company which is now very successful online in that niche market which he can do of people who are passionate about airstream parts he's able to advertise online using keywords which are airstream parts which not a lot of people bid on but he's able to target his audience very well and be at the long tail and be quite successful from right here in Vermont so that kind of entrepreneurship can happen but it also can allow for people to work remotely for large corporate companies this is for those of you who don't recognize it this is the Google Vermont headquarters office in the top top building in downtown Monterey Rejunction we are a roaring number of three that work out of there because I do so we rarely run into each other but the ability for me to be able to run a 12 person team covering multiple continents for a company like Google from Vermont is because of this technology and innovation as long as we are thinking about it that way and I recently spoke at an organization gathering over in Middlebury that is actually doing a young professionals group focused specifically on telecommuters telecommuters and so in this room where people were working for Intel and Sports Illustrated and GM and other companies all over the country they had some connection to Vermont somewhere and they were all trying to find common space and camaraderie while they were trying to do this distance learning so in order to get to the potential of this creative economy we need to recognize a few things that we know and none of this is particularly groundbreaking but it's a shift from where we were doing economic development even 10 15 years ago the first is that companies go to people now if you look at where Google sets up their major operations although they did show up there because they needed my skill set and skill set of the other people work out of there we said we're not moving and I guess they needed enough that they were willing to allow an office there but otherwise we're right literally in the heart of Carnegie Mellon or in the heart of MIT or where we were founded right outside of Stanford University so companies go to people rather than the other you build something and everyone sort of shows is forced to go there Vermont will struggle to compete in commodities you've been outside of Vermont you just got to know if it's commoditized it is not going to be able to be successful in Vermont because of the other values and priorities that we have it's just too difficult in the global marketplace and much less in other parts of the country it is unlikely that we will attract another large corporate campus to plump down in the state of Vermont those days I mean it's just we've got the new commissioner of economic development here that is going to be a very very hard thing to do and I don't think it's necessary or necessarily healthy for the state source of food across the country much less across the world is a growing concern which I think is for advantage I'm not going to get too much into that but it's something to think about because it's looking for value at and trusted brands but the final piece I want to leave you with is that Vermont's success is about exporting IP or intellectual property and importing cash that's where we're able to do well export ideas and creations and products that are innovative and they send us money to do Norwich University is a perfect example of that probably one of the more obvious ones where Norwich is exporting knowledge to the students that are here but also through their robust online program and money is coming into the state in that way but that's true for software companies and that's true for other entities around and that's how we get a stronger economy and we have big opportunities we've got a great brand we've got a strong quality of life strong public schools a unique geographic position that I'll talk about we have underutilized infrastructure and right-of-ways that we've just held on to for a long time you know and both this and the quality of life it's sort of what Frank Bryant used to say was like we were on a race with other states we got so far behind we ended up ahead and it's sort of true right we didn't screw up these things we didn't sell our rail our rail access points or let them go bankrupt and go away and now they're available for both transportation but also for fiber optic connectivity we have the size and scale to potentially move quickly and we've got authentic communities that people are really looking for and is more and more a part of economic development standings the biggest thing that we have is brand but it goes both ways first of all I would challenge anyone to tell the difference between Vermont Maple Syrup and New Hampshire Maple Syrup that's a tough taste test to do I will always buy the Vermont Maple Syrup but you know what, we get a premium for it my wife's family, the tailors have a farm in Plainfield, New Hampshire and they get apoplectic about how you can get just like two miles over the river another 20% for your maple syrup then they are able to get but it also goes the other way because the general perception of Vermont is that it's about old school agricultural things it is not seen as a place that can have a my web brochure at dealer.com entities that can actually move the needle at you in advancement but the biggest thing that I think it's important for us to recognize is our location we are actually at the epicenter of three major metropolitan areas of New York and Boston and Montreal and in fact that's not all that different in size than the tech triangle in North Carolina it just happens that North Carolina is a bigger state and therefore it all fits within one state dynamic and if we think of ourselves at the epicenter and at the place where you actually want to live in this triangle we can think about ourselves as that location where people can go to noodle to experiment and to be able to deliver new innovative approaches some of you have heard me talk about broadband in the past and I will continue to talk about broadband we are still in the latest report that I pulled up last night we are still last in the country in terms of actual broadband speeds we are making progress and the governor is putting his back behind making progress but we are still last and the painful part to me is current work for my team is mostly about bringing gigabit speed fiber to places other than Vermont and we are going to metro areas where we can move fast and all kinds of other things and we are not coming to Vermont so please don't hit me afterwards over and over again at least not in the next couple of years we need to be really really focused on this because this is a constraint which we can't have before brine cc we need to expand our transportation I am completely addicted to leaven and airport may seem like a little blip but it is how I am able to get to the google office in new york or the google office in washington dc faster than my colleagues coming from the suburbs and that gives me a competitive advantage which allows me to do what I do and lots of other people will crowd in with me on the nine seat plane but it is important to have that rail and air transportation for business work we have millions of square feet of authentic empty factory space and we have to invest in higher education I believe we are 49th or 50th right now take your pick that is not going to be a sustainable place if we want to be able to be a center of innovation the question then becomes what does a creative economy look like and I am going to lead you with a couple of thoughts I believe we need to have a larger population one of the most concerning things for me to see in our ranking right now for business development in the country our cost of doing business is not so bad we are right in the middle of the country of all the states and many other factors are in our favor but the lowest ranking that we have been falling in is in the quality of our workforce and that is a very, very precarious place that was always Vermont's advantage we had an extraordinarily well trained, ready to go workforce but because of some of the demographic shifts that are happening as well as people leaving the states after they have gotten superb educations here and at BTC and other institutions that workforce is declining and if we are going to do it and if we are going to actually be able to grow we have to have, I believe a larger population that is on the younger side we don't have to create sprawl development in order to do that, we have plenty of capacity in our downtown locations we have to do that we need to have a forex increase in the number of startups the number of new business starts in general in Vermont has been on the decline since 2003 and that is a precarious place to be and we need to be able to create opportunities for clusters around emerging innovation and I've actually moved away, I used to be this believer that we had to pick things that we were good at and then cluster around it but all the research actually shows that it's way too much trying to predict the future you need to create the environment where you can have innovation happening across all different kinds of sectors rather than trying to pretend we can pick one and go deep on it somehow because by the time you get there going deep it's then six other things that have been able to emerge over time and innovators just like other innovators they don't need someone who's also doing mapping or someone who's also necessarily doing food we want people who are thinking outside the box and the other one is by towns and having interesting places for people to work this is a Google office which is a usual open space there are not big cubicles or walls or offices with doors creating that type of space whether it's a co-work space like we have in emerging in different parts of the state or it's the kind of space that people would want to set up their innovative operations this is a complicated slide but I just want to talk about it because this is what that kind of economy would look like and I sometimes talk about it as a churn economy and it gets back when I was doing politics it got me into trouble because people don't like the idea of churn of stability where people are going to be able to show up when they're 22, start a job and then be able to retire with them at the end but the economy that's available in Vermont for the most part I believe is going to be in this area where there are startups that move through a process and hopefully be able to have investment and growth they get to a certain size and then they sell and then the question is how do I come out of that sale if we can be proactive and make sure that those go back into the incubator system where they can start 10 additional companies of which 3 will make it through this process then you can create an ecosystem that will be able to grow over time and will be able to have hiring opportunities for people who are in here taking a risk because if there aren't other options you're not going to take that risk and if they need to move up to the area to be able to make a difference or to be able to participate in an entrepreneurship activity frequently they are married and their spouse needs to do something which is a huge barrier when you're trying to recruit people I don't know what my wife will do or my husband will do or will I be able to meet a spouse that's we used to joke in a rebellion but if it's a we need to be able to get that critical mass going but we need to be intentional about it you need to be able to embrace that idea of churn and look at the kinds of support that isn't just going to trade shows in other states trying to lure people over it's about creating an ecosystem where you reward taking things that come out of these sales and driving it right back into the ecosystem over and over and doing the pieces parts in between whether it's the infrastructure or the resources at the right time including higher education to be able to create a stable innovative environment for them to be able to succeed I want to talk about two sort of interesting case studies Center for Cartoon Studies how many people have heard of Center for Cartoon Studies? Alright so a good number so this is a school that is a two year MFA program it is now considered the the leading graphic novel institution in the country it has got huge name recognition in that the art world and it's based in Marker Junction, Vermont and they now have at any given time between 40 and 50 students that are taking classes that are the best of the best and then the students don't leave sometimes we would like them to but because they keep crowding into the classrooms looking over the things that the other students need so they have to create other space for them so White River Junction has become this hub of activity in this very specific sector and the publishing industry has to come down to White River Junction to see where the emerging talent is and they're creating their own work and they're doing it over time and the spin off is fantastic and again it's a classic notion of exporting intellectual property and importing cash where the students are now reducing award winning graphic novels which by the way is the only growing part of the publishing industry and so I just throw this out here again we would never have predicted that White River Junction was going to be the graphic novel capital of America if we were like saying we've got a plan and we're going to make it that and that's how we're going to have an economic engine in White River Junction but we created the the environment to allow them to be able to arrive there in an inexpensive actually free space to start up in and to get rolling and then continue to support that over a period of time including now with traditional economic development investment to be able to expand their incubator and it's incubator yeah anyway okay the other thing I want to comment on is dealer.com because unlike when the logic associates sale went through there was not necessarily a cry when dealer sold I heard from some people oh my god what's going to happen to the Burlington economy but there was an equal number of people who said what a validation and that's what I think we should all be thinking about the fact that dealer.com sold for a billion dollars is not only a valuation of dealer.com it's a valuation of tech in Vermont and it made news around the country and I think we were just talking about this we can make that story even bigger and again if we had tried to predict we were going to make a 10 year economic development plan and we were going to be the leader in automobile dealer platforms in the country that would never have come up on our list and in fact most of my friends at Google were all surprised that it was based in Vermont they seem to do is based in Detroit or around Detroit because that's where dealer.com should be but no it was a group of Vermont guys who just started noodling on something and by the way it kind of worked out and then the question is how do we make sure that the incredible entrepreneurial spirit and the resources from this get plowed back in so that we have 20, 30, 40 potential dealer.coms then coming up because if that pipeline is not there this will be a one time hit there will be a nice surplus in the state budget for one year which they will spend and then there won't be that next step along the way so a couple of thoughts just to leave with so Larry Page, CEO of Google is passionate about this do not have a plan and we are committed as a company to not have a plan we measure everything so we look at what is working and what is not we kill things that don't work very quickly we put resources behind things that do but his belief is that if you have a plan then you think you know more than the market and he said also then marketing people become in charge and that's the death knell of any tech company but as a recovering marketer I try not to take offense to that but it's real today and again that gets back to the situation with the center of marketing studies or dealer.com that was not in the plan they were huge successes remove constraints this is the other thing that we do at Google we look for constraints and innovation and being able to do new things and go out there whether it's the amount of computing power, you have the amount of storage power the amount of connectivity and we just systematically go out and remove them that's the same that can be done in Vermont to think about what are the constraints people think about and get rid of them one after another after another usually it's in infrastructure and then the final piece is to be comfortable that's not the usual place for economic development folks to know that there's going to be chaos and you're not sure what's going to work and we're going to try these 30 things Laura seems more comfortable with it than most people but you've got to be able to be comfortable with that chaos and to have that peripheral vision and to be iterative so that you can allow for these things to happen rather than excluding things that actually are going to be that next economic engine so with that I'm going to segue to my friend Matt Busey who I would say is the king of churn and not having a plan and yet he's got a real estate so I'm not sure how those things go together but I will turn it up to you, turn it over to Matt thank you so we will have an opportunity for questions after the second presentation so please don't forget your questions so now we have Matt either Matt number one or Matt number two I don't want to make anybody number two another Matt Matt Busey Matt is a Wyoming native and a Yale trained architect film photographer and property developer is known for his transformation of waiver rejunction Vermont into the next generation nexus he is praised for his purchase of early 1945,000 square foot tip top bread factory in the heart of the downtown Busey transformed the dilapidated building turning raw industrial space into workspaces for artists creative businesses a cafe and health practitioners Busey is also the owner of Hartford Woolman mill his first purchase and that included maxing out six credit cards and self-construction good word Matt a former American Legion building and the dreamland built he has completed three major renovation projects and is starting a fourth in the upper valley village and former railroad community within the last 20 years Busey's development as a common thread of turning underutilized buildings into creative economy hubs Matt welcome so it's true I don't really operate with a plan and so I was going to show some pictures about planless operation and I recently took a test online and told me I should have been a philosopher and I looked through a ton of pictures yesterday thinking about that in white river junction and pulled together a slideshow and kind of think about the philosophy of creative economic development okay I arrived in white river junction pretty much if something happens by accident I believe it if it's something that I think should be happening I don't tend to believe it but what I think is going to happen is the less I'm trusting of it so I really look for feedback from the environment as my primary motivation and every project I've started in white river junction has started by accident the first one was just driving by a building going in calling the number on it and ended up buying it like a year later the second time was walking and looking for a space to do some film work in the third one was being in a cocktail party saying that building is so ugly I can't stand it oh it's for sale I'm like really and the fourth one was they called me and said you should buy this building and I was like no and a month later they said call me again you should buy this building and I said no and they said really you should buy this building I'm like well alright how much they're like whatever name and price I gave them the most low ball thought offer I thought I thought I was sending them a no in financial terms and they said okay so I ended up with four buildings I did not plan to become a developer and I really completely entered into doing it because I had aspirations of being an architect and I was trained as an architect so that's helped a lot but does anyone know what this is I saw this picture and I thought well this kind of summarizes my thought process this is a electron microscope photograph of a chalk piece of chalk a chalk particle and it reminded me of how like when you're looking at stuff it's never what you think it is so you know I thought it was some industrial object or an organic thing but it's actually a mineral it's a it's not living it's not man-made and it has all these great properties at the same time you're not really looking at a piece of chalk you're looking at a projection of a piece of chalk which is actually pulling up even way more than it was in the electron microscope because it's huge on the screen I mean you think about the scale of a representative here it's enormous so I think that what it represented to me was how whenever you're doing any kind of development you really need to traverse all these scales that are present and try to suss out what where the potentials are and whether there is any at all or not and let's see it's a space bar so here's another example it's a picture of a house it's not really a house it's a drawing of a house and it's a very simple drawing of a house and then when you go around the corner it's not even three dimensional so I love stuff like this because it always reminds me how fallible my mind is and we're easily tricked into seeing patterns and potentials where there really isn't any so I'm totally in favor of the atmosphere technique of finding stuff you just beat on things over and over again iterate iterate iterate like Matt said until you actually get some real information back and that's where I think for me planning fails because when I plan I usually come up with one idea and I push it all the way through to the end until I end up with this thing and usually I never execute it so like I'm not executing the slideshow like I thought I was my team so a little bit about me this is where I grew up it's Denver, Colorado the trees have grown a lot since I grew up there that's a Google map picture I love that I went to Middlebright College went to the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York City finished taught me a lot about being in the place that you're going to be working in and pounding the pavement it was a great school because unlike where I went to school afterwards at the university every day we came into class and they took us out on the street and we just I followed the professor around on the street we were exhausted again every day and he bought us hot dogs some hot dogs dance but it really was a great experience of looking at what you're talking about and thinking about what you're talking about and looking at representations of what you're talking about we were actually looking at the stuff so I went to Yale University and then I ended up in White River Junction I worked for New England Digital we made synthesizers and my first job I wrote software I developed a software that alleged to move a mouse over sound and hear it go boop boop boop boop they hadn't padded it out they didn't they got eaten up by technology I've made maple syrup I've cleaned up after Irene I ran for the select board in a costume and lost and then two years later I ran with absolutely no campaign and won by a landslide so again that taught me a lot about planning and intention I like to get dressed up and get crazy at parties and I also like economy and I can look like you know a business person I make movies I'm a cinematographer and I shoot a series called Star Trek Continues this is us shooting on location in California it's an online online show it's got a pretty huge audience we've clipped over a million views for our first two episodes already and we just released last year this is what it looks like it's the original Star Trek done with new scripts they rebuilt the entire set from plans that Irene drew as an architect from the original Paramount set these guys are fanatical about Star Trek I mean I liked it as a kid but these guys over the top they really think they are the characters I shot a lot of movies shorts these are just some stills of the work I do I love working with light this was a short film I did last year that's won probably 25 awards around the country making films is a total like crap shoot you just never know what's going to happen I've made a lot of films probably 50 at this point this is when we made you never know how it's going to go we sent it out to the festival circuit I got a call from the director he's like are you driving or anything I'm like yes he goes we'll pull over I'm not going to pull over he goes we won the Seattle International Film Festival best film award I just sort of took off I'm working on a web series about Andy Warhol's granddaughter and the time travel kind of thing I love working electronics I do things like this with Gabriel my partner I do electronics with the shoes here I'm a pilot I love flying around I started a flight school in Never Valley because it's the one that I was taking lessons from point out of business my favorite band is The Talking Head my favorite movie is The Razor Head my favorite book is QED by Richard Fundman and that's my favorite kind of plane White River Junction so I ended up there because I ended up there because of New England Digital really I had no idea where White River Junction was I went to Middlebury College New England Digital hired me I came there to write software and I arrived and immediately thought wow this is the strangest place I've ever been I gotta live here it just had an odd feel about it because there was the sense of industry and the feeling of the resonance of all the industry that was there but it was kind of all gone and the downside still had a little bit of a little bit of an economy going the department store was still there the office supply store was there there was a bank but they were closing month after month that one would close so it kind of got left with what made it start in the first place which was interstate there's 200 states across there there's the rivers and then there's the railroads and those were like the three elements of commerce that were intersecting on White River Junction and it occurred to me even though everything was closing at the time I was like this is an amazing place I mean it has huge potential it's got all the infrastructure to make it go and it's just falling apart and the reason largely was at the time from my perception that everyone there was really down about it they'd been going downhill for so long that everyone had this faked in this place this terrible you know attitude we have to quit your words though so White River when I moved here was kind of sleepy this is the view coming into town it has kind of cool geographical layout it's you know in a valley squeezed between a river and a railroad and a hill and really conforms to the geography there it has a small downtown which is you know quasi quasi-urban for about 600 feet the building's there there's some really great buildings the guy who designed this building right here actually one of these architecture school in France designed the tip-top building too really nice really nice building but you know classic Vermont town older building stock we have public transit we have a lot of opportunities too building's burned down periodically leading holes and these things are getting infilled now and all those spaces lots of great weird spaces in town a lot of the sort of feel of the place and that's what attracted me to it beautiful church funny intersections funny signs odd staircases lots of state imposed signage and you know compositions like this all over the place which really speak to no planning and then you know things like this old railroad underpasses that just got rebuilt so when I started when I started doing my real estate development this was sort of my relationship to money I was like totally in my cat world and I knew there was money around but I couldn't quite figure out how it related to me and you know this cat didn't even realize that money was fake so it's more just in the carpet so I was kind of like quasi focused on what I was doing which was software and interest in architecture so I bought this thing and I still live there and it still looks actually it looks worse than this now I had a sign on it for sale and I called and the guy said it was $300,000 I was like what $300,000 this was in the 90s I was like you gotta be kidding me and he said well it's brand new like what's the problem? I said are you kidding me you're telling me that thing's brand new and I said it's it's falling off it looks hell I was like oh that building you can have that one for almost nothing I went and toured it it was just the coolest thing I'd ever seen big open spaces inside I had my dream come true I have these dreams all the time giant spaces that I'm discovering I was walking and there was like being in my dream so I was like okay I gotta buy this thing and I didn't know how to buy a building so I was like well I guess I have to go to a bank so I went to like six banks and it was really hilarious it wasn't that I was an idiot I was like 29 I'm touring into this building which is basically falling down and I'm telling I'm telling them how great it's going to be and they were very excited about my enthusiasm and we had a lot of fun talking about it but the answer was always no and it took like two months to get nose which I found really frustrating I think it just didn't want to discourage me but I hope some other bank would pick me up but finally got all nose and I went back to the owner and I said look I don't have no money and the bank was like just take it out of my hands please he was like 75 years old he was like probably white reproduction it's original creative economy person he used to own this mill he was a family long you know sort of hard for an old money owned the mill it's father owned the mill grandfather owned the mill great grandfather owned the mill and he was up there on the third floor in this tiny room with an open five gallon pail with a lacquer taking the old bobbins and turning them into camel sticks I think it was high as a kite he came there every day he just got stoned on the lacquer and was stumbling down the stairs about four in the afternoon that was his thing and he had actually pretty big business from it and you still see these things all over the place he had become the federal foreclosure agent for all the mills in the area so he had access to all these bobbins I mean literally that entire building was full of bobbins and he said the deal is you have to wait till I get rid of all these bobbins so he slowly got rid of the bobbins and I slowly started renovating the space myself and being 29 I was like yaw I can have a full time job and now I can do this project so I would work from nine until six or seven at night come here and work until one or two in the morning during construction go back and work and I did that for seven years however I didn't have any money so this was kind of the situation at the end of in the middle of my process I was like oh my god and you know I came up with different paint schemes for the thing anyway my credit card's maxed out and I figured out you really can't transfer balances forever and my dad's a businessman so one day he's like how's it going and I said well I don't know what to do exactly I've got all these credit cards in there sort of bouncing around and building up and he just got so angry with me he's like I can't believe you know those dad moments so he's like okay how much money do you owe and it was like thirty thousand dollars to the credit card companies which wasn't that much money really but to me it was like at the end of the world there was no way I could see how to recover that so he bought half the property from me with the agreement that I had to buy it back from him in five years for nine percent profit because this will teach you about time money relationship so I sat down with a spreadsheet for like I was like my best moments have really been when I've hit rock bottom like when I feel like I can't make any moves I'm just completely wiped out so I literally sat down and was like super depressed state with a spreadsheet instead of like going through all the functions NPV okay future value in general rate of return I was like what the hell is all this stuff so actually in two weeks I've had a pretty good handle on it and I was like oh my god I can save myself so I did this twenty year projection on the building very proudly mailed to my dad and he was like okay good and you know within a couple years I'd actually paid it back and I had tenants you know in the building moving in I learned about the state regulatory process the inspector showed up one day and said where are your permits I'm like what permits I thought it was Vermont he was like no no no you have to have a permit I'm like okay where do I get a permit he goes you have to go Springfield I'm like okay fine I'll go there tomorrow so I drove into Springfield walked in and I said I'm here to get a permit and they're like for what I said I'm renovating a building they said where are you I said I didn't have to try I said he's a paper so he goes yeah gave me just a copy paper I drew the building out I said here and he's like okay I was like yep it is Vermont sadly it's not that way anymore I'm afraid it's gotten in the last twenty years things have gotten much more like regulated so that building turned out to be you know okay and I survived and learned a lot it was actually I'm so fortunate to have crashed and burned on my first building with a relatively low amount of capital because it taught me everything I needed to do to do these next projects so I walked into this building and they you know I wanted to rent like a little closet basically and they sold me the whole building the situation was White River was still sort of nose diving and they had a $250,000 newt on this building 45,000 square feet they wanted to get rid of it so I was like okay and all they wanted me to do was pay off right now I was like damn that's a cheap real estate so I've got my spreadsheets out I sort of did my calculations as I did them before for the other building and had confidence because I'd seen that work and I was like this is a no brainer even if the town goes to toll hell this is a no brainer so bought that building borrowed some money and this time the banks were okay talking to me the project had no plan whatsoever I was like buy it see what happens and I already had five tenants and it was cash flowing positive so I was like even if nothing happens I'm not losing money so then we started renovating it and let me just show you a little bit about it here's what it looked like in 1910 it was a single little building on the block and they slowly expanded it putting additions on mainly for transportation purposes trucks and stuff because it was in bakery and they had a lot of deliveries now back on the tracks which I originally got like totally can't stand it anymore by the police I can't believe how many pictures they have on the tracks you know the building was basically run down roof was shot windows were shot everything was shot and the Valley News our little paper decided to do a front page story about it and I discovered the secret to all economic development is to get your face on the front page on the top half and it works miracles and the best way to do it is not to tell them anything let them find it and then they'll be all excited about it put you on top page if you go PR'ing them press releasing there won't be any tension to you so I never tell the newspaper anything I might like send messages around through like seven indirect channels but it really works and this is my office doesn't look like that now this is the drawing I did to show you the level of planning that I did that is the drawing for that whole building there's another one for a second floor but that would be it so I went through the entire process that was my complete planning process this little sketch and it served pretty well actually I always get your hands dirty excavators were too expensive I called up the rental place they said bring me a backhoe and they did and I learned how to drive it saved myself a lot of money we renovated the perimeter spaces of the building first to try to show to the town that something is actually happening because I found the best form of advertising is construction if people actually see something happening they pay attention if they hear people talking about something happening we'll wait and see so the building was basically hollow we renovated the exterior spaces to give an impression we threw an open house in December 2001 I expected no one to show up because 9-11 had just happened there was like economic development everything quieted down we had like 700 people come to this thing and I ended up renting the building out in about three weeks so we feverishly renovated the building this is what it looks like today there's a cafe pottery place anything on pottery there's a lot of art studios on the second floor the hallways I've made fairly large and they basically operate as art galleries painters our first Fridays we have open house first Friday you're well attended it's printmaking studio, karate space, yoga space more art studios there's Gabriel sculptors and the cheapest way to make something look fresh is the paint and bright colors I sort of went hog wild in here and I think it really worked there's so many textures in the building we went with silver as well sort of call out the textures and honor the past of the building and not spend a ton of money and the goal was basically to offer the spaces at well below market rate and to this day there's still a well below market rate these are just some of the some of the looks on the inside of the building we opened up the interior to let light come down through the middle of it since it's gigantic we have first Fridays like I mentioned lots of events going on there gallery talks, performances and to give you an idea of that distance we had to travel to get there this is what the building looked like when I bought it that was the interior it was a rainforest basically the roof was shot water was pouring down rusting everything electrical boxes would spark and explode all the time the roof was gone that's the entrance which I just showed you a few slides before more than I thought that's that space that's what it looked like when I bought it I mean literally falling apart but I was very excited by this and we ended up spending only $35 a square foot renovating it I was a general contractor I was hiring people off the street they were getting hauled off by the police for breaking their perils it was a good time lots of fake social security numbers that I never got resolved this is great I love this picture because it's like this is what planning does to you you think you've got the thing in the right place and then oh my god no that's a bad idea let's put it over here that's where the door was going to go and that's how tall it was going to be and then that's where it ended up going this building I literally drew the building on the building so all the walls and stuff were laid out by me going along with chalk and spray paint and just saying to the contractors here's where the wall goes and I brought the fire marshal up and said here's the plan and he's like okay full scale drawings where do I stamp them? I don't know these are some comparison photos of the building so four and a half are in the same locations there's that comparison I was trying to draw these are a little small sorry the iterative process and the non-planning process means that you build something and try something build something and try something so as far as the interior design went I would have the painters and the carpenters build everything the way I wanted it and paint it white and then I would go into Photoshop and color it and then I'd hold up the paint chips to my screen to find the colors and then I'd number them in hand under the paint contractors to go off and paint them so that's what happens and it's a really fun way of playing with buildings and just using computer tools to simulate what things are going to look like the social aspect of the building turned out to be a really huge aspect of it so we started throwing lots of parties and this was really like a community thing so there's a clothing store in town Revolution, Kim Souza runs it she organizes a lot of parties this is the Halloween party that we throw annually we kind of took a lesson from New Orleans and Mardi Gras and decided to turn our Halloween party into a costume parade the first year we did it there were like 50 of this we just went around the block the second year people heard about it and more like 200 people showed up and we couldn't walk in the sidewalk so we just paraded down the street somebody called the police and said there was a riot or something the squad car pulls up we had a brass band and he's like what's going on I'm like it's a parade and he's like what? and he got back in his car and left I was like okay 10 years later chief of police arrived he'd gotten out of bed he's like what is going on it's our Halloween parade he goes well you didn't get a permit I said well we didn't know as many people were going to show up just sort of happened and he goes okay well you need an escort I'm like okay great escort he's like he gets out in front of the parade puts his lights on he came in tradition next year he brought his kids we have White River Indie Films which is a local group I help co-found it's an independent film festival it runs usually three days in April that started that ran in the tip-top too so all these social things were happening in the tip-top it now spread out and like moved all around town which is great so the fashion show the revolution puts on the dance party afterwards that's in the cafe downstairs we had a party we turned the elevator into a bar which we found out was illegal later to celebrate an artist hanging out these giant wooden spoons Maria Blas there she is with her spoon hat and you know we just kind of do these things all the time they're not necessarily announced there was a ballet recital going on at the same time we didn't realize it so the parents were pushing the elevator button going up to see their child do a ballet performance and there's a bar and a party going on and they were just like wow we had them on the last line and some moms were there at first out so they really enjoyed it this is an elevation drawing I did of the tip-top well actually two friends Danny Sagan and Lisa Dworkowski helped me on this project they're here in Montpelier and I went to school with them so I called it architectural therapy with them they weren't really the official architects but we would get together and we would sort of do design therapy and it was really great having them I love bouncing ideas off people this is the ugly building that I ended up buying after a cocktail party and it's right across from the street from the tip-top and I don't know I probably shouldn't hate on buildings but I really hated this building it just irritated me so I ended up buying it thinking we were going to do something and I worked with a partner on this and we hired an architect and this is what it used to look like it was actually a really kind of beautiful theater which got torn down in the 60s because the movie business was sinking and they built this thing I was like wow and I went to the town offices and I found that isn't exactly the way it's drawn in the permit I was like wow so anyway I was like I sort of wanted to do the other extreme and I have to erase this building so we started doing these crazy designs for it with different coloring patterns and shapes and things we sort of settled on this thing and that's what it was going to look like probably not that bright in reality but it ended up coming in at way too much money so I scaled the whole project back and ended up just resurfacing in front of the building and that's sort of the model ended up being much more neutral and this was the transformation of it into the new facade and really I was just trying to get rid of the ugly foe Mount Vernon colonial whatever was going on there and it was interesting doing this project because unlike the tip top which didn't have a lot of exterior transformation this one was a radical transformation people at first really didn't a lot of people didn't like it but pretty much all those people have come back to me and said it warmed up to it and it was a difficult facade I didn't know what to do with it I looked graphically and made some patterns that were similar to the bridge nearby and opened up the bottom to the storefront glazing to make the building have some presence on the street I have turned down some projects like this building fell in my lap I went and looked at it and loved it but it just didn't make sense it was a paper mill and this is the Legion building which is the current project I'm working on in South Main Street one of the things I really thought and let's sit with a cartoon skull which has really made a huge impact like Matt said and Northern Stage which is an equity theater company in town just about to start construction on a new theater there also brings a lot of regional actors mostly from New York City into the town so we have a great spread of ages through white reproduction now when I was there there was no one in their 20s now it's pretty much all ages which is great this project sort of fell in my lap and when it did I'm like what am I going to do with this thing that's one giant space upstairs there a giant function hall and as much as I love giant spaces I thought you know what I would have been saying when I need to sort of follow up on is the need for residents so we're going to turn this into a 22 unit apartment building on the second floor and then it will be commercial space on the first floor and we really wanted to do a great energy retrofit on this building because last one I just got killed by the cold winter and the high fuel prices and I'm like I need to hedge against that so we're going to do a super thermal envelope on this building it will pretty much use at least a really small amount of energy despite all the glass in it and we wanted it to be playful and contribute to sort of a new aesthetic on South Main Street I don't think I have any pictures here of it but it's kind of run down still is run down and the hope is that this building and I think buildings really do message communicate a lot to people I've learned that with my work on the other buildings that you know the first couple seconds of an impression that a building makes on people informs them about the intention of the people that live here the safety the quality of life, the community and helped them to start thinking about potential in this area after I did the tip top a huge amount of development happened nobody did anything in my group for quite a while so and I was just very brazenly saying this is the best town in the world I told the Boston Globe when they came up to do an interview I said this is going to be the next art make of New England and they printed it but we had people from Massachusetts driving up for weeks kind of going I was like oops not yet but then CCS showed up and other creative people moved into town so I really think that thinking that consistently over the last 20 years has helped made it happen because every time someone asks me about it I'm like oh yeah art make of comes through so one of the traditions is that every time I get a building we have to throw a big party in it so this is the party in the Legion building it was New Year's and we were like what are you going to do for New Year's and I don't remember how it happened but I was like somebody was talking about having the dropping ball I'm like well that's just like everyone does the dropping ball I said let's go get something else let's have the sunset and I was like where is the sunset at midnight oh it's where that giant trash swirl is that they can't control and it's growing new organisms I said okay we're going to have a giant sunset over the trash swirl in the Pacific so that's what we did we got all this trash and brought it together and people danced around on the trash and there was a big scrim back there that the sun came down so I think that during this kind of thing it really helps people get in their minds and something new is happening it's great to sort of mix it up you know become go for the media and I'm getting to be man one of the things I've noticed is that in my thought process which I think is basically my creative thought process is always try to find un-likes to combine with each other and see what happens so that's sort of the Adam Smashing plan this approach where you hybridize un-like systems so you take things that don't belong together and put it together and see what happens and you end up using whatever that thing is it gives you a lot of really great information that you can use moving forward in more practical situations so why you do that? I don't know but I love it it's like I think it's supposed to be a nice painting but it's so violent I'm not really sure but basically I don't know what to make of it which I like things like this I love you're doing something to a building in Congress to the building different modes of transportation unusual positions incongruities and strange labels so thank you very much so going with our theme this morning of no planning we're a little over on our time not for which I apologize but we do have a few minutes for questions if there are any questions for either of our speakers ask them about it's still there there's the pictures of it in there David Briggs the proprietor is still running it it's a hotel a lot of people live there a lot of the cartoon school students live there there's a hostel up on the top floor it's actually it still remains a relatively busy place and it's the only hotel in town so if you're going to stay in White River that's where you stay it has a lot of regulars people come back in the summertime to stay there yeah so well that one project that I didn't go for was in Bellas Falls and one of the major problems for me was the time I was going to be spending going back and forth you have to babysit these projects I mean you've got to be there every day in their development or you've got to have somebody to really trust and so far I haven't found anyone like that as long as I don't know what's going to happen and you catch me in a cocktail party probably okay no planning I've actually talked to a lot of different groups in different towns about developing their buildings and I mean I've just given them the low down on the economic reality of it and the fact is that if you know it through yourself and you hire a lot of people to help you it's going to cost you a lot of money and it probably won't work you've got to have people who are willing to put in the time and the energy and the physical labor the problem is now you have to have at least in Hartford everything's got to be stamped you know a person everyone's got to be a licensed contractor it's gone from being fairly open framework to totally like regiment and regulated and the problem with that is it just drives the cost up dramatically and I'm not sure you get a heck of a lot of benefit out of it other than the people running the departments have more peace of mind that if something happens they're not going to be liable for it and so it's a liability it feels like liability is driving everything and it's too bad because it scares away anyone who's willing to take a risk thank you so thank you all again very much for coming on your tables there are these cute little green cards if you would please fill them out and leave them at the table as you leave and we also have the opportunity for anyone interested to take a tour of Norway to student led tour and if you would meet Jen at the back table she will make sure that happens so again thank you to both our speakers a very interesting and dynamic presentation and certainly a different perspective on economic development so again thank you very much have a great day