 This is Think Tech Hawaii, the immunity matters here. Okay, we're back. I told you to come back. We came back. It's the 130 block, if you will, here on a given Wednesday. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Think Tech. And more specifically, this is Think Tech Talks. Now, you may not know this, but last Saturday, you should have known it, was the visitor industry charity walk in and around and back to Alamoana from Waikiki. And we were there. We took footage. And that footage is going to play this Sunday and the week following and every day in the week following on OC16. So take a look at it. And it includes lots of wonderful conversations with the people who were walking. Some of them are pretty interesting. Some of them are really funny. And one of them, one of the conversations was with Prashant Doshi, who was right there in front of, where was it? It was right near the Ilikai. Right near the Ilikai. And that was worth having. And if you watch our show at 10.30 on Sunday, you'll see a bit of Prashant. So welcome to the show, Prashant. Nice to have you here yet again. Oh, great to be here, Jay. It was an interesting story you talked about. It was a story about tech, entrepreneurship, a story about courage in the marketplace, if you will. So let me see if I can pick up on the thread. You're here in Hawaii because you want to do tech. And we always like that because our middle name actually happens to be tech. So you were in New York, which is my original hometown. And you were doing three, not one, not two, but three tech companies there. And you upended all of that and sold them all. In the process. In the process. And we'll ask you about that. And then came out here because this is a better place for many reasons and we'll talk about that too. And you wanted to establish a tech company. And in fact, today, what's today's date? 23rd of May. 23rd of May. It's my wife's birthday. It's my wife's birthday. Prashant Doshi formed a Hawaii LLC. And following through on what he said he was going to do on Saturday called Shreem, that's H-S-R-E-E-M-L-L-C right here in Hawaii. Good for you. It's a good beginning. What does Shreem mean? So Shreem is actually an ancient Indian mantra. It's a beach mantra. And it's the mantra for Lakshmi. And Lakshmi is the goddess of prosperity. So when you literally say Shreem, you're invoking prosperity. And you don't have to be Hindu or have you. It's about invoking prosperity. That's pretty good. I haven't heard the name before, so looks like I got a lock on that one. I hope so. And I do have a trademark on it as well. Go get a website right away. Shreemcom.com or something. Okay, so let's talk about, you know, the story. Sure. How did you come by having three tech companies in New York City? Yeah. So it's actually, it starts in New York City. So I'm originally from MIT. And I've been in a variety of industries across the board. I've been doing something from manufacturing to telecom, cybersecurity. This story kind of starts in the late 90s. I was, I'm independent, but I was consulting to the Giuliani Administration through a private sector company. Giuliani, did you say Giuliani? I did. I thought you said Giuliani. I did. He's no longer my hero, I gotta tell you that. You know, if we want to make this a part of the project, no he's not. And actually he's kind of, I'm no offense. But he's letting me down a little bit and some of the choices he's more recent. You and millions of others, yeah, but that's another story. But he was a fantastic mayor at the time. I mean, I grew up, I was born in Hoboken and New York back in the day. How the mighty have fallen from grace. Yeah, Hoboken. Yeah, I was. I was born in Hoboken, me, Frank Sinatra in baseball. One of the three of us is not well known. So, yeah, no, but I, back to New York. We were there in the late, I was there in the late 90s. And I was coming back from Europe. I had been working in the telecom arena. And the head of HR, the company that a multi-billion multinational corporation said, you know, you get bored easily. You like to solve new problems. We're going to throw you into health and human services. And I knew nothing about it. And I'd never worked with the government before. They have pills for this, you know. Yeah. So, we were in New York City. You probably have heard, you know, sort of the broken windows theory, which is the, it's essentially, New York was not, was a crime-ridden place, right? And it was a difficult place to go to. People like to not hang out in New York City. And Giuliani, you know, he, former district attorney, really cleaned it up. And the story is actually a story about data and the use of technology and data. What they found out, essentially, is that the big stuff relates to the small stuff. So, big crime is expensive to resolve, has a low hit rate, and it's very difficult, okay? The small stuff is, what the data showed is that it's correlated to the big stuff. So, we're talking about graffiti and turnstile jumping and broken windows, hence the broken window theory. And the idea was that if you could be tough on the small stuff, the big stuff goes away. And it was true. It was a true theory. It actually worked that way. It actually worked. And he capitalized on that, and he made the city a lot safer. He did. And I definitely credited him for that. I mean, all hats off to him, you know, the police chief, and all the precinct commanders. Well, in 9-11, he was pretty good in that. Well, and I was there. In 9-11, I watched the towers come down. That leads to a second story, but I actually... There's a watch. Yeah. Well, I ended up running the city's, part of the city's disaster relief efforts in New York City. So, that was incredible. But the story was about performance management and analytics, and I had come from this very similar background in other industries and using data strategically. We just studied MIT. I did chemical engineering and economics, and I disagreed with most of my economics professors and most of my chemical engineer professors probably didn't like me much either. But that's not atypical. Yeah, it kind of sort of happens. Yeah, but the story about using data strategically, and then we applied that to the health and human services field. Long story short, I ended up creating a program there called Centerstat. It was one of the finalists for Harvard's Innovation Awards in government. And it was basically about using data to help government people. Now, just mind you, government is not what I would call at the top of the list in terms of accountability and performance and results. And that's what it was about. It was about culture. It was about using data strategically to recognize people. Analytics. Analytics. And that ended up, long story short, the welfare roles were cut in half, went from a million to half a million, typically in New York. In the city of New York. In the city. All five boroughs are just about half. Five boroughs. And so there were a million people on welfare in the mid-90s. And then half a million by the time we were done. And typically the agencies were putting in about 10 or 15,000 people in the jobs. Giuliani in, I think it was 2000, had given us a goal of 100,000. None of us thought that was achievable. But we achieved 133,000 job placements. And that's a collective story. That's not a story about me. That's a story about all of us working together. But you all, you worked together with this data stack. What did you call it? This program in particular was called Centerstat. And it was one of three major programs that all worked together. That was company number one. That was not a company. I was working for another company at the time. And then from there I went and, you know, because I was involved in disaster relief. I went to DC. I launched a, we, and the company that I was with launched a cybersecurity practice. That happens. That's a long story. I ended up sort of leaving and deciding, took a severance and went out to the west coast and have always continued to move out west since. And from there decided with a partner to take what we had learned in New York City and apply it to a broader group in health and human services. So what was the three companies you established? The three companies were exemplar human services, exemplar analytics, and exemplar corporation. And these are kind of three companies that work in tandem that primarily help government agencies. And most of our... Like city or state agencies. Yeah, county agencies in particular. And California is a big mainstay, was the mainstay of our business. Because there's, California if you know now is like the fifth largest economy in the world. About 37 million people. And they're 58 counties. So you were in New York before you came out? No, I was in California before this. But the work came out, while you remember New York is, A, we're both from there. And B, the work kind of, you know, spun out of that. Yeah. But yeah, that's sort of the story. Okay, so your last place... It's California. It's California. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's all over California. Okay, okay. We're virtual. Okay, so you have these virtual companies, they're surviving, if not doing really well. They're done very well. And you're able to go where you want, and you decide you come to Hawaii and sell them. How easy is it to sell a tech company, three tech companies in California right now? Yeah, you know, the thing that we do is very unique. I had developed the only software as a service cloud-based model for what we do. It's still, you know, 11 years ago. Still is the only one. We typically compete, if you will, with the large systems integrators. Software as a service is a term that I heard 10 years ago. Yeah, right. I don't hear it anymore. Yeah, exactly. And it's, you know, cloud-based, you know, reporting and analytics service. So it's still the only one in California and in the industry space, at least the best of my knowledge that exists. So it's fairly unique. It's a fairly attractive kind of proposition because of its placement. So how do you sell a company like that? Well, that's part of the thing that's happening right now is it may be to the other shareholders and maybe we have, you know, foreign buyers that are very interested. So we're just right now trying to figure out what's the best thing. Why don't you hold on to it and appoint someone else? Yeah, I mean, that is part, I did actually. You can sit on the beach with me. Yeah, you know, I've never sat on the beach. I'm one of these kind of guys that doesn't sleep all that much and I work about, you know, 18 hours a day. I understand back in Hoboken and MIT you were a shy child. You know, I doubt that anyone ever would say that. My wife would hope that someone would say that, but that's not happening today. All right, so you haven't sold them yet? It's kind of near. Got buyers? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Definitely. So it's up to the lawyers. Yeah, it is. That's where it is. They're important in the development of the sector. They are actually important. You know, I never, my dad always said I should have been a lawyer. And, you know, actually, I really do want to bring that up and this is, you know, to the folks out there. This is a shout-out to the camera. Yeah, yeah, this is a shout-out to the camera. One of the, I think, the main important things if you're in a start-up, because you tend not to spend a lot of money because you're bootstrapping and defensive IP and making sure you have agreements in place, partnership agreements, membership, confidentiality, IP protection, hugely important. And typically something, even us as a company, really didn't do a great job in the beginning and you sort of pay the price if you don't do it right. Yeah, it really does. And you have to have a lawyer who will dot the i's and cross the t's. And one that actually knows the subject matter area well. Right, and it's very specialized. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I guess we can have another show about this, but how do you determine whether the lawyer who presents has specialized, especially in tech, especially with certain kinds of technology and intellectual property, how do you know he's real? Yeah. I mean, you can be a lawyer, but it doesn't mean you know that stuff. Yeah. Anyway, okay, moving on forward. Yeah. So you decide one day. It comes down a vision perhaps. It comes down to a lightest shining on your face. And there's a voice. And the voice is saying... Go to Hawaii. Prashant, go west, young man. It says, go to Hawaii. Get on the beach. No. Get on to the Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs, Fuller Corporation. Yes, I did. And it's one of the best websites I've seen. So easy. It didn't about 15 minutes this morning. So tell me about the light coming down. Yeah. So what happened is about a couple of months ago. It was clear that my vision and the vision of the other shareholders was sort of diverging, I think, very globally and wanted to do business globally. And the others kind of wanted to stick within one vertical within the United States. And I'm not suggesting that the U.S. is great, but tech is one of those things where truly you could be located anywhere. Sure. I've now spent, in the last four months, I've been on four different continents. I've spent a lot of time in India, the UAE, Scotland, Australia, and here, Hawaii, and then California. And I tell you, I've been amazed at the innovation that's going on around the world in pockets. Now, people tend to think of Silicon Valley, right? I hang out a lot in Palo Alto and Stanford and what have you. And innovation is happening everywhere. And so the application, whether the ideas now come from everywhere. I actually believe that money's not the real currency anymore. And of course, if you own any Bitcoin, you would know a little bit about that, I'm sure. I actually wrote a social currency. 27 shows on Bitcoin. Yeah, I wrote a social currency prior to Bitcoin. But what I was going to say is that ideas come from everywhere and I believe information, knowledge, insights, that's the new currency of the world. Yeah, well, you know, we look for seed changes. That's what it's all about for us. We don't spot the seed changes. We don't want the little pieces. We want to look at the big pieces and find out how the world is changing so we can sort of gauge ourselves or, you know, to integrate better. And so I think it's absolutely true change in general. And one of the changes, you know, I'm thinking of Ai Weiwei's new movie. It was in February, I think it opened up. It's called Human Flow. Yeah. And it's about refugee camps around the world. There are 65 million people. I didn't know that. Yeah. I don't think a lot of people did know that. And it's a seed change. The world has changed and we weren't watching. Right. And now he helps us understand the seed change and how we better stay conscious about that because it could lead somewhere that we don't like. So the same thing here. There's a seed change happened. Yeah. It's not all in Silicon Valley. No, it's not. It's not all in Beijing either or in Tianjin. No. It could be anywhere now. It could be in Europe. Okay. Let's go further than Europe. You know, there's a question. Let's go to Asia. Let's go to India. Let's go to Southeast Asia. Absolutely. They're out there, kids. I say kids. They're not a kid anymore. Although you're not shy. Yeah, I know. You know, who are having innovative thoughts because the fundamental building blocks of making information technology are available to everyone instantly. That's the piece. That is, and I want to underscore that point. I mean, I think technology, IT, and all the technology fields, is the great equalizer of this generation, right? Globally. Globally. It doesn't matter where you come from, what you have. You know, if you can get access to connect into the internet, and most of so much of freeware is available now, that you can build something that could transform the world. So I just want to ask one more question before we take a break. Sure. Yeah. You know, in order to use these building blocks, in order to be innovative, in order to transform the world, I think you can confirm one way or the other. I think you don't need to go to MIT. And if you went to MIT, you don't need to finish MIT. It's been proven so many times. This is a discussion that's a particular area of passion for me. I took the former prime minister of Australia, Julia Gillard, to task in Stanford. She was at a global education forum. And they were all kind of beating on the drums of college, college, college. And you hear that in the country. And I'm telling you, that's absolutely untrue, especially when it comes to tech. So what do you need? What you need, first of all, you need some chutzpah. You need some courage. You need to be a good observer of humanity. Look for problems. The first thing is to find out what problem or unique value proposition you're going to create. You've got to be a pessimist and find the problem. Yeah, you do. But once you do, then you think creatively. You apply some technology, and I believe in fast pilots and agile technology doing things, not sitting in some backed in the old software. Uber. Exactly. Think about Uber. It's not just about the app. It's about a democratization and unleashing. I had a piece in Symbol Beat this morning, came to that same conclusion. It's the democratization of our society right now, right here. I've been taking ubers all around Honolulu because I was like, why rent a car? I can take Uber everywhere. I mean, at 3 AM, I took an Uber this morning after my walk. My point, I've met a realtor whose child is at Punahou who in between showings is like, hey, I'm already on the road. Let me use Uber or Lyft or whomever it is. The point is that people had an asset, it was called their car. They have another asset, it's called their time. And Uber connected those two with the real easy interface and said, hey, you want to make some money and especially important in a place like Hawaii where a lot of people have a second job. It's brilliant. And right after this break, Versace, I want to find out how you're going to do the same thing, not the same exact app, but how you're going to do the same thing right here in River City. We'll be right back. You'll see this is going to be amazing. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Aloha, I'm Dave Stevens, host of the Cyber Underground. This is where we discuss everything that relates to computers that's just going to scare you out of your mind. So come join us every week here on thinktechawaii.com, 1 p.m. on Friday afternoons. And then you can go see all our episodes on YouTube. Just look up the Cyber Underground on YouTube. All our shows will show up. And please follow us. We're always giving you current, relevant information to protect you. Keeping you safe. Aloha. You're probably glad you stayed around because now it really gets good with Prashant Doshi. And we're talking about this company he started, but before we get into the grass roots of that and the weeds, if you will, I want to follow through on the one point about whether you need MIT and finishing MIT in order to do Ukubucks. Absolutely. I mean, look, I'm very thankful that I got into MIT and I had a great run at MIT. And it obviously opens a lot of doors for me. But I can absolutely assure you that it's unnecessary. And you look at now the burden of college debt, okay? And people coming out, what, you're, you know, 300,000 easily in the hole. And assuming you get, you know, people are paying their college loans forever. Apprenticeships is the key. I've studied apprenticeships around the world, okay? Germany is one of the best models. Switzerland's another good model. They've done it in the UK. But the one that I think is most relatable to Hawaii and the U.S. in general is Australia. I was just down there for quite some time last month. And they have a national apprenticeship strategy, okay? Wherever you go in Australia, you can get an apprenticeship across a ton of industries. I met with people from the government, from the private sector, apprentices, you know, they call it a year 13, right after high school that you can go. But it starts with a cultural acceptance that you are not less than because you didn't go to college. That's the big problem we have in this country is that we think that if you don't go to college, there's something wrong with you. I tell you, you can be a plumber, making twice as much money as the guy that graduates with a BS, you know, and I didn't mean BS as in BS, but, you know, a bachelor's in some sort of degree and still not making enough money. So apprenticeships are key. I'd like to highlight a particular example or model. So Jim McKelvie, the co-founder of Square, is a colleague of mine, an esteemed colleague of mine. And Jim got very upset after he launched Square and that became a, you know, multi-billion-dollar success that, you know, no one teaches really how to code, okay? And so there are a number of coding academies out of there, but the key thing that Jim did... We have one here. Yeah, the key thing that Jim did is not just 60, anyone 16 to 60 can learn how to code, okay? But after you do that in the three to six month academy, you get an apprenticeship and you work somewhere, okay? And they make sure that that happens. All of his results are on launchcode.org. Go check him out. And the basic story is he takes people that had earnings expectation of $10 to $15 an hour and turns them into 50 to $60,000 jobs. Right, and potentially entrepreneurs. And entrepreneurs. And that's particularly important and relevant here in Hawaii because we have a brain drain problem, right? Yeah, yeah. So there's a brain surgeon and he's got a leak in his house under the sink. He calls a plumber and the plumber slides under there. He hits the thing with a couple of the hammer, you know, slides out and says, it's all fixed. The brain surgeon says, how much is that going to be? He's going to be $1,500. $1,500. I'm a brain surgeon. I don't make that kind of money. And the plumber says, you know, when I was a brain surgeon, I didn't make that kind of money either. That's great to be here. Okay, let's go to the weeds now. What do you got in mind for Shreem LLC? Okay, so Shreem, it's a couple of parts. And it's a concept that's a strategy. It's an approach and a methodology more than anything else. All right, so as I was telling you, I've been working with the government agencies to try to impact social good change, right? And I'm a little frustrated. I tell you, you know, the government's not the easiest of organizations to deal with. You heard it here on Think Tech. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You heard it here. I'll sign anything. I mean, look, a lot of folks in Silicon Valley and other places stay away from the government because they're hard to do business with, okay? In general. And, you know, so I'm also frustrated with that. And look, there's some amazing people in the government, but the burden of the bureaucracy just makes it difficult for entrepreneurship to flourish. And we've had to fight tooth and nail and a lot of blood, sweat and tears in 12, 13 years. And I'm like, there's got to be an easier way. I think you're going to do better here. Well, so I don't want to do it in the government, okay? So my thought is that I'm going to go into the commercial sectors. Now, prior to these companies, I was all in the commercial sector, in telecom, in manufacturing, in FinTech, all these different ones. And I'm not, it's more cutthroat, okay? But, and the competition's higher, but it's easier. If I sit there, your CEO or CFO or, you know, head of technology, and I convince you that I can make you money, save you money, improve efficiencies or what have you, you're going to give me a chance. I could do that with you and government. And it might be two years later that we actually have a contract. Well, yeah. And the other thing with government is you don't know what motivates them. Well, exactly. Power maybe. Yeah. Or maybe they don't like the way you part your hair. Who knows what it is. Well, and sometimes doing things like saving costs is actually not a good thing because their budgets might get cut in the next cycle, right? Exactly. But in business, you always know what the bottom line is, the bottom line is the bottom line. Exactly. And so I said, you know what? I said, I'm going to go back to my history and the things I learned prior to these companies. And then what I'm going to do is work in the commercial sectors. And then, and this is my, and I'm announcing it right here so you guys can all hold me accountable. You start taking notes now. So, so I was in India for four months, right? And they implemented a 2% CSR requirement, Corporate Social Responsibility, meaning 2% of income. I mean, I forget if it's net income, we'll go to doing good, right? Altruism. But the common good. Yeah. Mine is going to be 11%. Why 11? Why not 15? Well, hey, hey, now come on. Now I got to make some money again. Well, 11 is still five times more than what they're mandating in India, right? Okay, okay. But the idea is, and I like the number 11, but the reason is that I believe in tech, if you operate efficiently, first of all, you can have those kind of margins. Does 11 have some symbolic meaning to you? It does. But that would be like a whole, so I have 888. 888? Yeah, yeah. So you know that. Long life and everything. That's right. In Chinese, but... 11's a mystical number, okay? And it's, you know, it's a divine mystical number. Oh, now I understand. Yeah. So 11% will go, and what I'm deciding right now, so remember I told you before, Shreem, I actually did a social currency. And what originally I was thinking was taking 11% of dollars and giving it to places, right? And that's how I'll do the social good. I decided differently as recently as this week after I met you. That... Yeah, it was something you said. You positively influenced me. The 11% what I'm going to do is use that to hire people that will then give away for free to the government or the nonprofit sector their expertise, okay? So you're getting a multiplier effect, right? So the 11% of net income will be used to say, for instance, instead of us, my previous company, working directly with the government agency, Health and Human Services, Child Welfare, whatever it is, I will hire someone or contract with someone and use that money to get an expert to work for free with the government. So then we don't have that contracting crap. People come in and sign their agreements and say we're just giving them to you for free. The other thing is I'm going to use a lot of, I'm going to call it, because they call it themselves, retired talent. See, I don't believe in this thing about 65 as the retired. Life gets better after that. Exactly. The ancient Vedas suggest that the natural lifespan is 120. So 65 to me is about, 65 to me is midlife, okay? But my point is that 65, something didn't suddenly turn off in your brain that you're no longer useful, okay? In fact, what I believe retirement is that you get to decide what you want to do versus what you have to do to take care of your family and other responsibilities. That's a great asset. It's an asset like the car and the time you talked about in the case of Uber. Yeah. It's an asset to be played and if you can connect with that and you can use computing power to manage that asset and leverage that asset, it's got to go in the right place. So what's the ultimate goal here? Yes. You want to do the 11% and make everybody happy or do you want to put yourself on a tropical island with a mint julep? Well, I mean, it may be perhaps a little bit of both, and I'm already on a tropical island. Okay. So what I'll say is what the real mission of Shreem is, in addition to the social impact side of it, is, okay, Facebook and those, a number of these companies have been in the press recently about how essentially your data is used against you, okay? Now, I've worked in the cyber security and intel field and I'm telling you it's been going on for a very long time, okay? Your data is used against you. Yeah. We knew from the New York days. Yeah, Facebook account? Yeah, it's... Your profile? No, none, none. I, in fact, deleted all my accounts. I'm one of those people that I actually deleted. You mean recently? Yes. Well, I had, I've never had too many of them, but I only keep LinkedIn and this is not a pitch for LinkedIn, but I kind of like LinkedIn. But no, what I was saying was that data has been used against you. As we say in New York, there's no such thing as a free lunch. There is no such thing as a free lunch. And data that you think, a lot of people are not aware that they go on and post all this information and whatever it is. And this is not, again, I like Mark, you know, a good guy, and he's done a lot of great stuff, but I'm talking about the fact that these companies' business models are fundamentally driven by collecting as much data about you as possible. It's true. And then selling you stuff or using it against you. You know, maybe you could give him a call. Mark? Yeah. Yeah. He's on Kauai. Yeah, sure. It's an 808 number. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. Maybe, you know, pop up at his house one day to come on the show. I will. I have some questions. Well, them, Google, I mean, come on, you know, you know, everyone is, and I don't believe as a consumer. It's all about relationships, isn't it? It really is. It's all about connecting up and networking, and this is a great place for that. So I'd like to have you come back. You want me to bring Mark? Bring Mark? I'll bring Jim. Square, I mean, that's pretty amazing. Okay, bring Jim. I'll get a crew. Okay, all right, yeah. And we'll talk some more. Well, you know, we're going to need that here. You want to follow your company. I hope it's successful. I hope you make all the right moves, and I'll see you back at this table. We'll take further status on it soon. Jay, thank you so much. It's been an honor to be here. Fashant, nice to meet you. Nice to talk with you. I knew it would be like this. Aloha. Aloha.