 You know, one of the things that I think we might talk about in this panel is about a dense kind of urban ecosystem for these kind of labs, incubators, and colonies, and maybe more specifically about designing spaces for innovation in New York City. So we'll have three speakers, and I'll be the second one. The first speaker, someone well known at the school and in the city, Karen Wong, who is deputy director at the New Museum, mastermind and originator of New Inc., among many other things, and a professor here at the school. And Daphne Kwan, who will be the final speaker before we have a little bit of discussion, is president and COO of BetaWorks Studios. So Karen will make the first presentation. In some ways, I'd rather talk about what everybody else has been talking about. So I'm just going to start here. I threw this slide together because it actually comes from one of my lectures. And Marcus from Bell Labs had talked about how important science fiction is in terms of being able to see the future. And Cheryl spoke how important the green view is and how walking can lead to creativity. So what you have on the left hand side is Tron. I don't know if you guys remember that film. It actually came out in 1982. That's a disk which actually has like all the information of the world on it. So it's like some kind of ring of knowledge. And a fun fact, the Tron legacy was actually directed by a GSAP alumni in 2010. So the next image you see is Norman Foster's Apple headquarters. And what I just want to say here is not quite sure if Norman's ring building was so original. And that the diameter of that building is over a mile long. So when you talk about this idea of all the engineers at Apple having a green view, as well as having to walk to see one another, there you go. So I will now actually I guess have to go back on point. New Inc. right next to the New Museum. And this is us in a snapshot. And I think the important thing to say here is it's a curated community. We have 40 members, so not unlike the 32 folks over at McDowell Colony, who are the full-time members people have to apply. It's a year-long commitment. And it's been really important for us to be inclusive. And I'll speak a little bit more about that in a second. And the areas of focus is kind of a mishmash. And that was also something very important with regards to we weren't interested in being competitive. We like this idea originally of having one of everything, because ultimately we were looking to build a like-minded community that was interested in collaboration. I think we've spoken a lot about diversity today already. And I just wanted to add that you can't have diversity unless you're intentional about it. And in our case, after year one, we understood that we actually needed to hire somebody who was going to be a director of outreach, so that we could not only, in three years' time, we achieved gender parity, but we have also achieved a balance between people of color and Caucasians in our space. And ultimately, this is not about a numbers game, but it's about being reflective of the community here in New York City so that our incubator looks like New York City. We are a melting pot. And then these are just some of our values that are really important. I think one of the terrific things that we do is we set intentions for ourselves and for our projects in the first week of the program. And these type of things, believe it or not, really end up building the right type of spirit and the right type of momentum that takes you through a year that's going to be filled with ups and downs. The professional development is very important. We're a combination of a workspace and a professional development program where oftentimes people have said, wow, it's kind of like getting a creative MBA, but it's a lot cheaper. So, you know, the statistic here in New York City, which I'm sure is not a surprise to you guys, is that we graduate more artists and designers than any other city in the United States. But what kind of infrastructure in a rich city like New York City has for creatives? And the answer is not many. And so the idea here is after most folks get out of school, they're really left on their own to kind of figure out how am I sustainable? How do I put together a business plan? How do I understand and how to read a contract? So these are all things that we're trying to make sure creatives have access to. This is a quick program in overview just to kind of hit home in terms of, you know, again, a lot of things are deliberate, but it's also been a very organic process. And I think one of the things that really connects all of the incubators, labs, and colonies that we've talked about today is I've understood that everyone's had an organic process which has led to an authentic voice. And then subsequently, we've also heard that everyone's quite reflective, which I think ultimately leads to success. So again, this is a program overview that took us four years to develop. And now in year five, we think we finally have the right formula. And another key thing that we've done with our incubator is that we've decided to make sure that the 40 full-time members are on tracks so that even within the community, they're having even stronger dialogue with folks who are doing similar things. So we have four tracks, immersive experiences, the museum tech, creative experimentation, and social impact. So again, many of the same words you've been hearing throughout today's symposium. And then member highlights. I think the proof is in the pudding. David started off with this kind of idea of what are the metrics to success. And for us, we think it's the stories of our members. And so very quickly, here is Eliza McNitt, a filmmaker. Didn't know much about VR, so she came into our space, collaborated with some folks and ended up making the first VR film that was sold for a 7 million figure at Sundance. And it's nice that it was a female director. Here in this case, another group of folks working in VR, which has become a natural space where folks seem to gather here at New Inc. We have Hyphen Labs, which is three women scientists who are looking at redefining black female identity through an experience in a beauty salon. And then New Reality Company, which is another group of artists who are looking at climate change and using virtual reality as their medium. And then in this case, Scatter, some folks who created the Depth Kit, which is a major tool that a lot of VR community is using. And again, they started in year one. They thought they had a pretty cool product. No one believed in it. Year two, year three, they decided to figure out how to position it, got some funding. And now they're quite successful to the point that our new members at New Inc. say, oh, we'd really like to end up like these guys. So already within four years, we're starting to create our own kind of mentors and icons. Stephanie Dinkins working in AI and again around the idea of black female identity. And then Nicholas Bentall, a terrific artist who works in kind of this outlier materials. I'm going to quickly, I'm going to skip over some of these folks. Yes. I think one of the great things about the incubator is, you know, you hope that you're having cultural impact and then you really wish you will have social impact. And that's become such a great story with regards to almost everybody who comes through the incubator is really looking at social impact. And so we have a number of collectives and artists and designers and coders who are really looking at what are those next platforms of alternative education. And then one of my favorite groups, they're looking at computational aesthetics through hip hop. And then again here is terrific micro museums where they want to democratize the idea of the museum institution. And oftentimes our museum experience is going through a grand staircase into these marble style exhibition spaces. And they said, you know what? We're going to create an exhibition in a kiosk and then we're going to replicate them. They're going to have holograms and they're going to be digitized and we're going to put them in waiting rooms and hospitals at the DMV. And the big play is probably to have them in airports. And so they were one of our major success stories. They came in, they decided, okay, we're going to be a nonprofit and in year one received $500,000 in foundation money. Year two, they're now 1.5 million and they have over two dozen people working with them. And so I guess at the end of the day, you know, you do end up going back to metrics. These are our metrics and they look really impressive. But ultimately if you ask the new INC member what is the most important thing they got out of their time at new INC, they're going to say community. So it really goes back to everything we've been talking about today that is about human connection. Thanks. I want to thank GSAP Dean Amal Andreos for launching the GSAP incubator in the first place and for convening and supporting this great event. It's been fascinating for me and thank you all for coming. I'd also like to thank Karen for all of her inspiration over the past four years and partnership to the school in this initiative. I'd like to thank Augustine Shang who's the GSAP incubator manager. And I'd also finally like to thank Lila Catellier, one of the directors of events here at the school who really pulled everything together for this afternoon. Okay. So you've heard from me a little bit already and I'm going to keep this brief but I want to describe a little bit about our own take here at the school on incubators, labs and colonies. So the GSAP incubator as you probably already know is a kind of collaborative environment for developing new projects about architecture, culture and the city. This week we started our fourth year of the program with about 25 recent graduates from GSAP working on 18 teams on self-initiated projects for a one-year membership. So it shares a lot of similarities with other incubators and Nuink has been a great model and leader for us. We're kind of responding to Nuink's lead in this, in our own program. Over our first three years we've had some amazing members from all of our academic degree programs. So by that I mean the master of architecture program but also planning, preservation, real estate, curatorial practices. All of these different programs that are within this school here, this graduate school are part of our incubator. And they've created some amazing projects on a wide range of topics, things like technology startups of course but also architecture firms, nonprofit organizations, curatorial projects, publications and activist organizations. And I want to encourage you if you haven't already to pick up one of the booklets at the back where you can learn a little bit about each of the projects including some information about the events that we have put on over the past few years and all of the exciting members that we've had. For the sake of this discussion I want to talk a little bit more and maybe return to some of the broader issues that I was trying to introduce this morning rather than talk too much about the specifics projects. And so I want to explain that when we started the incubator and I'm showing this, it looks a little funny, this image. Is there a problem with the projector? Anyway, it's okay. It's kind of artistic. That's kind of cool. But my point was to show like the empty space. I mean we basically developed this partnership with the New Museum and with New Inc. And then had to figure out what to do with our square feet inside the space. And we really started by asking ourselves some questions, some difficult questions. Oops, yes, yeah. I saw you coming here. Good. So we were asking ourselves things like what are our recent graduates thinking about and working on that we might be able to gather together to get some kind of multiplier effect for and support in some way. How might an architecture school explore a version of an incubator when in a way it's already had an incubator? I mean if you speak broadly enough about incubators, the school was an incubator. Or in other words, you know, we already created a curriculum, thought about what people should know, thought about what they needed to make an impact in the world, have a pedagogical model. Students already graduated from that. So what exactly were we saying by having, you know, another type of program? Or, and even what do we call it? Should we have a model in our incubator program for more kind of classes and professional development when we're already kind of supposed to be a professional school here, you know, Uptown and, you know, in Morningside Heights within a university. So, so kind of, you know, what exactly were we getting at? If we were not aiming to turn our members' projects into successful businesses, should we even be calling ourselves an incubator? Is that the right term for us? Why would our graduates come to this space instead of some of the other exciting spaces in New York City? Incubator spaces, co-working spaces. And really, how could the members and projects and energy from the incubator impact the school here? You know, how could we have this kind of feedback loop between the incubator and the school and the university? So, you know, I think like many people have described, we have some working models, some ideas about it, but their works and progress were continually evaluating. But I'm going to describe some of the things that we've thought about and that have kind of stuck, you know. So, here's us kind of occupying that space formally empty. So, just a couple of comments about some of the things that continue to kind of be on our minds and guide us. One of the things that I think is amazing that we have and that I think in a way New Inc. has as well is a unique combination of an educational institution, Columbia, a cultural institution, the New Museum, and this really dense, exciting neighborhood with creative energy, you know, the Bowery. And I think, you know, although there are a lot of incubators in a lot of places, that kind of combination, I think, is worth noting and is interesting. Another thing that we have been thinking about is, and Dean Andreos mentioned this at the beginning of the day, that we're thinking in our specific incubator, which is really only for our school's alumni. So, it's different than some incubators in that way. We're thinking about expanding and maybe even blurring the territory between academia and the profession. And I think that's something that our graduates have always wanted. They've been thirsty for. But more generally than that, I think that's an important concept in the world in general, or thinking about the future of the university, like blurring that line a little more. We're also thinking very much about expanded modes of practice. You know, what is it to practice architecture these days? It doesn't mean only, you know, the narrow definition that we, you know, may have used to think of. It means many things, including directing Tron, but, you know, also starting nonprofits and doing things and spreading design thinking to the rest of the world and many other things. And as I mentioned before, we think of this as a kind of space for questioning as much as for answering. And finally, and maybe most importantly, we think that, you know, our school's contribution to this kind of collection of incubator spaces, discussion about incubators, you know, one of our best contributions might be the culture of design studio, the culture of critique, of iteration, of discourse, not only the formal crits, you know, that we have at school where, you know, faculty and invited guests give comments on student projects, but the kind of unspoken amount of critique and sharing that happens between students at the school and that ideally could happen between projects and something like an incubator. So with all of that as a kind of background, I will quickly describe, you know, kind of four hypotheses. I started with two hypotheses and these are four hypotheses more specifically about our incubator. We think of our incubator as being about humanities as well as the sciences. So, you know, we've heard a lot about that today and I was really glad to hear that especially in the first two presentations but we've heard of this as a kind of theme and that's something that we've kind of carried through in our incubator and some of our projects. We also are interested in critique and history as well as action and technology and so, you know, maybe more than some other programs and I'm just showing a few snippets of incubator members' projects but I'm not going to describe them in general. And so that's important to us too and that's again something we're bringing from architecture school, you know, into the incubator world. We think of trying to engage deep critical thinking as well as concise elevator pitches, you know, so there are many ways to tell stories, to talk about projects, to convey ideas and we want to, you know, note that the deeper, longer, more critical thinking is important as well as the pitch. And finally, you know, coming full circle to what I was getting at at the beginning of the day, we have some metrics of success beyond financial metrics. You know, several of the projects I've just shown, you know, are things like nonprofits. This is an exhibition project, you know, at the Venice Biennale a couple of years ago and, you know, we think and we value at the school that there are a lot of things that are important and valuable beyond just those financial metrics. Of course, some engagement with the real world of making a living is important and we're not trying to neglect that, but we want to kind of put on par, you know, some other factors as well. And with that, I'll close out my comments about the GISA. I think you better welcome a little more discussion and welcome to the stage, Daphne. Thank you. So thanks for having me. I'm sorry we're a little bit late, so I'll try and speed things up, but I'm pretty blown away by the presentations I saw. Thanks, Karen, for inviting me. They're amazing and I'm a little humbled and slightly embarrassed by my own presentation because those presentations are amazing. So I'm so bad that I needed three people in the duet, so just to set it up for you. So this is something that we have launched at the BetaWorks studio. BetaWorks is a 10-year-old company, but I'm just going to talk about a new initiative that we had that we just opened in May. BetaWorks already is an accelerator, it's already an incubator, and we're definitely not a colony the way that it was described earlier today with like 32 people maximum. So we're maybe a little bit different and so I'm hoping that you guys can see a little bit different from what you've been seeing today, which are just amazing companies. So BetaWorks, when it started 10 years ago, it was born out of a different economy in New York, right? So there was no money, there was no capital, the talent was in big banks and telecom companies, and it was not entrepreneurial. And so John Borthwick, who as among other things with the CTO of Time Warner, when he started BetaWorks, the thought was how do I stay close to founders? How do I get founders to create products that are human-centric, that are technology-centric? And how do I help them develop these products so that they're designed in a way that has diverse voices in it? And so he had a very specific way of creating them. So at the time, the only way to do that was really to create your own environment. So that's what he did. He started as a, now they call it like an incubator, right? So basically he hired a bunch of engineers and then just had them play. And so BetaWorks, the word came from Beta's work, right? So he just wanted them to try things and fail and try things and fail. And so the companies that are in red are the ones that were actually literally born in the space that he had in the four walls. And the others are either companies that somewhat were incubated by BetaWorks or also what ended up happening was as the evolution started of the New York tech scene, he needed to change that model a little bit. And so three years ago he launched a venture fund. So the fund was then now, it's not obviously just funding your own companies, but also starting to fund other companies that are outside of your walls. So as the ecosystem changed, he changed his model again, constantly thinking about how do I create a founder community? How do I surround them by research sources that they need? And so as New York evolved, he had evolved his model. The last iteration that's happened then is we really did start kind of a, sorry, that was the accelerator, sorry, the first part is the accelerator. And then so the incubator part, he started, sorry, no, that's right, incubator and then accelerator. So the accelerator part, he started just a year and a half ago where he started figuring out, well, okay, again, now that there's a ton of money, there's a ton of fighting for who's gonna get the best companies. What he did was he realized that one way to serve founders was to go into verticals, very narrow verticals. And being a technologist himself, the way he did it was he started camps. So camps are companies that are only like one or two people that are mostly pre-funded, definitely pre-product, mostly pre-revenue, or obviously then pre-revenue. And so he went into technology verticals that were very specific and then created a little cohort around that. And so we just started this week live camp, which is focused on live gaming, live streaming. So those six companies are now in a 12-week program. And again, that includes investment, it includes the things that you know about. But again, that was due to the evolution of the New York tech scene and how it needed to evolve. So looking forward then at, well, what happens now? So there's incubators, there's venture funds, there's accelerators, you know, how do you move from that and why would you move from that? So one of the things that we were looking at is, and if you talk to VCs at all, this is what scares them. There's just a dispersion now, and you all know it, right? There's just a new way of working in the United States. Clearly New Zealand has no idea about this necessarily. But people are now starting up companies wherever the heck they want to. Their resources are being hired in India and all over remote countries, wherever the talent lays, and you don't have to be in one space anymore. So this is the future of work, right, where it's all dispersed. So then you think about, okay, so this map is, I think it's the job creation from start. It's just to show you that they're happening all over the place. So then all of a sudden, New York as a city, or San Francisco as a city, starts losing its importance as the place to incubate or the place to accelerate or the place to invest in. And so looking forward at how do you stay close to founders when founders are everywhere? So we look at what the problems this type of dispersion has and one of them would be, there's this sense, and you guys may have some of it a little bit yourselves, but there's a sense of disassociation. It's just lonely, right? It's just lonely being a founder. It's always been lonely, but now when your resources are all exploded all over the place and so your workers aren't even in one place anymore, it's just a ton of ability to just get disconnected from everything and what we've seen is the products that are being born out of that are very technical, right? So for example, or analytical and not human centric, that's the way that we're hoping that technology is able to go. So, you know, you hear, I'm disrupting the industry. We don't like disrupting, we don't like products that disrupt for disruptions, say, I'm gonna kill the bodega, right? Like that was like a disrupting one. And that's not something that we think is a human centric product. And so those are the things that we're trying to make sure, if you bring people together, products we think become much more human centric. So that's one issue with it. Is that if you're a founder and you're in anywhere, right, in the world, but really in the country as well, the resources that are available to you are also exploding. So WeWork is the one, that's the big gorilla that just takes all the air out of the room. But WeWork is a good example of, you know, you used to have an office and now you can have all your workers in all these different WeWork offices. So what founders are left doing in that map is having to now go and piece these, piece their world together, right? Piece their community together and grab these little pieces of things that help them network and stay connected. So they're lonely, they can't put their connections together. And so our concept, although we launched in New York just to keep in mind, our concept is to create, to use the New York location just as the springboard to create these nationwide and hopefully globally. So what we've done is, in launching the studios, the number one thing that we're trying to do is create a network of people, right? So really putting in touch with people with each other, not digitally, so part yet. So part of it is really why we needed the physical space was you've heard all day to day, making those connections for us means that you can make a better technical product, getting more diverse voices into your process, baiting things like putting them out and getting feedback, putting them out, getting feedback, talking to people, working with other founders, getting human support. It's critical to making the new generation of products that we're hoping can be, again, much more human-centric than we think the direction that they're going right now with everybody dispersed. The other things we're doing are, we're creating experiences around that. You hear a lot about programming, so we're very focused on that. Part of the programming is just to get like-minded people together but part of the programming also is to level you up. So we're saying that we care about not your company, but we care about you. So you as a founder, you as part of the ecosystem, we want you to think about yourself and not so much your company here in this space. So again, it's about that. And then we hope to do the national flexible founder space. Oh, so Christian is going to kill me. So I just threw in these two next-to-edly slides, like literally I just made them here and realized this was an architecture school. And so Chris is my beautiful designer and architect, brilliant Leong and Leong are the people who helped us think through how to do what we're doing. So I'm just going to walk you through something. And I haven't walked anybody through this before and Chris has never seen these slides, but he made them. So this is not a slide I show anybody. The other slides I do, this is what I don't. So I don't know how to- Okay, there you go. So when Chris was brought in initially, Leong and Leong was brought in initially, we didn't really know what the hell we were doing. So they're like, well, what are you planning to do with these people? I don't know. Do you want them working? I don't know. And so Chris was literally trying to step us through. Well, I can't design you a space if you don't know what you want the people to do. So this is iteration one. And I would just like to point out this was pre-dafty. So I was not here when this was going on, this disaster. So there was this thing about the staircase. Don't even look at that. There's like a staircase issue we had at the moment. I broke the back of that. It was like the first thing I did. So what Chris was told was we want a little co-working space and then we want people to be able to sit and work on their company and then we want some food and beverage type of flexible social space and then we want to throw events, right? So Chris was like, okay, so I have to chop up the space for that because they're totally different things, right? So this is no good for networking. So if I just said the most important thing we're trying to do is network, then why is like 60% of the space used for seating? And when I say seating, it's like literally sitting, right? And it's sitting and working and not talking to anybody. How could you talk to anybody because you're like sitting and working, right? And so these little teeny dots were it for networking. But that was like totally not the concept. The whole concept was to bring people together. So they did not blink an eye and went back. And as we talked more about what we were trying to get done, so you have to reorient yourself. I told you these are totally ugly slides. So this is the same size of space that you just saw, but now it's laid out to allow a lot more networking and flow. And so the entrance is over here. Sorry, the entrance is over here. So somebody mentioned ground floor. We required ground floor entrance. So absolutely you can't be in a we work and you know, pretend that you're something else. And so we absolutely needed retail space. We have retail space and meatpacking. You come in the front door over here. You go through reception. You enter over here. So what Leong and Leong did for us was they created a flow, right? So it went from noisy and social to quiet. The quiet is totally flexible. These are glass doors. So they're here, but actually this picture was taken before the doors are in, but there are glass doors here that are completely bifolded away. So you can open it up completely. And what we did was they kept the kind of food and beverage type of seating here. There's a little bit of food and beverage here. They created these amazing banquets. So there aren't, my boss John is like from England. So he keeps saying banquets. And like we can't understand what he's saying. And so he's like banquets. So these banquets are, they're beautiful. So they're, they're here, right? So they're this beautiful velvet. You just want to lie down in them type of banquets that are really not a lot in New York. There are not, who knew that, right? But somebody said, oh my God, there's no banquets in New York. And so what those really are great for though, other than a restaurant, right, is meetings, right? You want to sit down. You want to talk to each other. There's a table. There are chairs. So constantly people are here having meetings. And so these banquets are under tremendous demand. And these ceilings are against the wall here, sorry, against the window here. And it's being used. And so that's the front space. And then this is actually a forum. These chairs here are completely movable. So it's meant to, again, be like a forum so people can engage their own forum. So we have these things called think lunches that members come up with. Oh, I didn't mention this a private club, right? But we're, but it's unlike the 32 that I had heard earlier. We're at hundreds, right, right now. And we're hoping to get to 1,000. And so these, these are completely movable. And so we can have what we consider campfire, fireside discussions, right? Like right in the middle of the room. And then you can clear them completely away. And then, and this is a private room, which has tables here. You can see this table here. So it's meant to be quiet and so people can go there. But we can open the whole thing up and, and we have had 200 person events in this space, right? So, so Chris just designed this beautiful, flexible space because why we were betaing. We did not know what we needed, but we knew we needed not fixed space that would had walls and had purpose because we weren't sure the purpose. That was just something there's a saying, am I allowed to curse? So there's a saying that is attributed to beta works, although we don't say it's ours. It's called fuck it, ship it. And what that means is just, you know, it's done. It's good enough to put it out there. And so at some point, Leong and Leong had to get comfortable with fuck it, ship it. And then they, they just went to print and we, this, you know, this is what we came up with. And there are plenty of improvements that all of us would like to make on it. But it was great to be able to do that with, okay. So, so now I'm just going to go quickly through the business because I did want to just, oh, Chris, is there anything to add other than we're terrible clients and we pay late and we're just like terrible clients. So, so, so this is a little bit about how we're going to build it, right? So Karen talked a little bit about the curation of the community. So yes, so we're hundreds now, right? So I'm trying to get to a thousand. We're tightly curating the community. We have debates over every single person. Every single person gets their LinkedIn clicked on by seven people, including John Borthwick, who's the CEO. And we look through their Twitter feed. We look to see if their Twitter feed is original or whether they're retweeting a bunch of stuff. We look through their GitHub. And if you're, you know, an engineer, you know, what GitHub is, but I did, I'm not. And I didn't. And so I don't look at it, but other people do. And so, you know, it's, it's, it's proctological what we do to find people. And so it's a slow build. And that's critical for us. So what ends up happening is that naturally we didn't aim for this 65% of our community that we've, that we've built our membership. This is this is private membership that we built our founders 40, 44% are current founders. That means they're coming in and they're trying to build their company and they're trying to figure out how to do that. And the another 21% have, have founded companies in the past. They founded often. Okay, so this is a terrible statistic. And I'm so embarrassed by that, but I will tell you, I will put out an email to 100% women and I will only get back 21% women applicants and 79% men. Like it's just, it's, it's, I just cannot get past it except that Karen had a great idea, which is you just need to be focused on it. You need to hire somebody that's focused on it. You need to goal them on it. And that's the way to get it done. You can't just throw it out there to an all women's list and expect they're going to come. What I will say is this, I'm very proud though, if you go into the club, it is not 21% women. It is often 40, 50, 60% women in the club. So what I'm hoping is that they're comfortable there, right? And so they'll start talking to each other and we'll get more of them. So that's what I'm really proud of. That number surprised the shit out of me when it came out because I did not, I did not expect that based on who was coming to the club. The ecosystem is really important. So the other 35% of people are ecosystem that are around the founders. So either they want to be near innovation in founders or founders want to be near them. So the ecosystem is really important of who the other people are. So we're constantly checking. It's a little bit older right now because we went out and pre-approved people and that was a lot of people we knew and so they were a little bit older. But as we start taking in more founders, it's aging down. So that's one thing that was not targeted, but we knew it was going to happen right now. These are just like, you know, famous people who you don't even know are famous probably that I barely understood were famous, but they're founders. They've made a lot of money or they have a lot of money or anyway, they're very smart. So KPIs, I just wanted to show you this one slide. So on KPIs, so this is not an important slide but just on the KPIs side. So if I'm telling you that networking is one of the most, is the most important thing. These are kind of some of the things that we're thinking about. So we're thinking about have they come to a session which meant they met people. Are they bringing guests? So any given moment in the club of every four people that are there, there are three additional guests. So people are coming in and bringing in other people. That's the whole point of this, right? To be able to talk and meet with other people. The startup bar is actually where we actually have a human instantiation of somebody, oh, I'm actually out of time, a human instantiation of somebody who actually is trying to connect people. So we actually have hired somebody to make those networking things work. And so those are some of the KPIs that we're trying to put ourselves against. We're going to have technology that helps people connect. So again, that's really important to us. And somebody was talking about having the reading within the four walls. So what are you doing within the four walls? Who are you bringing in? Those are some of the things we think about. Programming, everybody's talked about programming. Our programming is technology-focused and founder-focused. It's very focused on whether or not we're connecting people during it. One other thing just really quickly is we do want partners. So we want almost everybody that spoke today and everybody else who's here. We want partners to bring the best of what they have to our founders and to our ecosystem. We plan to go national with this. So we want to then take this New York experiment and blow it up into different locales and different cities to support their communities. And that's it. I think the three of us are in privileged positions that we are making this kind of work in New York City, which is very supportive and we have the community. And I just want to shout out to folks who are in the rural areas in New Orleans and New Zealand that I think the work that we're all doing is very challenging, but it's much more challenging for folks in your geographic spaces. And I just want to recognize that before we talk about New York City. How's it going? My name is Charles Owai. Hello, everyone. Hello, Charles. In regard to the frameworks and the systems of what it means to be an incubator or a lab or a colony, you all are very focused on it. You have it straight from the beginning that you are a group of engineers and then you're focused on moving forward the technology sector, alumni, and then for New Museum, very cultural and community-driven. But what focuses do you have on the evolution? I know you mentioned that at BetaWorks, the evolution is pretty much directed by the technology sector and the need for evolution for the technology sector. But for everyone else, what really drives that form of evolution in order to put your incubator, your lab, your colony to that next echelon? I think for us, we still consider ourselves in the embryonic stage, and so evolution for us means improving our program. If you say, have we thought about what we're going to do in the next five years, sure. And of course, the idea of growth is always very sexy. I think we're going to be very careful in terms of what does growth and evolution mean. Sometimes it means being bigger, but sometimes it could mean maybe we want to take things online. Maybe we want to focus on our alumni. So we're pretty excited that we're in a space now understanding that we have a successful incubator to start thinking what is that next chapter. So I guess I would say stay tuned. I think, Rick, you put your best practices open source online. I think for us, our biggest challenge is going to be how do we take what we've gotten and do it in a different city. That's super exciting to me. So is it operations and manufacturing in Michigan? What is the flavor of that location that we can grab ahold of for those founders in that tech ecosystem and not New Yorkify them? So the whole point is not to take everything that we are and just shove it onto Philadelphia or some other city that already has a culture and already has strengths. And how do we lift that up through the studio? So super excited about being able to do that. I mean, I'll just add that, you know, I think as an architecture school, we're learning a lot from all of these other, you know, incubator spaces, labs, colonies. But I think our real goal is to bring it back into architecture school. So our kind of future vision is that maybe in some way this kind of experiment, you know, in your space at 231 Bowery is going to impact the way we run our school here or the way that we engage with architectural education. So getting that feedback back into, you know, the university. I think I'd also want to say something, you know, in terms of how one defines evolution. I really liked what Andrea said was this idea that, you know, you just can't have one person trying to solve that one problem. And I think as we start to talk about the infrastructure of our community of, you know, labs and incubators, colonies, how are we creating, even here in New York, an ecosystem? And so in many ways, the reason why I like this trio is all of us are actually creating pipelines that actually will eventually feed into each other. And so even in the case of BetaWorks, you know, we've certainly had some folks from BetaWorks be able to come to New Inc. and review some of our pitches and maybe even consider some of our folks eventually for funding or that they might graduate into your spaces. And with Columbia, you know, the hope is that some of the architectural graduates, they're going to collaborate with our New Inc. members or subsequently they switch over to New Inc. because there's a track that they're particularly interested in. And so that's also been the case with a couple of folks who moved into New Inc. in the museum tech track. So I think an ecosystem and how we need to be deliberate about it is going to be important in terms of our survival. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's great. And I'm really glad you're picking up on that collective and that you brought that term into the discussion. And I'm just thinking too that, you know, some of the faculty here at this school have been part of the McDonnell colony and there's already that connection. But I was fascinated by one of things Marcus said at the very beginning of the day that he thinks one of the next challenges is automating infrastructure and automating the physical world. And that is something that, you know, I think it would be amazing for an architecture school to engage with a place like Bell Labs with, you know, some of the other people doing a lot of the digital technologies for that. But that impact on the physical world is just, you know, I think so interesting for us in an architecture school. You've sort of answered it. But one of the things in New Zealand is, especially in Wellington, is that we are frenemies, the different programs. We are friends in some cases and in other cases we're competing for funding and pipeline. And maybe that's not an issue here, but then I heard it's something that made me think, oh, maybe it is. So actually, and one of the things I found in New Zealand is that actually now the people, the entrepreneurs, are starting to change the landscape for us because they are going to multiple programs. So, you know, we're sharing that. So I just, your reflections on collaboration and competition. Okay, I'm going to be really, I'll be very transparent. Year one, we were frenemies with everybody. Like we didn't want anybody coming into our space. We didn't know what we were doing. Other museums like MoMA and Met were like, oh, we heard you're doing this cool thing and you want to be collegial and let come over and let us check you out. And we're like, no. And then, you know, we started to gain our confidence. And then we started to understand, you know what, it's not so much about each other taking something away, but it's about adding something. And so by year two, we changed our attitude. Year three, I would say, then it became 180. So it's been a progression. But what's been really awesome is the number of partnerships we do have. It started with GSAP because we felt we really wanted to partner with the university. We loved the idea that thought leadership would automatically be part of New Inc. And we didn't think of that as so competitive. But now, you know, it's really exciting that other museums and curators are coming to our retreat and they're figuring out, well, what is our special sauce and can we take some of that special sauce and simply just even bring it to our staff. It's not even about, oh, we got to create another incubator or museum incubator. It's about taking what we've learned and being able to use it as a methodology. But it's also been exciting with regards to being very friendly with pioneer works and national sawdust. And yeah, so I would say it took us some time, but we really do now believe that partnerships are the way forward. So I'll tell you one MBA thing, which is if you are that scared of the others that are out there, your mission is not sharp enough. You're not differentiated enough. So you need to get sharper and more differentiated so you're not afraid of everybody out there. Because if they can do what you're doing, then yeah, you should be afraid because they can do what you're doing, right? So you have to be really sharp on what's your differentiator and then you're just less frenemy-ish because you're just like, well, you can't do what I'm doing. So yeah, I'll talk to you, right? And so that's one thing. That's the MBA kind of competitive advantage BS. So then the other thing I'll just tell you a secret, which has happened to us, is data works as an investor, right? So we have a fund. So you think, okay, we have all these founders coming in so they want to meet all the founders. Do we want other venture capital funds coming in and meeting these people? No, right? Because we want them and we want to figure it out. So we were a little bit like what Karen's saying. So then what we realized, though, is that we can't invest in everybody that needs investment. And so how selfish is it of us to just say, okay, well, we're not going to bring in any capital that might be interested in your type of company, right? We have a CBD company that, like, he has a pot farm in Colorado. And so he's a founder and he's a member. But we were never going to invest in him, but somebody would, right? It's a hot area. And so what were we doing? So what we did, and we're doing it right now, so you can't tweet this, but right now we're going out to other VCs and we're pitching them to come in and invest in us and become part-owners in us. And then open up our capital. So we learned that a little bit on Karen, but it was a little bit more selfish than Karen was. So it was just a great example. And we're doing it right now. And to your point, they're like, this is great. We can't put this stuff together. We can't put programming together. We can't put a place together. This is great. You do that for us. That's fantastic. Here's money, right? So I have a statement and a question. The question is around pipelining. And I think that's really where the issue with recruiting diverse communities is a lack of imagination around pipelining. But to Karen's point about confidence, one of the first things we did was really to kind of expand our wings a little bit and kind of share what's going on, what we have going on, but also learn from others. And I think this event is a sharing that's so necessary of incubators, sharing what they have unique, but also what works so we can all kind of bind together and help the future of work. So the pipelining thing, I'm curious, I know our pipelining situation and David inherently is pipelining from the School of Architecture at Columbia. So where are you finding your talent? And maybe there's like changing the lens, or broadening the lens on pipelining around women founders. Yeah, so we're doing a terrible job. And thanks for pointing that out and make me feel bad about it. But yeah, we're doing a terrible job. But what we are doing is we are reaching out to our own members who have the passion for recruiting and finding new veins to hit into. And we're supporting them and we're actually having a ton of discussions with members about diversity, hiring period in their companies and our company. And we're learning ourselves. And so we're bringing in experts to talk about that. But yes, that actually is a concept that has just recently been hit in our company, which is where do you start, right? And you're not trying to convert the people, but where do you start finding them, right? And so you have to go up the tree to find where the people are. And so we're looking at Harvard's engineering program specifically around minorities, right? Because they're technology. So we're just, we're going back more. One last question before we wrap. What happened afterwards? What happened with all those members that were part of your programs and how you get engaged with them? What's the future of that? Is there like an idea of the social club that you belong? I mean, how do you work with that community? It was so connected and attached for at least a year. And some of them for more than two years, beyond friendship, of course. Well, I think we're just really starting to think about that now with four years of class with 300 people. We are starting, you know, something like an alumni network and Russell and Stephanie, our new ink director, will be charged to figure out programmatically and how deliberate we want to be about that. But I think given the notion that community is so important to us, there's no doubt that we will do something that has a framework around the alumni.