 So, whether you love government or hate it, or somewhere in between, in the last two years you've probably started thinking a lot more about government. Firstly, if you're in technology, the problems you're solving and the solutions you're working on more and more bump up against city, national or global governments or governance questions. Make sharing economy platforms artificial intelligence to name just a few of the usual suspects. Secondly, the momentous elections in Europe and America have shown the danger of undermining public trust in government, which for all its problems, for all its room for improvement is such a critical platform for progress. Now, as an entrepreneur who's always been interested in social change, I got interested in government because of its potential for scale and because of its potential to go upstream of problems working through policy with their causes rather than their consequences. And back in 2015 when my co-founder and I started looking at the space, it struck us as crazy that a traveler could quickly find out about lumps in a mattress on the other side of the world, but a public servant couldn't quickly find out about known lumps in a policy on the other side of the world, one that could cost millions in taxpayer dollars and affect millions of lives. It also struck us as crazy that we are so good at celebrating innovators in the private sector and in civil society. Just look around at us at this amazing conference, but we never celebrate the innovators in government. We never talk about what's working in government. So we created a political global peer-to-peer platform for government to try and solve this. Two years on we've learned a lot of interesting lessons about government and what I wanted to do today is share five of the most interesting. My hope is that this will help provide a window into what is a bit of a black box, but which entrepreneurs increasingly need to understand. So the first lesson, rich countries can learn from poor countries. We've all heard about poor countries leapfrogging rich countries in mobile tech and solar because the infrastructure didn't previously exist. Well exactly the same is often true for policy. Policy infrastructure and policy dogma doesn't exist. So it turns out poor countries are full of interesting lessons for rich countries. Take participatory budgeting, which is now live in 2,500 locations around the world. Does anyone know where it started? It started in Brazil years and years ago. More recently in Brazil, they pioneered an incredible open data platform drawing very heavily on visualizations, which has been so successful it's inspired a revamp of an American platform and a new one in Africa. Not far away in Colombia, a three person team has built an app that has already identified $1.5 million worth of corrupt projects drawing on citizens to highlight them. In India, crowded cities are finding space for solar by renting roof space from citizens. Now interestingly, there was a lot of skepticism that this would work and they used in order to convince power companies, they used satellite imagery to prove the scale of the roof space available. Now it's not all technology solutions, still in India in Bhubaneshwar, cities involve children in redesigning spaces to make them safer. And this was so successful, they've now created children's audit committees to check new developments before they are built. Now finally, my favorite example from Africa, which is a program in Kenya where girls are being taught self-defense to deal with rape and boys are being taught consent. Now this policy which we profiled was picked up by the media company Attention and turned into this video, which is hopefully going to play, they promised me I would play, let's see, full of weeks, more than 35 million times all over the world by people saying we want this here, which brings me to lesson number two, policy can be wildly popular. Now it's perhaps not so surprising that a program about girls learning self-defense goes viral, what is much more surprising is when a Swedish tax policy goes viral. Now the policy in question was addressing the fact that our throwaway culture is damaging the environment. So what Sweden did was they gave a tax break to consumers who got their clothes fixed or their white goods fixed, which saved them money, helped their environment and created jobs in the low-skill jobs part of their economy, which is so at risk due to technology. Now we published the story with the World Economic Forum, one of our media partners, and that was watched 17 million times, which is not bad for a tax policy and which makes us super excited because if you can find these great policies and make them accessible and inspiring and get them not only into the hands of public servants but also into the hands of citizens, you can massively accelerate change and you can make it much harder for those who resist change to do so. Lesson number three, some of the best innovators on government, innovators like the people behind that tax policy. I had thoroughly drunk the private sector tech Kool-Aid before I started working on this company. I thought that was where all the smartest people went and I was completely wrong. In the couple of years I've spent building a political, I have met as many smart resourceful creative people in government as I have in a career in the private sector. But these people are working against extraordinarily difficult circumstances. Infinite stakeholders, capricious political overlords, super risk averse bosses. They're not only unsung, they're also very lonely. We did a survey recently asking 7,000 public servants what would most take their work to the next level. 52% of them said just networking with other innovators. Now you all know the importance of peer connections here in technology. Imagine if you were working on the challenges in government and had no one to turn to. The fourth lesson, governments can learn from business but not in the way business likes to think. So this idea that if government just became more like business it would be more lean and mean and efficient is so pervasive it's hardly ever questioned. Now there's obviously some truth to it but it's way oversimplified. I've lost count of the number of times I've talked to executives or entrepreneurs who've gone into government and been shocked and humbled by how difficult it is to make anything happen. So it's paradoxical that the thing that government could most learn from business is never talked about by business. In the private sector if you're starting a new venture or launching a new product you would never do so without knowing what your competition was up to. In government this routinely happens leading to enormous duplication and waste. With one exception there's one country in the world to our knowledge that spends a lot of resource systematically learning about what's working in other countries. Does anyone want to guess? How's it a guess? It's China which is kind of amazing because in some respects you might think that a country so big and in many ways so unique has least to learn. But China spends a lot of effort learning and we think this effort is only going to get more important for countries everywhere because as solutions are more and more underpinned by new business models and new technologies which cross borders more easily there's more and more to learn. Now critically these new business models and new technologies are generally pioneered by startups which brings me to the fifth and final lesson which is that governments love startups but they can't swipe right. So we were pretty surprised how often startups write to us and say I'm working on this great solution to this policy challenge you've written about but I can't talk to government. We were much more surprised then when government came to us and said we can't find these startups we want to work with we can't work with them. So we tried to unpick what was going on and what startups told us is that they don't have lobbyists so they don't know who to talk to in government and by the time that government tender is written it doesn't recognize the technology available in the market it looks backwards it looks to old technology. Where occasionally the connection between the two does work what tends to happen is a startup will meet an innovating government upstream when the problem is still being understood when the solution is still being formulated. So to try and accelerate this we're launching a subscription soon for purpose driven startups and SMEs to help showcase their work to governments and to help connect them to those decision makers in government they need to speak to and this really matters. The global GovTech market is about four hundred billion dollars and growing and it is still dominated by big corporations and this is a time when it is startups and not big corporations that have the citizen centric and cost effective technologies that we all desperately want from our governments. So please join us and help us in our mission to make governments work better for citizens everywhere. Thank you.