 It's the end of the day. I flew all the way from California just to be with you all. So I'm gonna try this one more time. Yo, Helsinki, yo, slush, what's up? Now that's what I'm talking about, excellent. Well thank you so much for having me. I wanna make sure that I'm inclusive and I recognize where I am. So happy Independence Day, which I know is tomorrow, big deal. Folks, my name's Damian Hooper Campbell. I am honored to be here today. We have a short amount of time to do a bunch of stuff, so I'm gonna jump right in, all right? So today's conversation is about humanizing diversity and inclusion. Wherever you look, it's not just the United States, it's right here in Finland, it's across the world. Things are happening on the political and geographical and social spectrum that threaten to actually drive us further apart. My thesis is that diversity and inclusion, yes, it's about numbers, it's about programs and all of those things. But one thing we've forgotten to do as human beings is to simply have a conversation. And so for the remainder of today, I'm gonna give you a couple of ways that I think about diversity and inclusion and then I'm gonna show you a couple of things that we're doing at eBay, okay? So let's jump right in. So one thing you should know about me and diversity and inclusion is that if you are expecting to leave here today with a nicely wrapped gift that says, here are the world's answers to all of diversity and inclusion problems, you should leave now because it's not gonna happen. There is no nice package that solves this issue. It's hard, it's complex, and it's about us as human beings. So let me tell you what I've learned in the many years of doing this work. Number one, there are no quick fixes. This isn't an app that you launch. It isn't a startup that gets funding. This is a long-term game. No quick fixes, no killer apps for this. Number two, there's no checklist. Oftentimes people say, well just give me the long list of things that I can do to hire more female engineers or to hire more lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender engineers. And I wish that I could give you a checklist, but the truth is, is that every single one of you as founders, as investors, as attendees, inside of your organizations, you're at your own stage when it comes to this journey. So there is no one checklist that works for everybody. Now that we've conquered that and you understand that basic premise, I wanna dig in a little bit into a couple of questions that I think you should be asking yourself if you're actually serious about diversity and inclusion. Number one, why do you care or why don't you care? Too often we hear CEOs and founders and investors saying, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I wanna hire more women because it's the right thing to do. I wanna hire more women so that I don't end up on the cover of the local newspaper saying that I don't care about women. And while those are reasons that might get you to action, what I'm asking you to think about as individuals today is why, Michael, do you care about diversity and inclusion? Why is it personal to you? Think back in your life and understand the time in your life when you've either felt excluded and I don't care if you are a heterosexual man or if you are someone who has an invisible disability. Every single person in this room has had an experience where we felt excluded. And that should give you a starting point to understand why you should care about this. Yes, it's about business results. Yes, it's the right thing to do. But at a very basic level, we all know that it sucks to feel excluded. And so why would you ever create an environment inside of your company where people feel that way? Now, the other truth is that not everybody in this room actually cares about diversity and inclusion. And we need to start being honest about that. That's OK. I welcome those people who say that. And I would encourage you to actually speak up and to say, I'm not convinced that we should be investing a bunch of money in this conversation and to join the conversation and to understand a little bit more about why it might matter to you personally. So number one, why do you care or why don't you care? The second question, your work, what you are doing on a daily basis, when it comes to diversity and inclusion, is it actually aligned with your values as a human being? And is it aligned with your company's values? Far too often, people create these diversity and inclusion programs, and it's miles away from what the company actually says it values publicly. It's miles away from the work that the company is actually doing. I'll give you a test. If you're hiring people and the first time that they ever hear about diversity and inclusion being important to your company, to your startup, if the first time they hear about it is three months after they've been hired, you've failed. People should know that you value this and that it aligns with your personal values and your company values well before they ever interview for your startup. Third question, are you actually close enough to the people who you're supposed to be representing? I see this far too often. Companies get out there publicly, and they say, we care about diversity and inclusion. We care about people with disabilities. We care about women. We care about the transgender community. And the same individuals who are standing up and saying they care, which is probably very true, have never actually had a conversation with someone who's transgender. They've never actually had a conversation with someone who has a learning disability like I do. They've never actually had a conversation with someone who's an immigrant, or someone who represents a refugee community, yet they say that they stand up for those people. And so I'm gonna encourage you all, as you think about your own journey, as you think about being authentic, go and get next to the people who you're saying you represent. Have the tough conversation with someone who represents values that are far different than yours. That is what it means to humanize this conversation. That's not an initiative. It's not a program. It doesn't cost billions of dollars to do. It's about us as human beings simply going towards the uncomfortable conversation. The next question, who's on your team? When you look around the room, when you're at your startup, when you're at your larger company, when you're at your investor firm, who's actually on your team? Who are the people on a day to day basis who are challenging your thoughts, who are pushing you to think outside of the status quo? Far too often, yet again, we get out there publicly and say we believe in this and we don't even look at ourselves. I remember there being an article in the New York Times who was notorious, rightfully so, for putting companies, big tech companies on blast for the fact that they didn't have a large number of women. And finally, the New York Times scratched their head and they said, oh my goodness, we've been spending all of this time talking bad about other people and when we looked internally, we sucked too. And so I'm encouraging you, before you get out there pointing the finger or saying that you believe in this, find out who's actually on your team. Next question, does the walk actually match the talk? There's a famous hip hop group, one of my favorites called the Migos and they got a song out there, Walk It Like I Talk It. I'm saying to you simply that if you get out there and you say you actually believe in diversity and inclusion and the people who are inside of your company, who represent the minority, that you say you value are not having a good experience, it doesn't take long folks, just Google it. There are so many big name companies right now who are out there who have egg on their face because they didn't look inside and take care of people. They spent a lot of time on PR. They spent a lot of time getting in the news and getting online and saying yes, yes, we care, but they didn't look inside at the very people who represent the underrepresented minority populations. And on that note, diversity and inclusion is not just about the black people. It's not just about the gay people. It's not just about the women. It's also about the majority groups that might be men in your organization. We can't do this as a small group of underrepresented minorities alone. This can't continue to be an us versus them conversation. This has to change into an us with them conversation or we will continue to be in the same place that we've always been in. The final question that I would pose to all of you and this is very, very personal. This is a question that I would ask you that if you're sitting in this seat today and there's a reason why you came and actually listened to humanizing diversity and inclusion by Damian Hooper Campbell, then there's something in you either you don't believe in this and you wanna be convinced or you believe in it and you wanna be encouraged. But the question that we have to ask not just in your startup, not just in your investor firm, as a world, as a human race, are you a perpetrator or are you a provoker? What I mean by that is, are you the person who sits and lets the status quo continue to happen over and over and over again? And you're too scared to stand up and to fight or are you the person who realizes that just not even 100 years ago, someone like me, a black man, might not have been able to go to school with people in the United States who look different than me. Someone like me, a black man, would have had to use a different bathroom than many other people. That was less than 100 years ago. And so what I'm saying to you is that regardless of where you are from, the US, outside of the US, there are people who came before us, who gave their lives, who fought really hard when they were tired, when they could have given up and said, no, I'm gonna be a perpetrator. They provoked the system in order to make sure that all of us could be here today. And so the basic question that you should ask yourself is are you a perpetrator or a provoker? And I would argue, folks, that all that we've been given as a human race, you don't have a choice but to be a provoker. Now, at eBay, we've asked ourselves these questions, we continue to ask ourselves these questions because we're not perfect. But every single thing that we do when it comes to diversity and inclusion falls into one of three buckets. And I would argue that if you're serious about diversity and inclusion, it can't just be about your workforce. That's who you hire and how you go about hiring people. Yes, that's the one you always hear about in the news. We have X percentage of women. We have X percentage of this group. While that's important, it's not the only thing. So we think about the workforce for starters. For seconds we think about the workplace. What good is it to have amazing, brilliant, talented minds from all different backgrounds inside of eBay if they get there and it sucks to work there? And so a lot of what we do is we say great that we have many different people from eBay who are working together, but how do we make sure that the person who's in Finland on video conference when the majority of the team is in San Jose, California in person, how do we make sure they don't feel left out on that video conference? How do we make sure that their opinion is as important as all those 10 people who are in the room? How do we make sure that the interns who are coming from university, who are junior, but might have the billion dollar idea that's more relevant to their generation? How do we make sure that when they get into the company, they actually feel like we are intentionally asking them about their opinions? So the second bucket is the workforce. And then the final bucket that's very unique to eBay, we have 175 million buyers and sellers across the world who come from every single background. And so we have to think about how can we be more inclusive of the people who are currently on our platform? But then what about the people who we maybe have accidentally ignored? People who live in other parts of the world, people who might have disabilities that are invisible? How can we be intentional? So any good diversity and inclusion strategy will have a workforce component, a workplace component, and a marketplace component. Let me give you a couple of examples. Not only am I chief diversity officer, I also own university recruiting. By doing that, university recruiting has an inherent strategy of diversity and inclusion. And we've been able to increase the number of women that we have in our intern class from 26% three years ago to 46% just this last summer. And we've seen incredible increases across many different backgrounds over the past three years. When it comes to our workplace, we decided it's not gonna be taboo to talk about the fact that somebody is conservative and somebody is liberal politically. We're actually gonna create an environment and some facilitated discussions where people can talk about these things openly. It's gonna be uncomfortable, but it will be safe. And so earlier this year, we launched our courageous conversation series to give people an opportunity to talk about the things that our parents told us we should never talk about at work, like religion, like politics, like race, like gender. The future of work doesn't run from these realities. They run towards them. And then finally, in our marketplace, I wanna show you one of the most beautiful examples of what happens when you have an inclusive workforce and then you create a space where they can be themselves and use the unique aspects that they bring to actually drive revenue in the marketplace. At eBay, we want to use AI to make the complex simple. And we also want to connect the users easily so that everybody is enabled to participate in this commerce. The application is surprisingly very simple. Use the front-facing camera, open the app. It starts tracking immediately. Pretty much you just move the head left, right, up, down. So initially our primary audience was motor control disability. But then this is also useful for other hands-free situations, for example gaming. Hoping that there'll be more applications that actually use this technology so that people with motor control disability will be able to experience the world easily. You're not making any sounds. You're not using voice. You're not touching. So it's very easy to use. My idea is to bring people together. We're very intentional about how we work together and how we create new ideas. It's not an accident. We learned a lot working with Morachan, right? That's also one of our goals, you know, to make the user experience simple. You really have to work with somebody who experiences that every day to remove the pain points. His ideas and his creative way of providing access to a group of people who may not have access otherwise exemplifies exactly what we're trying to do. The fact that there are opportunities for people to use this technology that we don't even know about today is powerful. So folks, Morachan was an intern, a PhD intern who was diagnosed with cerebral palsy. We made an inclusive workplace for him. We didn't ask him to create that. He had a manager who cared enough to make sure that in whatever way was unique to him that we could translate that into his work. And we created HeadGaze, just one of many ways that diversity and inclusion can drive business. As I close, folks, couple of things I wanna leave you with. Number one, be patient. Don't be so hard on yourselves and saying, oh my gosh, I've been working at this for a year and I haven't seen anything change. This takes time. As human beings, we're trying to unlearn things that we've been taught all of our lives. So be patient and recognize that it's a marathon, not a sprint. Second, ask yourself those tough questions that I put up there. And be okay if the reality of your responses are uncomfortable. And then finally, do it authentically. You can pay for all kinds of PR. You can get a nice rainbow of people on your website and that looks really good. But in today's day and age, if your outsides don't represent your insides, you will be found out. So slush. Helsinki, listen, that's my time. I wanna say a couple of things. Thank you. Don't wait for someone like me as your Chief Diversity Officer to step up. All of you in this room, for many reasons, especially right now in our world, where the situation is so dire, need to be Chief Diversity Officers. With that, I say thank you and keep fighting. Peace. Thank you so much, Damian, for that one.