 From Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Imagine, nonprofit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown Seattle, actually right on the waterfront at the AWS Imagine nonprofit event. We were here a couple of weeks back for the education version of this event. First time to come into the nonprofit event, and we're really excited to have our next guest. I knew a little bit about this organization before, now I know a lot more as he came off as keynote. He's brought, excuse me, Byron Hill, Global Head of Technology for the Movember Foundation. Byron, great job on the keynote. Thank you so much. Awesome to be here to talk to you. And I think you came further than anybody. Did any other hands come up? I couldn't see the audience when you talked about 8,000 miles. I saw one that I didn't actually ask where they were from. So, my whole stick around, you know, being from Australia, 8,142 miles to Seattle, would have lost its appeal if I'd said, how far are you from 10,000 miles? Yes, yes. We're glad you made it. So, for the people that aren't familiar with Movember, give them kind of the quick overview. Absolutely. So, Movember is one of the world's largest men's health charities. We focus on three areas of men's health, prostate cancer, mental health, and testicular cancer. And every year, we have an annual fundraising campaign where we encourage men and women to fundraise for our causes. So, men's health is a really tricky situation. Let's met with a guy who's like, yeah, I'm going to do this startup. I'm going to help. I'm going to help all my male friends get to their doctor appointment. Yeah, yeah. I was like, that's not the problem. The problem is they never want to go in the first place. They don't want to talk about it. They want to acknowledge it. You know, they don't want to get their colonoscopy. They've heard horrible things about the prostate exam. So, this is a really challenging thing to tackle. So, how did you guys decide to go after it? How are you doing it a little bit differently so that you can have some success in these not easy to operate areas? Well, we realize that men's health was in a state of crisis. Men lived on average six years less than women. And as you say, it's because we sit on the couch. We don't let things, we don't take action as opposed to women who will always talk to themselves and actually get out there and get something checked. So, focusing on areas such as prostate cancer where we know the family history and ethnicity are really important factors around these disease types and really targeting those populations and making sure we can have a big impact. We also spend a lot of time looking at survivorship and how we can help people through that journey and understand what that journey looks like and help them actually have a really positive outcome at the end of it. Male suicide is a huge area of our focus. One man every minute globally will die by suicide. And while that's not a uniquely male disease, three out of four suicides are male. So, really trying to develop unique messaging to talk to men in a very direct way has been one way we've tried to get some cut through to really make a difference. Right. So, the mustaches in November and November, how did that come together? So, you know, you've got these very serious diseases that you're trying to address, a really big global problem. And you're coming at it with this kind of fun, kind of tongue-in-cheek thing, November, so for the folks that aren't familiar, what is November all about? How did it come about? And really, what's the impact? Is it actually, it has a huge impact which you outlined in the keynote. Absolutely. So, November started with two guys in a pub talking about fashion trends. They got onto the fact that the mustache had been the mainstay of 70s and 80s fashion, and it all but disappeared in the 90s. They decided to bring the mustache back. As a gag, they got 30 mates and they all grew mustaches. They raised zero dollars. They realized that people, complete strangers on the street were coming up to them, asking about the mustache. What's that thing on your lip? And they realized the power of the mustache was something much more. It created conversations. It allowed people to connect with one another. To create an environment where we were able to talk about men's health. That's where we started. We never intended to become a men's health charity, but fast forward to 2019, and we've had over six million people participating in our fundraising campaigns. We're in the top 45 NGOs globally and have funded over 1,200 men's health programs. And again, all starting with two guys in a pub having a conversation about fashion trends. Yeah, the numbers are amazing. I think you said, so started in 2004, and you guys are raising over $100 million a year. So how does it tie back to the mustache? It's just the conversation started. Oh, by the way, this is why I'm doing it, and please go to the website. What are the mechanics? So it's all about fun. Like originally the idea of the mustache was just fun. Just grow a mustache, raise some funds. That's it. We've really matured and progressed in the last few years around really focusing in on the importance of men's health. So it started as a fun thing back in the day, and now we still try to maintain the fun. We also have a serious message to get through. So quite literally we'll ask people to grow a mustache, we'll ask them to host an event, we'll ask them to move. We've got a whole range of different fundraising ideas. And the idea is to absolutely get people raising funds in November, get in as many people as we can to sign up and to grow mustaches and to donate. So that's quite literally how we do it. And then we invest those funds back into men's health causes. Great. Well, I can assure you after today we will be, the CUBE team will all be doing their best to get the mustaches going in a couple months. But you had a lot of other really interesting messages within your talk. A lot of them was about a culture of innovation. Yes, yes. And everyone is always struggling. How do I instill a culture of innovation, especially in a large organization? You had a great quote. You're not the first one to ever say it, but you said it was such passion and clearly it's falling in love with the problem, not the solution. Too many people, especially in tech, they want to talk about the tech. They don't want to talk about the problem. How do you execute that? How do you instill that in your team? And how has that really been a great driver for your success and development as an organization? Absolutely. So you're quite right. People will jump to the solution. And it's not just technical people. Most people will come to you with a solution because they think they're actually helping. They think that they know exactly what the problem is. So really just trying to position that to say, well, let's get really clear, and as you say, falling in love with the problem, get really clear around the outcomes we're trying to deliver. Think about the experiences we're trying to give people here. And then think about the technology. I talked about bringing the community into the conversation. Imagine the power you can have by bringing the community at the table when you're designing a new product. We try to do that all the time. Having a man in the room that suffered from prostate cancer. The insights they give you will very quickly highlight that you may have absolutely no idea of what the problem is. I talked a lot about assumptions. We form assumptions in our mind. They crystallize. We have this bias. And you have to challenge yourself to constantly go back to the cold face and look at those assumptions. Are they right? Are we solving completely the wrong problem here? You can deliver a great solution that completely misses the problem. So how do we do that? We encourage people to think about the problem, immerse yourself in the research. I talked about an example in testicular cancer. We spent three months on understanding the problem. Three months. We spent four weeks on building the solution. And that was through a feeling that we didn't quite have the confidence that we knew what the problem was. And we wanted to know what it was. We wanted to delve into that research and really engage with people, engage with our community to get a deep-seated understanding of what we were trying to solve. Another piece you talked about is the community and how important is the community. And really you said the community is the why. Really powerful statement. And I don't know, people sometimes, I think, think of community tangential. Not really as the purpose for why you get up in the morning every day and why you do what you do. How did that come about? And how do you make sure that that stays clearly in focus for everyone? Yeah. Look, it's a really important point. And it's the why we exist. And for us, it's a mobrose and most sisters and the men that we serve. So how do we do it? We have to constantly anchor ourselves back to the point that there are millions and millions of men out there suffering from those diseases that we support. We want to create a better world for them. So if we can align around the why, if everyone in our organization understands why we are doing the work, it helps us deliver some amazing outcomes. And again, the context of having people in the room, the community being part of the conversations that you're having gives that real sense of context. And it hasn't been easy. It's taken time to get there. And you can't involve, I gave an example of 20,000 people that responded to a survey. It doesn't have to be huge amounts of data. The voice of one or two people can be enough to provide unique insights that give you a real sense of purpose and really give you a sense of what you're trying to achieve. Right. The third piece you talked about, the third leg of the stool, if you will, is culture. And again, driving innovation of culture. Your example you gave in the keynote was phenomenal, which is when your team found a problem and asked you for approval on a $500 budget item to fix this. And you said, empower your people to find the problems and solve the problems without me. And I think it's such a great message. And you spoke in depth about learning, about a screw up, a failure, and really identifying that as a terrific learning opportunity. Where did you learn about that kind of cultural approach? How do you keep that up? Because that is really the key to skill. And I think so many people are afraid to trust and afraid to have kind of blameless, blameless postmortems is another phrase that we've heard. So important to enabling your people to actually go out and accept. It's not easy. And how do we learn? Like all good things, we did it on the fly. Like if you're facing a situation where you've got a major piece of work that's kind of screwed up and it doesn't do what you think it's going to do, we had two choices. We could try to fix it. And I just knew we weren't going to get there. So really using it as an opportunity to positively reinforce what we should be doing. That was learning. We had a really narrow opportunity to learn and learn in an in-depth way. And how do we develop that culture? We had to spend that time and it was really consciously thinking about when you've got a team who are not feeling a lot of love, they're really worried, they're actually concerned for their jobs, refocusing their effort, giving them confidence, telling them, I've got your back. And ultimately it's helped us create this culture where people can proactively go out there and solve problems. And my example of the business case or a showcase, every single time we will go for the showcase, getting people to talk about how they're solving these problems, what is the problem, and actually putting a proof of concept in or showing us as an example of what it looks like. That's taken a long time to develop that culture. However, it's been absolutely worth it. Yeah, that's great. And you gave the audience three challenges at the end of your talk, which I thought was pretty interesting. That weren't in there because they kind of encapsulated kind of your key three themes. And that was really understand the problem you're trying to solve. Talk to two people in the community. I love that. Don't presume you know what's going on. Talk to people. And then the last thing is encourage three people to start working on the problem. Don't start working on it yourself. But again, you seem to have such a good grasp on engaging the team to the benefit of the whole. Great, great messages. Yeah, hopefully the audience appreciate the homework I gave them to go back to their desks on Monday morning and try these things. But look, I firmly believe that those three challenges, and they're only small, like this is not about trying to solve world hunger. This is just starting with something small in your business that you can look at. You can get two of your people to three of your people to focus on that, validate the problem, and look for ways around it. So it doesn't have to be a huge group of people just getting a start. And I've already talked to a number of people after the keynote who have really said that really resonated, just starting that conversation small, getting that idea to snowball and eventually growing as part of your organization. Culture is something which takes a huge amount of time to get right. And again, starting small and letting that grow and permeate and do as much as you can do to reinforce that culture within your organization. Really living and breathing that culture is important. But even though it's starting small, your guys' goals are huge. I mean, your goals are to cut the prostate and the testicular by 50% and to drop the suicides by three quarters. So it's a really interesting approach. Start small, focus on the small, but you clearly have a really big goal in mind. It's huge goals, yeah. And we know we can achieve those goals by ourselves. So we collaborate as much as we can with others who have similar missions and trying to band together. And we realized very early on that bringing together the best and brightest minds in the world to solve these problems was absolutely essential. We couldn't do it by ourselves. So forming those networks, those global networks of experts, researching, constantly evaluating that research, making sure we're having the cut through and we're now in the process of scaling those programs that have shown great outcomes to reach the lives of millions of men. So it's, again, starting small, proving these ideas out and then looking to scale those ideas to reach, frankly, millions of men globally. Right, Byron, we're almost out of time. We've got about 10 weeks until the month formerly known as November. Absolutely. So how do people get involved? What should people do? Give us some concrete tips for the audience. Absolutely, absolutely. So first of all, you want to go to MoVemba.com and you want to sign up. Sign up to be a MoBro or MoSister. You can either grow a mustache, you can host an event, you can move from MoVemba, start donating and start getting people to donate. So grow a mustache and ask your mates to give you money. That's the first way to do it. Second tip is what sort of mustache are you going to grow? There's so many styles. There's the... Do you have a little style guide on the website? We do, of course. Not everyone can grow a wicked tash, but we do have wards for the lame mo. So some of those... For the lame mo. The lame mo, yeah. I can always recommend some augmentation of your mustache if you've got a few gray hairs in there to maybe bush it out a little bit, a bit of color augmentation, something like that. But above all else, if I was going to leave you with one message, it's about getting yourself checked. When things don't feel normal, go to the doctor. Have that positive impact on your life. And of course, movmber.com is full of really useful tips and great content to help you on that journey. All right. Well, Byron, thank you very much. And again, congrats on the keynote. Thank you so much. Really enjoyed the time. Excellent, thank you. All right, he's Byron, I'm Jeff. You're watching The Cube. We're at the AWS Imagine nonprofit in Seattle, Washington. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.