Could I have your attention for a moment, please? Welcome to the Sheldonian Theatre. The event is about to begin, but before it does, could I ask you please to ensure that your mobile phones are put on silent? I would also remind you that flash photography is prohibited. The Sheldonian is a Grade I listed building; it was not designed to modern building regulations. As such, please take extra care in the building. Guests in the upper gallery, please ensure that you enter and leave via the access steps in the middle and to the sides. Do not use the tiered seating as steps. If the fire alarm sounds, please leave the building by the nearest available exit. The assembly point is at the far end of the Quad by the Cat Street exit. Thank you, and enjoy the event.
Good afternoon everyone. My name is Soumitra, the Dean of the Saïd Business School, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you today to the Saïd Business School's World Re:thinking Lecture. This building is a historic building in the University of Oxford. We hold our graduations out here, and I feel privileged each time I come here for the graduation ceremonies. Coming here is a privilege, but today is the second time I'm coming here, and that's an extra privilege. Why? Because this morning we were lucky and fortunate to see the inauguration, the admission of our new Chancellor, Lord H of Richmond. I mention that because today in his comments, which were brilliant, towards the end he spoke about four points for the future of our great University. And what impressed me the most was that three of his four points were linked to technology. He talked about the importance of the University of Oxford being at the forefront of science and technology, important for the world but also important for the UK as we seek to set the country's trajectory of growth and innovation. Also, importantly, spoke about the importance of connecting the arts with technology, how in a world which is increasingly dominated by technology, it's important to also get back to humanity, and that's where Oxford can in fact play a very important role. So to explore this very important topic today, we are honored to be joined by two pioneers and leaders of the technology industry: Biz Stone and Evan Sharp, who will be having a conversation on this intriguingly titled lecture 'Reconnecting with the Sacred in a Technology-Driven World.' It seems so fitting when we think of Oxford's ability to combine the ancient with the modern. As a young 29-year-old business school embedded within a 900-year-old university, this is a special moment for us, and I'm grateful as a Dean to share it with all of you. Biz and Evan are almost uniquely qualified to speak on this subject, as two giants of the tech industry, the leading lights and revolutionaries, and their credentials speak for themselves. Biz is a co-founder of Twitter among other technology companies, including Jelly Industries, the Obvious Corporation, and Medium. He has held senior leadership roles at Google and has been heavily involved with the startup community as an angel investor. He was named Entrepreneur of the Decade by Inc. magazine and by Time as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Evan, his co-founder of Pinterest, has held product design roles at Facebook and Love, and is credited with designing and coding the Pinterest grid for his initial product launch. Evan was selected by the outgoing Chief Design Officer at Apple, Jony Ive, as the figure in technology he believes will change the future. Evan and Biz have worked together on numerous projects. They're very busy people with many pulls on their time, and we are privileged, grateful, and honored to have them here with us today. Biz is also a long-term and highly valued member of the Oxford Saïd community, both as a major supporter of the school, having generously supported our entrepreneurship initiatives, particularly the hugely successful Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford speaker series, and as a Visiting Fellow at Oxford Saïd, who has also generously given his time to talk to our various student cohorts over the years. He's a member of our Global Leadership Council and also a generous supporter of Exeter College, having played a central role in supporting the new library. Thank you, Biz and Evan, for your generous support of our University, for being here today, and it's over to you now. Thank you.
That was a lot. Thank you, Dean, for inviting us, and thank you everybody for coming out in the cold to listen to us talk to each other about ourselves and hopefully other things. What are we talking about? We're going to try something. Biz and I have never given a talk before together. This is an experiment, and you're the subjects of it. And we heard about technology and humanity; we're going to try at the end to talk about divinity, but we probably won't get there till the very, very end. It's a hard topic to talk about, divinity and technology. And so the way we want to talk about it is when we—Biz and I—are in our lives and also when we feel like we are with technology, is to talk about our lives, our adolescence—not too much about our adolescence—our careers, and sort of what we've learned and how that's brought us to where we are today, and how in a way it mirrors the childhood and adolescence that the internet has been going through the last 30 years. So yeah, Evan wanted me to start with my adolescence since it came first, age before beauty. All right.
I come from what you might call a stormy childhood. It was emotionally and physically violent in the household, and we grew up poor. I started working when I was eight—this is sounding very Dickensian, but anyway. We had government blocks of cheese, rectangular logs, because that's what you need when you're poor: a lot of cheese. But the silver lining was that the folks who had adopted my mom had left her a little house in an affluent town west of Boston, Massachusetts, called Wellesley—I'm sure you have one of those here. And as a result, I got to go to a really great public school system. So I grew up sort of tiptoeing around the house, a quiet kid, making sure to stay quiet when I was younger. But as I grew up and got into my adolescence, I started to realize that humor, confidence, respect, curiosity, and pushing into life sort of got you places. I had a great high school career, did a lot of things. One thing I'll point out: about two weeks into my freshman year, I realized that having to work after school and having to go to—I had started a lacrosse team, so having to go to practice and go to work—I had almost no time for homework. When I tried to do the homework, I ended up staying up till 3:00, 4:00 AM trying to do it. So I went into each of my teachers after class and said, 'I'd like to talk to you. I'd like to tell you that I have a no homework policy, so I won't be doing any homework.' Each one of them laughed at me. When they were done laughing, they looked at me and saw that I was being serious but respectful. I said, 'You know, I wish I could help you out, but it's the policy. So I will be paying attention in class.' They said, 'Well, it's going to affect your grade.' I said, 'You have to do what you have to do, but again, policy.' So they ultimately—I did this with each and every one very respectfully, and I never did homework in high school. I remember one day throwing all my books and stuff into a locker and just shutting it. My friend Matt Flanagan looked at me and asked what I was doing. I said, 'What do you mean, Matt? I'm leaving.' He said, 'But what about your homework?' I said, 'Oh no, I have a no homework policy. I don't do homework.' He said, 'You can't do that.' I said, 'Matt, it's a free country. You can do anything you want.' I don't think he liked me after that day. My best friend later, many years later, told me, 'When I met you in high school, you showed me that you could hack the matrix. You didn't have to do what everyone said.' I didn't really realize that, but I did a few things like start a lacrosse team, produce a play, do a lot of things that you weren't supposed to do. But it was a great school with great teachers, and I was allowed to do them. It planted the seeds of entrepreneurialism, the idea that you could start something from scratch and take it through, and also a little bit the idea that you could manipulate reality if you needed to to be the way you needed it to be. It was almost magical.
You're a genius. I don't know how you pulled that off. In your adolescence, it sounds like you were trying to control your reality, and you were forced to do these things that planted seeds for later. My adolescence, I kind of missed it entirely. I had a very stable, loving family, so it was a lot of nature and history, but the house I grew up in is amazing. But when it came to romance or anything adolescent, it was very quiet, little shameful. Like people start kissing on TV—'Oh, what's going on?' So when I started to come into adolescence, looking back, I think I was really afraid and completely unsure what to do. The way I dealt with that reality was by escaping into this computer, shifting my consciousness for hours a day into this little screen. I found this old computer, put it in my room, came home from school, and just went into this little box where everything was logical. I completely lost my body. Everything was controllable. I spent hours and hours changing everything and making it exactly what I wanted, then changing it again. At the time, that was not normal. This is the very late '90s. But if you think about it now, that's basically the rite of passage of adulthood: as you enter adolescence, you get a screen and you disappear into it. I think it's the worst time for your consciousness to lose its connection to what's happening to you. And that's the way I dealt with controlling my reality, by moving into a different reality.
The next phase we want to talk about, as we march towards this larger set of questions, is how we both became accidental technologists. We think of it as accidental, but you'll see some things that seem to be on purpose.
I wanted to be an artist, like Evan. I also poured myself into a computer in a different way. My high school had Macintosh computers, and I found Photoshop. I wanted to be an artist, so I squeezed every bit I could out of learning Photoshop to create art. I got a Chancellor Scholarship for excellence in the arts to go to university, but I wasn't as excited there; I didn't have the freedom I had in high school. So I got a job on the side moving boxes from the attic to the lobby of a publishing house in Boston called Little, Brown and Company. This was just at the time when the art department was switching over from the old techniques of spray glue, X-Acto knives, and stat machines to desktop publishing. It was perfect for me. The art department went out to lunch one day together, and I snuck onto the art director's workstation. I found a book cover that needed designing, designed it, printed it up, matted it up, and slipped it in with all the others to go off for approval in New York City. When the art director came back, he was asking around, 'Who did this? Which of you did this?' He had five designers there. I said, 'Oh, that was me.' He said, 'The box kid.' So I was the box kid. He ended up offering me a role. I thought to myself, 'All these other folks have Master of Fine Arts degrees. I'm skipping ahead in life. Why am I going to school? This is to get this job.' Also, I thought this was an excellent opportunity to apprentice, because he was offering not just a job but to work directly with him. So I quit school and took the role. I ended up designing book covers and getting to know design deeply. He taught me everything he knows, and to this day he's my son's grandfather—he's part of my family. We're still very close. After a few years, I thought I could open my own studio. He filled my head: 'When I was your age, I had a studio.' So I did that. Out in the real world, I had to find work. Someone came to me and said they had a $5,000 budget. I didn't care what they were going to say next. 'Do you do websites?' I said, 'Absolutely.' I had no idea how to build websites, but it didn't matter. I got a book on how to muddle through and build a terrible website for these folks, but it was good enough back then. It was 1997 or something, and they just had to check a box. Then my friends who had graduated from Ivy League schools—they had gone into high-paying consulting jobs—said, 'What are we doing telling other people how to run their businesses? We're smart. Biz, you're the web guy. We should start a startup, a web startup.' I said, 'Of course, absolutely. I'm your guy.' So we started an early social network, a social network/blogging network called Xanga.com, spelled with an X. It's a joke if you have to explain it. If you were Asian American in the year 2000, you know what Xanga is; otherwise, you've never heard of it. For some reason, it took off in that crowd. So I was this accidental entrepreneur technologist. I didn't mean to be, but I just kept saying yes to stuff.
What about you?
All right, let's see. I went to college at the University of Chicago, got a history degree. If you were to rank all the students in terms of how much of a plan they had to make it after graduation, I was probably in the bottom 10th percentile. I graduate with this history degree and I'm basically like, 'I'm going to open a history store on Main Street.' That didn't work. Then I went to a job fair a couple of months after graduating at the school, and went up to the very first booth, which was from City Hall in Chicago. They said, 'Oh, you should come and learn how to do city government work.' I said, 'Oh, that sounds great.' He says yes after one booth; he doesn't even go to 50 others. So I got this job in City Hall. I show up the first day and ask, 'What am I going to be doing? Budgeting?' They said, 'You are going to be issuing liquor licenses. We need you to meet with the public all day—people opening bars and restaurants—taking their forms, giving them some stuff, and giving them back other forms.' So that's what I did for a year and a half. But the thing that actually ended up happening for me was that I found design because the forms were so bad. I think 80% of my day was people coming in ready to get a liquor license, and then everything was wrong, not because they weren't smart, but because the people who made the forms didn't care enough to make it really clear what you had to do. So I redesigned all the forms in the department and made it way better. Then, when I went home at night, I was still this computer nerd. I wasn't a genius programmer, but I spent a lot of time on the computer and started to reverse-engineer websites and make my own. That ultimately led to me getting a job at a startup. I got so into design that then I went to Columbia University to get a master's in architecture, which is very different from technology as well. Both of us ended up doing this without a formal education.
So picking up my thread where we left off, I forgot to tell you that we started Xanga. It actually grew to a million users fairly quickly, which is unusual in 1999/2000. It was just popular, but I quit because my friends were hiring their consulting bros from their previous colleges, and I just really didn't like the way the culture was going. I was too green at the time to realize I could have worked to change the culture, so instead I quit. Then I felt instantly like I was on the wrong side of the screen. So I got a job at Wellesley College for about a year. Blogger, the company that Evan Williams started, was a rival to Xanga at the time. I loved the software and used it, and I also read his blog and was very much intellectually in line with what he was publishing. I read about Google acquiring Blogger in 2003. So I found his email—I'd never met him—and sent him a note saying, 'Congratulations on the acquisition, and also, I kind of feel like I was always a missing member of your team.' I just threw that in there. A week later, he said, 'How'd you like to come work at Google?' I thought, 'First of all, I don't think they'll take me, but I'll be on the other side of the screen, on the right side.' So I said yeah, sure, sounds great. It was that easy. Meanwhile, the founders of Google, Larry and Sergey, were telling Evan, 'We don't want this guy. There's no way we're hiring; he's a dropout. What do we want him for?' But apparently Evan was enough of a pain in the butt that they said, 'Okay, we'll take him.' So I ended up flying out to California—actually, I drove out with two cats in the back of the car, not recommended. I started at Google, and it was amazing. It was kind of like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. I worked on the Blogger team, but I would get up and just go around, look around, see what doors were unlocked, open them, and look in. I said, 'Wow, there's a whole bunch of people in here with a light down, operating a pedal, and there's something with a book. What are you guys doing in here?' They would look up with bleary eyes and say, 'We're scanning every book ever published.' I said, 'I'm not sure that's allowed, but okay, see you later.' I went into another room, opened the door; there was a guy in there, bare-chested, looked like he was up for days. There were TVs all around him and DVRs with wires hanging out everywhere. I asked, 'Are you okay? What are you doing in here?' He said, 'I'm recording everything being broadcast.' I said, 'Okay, keep up the good work.' There was just amazing stuff going on. But as amazing as it was, and it was a huge opportunity for me to get equity in this startup that was really going places—it hadn't IPO'd yet—I did get a sense that if they had an ordered list, a very short one, it went number one: technology, number two: people. And that wasn't my thing. I worked there for a couple and a half years, and they went public. I was able to sell enough stock to get to zero, because I had gone out there with debt. Then on the car ride home one day with Evan Williams, I had an idea. I said, 'You know what? People seem to like these iPods, and you can record your voice in the browser. So isn't it possible to let everyone have their own personal radio program? Wouldn't we be able to democratize that if we...?' He had the big eyes and said, 'Oh my God, yeah, we could do that.' We didn't know it was podcasting, but we thought it was a really novel idea. So I told my boss at Google—who I'd never met before that time—I said, 'I'd like to leave because I'm going to do a startup.' He just said, 'So you hate money?' I asked, 'Did you really say that?' He repeated, 'You hate money.' I think he's still sitting there saying, 'You hate money,' because I wasn't really getting it. I went home to my soon-to-be wife and asked, 'Did we move here so I could work at a search company, or did we move here so I could work with Evan Williams?' It was obvious as soon as I asked the question; she said, 'Oh, this is a no-brainer. You work with money.' Objectively, it was a terrible idea to leave what I left, and that's why the guy was saying, 'So you hate money.' I wasn't really getting it because I was looking at the next thing. But he was right—I didn't hate money, but I was really following what I really wanted to do. I'll update you on that later after Evan tells his story.
Listening to podcast, we weren't recording podcasts. So I went out to dinner one night with Ev and I said, 'What if everything goes right and we just nail it and we become the kings of podcasting? Is that what you want?' And he went like this, because neither of us really cared. We weren't emotionally invested in this. This was a novel idea, but it wasn't like an idea that was coming from an emotional spot. So he said, 'Oh God, no. I don't know. This was a cool idea, but we raised all this money, we're doing this thing, we don't care.' So he said, 'I'll focus on trying to sell this. You take the rest of the team and try to do a hackathon, just break it up and work on whatever.' And we had hired a guy named Jack Dorsey to come work with us at Odeo, and he and I had become really good friends. So the idea of pairing up, we were like two kids in gym class. 'Okay, let's work on something together.' And my main thing was, 'Let's just do something simple.' This whole podcasting thing is so complicated with the recording studio and the browser and everything. So we came up with this really simple idea of attaching text messaging to the web. It's like, 'Oh, you can find out what your friends are up to without even asking them. And if you have something to say, you just say it, and anyone who cares gets it.' I hacked something together that wasn't real, it was like a fake thing. We couldn't build it in time, but we showed it, we demoed it at the demo day of hack day, and everyone said, 'What else does it do?' And we were like, 'What do you mean? It's beautiful in its simplicity. You send a text, it goes to the web. You type on the web, it goes to the text. It's great.' And they were like, 'No, not so much.' None of our own team were like, 'This is a bad idea, this is stupid.' Evan saw that me and Jack were really into it, so he said, 'You guys should just keep working on this.' So we kept working on it, and eventually I think our enthusiasm was so infectious that the rest of the stragglers came over, and then it started growing like crazy. It grew with tech early adopters and also a lot of people who wanted to sign up to say how dumb it was. They clearly had a short opinion on it, and this was the best way to say, 'This thing's stupid and I'll never use it.' That was a lot of our signups. It started growing really fast. I was doing all of the design, all of the UI design, all of the product design and everything. It started as a hack project and it continued as a hack project for many years. That was the mentality. So many things that we did did not have real intention behind them. I'll give you one example. One day, my chore was to put together a little profile of the person who is tweeting. We didn't call it that yet. But okay, what do I have? I have their username, I have their name or pseudonym if they put one, I might have a profile pic. Jesus, I got nothing. Oh, I know what I have. I have the number of people who are following them. I'll put that right next to their name. Okay, good. Next project. What I didn't realize I was doing was driving an incentive. If you have a number next to your name, you want that number to go up like a score. I didn't even think about it, but I was creating the incentive. 'I need more followers.' I didn't even think about it because I had half a day to put that together and then on to the next thing. That's what life was like. I really learned about what happens when you're not very intentional about the design.
Is that where I end it? It's good. Yeah, good job, B. Thank you. Oh, let's see about Ev. Well, so I left Facebook and we rebuilt the thing I built in grad school. Wasn't exactly the same, but with Pinterest it was funny because I think if we were better educated as entrepreneurs, we would have pivoted. No one used it for six months, nine months, and that's when we were supposed to pivot. But we just didn't. We really loved it, we loved working on it. And then all of a sudden it took off. That was really interesting because, as you said, Twitter took off with the stereotype of a tech early adopter and people trying to find their people. And Pinterest took off with the stereotype, at least in the United States, of the opposite of that: people in the middle of the country, not in New York or San Francisco. It was a lot of women, not a lot of men. And when it took off, the impact of who was using it was that the Silicon Valley folks didn't even know what was going on. No one they knew was using it. Even though we were growing like crazy and hiring people, it was almost like we didn't exist. It was really strange. Even I didn't really get it. Coming in from Facebook, I tried to adopt some of the stuff I'd learned working on that product for years. So it's like, okay, on Pinterest you can make these beautiful inspiration boards, but what do we do when you land on the service? We need a feed like Twitter. So we made a feed that was what your friends were saving, pinning. But then our users were like, 'We don't want to see what my friends are pinning. I just want to see ideas relevant to my life.' And we were like, 'Oh, this is personal media.' And it wasn't social media. When we got big, the industry didn't really understand it. We got lumped in with Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. Now it wasn't about other people, it was really about you, about your life. Similarly, I thought like Twitter, 'Okay, a feed of stuff happening now. Let's show people ideas people are saving. There's visual, we'll look into what's happening in the world.' And they hated that too. They're like, 'I don't want to see what's going on. This is the one place I can go that's not about that. This is the place where I go to look at ideas for the future. I just want to see these images that give me this hope and this positivity.'
You weren't really getting that yet, right?
Yeah, I think it took several years for me to even start to understand at a deeper level what we built and why so many people liked it.
Yeah. It's funny because we fast forward now to 2017. This is when Evan and I met, and we started having breakfast once a week and talking about stuff. Also in 2017, I had left Twitter to do some other things. Twitter's CEO situation was like a Game of Thrones by 2017. It was back to Jack Dorsey after all these others. He said, 'Look, we're losing great talent, we're losing users, we're not profitable, morale is down, everything's... I need you to come back and make this place special again.' And my wife at first said, 'Hell no.' And she's usually right, so I thought about it for a minute. But then I thought I would really regret it if I couldn't help. So I said I would come back. I did a lot of things, but I think the most important thing that I did was I realized that we had taken off so quickly that we never had a chance to articulate a purpose statement. I like 'purpose statement' rather than 'mission statement' because I believe missions are either accomplished or failed, but a purpose is like an enduring, aspirational thing that never ends. So I decided we needed a reason why Twitter exists. I spent a few weeks to a month crafting a lot of different versions, and I ended up with: 'Twitter exists to serve the public conversation.' I had a feeling that this would help, that it would get a lot of people on the same page. But it helped a lot more than I thought it would. Not least because Jack liked it, we got the rest of the leadership behind it, we really marketed it internally so that it was on the top of everyone's brain. Everyone was hearing this all the time. But it didn't just get people aligned on the same page. It told us, 'Don't do all of this work.' It self-selected out all the people who didn't believe in that purpose. It brought in new people who wanted to work on that purpose. It really had a huge transformational effect. It helped with all the other things that I was supposed to do too. If you're there to serve the public conversation, it naturally follows that you're there to be responsible for the health of the public conversation. So here's governance and here's policies around all these things. Infusing the company with purpose was one of the best things that we could have done.
At the exact same time, maybe because we were getting breakfast, one of the things that I felt so grateful for with Pinterest was we just had these users who loved it. Like, really loved it. That year, this big brand survey came out in the US of top brands, and in the category of creativity and inspiration, it was number one brand Pinterest, number two brand Lego. That's amazing. We were like, 'Whoa, that's interesting. Why are we bigger than Lego?' I make it easier to build staircases out of Legos anyway. So what we did is we started to do these, we called them Pinner tours, user trips, where we would just fly somewhere once or twice a year and meet with people that use Pinterest one-on-one, not like a public thing, and just talk to them about why they liked it and also what it was like to use social media and what it was like to have a phone. I just started to realize much more deeply how much the company wasn't fully aware of the impact of the product. I remember this person I met, this woman in Iowa, lovely soul. She was telling me this story about how she started saving these images for her friend of very androgynous fashion. Started out as, 'All right, she needs some images for a project, so here's 10 images.' Then she was like, 'I just kept going. I got to 100. And then I'm like, am I getting to a thousand images?' And then she was like, 'Wait, am I actually pinning these for me?' And she had this entire shift in her life catalyzed as she realized what she'd been missing in her life and suppressing. That's a story I heard so many times. I started to realize, man, these images, it's more than just photos. The way people are relating to this visual inspiration is very deep, very personal. It's almost like a mirror. If people are finding their people on Twitter, on Pinterest they're finding themselves. So we did a project just like you did at Twitter where we got to redo the mission. Because the time we'd been talking about discovering things, buying things, we made the mission 'inspiration,' which literally means in Latin 'to breathe in spirit.' The company is the inspiration company. I really think that's helped Pinterest just grow up into its role in society and prioritize the right things internally. It speaks to the power of the right clear purpose.
Yeah. And it also speaks to, might seem obvious, but if you build something hundreds and hundreds of millions of people are using, you just have a responsibility to know it really deeply.
Yeah. What we talking about? Purpose. So if I recognize the purpose, that defining a purpose for a company or an institution was valuable, it then made sense to me that it's really valuable for yourself. Why do I exist? What's my purpose? That can be a little daunting because it might take a while for you to figure that out. But when you back up from that, you can break it up. You can break up your soul's purpose in life into smaller things. I can think of those as intentions. You can have an intention for a week or for a day or for a certain thing. For example, I have to drive my son to school every day before work. It's a 20-minute drive. I can think of this as a chore and I can think to myself, 'Oh, I got meetings today,' and I can say 'uh-huh, uh-huh' to Jake and I can drive and we can drop them off. Or I can stop and for two minutes I can just say to myself, 'My intention for the 20-minute drive is to be an active listener and a present father.' And then when we do that thing, time stretches out, it becomes richer, not just for me but for him, and then for the two of us as a duo. It becomes remembered. I hear things, he hears things. It's almost like just by saying even to myself those words, it's like I've cast a magical spell. I've been living my life like this, and it really feels like magic is a real thing to me.
Yeah. What I hear you're talking about is the way intention is just like a technology for consciousness. This is where we start to get a little like why we put 'Sacred' in the title. It's a big deal to us.
I think the other thing I realized back when I was talking to these Pinterest users in 2017 was how, if you're building technology, like I said, you have to know what impact you're making. If you're building a car, if that's the technology you're working on, and it starts crashing and killing people, you need some seatbelts. Obviously you know something's wrong. The government comes in, shuts you down, does recalls. But 2.1 billion people today, probably something like that, 2.1 billion used just Facebook alone. So what's the difference between a car and Facebook? Well, a car is moving your physical body. The medium for media, social media or media, is consciousness literally. I think last year I read something like 40% of the awake human time in US and UK last year was spent on a screen. 40% of the awake human lifetime spent on a screen. As I've tried to understand, 'How do we know if that time is healthy? How do we know if it's not healthy?' I've had an intense spiritual awakening, which I'll talk about in a minute maybe, but I've been completely floored by how few people know how to ask that question properly and how important it is. That's why we're working together and trying to figure out a different way of building technology.
Yeah. We're now working together, and our approach is just to be much more intentional, to invite into the workplace the ancient traditions and sacred traditions. If we work by the seasons instead of the quarters, it's not that much of a difference, but it feels like a big difference. When you come into our office, you'll see this little table with framed photos of the people that came before us. We call it our ancestor table. We light a little candle. There might be a little bit of meditation before each meeting. It's just inviting more intentional and more appreciative of the things that came before and weaving them into the future-looking tech that we work on. We even have on our leadership team a 30-year... I'm not going to tell you the word, I keep forgetting the name. Minister? A religious scholar. We have a foremost psychologist in human emotion on our team. We're inviting these types of characters in.
