Podcasts about licensing

When it comes to music, there is no greater medium for calming the mind and body. Concentration, relaxation, and sleep aids for coping with anxiety, stress and even depression. Have you ever wanted to lie on a beach, eyes closed and take in the sounds of the tropics? The resonation of a tropical beach ambience mixed with waves washing ashore is the perfect stress relief after a long day at work, study, decision making and even restful sleep. The exact process takes place with the sounds of nature, birds in deep forests, waterfalls and rivers – All have the same calming effect, aiding focus and a sense of wellbeing. Nature Sound Retreat's music stimulates the brain into a specific state using subtle pulsing sound to encourage your brain waves to align to the frequency of the beat. It helps induce enhanced focus, entranced state, relaxation, and sleep. NSR blends well the very best of elemental nature, Celtic music, orchestra and mostly percussion free classical compositions ,specifically targeting the effects desired as outlined above. Various ancient healing frequencies are utilized: 432Hz, 963Hz specifically, and combined with binaural beats, ASMR nature sounds, Alpha and Delta waves – enable listeners interested in deep sleep, stress relief, yoga, study music for focus and concentration, massage music. But there is more to Nature Sound Retreat for those who like to watch and not only listen. We combine meditation music with beautiful imagery, stunning landscapes and hypnotic Kaleidoscope videos that will take you on a journey of deep relaxation. Proponents of our music receive these potential benefits: Reduced stress and anxiety Increased focus, concentration, and motivation Improved confidence Better long-term memory after exposure to beta pattern frequencies, according to a 2019 study Deeper meditation Enhanced psychomotor performance and mood Join this channel to get access to perks: ►https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcsplj60aQC7mb1rgdhk5sw/join SUBSCRIBE NOW to become part of our community of FREE MEDITATION MUSIC. ►https://naturesoundretreat.com/YoutubeSubscribe iTunes here: ►https://naturesoundretreat.com/AppleMusic ------------------------------------------------------------------------ SPOTIFY here: ►https://naturesoundretreat.com/Spotify ------------------------------------------------------------------------ AMAZON here: ►https://naturesoundretreat.com/AmazonMusic ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Website: ►https://NatureSoundRetreat.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Facebook: ►https://www.facebook.com/NatureSoundRetreat ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Pinterest: ►https://www.pinterest.com/naturesoundretreat ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Instagram: ►@NatureSoundRetreat ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Twitter: ►@retreat_sound ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ©2023 Nature Sound Retreat. All Rights Reserved. Nature Sound Retreat is a Registered Trademark All videos and music are the sole copyright of Nature Sound Retreat. Licensing inquiries can be sent via Private Message #naturesoundretreat #mindfulness #JustBreath

Chuck Joiner, David Ginsburg, Jim Rea, Web Bixby, Eric Bolden, and Ben Roethig shift to a new topic on MacVoices Live!, examining  Spotify's decision to put song lyrics behind a paywall weighing the pros and cons. We also delve into Apple's challenges, including subscription services and the transition to USB-C cables. Lastly, we touch on Amazon's changes to their streaming music service and the risks associated with uncertified cables for the new iPhone. (Part 2)  This edition of MacVoices is brought to you by the MacVoices Dispatch, our weekly newsletter that keeps you up-to-date on any and all MacVoices-related information. Subscribe today and don't miss a thing. Show Notes: Chapters: 0:01:01 Spotify's Decision: Lyrics Only for Paid Accounts 0:02:21 Copyrighted Lyrics and Fake Lyrics Websites 0:03:27 Spotify's move to devalue the free version 0:06:04 The impact of a generous free version on premium subscriptions 0:06:24 Spotify vs Apple Music: Disparity in Artist Royalties 0:09:23 Amazon's Limited Music Catalog and Competition with Other Platforms 0:15:19 Apple Stock: Not Always Up, But Still Promising 0:17:18 Apple's Brilliant Move: Continual Revenue through Subscription Model 0:19:09 Uncertainty Surrounding iPhone Upgrade Cycle 0:20:10 Transition from Lightning cable to USB-C discussed 0:21:28 Commonality across Apple product line with USB-C interface 0:22:17 Licensing revenue and ecosystem concerns arise 0:23:19 The Importance of Certified Cables and Data Transfer 0:25:29 Discussion on Capital Allocation and Share Repurchases 0:29:21 Uncertainty Surrounding Apple's Economic Conditions Links: These are the 5 top risks to Apple stock ahead of its September iPhone 15 event, according to Goldman Sachs https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/apple-stock-price-outlook-5-risks-september-iphone-15-event-2023-8 Apple Argues iMessage Isn't Popular Enough in the EU to Be Regulated https://www.macrumors.com/2023/09/05/imessage-isnt-popular-enough-for-regulation/ Guests: Web Bixby has been in the insurance business for 40 years and has been an Apple user for longer than that.You can catch up with him on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Eric Bolden is into macOS, plants, sci-fi, food, and is a rural internet supporter. You can connect with him on Twitter, by email at embolden@mac.com, on Mastodon at @eabolden@techhub.social, and on his blog, Trending At Work. Brian Flanigan-Arthurs is an educator with a passion for providing results-driven, innovative learning strategies for all students, but particularly those who are at-risk. He is also a tech enthusiast who has a particular affinity for Apple since he first used the Apple IIGS as a student. You can contact Brian on twitter as @brian8944. He also recently opened a Mastodon account at @brian8944@mastodon.cloud. David Ginsburg is the host of the weekly podcast In Touch With iOS where he discusses all things iOS, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Apple Watch, and related technologies. He is an IT professional supporting Mac, iOS and Windows users. Visit his YouTube channel at https://youtube.com/daveg65 and find and follow him on Twitter @daveg65 and on Mastodon at @daveg65@mastodon.cloud Jim Rea built his own computer from scratch in 1975, started programming in 1977, and has been an independent Mac developer continuously since 1984. He is the founder of ProVUE Development, and the author of Panorama X, ProVUE's ultra fast RAM based database software for the macOS platform. He's been a speaker at MacTech, MacWorld Expo and other industry conferences. Follow Jim at provue.com and via @provuejim@techhub.social on Mastodon. Ben Roethig has been in the Apple Ecosystem since the System 7 Days. He is the a former Associate Editor with Geek Beat, Co-Founder of The Tech Hangout and Deconstruct and currently shares his thoughts on RoethigTech. Contact him on  Twitter and Mastodon.   Support:      Become a MacVoices Patron on Patreon      http://patreon.com/macvoices      Enjoy this episode? Make a one-time donation with PayPal Connect:      Web:      http://macvoices.com      Twitter:      http://www.twitter.com/chuckjoiner      http://www.twitter.com/macvoices      Mastodon:      https://mastodon.cloud/@chuckjoiner      Facebook:      http://www.facebook.com/chuck.joiner      MacVoices Page on Facebook:      http://www.facebook.com/macvoices/      MacVoices Group on Facebook:      http://www.facebook.com/groups/macvoice      LinkedIn:      https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckjoiner/      Instagram:      https://www.instagram.com/chuckjoiner/ Subscribe:      Audio in iTunes      Video in iTunes      Subscribe manually via iTunes or any podcatcher:      Audio: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesrss      Video: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesvideorss 00:01:01 Spotify's Decision: Lyrics Only for Paid Accounts 00:02:20 Copyrighted Lyrics and Fake Lyrics Websites 00:03:27 Spotify's move to devalue the free version 00:06:04 The impact of a generous free version on premium subscriptions 00:06:24 Spotify vs Apple Music: Disparity in Artist Royalties 00:09:23 Amazon's Limited Music Catalog and Competition with Other Platforms 00:15:18 Apple Stock: Not Always Up, But Still Promising 00:17:17 Apple's Brilliant Move: Continual Revenue through Subscription Model 00:19:09 Uncertainty Surrounding iPhone Upgrade Cycle 00:20:10 Transition from Lightning cable to USB-C discussed 00:21:28 Commonality across Apple product line with USB-C interface 00:22:17 Licensing revenue and ecosystem concerns arise 00:23:19 The Importance of Certified Cables and Data Transfer 00:25:28 Discussion on Capital Allocation and Share Repurchases 00:29:21 Uncertainty Surrounding Apple's Economic Conditions

Chuck Joiner, David Ginsburg, Jim Rea, Web Bixby, Eric Bolden, and Ben Roethig shift to a new topic on MacVoices Live!, examining  Spotify's decision to put song lyrics behind a paywall weighing the pros and cons. We also delve into Apple's challenges, including subscription services and the transition to USB-C cables. Lastly, we touch on Amazon's changes to their streaming music service and the risks associated with uncertified cables for the new iPhone. (Part 2)  This edition of MacVoices is brought to you by the MacVoices Dispatch, our weekly newsletter that keeps you up-to-date on any and all MacVoices-related information. Subscribe today and don't miss a thing. Show Notes: Chapters: 0:01:01 Spotify's Decision: Lyrics Only for Paid Accounts0:02:21 Copyrighted Lyrics and Fake Lyrics Websites0:03:27 Spotify's move to devalue the free version0:06:04 The impact of a generous free version on premium subscriptions0:06:24 Spotify vs Apple Music: Disparity in Artist Royalties0:09:23 Amazon's Limited Music Catalog and Competition with Other Platforms0:15:19 Apple Stock: Not Always Up, But Still Promising0:17:18 Apple's Brilliant Move: Continual Revenue through Subscription Model0:19:09 Uncertainty Surrounding iPhone Upgrade Cycle0:20:10 Transition from Lightning cable to USB-C discussed0:21:28 Commonality across Apple product line with USB-C interface0:22:17 Licensing revenue and ecosystem concerns arise0:23:19 The Importance of Certified Cables and Data Transfer0:25:29 Discussion on Capital Allocation and Share Repurchases0:29:21 Uncertainty Surrounding Apple's Economic Conditions Links: These are the 5 top risks to Apple stock ahead of its September iPhone 15 event, according to Goldman Sachshttps://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/apple-stock-price-outlook-5-risks-september-iphone-15-event-2023-8 Apple Argues iMessage Isn't Popular Enough in the EU to Be Regulatedhttps://www.macrumors.com/2023/09/05/imessage-isnt-popular-enough-for-regulation/ Guests: Web Bixby has been in the insurance business for 40 years and has been an Apple user for longer than that.You can catch up with him on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Eric Bolden is into macOS, plants, sci-fi, food, and is a rural internet supporter. You can connect with him on Twitter, by email at embolden@mac.com, on Mastodon at @eabolden@techhub.social, and on his blog, Trending At Work. Brian Flanigan-Arthurs is an educator with a passion for providing results-driven, innovative learning strategies for all students, but particularly those who are at-risk. He is also a tech enthusiast who has a particular affinity for Apple since he first used the Apple IIGS as a student. You can contact Brian on twitter as @brian8944. He also recently opened a Mastodon account at @brian8944@mastodon.cloud. David Ginsburg is the host of the weekly podcast In Touch With iOS where he discusses all things iOS, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Apple Watch, and related technologies. He is an IT professional supporting Mac, iOS and Windows users. Visit his YouTube channel at https://youtube.com/daveg65 and find and follow him on Twitter @daveg65 and on Mastodon at @daveg65@mastodon.cloud Jim Rea built his own computer from scratch in 1975, started programming in 1977, and has been an independent Mac developer continuously since 1984. He is the founder of ProVUE Development, and the author of Panorama X, ProVUE's ultra fast RAM based database software for the macOS platform. He's been a speaker at MacTech, MacWorld Expo and other industry conferences. Follow Jim at provue.com and via @provuejim@techhub.social on Mastodon. Ben Roethig has been in the Apple Ecosystem since the System 7 Days. He is the a former Associate Editor with Geek Beat, Co-Founder of The Tech Hangout and Deconstruct and currently shares his thoughts on RoethigTech. Contact him on  Twitter and Mastodon.   Support:      Become a MacVoices Patron on Patreon     http://patreon.com/macvoices      Enjoy this episode? Make a one-time donation with PayPal Connect:      Web:     http://macvoices.com      Twitter:     http://www.twitter.com/chuckjoiner     http://www.twitter.com/macvoices      Mastodon:     https://mastodon.cloud/@chuckjoiner      Facebook:     http://www.facebook.com/chuck.joiner      MacVoices Page on Facebook:     http://www.facebook.com/macvoices/      MacVoices Group on Facebook:     http://www.facebook.com/groups/macvoice      LinkedIn:     https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckjoiner/      Instagram:     https://www.instagram.com/chuckjoiner/ Subscribe:      Audio in iTunes     Video in iTunes      Subscribe manually via iTunes or any podcatcher:      Audio: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesrss      Video: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesvideorss

In this episode of the Beginner Photography Podcast I interview landscape photographer Gary Crabbe. He shares the power of photography as a communication medium and how to effectively convey your message through every photo you take. Gary shares his decades of experience, discussing the importance of constantly evolving and improving your skills. From the significance of light to creating emotional connections in your landscapes. We also explore the challenges and rewards of capturing the perfect shot, and how to embrace unexpected opportunities. The Big Takeaways with Timestamps:[00:04:34] Applied for job, recognized famous photographer, got hired, went on honeymoon, given department responsibilities.[00:08:30] No clue what I was doing; succeeded.[00:17:39] Learning to see like film was essential in the digital world.[00:23:58] "Quickly find creative ideas for photography."[00:26:19] Capture beautiful light for stunning landscape photography.[00:33:49] Photography is a communication medium, telling stories.[00:46:56] Instagram: A shallow appreciation for photography.[00:56:20] Licensing: selling permission to use photos commercially.[01:05:58] Previsualizing a scene, adapting to changing light.[01:12:41] Embrace opportunities, communicate through photography, appreciate momentsResources:- Landscape Photographer Gary Crabbe's website- Galen Rowell's website Transform your Love for Photography into Profit for FREE with CloudSpot Studio.And get my Wedding and Portrait Contract and Questionnaires, at no cost!Sign up now at http://deliverphotos.com/ Connect with the Beginner Photography Podcast! Join the free Beginner Photography Podcast Community at https://beginnerphotopod.com/group Email me at BeginnerPhotographyPodcast@gmail.com Send in your Photo Questions to get answered on the show - https://beginnerphotopod.com/qa Grab your free camera setting cheatsheet - https://perfectcamerasettings.com/ Thanks for listening & keep shooting!

ART STYLE ACADEMY:  https://www.laurenlesley.com/asa-sales-page-35-spots DM me on Instagram:  @LaurenLesleyStudio   Do These 6 Things BEFORE Going Full-Time as an Artist Hey!  How are you?  If we haven't met before, I'm Lauren.. I'm your host of the Design Tribe podcast, and I'm an artist and textile designer.  In the last episode, I went into pretty great detail about what it was like working as a full-time artist and licensing surface pattern designs.  So if you missed that episode, be sure to check it out.   I know a lot of you are either trying to make it as a surface pattern designer OR you dream of one day being able to leave your day job to license your artwork to companies.   I spent 2 years as an independent artist, and although there were many things I loved about working independently, I ultimately went back to an in-house job as a Senior Textile Designer.     A lot of these tips I'm about to share with you are things I WISH I did before making the leap to being a full-time artist.  We'll talk about all the money stuff in the very last tip so be sure to stick around for that juicy topic.   Okay, so my first tip is to…   Publish a class to Skillshare. This might not be the advice you were expecting, haha! And to be honest, I'm a little annoyed with Skillshare, because last year they cut their teacher's income by almost half - with no warning. From a business perspective, I understand if they needed to do this, but they really should have been up front about it and approached the cut in a much more gradual way.  So, it felt really crappy.. Especially when a lot of teachers relied on this as a dependable stream of income. BUT! The reason my first tip is to upload a class to Skillshare is because when you go full-time as an artist, you will need some recurring revenue coming in on a regular basis.   When it comes to teaching, Skillshare is one of the easiest places to start, because they already have such a great built-in audience with lots of students who are creative.   Domestika is another popular teaching platform you could choose if Skillshare has lost your trust.  I haven't personally uploaded classes to Domestika so I can't comment on whether I like the platform or not, but other artists seem to really like it. Another reason to upload a class is to just get your feet wet and see if you enjoy teaching. A lot of full-time artists teach on a platform like Skillshare or sell a course as a way to supplement their licensing income, which if you've ever done any licensing, you know very well it can fluctuate a lot! Your first class doesn't even have to be related to what you WANT to do moving forward.  It's easy to think:  “Well, I can't teach about that, because I don't have enough experience yet.”  And you would be right! Instead, think about where you were 5-10 years ago.  What have you learned since then? Your course could be about learning how to use Photoshop or how to draw a Still Life.  What are some things you learned in school that you could teach?  What did you major in?  It doesn't even have to be art-related! It does help to keep your class topics related in the long term, but for your very first class - it could really be anything. The idea is for you to discover A.) if you enjoy teaching - e.i. Filming yourself, doing a little video editing, etc.  and B.) to start generating some recurring revenue. Develop your Art Style When you're working as an in-house designer, it can be really hard to find your own Art Style.   Often when we work an in-house job, you get really good at doing ANY style… depending on what the project needs. Companies often try to fill out the white space in their line by covering a range of styles from traditional to modern to boho, you name it.  That means, as the designer, you develop the skill of designing ANY style. The problem with that is… you start to lose a sense of your own style and who you are from the inside out. You might get excited by new trends or a new project that changes things up.  When you like soo many different things, it can be really hard to narrow down to just ONE look.  Especially, when you don't know what's going to sell or which style might be the most reasonable to pursue.When you can do any style, HOW do you pick?! This gets very tricky, because in LICENSING… companies are really only interested in licensing when your art brings something new to the table… something that they don't already have from their own in-house designers. Companies want to know what YOUR perspective is. Think of the Jungalow brand. Justina Blakeney brought a brand new perspective to home décor by covering her house in an explosion of plants and colorful textiles.  In a time where Minimalism and white sofas were extremely popular, she did the opposite thing… and by staying true to her own vision, this Boho Maximalism style exploded. Think of Rifle Paper Co. and the unique style of Anna Bond's florals.She brought a brand new look to florals that really highlights her own unique style that's painterly, colorful, and friendly. Oftentimes, companies want to license work that's the same, but different.  This means the subject matter is often the same… like the florals that are so famous from Rifle Paper Co.  But the WAY Anna Bond painted them was so different. Style is all about technique. If this is something you're struggling with, I do offer a self-paced online program called Art Style Academy.  When you go through my program and do the work, you will develop your own style by the end of the course.  If this sounds interesting to you, you can check out the link in the show notes or check out my website at LaurenLesley.com - and Lesley is spelled with an E-Y. Create a Portfolio with a Large Body of Work Once you've developed your Art Style, the next area of focus is to build out your portfolio.  It will be sooo much easier to get the ball rolling if you already have a full portfolio to sell. From there, you can decide if you want to work with an agent, upload to an on-demand site, or exhibit at a tradeshow. So, you might be wondering… “Okay, but how many pieces do I need to have in my portfolio?” Honestly, you probably need close to 100 pieces in your portfolio.  I know this sounds like a lot, but it's important to work in collections and some of these could be coordinates.  For each collection, you also need to work in a limited color palette and make sure your pieces are looking related to each other. If you are cold-emailing Art Directors, you don't necessarily need 100 pieces to start.  You can pitch collection-by-collection. But if you're investing a lot of time, money, and energy to exhibit at a tradeshow, I recommend going in prepared with A LOT of work.  You're more likely to gain contracts if you have a collection that really resonates with a client. Okay, so what else? Start uploading to ONE On-Demand Site Etsy Society 6 Spoonflower Creative Market Patternbank MintedUploading to On-Demand sites can be a bit tricky for a lot of reasons.  I feel like that might be another whole podcast episode. But I think a lot of artists try uploading to one site, find that they're not having success so then they switch and try a different site. A lot of time gets wasted posting and re-posting your designs on so many different sites. I think it's important to figure out WHICH site you like the best up front - before you quit your day job.  Figure out which site is converting to sales. For example, my Character Builders sold really well on Creative Market.  Customers on Creative Market are usually other designers and they understand how to use programs like Illustrator.  They buy these products to save themselves a little time. However, when I tried to sell the same designs as Clip Art on Etsy it didn't do very well.  I had too many customers sending me private messages wanting me to customize the clip art for them and I was trying to get away from hourly work. I ended up preferring Creative Market to sell digital products, because I made the most money and customers weren't asking me to customize the artwork for them. I also like Patternbank the best for uploading pattern designs to the internet.  But I'll admit I have a love-hate relationship with this platform.  When a design sells, the money is a lot better than other sites I've experienced.  However, I'm constantly agonizing over which patterns I want to remain in my Licensing Portfolio and which ones I want to sell on Patternbank.   If there's something I no longer love, or don't feel as strongly about, in my Licensing Portfolio, I sort of think about it like putting those patterns on clearance by posting them to Patternbank.  It doesn't make them bad, but it's something I am just kind of “over” and I want to get rid of it.   Because I spent time on it, I want the ability to earn some kind of ROI, but I don't love it enough to continue spending future-time on pitching it to clients. I think artists have a lot of different opinions on these ON-DEMAND sites.  Some feel that it devalues the industry and isn't worth the low pay.  But other artists sometimes “get found” on these sites and it can really boost their career. Other sites like Minted and Spoonflower offer design challenges that I think can really help you understand what types of designs sell and how to level up your artwork.  So, if your artwork skills need developing this is a great place to get an education! The main point I want to make here is to play around with this option and figure out if you like it BEFORE quitting your day job.  I'd recommend only choosing one or two On-Demand sites you like and stick with it.  If you try to post to all of them, you'll spread yourself too thin and you won't make any progress. Start Outsourcing Hire an Assistant DesignerBelieve it or not, when you become a Full-Time Artist you have also decided to become a Business Owner.  You'll need to set up an LLC (if you're in the U.S.) and save at least 30% of your income for paying taxes. When you go independent, you're no longer just an artist. You're also the CEO, head of Marketing, Sales, and Accounting.  You are the only person in the business which means you have to do everyyyything.  What's so frustrating about this is that it can leave very little time for making art. When you're still working a day job, it's kind of a similar boat - where the majority of your time is spent working on your day job… so you don't exactly have enough time to build up your side hustle. Unfortunately, this doesn't change when you go independent, because you suddenly have so many more responsibilities. That's why I suggest outsourcing as much as you can BEFORE leaving your day job. You need to get your systems in place so that the business can run smoothly when you are ready to take the leap.  You don't want to be scrambling. Your website should be in a finished state. I really recommend hiring an Assistant Designer who is a jack-of-all-trades.  My assistant designer is amazing, because he can work on all kinds of things that require proficiency in everything from Illustrator or Photoshop to video editing in Premiere Pro. You can find really great design help on places like Fiverr or Upwork.  They keep track of the contract and the hours which is a huge help. From there, I like to use Asana to organize my projects and give a due date.  My Assistant Designer can keep up with the projects in Asana and knows what he can work on next.  It's all in there. That frees me up to work on my artwork. Figure Out Your Money You really need to get a good handle on both your personal and business expenses BEFORE leaving your day job. I found that business expenses ended up being a lot more expensive than I ever would have guessed.  Everything from paying for a website, to an email list, to attending a trade show, to outsourcing a mountain of tasks… really adds up! Some of you may be able to move into your parents' house or you may have a partner who supports you in the beginning.  This is all helpful, but you'll still need a way to fund your business - especially to get it up and running.Using your day job's salary to fund your business in the early stages is a strategy I quite like. The more you focus on building up Passive Income Streams like classes or selling digital products BEFORE quitting your day job… the more you'll be able to focus on your licensing portfolio.  The only issue is it does take more time.  Try to be patient. It's good to layer on an Active Income stream as well - especially if your Passive Income streams are slow or sporadic.  What I don't like about Active Income streams is that it's trading hours for dollars.  But!  You can generally earn more money more quickly.   Put on your Accountant hat and make a spreadsheet.Get real familiar with what your expenses will be! Ignoring them does not make them go away. Try to reduce your living expenses as much as possible.For example, my husband and I share a car that's already paid for.  We don't have a car payment, and because the car is old, our insurance isn't too high either. Pay off your student loans!  If you still have student loans, you are not ready to quit your day job. Get rid of any credit card debt. Build up your resources.Think of any equipment you might need to start your business. BEFORE quitting your day job, go ahead and buy all of the fancy things.A new computer An iPad A good camera (can be used) A microphone A Pantone Book All of the art supplies you might want Any art books   Okay, so to recap the 6 things you should do BEFORE going full-time as an artist… we talked about:   Publishing a class to Skillshare or another platform like Domestika. Develop Your Art Style  Create a Portfolio with a Large Body of Work (100 pieces) Find ONE On-Demand site that you're liking  Start Outsourcing Business Tasks Figure Out Your Money   There's honestly so much more I could say on this topic, but that's a really good place to start!  Feel free to DM me over on Instagram @LaurenLesleyStudio  if you want to chat more.  I always love hearing from you all!   Have a wonderful day and good luck on all of your amazing art businesses!  Talk soon.

When it comes to music, there is no greater medium for calming the mind and body. Concentration, relaxation, and sleep aids for coping with anxiety, stress and even depression. Have you ever wanted to lie on a beach, eyes closed and take in the sounds of the tropics? The resonation of a tropical beach ambience mixed with waves washing ashore is the perfect stress relief after a long day at work, study, decision making and even restful sleep. The exact process takes place with the sounds of nature, birds in deep forests, waterfalls and rivers – All have the same calming effect, aiding focus and a sense of wellbeing. Nature Sound Retreat's music stimulates the brain into a specific state using subtle pulsing sound to encourage your brain waves to align to the frequency of the beat. It helps induce enhanced focus, entranced state, relaxation, and sleep. NSR blends well the very best of elemental nature, Celtic music, orchestra and mostly percussion free classical compositions ,specifically targeting the effects desired as outlined above. Various ancient healing frequencies are utilized: 432Hz, 963Hz specifically, and combined with binaural beats, ASMR nature sounds, Alpha and Delta waves – enable listeners interested in deep sleep, stress relief, yoga, study music for focus and concentration, massage music. But there is more to Nature Sound Retreat for those who like to watch and not only listen. We combine meditation music with beautiful imagery, stunning landscapes and hypnotic Kaleidoscope videos that will take you on a journey of deep relaxation. Proponents of our music receive these potential benefits: Reduced stress and anxiety Increased focus, concentration, and motivation Improved confidence Better long-term memory after exposure to beta pattern frequencies, according to a 2019 study Deeper meditation Enhanced psychomotor performance and mood Join this channel to get access to perks: ►https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcsplj60aQC7mb1rgdhk5sw/join SUBSCRIBE NOW to become part of our community of FREE MEDITATION MUSIC. ►https://naturesoundretreat.com/YoutubeSubscribe iTunes here: ►https://naturesoundretreat.com/AppleMusic ------------------------------------------------------------------------ SPOTIFY here: ►https://naturesoundretreat.com/Spotify ------------------------------------------------------------------------ AMAZON here: ►https://naturesoundretreat.com/AmazonMusic ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Website: ►https://NatureSoundRetreat.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Facebook: ►https://www.facebook.com/NatureSoundRetreat ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Pinterest: ►https://www.pinterest.com/naturesoundretreat ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Instagram: ►@NatureSoundRetreat ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Twitter: ►@retreat_sound ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ©2023 Nature Sound Retreat. All Rights Reserved. Nature Sound Retreat is a Registered Trademark All videos and music are the sole copyright of Nature Sound Retreat. Licensing inquiries can be sent via Private Message

Wes Miller, Research VP at Directions on Microsoft, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss the various intricacies and pitfalls of Microsoft licensing. Wes and Corey discuss what it's like to work closely with a company like Microsoft in your day-to-day career, while also looking out for the best interest of your mutual customers. Wes explains his history of working both at and with Microsoft, and the changes he's seen to their business models and the impact that has on their customers. About WesWes Miller analyzes and writes about Microsoft security, identity, and systems management technologies, as well as Microsoft product licensing.Before joining Directions on Microsoft in 2010, Wes was a product manager and development manager for several Austin, TX, start-ups, including Winternals Software, acquired by Microsoft in 2006. Prior to that, Wes spent seven years at Microsoft working as a program manager in the Windows Core Operating System and MSN divisions.Wes received a B.A. in psychology from the University of Alaska Fairbanks.Links Referenced: Directions on Microsoft Website: https://www.directionsonmicrosoft.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/getwired LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wmiller/ Directions on Microsoft Training: https://www.directionsonmicrosoft.com/training TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Corey Quinn. So, I write a newsletter called Last Week in AWS, which has always felt like it's flying a little bit too close to the sun just because having AWSes name in the title of what I do feels like it's playing with copyright fire. It's nice periodically to talk to someone—again—who is in a similar boat. Wes Miller is a Research VP at Directions on Microsoft. To be clear, Directions on Microsoft is an analyst firm that talks primarily about Microsoft licensing and is not, in fact, part of Microsoft itself. Have I disclaimed that appropriately, Wes?Wes: You have. You have. And in fact, the company, when it was first born, was actually called Microsoft Directions. And they had a reasonably good relationship with Microsoft at the time and Microsoft cordially asked them, “Hey, could you at least reverse that so it corrects it in terms of trademark.” So yes, we're blessed in that regard. Something you probably would never get away with now, but that was 30 years ago.Corey: [laugh]. And now it sounds like it might as well be a product. So, I have to ask, just because the way I think of you is, you are the folks to talk to, full stop, when you have a question about anything that touches on Microsoft licensing. Is that an accurate depiction of what it is you folks do or is that just my particular corner of the world and strange equivalence that gets me there?Wes: That is our parts of the Venn diagram intersecting because that's what I spend a lot of time talking about and thinking about because I teach that with our company founder, Rob Horwitz. But we also spend an inordinate amount of time taking what Microsoft is talking about shipping, maybe servicing, and help customers understand really, as we say, the ‘So, what?' What does this mean to me as a customer? Should I be using this? Should I be waiting? Should I upgrade? Should I stay? Those sorts of things.So, there's a whole roadmapping side. And then we have a [laugh]—because licensing doesn't end with a license, we have a whole side of negotiation that we spend a lot of time, we have a dedicated team that focuses on helping enterprise agreement customers get the most successful deal for their organization, basically, every three years.Corey: We do exactly that with AWS ourselves. I have to ask before we dive into this. In the early days, I felt like I had a much better relationship with Microsoft. Scott Guthrie, the head of Azure, was on this show. A number of very highly placed Microsoft folks were here. And over the years, they more or less have stopped talking to me.And that leaves me in a position where all I can see is their actions and their broad public statements without getting any nuance or context around any of it. And I don't know if this is just a commentary on human nature or me in particular, but I tend to always assume the worst when things like that happen. So, my approach to Microsoft has grown increasingly cynical over the years as a result. That said, I don't actually have an axe to grind with them from any other perspective than as a customer, and occasionally that feels like ‘victim' for a variety of different things. What's your take on Microsoft as far as, I guess, your feelings toward the company?Wes: So, a lot of people—in fact, it used to be more so, but not as much anymore, people would assume I hate Microsoft or I want to demonize Microsoft. But the irony actually is, you know, I want people to remember I worked there for seven-and-a-half years, I shipped—I was on the team that shipped Windows XP, Server 2003, and a bunch of other products that people don't remember. And I still care about the company, but the company and I are obviously in different trajectories now. And also, my company's customers today are also Microsoft's customers today, and we actually have—our customers—our mutual customers—best interest in mind with basically everything we do. Are we helping them be informed? Are we helping them color within the financial lines?And sometimes, we may say things that help a customer that aren't helping the bottom line or helping a marketing direction and I don't think that resonates well within Microsoft. So sure, sometimes we even hear from them, “Hey, it'd be great if you guys might want to, you know, say something nice once in a while.” But it's not necessarily our job to say nice things. I do it once in a while. I want to note that I said something nice about AAD last week, but the reality is that we are there to help our mutual customers.And what I found is, I have found the same thing to be true that you're finding true that, unfortunately, outbound communications from them, in particular from the whole company, have slowed. I think everybody's busier, they've got a very specific set of directions they're going on things, and as a result, we hear very little. And even getting, trying to get clarification on things sometimes, “Did we read that right?” It takes a while, and it has to go through several different rungs of people to get the answer.Corey: I have somewhat similar relationships over the years with AWS, where they—in many cases, a lot of their executives prefer not to talk to me at all. Which again, is fair. I'm not—I don't require any of them to do it. But there's something in the Amazonian ethos that requires them to talk to customers, especially when customers are having a rough time. And I'm, for better or worse, the voice of the customer.I am usually not the dumbest person in the universe when it comes to trying to understand a service or make it do something that, to me, it seems that it should be able to do. And when I actually start having in-depth conversations, people are surprised. “Wow, you were super pleasant and fun to work with. We thought you were just going to be a jerk.” It's, yeah, it turns out I don't go through every meeting like it's Twitter. What a concept.Wes: Yeah, a lot of people, I've had this happen for myself when you meet people in person, when they meet your Twitter persona, especially for someone who I think you and I both come across as rather boisterous, gregarious, and sometimes people take that as our personas. And I remember meeting a friend in the UK for the first time years ago, he's like, “You're very different in person.” I'm like, “I know. I know.”Corey: I usually get the, “You're just like Twitter.” In many respects, I am. Because people don't always see what I'm putting down. I make it a point to be humorous and I have a quick quip for a lot of things, but it's never trying to make the person I'm engaging with feel worse for it. And that's how I work.People are somewhat surprised when I'm working in client meetings that I'm fun and I have a similar sense of humor and personality, as you would see on Twitter. Believe it or not, I haven't spent all this time just doing a bit. But they're also surprised that it tends to drive toward an actual business discussion.Wes: Sure.Corey: Everything fun is contextual.Wes: Absolutely. That's the same sort of thing we get on our side when we talk to customers. I think I've learned so much from talking with them that sometimes I do get to share those things with Microsoft when they're willing to listen.Corey: So, what I'm curious about in the context of Microsoft licensing is something that, once again, it has intruded upon my notice lately with a bunch of security disclosures in which Microsoft has said remarkably little, and that is one of the most concerning things out there. They casually tried to slide past, “Oh, yeah, we had a signing key compromised.” Which is one of those, “Oh, [laugh] and by the way, the building's on fire. But let's talk about our rent [unintelligible 00:07:44] for the next year.” Like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on. What?”That was one of those horrifying moments. And it came out—I believe I learned about this from you—that you needed something called E3 licensing—sorry, E5 licensing—in order to look at those audit logs, where versus E3, which sounded like the more common case. And after a couple of days of, “Explain this,” Microsoft very quickly wound up changing that. What do all these things mean? This is sort of a foreign concept to me because AWS, for better or worse, does not play games with licensing in the same way that Microsoft does.Wes: Sure. Microsoft has, over the years, you know, they are a master of building suites. This is what they've done for over 30 years. And they will build a suite, they'll sell you that suite, they'll come back around in three to six years and sell you a new version of that suite. Sometimes they'll sell you a higher price version of that suite, et cetera.And so, you'll see products evolve. And did a great podcast with my colleagues Rob and Mary Jo Foley the other day where we talked about what we've seen over the last, now for me, 11 years of teaching boot camps. And I think in particular, one of the changes we have seen is exactly what you're being exposed to on the outside and what a lot of people have been complaining about, which is, products don't sit still anymore. So, Microsoft actually makes very few products today. Almost everything they sell you is a service. There are a handful of products still.These services all evolve, and about every triennium or two—so every three to six years—you'll see a price increase and something will be added, and a price increase and something will be added. And so, all this began with the BPOS, the first version of Office 365, which became Office 365 E3, then Microsoft 365 E3 then Microsoft 365 E5. And for people who aren't in the know, basically, that means they went from Office as a subscription to Office, Windows, and a bunch of management tools as a subscription, to E5, basically, it took all of the security and compliance tools that many of us feel should have been baked into the fundamentals, into E3, the thing that everybody buys, what I refer to still today as the hero SKU and those security and compliance fundamentals should have been baked in. But no, in fact, a lot of customers when this AAD issue came out—and I think a lot discovered this ad hoc for the same reason, “Hey, we've been owned, how far back in the logs can we look?” And the answer is, you know, no farther than 90 days, a lot of customers hit that reality of, what do you mean we didn't pay for the premium thing that has all the logging that we need?Corey: Since you sat on this for eight months before mentioning it to us? Yeah.Wes: Exactly, exactly. And it's buried. And it's one of those things that, like, when we teach the licensing boot camp, I specifically call out because of my security background, it's an area of focus and interest to me. I call out to customers that a lot of the stuff we've been showing you has not questionable valuable, but kind of squishy value.This piece right here, this is both about security and compliance. Don't cheap out. If you're going to buy anything, buy this because you're going to need it later. And I've been saying that for, like, three years, but obviously only the people who were in the boot camp would hear that and then shake their head;, “Why does it have to be this difficult?” But yeah. Everything becomes a revenue opportunity if it's a potential to upsell somebody for the next tier.Corey: The couple of times I've been asked to look at Azure bills, I backed away slowly as soon as I do, just because so much of it is tied to licensing and areas that are very much outside of my wheelhouse. Because I view, in the cloud context, that cost and architecture tend to be one of the same. But when you bolt an entire layer of seat licensing and what this means for your desktop operating systems on as well as the actual cloud architecture, it gets incredibly confusing incredibly quickly. And architectural advice of the type that I give to AWS customers and would give to GCP customers is absolutely going to be harmful in many respects.I just don't know what I don't know and it's not an area that interests me, as far as learning that competency, just to jump through hoops. I mean, I frankly used to be a small business Windows admin, with the products that you talked about, back when XP and Server 2003 and a few others, I sort of ruled the roost. But I got so tired of surprise audit-style work. It felt like busy work that wasn't advancing what I was trying to get done in any meaningful way that, in a fit of rage, one day, I wound up exploring the whole Unix side of the world in 2006 and never went back.Wes: [whispering] That's how it happened.Corey: Yep.Wes: It's unfortunate that it's become so commonplace, but when Vista kind of stalled out and they started exploring other revenue opportunities, you have Vista Ultimate Enterprise, all the crazy SKUing that Vista had, I think it sort of created a mindset within the company that this is what we have to do in order to keep growing revenue up and to the right, and you know, shareholder value be the most important thing, that's what you've got to do. I agree entirely, though, the biggest challenge I could see for someone coming into our space is the fact that yes, you've got to understand Azure, Azure architecture, development architecture, and then as soon as you feel like you understand that, somebody comes along and says, “Well, yeah, but because we have an EA, we have to do it this way or we only get a discount on this thing.” And yeah, it just makes things more cumbersome. And I think that's why we still see a lot of customers who come to our boot camps who are still very dedicated AWS customers because that's where they were, and it's easier in many regards, and they just want to go with what they know.Corey: And I think that that's probably fair. I think that there is an evolution that grows here that I think catches folks by surprise. I'm fortunate in that my Microsoft involvement, if we set things like GitHub aside because I like them quite a bit and my Azure stuff as well—which is still small enough to fit in the free tier, given that I use it for one very specific, very useful thing—but the rest of it is simply seat licenses for Office 365 for my team. And I just tend to buy the retail-priced one on the internet that's licensed for business use, and I don't really think about it again. Because I don't need, as you say, in-depth audit logs for Microsoft Word. I really don't. I'm sorry, but I have a hard time believing that that's true. But something that immediately crops up when you say this is when you talk about E3 versus E5 licensing, is that organization-wide or is that on a per-seat basis?Wes: It's even worse than that. It usually comes down to per-user licensing. The whole world used to be per device licensing in Microsoft and it switched to per user when they subscript-ified everything—that's a word I made up a while ago—so when they subscript-ified everything, they changed it over to per user. And for better or worse, today, you could—there's actually four different tiers of Microsoft 365. You could go for any one of those four for any distinct user.You could have one of them on F1, F3, E3, and E5. Now, if you do that, you create some other license non-compliance issues that we spend way too much time having to talk about during the boot camp, but the point is, you can buy to fit; it's not one-size-fits-all necessarily. But you run into, very rapidly, if you deploy E5 for some number of users because the products that are there, the security services and compliance services ironically don't do license compliance in most cases, customers can actually wind up creating new license compliance problems, thereby basically having to buy E5 for everybody. So, it's a bit of a trapdoor that customers are not often aware of when they initially step into dabbling in Microsoft 365 E5.Corey: When you take a look at this across the entire board, what is your guidance to customers? Because honestly, this feels like it is a full-time job. At scale, a full-time job for a department simply keeping up with all of the various Microsoft licensing requirements, and changes because, as you say, it's not static. And it just feels like an overwhelming amount of work that to my understanding, virtually no other vendor makes customers jump through. Sure there's Oracle, but that tends to be either in a database story or a per developer, or on rare occasions, per user when you build internal Java apps. But it's not as pervasive and as tricky as this unless I'm missing something.Wes: No, you're not. You're not missing anything. It's very true. It's interesting to think back over the years at the boot camp. There's names I've heard that I don't hear anymore in terms of companies that were as bad. But the reality is, you hear the names of the same software companies but, exactly to your point, they're all departmental. The people who make [Roxio 00:16:26] still, they're very departmentalized. Oracle, IBM, yeah, we hear about them still, but they are all absolutely very departmentalized.And Microsoft, I think one of the reason why we do get so many—for better or worse, for them—return visitors to our licensing boot camps that we do every two months, is for that exact reason, that some people have found they like outsourcing that part of at least trying to keep up with what's going on, what's the record? And so, they'll come back every two, three, or four years and get an update. And we try to keep them updated on, you know, how do I color within the lines? Should it be like this? No. But it is this way.In fact, it's funny, I think back, it was probably one of the first few boot camps I did with Rob. We were in New York and we had a very large customer who had gotten a personalized message from Microsoft talking about how they were going to simplify licensing. And we went to a cocktail hour afterwards, as we often do on the first day of the boot camp, to help people, you know, with the pain after a boot camp, and this gentleman asks us well, “So, what are you guys going to do once Microsoft simplifies licensing?” And Rob and I just, like, looked at each other, smiled, looked back at the guy, and laughed. We're like, “We will cross that bridge when we get to it.”Corey: Yeah, people ask us that question about AWS billing. What if they fix the billing system? Like, we should be so lucky to live that long.Wes: I have so many things I'd rather be doing. Yes.Corey: Mm-hm. Exactly. It's one of those areas where, “Well, what happens in a post-scarcity world?” Like, “I couldn't tell you. I can't even imagine what such a thing would look like.”Wes: Exactly [laugh]. Exactly.Corey: So, the last time we spoke way back, I think in 2019, Microsoft had wound up doing some unfortunate and fairly underhanded-appearing licensed changes, where it was more expensive to run a bunch of Microsoft things, such as server software, most notably SQL Server, on clouds that were not Azure. And then, because you know, you look up the word chutzpah in the dictionary, you'll find the Microsoft logo there in response, as part of the definition, they ran an advertising campaign saying that, oh, running many cloud workloads on Azure was five times cheaper than on AWS. As if they cracked some magic secret to cloud economics. Rather than no, we just decided to play dumb games that win worse prizes with cloud licensing. How did that play out?Wes: Well, so they made those changes in October of 2019, and I kind of wish they'd become a bigger deal. And I wish they'd become a bigger deal earlier so that things could have been, maybe, reversed when it was easier. But you're absolutely right. So, it—for those who don't know, it basically made licensing changes on only AWS, GCP, and Alibaba—who I never had anybody ask me about—but those three. It also added them for Azure, but then they created loopholes for themselves to make Azure actually get beneficial licensing, even better than you could get with any other cloud provider [sigh].So, the net takeaway is that every Microsoft product that matters—so traditionally, SQL Server, Windows Server, Windows client, and Office—is not impossible to use on AWS, but it is markedly more expensive. That's the first note. To your point, then they did do that marketing campaign that I know you and I probably had exchanges about at the time, and it drove me nuts as well because what they will classically do is when they tout the savings of running something on Azure, not only are they flouting the rules that they created, you know, they're basically gloating, “Look, we got a toy that they didn't,” but they're also often removing costs from the equation. So, for example, in order for you to get those discounts on Azure, you have to maintain what's called Software Assurance. You basically have to have a subscription by another name.If you don't have Software Assurance, those opportunities are not available to you. Fine. That's not my point. My point is this, that Software Assurance is basically 75% of the cost of the next version. So, it's not free, but if you look at those 5x claims that they made during that time frame, they actually were hand-waving and waving away the [assay 00:20:45] costs.So, if you actually sat down and did the math, the 5x number was a lie. It was not just very nice, but it was wrong, literally mathematically wrong. And from a—as my colleague likes to say, a ‘colors person,' not a numbers person like me, from a colors person like me, that's pretty bad. If I can see the error and your math, that's bad math.Corey: It just feels like it's one of those taxes on not knowing some of the intricacies of what the heck is going on in the world of Microsoft licensing. And I think every sufficiently complex vendor with, shall we say, non-trivial pricing dimensions, could be accused of the same thing. But it always felt particularly worrisome from the Microsoft perspective. Back in the days of BSA audits—which I don't know at all if they're still a thing or not because I got out of that space—every executive that I ever spoke to, in any company lived in fear of them, not because they were pirating software or had decided, “You know what? We have a corporate policy of now acting unethically when it comes to licensing software,” but because of the belief that no matter what they came up with or whatever good faith effort they made to remain compliant, of course, something was not going to work the way they thought it would and they were going to be smacked with a fine. Is that still the case?Wes: Absolutely. In fact, I think it's worse now than it ever was before. I will often say to customers that you are wildly uncompliant while also being wildly overcompliant because per your point about how broad and deep Microsoft is, there's so many products. Like, every company today, every company that has Project and Visio still in place today, that still pays for it, you are over-licensed. You have more of it than you need.That's just one example, but on the other side, SQL Server, odds are, every organization is subtly under-licensed because they think the rule is to do this, but the rules are actually more restrictive than they expect. So, and that's why Microsoft is, you know, the first place they look, the first rug they look under when they do walk in and do an audit, which they're entitled to do as a part of an organization's enterprise agreement. So BSA, I think they do still have those audits, but Microsoft now they have their own business that does that, or at least they have partners that do that for them. And places like SQL Server are the first places that they look.Why? Because it's big, found money, and because it's extremely hard to get right. So, there's a reason why, when we focus on our boot camps, we'll often tell people, you know, “Our goal is to save you enough money to pay for the class,” because there's so much money to be found in little mistakes that if you do a big thing wrong with Microsoft software, you could be wildly out of compliance and not know about it until Microsoft-or more likely, a Microsoft partner—points it out to you.Corey: It feels like it's an inevitability. And, on some level, it's the cost of doing business. But man, does that leave a sour taste in someone's mouth.Wes: Mm-hm. It absolutely does. It absolutely does. And I think—you know, I remember, gosh, was it Munich that was talking about, “We're going to switch to Linux,” and then they came back into the fold. I think the reality is, it absolutely does put a bad taste.And it doesn't leave customers with good hope for where they go from here. I mean, okay, fine. So, we got burned on that thing in the Microsoft 365 stack. Now, they want us to pay 30 bucks for Copilot for Microsoft 365. What? And we'd have no idea what they're even buying, so it's hard to give any kind of guidance. So, it's a weird time.Corey: I'm curious to see what the ultimate effect of this is going to be. Well, one thing I've noticed over the past decade and change—and I think everyone has as well—increasingly, the local operating system on people's laptops or desktops—or even phones, to some extent—is not what it once was. Increasingly, most of the tools that I find myself using on a daily basis are just web use or in a browser entirely. And that feels like it's an ongoing problem for a company like Microsoft when you look at it through the lens of OS. Which at some level, makes perfect sense why they would switch towards everything as a service. But it's depressing, too.Wes: Yeah. I think that's one of the reasons why, particularly after Steve left, they changed focus a lot and really begin focusing on Microsoft 365 as the platform, for better or worse. How do we make Microsoft 365 sticky? How do we make Office 365 sticky? And the thing about, like, the Microsoft 365 E5 security stuff we were talking about, it often doesn't matter what the user is accessing it through. The user could be accessing it only through a phone, they could be a frontline worker, they could be standing at a sales kiosk all day, they could be using Office every single day, or they could be an exec who's only got an iPad.The point is, you're in for a penny, in for a pound at that point that you'll still have to license the user. And so, Microsoft will recoup it either way. In some ways, they've learned to stop caring as much about, is everyone actively using our technology? And on the other side, with things like Teams, and as we're seeing very, very slowly, with the long-delayed Outlook here, you know, they're also trying to switch things to have that less Win32 surface that we're used to and focus more on the web as well. But I think that's a pretty fundamental change for Microsoft to try and take broadly and I don't anticipate, for example, Office will ever be fully replaced with a fat client like it has on Windows and the Mac OS.Corey: Yeah, part of me wonders what the future that all looks like because increasingly, it feels more than a little silly that I'm spending, like, all of this ever-increasing dollar figure on a per-seat basis every year for all of Microsoft 365. Because we don't use their email system. We don't use so much of what they offer. We need basically Word and Excel and once in a blue moon PowerPoint, I guess. But that's it. Our fundamental needs have not materially shifted since Office 2003. Other than the fact that everything uses different extensions now and there's, of course, the security story on top of it, too. We just need some fairly basic stuff.Wes: And I think that's the case for a lot of—I mean, we're the exact same way at Directions. And I think that's the case for a lot of small and even into mid-size companies. Microsoft has traditionally with the, like, Small Business Premium, they have an offering that they intentionally only scale up to 300 people. And sometimes they'll actually give you perks there that they wouldn't give away in the enterprise suite, so you arguably get more—if they let you have it, you get more than you would if you've got E5. On the other side, they've also begun, for enterprises, honing in on opportunities that they may have historically ignored.And when I was at Microsoft, you'd have an idea, like, “Hey, Bob. I got an idea. Can we try to make a new product?” He's like, “Okay, is it a billion-dollar business?” And you get waved away if it wasn't all a billion-dollar business. And I don't think that's the case anymore today, particularly if you can make the case, this thing I'm building makes Microsoft 365 sticky or makes Azure sticky. So, things like the Power Platform, which is subtly and slowly replacing Access at a minimum, but a lot of other tools.Power BI, which has come from behind. You know, people would look at it and say, “Oh, it's no Excel.” And now it, I think, far exceeds Excel for that type of user. And Copilot, as I talked about, you know, Microsoft is definitely trying to throw things in that are beyond Office, beyond what we think of as Microsoft. And why are they doing that? Because they're trying to make their platform more sticky. They're trying to put enough value in there so you need to subscribe for every user in your organization.And even things, as we call them, ‘Batteries not Included' like Copilot, that you're going to buy E5 and that you're still going to have to buy something else beyond that for some number of users. So, you may even have a picture in your head of how much it's going to cost, but it's like buying a BMW 5 Series; it's going to cost more than you think.Corey: I wish that there were a better path forward on this. Honestly, I wish that they would stop playing these games, let you know Azure compete head-to-head against AWS and let it win on some of its merits. To be clear, there are several that are great. You know, if they could get out of their own way from a security perspective, lately. But there seems to be a little appetite for that. Increasingly, it seems like even customers asking them questions tends to hit a wall until, you know, a sitting US senator screams at them on Twitter.Wes: Mm-hm. No, and then if you look carefully at—Microsoft is very good at pulling just enough off of the sweater without destroying the sweater. And for example, what they did, they gave enough away to potentially appease, but they didn't actually resolve the problem. They didn't say, “All right, everybody gets logging if they have Microsoft 365 E3,” or, “Everybody gets logging, period.” They basically said, “Here's the kind of logging you can get, and we're going to probably tweak it a little bit more in the future,” and they will not tweak it more in the future. If anything, they'll tighten it back up.This is very similar to the 2019 problem we talked about earlier, too, that you know, they began with one set of rules and they've had to revisit it a couple of times. And most of the time, when they've had an outcry, primarily from the EU, from smaller cloud providers in the EU who felt—justifiably—that Microsoft was being not—uncompetitive with Azure vis-à-vis every other cloud provider. Well, Microsoft turned around and last year changed the rules such that most of these smaller cloud providers get rules that are, ehh, similar to what Azure can provide. There are still exclusives that only Azure gets. So, what you have now is basically, if you're a customer, the best set and cheapest set is with Azure, then these smaller cloud providers give you a secondary—it's close to Azure, but still not quite as good. Then AWS, GCP, and Alibaba.So, the rules have been switched such that you have to know who you're going to in order to even know what the rules are and to know whether you can comply with those rules with the thing you want to build. And I find it most peculiar that, I believe it was the first of last month that Microsoft made the change that said, “You'll be able to run Office on AWS,” which was Amazon WorkSpaces, in particular. Which I think is huge and it's very important and I'm glad they made this change, but it's weird because it creates almost a fifth category because you can't run it anywhere else in Amazon, like if you were spinning something up in VMware on Amazon, but within Amazon WorkSpaces, you can. This is great because customers now can run Office for a fee. And it's a fee that's more than you'd pay if you were running the same thing on Microsoft's cloud.But it also was weird because let's say Google had something competitive in VDI, but they don't really, but if they had something competitive in VDI, now this is the benefit that Amazon has that's not quite as good as what Microsoft has, that Google doesn't get it at all. So, it's just weird. And it's all an attempt to hold… to both hold a market strategy and an attempt to grow market share where they're still behind. They are markedly behind in several areas. And I think the reality is, Amazon WorkSpaces is a really fine offering and a lot of customers use it.And we had a customer at our last in-person boot camp in Atlanta, and I was really impressed—she had been to one boot camp before, but I was really impressed at how much work she'd put into making sure we know, “We want to keep using Amazon WorkSpaces. We're very happy with it. We don't want to move anywhere else. Am I correct in understanding that this, this, this, and this? If we do these things will be aboveboard?” And so, she knew how much more she'd have to pay to stay on Amazon WorkSpaces, but it was that important to the company that they'd already bet the farm on the technology, and they didn't want to shift to somebody else that they didn't know.Corey: I'm wondering how many people have installed Office just through a standard Microsoft 365 subscription on a one-off Amazon WorkSpace, just because they had no idea that that was against license terms. I recall spinning up an Amazon WorkSpace back when they first launched, or when they wound up then expanding to Amazon Linux; I forget the exact timeline on this. I have no idea if I did something like that or not. Because it seems like it'd be a logical thing. “Oh, I want to travel with just an iPad. Let me go ahead and run a full desktop somewhere in the cloud. Awesome.”That feels like exactly the sort of thing an audit comes in and then people are on the hook for massive fines as a result. It just feels weird, as opposed to, there are a number of ways to detect you're running on a virtual machine that isn't approved for this. Stop the install. But of course, that doesn't happen, does it?Wes: No. When we teach at the boot camp, Rob will often point out that, you know, licensing is one of the—and it's true—licensing is one of the last things that comes in when Microsoft is releasing a product. It was that way when he was at the company before I was—he shipped Word 1.0 for the Mac, to give you an idea of his epoch—and I was there for XP, like I said, which was the first version that used activation—which was a nightmare—there was a whole dedicated team on. And that team was running down to the wire to get everything installed.And that is still the case today because marketing and legal make decisions about how a product gets sold. Licensing is usually tacked on at the very end if it gets tacked on at all. And in fact, in a lot of the security, compliance, and identity space within Microsoft 365, there is no license compliance. Microsoft will show you a document that, “Hey, we do this,” but it's very performative. You can't actually rely on it, and if you do rely on it, you'll get in trouble during an audit because you've got non-compliance problems. So yeah, it's—you would hope that it keeps you from coloring outside the lines, but it very much does not.Corey: It's just a tax on going about your business, in some ways [sigh].Wes: Exactly. “Don't worry, we'll be back to fix it for you later.”Corey: [laugh]. I really appreciate your taking the time to go through this with me. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to keep up with what you're up to?Wes: Well, obviously, I'm on Twitter, and—oh, sorry, X, whatever.Corey: No, we're calling it Twitter.Wes: Okay, I'm on—I'm on—[laugh] thank you. I'm on Twitter at @getwired. Same alias over on [BlueSky 00:35:27]. And they can also find me on LinkedIn, if they're looking for a professional question beyond that and want to send a quiet message.The other thing is, of course, go to directionsonmicrosoft.com. And directionsonmicrosoft.com/training if they're interested in one of our licensing boot camps. And like I said, Rob, and I do those every other month. We're increasingly doing them in person. We got one in Bellevue coming up in just a few weeks. So, there's opportunities to learn more.Corey: Excellent. And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:35:59]. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me again, Wes. It's appreciated.Wes: Thank you for having me.Corey: Wes Miller, Research VP at Directions on Microsoft. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry, insulting comment that will no doubt be taken down because you did not sign up for that podcasting platform's proper license level.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

https://nuancespod.com/2023/09/17/charles-levan/ GUEST BIO Established in 2002, Charles Levan, C.E.O/Owner of Blue Buddha Entertainment, LLC specializes in sync placement for independent artists and labels, serving as a premier conduit for contemporary groundbreaking artists and repertoire. Past sync placements include: Shrinking, Found, All American, This Is Us, Supreme Models, & Grey's Anatomy to name a few. With over 27 years of experience in the music industry, Charles' passion in the sync space is coupled with a focus on artist development, helping artists hone their musical craft in an ever-changing entertainment world. Starting out at The Right Stuff/EMI-Capitol Records (North America), in the Marketing & Radio Promotions Department. Charles' most notable work includes marketing Al Green's platinum-selling Greatest Hits album and other high profile reissues. Charles balances his work life through an extreme passion for music, basketball, working out and mediation to stay spiritually grounded. . Instagram | YouTube | Web DEFINITIONS Wet behind the ears: Lacking experience/immature AAPI: Asian American Pacific Islander Sync: Synchronizing music to another medium such as video or even podcasts. Music supervisor: A music expert who typically offers music suggestions to be used in a scene, and is also responsible for clearing the licenses from all stakeholders for the song to be used. MENTIONED S1 E11 - Dr. Ashley Chung-Fat-Yim Spotify developing AI trained on host voice TAKEAWAYS Even in industries that are white dominated, there are some good mentors out there who can actually shield you from a lot of the discrimination. So make every effort you can to find those supporters who will use their privilege to back you when you need them to! When you have the opportunity to work with a mentor, showing up and developing that relationship makes it more rewarding for both parties. As someone who has been mentoring podcasters and music producer, I 100% agree with that. Because East Asians often have baby face, they are often assumed to be younger and less experienced than they actually are. So if you find yourself thinking an Asian colleague is likely too young or too inexperienced, it's good to quickly check yourself and make sure you haven't been fooled by the genes we stole from the fountain of youth. We're not a monolith so our experiences vary widely. That's expected and one does not invalidate the other. Charles, as an Asian American cis-straight man, has a different experience from Tonie (S1E3) who is non-binary, or Summer Swee Singh (S2E6) who's a woman, or Dani Saldo (S3E5) who is a disabled woman. We exist across a broad range of experiences. CONTACT Instagram | TikTok | Web | LinkedIn | Twitter Host: Lazou --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/nuancespod/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/nuancespod/support

When it comes to music, there is no greater medium for calming the mind and body. Concentration, relaxation, and sleep aids for coping with anxiety, stress and even depression. Have you ever wanted to lie on a beach, eyes closed and take in the sounds of the tropics? The resonation of a tropical beach ambience mixed with waves washing ashore is the perfect stress relief after a long day at work, study, decision making and even restful sleep. The exact process takes place with the sounds of nature, birds in deep forests, waterfalls and rivers – All have the same calming effect, aiding focus and a sense of wellbeing. Nature Sound Retreat's music stimulates the brain into a specific state using subtle pulsing sound to encourage your brain waves to align to the frequency of the beat. It helps induce enhanced focus, entranced state, relaxation, and sleep. NSR blends well the very best of elemental nature, Celtic music, orchestra and mostly percussion free classical compositions ,specifically targeting the effects desired as outlined above. Various ancient healing frequencies are utilized: 432Hz, 963Hz specifically, and combined with binaural beats, ASMR nature sounds, Alpha and Delta waves – enable listeners interested in deep sleep, stress relief, yoga, study music for focus and concentration, massage music. But there is more to Nature Sound Retreat for those who like to watch and not only listen. We combine meditation music with beautiful imagery, stunning landscapes and hypnotic Kaleidoscope videos that will take you on a journey of deep relaxation. Proponents of our music receive these potential benefits: Reduced stress and anxiety Increased focus, concentration, and motivation Improved confidence Better long-term memory after exposure to beta pattern frequencies, according to a 2019 study Deeper meditation Enhanced psychomotor performance and mood Join this channel to get access to perks: ►https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcsplj60aQC7mb1rgdhk5sw/join SUBSCRIBE NOW to become part of our community of FREE MEDITATION MUSIC. ►https://naturesoundretreat.com/YoutubeSubscribe iTunes here: ►https://naturesoundretreat.com/AppleMusic ------------------------------------------------------------------------ SPOTIFY here: ►https://naturesoundretreat.com/Spotify ------------------------------------------------------------------------ AMAZON here: ►https://naturesoundretreat.com/AmazonMusic ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Website: ►https://NatureSoundRetreat.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Facebook: ►https://www.facebook.com/NatureSoundRetreat ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Pinterest: ►https://www.pinterest.com/naturesoundretreat ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Instagram: ►@NatureSoundRetreat ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Twitter: ►@retreat_sound ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ©2023 Nature Sound Retreat. All Rights Reserved. Nature Sound Retreat is a Registered Trademark All videos and music are the sole copyright of Nature Sound Retreat. Licensing inquiries can be sent via Private Message

In this episode of the Ask Nurse Alice podcast, host Alice Benjamin discusses the story of Eliana Tinnenbaum, a 16-year-old who recently graduated from Arizona State University's accelerated nursing program. Alice shares how this achievement sparked controversy and divided opinions among people. While some praised Eliana's academic prowess, others questioned the appropriateness of someone so young entering the nursing profession. Alice explores the different perspectives surrounding this milestone and emphasizes the importance of congratulating individuals for their achievements, regardless of their age.Jump ahead to listen:[00:00:27] Controversy over young nursing graduate. [00:04:38] Young nurse's eligibility dilemma. [00:08:19] Adolescents as nurses. [00:11:23] Licensing and age requirements. [00:15:11] Emotional challenges for young nurses. [00:19:13] Job demands and adolescent maturity. [00:21:40] Incorporating adolescents into healthcare. [00:25:19] Younger nurses and professional growth. [00:29:48] Impact of 16-year-old nurses. 

Alan Ohnsman, Senior Editor, Forbes joined Grayson Brulte on The Road to Autonomy podcast to discuss Gatik and the road to profitable autonomy. The conversation begins with Alan and Grayson discussing AB 316 — the future of autonomous trucking in California. The State wants to support the tech and get it out there, and sees the benefits of that. But at the same time you have active opposition from a very powerful labor group that represents a lot of truckers in the State of California. – Alan OhnsmanThe conversation expands from policy to the future of AI and Gatik, a middle-mile autonomous trucking start-up that is on the road to profitable autonomy. Gatik is a company that did not raise billions of dollars, and Gatik did not come out of the gate saying were going to use autonomy for everything. We are going to do robotaxi, we are going to do trucking, we are going to do food deliveries, you name it, we are going to do it. They focused on one thing — middle-mile delivery from a distribution center to a large retail store, that's it. Nothing else. – Alan OhnsmanCompared to their peers that have raised billions in capital, Gatik has raised a mere modest $120 million. To achieve their goals, the company does not need billions as they are highly disciplined when it comes to operating the business. For every contract that Gatik signs with a customer, each vehicle that goes into service is contractually guaranteed revenue of $200,000 per year. For every 100 vehicles the company puts into service, the company will generate $20 million in yearly revenue. At this time, Gatik currently has 50 vehicles in service, generating $10 million in yearly revenue. Gatik is forecasting that the company could potentially be profitable within as little as two to three years (2025-2026). As the company ramps up towards profitability, they are going to gradually start expanding to highway driving in addition to city streets. Their goal is to overtime, they will move into highway trucking. They will move into Class-8 trucking, they will move into other types of delivery services that they are not doing now, and it's going to be this gradual evolution of the business. All of it is premised on the fact that it has to a revenue generator. – Alan OhnsmanLooking to the future, Gatik will not explore a potential IPO until the company is profitable on a GAAP basis. Rounding out the conversation, Grayson and Alan discuss the autonomous trucking industry as a whole and the Waymo Via shutdown. Wrapping up the conversation, Grayson and Alan discuss licensing and the future of Zoox.Chapters:0:00 The Road to Autonomy Index0:56 The Road to Autonomy Introduction 1:23 AB 316 and Autonomous Trucks in California 6:01 AI and the Push Back from Unions 10:39 Gatik and The Road to Profitable Autonomy42:58 Licensing the Waymo Driver 45:16 Future of Zoox?50:10 Future of Autonomy Recorded on Monday, August 28, 2023--------About The Road to AutonomyThe Road to Autonomy® is a leading source of data, insight and commentary on autonomous vehicles and logistics. The company has three businesses: The Road to Autonomy Indices, with Standard and Poor's Dow Jones Indices as the custom calculation agent; Media, which includes The Road to Autonomy Podcast and The Road to Autonomy's This Week In The Index; and The Road to Autonomy Research and Consulting Services.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

  I am delighted to be back with you, my friends, after our summer break!  Our brief hiatus during the summer months was time well spent, as I devoted my energies to nurturing the Women of Wonder community.  Today's episode holds a special place in my heart! It stems from a question I posed on Instagram a few months ago about career guidance. Even though my post was intended for general advice, the very first query I received was related to mental health. Given my expertise in that area I decided to tackle this topic personally. I did some extra research to deepen my understanding and extend my knowledge beyond my home state for a broader perspective. For those on the path or considering a career in mental health, I am thrilled to engage in this discussion with you and share a glimpse into my personal journey with its twists and turns in the hope of inspiring you to believe that it is never too late to pursue your dream career. I provide practical guidance, especially for those interested in private practice, and discuss the steps to reach that stage. Beyond the specifics, I also explore the broader aspects of choosing a career in mental health.  If mental health is not your career interest, this episode may not be for you, but please share it with those who might benefit. What Do You Want to Do After Graduation?  Before pursuing a career in mental health, it's crucial to ask yourself what you envision doing once you complete your education. Your career goals will significantly influence the path you choose. Whether you aim to work in private practice, schools, social programs, or community centers, your desired outcome will guide your decisions. What Do You Want to Learn in Your Program?  The second vital consideration is the content of your educational program. The courses and curriculum should align with your interests and career goals. For example, if you are interested in clinical work, you will want a program focusing on psychology, counseling, and developing essential therapeutic skills. Ensure the program you choose matches what you want to learn. What License Do You Need?  Licensing requirements can vary widely depending on your location and career aspirations. To work independently in a clinical setting or private practice, you will typically need a Master's degree in counseling or social work. The type of license you pursue- whether it is in counseling, social work, marriage and family therapy, or another related field- must align with your career goals. Understanding the specific licensing process for your chosen field is crucial. The process often includes passing exams, completing supervised hours, and obtaining provisional licenses before achieving full licensure. 3 Key Factors Before embarking on a career in mental health, consider your ultimate career goals, the content of your educational program, and the specific licensing requirements for your chosen field. These three key factors will help you make informed decisions and navigate your path to a fulfilling career in mental health. Education and Early Career Steps  Upon completing a Master's degree in a mental health-related field, the next step is to pursue licensure. This journey often begins with entry-level positions. I worked at a domestic violence agency and served as an advocate in court for survivors of sexual and domestic violence to get social work experience. Engaging in one-on-one counseling with supervision can also be instrumental in building your expertise. Some positions may offer supervision as part of the compensation, which can be advantageous. Accumulating Supervised Hours  Gaining clinical experience and supervised hours is essential for licensure. I worked simultaneously at a domestic violence agency and a group practice to accumulate hours. My goal was to maximize clinical hours and work toward licensure efficiently. Seeking employment with supervision included can be financially advantageous and help you achieve licensure sooner. Pursuing Doctoral Education  While pursuing licensure, some individuals opt for doctoral education. I initially enrolled in a Ph.D. program focused on human behavior but switched to a Psy.D. program focusing on clinical courses over research and statistics. Doctoral programs offer specialized knowledge, and choosing one aligned with your career goals is crucial. Licensure Path Choices  After completing a doctoral degree, you may have the option to pursue additional supervised clinical work to obtain a psychology license. However, this route may be time-consuming and require working for free or paying for supervision. Choosing to pursue licensure should align with your career goals and financial considerations. Some mental health professionals decide not to pursue licensure and their degrees are still valuable in their practices. Transitioning to Private Practice  Many mental health professionals aspire to open a private practice. However, graduate programs often lack comprehensive business training. Therefore, you may need additional education or mentorship in entrepreneurship and business management to establish and manage a successful private practice. Self-Assessment and Decision-Making  Throughout your career journey, it is essential to reflect continually on your goals and desires. Ask yourself what you want to achieve, what you want to learn, and which license or credentials align with your career aspirations. Researching state licensure requirements and staying informed about evolving regulations is essential. Resources and Reading Recommendations  For those pursuing careers in mental health or anyone interested in gaining insights into the field, several books provide valuable knowledge and perspectives: The Gift of Therapy by Irvin Yalom: Essays offering insights into the therapist's experience and boosting confidence. Letters to a Young Therapist by Mary Pipher: A must-read for therapists, offering guidance and reassurance. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl: Explores human resilience and the search for meaning in life. An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness by Kay Redfield Jamison: A personal story of living with mental illness and pursuing a career in mental health. Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma by Galit Atlas: Explores trauma and its intergenerational impact. The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog by Dr. Bruce Perry: Chronicles stories of resilience and survival in the face of unimaginable trauma. My Grandmother's Hands by Resmaa Menakem: Explores trauma, racial trauma, and resilience. The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity by Nadine Burke Harris: Discusses childhood adversity and its lifelong impact on health. These books offer valuable insights, whether you are pursuing a career in mental health or simply interested in human behavior and resilience. A Dynamic Process The journey from education to practice in the mental health field is a dynamic process that requires ongoing self-assessment, reflection, and alignment with personal and professional goals. It is a rewarding path that offers opportunities for growth and the chance to have a meaningful impact on the lives of others.   Quotes:

In this MacVoices Live! conversation, Chuck Joiner, David Ginsburg, Brian Flanigan-Arthurs, Brittany Smith, Jim Rea, Ben Roethig, Eric Bolden, Jeff Gamet, and Mark Fuccio finish off the discussion of UK tech legislation then explore the intricate realm of music rights and licensing in television shows, emphasizing the significance of restoring the original music and how it contributes to a more immersive viewing experience. Additionally, we delve into the possibility of utilizing AI technology to create new songs with a specific era or show's style, providing a potential solution. (Part 2)  Today's MacVoices is supported by Factor. Visit FactorMeals.com/macvoices and use the code macvoices50 to get 50% off! Show Notes: Chapters: 0:00:00 UK's tech policies and Netflix's move away from DVDs 0:01:51 Alarming government actions, even in familiar settings. 0:02:08 Negotiating Exploit Lifespan for Government Surveillance 0:04:19 UK and US Security Services' Attitudes towards Encryption 0:06:11 Ben Franklin's Quote and the Trade-Off Between Security and Liberty 0:06:39 Android updates and security concerns 0:08:05 Companies using locked-down devices for remote work in China 0:09:50 Specific VPNs for China and abiding by government rules 0:11:15 Speculation about VPNs and privacy concerns 0:18:10 Netflix sends surprise discs to current DVD subscribers 0:22:05 The Disconnect Between Art and Commercial Viability 0:23:36 Star Trek Prodigy: Another Victim of Show Scrapping 0:24:04 Disney Plus: A Prequel to Jules Fern's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea 0:24:34 Questioning the intention behind tax write-offs 0:26:07 Challenges in accessing certain movies due to licensing issues 0:28:22 Cultural significance overshadowed by copyright restrictions 0:29:57 Disney's role in extending copyright and its consequences 0:31:42 DVD vs Streaming: Music and Cultural Connection Links: It's not just iMessage: UK government could ban Apple security updates https://9to5mac.com/2023/08/24/apple-security-updates-ban/ Benjamin Franklin on sacrificing freedom for security https://quotesfromthepast.com/benjamin-franklin-on-sacrificing-freedom-for-security/ Netflix Says You Can Keep Their DVDs (and Request More, Too) Guests: Eric Bolden is into macOS, plants, sci-fi, food, and is a rural internet supporter. You can connect with him on Twitter, by email at embolden@mac.com, on Mastodon at @eabolden@techhub.social, and on his blog, Trending At Work. Brian Flanigan-Arthurs is an educator with a passion for providing results-driven, innovative learning strategies for all students, but particularly those who are at-risk. He is also a tech enthusiast who has a particular affinity for Apple since he first used the Apple IIGS as a student. You can contact Brian on twitter as @brian8944. He also recently opened a Mastodon account at @brian8944@mastodon.cloud. Mark Fuccio is actively involved in high tech startup companies, both as a principle at piqsure.com, or as a marketing advisor through his consulting practice Tactics Sells High Tech, Inc. Mark was a proud investor in Microsoft from the mid-1990's selling in mid 2000, and hopes one day that MSFT will be again an attractive investment. You can contact Mark through Twitter, LinkedIn, or on Mastodon. Jeff Gamet is a technology blogger, podcaster, author, and public speaker. Previously, he was The Mac Observer's Managing Editor, and the TextExpander Evangelist for Smile. He has presented at Macworld Expo, RSA Conference, several WordCamp events, along with many other conferences. You can find him on several podcasts such as The Mac Show, The Big Show, MacVoices, Mac OS Ken, This Week in iOS, and more. Jeff is easy to find on social media as @jgamet on Twitter and Instagram, jeffgamet on LinkedIn., @jgamet@mastodon.social on Mastodon, and on his YouTube Channel at YouTube.com/jgamet. David Ginsburg is the host of the weekly podcast In Touch With iOS where he discusses all things iOS, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Apple Watch, and related technologies. He is an IT professional supporting Mac, iOS and Windows users. Visit his YouTube channel at https://youtube.com/daveg65 and find and follow him on Twitter @daveg65 and on Mastodon at @daveg65@mastodon.cloud Jim Rea built his own computer from scratch in 1975, started programming in 1977, and has been an independent Mac developer continuously since 1984. He is the founder of ProVUE Development, and the author of Panorama X, ProVUE's ultra fast RAM based database software for the macOS platform. He's been a speaker at MacTech, MacWorld Expo and other industry conferences. Follow Jim at provue.com and via @provuejim@techhub.social on Mastodon. Ben Roethig has been in the Apple Ecosystem since the System 7 Days. He is the a former Associate Editor with Geek Beat, Co-Founder of The Tech Hangout and Deconstruct and currently shares his thoughts on RoethigTech. Contact him on  Twitter and Mastodon. Brittany Smith is a trained cognitive neuroscientist who provides ADD/ADHD, technology, and productivity coaching through her business, Devise and Conquer, along with companion video courses for folks with ADHD. She's also the cofounder of The ADHD Guild, a community for nerdy folks with ADHD. She, herself, is a self-designated “well-rounded geek”. She can be found on Twitter as @addliberator, on Mastodon as @addliberator@pdx.social, and on YouTube with tech tips. Support:      Become a MacVoices Patron on Patreon      http://patreon.com/macvoices      Enjoy this episode? Make a one-time donation with PayPal Connect:      Web:      http://macvoices.com      Twitter:      http://www.twitter.com/chuckjoiner      http://www.twitter.com/macvoices      Mastodon:      https://mastodon.cloud/@chuckjoiner      Facebook:      http://www.facebook.com/chuck.joiner      MacVoices Page on Facebook:      http://www.facebook.com/macvoices/      MacVoices Group on Facebook:      http://www.facebook.com/groups/macvoice      LinkedIn:      https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckjoiner/      Instagram:      https://www.instagram.com/chuckjoiner/ Subscribe:      Audio in iTunes      Video in iTunes      Subscribe manually via iTunes or any podcatcher:      Audio: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesrss      Video: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesvideorss 00:00:00 UK's tech policies and Netflix's move away from DVDs 00:01:51 Alarming government actions, even in familiar settings. 00:02:07 Negotiating Exploit Lifespan for Government Surveillance 00:04:18 UK and US Security Services' Attitudes towards Encryption 00:06:11 Ben Franklin's Quote and the Trade-Off Between Security and Liberty 00:06:39 Android updates and security concerns 00:08:05 Companies using locked-down devices for remote work in China 00:09:50 Specific VPNs for China and abiding by government rules 00:11:14 Speculation about VPNs and privacy concerns 00:18:10 Netflix sends surprise discs to current DVD subscribers 00:22:04 The Disconnect Between Art and Commercial Viability 00:23:36 Star Trek Prodigy: Another Victim of Show Scrapping 00:24:03 Disney Plus: A Prequel to Jules Fern's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea 00:24:33 The Great Cancellation: Nautilus Show Gets Shelved 00:26:06 Challenges in accessing certain movies due to licensing issues 00:28:21 Cultural significance overshadowed by copyright restrictions 00:29:57 Disney's role in extending copyright and its consequences 00:31:42 DVD vs Streaming: Music and Cultural Connection

Learn how to make money from your ideas. Free Resources to help you sell your ideas: https://inventright.com/free-inventor... Do you need help? https://inventright.com/services/ Stephen Key's books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Stephen... Read our articles for Forbes, Inc., and Entrepreneur: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stephenkey/ https://www.inc.com/author/stephen-key https://www.entrepreneur.com/author/s... Connect with us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenmkey/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/invent/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/inventrightllc Visit inventRight.com. Call: +1 (650) 793-1477 Hi, this is Stephen Key and Andrew Krauss. We are here to help you make money from your ideas. We started our company inventRight over two decades ago to teach people how to license (aka rent) their ideas to companies in exchange for royalties. This process is called “product licensing.” On our channel, we show you exactly how you to take an idea and license it to companies in exchange for passive income. Today, you do not have to start a business to make money from an idea. With product licensing, you don't have to write a business plan, raise money, manufacture, market, sell, or distribute any longer. Visit our website inventRight.com for more information. If you have a product idea and need some help, please contact us at: Phone: +1 (650) 793-1477 Toll Free: +1 (800) 701-7993 Email: support@inventright.com Email us: stephen@inventright.com andrew@inventright.com Learn how to start a business, how to become an entrepreneur, how to protect intellectual property, how to patent an invention, how to stop people from stealing your ideas, how to prototype an idea, how to contact companies looking for ideas, how to design a product, how to make a sell sheet, how to make a promo video, how to negotiate a licensing agreement, how to get a higher royalty rate, how to do market research, and how to work with inventRight. Stephen Key and Andrew Krauss are the cofounders of inventRight, a coaching program for entrepreneurs that has helped people from more than 65 countries license their ideas for new products. They are also the cofounders of Inventors Groups of America, an organization that hosts a free, popular monthly educational meeting for inventors online. They have more than 20 years of experience guiding people to become successful entrepreneurs. New videos every week, including interviews with successful entrepreneurs. Learn from the best! Pitch us your story to be featured on inventRightTV: youtube@inventright.com. Get your own inventing coach by contacting inventRight at #1-800-701-7993 or by visiting https://www.inventright.com/contact. inventRight, LLC. is not a law firm and does not provide legal, patent, trademark, or copyright advice. Please exercise caution when evaluating any information, including but not limited to business opportunities; links to news stories; links to services, products, or other websites. No endorsements are issued by inventRight, LLC., expressed or implied. Depiction of any trademarks/logos does not represent endorsement of inventRight, LLC, its services, or products by the trademark owner. All trademarks are registered trademarks of their respective companies. Reference on this video to any specific commercial products, process, service, manufacturer, company, or trademark does not constitute its endorsement or recommendation by inventRight, LLC or its hosts. This video may contain links to external websites that are not provided or maintained by or in any way affiliated with inventRight, LLC. Please note that the inventRight LLC. does not guarantee the accuracy, relevance, timeliness, or completeness of any information on these external websites. The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.

We're Back!!! Its Season 6 and we are so glad to be here. We wanted to start this season career focused. You know we always talk about going as far as you can so for some that means taking the licensing exam. In this episode we are talking to our girl Queen T aka Tabatha from The 4air Project and her experience with taking this exam. Her story of resilience and perseverance is inspiring and encourages everyone not to give up even if you don't pass the exam the 1st or 2nd time taking it. Also, we discuss the data released by the ASWB that revealed what we already know that this standardized test marginalizes people of color and is inherently racist. You can find Tabatha on ig @the4airproject , there you can g to her link tree and see what she's up to and materials she offers parents in helping their children return to school. Here's the link to the ASWB data: https://www.aswb.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/2022-ASWB-Exam-Pass-Rate-Analysis.pdf .

In this video, inventRight Co-Founder Andrew Krauss interviews inventRight member Tess LaChance and her coach Paul Sorenson. Tess talks about her licensing vs venturing her product. You can support Tess by purchasing her product here. https://www.bootbinder.com/ Learn how to make money from your ideas. Free Resources to help you sell your ideas: https://inventright.com/free-inventor... Do you need help? https://inventright.com/services/ Stephen Key's books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Stephen... Read our articles for Forbes, Inc., and Entrepreneur: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stephenkey/ https://www.inc.com/author/stephen-key https://www.entrepreneur.com/author/s... Connect with us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenmkey/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/invent/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/inventrightllc Visit inventRight.com. Call: +1 (650) 793-1477 Hi, this is Stephen Key and Andrew Krauss. We are here to help you make money from your ideas. We started our company inventRight over two decades ago to teach people how to license (aka rent) their ideas to companies in exchange for royalties. This process is called “product licensing.” On our channel, we show you exactly how you to take an idea and license it to companies in exchange for passive income. Today, you do not have to start a business to make money from an idea. With product licensing, you don't have to write a business plan, raise money, manufacture, market, sell, or distribute any longer. Visit our website inventRight.com for more information. If you have a product idea and need some help, please contact us at: Phone: +1 (650) 793-1477 Toll Free: +1 (800) 701-7993 Email: support@inventright.com Email us: stephen@inventright.com andrew@inventright.com Learn how to start a business, how to become an entrepreneur, how to protect intellectual property, how to patent an invention, how to stop people from stealing your ideas, how to prototype an idea, how to contact companies looking for ideas, how to design a product, how to make a sell sheet, how to make a promo video, how to negotiate a licensing agreement, how to get a higher royalty rate, how to do market research, and how to work with inventRight. Stephen Key and Andrew Krauss are the cofounders of inventRight, a coaching program for entrepreneurs that has helped people from more than 65 countries license their ideas for new products. They are also the cofounders of Inventors Groups of America, an organization that hosts a free, popular monthly educational meeting for inventors online. They have more than 20 years of experience guiding people to become successful entrepreneurs. New videos every week, including interviews with successful entrepreneurs. Learn from the best! Pitch us your story to be featured on inventRightTV: youtube@inventright.com. Get your own inventing coach by contacting inventRight at #1-800-701-7993 or by visiting https://www.inventright.com/contact. inventRight, LLC. is not a law firm and does not provide legal, patent, trademark, or copyright advice. Please exercise caution when evaluating any information, including but not limited to business opportunities; links to news stories; links to services, products, or other websites. No endorsements are issued by inventRight, LLC., expressed or implied. Depiction of any trademarks/logos does not represent endorsement of inventRight, LLC, its services, or products by the trademark owner. All trademarks are registered trademarks of their respective companies. Reference on this video to any specific commercial products, process, service, manufacturer, company, or trademark does not constitute its endorsement or recommendation by inventRight, LLC or its hosts. This video may contain links to external websites that are not provided or maintained by or in any way affiliated with inventRight, LLC. Please note that the inventRight LLC. does not guarantee the accuracy, relevance, timeliness, or completeness of any information on these external websites. The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.

Wildcat Licensing WI LLC v. Atlas Copco Tools and Assembly Systems LLC

Today, Dr. Kathy explores the topic of college and career decisions for kids. She discusses the economic advantage of obtaining a college degree and how it can significantly increase earning potential compared to those with only a high school diploma. She gives practical helps to encourage parents to have open conversations with their children about their future and consider the opportunities a college education can provide. She emphasizes the importance of guiding children towards a bigger vision for their future and encourages parents to support their children's academic interests and aspirations. Tune in to gain valuable insights on navigating the college and career conversation with your kids.

Ask and you shall receive … Answers from The Guys!  How can investors plan to fund their retirement lifestyle? What effects might a declining population have on real estate?  Join us as we dig into the mailbag and address your most compelling curiosities in another engaging episode of Ask The Guys! Visit our Special Reports Library under Resources at RealEstateGuysRadio.com.  

When it comes to music, there is no greater medium for calming the mind and body. Concentration, relaxation, and sleep aids for coping with anxiety, stress and even depression. Have you ever wanted to lie on a beach, eyes closed and take in the sounds of the tropics? The resonation of a tropical beach ambience mixed with waves washing ashore is the perfect stress relief after a long day at work, study, decision making and even restful sleep. The exact process takes place with the sounds of nature, birds in deep forests, waterfalls and rivers – All have the same calming effect, aiding focus and a sense of wellbeing. Nature Sound Retreat's music stimulates the brain into a specific state using subtle pulsing sound to encourage your brain waves to align to the frequency of the beat. It helps induce enhanced focus, entranced state, relaxation, and sleep. NSR blends well the very best of elemental nature, Celtic music, orchestra and mostly percussion free classical compositions ,specifically targeting the effects desired as outlined above. Various ancient healing frequencies are utilized: 432Hz, 963Hz specifically, and combined with binaural beats, ASMR nature sounds, Alpha and Delta waves – enable listeners interested in deep sleep, stress relief, yoga, study music for focus and concentration, massage music. But there is more to Nature Sound Retreat for those who like to watch and not only listen. We combine meditation music with beautiful imagery, stunning landscapes and hypnotic Kaleidoscope videos that will take you on a journey of deep relaxation. Proponents of our music receive these potential benefits: Reduced stress and anxiety Increased focus, concentration, and motivation Improved confidence Better long-term memory after exposure to beta pattern frequencies, according to a 2019 study Deeper meditation Enhanced psychomotor performance and mood Join this channel to get access to perks: ►https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcsplj60aQC7mb1rgdhk5sw/join SUBSCRIBE NOW to become part of our community of FREE MEDITATION MUSIC. ►https://naturesoundretreat.com/YoutubeSubscribe iTunes here: ►https://naturesoundretreat.com/AppleMusic ------------------------------------------------------------------------ SPOTIFY here: ►https://naturesoundretreat.com/Spotify ------------------------------------------------------------------------ AMAZON here: ►https://naturesoundretreat.com/AmazonMusic ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Website: ►https://NatureSoundRetreat.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Facebook: ►https://www.facebook.com/NatureSoundRetreat ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Pinterest: ►https://www.pinterest.com/naturesoundretreat ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Instagram: ►@NatureSoundRetreat ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Twitter: ►@retreat_sound ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ©2023 Nature Sound Retreat. All Rights Reserved. Nature Sound Retreat is a Registered Trademark All videos and music are the sole copyright of Nature Sound Retreat. Licensing inquiries can be sent via Private Message

Learn how to make money from your ideas. Free Resources to help you sell your ideas: https://inventright.com/free-inventor... Do you need help? https://inventright.com/services/ Stephen Key's books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Stephen... Read our articles for Forbes, Inc., and Entrepreneur: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stephenkey/ https://www.inc.com/author/stephen-key https://www.entrepreneur.com/author/s... Connect with us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenmkey/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/invent/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/inventrightllc Visit inventRight.com. Call: +1 (650) 793-1477 Hi, this is Stephen Key and Andrew Krauss. We are here to help you make money from your ideas. We started our company inventRight over two decades ago to teach people how to license (aka rent) their ideas to companies in exchange for royalties. This process is called “product licensing.” On our channel, we show you exactly how you to take an idea and license it to companies in exchange for passive income. Today, you do not have to start a business to make money from an idea. With product licensing, you don't have to write a business plan, raise money, manufacture, market, sell, or distribute any longer. Visit our website inventRight.com for more information. If you have a product idea and need some help, please contact us at: Phone: +1 (650) 793-1477 Toll Free: +1 (800) 701-7993 Email: support@inventright.com Email us: stephen@inventright.com andrew@inventright.com Learn how to start a business, how to become an entrepreneur, how to protect intellectual property, how to patent an invention, how to stop people from stealing your ideas, how to prototype an idea, how to contact companies looking for ideas, how to design a product, how to make a sell sheet, how to make a promo video, how to negotiate a licensing agreement, how to get a higher royalty rate, how to do market research, and how to work with inventRight. Stephen Key and Andrew Krauss are the cofounders of inventRight, a coaching program for entrepreneurs that has helped people from more than 65 countries license their ideas for new products. They are also the cofounders of Inventors Groups of America, an organization that hosts a free, popular monthly educational meeting for inventors online. They have more than 20 years of experience guiding people to become successful entrepreneurs. New videos every week, including interviews with successful entrepreneurs. Learn from the best! Pitch us your story to be featured on inventRightTV: youtube@inventright.com. Get your own inventing coach by contacting inventRight at #1-800-701-7993 or by visiting https://www.inventright.com/contact. inventRight, LLC. is not a law firm and does not provide legal, patent, trademark, or copyright advice. Please exercise caution when evaluating any information, including but not limited to business opportunities; links to news stories; links to services, products, or other websites. No endorsements are issued by inventRight, LLC., expressed or implied. Depiction of any trademarks/logos does not represent endorsement of inventRight, LLC, its services, or products by the trademark owner. All trademarks are registered trademarks of their respective companies. Reference on this video to any specific commercial products, process, service, manufacturer, company, or trademark does not constitute its endorsement or recommendation by inventRight, LLC or its hosts. This video may contain links to external websites that are not provided or maintained by or in any way affiliated with inventRight, LLC. Please note that the inventRight LLC. does not guarantee the accuracy, relevance, timeliness, or completeness of any information on these external websites. The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.

This week, we spoke with Andrew, who loves licensing images and ideas! Andrew taught us all about how licensing works and why it's beneficial to creators and consumers of all kinds. You can find Andrew at his blog, at his data backup site and podcast, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, and on Instagram @andrewdarlow. His PSA hashtag is #FirstDayLightCheck. Follow us @throuthewindow on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr to stay up-to-date on our projects, and don't forget to use #LoveThisThingCast to tell us about the things you love!

A health campaigner says the Christchurch Mama Hooch sexual assault case has exposed failings in liquor licensing rules and is calling for an overhaul of the law. Last week Brothers Danny and Roberto Jaz were sentenced to significant jail terms for drugging and sexually assaulting multiple women at the family's bar over a three-year period. Health Coalition Aotearoa Board co-chair Boyd Swinburn says the fact the Mama Hooch bar remained open while there were the serious charges against them shows a real weakness in the licensing process. He says it should be hard to get a licence and easy to lose one. Swinburn spoke to Corin Dann.

Today on Day Two Cloud we dive into the implications of licensing changes that HashiCorp has made to its popular Terraform software. In short, the company has switched from an open source to a business source license. HashiCorp says it felt compelled to make the change to ensure that some other business entity doesn't take the open-source software and turn it into a competing product (looking at you, AWS). Will the licensing change have a significant impact? For 99% of users probably not, but there are caveats and concerns to discuss. Today's show is a crossover with Chaos Lever, a weekly podcast co-hosted by Ned Bellavance and Chris Hayner that covers IT news. The post Day Two Cloud 208: HashiCorp Licensing Changes And The Day Two Cloud-Chaos Lever Crossover appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Joining us today for this deeply technical conversation is RiscZero CEO Brian Retford and Justin Drake. RiscZero is attempting to create a zkEVM for Ethereum that will require such low compute requirements that validators could be run on smart watches and mobile phones. Moderated by Justin Drake, we take a look at the implications this tech can have on the future of Ethereum. -----

EP309 - Instacart IPO Filing  Warning: Given the complexity and breadth of topics, this is a longer than usual episode with a runtime of 90 minutes (if we had more time, we'd produce a shorter podcast). Update: In this episode Jason mentioned that he didn't think Instacart accepted SNAP payments. It turns out that Instacart did start accepting SNAP earlier this month. On Friday, August 25th 2023 Instacart filled its S-1 IPO form with the SEC, in advance of its intention to make an initial public offering. The complete filing is almost 400 pages. In this episode we summarize all the key points, including a number of surprises, in the filing. If you want to follow along with the actual S-1, you can download it here. Scot suggests you focus on pages 101-124. Topics Covered: Cover Page and Entry Level Items Overall Growth Trends 25:50 Unit economics 42:90 Cohort Analysis 48:10 Instacart Ads 56:30 The Big Risk/Concern 1:00:11 Other observations (Instacart+, Carrot Services, Generative AI) 1:22:50 Other episodes mentioned: Episode 255 - Instacart Chief Revenue Officer Seth Dallaire and Episode 224 Customer Cohort Analysis and CLV with Dr. Daniel McCarthy. Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 309 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Tuesday, August 29, 2023. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Jason: [0:23] Welcome to the Jason and Scot show this is episode 309 being recorded on Tuesday August 29th I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scot Wingo. Scot: [0:38] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason and Scot show listeners. We are going to jump into the talk tonight because one of our most popular shows as you know Jason the format is a deep dive and we have got a great Deep dive for you guys this episode. Last Friday August 25th there was a very big event not only in our favorite world's grocery which is Jason's favorite world and my favorite world of e-commerce and then Jason's favorite world of. But also in my favorite world of startups so this is this is a pretty big event and we wanted to dedicate a complete episode to it. I mean it is the filing of the S14 instacart. [1:24] And just to set it up the you know in my world of start-up land it has been very hard to get an IPO done so there's been a couple post coated and like late 2020. And then summon 21 and then there's been a dry spell there's been something called a dese back so you have this spec which is this. [1:44] Special-purpose acquisition thing and you can kind of go public through this kind of complicated convoluted thing. Tends not to go very well so there's been some of that like in My World Mobility there is one called get around and there's been a couple others and those typically have not. Gone so well they're down like 95% bird the scooter company did this as well. So it's been a very dry IPO market for startups and thus of interior backed investors. So there has been a lot of anticipation around when is that a PO when they're going to open who's going to be brave enough to kind of stick their foot out there first. And you know a lot of people have been rooming that instacart would be out there there's a couple other companies in this kind of unicorn Stratosphere stripe is another one that we cover a lot on the show from the payments world. There's also the others you can think of Jason there's this one. There's a software one that is just doing really well in AI that's been mentioned a lot not not open AI it'll come to me in a minute. So you know so this is kind of the real. Bang the Big Bang of here's a company that is being brave enough they're gonna go first and we're going to see what happens so it's going to be really interesting and we thought because it hits this Venn diagram of all of our favorite things that we would spend a fair amount of time on. [3:10] So first of all this is a 400 page document so our value add to the listeners is we have distilled it down into what we think are the most interesting little tidbits and some of the things we've learned from instacart it is nice because there's been a lot of rumors about how instacart Economics work and Jason has been tracking their ad piece which is you know cpgs have really seen some really nice results from that so we know that's been active and the areas we picked apart we thought we would cover tonight is I wanted to kind of give you a quick and dirty Scott's guide to reading an s-1 and we'll start at the cover page that's there's actually a lot that happens on the cover page so I want to spend a little time there and kind of give you a little I haven't taken a company poet behind the scenes of what's going on on there and then we're going to talk about some of the overall growth things that just kind of help you understand. [4:07] How to think about instacart how they're growing and what they do and what role they play and then unit economics one of the things that is happening more and more in these s1's is they're doing a more comprehensive cohort analysis and this is basically showing hey if if I car to a customer in a certain period how are they doing now and what are those Trends so that this this had a lot going on there of course we want to talk about the ad business and then little bit of a catch-all for other observations, Jason anything I missed before we jump into the cover page. Jason: [4:42] No I think you mostly covered it just one slight correction it's four of our five favorite things for those listeners that tuned in to hear us talk about Ahsoka we're going to do that on an upcoming episode so that Star Wars would be our fifth. Scot: [4:56] Yes sadly there was no Star Wars in this one so it's that one little part of the over the Venn diagram was left is its own little circle out in space. Jason: [5:06] That's a we call that a teaser for a future episode. Scot: [5:09] Yeah yeah we're we're Pros were 300-plus episodes into this thing and this is the kind of you know Pro level that we deliver on the pod. So you guys missed it Jason forgot to plug in his microphone earlier so that's a yeah we're still still learning every day, so when you open an s-1 the first thing you see is the cover page and it you know a lot of people just Breeze by it because it's a cover page but it has a lot of really valuable information so first of all the first thing that I noticed is I was searching for this on Edgar and I kept typing in instacart and it wouldn't show up and I was like WTH I know this s1's out there why can I not find it and then I saw an article and it said oh the company's real name is maple bear so that's the first thing you see on the cover is the company we all refer to as instacart its actual Corporation name is maple bear and it does business as instacart so I thought I did not know that prior so that was the first thing I learned right there on the cover so that's interesting so if you do go to the will put a link to the s-1 in the show notes but if you do Brave the Edgar SEC database yourself throwing a little Maple bear there and not instacart. Jason: [6:22] Not to be confused with Amazon's house brand Mama Bear. Scot: [6:26] Yeah yeah and I'm sure there's a honey bear and brown bears there's a there's a lot of a lot of bear things going on. The other thing that I was like to see is what symbol are they using I think it's fun to kind of you know as an entrepreneur to kind of think about what symbol you're going to use that best personifies your brand Channel Bowser we had ecom's so that was an exciting one so we captured e-commerce Shopify go. Jason: [6:52] The best ticker symbol of all times by the way. Scot: [6:55] Thank you thanks thanks I appreciate it. Shopify head shop and that was a good one and instacart / Maple bear is going with cart so I think that's a that's a that's a pretty nice one you know it kind of there a multi grocer chart cart and we all think about instacart I'm sure they hate being called Instagram so this kind of like really punches on the cart so maybe they get away from everyone mistakenly calm Instagram. Jason: [7:19] I think it's solid. Scot: [7:20] Yeah A-Plus on the symbol and then in the you'll notice that a lot of the evaluations and how many shares they're selling are blank and that's you know in this draft of this one which is the first kind of public one that they're dropping out there they'll they'll iterate a couple more times they'll do their Roadshow and then write one that, it prices they'll update the S12 include all that information so they'll make kind of literally a game day decision the night before IPO of how much based on the order book how much they want to sell and at what price so that, that's going to be blank through probably several more iterations as we go on then this is did you want to do something in. Jason: [8:04] No I was just I was just thinking that they I assume they left it blank because the underwriters were out of practice. Scot: [8:10] Yeah no no they they are there waiting and that's a good point because when you go public the the companies that take you public in this context they're all investment banks on Wall Street. But they they filled this role of Underwriters and basically what they're doing is they're acting as market makers they're going to cover your stock when it's public and they're also going to be basically pounding the pavement to sell your stock to buy side by side analysts and firms on Wall Street. Which there's two buckets of there's mutual funds and hedge funds there's also retail that I guess there's three buckets, retail would be you log into Schwab or Robin Hood and the diet of the IPO you try to buy some chairs that's retail and they all allocate a little bit of that for the IPO so they like retail to come in and get a little taste. [9:04] A lot of folks that if you're an accredited investor at an institution and you have a wealth manager, sometimes you can get a little bit of access to an IPO before it prices you don't get a special price or anything but you can if you're really excited and you're a retail customer you and you're in this kind of wealthy bucket then you can you can get some allocated shares I think is what they call it these call this friends and family they don't call that, that anymore that's called a allocated shares but what's important about the underwriters is there's actually a signal there several signals here and I didn't know this time went through the process. First of all they have lined up a who's who of investors so even before you get to Underwriters they have this really interesting note right before right underneath before they get in the underwriters and they say oh by the way we have lined up these investors already that have committed to buying and they have committed Asterix and then they kind of like take away the committed but. [10:05] I think that's a legality I think I think it's a pretty hard commitment is my reading of them and they basically say these guys are already these guys have lined up to buy at least 400 million in this offering. Regardless of the price and there's some big names in there there what I would call. Public-private so they have invested in instacart already as a private entity and then they have another side of there. Firm that invest in public entities and they have said that side is going to support the private side and that's nor just Bank tcv. [10:38] Sequoia and a couple others this is very unusual but I think it's an interesting play because it basically says to the market. Hey you don't have to worry about this thing you know taking on the first day because we're going to were signaling to you we're going to place a chunk of this with these folks that are long-term holders and they're going to backstop this thing I think of it as a adding a floor to the IPO basically saying we know it's been a while we know there's risk out there we're going to have a floor on this so so there's built-in demand for this IPO so that's quite unusual and this is the first time I've ever seen anything like that sometimes you'll see tiro price is a big one a big mutual fund that likes to do this or they'll have a private-public and they'll say you know they'll kind of suggests that, they're interested in buying more and they'll come out and say they don't plan to sell or they've accepted a lock up for a year or something like that I've never seen such a strong message as this one so I thought that was interesting. Okay then we move to the bottom of the cover and that's where you have the list of the underwriters and what's really interesting is the way this works is the bigger your font the bigger a role you play in the IPO so on this one the biggest font is Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan and you know they have I don't know what would you say Jason like a 40 Point font. Your. Jason: [12:03] Yeah I had to read it with my my PDF zoomed way up so I feel like I yeah but it was a big font. Scot: [12:11] Yeah yeah so those guys get like a you know they're kind of really big and then what's also interesting is where you show up on the page is important so your importance starts at the left and goes down to the right so the most important what we would call the vernacular is the lead left which is the biggest font on the left side of the cover is the lead Investment Bank and as Goldman Sachs and they're they're The Bluest of Blue Chips everyone wants Goldman Sachs if they come out. [12:37] And then usually you want either JP Morgan or Morgan Stanley now JPMorgan has increased greatly and stature over the last three years because they have weathered coded and they have basically absorbed most of Silicon Valley Bank's deposits and a lot of these other riskier Banks and their CEO is pretty famous Jamie dimon so they've this is kind of you know two blue tips on the top of the book here which is pretty interesting and then, then you kind of go down a bit and you end up with 18 more Underwriters and there's like three levels of them there's like the font gets smaller so you go from 40 point to 20 point then you go to like kind of like 15 point and you go to seven point and you know what's interesting is I have never seen this many Underwriters either so they basically have said we want everyone on Wall Street lined to go and help us sell this we will turn no Rock no Rock will be unturned looking for buyers of instacart stock with the institutional investors. There's some International Players so they've basically if you kind of said if you if you. [13:53] Few War Room doubt what are some things a company could do 2D risk an IPO they have done things I've never seen before times like three and then the last thing that's interesting is the economics each of these Banks gets kind of depends on where they are on the page so you know if it all this gets him to like, there's all this Machinery but these guys do it because they make money so Goldman will make their kind of highest percentage and then JPMorgan and so on and so on based on how much they contribute to the book and all this kind of calculus that goes on behind the scenes so I thought that was kind of a really interesting just on the cover some things that were very unusual from other IPOs I've seen Jason anything that you found on the cover that was riveting. Jason: [14:43] We'll know I did. I have a question for you though I got I guess I when I saw all of those Underwriters I kind of and perhaps erroneously assumed that part of what was going on here is, it's been a while since there were in any IPOs that went through an underwriter and that all of the underwriters are out there. Desperate for four deals and that therefore. Instacart had more more leverage to get more Underwriters like is it. Is it literally instacart just agreed to pay more for these two more Underwriters 2D risk the IPO is that. Scot: [15:23] Yeah I think. So human nature is that the lead laughed and Lead right want to absorb a lot of the deal and don't want to share too much so so typically there's some friction there right so they'll be like yeah you could add a couple and they use this tearing language I don't you know this is just kind of how I don't know who how they know what who's what dear, but tier one is Goldman Morgan and JP Morgan Morgan Stanley and then tier 2 is you get kind of Stiefel, a couple others in there then you go tier 3 and then you kind of have like an international kind of tearing as well so usually you get like two from Tier 1 Maybe two or three from tier 2 and then that's kind of it and then if you've if the company feels strongly like another consideration is when you go public one of the things that helps you long term is to have analysts that follow your stock and we've had many of these analysts on our show Mark mahaney Collin Sebastian these are and then Scott Devitt he was at stifel and he's moved on to another shop these are these are famous people in the internet marketing world so you want take Mark sets, I wasn't even as Fern was he ever green but that's not it. [16:40] Ever Quorum so so you as the company can say the Goldman hey I know you guys want to keep a lot of Economics but I want mahaney on this and we got to get ever Cora so some of those on the bottom are probably International distribution retail or something the company wanted kind of specific to add them on and you know that was all pre-negotiated with Goldman getting lead left they had they kind of had to acquiesce to having a bit of a large number of Underwriters on there so I don't yeah I don't think I'm sure they all wanted to be to your point like there certainly wasn't even saying no to being invited to this and they probably you know you just bake off in this was I came to imagine if they ended up with 18 like, mr. started with 80 I don't know it's crazy that was probably like a. Six week bake off just to hear from all the bankers so yes I think there's more around the analyst going on with with the large number on some of those. Jason: [17:39] Got it and then I want to hear your speculation about where the price might come in but I'm trying to remember the details there's been a lot of interesting things going on with the private placements before we got to this point right so I think the some of the valuations of the private placements were at some point disclosed and then I want to say instacart reset there. Their valuation at a lower number while they were still private like presumably to make the equity appealing for employees. Scot: [18:17] Yeah the sequence of events and this is all you know they don't disclose all this in this one because it's kind of like. Jason: [18:25] Sure I'm just trying to get the the Run. Scot: [18:27] The Whispers And if you read some of these you know I subscribe to a lot of things that talk about some of this kind of rumors and so take it with a grain of salt but there was some sequins like they were chugging along and then Covent hit and it was like Off to the Races vertical and I think the wheels kind of came off the bus and they started to lose money because the unit economics weren't weren't ready for for like a surge like that and then right around 21 they replace the CEO and they had to kind of emergency raise some Capital which is kind of like one of the worst times to do it because even though their revenue was surging the rest of the market was in the toilet basically so I think they had to do a Down Round And what I've heard is their bed raised money as high as 39 billion and then they took this haircut at with this new CEO in this kind of re leaning down the company at about 13 billion so. [19:19] So I think that's kind of like the watermark is kind of where they've last raised money and if you look at their revenue that's actually not that's a very reasonable Place given where you know they've grown since then but now what's the revenue like four billion ish yeah so they're like 3 billion and 22 in revs so that's like a four times Revenue which is pretty reasonable for a company growing the way they are with with good profitability so I would be I would not be surprised we don't we won't know this per share price until we see the denominator and they didn't have the denominator which is market cap divided by number of shares equals share price we don't know the number of shares so I would I would suspect. I'll guess, four billion I'm gonna guess 20 billion would be a low like I think it will price they're on the low end and it could go as high as 25 30 depends on you know. Retail and how much momentum it gets with with buyers. Jason: [20:26] And part of the art here is you don't you don't want to price it too low because that means you you have money on the table when you sold your Equity but you also don't want to price too high and have the, the stock like go down from the offering price and get below water right away right so. Scot: [20:49] Yeah it's very common we kind of had this situation at Channel visor we went public right after you know cortical right after in a longer time window of 08 09 and you know they strongly we had golden lead left and they strongly encouraged us to think long-term and not get obsessed about that pricing and leave a little bit of money on the table and yeah and then over time you could do a secondary at a higher price and you really want to you don't want to tank especially in a tepid market so I'm sure this was all part of the um you know Goldman would counter negotiate this to be lead left and say look we we need your commitment that your yep part of the pitch is they give you what they think it's worth and how it's going to price and they also discuss the strategy and that's part of the selection processes and you would think it would be. Okay whoever says they're gonna give me the highest price but you actually kind of they really stand out a lot because the Goldman people can talk about Dave, they've got like a lot of data to back up their strategy and you know there's like Watson there that that are. It would make your head spin and so they do a really good job of talking about why it makes sense to price the way they think and how how they see it over a longer Arc of time. Jason: [22:12] Gotcha so the guys with all the money have really good justification for why you shouldn't worry so much about the money. Scot: [22:18] And then the other thing to know though is what typically happens is you are not sharing you're not selling any one shares so the company so as part of this IPO the company will issue new shares so so you as the founder and the other investors you still have your shares you're not actually selling them at this moment so you know in a way now you get diluted right so the flip of that is your percent ownership goes down but you know it's kind of the would you take a little bit smaller. Of that and long term when you can sell your shares as the investor and the founder and the team and the people that bet on you now you know can you execute and deliver and then earn your way into a higher price and then that's when you can kind of like get some equipment sir. Jason: [23:08] Do you want a little bit of a grapefruit or all of a grape. Scot: [23:11] Yes exactly yep that is a good description. [23:17] Okay so here's here's the other part of the quick and dirty guide to reading the S1 you can take so that's cover is really good and then you take the literally the next let's see what is it. 100 pages and you can toss them so this is where the lawyers come in and they love to make sure you understand all the risk factors you know a meteor could hit the Earth people could stop needing groceries cybersecurity I could be no one wants to shop for them it could be they'll compete with a bunch of people Amazon is always a risk factor Google Microsoft. So all that really doesn't add value and then there's a little bit of financial stuff but it's it's pretty dry and it's kind of like from the Auditors almost so it's like super drive so it always do is you skip to the part of this one we're finally the lawyers have earned their large fees and they vomited forth 100 pages of risk you know stuff. And then you get to write your story and that's called the Management's discussion and Analysis in the industry it's called the md&a. [24:27] It's confusing I thought for a long time it was md&a because Aaron says mdna really fast and they're saying the word A and D and it sounds like an end to me and I kept saying what the heck does md&a stand for they're like what do you mean what's up what are you saying. It's like a who's I first got a thing but it's md&a so Management's discussion and Analysis and this is where you. Jason: [24:49] Because I read all 100 pages and and I'm super depressed and one of the risk factors is the way I could become sentient and take over the Earth. Scot: [25:00] Mmm yep that is a risk factor and then it will bring our groceries to us I guess as we are batteries for its consumption. Jason: [25:08] The computers won't eat. Scot: [25:10] So if you really want you know so what you can do is you can get the gist of 95% of this by printing out the s-1 pages 1012 124 that's it's only 23 pages and it's really dense but it is actually this is actually a very good read they did a very good job of making this so you know. It's very approachable and they go into a level of detail that's really handy into problem so we're going to give you some of the highlights from that but if you want to go deep on your own we will give you all you need to go to the next level just by looking at those 23 pages. Okay so what did you see and them DNA and that got your attention. Jason: [25:55] Well I mean a number of things so maybe just super high level what's exciting to me like obviously a lot of this information about the business was not, publicly available so in the process of going public in issuing S1 they suddenly reveal a lot of things and they reveal things about. Their own business but they also have to paint a pretty good picture of what they think is happening and could happen in the digital grocery business so it's kind of like getting a whole class of really smart people to sort of, write a thesis about the the digital grocery business that we get to read and interpret and you know we they reveal things that we didn't know like how valuable customers are over time and how much consumers spend on a given order at instacart and what percent share of wallet they think digital gets versus brick and mortar and all these sorts of things and we'll get into a bunch of them in the in the individual sessions but my my takeaway from the beginning of that management discussion was that it's a. [27:08] A pretty robust business that the aggregate amount of. GTV that they that they have is pretty significant its twenty eight point eight billion dollars in groceries that they sold in 2022. Scot: [27:27] Yeah and GTV is gross transaction volume so instacart it's basically a Marketplace like eBay or Amazon where parts of parts of Amazon all of you back where you have in the marketplace of product Marketplace use GMB a lot of payment systems like PayPal use tpv gross merchandising value total payment volume they have chosen to use this term for the gross figure of GTV and at first I thought it was going to be groceries to do but it's gross transaction value I thought for sure it was like grocery, I was trying to decode it without looking it up and I was like that can't be grocery because then I don't know what a TV is doing there and you know so then their revenue is a derivative of that meaning of some percentage then of that big number Falls to them as Revenue after they pay the grocer The Shopper and then instacart the business has the leftovers and which ends up, we'll go through the unique and I'll mix it ends up being being pretty small because the grocery business does not have huge merchants. Jason: [28:26] Yeah so kind of looking at those business fundamentals that you know in 2022 they sold 28.8, billion dollars worth of stuff which for them generated 2.5 billion dollars in revenue and they were profitable on that Revenue they they net 428. Million dollars which like back in the a couple years ago when there were more IPOs happening there were there were IPOs in the space they were happening with companies that still weren't profitable so so that was interesting that they they were meaningfully profitable and then the, you know you're super interested in what the growth trajectory is and. [29:13] 20:19 was a very small year so going from 2019 to 2020 you know and then the pandemic app in the middle 2020 and urban was ordering groceries from, from instacart so the growth in 2020 was astronomical like 300% or something like that. But then the growth in 2021 over 2020 was 24%. On revenue and the growth in 2022 over 2021 was 39% in Revenue so. The revenue growth is Meaningful and accelerating. Which would be exciting they were not profitable in 2020 or 2021 so 2022 is the First full year that they were profitable. The GTD is a little different though they had significant growth three hundred percent in 2020 20 percent in 20 21 and 16 percent in 2022 so, well they have a track record of growth it's the top on GTV growth is decelerating. And then of course we're halfway through 2023 so they have to disclose. [30:23] How the well they've done in the first six months of this year and they compared to that to last year and the revenue and GTV are both essentially flat in the first six months of this year. Versus last year so I don't know you'll have to tell me but I look at that and you go man there's some robust stuff here there's a great growth story. I should have mentioned that that's on an annual basis on a quarterly basis they have five consecutive quarters of profitability which also seems. Impressive him pretty favorable but it's probably a slight worry that the. A lot of that growth seems like it's it's leveling off in 2023 I don't know if. That the most recent performance gets gets over weighted or underweighted and sort of evaluating the the prospects for the company. Scot: [31:19] Yeah the buyers will you know what every everyone has a different way they value things and they they're going to build their own models and the company will give them some guidance that's some of the stuff we did it we're not going to go over and but you have to be careful because you don't want to make forward-looking statements so this is this weird dance you do of you. You try to get people excited by not saying anything about the future which is which is a little tricky so you know what I imagine instacart s' just reading the tea leaves again they talked a lot about how they don't really do much sales and marketing which I kind of read to say, look we really hunkered down on our unique economic sand we've got it dialed in right now and spoiler will get to adds a lot of a lot of that has come from this ad piece. And I think now. [32:07] Because investor and I was the bullish scenario is you know they're going to raise at least 400 million they'll probably raise a lot of money from this they could start doing some advertising and you pick up some new customers that again I'm going to kind of hope they look at the cohorts those cohorts look like with what this in the here and they have at least the same unique anomic so if not better and I'm going to look at this growth accelerating wow what Wall Street loves their favorite favorite favorite kind of the top quadrant is accelerating Revenue growth an accelerating profitability and you know I could see a scenario the light has to go their way but I could see a scenario where that works here you know if they could if they could start spending some really careful sales and marketing dollars building the brand where they've been kind of under the radar for the most part and then. That works those cohorts stick and then they can work on the economics because that's gonna bring more advertisers per order because the more average more orders and more. GTV is going to bring more cpgs in that want to advertise against that then you could argue accelerating Revenue growth accelerating profitable unit economics. So I think that's the bull case the bear case is they've hit saturation they've got all the stores. 4% is anemic and nowhere to go but down. So that's the end of it is it is going to be interesting to see there's a little bit of A Tale of Two Cities in those possible outcomes. Jason: [33:36] Yeah what else jumped out at you in the management discussion. Scot: [33:43] They made a big point of talking about they have 7.7 million monthly active users which is a good number but they point out that in the u.s. there's 330 million consumers or I guess population so they use that and this is kind of one of those hints I was talking about the basically said hey we're. We've done good to get here but these are like the early adopters we still have a long way to go there's a lot of people you know I don't think they'll get all of them and I'll talk about that in a second but there's a lot more people that you should be using our service that aren't is so they kind of paint that 7.7 million and say that's teeny tiny compared to where we should be. And then you know the other thing they talked about that I thought was interesting I wanted to get your opinion on is they talk about, per user per month they get three hundred and Seventeen dollars and I was wondering I know you probably know this off the top of your head. What is if you look at the average US consumer and you probably look at the. Population of the convenience store that's like a kind of probably like that 100K and up household you know what is their monthly and is this like half of it a quarter what is your spidey sense tells you on that. Jason: [35:00] Yeah so real rough numbers the average American family and you know people shop for groceries in households versus people so it's almost better to talk in household so there's like 131 million households in the US and sin they've got. Seven million of them as customers the average household shops for groceries 1.6 times a week and they spend a hundred dollars per visit so you kind of you know rough that up and you get. Get what is that I'll have the intern do in turn do the math one point six times. 100 times, 4.5 is 720 total grocery spin which I don't have the census numbers in front of me but but that passes the smell test that so. Households are spending six seven hundred bucks a month and instacart saying that they're getting less than half of that. Scot: [36:12] Yeah and I saw some people speculate on this that, what their inferring is Davin they have an average order of 110 so this is like 2.6 instacart some month instacart orders per user per month that's another kind of interesting metric and then people are speculating in the saying the pattern is probably people are doing a big shop once a month and they're kind of going and getting you know, a lot of like maybe canned goods and things like that and then they supplement it with two or three instacart has to bring maybe a refresh of the the replenishable is like the cheese the milk the veggies and the fruits kind of thing. Again this is everyone just kind of like taking data and kind of going out for data point so the cone of uncertainty is pretty big out there but it kind of passed my sniff test that's how we've used it before, at our house with exception of wizard a lot at work to fill our snack area at work and we're probably like we're probably like top one quartile of this whole thing that's the number of snacks we get from Instagram. There's a deep does that that analysis of the one big shop yourself and then supplement does that. Jason: [37:26] No exact yeah I mean I think the Grocer's talk and I hesitate to bring this up because I don't think I remember I'll for off the top my head but there's like four typical types of shopping missions right so there is that like Pantry stocking shop there's like a weekly shop there's a. Occasion Bay shop where your your it's date night or it's Christmas or whatever and you make a special shop and then there's those, top off shops and I think it's generally agreed like there's not a big cohort of consumers that have just said I'm never using a grocery store again then I'm exclusive we gonna, I have all of my my calories show up at my doorstep so digital grocery ends up being one of the tools in the family's tool kit for, procuring their their calories and so it makes. Total sense that they would have a share that one of the ways they could grow is to increase that share presumably by. Being the best choice for more of those different kinds of missions. Scot: [38:34] Yeah and then the md&a they talk a lot about how they have these new offerings where you can get a weekly Monday thing and they're definitely poking around at this experimenting on how to grow the sand again they're kind of signaling we think we've got some room to go on this we can get that. [38:51] Bridge order up and we can get the ma use way up the second thing I noticed was you know they use this they use this phrase, several times you can tell it's kind of like must be tied to company values and they talk about we believe people want selection quality value and convenience if that sounds familiar to you the this is infamously brought up in the Amazon Jeff Bezos first shareholder letter in 1997 where he talks about the mark you know what Amazon believes and they believe that a multi-decade trend is people will not get tired of selection quality value and when value he uses kind of free shipping like versus product value is pretty specific on it and then convenience and then what got me thinking about this is. [39:38] Value inconvenience her you know they're often in conflict and this is the whole point of we've had, Casey on the show from the Lloyd there bifurcation kind of model which shows this was this I think a lot about this because this is the whole one of the whole reasons I started spiffy and we decided early on if we're going to be convenient we can't be the cheapest and I don't think people look at instacart as the cheapest you know whenever we use it it's kind of like, holy cow this is this is a pretty expensive treat in you know I really kind of need to be able to justify this to myself that I can't just pop over the grocery store and do this myself it needs to be yeah some some reason I'm going to miss a kid event or something that I'm getting a really good bang for the buck here so I thought that was interesting that at some point I wonder do they value part kind of struggle with you know how. Jason: [40:31] I think they have to have a. A more liberal definition of value because I think you're exactly right right and obviously you know value means different things to different people like they disclosed later in the S1 that they not surprisingly that they skew disproportionately to households that make over 100,000 a year compared to a traditional retail and particularly a traditional grocer like give I've no idea what it looked like when they actually did it but when Kroger went public or certainly when Walmart went public they would have talked about the top of their tree that we think the consumer really values price and and Walmart probably said price not value and you know they built a business around very aggressively maintaining those low prices because they thought that was the beginning of their flywheel and and you know Amazon talked about value but they when they said value a lot of what they meant was and we're going to you know have the very competitive or the lowest price on a lot of these goods and, the the business model of instacart makes it unlikely that that can be their positioning so they have to kind of, find a a valid but alternative definition of value to hang their hat on. Scot: [41:50] Yeah and I thought was interesting they put convenience a lot you know last you may say oh you're reading too much into it but you know I've been in rooms you spend so much time on every word there's a purpose to this order of selection quality value and convenience and and they mentioned this exact phrase like several times so this is a this seems to be an yeah a pretty important phrase in their their world to I just thought that was I want to get your take on you know at some point they may cross this road where they have to pick a lane and it'll be if it ain't going to be the value late you know I don't see a path there but you know maybe they think they can and you know they also talked about selling to the grocer some software so maybe that's kind of like how they're squeaking that in I don't know. Jason: [42:36] Yeah yeah and there's I think we'll talk about this and in our final conclusion but the there's multiple ways you could see this going over time and depending on which path it took like value could mean something different. So what will come back to that. I heard you like dissected all of the the disclose data and put together unit economic model for for instacart. Scot: [43:07] Yeah so it starts at the top so the GTV per order so every order that comes in they get the GTV as $110 and then there here's how they slice the onion so the biggest chunk goes to the grocer for the groceries and they get 83 percent which is $91 so right off the top we're left with $19 but now the grocer they have to go make all their money so instacart is that's what you would basically get I think if you and I went to the grocery store you know maybe they're getting a little bit of a discount but they're they're taking that $91 and they're adding $19 on top of it and this is all X tip there's a there's there is a delivery fee and what not so then the Shopper gets 8.2% or nine dollars in order and that's in that delivery fee and then they get the tips. Jason: [43:58] Clarification on shopper because like in most contact Shopper would mean the consumer that's buying the goods The Shopper in this case is is a instacart gig worker that goes to the store and gets Aggregates the order for the customer. Scot: [44:14] Exactly the gig worker is the Shopper so they get nine dollars and they get 100% of the tip so whenever you you know whenever you what what they don't say some of these gay places in this bothers me because we fell out on this they say the gig worker gets 100% but then they take a transaction fee of 3%, now I can't find they say 100% I can't see any little asterisks that says there's going to skim 3% or something so. [44:44] So to the hopefully they're being super up front and they the gig worker does get 100% of the tips but the tips aren't in the economic the kind of sit over on the side to go to kind of bypass instacart all together and they go straight to the shopper. Who also gets nine dollars from instacart so if you gave a 20 dollar tip the the Shoppers going to get 20 plus 9 or 22, then at this point we are finally at instacart Revenue which is ten dollars and that's into pieces seven dollars is the transaction revenue and three is ads. So almost half their margin you know so 30% I guess yeah. I say half because the line is going so fast it will become half probably by 2024 you know half the. Profit the margin the revenue that they get and probably disproportionate part of margin is from the ad piece which we're going to talk about in detail so that is. That's pretty important to this whole enchilada and until they figure that out this didn't really work I do. [45:48] So they get so 110 dollar order $91 goes the grocer that leaves us with 19 Shopper gets nine we're left with 10 7 of that, is the transaction Revenue three is ADS then their costs come out they have three dollars of cost per order. And this is this is things like you know their entire some allocation of all their website hosting the engineering team developed the app. I don't know if they would put sales and marketing in there and they weren't very specific about what they do and don't put in cogs so that was a question mark. And they're left with seven dollars of gross profit for that order. My bet is marketing is not in there and they kind of take that up later but again the didn't really. Disclose that I saw what all was and not in Cox so basically that 110 boils down to seven dollars a profit from them and if we looked at it you know. I bet that three of that seven is basically from the ads and you know because there's almost no cost to serve an ad and so so I thought that was pretty interesting that like you know around half of the Prophet basically is from the ad system. Jason: [47:00] Yeah I think I think it's for sure interesting and like you know two possibilities there there there, average value of an order is 110 bucks traditional brick-and-mortar grocer is a hundred bucks and so one question like did instacart wasn't totally clear I mean they tried to take credit for having a higher order value but it wasn't clear like do we think. There's something unique about our experience that causes people to spend more or. Is our service just more expensive and so therefore you know if I got the same 60 items from from Walmart it would cost me $100 but if I got it from instacart Cassandra and ten dollars. But if it's the latter and I'm sure the real answer somewhere in between but but if it's the latter then you go you know all of the, The Profit that instacart is potentially taking is kind of from the. The convenient spread where they're you know getting consumers to pay more for the extra convenience of this grocery delivery. Scot: [48:08] So that was the unique nanak's what did you discover from the cohorts. Jason: [48:12] Yeah well I think we both we both noticed that they had a pretty detailed cohort analysis in the s-1 and by cohort analysis what we mean is they. They break down all the revenue they get from every. Group of customers on the first year they acquire those customers and then they track the spending for that group of customers in each, subsequent year and so you have a cohort that you acquired in 2017 you have a cohort you acquired in 2018, so on and so forth through this 20:22 cohort and there's. Other dimensions you could do Court analysis on but this this tenure cohort is most common and loyal listeners of the show will know we've certainly talked about it before no most notably with a guest Professor Dan McCarthy. From Emory University who spends a lot of time. [49:13] Talking about and thinking about cohort analysis so I my first thought when I saw this cohort analysis is I'll bet you Dan McCarthy's really happy right now and is probably. Deep deep into these numbers and he has a phrase that he calls a super annuities which is for the circumstances. The older cohorts get more valuable over time and keep contributing more Revenue to your business which is, you know that if you think about it that's that's the ideal state right you want those kind of six-year-old cohorts to be. [49:51] Growing and be your most valuable and if they're you know significantly tailing off over time then like you know you start to question the core value proposition of the business like maybe customers get fatigued with your business or decide it's not a good value in the long run or something else so um the the big takeaway for me of the cohort analysis is the cohorts grow over time the if you look at like the year one value of this cohort it averages $226 and then it goes up 33 percent in year two to three hundred dollars and then up 16%, to 350 dollars in year three and then another up another 16% to 4:00 in your for and then up 10% $445 in year 5 and up another 8% to 480 dollars in year 6 and so like fundamentally. That is a very good picture of. The value of the cohorts and I'm certain why they chose to include the cohort analysis in there as one because I don't believe there's any. Any filing requirement to do that and certainly lots of companies don't include any cohort cohort analysis but then my kind of secondary take is. [51:12] You know not every year is the same and so some of those cohorts like started before Cove it and then they're their behavior, was slightly impacted by their maturity but also impacted by covet and some of these cohorts started after Cove ID and so one of the things you would look for in that cohort analysis is did these guys just get a big spike from Cova da, when people are afraid to go to grocery stores and you know has that worn off right and that's kind of a comment common narrative out there like I argue. [51:45] It's mostly misunderstood when people give that narrative about digital but it's. It's even more likely that is misunderstood if you have that narrative and grocery because grocery appears like on the surface to be the one category where hey we're at three percent e-commerce penetration before covet and now we're 12% e-commerce penetration and so this, these cohort analysis if if there was a spike that dip back down you would expect to see some of the later cohorts underperforming versus the the precoded cohorts and we don't see that right that like all the cohorts grow and they grow over time the rate of growth slows down over time which is like I think pretty pretty typical and not surprising um so all that was super favorable the one thing and one will have to have Dan on the show but the one thing that I think wasn't in here that you'd really want to understand how valuable the customer bases and and again guys like Dan kind of pioneered this idea of how you value a company based on their customer base. [52:53] And kind of set the price based on on this type of data but I think they would also want to see some churn data and understand. How many people are each in each of these cohorts and whether there's the same people or lots of defectors and new people coming and all those sorts of things and none of that was was disclosed and assess. Scot: [53:22] Yeah you're right the I think they're making the argument that the swamps turn but because they don't disclose it you kind of. You have to trust him and he would he would want that data because you know the whole Begin Again the the bull case here is all right if you got super annuities than spending ad dollars to bring super annuities in this smart right because everyone you bring in the door is going to follow this cohort and start of it you know you and I looking at a table that the says you're one they start at 2:26 and then by year 60 at 500 bucks so they they double over their life cycle in their GTV so over six years so if you know if you can go buy them for a hundred bucks a pop then you would just go and, and spend all that money in it should be we have a super annuity on one side you can spend a lot of money acquiring customers on the other. Jason: [54:15] For sure true what. Scot: [54:17] You turn there's something that they could hide in there. Jason: [54:19] Yeah so you have to worry about that you also side note like a thing that drives CFOs crazy about marketers is you also have to have this argument about correlation and causation right that like if I went out and bought a bunch of customers would they maintain this the same level of performance or with those those. Purchase customers through higher advertising and through greater sales and marketing a activities be less oil less valuable customers by. The answer varies depending on the business. Scot: [54:53] Yeah that's where I this kind of come back to that bifurcation thinks I think would you say 120 million households. Jason: [54:59] Yeah 131. Scot: [55:00] Yeah so there's probably I think it's probably a pretty evenly split between convenience and value so call it 60 and they've got 7.7 so there's actually good I think they've got a 10% share of, what does the actual dress for Market because I don't think they're going to get any of the value or in a consumers because yeah the valuing consumer does not pay for convenience they'll just go to grocery store. Jason: [55:23] Yeah and again in the bottom quartile a lot of people are shopping for for groceries with government assistance and I don't actually think instacart should double-check this but I don't believe instacart has a way to accept Snap payments. Scot: [55:36] Yeah I don't think the government is going to subsidize the food delivered. Jason: [55:39] Well they just you know they do in other great white white guy like you can order groceries online from Walmart and pay with SNAP but I don't think you can with instacart. Scot: [55:49] Yes that's another factor and then at some point yeah I'm sure you'll bring this up but the. The if you're if you're a grocer you know a lot of ours opt out of the sand to themselves and they like we have a Harris Teeter that they don't accept instacart yeah they're not on there and they want to do their own they want to own the customer themselves. Jason: [56:12] Yeah I save that discussion for other but I think that's a super important one. Scot: [56:16] Forget I said that that's a teaser that's it's a teaser was what we call a tease. Jason: [56:19] Excellent teaser yeah because I feel like we've gone to the add segment of the breakdown of is there anything else you wanted to cover before that Scott. Scot: [56:28] No I'm on the edge of my seat to hear what you thought about that specific. Jason: [56:31] Yeah so it turns out instacart sanad Essence and probably shouldn't surprise anyone you know Scott you alluded to the change in CEO the the current CEO for this IPO is fidge Asuma Seema who formerly was VP of advertising at Facebook so they brought in a Facebook. Exact to run this business and shoot I should have looked up what episode he was on but Seth Dallaire was a past guest on this show when he was the chief Revenue officer. For instacart which was right around the time that that fidget joined. [57:19] Instacart so we actually had a discussion about their aspirations to become an advertising business and spoiler alert, it worked at instacart which we're going to break into and that guess set the layer subsequently was hired as the chief Revenue officer at Walmart where he's. Building Walmart connect which is also working so turns out ads are becoming an increasingly important part of the ecosystem for retailers but the basic ad math at instacart is that in 2022 the last full year of data instacart generated 470 million dollars in ads so 470 million on 28 billion in GTV, means that that's about 2.6 percent of the spin. That went to ads it's thirty percent of their revenue today and. [58:20] It's growing at 29 percent so it went up 29% from 2022 to from 21 to 20 22. Um it's grown another twenty four percent in the first months of six months of 2023 so, a lot of the unit economics of their transactions have kind of stabilized and are flat the one thing that's still growing at a very fast double-digit pace, is the ad business and at seven and twenty million dollars it's already reasonably robust and they don't. Ads are not a line item on the income statement that they included like you know and presumably like it's not. You could argue it's not Material against the three billion in in Revenue. But the so we don't we don't really know exactly how profitable, Those ads are but in general we would call these ads or retail media Network and the you know people argue about how profitable these retail media networks are people particularly argue about Amazon's but kind of the middle of the range when people estimate how what how profitable these things are is that they're about 75 percent gross right so in theory they should be near 99% gross margin because like you don't have to make anything to sell an ad. [59:46] You know you do need some technology you need an ad server you need Administration and salespeople you need brand safety people you know there is. Some infrastructure some of which has to scale with the ad business and so the the kind of. Most common estimate that that I see out there is like 75% of that revenue from ad business is profit. So that implies that the ad business contributed seven 555 million to the. To the income statement for 2022. Um and they were only profitable 428 million in 2022 so that the ad business contribute like by that sort of slice the ad business contributed. [1:00:33] You know covered all of their losses and and was essentially all of their their profit. In in 2022 and it's growing faster than anything else so it's very clear that the ad business is a key. Tenant of this instacart model and they in the management can section they it was kind of funny working for a big, advertising agency because they had to spend a fair amount of time like justifying that ads are valuable good thing and that people are spending money on ads so they kind of you know paint paint this picture that consumer packaged Goods companies which are you know most of the goods that instacart cells that. [1:01:20] Cpgs in the u.s. spend about 200 billion dollars a year on advertising and currently about a quarter of that is digital. And so the. The you know a typical cpg spends like about thirty percent of their gross sales on advertising and you know at the moment instacart is collecting about less than three percent of its sales in advertising so I think they're saying like hey. Advertising is super effective it's an important part of our economic model and there's a ton of. Of potential growth for us in this market and that cpgs need us and they amongst their claims about the size of their business, there are 50 500 brands that are advertising on instacart today and those are. At the moment all brands that sell. [1:02:18] Whose Goods get sold on instacart so we call that endemic advertisers right so it's it's Mondelez selling cookies and folks like that a lot of advertising companies. Sell ads to people that aren't necessarily selling through the. The the platform we call those non-endemic advertisers and we I don't think there are any non-endemic advertisers on instacart as of yet. But so at the Top Line like these are these are solid fundamentals for an ad business you like. [1:02:54] From my perspective retail media networks are super important evolution in the space they are very important I actually think for a lot of smaller retailers they get overhyped and that there's a problem with scale with a lot of these but instacart appears to be one of the companies. That has enough scale to build a real. A real business around this there is a unique problem that instacart has with ads that you know I think they've only been partially able to remediate so far who's paying for the ads. [1:03:25] Right so they talked about the brands paying for the ad right it's Procter & Gamble about the ad but there's a lot of stakeholders with budgets at Procter & Gamble, there's Mark Pritchard that buys Super Bowl ads and tries to build the brand and make people love tied but there are also account teams, that are trying to Goose the sales at their account so there's a Walmart account team and a Kroger account team and an Albertsons account team and all of those guys have an ad budget, that they want to use to sell more stuff at Walmart Kroger and Albertsons respectively. And so the big problem you have with instacart is you spend that ad dollar with instacart and you don't actually know. Which retailer it's going to impact. Right and so it's kind of like it has to come out of the top of funnel ad budget but it's bottom of the funnel Performance Marketing, type ads mostly search ads and so not saying that model can't work but it's. [1:04:33] The the guys with budgets that are used to buying ads are used to a slightly different structure so I will say that at the moment instacart causes a lot of consternation because it's a it's an unusual Beast that people don't exactly know how to budget for or how to spend their money on and you know I would assume if instacart wants to grow a lot they have to make that, easier for for the brands to do. Scot: [1:05:00] Yeah so what do you think. They're so this is a relatively good chunk of Revenue where do you think they're getting it from is it online going offline I mean offline going online are they taking it from Google are they taking it from couponing or. Two Brands even do like newspaper inserts are still a thing like I know that back in the day. Jason: [1:05:22] So I know I yeah I think. Brands are pretty pretty rapidly shifting their their dollars to digital vehicles and so two things like there's you know traditional kind of, newspaper magazine advertising that's atrophying and and the brands are replacing that with digital there's a slight misnomer the whole privacy thing and Facebook is a real thing but you know who wasn't buying a huge amounts of Facebook ads are like National cpgs with huge brand recall so so you know those tended to be smaller Brands and longer tail things so it's less like oh. [1:06:05] The these guys are shifting from Facebook it's more they're shifting from old-school marketing and over are television to to these digital vehicles but a big chunk of it is still coming out of these trade budgets right and so there may have been a pool of money that was allocated to spend at Kroger and it used to get spend on newspaper circulars that were like Kroger ads that fell out of the newspaper and that's an increasingly ineffective vehicle or maybe they even got spent on floor decals in the aisle at Kroger right you know like Shopper marketing tactics or trade tactics and so increasingly the retail media networks are getting a chunk of those trade dollars and I do think instacart is getting some of those even though it's trickier to do because you know it's not allocated exactly 21 specific retailer at the moment. Scot: [1:07:07] Yeah the so what did the ad formats I've seen is I always get this one that's like you through some Quaker Oats granola bars in there if you add these six things will give you a five bucks or something I've seen a coupon and I've seen a you know an upsell hey you've previously bought this or you may like this are there those are the three main add units or am I missing something. Jason: [1:07:33] Yeah so I am not going to speak specifically about the variation in ad units but as a general rule like probably I'm assuming the most predominant ads on the platform are search ads right so people search for products like always and you know above all the organic results are a bunch of sponsored ads right and so off very often those don't have a special offer in them they're just premium. [1:08:00] And so a big chunk is probably those those search ads you know then they're there are like Banner type ads that that land either on like the homepage of a particular retailer or on a category page or subcategory page and more often those are likely to have some call-to-action offer in them so they might have a promotion or a discount of some kind and then in the digital space um there's a lot of what we call like top off and impulse ads which are what you were just talking about right and you know one of the big problems we have with digital grocery is when you go shopping at the grocery store your wife sends you to the store with a list of 10 items and you buy all those 10 items but then you walk by the ice cream aisle on your way to the cash wrap and you add ice cream even though you didn't plan to buy ice cream and then when you're standing in the cash wrap, you're sneering at that Snickers bar or that Wrigley gum and you add that to the car and maybe a cold Coke to drink on the way home from the grocery store so a big chunk of a traditional grocer sales are all these unplanned impulse purchases and that. [1:09:16] By default happens a lot less in digital Grocery and so a lot of these ad formats are kind of are, our Industries early efforts to try to reinvent digital impulse and I would I would call it pretty imperfect at the moment. Scot: [1:09:35] Don't you get a nursing inside about gum or something like because self-checkout smelled the gum that serendipity. Jason: [1:09:42] Yeah the the that that cash wrap used to be the most valuable real estate in a grocery store like the most Revenue per square foot was that what we call the cash wrap which is the. The conveyor belt that you stand in line and actually the first thing that killed the cash wrap was not any of this digital shopping or any of these things it was. Facebook and the mobile phone and simply because you now had something else to do when you are standing