Podcasts about Q2

It's our annual (semi-annual?), let's respond to some...interesting claims made on YouTube episode! In this installment - Is Roblox, one of the most popular gaming platforms in the world, exploiting your child? What you don't know...probably won't change your understanding of the underlying voluntary transactions at play here. That said, there's much to discuss as Shut Up and Sit Down's Quintin Smith gets *extravagant* on behalf of People Make Games. Nobody needs to Shut Up, but we should probably have a bit of a Sit Down...in Virtual Legality. CHECK OUT THE VIDEO AT: https://youtu.be/pE3TjauWcow #Roblox #Exploitation #Response *** CHANNEL SUPPORT PATREON - https://www.patreon.com/VirtualLegality STREAMLABS - https://streamlabs.com/richardhoeg STORE - https://teespring.com/stores/hoeg-law-store *** CHAPTERS 00:00 Introduction 03:50 The Underlying Premise 05:46 Overview 06:53 Encouraging Folks to Develop 19:32 Problems of Discoverability 25:07 A Fair Share 36:47 Robux and Suspect Terms 44:57 Understanding Company Scrip 49:59 Bonus Arguments: Children and Activists 57:50 Jumping to Conclusions 1:01:59 My Conclusions (and Emil's) *** Discussed in this episode: "Been working on this for a while." Tweet - August 19, 2021 - Quinns https://twitter.com/Quinns108/status/1428341253603831812 "Investigation: How Roblox Is Exploiting Young Game Developers" YouTube Video - August 19, 2021 - People Make Games https://youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ "What is Roblox?" Roblox Parents Webpage https://corp.roblox.com/parents/ "An Antitrust Epic" YouTube Playlist - Hoeg Law https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1zDCgJzZUy-lb7ReoUqL5_dTcM8ngmfV "Roblox bookings grow 35% to $665.5M for Q2 2021" VentureBeat - August 16, 2021 https://venturebeat.com/2021/08/16/roblox-bookings-grow-35-to-665-5m-for-q2-2021/ "Infographic: Indie game revenues on Steam" August 9, 2020 https://vginsights.com/insights/article/infographic-indie-game-revenues-on-steam Roblox Corporation FORM S-1 REGISTRATION STATEMENT https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1315098/000119312520298230/d87104ds1.htm "Roblox Terms of Use" Updated May 18, 2021 https://en.help.roblox.com/hc/en-us/articles/115004647846-Roblox-Terms-of-Use "Developer Exchange Terms of Use" Roblox Help Page - Updated October 4, 2019 https://en.help.roblox.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005718246 "American kids want to be famous on YouTube, and kids in China want to go to space: survey" Business Insider - July 17, 2019 https://www.businessinsider.com/american-kids-youtube-star-astronauts-survey-2019-7 "Scrip" Wikipedia Entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip "Payment in scrip or similar medium not authorized." 29 CFR 531.34 https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/29/531.34 "Definitions" 29 USC 203 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/29/203 *** "Virtual Legality" is a continuing series discussing the law, video games, software, and everything digital, hosted by Richard Hoeg, of the Hoeg Law Business Law Firm (Hoeg Law). CHECK OUT THE REST OF VIRTUAL LEGALITY HERE: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1zDCgJzZUy9YAU61GoW-00K0TJOGnPCo DISCUSSION IS PROVIDED FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY AND IS NOT TO BE CONSTRUED AS LEGAL ADVICE. INDIVIDUALS INTERESTED IN THE LEGAL TOPICS DISCUSSED IN THIS VIDEO SHOULD CONSULT WITH THEIR OWN COUNSEL. *** Twitter: @hoeglaw Web: hoeglaw.com

EP272 - Q2 Ecom Data, Earnings, and Amazon News US Dept of Commerce Data In July retail sales were up 13.3% from previous July (down 1.1% from June). Year to Date sales were up 21.1% vs. 2020. Apparel is in the biggest recovery, up 63%. At peak of pandemic, restaurants lost nearly $51B/mo of sales to grocery stores. In July the gap has closed to $4B in sales. Restaurants sales for the past two months are higher than two years ago. Retail sales for all of Q2 2021 grew 28.2% from Q2 2020, e-commerce in Q2 grew 9% during the same period (due to the very high covid driven e-com last year). E-Com was 13.3% of retail sales for Q2. Q2 Retail Earnings Reports Walmart – US Comp Store sales up 5.2%, E-Commerce up 6% Target – US Comp Store sales up 8.9%, E-Commerce up 10% Home Depot– US Comp Store sales up 3.4%, E-Commerce flat Lowes– US Comp Store sales down 2.2%, E-Commerce up 7% Stores selling essential goods are comping against a very large 2020 basis in Q2. Most stores saw increased foot traffic driving store growth. Concerns about Covid resurgence and supply chain disruptions loom for Q3 and Q4. Amazon News NYT wrote that people now spend more at Amazon than Walmart – Jason says the number are debatable and that's besides the point. WSJ wrote Amazon Plans to Open Large Retail Locations Akin to Department Stores. We discuss Episode 272 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday August 20, 2021. 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. Transcript Jason: [0:24] Welcome to the Jason and Scot show, this is episode 272 being recorded on Thursday august 19 20 21 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scot Wingo. Scot: [0:39] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason Scott sure listeners Jason we had a little bit of a break in there you had vacation and I got to focus on car washing and it's good to be back together. Jason: [0:53] It is I had a great time but I did miss you. Scot: [0:57] Oh I did see that while you are on vacation your company won a big Walmart deal so I think they would like for you to go on vacation more often. Jason: [1:09] Yes that is the general consensus the like I have great empathy for anyone in these spaces where you have these like huge drawn-out pitches but this was like. More than five month pitch and. Not shockingly it took the the client a little longer to pick a winner then they they promise so I you were kind of. On pins and needles for a long time and then I went on vacation and we got a good result so I think all my my co-workers my the hundred of my co-workers that were involved in this pitch with me like are all eager for me to work even less than I already do. Scot: [1:48] Well I heard it was because Doug mcmillon listens to the podcast. Jason: [1:54] Yeah amongst others so Chef to all of our listeners from Walmart thank you so much for putting your trust in me and all the mean things that get said about you on the podcast all come from Scott please remember that. Scot: [2:08] Absolutely not I love Homer I probably spend more time in a Walmart than you. Jason: [2:13] That is debatable but I do know that you are a legitimate Walmart Shopper and and you have an awesome use case for Walmart. Scot: [2:25] Which one are you referring to. Jason: [2:26] I feel like Walmart is your go-to for hard to find Star Wars collectible toys. Scot: [2:34] That is true I have spent many a midnight at a Walmart waiting for the pegs the toys to be hanging from the pegs and it's just the best time to be at Walmart is the best people people watching that 12:00 to 3:00 a.m. period. Jason: [2:47] Yeah they're there are some interesting shifts that go on at a Walmart store especially the 24-hour ones. Scot: [2:57] And then I'm super jealous because on your vacation you've got to go two galaxies Edge before me and that is for the non Star Wars fan folks in the audience that is the new Star Wars attraction at both the California and Florida Disney parks. Jason: [3:16] Exactly and it was awesome we went to California Disneyland as many listeners will know I'm a dad in the body of a grandad so I have a, almost six year old son so we took him to Disneyland for the first time and generally, my my Advanced age is a disadvantage but in this one case it was an advantage because I had a much better excuse than you do to take time off from work and go to Galaxy's Edge. Scot: [3:43] Awesome well I'm bummed was it fun how would you rate it. Jason: [3:48] I highly recommend it I mean yes the whole trip was fun Galaxy's Edge lived up to my expectations and there's. Kind of too wet in the old days we would have called e-ticket rides in Galaxy's Edge. Smugglers Run on the Millennium Falcon and this much more extravagant ride called rise of the resistance and they were both awesome I would say rise of the resistance is the best ride I've ever been at an amusement park so so, totally cool totally worth it and you for sure have to go and I'll go with you when you're ready. Scot: [4:22] All right strong words were gone we'll take we'll take all the listeners will take your mom and you know some of the other folks with us. Jason: [4:31] I'm sure a lot of listeners would love to go the one that wouldn't would be my mom because my six-year-old dragged her on every roller coaster at Disneyland and he had a blast but she was like white-knuckled the entire time. Scot: [4:43] Okay so she's already checked the Box. Jason: [4:46] Exactly exactly you're not a big enough draw only the grandson is a big enough traffic to your bed. Scot: [4:53] Well I'm glad you had an awesome vacation and the last time we recorded a podcast was one of my favorite days which is Amazon earnings and today is one of your favorite days of the year this is when the US Department of Commerce who sidebar has been on the podcast they drop a big load of data what did you discover in the data. Jason: [5:15] Yeah so just side note I just to be jealous of my my month Disneyland. Got got invited to keep working with my my favorite client for for the foreseeable future and I got quarterly e-commerce data from the US Department of Commerce so that's what I call winning. But yeah let's jump into it so. We're recording this on a Thursday on Tuesday the US Department of Commerce released their monthly retail sales data so super brief. Primer recap they published data every month. For the previous month and that's called the advanced retail monthly data it's kind of a quick look at the the month it was 15 days prior. And then they publish more comprehensive set of data for two months back which would be like 45 days prior. So so that's the data that we got on Tuesday and of course we're all pretty interested in what July looked like because there was this whole kind of. [6:19] Covid recovery and people rushing back to stores in the pivot from online back to stores and then there you know had been a lot of like negative news and rebounds because of Delta and so you know it's kind of interesting to see. See how the the data swung and so in general, if you were someone that looked at month-over-month retail sales it was a Debbie Downer month so Joel I was about one percent lower than June, but as I have counseled many times on this show that's not a very important number to look at what we really want to look at is July 20 21 against July. 20/20 so so year prior data and retail sales for for this July were 13.3% higher, then last July so ordinarily that would. Um cause for a party that's a huge growth like ordinarily we see like kind of for to unit three to four percent growth year over year in total retail sales so 13% is huge. But of course. Last July was still pretty impacted by by covid so we have this weird basis and as we'll talk about later that's why most retailers are talking about year over two years at this point but so first data point. [7:44] July was a good month it was up 13 percent from the previous July. [7:51] We I also like to look at year-to-date sales so I add up all the months and January through July of this year is up 21% versus January through July of last year, which is also very healthy and again half of that period would have been pre covid versus last year so that's that's encouraging and then, there isn't a. [8:14] In awesome measurement of e-commerce in the monthly data especially the advanced monthly data but there is this thing called non store sales which is kind of the closest proxy we have to e-commerce and that's where things got interesting it was about 5.9 percent up from last year so way slower growth. Then you would normally expect for e-commerce so you normally expect retail the girl about four percent in e-commerce to grow 12 to 15% so so retail growing 13% is unusually fast and and Ecommerce growing 6% is unusually slow. But again if you think about the fact that last July a lot less people are going to stores and instead spending online. It kind of It kind of fits so I would from my perspective, there was nothing there was nothing like super anomalous in this data it's kind of where we would have expected it to be and then I like to dive into the categories and see if there's anything important in the categories and again the categories are kind of where you would expect, by far the category that's most up this year versus last year on a monthly basis and a year-to-date basis is a Peril so the apparel industry is like. [9:32] Sixty-three percent better this year than it was last year because they were just absolutely creamed by by covid last year restaurants and bars or up thirty percent over last year but then there's some some categories that actually did well in covid but are still pretty significantly up so things like furniture and home, Sporting Goods those and consumer electronics are all up significantly. Even though they generally got a covid boost so. That that is pretty interesting and then the thing that I most look at specifically related to covid is. In covid everyone bought all their food from grocery stores instead of restaurant so restaurants got creamed grocery stores did really well and so we've been watching to see if that. [10:26] Goes back to pre covid levels and it's getting awfully close so you know in. March of last year seventy percent of the calories got sold by grocery stores 30% by restaurants and that's a that's a that meant 60 billion dollars a month in sales that used to go to restaurants were going to grocery store so that's huge. And in July that Gap it became kind of, 52 versus forty eight percent so only a 4% Delta and pre covid-19 t-50 so that's that's about four and a half or five billion dollars a month, that grocery store still winning that they didn't win before covid but not surprisingly. Like people were eager to go back to restaurants and they are going back to restaurants and that's one of several indications we've seen that while. Digital grocery grew a lot during covid and it's going to keep some of those gains it does not appear to keeping all of those games and we are seeing some backslide and we're seeing that in things like like instacart sales as well. Scot: [11:40] Yeah there's been wasn't there a rumor that instacart was looking to be acquired. Jason: [11:46] Yeah yeah there's a few things out there there is a rumor that instacart was talking to doordash. And then Super interesting this week and I'll put a link to it in the show notes former guest and friend of the show Dan McCarthy who remembers the, the professor at Emory that specializes in in customer lifetime value and cohort analysis he got a big. Set of credit card panel data from Ernst research and he was able to use it to kind of. [12:20] Back into the gmv which in the restaurant business or the grocery business they actually would call govt Gross order value um and he was able to kind of figure out the size and stickiness of doordash and instacart and what he found was, instacart got a bigger covid bump than door – but that door – is much stickier and and has a much higher rate of repeat customers than instacart in fact. About 30% of he found that about 30% of door – Shoppers repeat and only about 20% of instacart Shoppers repeat and that that difference, is is very meaningful in the financial outcomes for those two companies and he kind of estimated that insta cards govt is probably around twenty three billion dollars on an annualized run rate so he kind of looked at it and said hey instacart does appear to have significant weakness versus door – and and so it kind of lien when the some Credence and some tangible Nest to the. The rumor that you know instacart might be on a covid peak in trying to sell at it's at its high we've also heard just some rumors that they're you know struggling to retain some of their there, customer Sellers and some things like that so so it's going to be an interesting space to follow. Scot: [13:48] Any other surprises from the dinner. Jason: [13:50] Nothing wildly surprising in later in this podcast we're going to talk about earnings and we're going to talk about Home Depot and Lowe's reported and so sort of a preview I would say like. Um the do-it-yourself category was a category that did really well in in covid-19, um and so you you know it's interesting to see like if that sticky if have you know as people are starting to go out more are they are they stopping the investment in their home and or are they reinvesting in their home this year is that a new habit so I've been watching the do-it-yourself space and it had modest growth. From last year so I want to from memory I want to say it was about eighteen percent up from last year and last year was a very. Hi year so that that's interesting and I won't spoil it but it's going to be that number will be even more interesting when we talk about how Lowe's and Home Depot. Scot: [14:53] Let's jump into it. Jason: [14:54] Okay so the next thing I wanted to talk about is so I mentioned that this monthly data doesn't have awesome e-commerce data in it. The US Department of Commerce publishes much better e-commerce data but they only publish a quarterly and that's why this week is so fun is because this is one of those quarter months when they publish both the monthly data and the quarterly data so we just today got the cue to e-commerce data from the US Department of Commerce and the top line here is Q to 2021 Drew about 28% from Q2 2020 and e-commerce. [15:38] I'm sorry tale so that's all of retail which like that's way higher growth than you normally see and eCommerce growth was 9% for that period so lower. Then you would normally expect to see right and again that kind of follows the trend here. E-commerce was artificially High last year and so you know even though it's growing it's growing against a bigger base and so the growth this year does not look as big. So a lot of people are you know trying to talk about. Growth on a two-year stack but that 9% growth becomes super interesting when you think back to Amazon you know Amazon got beat up because their rate of growth slowed a lot they were down to 22 percent but 22% still means you're more than growing more than twice as fast as the industry average. And as we're going to see you later like much faster than most of their competitors so so that that is pretty interesting and then a ton of news then writes like e-commerce is down. Because nine percent is lower than we would usually expect but I just want to remind people. That down doesn't mean what you think it means like like we sold more stuff online in Q2 of this year than we did Q2 of last year and Q2 of last year was amazing. It's just the rate of growth is slowing down. Scot: [17:02] This is where I always get confused because the headlines that came across my CNBC trackers were retail sales were down 1.1 percent and worse than expected. Jason: [17:14] Yeah so that was. Scot: [17:15] How do I reconcile that with 28%. Jason: [17:18] Yeah well so the 1% is monthly and it was that mean that was down month over month so that's June to July so, July 2 July monthly going back the retail sales were actually up by 13 percent which is much more healthy and Q2. Versus last Q2 retail sales are up what did I just say 20 that's the. Scot: [17:48] But okay but then the month-on-month is interesting because why do you you know if we're still coming out of covid you would expect it to be kind of climbing up even if we were heading into the fall or. Jason: [18:00] What you have to remember about consumer spending patterns and Retail is there it's all heavily driven by these purchased occasions and there's a bunch of purchase occasions that are tied to date and so the spending patterns you'd expect to see in July are different than the spending patterns you'd expect to see in June so there's there's more people spending on summer activities in June than July and there's more people starting to spend on back to school in July then in June and so there are all these factors that make it really hard to. Compare month-over-month in West you you do some like heavy seasonal adjustment gymnastics and even that tends to not work because, some of these these purchase occasion shift from month to month from year to year so sorry it's complicated. Scot: [18:51] Got it dads and grads will scrap it up two dads and grads being in June. Jason: [18:57] Yeah but so I mean my biggest takeaway is like as a retail I guarantee you every retail team I work with care a lot more about there. Their sales bases from last year than they do their sales bases from last month. Now the Miss versus analysts expectations that's a separate story and some you know obviously is you know like investors tend to get squeamish when, when the recharge missed the analyst expectations but it's super hard to predict analyst it's a tough job for the analyst right now given all the uncertainty around health and covid and we simultaneously have states where they're throwing parades because covid over and people are opening up and then we have states where their reinstituting Mass mandates so it's. It's like high degree of uncertainty at the. [19:51] Um so in that climate some poor companies had to report their earnings and face investors and so this was to me a fun week for earnings calls, Walmart reported their their Q2 earnings Target reported their Q2 earnings Lowe's and Home Depot reported their Q2 earnings and then TJ Maxx reported their cue turning so it's a pretty fun week in retail earnings um and. Again I tend to focus more on the operational metrics and less on the investor metrics so you know there were some beets and some misses in there that impacted stock performance and I don't pay that much attention to those. [20:33] As a reminder because Amazon reported a couple months ago and we did a whole show a couple weeks ago we did a whole show about it, Amazon is predominantly e-commerce and Amazon's Q2 was up 22 percent from Q2 of last year so so, put that data point in your head and then you go okay home Walmart and Target how did you guys do Target was up eight point nine percent. Which was a beet and Walmart was up 5.2% which I want to say was a meat if I'm if I'm remembering right so so both those retailers did pretty well they sold a ton of stuff last year during covid and they sold significantly more this year. Um with less of a covid impact and less of an economic stimulus impact and so that that. Was pretty encouraging both retailers throughout cautions about. Their performance the rest of this year and so both retailers I think had some negative movement in their stock based on there, um on there like forward-looking expectations but not based on their performance so so again. [21:53] Amazon twenty two percent Target at eight nine percent will call it and Walmart at 5%. Um that's their total sales e-commerce was a much more interesting story targets e-commerce grew ten percent. [22:09] And Walmart's e-commerce grew three percent and those numbers are tiny by historical standards right so Amazon is all e-commerce so their 20% growth means their e-commerce grew 22% so the so Amazon's e-commerce grew more than twice as fast as Target and more than four times as fast or about four times as fast as Walmart so that that makes Amazon's performance look even more impressive if you think about Target like last year. [22:41] They grew a hundred and ninety-five percent so, so again like really sucky to comp against that that huge huge Peak and last year Walmart grew a hundred percent so they're comping against a huge Peak so the, the story of Q 2 for all these retailers is going to be, you know how do they hold on in their total retail sales can they kind of beat the industry average and then. You know where do they fall on e-commerce and candidly like. Target Walmart and Amazon kind of don't surprise me what surprised me was Lowe's and Home Depot so remember I told you earlier that, the do-it-yourself category is crony US Department of Commerce is performing reasonably well it's like up like eighteen percent so. Home Depot with retail sales for the quarter were only up 3.4 percent and lows sales were down 2.2%. [23:52] So Kind of hard to reconcile that in my head like there are many other do-it-yourself retailers besides Lowe's and Home Depot. I almost think this is like highlighting a problem in the US Department of Commerce categorization because it just, I can't put together a model where Home Depot only grew by 3 / 3.4% where lows went backwards 2.2% and yet the whole do-it-yourself category went forward, yeah but that being said Home Depot's e-commerce and super cheesy how they report this like they Home Depot totally tried to bury this but Home Depot's e-commerce growth was flat, they did not grow from last quarter from this quarter last year again off a big basis they grew a hundred percent last year and then was grew seven percent. Which you know again that that's actually better growth than Walmart and Lowe's also had a big basis they had a hundred and thirty five percent so on an e-commerce standpoint you'd say like glows actually kind of out performed in e-commerce but then the bad news for Lowe's is they way underperformed and in terms of a brick-and-mortar thing which is of course much more meaningful to them. [25:11] Um so those were kind of the monthly earnings so. That I you know I think that is a trend the other thing that came out in these earnings calls is both Walmart and Target talked about how last year retail traffic was way down but ticket size was way up people came to the store to last and they bought more in each, trip almost all the retail growth we saw this quarter was from increased trip frequency, so it was almost all tied to more people walking into Targets in Walmart like there's probably pent-up demand go shopping from people that were we're doing more of their spending online so this is kind of, all of these data points are converging to say that people are are had kind of online fatigue and we're happy to go back to stores and we're seeing that in the industry data we're seeing that in the earnings data and you know it's going to be really interesting to look at Q 3 because. It's not clear that that trend is going to continue based on some of the the health news and. State restrictions that are getting imposed and certainly based on some of the international news. Scot: [26:22] Yet it was this time last year when we kind of coined the ship again, I wonder if we're teeing up for you even kind of a tougher holiday this this may be kind of teased out of the date a little bit like maybe maybe Lowe's was down because of supply chain issues of you know they just couldn't stop the stores I don't know that that's one way to explain kind of why one retailer would be doing bad but the category did it better, and yeah so you know the supply chains are all jammed up there's just all the way from Manufacturing to hear stories of you can't get room on boats and certainly planes and then when it gets here you can't get it off the dock because there's not enough trucks and then you know I'm living the nightmare scenario where you can't buy vehicles and I have a business built on being buying Vehicles so you know there's you know. The whole system's and need to add capacity for delivering more and there's literally no vehicles to be had due to this tube shortage so it's gonna be really interesting next four months to see how this plays out. Jason: [27:35] Yeah no a hundred percent agree I'm super concerned about holiday the inventory levels like wouldn't really show up in the, the kind of reported earnings like where it would come up in is the transcript of the investor calls and I'll confess I didn't listen live to I did listen to Walmart and Target I didn't listen live to Home Depot or Lowe's I kind of skimmed the transcript so I can't I don't I did not see, then calling out supply chain as a reason for this quarter's performance it definitely was called out as a risk factor for there. Their future performance and what was a little interesting is Walmart and Target vote both went to Great Lengths to express that they felt like they were going to be in a good inventory position for holiday and I say that because none of us are expecting them to be in a great inventory position for holiday so they're they're trying to. Push back that narrative and it like obviously those are two of the biggest retailers that have a lot of Leverage over the supply chain so it's like, you know if anyone can buy inventory it's going to be them and they're saying they've invested early and they think they've got the inventory they need for Holiday locked up. Your points are all, super valid like every step in the supply chain is more expensive and more fragile right now and the one that you didn't mention is. [29:05] It's also just harder globally to get stuff made and you know if you look at the global, like flow of covid there's really only one economy economy that completely recovered and got a hundred percent of their retail foot traffic back for example and that was China and guess what China is, like in the throes of a Delta pandemic and foot traffic to retail as way down like they've had a back slide and that has impacted factory production and productivity and you know you mentioned one tangible, way that's playing out as these chip shortages but like there's a bunch of them and then we also have this Global labor shortage, and a place where it's been particularly hard to hire people is in warehouses and factories and so I here in the United States we've got like a bunch of Labor shortages we've got a bunch of labor dispute so I want to say Mondelez has like three big factories under strike so Santa may not be able to get Oreos this Christmas like there's a lot of those things playing out right now so I would say, that Walmart and Target may have locked up enough inventory but there's. [30:21] Severe uncertainty about the holiday and I think everything we talked about for ship again in last year's going to be worse this year. FedEx and UPS have both announced their surcharges for holiday and they've already informed most of their customers of what there, how they quotas will be so that's going to for sure come into play the US Post Office which historically has not had surcharges is adding surcharges this year so lots of stuff going down and again, I'll be shocked of Amazon has as much capacity as they want but you know Amazon unique amongst all these retailers owns a lot of their own capacity and in fact. They're huge Amazon air Hub in Cincinnati just went online so. Yeah yeah and even when you can get stuff it's just more expensive like I want to say that like average price of a container with six thousand dollars last year and it's 22 thousand dollars right now so. Scot: [31:19] Effort Amazon Seller say 40,000 I don't know. Jason: [31:23] I think yeah it depends on what you know but yeah and so I again I've seen like. Retailers by part of a porch in Canada I want to say, um Canadian Tire like literally bought a shipping Port you know we've seen lots of retailers including Home Depot by their own container Freighters like, we're seeing all kinds of crazy reaches up into the supply chain to try to protect capacity so it's it's definitely going to be interesting. Scot: [31:54] We will keep listeners posted well this is the place to go to where we're called it last year early and we're going to keep tracking it and calling it early this year. Yeah and then since we're doing a news episode it wouldn't be a Jason and Scot show without a little. Jason: [32:15] News new your margin is there opportunity. Scot: [32:23] That's right Amazon news Jason I saw this one got your dander up a little bit on on the the Twitter there was a New York Times article where they talked about how Amazon is now officially a hundred percent without any argument bigger than Walmart and an article what they do is they use a third-party source for GM v data which I actually appreciate this because for a very long time I was trying to help educate people that that you can't just look at Amazon Revenue numbers that their impact is bigger because there's this kind of Iceberg neath the surface of gmv that matters because if someone buys something from a 3rd party seller for $100 other retailers lost $100 they didn't lose the around $10 commission that Amazon shows us Revenue so I thought this was pretty interesting and when you you gross up now the number they used was pretty aggressive I don't know who this this Source was I don't have a subscription but it seemed a little aggressive and the lines are definitely going to cross I thought maybe they had pulled it into your to what we're I know this kind of got you a little agitated what what do you think about this. Jason: [33:39] Yeah yeah so it's super interesting it's a great article it's it prompted a lot of conversation I am mildly annoyed so first of all the I have seen as a result of this this article got written in the New York Times and it's a very accurate article. But it then got echoed by hundreds of other Publications and it got. Progressively worse so a I thought that would warm your heart is a ton of these articles go to Great Lengths to explain why revenue is in a valid way to compare these retailers and what gmv is and it's like. They all have discovered this year what you've been been teaching all of us for four. Probably 10 years now at this point we're old but so that was kind of fun so the New York Times article the headline first of all was people now spend more at Amazon than at. [34:33] And then the subtitle is the biggest e-commerce company outside of China has unseated the biggest brick-and-mortar seller. And so what this article is saying is, they're using a gmv estimate from a data company that sells data to investors and so it's a Wall Street analyst firm called factset and facts that said, Walmart's trailing 12-month gmv, was 500 Global GMB was five hundred sixty six billion dollars and Amazons 12-month gmv was six hundred and ten billion dollars so for the first time Amazon's Global gmv is higher than Walmart's and so Amazon has finally passed. Past Walmart and you know we've hit this big milestone that everyone should be talking about right like so that was their article and nothing in its wrong I would argue that the fact that data tends to be on the aggressive side but, maybe aggressive for both and, facts that is not estimating gmv for Walmart just you know like they're using revenue for Walmart and they're using GM V for Amazon and as you know, Walmart now has a meaningful Marketplace why got you know I don't think they've disclosed what the. [35:59] The ratio of 1 Peter 3 p is but Walmart has said they're going to sell 75 billion dollars online this year so. That you know their gmv is likely significantly larger than their revenue but the biggest reason this isn't an apples-to-apples comparison is these two companies don't sell in the same countries right so Amazon's and many more countries than Walmart so you know their incontinence that that Walmart isn't in and, the there India is a quite large Market both of these companies are significant players in India, the Amazon includes India sales in their gym in the fact that Jim V there are the facts that GMB includes am India for Amazon Walmart revenue does not include any India sales because Walmart owns a minority majority interest in Flipkart. [36:53] Um but that's that's really the way Amazon does business in India as well like if you're doing Apples to Apples I would argue that it's probably true that Walmart is still slightly bigger than Amazon of you if you put India back into these numbers and and do a gmv estimate for Walmart instead but I don't, even really care about that what's annoying is everyone that read the New York Times article then wrote a new article saying Amazon's the biggest retailer in the world and that's, wildly untrue because. Ali Baba's gmv is bigger is like 1.3 trillion right so its bigger than Walmart plus Amazon's estimate in these articles and that's why the New York Times had to write the most awkward headline ever that's like, outside of China even and you go well why are they saying outside of China when both Walmart and Amazon are competing in China well it's because they don't want to talk about the fact that they're both way smaller than Ali Baba. [37:51] And so so again like I just I kind of don't think this is a very big milestone I think Amazon spins more time and effort trying to sell more stuff in the US than anywhere else and Walmart spends more time and effort trying to sell in the US than anywhere else it's the whole market for both countries for companies it's highly likely that Amazon is going to pass Walmart for sales in the US in the near future I don't think they have yet and when they do that will be a big milestone that will be like when Walmart passed Sears Versailles in like 1990 but to me that's the big milestone that this, this kind of facts that data thing that New York Times is trying to spin and then you know everyone else misreported like to me it's. Not that interesting and so I'm kind of annoyed how much Buzz it's gotten but I just blew it and gave it a bunch more buzz on the podcast. Scot: [38:44] Okay another one Amazon this was kind of the big big topic today there was a leak or someone figured out that Amazon is going to open a department store. How do you feel about Amazon departments course I feel like they're going to have put Target out of business in six months. Jason: [39:09] I just sold all my Target stock it so it's over. I'm kidding yeah so I mean this is interesting news the. I would say it's very vague news at this point like I don't think it surprises anyone that Amazon is interested in and is probably moving forward with trying a bunch of different retail floor mats I do think Amazon realizes that. That brick-and-mortar is important I don't think they think of themselves as purely an online, retail and they've been investing a bunch of brick and mortar and a category they want to do better and is a parallel and they have been making a lot of progress in a parallel so it's not shocking that they would be trying to experiment with some apparel formats so so this news is kind of exciting I'd be eager to see what they what stores they do open and I'm aisle you know quickly go visit them when they do to see what see what they're trying but. From this article it's hard to know exactly what they're talking about so the the leases that the. The reporter found in this is an exclusive article from Wall Street Journal. The wheezes they found were for thirty thousand-square-foot stores so the first thing is again everyone saying like Amazon's getting into the department store business. There are almost no 30,000 square foot department stores most department stores are much bigger than 30,000 square feet. [40:33] Whatever it's worth the the article says that apparel is one of the categories that's likely in this new store from Anonymous sources that talk to them. So does that mean it's primarily an apparel store so that would make it like a Kohl's or T.J.Maxx eyes store and that could be interesting and meaningful or does it mean it's a general merchandise store that has some apparel and also has a full grocery store because there's a lot of 20,000 25,000 square foot grocery stores so 30,000 square feet. Isn't that much different than the the bigger store formats we've already seen Amazon starting to experiment with so I guess I'm just saying. Any brick-and-mortar news from Amazon is interesting I'll be super eager to follow it but there was nothing, to me and this announcement that goes man my mind's blown this is a major Game Changer or some some new industry that wasn't worried about Amazon last week should be super worried about them this week like I think all those Industries should have already been worried. Scot: [41:35] Yeah and a lot of people I saw coming and we're saying they're abandoning the bookstore this means the 4-star store doesn't work they're getting rid of just je wat technology the Amazon goes towards and I think people just kind of, Amazon. At the heart of their DNA is to experiment with stuff doesn't just because they're experimenting with something doesn't mean the other things failed they can run they have the resources to run 300 experiments retail store experiment simultaneously if they want to and that you can't really read that kind of stuff into them I think that's really jumping the gun. Jason: [42:12] No I would a hundred percent agree with that and again it's built right into their leadership principles like small autonomous teams right so it's not like it's one big entity and they can only do one thing at a time. They've got you know a ton of entities that are doing a ton of things at a time so I I certainly. Scot: [42:28] Purposely don't talk to each other because it was a slow not yeah. Jason: [42:31] Yeah absolutely. So excited to see them doing new things I do think when they open new store formats they tend to be more Innovative than than traditional retailers that are opening new format so I hope they open them and I will be there when they do. Scot: [42:48] And then while we were on the podcast Tesla announced they have a new robot swiped will have to you have to order one of those and then give us a gadget unboxing kind of walkthrough of how that goes. Jason: [43:02] I feel like you are higher on the Tesla waiting list than I am so we may have to leverage your status but I'm all for doing a robot Deep dive at our earliest convenience. Scot: [43:12] Yeah humanoid robots kind of freaked me out so I think I'll lose my status to send it to your hostel we'll see if it a skynet's you or not. Jason: [43:20] Yeah isn't is there another Terminator movie coming out I think there is. Scot: [43:23] There's always another Terminator movie coming out sometime. Jason: [43:26] Fair enough awesome we'll listen we set a goal for ourselves to do a shorter concise show and I said I think we can knock this out in 30 minutes so I totally blew that this feels like about 45 minutes but hopefully it was valuable to listeners if it was we sure would appreciate, five star review on iTunes if you have any questions or we got anything wrong in the show you want to talk about we would encourage you to hit us up on Twitter or Facebook. Scot: [43:57] Yeah I like to think we gave everyone 50% more for their money today so you're welcome. Jason: [44:03] Yeah and you and I earned fifty percent less what's 50% of zero awesome well until next time happy commercing!

This week we discuss 1Password moving to Electron, Knative and Infrastructure as Code best practices. Plus, what to do with extra lumber… Rundown Users lobby 1Password to abandon new Electron version (https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/08/16/users-lobby-1password-to-abandon-new-electron-version) Cisco beefing up app monitoring portfolio with acquisition of Epsagon for $500M (https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/16/cisco-beefing-up-app-monitoring-portfolio-with-acquisition-of-epsagon-for-500m/) Cloud startup Epsagon to be acquired by Cisco for $500 million (https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3915010,00.html) Relevant to your interests Clearlake Capital completes strategic equity investment in RSA (https://clearlake.com/clearlake-capital-completes-strategic-equity-investment-in-rsa/) Apple SVP Craig Federighi responds to confusion over iOS 15 iCloud child safety policies in new interview (https://9to5mac.com/2021/08/13/apple-svp-craig-federighi-responds-to-confusion-over-ios-15-icloud-child-safety-policies-in-new-interview/) Poly Network offers $500,000 reward to crypto hacker who returned stolen assets. (https://www.engadget.com/poly-network-rewards-crypto-hacker-121507483.html) PolyNetwork's Hacker Returns All Funds on Ethereum and Refuses a $500K Bug Bounty (https://cryptopotato.com/polynetworks-hacker-returns-all-funds-on-ethereum-and-refuses-a-500k-bug-bounty/) Disney Beats Q3 Estimates As Streaming Flagship Hits 116M Subscribers (https://deadline.com/2021/08/disney-q3-beats-estimates-streaming-116-million-subscribers-1234813827/) (https://www.engadget.com/poly-network-rewards-crypto-hacker-121507483.html) Translates GitHub Actions into Tekton and Knative Objects (https://github.com/triggermesh/aktion) Music Distributor DistroKid Raises Money at $1.3 Billion Valuation from the creator of F'dcompany.com (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-16/music-distributor-distrokid-raises-money-at-1-3-billion-valuation?srnd=markets-vp) HashiCorp State of Cloud Strategy Survey (https://www.hashicorp.com/state-of-the-cloud) T-Mobile Investigating Claims of Massive Data Breach (https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/08/t-mobile-investigating-claims-of-massive-data-breach/) Funding, Buyback, and Hiring (https://ma.tt/2021/08/funding-buyback-hiring/) Palantir bought $50 million in gold bars in August as cash pile grows (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/17/palantir-bought-50-million-in-gold-bars-in-august-as-cash-accumulates.html) In No Code you delete code as you write it. (https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower/status/1427707854090215429?s=20) Roblox bookings grow 35% to $665.5M for Q2 2021 (https://venturebeat.com/2021/08/16/roblox-bookings-grow-35-to-665-5m-for-q2-2021/) WhatsApp Can't Ban the Taliban Because It Can't Read Their Texts (https://www.vice.com/en/article/93yvy5/whatsapp-says-its-not-banning-the-taliban-because-it-cant-read-their-texts) OK, so you stole $600m-plus from us, how about you be our Chief Security Advisor, Poly Network asks thief (https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/18/poly_network_job/) Postman's Series D Funding and the API-First World (https://blog.postman.com/postman-announces-series-d/) Would the math work if Databricks were valued at $38B? (https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/18/would-the-math-work-if-databricks-were-valued-at-38b/) Debian 11 formally debuts and hits the Bullseye (https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/16/debian_11_bullseye_released/) This is why Valve is switching from Debian to Arch for Steam Deck's Linux OS (https://www.pcgamer.com/this-is-why-valve-is-switching-from-debian-to-arch-for-steam-decks-linux-os/) Nonsense The Most Dangerous Writing App (https://www.squibler.io/dangerous-writing-prompt-app) Suicide Linux (https://qntm.org/suicide) Austin expected to become least-affordable metro for homebuyers outside of California (https://www.kvue.com/article/money/economy/boomtown-2040/austin-expected-to-become-least-affordable-metro-for-homebuyers-outside-of-california/269-6bbed38e-ce06-453e-a659-aece44c6c111) These People Who Work From Home Have a Secret: They Have Two Jobs (https://www.wsj.com/articles/these-people-who-work-from-home-have-a-secret-they-have-two-jobs-11628866529) How QR codes are made (https://twitter.com/Nick_Craver/status/1425606620265000965) Atlas | Leaps, Bounds, and Backflips (https://blog.bostondynamics.com/atlas-leaps-bounds-and-backflips) Every hotdog eaten shortens life by 36 minutes (https://news.yahoo.com/every-hot-dog-eaten-shortens-142355450.html) Progress Report: August 2021 (https://asahilinux.org/2021/08/progress-report-august-2021/) PINE64 presents PineNote, its new tablet in ebook format with electronic ink (https://linuxstoney.com/pine64-presents-pinenote/) EC2 offers 400 Instance Types (https://twitter.com/furrier/status/1426323051168165891?s=20) Amazon EC2 M6i Instances Powered by the Latest-Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-ec2-m6i-instances-powered-by-the-latest-generation-intel-xeon-scalable-processors/) Sponsors strongDM — Manage and audit remote access to infrastructure. Start your free 14-day trial today at strongdm.com/SDT (http://strongdm.com/SDT) CBT Nuggets — Training available for IT Pros anytime, anywhere. Start your 7-day Free Trial today at cbtnuggets.com/sdt (https://cbtnuggets.com/sdt) Clubhouse.io — is project management built specifically for software teams. Sign up to day at www.clubhouse.io/sdt (https://clubhouse.io/sdt) Conferences SpringOne (https://springone.io), Sep 1-2 DevOps World by CloudBees September 28-30 (https://www.devopsworld.com) DevOps Loop | October 4, 2021 (https://devopsloop.io/?utm_campaign=Global_P6_TS_Q322_Event_DevOpsLoop_at_VMworld&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social) - see Coté's promo video (https://twitter.com/cote/status/1425460843014131716). THAT Conference comes to Texas January 17-20, 2022 (https://that.us/activities/call-for-counselors/tx/2022) SDT news & hype Join us in Slack (http://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/slack). Send your postal address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com (mailto:stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com) and we will send you free laptop stickers! Follow us on Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/sdtpodcast), Twitter (https://twitter.com/softwaredeftalk), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/softwaredefinedtalk/), LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/software-defined-talk/) and YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi3OJPV6h9tp-hbsGBLGsDQ/featured). Brandon built the Quick Concall iPhone App (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/quick-concall/id1399948033?mt=8) and he wants you to buy it for $0.99. Use the code SDT to get $20 off Coté's book, (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt) Digital WTF (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt), so $5 total. Become a sponsor of Software Defined Talk (https://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/ads)! Recommendations Brandon: The White Lotus (https://www.hbo.com/the-white-lotus?camp=GOOGLE%7CHTS_SEM%7CPID_p64640553468&keyword=whats+the+white+lotus+about&utm_id=sa%7C71700000085024446%7C58700007207672331%7Cp64640553468&utm_content=tun&gclid=CjwKCAjwmeiIBhA6EiwA-uaeFZn4B3y39e_zSPMRqpQRLRlpbZcqjCPZ2XXT4RyS11xRWmAFvRv86BoCrUEQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds) on HBO (https://www.hbo.com/the-white-lotus?camp=GOOGLE%7CHTS_SEM%7CPID_p64640553468&keyword=whats+the+white+lotus+about&utm_id=sa%7C71700000085024446%7C58700007207672331%7Cp64640553468&utm_content=tun&gclid=CjwKCAjwmeiIBhA6EiwA-uaeFZn4B3y39e_zSPMRqpQRLRlpbZcqjCPZ2XXT4RyS11xRWmAFvRv86BoCrUEQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds) Matt: Cloud Native AF #2: James Urquhart (https://www.cloudnativeaf.com/2) Mitani Chicken Salt (https://www.mitani.com.au/) Coté: Sharp R20DS microwave (https://www.coolblue.nl/en/product/746608/sharp-r20ds.html). Also, see product descriptions about defrosting stew and other “small meals” for rival microwaves (https://twitter.com/cote/status/1423964819787485184). Photo Credit (https://unsplash.com/photos/vKyp17kj31w) Photo Credit (https://unsplash.com/photos/exf4mcFw4zg)

In the latest edition of the Omni Talk Fast Five, sponsored by Takeoff and the A&M Consumer & Retail Group Anne Mezzenga and guest hosts Mohit Mohal and Hemant Kalbag of the Alvarez & Marsal Consumer & Retail Group discuss: -Target's and Walmart's banner Q2 earnings and what, if anything stands in their way. -If Allbirds has all the right stuff to become a competitive and successful player in the activewear space, or if this pre-IPO move will have them wishing they stuck to the soft and sweat-wicking shoes that they're good at. -Giant Eagle becoming the first grocery chain to accept Venmo and Paypal payments in stores and how they might be grooming customers for more GetGo cashier-less experiences beyond the convenience store. -If Instagram's move into ads will get a "like "or a "swipe" from consumers and how brands have to carefully think about their approach to this shiny penny of social commerce. -Ikea's new scan-and-go concept store in Shanghai and while Hemant and Anne are ready to visit tomorrow, why Mohit may not be joining them just yet. The crew wraps up the pod debating how much they'd be willing to pay (and how long they'd wait) for 7-Eleven alcohol delivery, the retailer that should be next to test Taco Bell's 4 lane drive-thru, and who they're trusting with their IT services: Walmart or Best Buy. To learn more about the A&M Consumer & Retail Group, visit: http://www.alvarezandmarsal.com/industries/retail/retail To learn more about Takeoff, visit: http://www.takeoff.com/

Ross Stores, Inc., Q2 2022 Earnings Call, Aug 19, 2021

QIWI plc, Q2 2021 Earnings Call, Aug 19, 2021

Macy's, Inc., Q2 2022 Earnings Call, Aug 19, 2021

Despegar.com, Corp., Q2 2021 Earnings Call, Aug 19, 2021

DLocal Limited, Q2 2021 Earnings Call, Aug 18, 2021

L Brands, Inc., Q2 2022 Earnings Call, Aug 19, 2021

We shared our Q2 business results earlier this week, and what a quarter! Walmart U.S. saw 5.2% comp sales growth, and our CFO Chris Nicholas joined The Huddle with John Furner to talk about the momentum we're seeing. Chris' first retail job was in England at 14 years old pricing products, zoning shelves and working in the backroom. He's since worked retail in nine different countries and knows no matter where you are, being curious helps you best serve customers. It's up to us to stay curious - always innovating and looking for ways to improve our business. Thank you for a strong quarter, and let's keep it up!

Jason breaks down the 2 metrics he uses to to assess Robinhood's Q2 earnings (1:43) and Amazon entering Department Store retail (16:39). Then, Mark Suster from Upfront Ventures joins (24:07) to discuss venture metrics, community as a moat, why high valuations don't necessarily mean a bubble & more.

Jason breaks down the 2 metrics he uses to to assess Robinhood's Q2 earnings (1:43) and Amazon entering Department Store retail (16:39). Then, Mark Suster from Upfront Ventures joins (24:07) to discuss venture metrics, community as a moat, why high valuations don't necessarily mean a bubble & more.

We've reached quarterly Christmas again, and it's the best yet, but we've got some unfortunate news to go along with otherwise massively good news. Q2 2021 Shareholder Slide Deck and Earnings Call - https://ir.tesla.com Have a comment or question?  Tweet @teslatidbits with the hashtag #AskTeslaTidbits if you'd like to be on the show, or send a message to podcast@teslatidbits.com!  Support the show!  Patreon - https://patreon.com/teslatidbits Pure Tesla - https://puretesla.com/tidbits - Looking for a great solution for Sentry Mode storage?  These guys have your solution in three flavors.  Preformatted and ready to go, they utilize either MicroSD or SSD technology for longevity and integrity of data. Interested in Cryptocoins? - https://www.coinbase.com/join/harbau_ef - Check out Coinbase for your crypto trading needs!  Sign up with my link, and both of us pick up $10 when you buy or sell your first $100 worth of coins with Coinbase. Looking to buy a new Tesla?  Please use the show referral code, https://ts.la/sunil91588 to pick up 1,000 miles of free Supercharging for your new vehicle! #Tesla #EV #ElectricCars #ModelS #Model3 #ModelX #ModelY #Plaid #Roadster #CyberTruck #Autopilot #Supercharger #Gigafactory #FSD #FullSelfDriving

Frank and James return with an episode focused on the MLB playoff race and the preseason expectations for the college football and NFL seasons. They begin with some overdue reactions to the Olympics and the Indians name change to the Guardians before diving into the MLB as a whole. The Giants may indeed be the best team in baseball and we look at the pennant races across the board after a wild trade deadline. On the fantasy football perspective the duo rifles off some questions back and forth to one another including why they're ok waiting on QBs this year. In the college football landscape, they preview some of the early season matchups including Clemson/Georgia and The U vs Bama week 1! Heisman picks range from Sam Howell at UNC to Austin Burton at Purdue...From a financial perspective, the markets have remained warm as we throttle through Q2 earnings for most companies. The co-hosts discuss giving stocks as gifts to kids and what the Fed has in store for a rate hike by late 2022. SOTW - Texas Sun by Khruagbin/Leon Bridges

Weibo Corporation, Q2 2021 Earnings Call, Aug 18, 2021

Target Corporation, Q2 2022 Earnings Call, Aug 18, 2021

Robinhood Markets, Inc., Q2 2021 Earnings Call, Aug 18, 2021

Walmart Inc., Q2 2022 Earnings Call, Aug 17, 2021

VTEX, Q2 2021 Earnings Call, Aug 17, 2021

Sea Limited, Q2 2021 Earnings Call, Aug 17, 2021

The Home Depot, Inc., Q2 2022 Earnings Call, Aug 17, 2021

Topics covered on this CPA Exam Podcast: Intro: CPA Exam Pass Rates for Q2 20211. Hey Jeff - I'm beginning my CPA Exam preparation. How many weeks should I plan for each test? - Denise2. I just resubscribed to NINJA after failing the FAR section for my 5th time on June 29th with a 67 (My other scores were 59 [12/28/20, I used NINJA before my 2nd attempt and then got a 68 [2/11/21], 52 [3/23], and 70 [Originally scheduled for 5/14, but halfway through taking my exam, the entire testing center crashed and had to retake it on 6/4]). [I then figured maybe to 'rush my retake before June 30th]. My 'primary' CPA course is Roger. Now, here I am, with my 6th attempt scheduled for September 1st (3.5 weeks). I wanted to know if you had any tips to help because I am almost on the verge of 'throwing in the towel' and saying, "I guess this isn't for me." :( Also, do you think I should reset my data in the MCQs Dojo? Thanks so much!!! Yitzchak3. Your reg notes say NOL for 2018 and beyond are limited to 80% taxable income and carried forward indefinitely. I believe this is wrong. Because of the cares act, this changed to 2018-2020, has no limit on taxable income, and can be carried back five and forward indefinitely. Then beginning 2021, it has the 80% limit and is carried forward indefinitely. Am I correct?- Josh 4. I'm having trouble passing Auditing. I'm using Becker, but it's so much material. I'm taking too long getting thru the material. I forget the info learned in the earlier chapters. I need a plan. Can you help? - Priscilla “What is your best recommendation to study if I have around 20 days? Review ninja notes and do two final exam rehearsals?” - Marija  6. “I already started studying for FAR with another CPA review, I have access to the lectures, MCQ, Simulation, etc, and I also received a Book for the FAR Section. I only purchased this section. My question is, does the NINJA CPA Review include a book? Does NINJA have to be used in combination with another review, or can I use it without getting another review course?” - Harold7. “If I am testing after July, please tell me which are the applicable rates for REG: Corporate Charitable contribution is 10% or 25%, and Medical Expenses - 10% or 7.5%?” - Abi  “I am planning out my last few weeks of work before taking Far in mid-August and wondering which program to do practice exam(s) in - Roger or Ninja? With Roger, the sims are all or nothing in grading. Is this how the practice exams are too? Is one practice exam enough, or should I aim to do more than one? Finding 4 hours of uninterrupted time is tricky (working 30+ hours and two kids at home), so if one will suffice, I'd rather just hit MCQs hard instead. Thanks for the advice!” - Glassnerdhouse on /CPA reddit 8. I don't know what to do anymore. The CPA Exam has been the only obstacle to my dreams I keep failing over and over again, guess it's time to quit

Big crypto news today with Fidelity making a bigger bet on crypto with 90% of their biggest clients have been asking about Bitcoin and now they want to open up the space to retail. Lloyds Bank is hiring a “Digital Currency Manager” for its 30 million customers. US lawmakers urge CFTC and SEC to form joint working group on digital assets. Congressman Tom Emmer and Darren Soto reintroduced the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act to help push crypto regulations.Audius, a music streaming platform based on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains, is partnering with TikTok on the video-sharing app's new “TikTok Sounds” library.Hong Kong-based crypto miner BIT Mining's (NYSE: BTCM) revenue surged by RMB 2.85 trillion ($440 million) in Q2 2021 compared to the first quarter of the year, thanks to its April acquisition of mining pool BTC.com, according to the company's earnings release. Shares were rising 7% to $6.84 on Tuesday following the release of the report.Mark Cuban owns less than $500 in Dogecoin despite team's stake in the Crypto.David Schwartz Polysign Interview - https://youtu.be/QewtMvmolcwTom Emmer Interview - https://youtu.be/G-y-6Zn_71s

Tencent Music Entertainment Group, Q2 2021 Earnings Call, Aug 16, 2021

Endeavor Group Holdings, Inc., Q2 2021 Earnings Call, Aug 16, 2021

Roblox Corporation, Q2 2021 Earnings Call, Aug 17, 2021

Endeavor Group Holdings, Inc., Q2 2021 Earnings Call, Aug 16, 2021

Tencent Music Entertainment Group, Q2 2021 Earnings Call, Aug 16, 2021

Give us a call - 888-723-4630 Send us an email - podcast@ebay.com visit us at ebay.com/podcast    Welcome to eBay for Business! This week, we'll meet Stephen Weller, an eBay employee who also sells full time on eBay. Griff talks with three eBay leaders about the upcoming Holiday season as well as eBay seller Mary Robbins who elaborates on her holiday sourcing strategy.  To have your questions answered on our eBay for Business podcast, call us at 888 723-4630 or email us at podcast@ebay.com.  To give us feedback, please take our podcast listener survey at (https://connect.ebay.com/srv/survey/a/sellerops.podcast)   00:01 - Intro 08:36 - Leader Panel from eBay Open 19:24 - Stephen Weller - eBay Employee and eBay Seller 29:34 - Mary Robbins - Holiday Sourcing 33:52 - Q&A and Outro     New Links for Ep 152: eBay Up and Running Grant Application - http://ebay.helloalice.com/ eBay Q2 Business Results - https://community.ebay.com/t5/Announcements/eBay-s-Q2-2021-Business-Results/ba-p/32169820 Create your customer memento from eBay Open - https://ebay.jebbit.com/cuolvihf?L=Facebook Daniels Podcast (Reseller Stories Podcast) - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeZuKuCq4kUOS0ricdZyTDw   eBay Sellers Stores mentioned: Stephen Weller's eBay Store - https://www.ebay.com/str/subliminalsuzi Mary Robbins eBay Store - https://www.ebay.com/str/3rddownandgoal Daniel's Fuller's eBay Store - https://www.ebay.com/str/cavemanresale David Mitchell's eBay Store - https://www.ebay.com/str/mitchadew     Recurring Links / Phone Numbers / Hashtags Mentioned: 888-723-4630 - Call in Line  eBay Seller News Announcements - ebay.com/announcements eBay Community - ebay.com/community eBay Weekly Community Chat - ebay.com/communitychat eBay Help - ebay.com/help/home eBay Meetups - ebay.com/meetups Managed Payments on eBay - ebay.com/payments eBay for Business Podcast - ebay.com/podcast eBay Seller Center - ebay.com/sellercenter eBay Seller Hub - ebay.com/sh eBay System Status - ebay.com/sts explore.ebay.com facebook.com/eBayForBusiness eBay for Business Podcast Listener Survey - https://connect.ebay.com/srv/survey/a/sellerops.podcast #ebaypodcast

We didn't know what to expect when we sat down with Greg Beaumont, Senior Business Intelligence Specialist at Microsoft specializing in serving Microsoft's Healthcare space customers' technical Power BI issues.  What we got was an insightful, delightful, and impactful conversation with a really cool and smart human! References in this Episode: The Game Azure Health Bot The Future Will Be Decentralized-Charles Hoskinson Spider Goats Episode Timeline: 3:10 - The magic of discovery with the Power Platform, It's all about the customers(and Greg has a LOT of customers!), and Greg's Data Origin Story 21:10 - The IT/Business Gap, Getting good BI and keeping data security is a tricky thing, The COVID Challenge hits Healthcare 43:00 - Power BI-Not just a data visualization tool, a very cool discussion on Genomics and using data to save lives, the importance of Data Modelling 59:10 - The Bitcoin Analogy, The VertiPaq Engine and when is Direct Query the answer 1:08:30 - We get a little personal with Greg, Azure/Power BI integration and Machine Learning, Cognitive Services and Sentiment Analysis Episode Transcript: Rob Collie (00:00:00): Hello, friends. Today's guest is Greg Beaumont from Microsoft. Like one of our previous guests, hopefully, Greg has one of those interface jobs. The place where the broader Microsoft Corporation meets its customers at a very detailed and on the ground level. On one hand, it's one of those impossible jobs. More than 100 customers in the healthcare space look to Greg as their primary point of contact for all things technical, around Power BI. That's a tall order, folks. And at the same time, it's one of those awesome jobs. It's not that dissimilar, really, from our job here at P3. Rob Collie (00:00:45): In a role that, first of all, you get broad exposure to a tremendous number of organizations and their problems, you learn a lot super, super quickly. When you're doing it right, your work day is just nonstop magic. The power platform is magic and not really because of the technology, but instead because of its impact on the people who use it, who interact with it, who benefit from it, whose lives are changed by it. And again, I can't stress this enough, software usually doesn't do this. And as we talked with him, Krissy and I just couldn't stop nodding, because we could hear it, he lives it, just like we do. And I hope that just leaps out of the audio for you like it did for us. Rob Collie (00:01:32): No surprises here, Greg didn't start his life as a data professional. He's our second guest on this show, whose original training was in biology. And so, some familiar themes come back again, that good data professionals come from a wide variety of backgrounds, that the hybrid tweeners between IT and business are really where the value is at today. And I love this about Greg, that we made a point of talking about how much easier it is today to break into the data profession than it's ever been and what an amazing thing that is to celebrate. Rob Collie (00:02:06): We talked about COVID and specifically its impacts on the industry. How that has served as a catalyst for many organizations to rethink their analytic strategy, the implications of remote work, data privacy and security. And of course, it wouldn't be an episode of Raw Data, if we didn't nerd out about at least one thing. So, we get a little bit into genomics and the idea of DNA and RNA as forms of biological computer code. And as you'd expect, and want, Greg is far from a one dimensional data professional, just such an interesting person, authentically human, a real pleasure to speak with, so let's get into it. Announcer (00:02:47): Ladies and gentlemen, could I have your attention, please. Rob Collie (00:02:51): This is the Raw Data by P3 adaptive podcast with your host, Rob Collie. Find out what the experts at P3 Adaptive can do for your business. Just go to p3adaptive.com. Raw Data by P3 Adaptive is data with the human element. Rob Collie (00:03:13): Welcome to the show, Greg Beaumont. How are you? Greg Beaumont (00:03:17): I'm doing well. How are you all? Rob Collie (00:03:19): I think we're doing pretty well. Greg Beaumont (00:03:19): Awesome. Rob Collie (00:03:20): Business is booming. Data has turned out to be relatively hot field, but I think it's probably got some legs to it. And the Microsoft platform also, well, it's just kind of kicking ass, isn't it? So, business wise, we couldn't be better. I think personally, we're doing well, too. We won't go into all that. What are you up to these days? What's your job title and what's an average day look for you? Greg Beaumont (00:03:39): So, I'm working in Microsoft and my title is Technical Specialist. And I'm a Business Intelligence Technical Specialist, so I focus almost exclusively on Power BI and where it integrates with other products within the Microsoft stack. Now, I'm in the Microsoft field, which is different from a number of guests you've had, who work at corporate and we're working on the product groups, which is that I'm there to help the customers. Greg Beaumont (00:04:01): And you hear a lot of different acronyms with these titles. So, my role is often called the TS. In the past, it was called a TSP. It's just a change in the title. Sometimes you might hear the title, CSA, Cloud Solution Architect. It's very similar to what I do, but a little bit different. But effectively from an overarching standpoint, our goal in the field as Technical Specialists is to engage with customers, so that they understand how and where to use our products, and to ensure that they have a good experience when they succeed. Rob Collie (00:04:29): Your job is literally where the Microsoft organism meets the customers. Greg Beaumont (00:04:34): Yep. Rob Collie (00:04:35): That's not the role I had. I was definitely on the corporate side, back in my days at Microsoft. I think the interaction between the field and corporate has gotten a lot stronger over the years. I think it's a bit more organic, that interplay, that it used to feel like crossing a chasm sort of thing. And I don't think that's really true anymore. Greg Beaumont (00:04:54): At a green, I think that's by design, too. So, with the more frequent release schedules and also kind of how things have changed under Satya, customer feedback drives the roadmap. So when these monthly updates come out, a lot of it is based off of customer demand and what customers are encountering and what they need. So, we're able to pivot and meet the needs of those customers much more quickly. Rob Collie (00:05:15): Yeah, you mentioned the changing acronyms, right? I mean like yes. My gosh, a thousand times yes. It's almost like a deliberate obfuscation strategy. It's like who's what? Why did we need to take the P off of TSP? I mean, I'm sure it was really important in some meeting somewhere, but it's just like, "Oh, yeah, it's really hard to keep track of." It's just a perpetually moving target. But at the same time, so many fundamentals don't change, right? The things that customers need and the things that Microsoft needs to provide. The fundamentals, of course, evolving, but they don't move nearly as fast as the acronym game. Greg Beaumont (00:05:52): Right. I think that acronym game is part of what makes it difficult your first year here, because people have a conversation and you don't know what they're talking about. Right? Rob Collie (00:06:00): Yeah, yeah, yeah. Greg Beaumont (00:06:00): And if they just spelled it out, it would make a lot more sense. Rob Collie (00:06:03): Krissy was talking to me today about, "Am I understanding what Foo means?" There's an internal Microsoft dialect, right? Krissy was like, "Is Foo like X? Is it like a placeholder for variable?" I'm like, "Yes, yes." She's like, "Okay. That's what I thought, but I just want to make sure." Krissy Dyess (00:06:18): That's why there's context clues in grade school really come into play when you're working with Microsoft organization, because you really got to take in all the information and kind of decipher it a bit. And those context clues help out. Greg, how long have you been in that particular role? Has it been your whole time at Microsoft or are have you been in different roles? Greg Beaumont (00:06:36): So, I should add, too, that I'm specifically in the healthcare org, and even within healthcare, we've now subspecialized into sub-verticals within healthcare. So, I work exclusively with healthcare providers, so people who are providing care to patients in a patient care setting. I do help out on a few other accounts, too, but that's my primary area of responsibility. Greg Beaumont (00:06:55): So, I started with Microsoft in 2016. I was actually hired into a regional office as what's called the traditional TSP role and it was data platform TSP. So, it was what used to be the SQL Server TS role. A few months later, the annual realign happened, I got moved over to Modern Workplace because they wanted to have an increased focus on Power BI, and I had some experience in that area. Plus, I was the new guy, so they put me into the experimental role. A year later, that's when they added the industry verticals and that's when I moved into what is kind of the final iteration of my current role. And the titles have changed a few times, but I've effectively been in this role working with healthcare customers for over four years now. Rob Collie (00:07:35): And so, like a double vertical specialization? Greg Beaumont (00:07:37): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:07:37): Healthcare providers, where there's a hierarchy here? Greg Beaumont (00:07:40): Yeah, yeah. Rob Collie (00:07:41): Those are the jaw dropping things for me is sometimes people in roles like yours, even after all that specialization, you end up with a jillion customers that you're theoretically responsible for. Double digits, triple digits, single digits in terms of how many customers you have to cover? Greg Beaumont (00:07:58): I'm triple digits. And that is one of the key differences from that CSA role that you'll see on the Azure team is they tend to be more focused on just a couple of customers and they get more engaged in kind of projects. And I will do that with customers, but it's just, it's a lot more to manage. Rob Collie (00:08:14): Yeah. What a challenging job. If you think about it, the minimum triple digit number is 100, right? So, let's just say, it's 100 for a moment. Well, you've got 52 weeks a year plus PTO, right? So, you're just like, "Okay." It is very, very difficult to juggle. That's a professional skill that is uncommon. I would say that's probably harder than the acronym game. Greg Beaumont (00:08:37): Yeah, there's been times I was on a vacation day and I got a call. I didn't recognize the number. I'm like, "Okay, I'm going to have to route this to somebody because I'm off today." And they're like, "Well, I'm the VP of so and so and we need to do this." And I'm like, "Okay, I got to go back inside and work now, because this is an important call." So, you have to be flexible and you're correct, that it makes it a challenge to have that work-life balance also, but the work is very rewarding, so it's worth it. Rob Collie (00:09:01): Yeah. It's something that vaguely I have a sense of this. I mean, transitioning from corporate Microsoft to, I mean, you can think of my role now as field. I'm much, much closer to the customers than I ever was at corporate. And yes, Brian Jones and I talked about it a little bit. And this is a bit of an artifact of the old release model that it was like every few years, you'd release a product, which isn't the case anymore. But that satisfying feeling of helping people, like even if you build something amazing back at Microsoft in the days that I was there, you were never really around for that victory lap. You would never get that feedback. It even never make it to you. Rob Collie (00:09:37): It was years later muted whereas one of the beautiful things about working closely with customers and our clients with Power BI, and actually the Microsoft platform as a whole, is just how quickly you can deliver these amazingly transformational like light up moments that go beyond just the professional. You can get this emotional, really strong validating emotional feeling of having helped. And that is difficult to get, I think even today, probably, even with their monthly release cycles, et cetera. By definition, you're just further removed from the "Wow" that happens out where the people are. Greg Beaumont (00:10:15): Yep. And I'm sure you all see that, too, with your business is that a lot of work often goes into figuring out what needs to be in these solutions and reports, but when you actually put it in the hands of leaders, and they realize the power of what it can provide for their business, in my case for their patients, for their doctors, for their nurses, it becomes real. They see it's actually possible and it's not just a PowerPoint deck. Rob Collie (00:10:38): And that sense of possibility, that sense of almost child-like wonder that comes back at those moments, you just wouldn't expect from the outside. I had a family member one time say, "Oh, Rob, I could never do what you do." Basically, it was just saying "How boring it must be, right?" It's so boring working with software, working with..." I'm like, "Are you kidding me? This is one of the places in life where you get to create and just an amazingly magical." It's really the only word that comes close to capturing it. You just wouldn't expect that, right? Again, from the outside like, "Oh, you work in data all day. Boring." Greg Beaumont (00:11:17): I'd add to that, that I'd compare it to maybe the satisfaction people get out of when they beat a game or a video game. That when you figure out how to do a solution and it works and you put in that time and that effort and that thought, there's that emotional reward, you get that I built something that that actually did what they wanted it to do. Rob Collie (00:11:35): Yeah. And after you beat the video game, not only did that happen, but other people's lives get better as a result of you beating this game. It's just like it's got all those dynamics, and then some. All these follow on effects. Greg Beaumont (00:11:46): It's like being an athlete and enjoying the sport that you compete in. Rob Collie (00:11:50): Yeah. We're never going to retire. We're going to be the athletes that hang on way too long. Greg Beaumont (00:11:56): Yep. Rob Collie (00:11:58): So, unfortunately, I think our careers can go longer than a professional athletes, so there's that. I can't even really walk up and down stairs anymore without pain, so. So what about before Microsoft? What were you up to beforehand and how did you end up in this line of work in the first place? Greg Beaumont (00:12:15): Sure. And I think that's actually something where listeners can get some value, because the way I got into this line of work, I think today, there's much more opportunity for people all over the world from different socioeconomic backgrounds to be able to break into this field without having to kind of go through the rites of passage that people used to. So, I was actually a Biology major from a small school. Came from a military family. I didn't have corporate contacts or great guidance counseling or anything like that. My first job right out of school was I said, "Oh, I got a Biology major. I got a job at a research institution." They're like, "Okay, you're going to be cleaning out the mouse cages." And it was sort of $10.50 an hour. Greg Beaumont (00:12:53): So, at that point, I said, "Okay, I got to start thinking about a different line of work here." So, I kind of bounced around a little bit. I wanted to get into IT, but if you wanted to learn something like SQL Server, you couldn't do it unless you had a job in IT. As an average person, you couldn't just go buy a SQL Server and put it in your home unless you had the amount of money that you needed to do that. Side projects with Access and Excel. Small businesses did things probably making less than minimum wage and side gigs, in addition to what I was doing for full-time work to pay the bills. Eventually caught on with a hospital where I was doing some interesting projects with data using Access and Excel. They wouldn't even give me access to Crystal Reports when we wanted to do some reporting. That was really where I kind of said , "Data is where I want to focus." Greg Beaumont (00:13:41): We did some projects around things like Radon Awareness, so people who would build a new house now, they're like, "Oh, I have to pay $1500 for that Radon machine down in the basement." But when you talk to a thoracic surgeon and their nursing team and you hear stories about people who are nonsmokers, perfectly healthy, who come in with tumors all over their lungs, you realize the value there and by looking at the data of where there's pockets of radon in the country reaching out to those people has value, right? I think it's that human element where you're actually doing something that makes a difference. So, that kind of opened my eyes. Greg Beaumont (00:14:14): I then after that job, I got on with a small consulting company. I was a Project Manager. It was my first exposure to Microsoft BI. It was actually ProClarity over SQL Server 2005 and we were working with data around HEDIS and Joint Commission healthcare performance measures for one of the VA offices. So, I was the PM and the Data Architect was building the SSIS packages, built out kind of skeleton of an analysis services cube. He asked me to lean in on the dashboarding side, and that's also where I started learning MDX because we were writing some MDX expressions to start doing some calculations that we were then exposing in ProClarity. And at that point, it was like, "This is magic." Greg Beaumont (00:14:57): From a used case perspective, what they were doing traditionally doing was they'd send somebody in from some auditing agency, who would look at, I think it was 30 to 60 patient records, for each metric and then they take a look at where all of the criteria hit for that metric, yes or no. And it would be pass/fail, how good is this institution doing of meeting this particular expectation. So, it would be things like, "Does a patient receive aspirin within a certain amount of time that they've been admitted if they have heart problems?" Something like that. With looking at it from a data perspective, you can look at the whole patient population, and then you could start slicing and dicing it by department, by time of day that they were admitted, by all of these different things. Greg Beaumont (00:15:38): And that's when I kind of said, "This is really cool, really interesting. I think there's a big future here." And I kind of decided to take that route. And from there, I got on with a Microsoft partner, where I stayed for about six years. And that's kind of where I was exposed to a lot of very smart, very gifted people. And I was able to kind of learn from them and then that led to eventually getting a job at Microsoft. But to make a long story short, today, you could go online and get Power BI Desktop for free. There's training resources all over the place, and you could skill up and get started and get a great job. I'd like to tell people take the amount of time you spend every night playing video games and watching television, take half that time and devote it to learning Power BI and you'll be amazed at how far you get in six to 12 months. Rob Collie (00:16:24): That's such good advice. I'm not really allowed to play a lot of video games, so I might need more time than that. But I had my time to do that years ago, learning DAX and everything. A couple of things really jumped out at me there. First of all, you're right, it was almost like a priesthood before. It was so hard to get your foot in the door. Look, you had to climb incrementally, multiple steps in that story to just get to the point where you were sitting next to the thing that was SSIS and MDX which, again, neither of those things had a particularly humane learning curve. Even when you got there, which was a climb, you get to that point and then they're like, "And here's your cliff. Your smooth cliff that you have to scale. If you wanted a piece of this technology," right? Rob Collie (00:17:11): You wanted to learn MDX, you had to get your hands on an SSAS server. The license for it. And then you had to have a machine you could install it on that was beefy enough to handle it. It's just, there's so many barriers to entry. And the data gene, I like to talk about, it does. It cuts across every demographic, as far as I can tell, damn near equally everywhere. Let's call it one in 20. It's probably a little less frequent than that. Let's call it 5% of the population is carrying the data gene and you've got to get exposure. And that's a lot easier to get that exposure today than it was even 10 years ago. Greg Beaumont (00:17:50): I'd completely agree with that. The people in this field tend to be the type of people who likes solving puzzles, who like building things that are complex and have different pieces, but who also enjoy the reward of getting it to work at the end. You've had several guests that have come on the show that come from nontraditional backgrounds. But I'm convinced that 20 years ago, there were a lot of people who would have been great data people, who just never got the opportunity to make it happen. Greg Beaumont (00:18:14): Whereas today, the opportunity is there and I think Microsoft has done a great job with their strategy of letting you learn and try Power BI. You can go download the dashboard in a day content for free and the PDF is pretty self-explanatory and if you've used excel in the past, you can walk through it and teach yourself the tool. I think the power of that from both the perspective of giving people opportunity and also building up a workforce for this field of work is amazing. Rob Collie (00:18:42): Yeah. I mean, all those people that were sort of in a sense like kind of left behind, years ago, they weren't given an avenue. A large number of them did get soaked up by Excel. If they're professionally still active today, there's this tremendous population of Excel people if they were joining the story today, they might be jumping into Power BI almost from the beginning, potentially. And of course, if they were doing that, they'd still be doing Excel. But there's still this huge reservoir of people who are still tomorrow, think about the number of people tomorrow, just tomorrow. Today, they're good at Excel and tomorrow, they will sort of, they'll have their first discovery moment with Power BI. The first moment of DAX or M or whatever, that's a large number of people tomorrow who are about to experience. It's almost like did you see the movie The Game? Greg Beaumont (00:19:36): I have not. Rob Collie (00:19:37): There's this moment early in the movie where Michael Douglas has just found out that his brother or something has bought them a pass to the game. And no one will tell him what it is. He meets this guy at a bar who says, "Oh, I'm so envious that you get to play for the first time." Also, this is really silly, but it's also like the ACDC song For Those About To Rock, We Salute You. For those about to DAX, we salute you, because that's going to happen tomorrow, right? Such a population every day that's lighting up and what an exciting thing to think about. Do you ever get down for any reason, just stop and think, "Oh, what about the 5000 people today who are discovering this stuff for the first time." That is a happy thing. Greg Beaumont (00:20:16): Yeah, I actually had a customer where one of their analysts who turned out to be just a Power BI Rockstar, he said, "I'd been spending 20 years of my life writing V-lookups, and creating giant Excel files. And now, everything I was trying to do is at my fingertips," right? And then within a year, he went from being a lifelong Excel expert to creating these amazing reports that got visibility within the organization and provided a ton of value. Rob Collie (00:20:42): And that same person you're talking about is also incredibly steeped in business decision-making. They've been getting a business training their whole career at the same time. And it's like suddenly, you have this amazingly capable business tech hybrid, that literally, it just like moved mountains. It's crazy. We've talked about that a lot on the show, obviously, the hybrids, just amazing. And a lot of these people have come to work for us. Rob Collie (00:21:09): That's the most common origin story for our consultants. It's not the only one. I mean, we do have some people who came from more traditional IT backgrounds, but they're also hybrids. They understand business incredibly well. And so, they never really quite fit in on the pure IT side, either. It's really kind of interesting. Greg Beaumont (00:21:26): Yeah, I think there's still a gap there between IT and business, even in kind of the way solutions get architected in the field. It's understanding what the business really wants out of the tool is often very different from how IT understands to build it. And I think that's where people like that provide that bridge, to make things that actually work and then provide the value that's needed. Rob Collie (00:21:47): There's such valuable ambassadors. It's just so obvious when IT is going to interact with a business unit to help them achieve some goal. It's so obvious that, of course, who you need to engage with IT. IT thinks, "We need to engage with the leaders of this business unit." They've got the secret weapon, these hybrid people that came up through the ranks with Excel. The word shadow IT is perfect. These people within the business, like they've been Excel people for their entire careers, they have an IT style job. Rob Collie (00:22:22): Almost all the challenges that IT complains about with working with business, you take these Excel people and sort of put them in a room where they feel safe. They'll tell you the same things. They're like, "I had exactly the same problems with my 'users,' the people that I build things for." And yeah, there's such a good translator. And if the communication flows between IT and business sort of through that portal, things go so much better. That's a habit. We're still in the process of developing as a world. Greg Beaumont (00:22:51): Yeah. And in healthcare that actually also provides some unique challenges. With regulation and personal health information, these Excel files have sensitive data in them, and you have to make sure it's protected and that the right people can see it. And how do you give them the power to use their skills to improve your organization, while also making sure that you keep everything safe. So, I think that's a hot topic these days. Rob Collie (00:23:15): Yeah. I mean, it's one of those like a requirement, even of the Hello World equivalent of anything is that you right off the bat have to have things like row level security and object level security in place and sometimes obfuscation. What are some of the... we don't want to get to shop talky, but it is a really fascinating topic, what are the handful of go-to techniques for managing sensitive healthcare information? How do you get good BI, while at the same time protecting identity and sensitivity. So often, you still need to be able to uniquely identify patients to tie them across different systems, can identify them as people. It's really, really, really tricky stuff. Greg Beaumont (00:24:02): And I think just to kind of stress the importance of this, you can actually go search for look up HIPAA wall of shame or HIPAA violation list. When this information gets shared with the wrong people, there's consequences and can result in financial fees and fines. And in addition to that, you lose the trust of people whose personal information may have been violated. So, I think a combination of you said things row level security and object level security as a start, you can also do data masking, but then there's issues of people export to Excel. What do they do with that data afterwards? Greg Beaumont (00:24:37): And then there's going to be tools like Microsoft Information Protection, where when you export sensitive information to Excel, it attaches an encrypted component. I'm not an MIT expert. I know how it works. I don't know the actual technology behind it. But it attaches an encrypted component where only people who are allowed to see that information can then open that file. So, you're protecting the information at the source and in transit, but you're still giving people the flexibility to go build a report or to potentially use data from different sources, but then have it be protected every step of the way. Greg Beaumont (00:25:11): So like you said, without getting too techie, there's ways to do it, but it's not just out of the box easy. There's steps you have to go through, talk to experts, get advice. Whether it's workshops or proof of concepts, there's different ways that customers can figure that out. Rob Collie (00:25:28): Yeah. So because of that sort of mandatory minimum level of sensitivity handling and information security, I would expect, now that we're talking about it, that IT sort of has to be a lot more involved by default in the healthcare space with the solutions than IT would necessarily be in other industries. Another way to say it, it's harder for the business to be 100% in charge of data modeling in healthcare than it is in other industries. Greg Beaumont (00:26:02): Yep. But you can have a hybrid model, which is where the business provides data that's already been vetted and protected and there might be other data that doesn't have any sensitive data in it, where it's game on, supply chain or something like that. But having these layers in between, the old way of doing things was just nobody gets access to it. Then there was kind of canned reporting where everybody gets burst in the reports that contain what they're allowed to see. But now, you can do things in transit, so that the end users can still use filters and build a new report and maybe even share it with other people. And know that whoever they're sharing with will only be able to see what they're allowed to see. It gets pretty complex, but it's definitely doable and the customers that are doing it are finding a lot of value in those capabilities. Rob Collie (00:26:48): That's fundamentally one of the advantages of having a data model. I was listening to a podcast with Jeffrey Wang from Microsoft and he was talking about it. And I thought this was a really crisp and concise summary, which is that the Microsoft Stack Power BI has a model-centric approach to the world whereas basically, all the competitors are report centric. And what does that mean? Why does that even make a difference? Well, when you build a model, you've essentially built all the reports in a way. You've enabled all of the reports. You can build many, many, many, many, many like an infinite number of different reports based on emerging and evolving business needs without having to go back to square one. Rob Collie (00:27:28): In a report-centric model, which is basically what the industry has almost always had, almost everywhere, outside of a few notable examples, Power BI being one of them. When a report centric model, every single change, I remember there being a statistic that was just jaw dropping. I forget what the actual numbers were, but it was something like the average number of business days it took to add a single column to a single existing report. It was like nine business days, when it should just be a click. And that's the difference. And so, preserving that benefit of this model centric approach, while at the same time, still making sure that everyone's playing within the right sandbox that you can't jump the fence and end up with something that's inappropriate. Very challenging, but doable. Greg Beaumont (00:28:15): Yep. That reminded me of an old joke we used to tell in consulting and this was back in the SharePoint Performance Point with Analysis Services days is there be a budget for a project, there'd be change requests along the ways, they discover issues with the data. And at the very end of the project, they rushed the visualization to market. And they're like after six months, with 10 people dedicated on this project, "Here's your line chart." Rob Collie (00:28:39): Yeah. I had a director of IT at a large insurance company one time, looking me in the eye and just brutally confess. Yeah, my team, we spent three months to put a dot on a chart. And that's not what you want. Greg Beaumont (00:28:59): Right, right. Rob Collie (00:29:01): That was unspoken. This was bad. To the extent that you're able to tell, what are some of the interesting things that you've seen in the healthcare space with this platform recently? Anything that we can talk about? Greg Beaumont (00:29:15): Yeah, so I think I'd start with how everything changed with COVID. Just because I think people would be interested in that topic and kind of how it changed everything. I actually had a customer yesterday at a large provider who said, "COVID was the catalyst for us to reconsider our investment in analytics, and that it spurred interest from even an executive level to put more money into analytics because of the things that happened." So obviously, when it hit everybody was, "What in the world is going on here?" Right? "Are we even going to have jobs? Is the whole world going to collapse or is this just going to be kind of fake news that comes and goes?" Everybody was unsure what was going on. Greg Beaumont (00:29:50): At the same time, the healthcare providers, a lot of them were moving people to work from home and these were organizations where they had very strict working conditions because of these data privacy and data security considerations, and all of a sudden, you're in a rush to move people home. So, some of my counterparts who do teams, they have some just amazing stories. They were up all night helping people set up ways to securely get their employees to a work-from-home type experience, so that they only had essential workers interacting with the patients, but then the office workers were able to effectively conduct business from home. Greg Beaumont (00:30:25): Additionally, there were use cases that were amazing. So, Microsoft has now what's called the Cloud for Health where we're effectively taking our technology and trying to make it more targeted towards healthcare customers and their specific needs, because we see the same types of use cases repeat from customer to customer. One of those use cases that came out of COVID was called Virtual Visits. And I actually know the team that built that solution, but because of patients who were on COVID, they didn't know how contagious it was. Greg Beaumont (00:30:56): There were people being put on ventilators, who weren't allowed to see their families and they were setting up a team's application, where people were actually able to talk to their family and see their family before they went under, right? There were chaplains who were reading people their last rites using video conferencing, and things like that. So, it was pretty heavy stuff, but I think from a healthcare perspective, it showed the value technology can provide. Greg Beaumont (00:31:21): And from our perspective in the field, it's like we're not just out there talking about bits and bytes. It kind of hit home that there's real people who are impacted by what we're doing and it adds another kind of layer of gravity, I'd call it, taking what you do seriously, right? I had another customer, they were doing some mapping initiatives with some of the COVID data because they wanted to provide maps for their employees of where the hotspots were. Greg Beaumont (00:31:46): And we were up till I think 11:00 at night one night working through a proof of concept. And they said, "Yeah, what's next is we also want to start mapping areas of social unrest." I said, "Wow, social unrest. Why are you worried about that?" And they said, "Well, we expect because of this lockdown, that eventually there's going to be rioting and issues in all different parts of the world." And at that time, I just kind of didn't really think about that, but then a lot of those things did happen. It was kind of just interesting to be working at night and hearing those stories, and then seeing how everything kind of unfolded. Greg Beaumont (00:32:18): Another example, look it up, there's an Azure COVID Health Bot out there and then there's some information on that, where you can ask questions and walk through your symptoms, and it will kind of give you some instructions on what to do. Another one that is even popular now is looking at employees who are returning to work. So, when people return to work find out vaccination status, "Are you able to come back to work? Are you essential? Are you nonessential?" I don't think a lot of customers were prepared to run through that scenario when it hit. Greg Beaumont (00:32:48): So, having these agile tools where you can go get your list of not only employees, but maybe partners that refer people to your network, because you might not have all the referring doctors in your system. So with Power BI, you can go get extracts, tie it all together and then build out a solution that helps you get those things done. I'd say it was eye opening. I think for customers and also for myself and my peers, that we're not just selling widgets. We're selling things that make a difference and have that human perspective to it. Rob Collie (00:33:20): Yeah, that does bring it home, doesn't it? That statement from an organization that COVID was the catalyst, evaluating and investing in their analytic strategy? Greg Beaumont (00:33:29): Yep. Rob Collie (00:33:30): Being in BI, being an analytics is one of the best ways to future proof one's career because at baseline, it's a healthy industry, there's always value to be created. But then when things get bad, for some reason, whatever crisis hits, it's actually more necessary than ever because when you've been in a groove when a an industry or an organization has been in an operational groove for a long time, any number of years, eventually, you just sort of start to intuitively figure it out. There's a roadmap that emerges slowly over time. Now, even that roadmap probably isn't as good as you think it is. If you really tested your assumptions, you'd find that some of them were flawed and analytics could have helped you be a lot more efficient even then. Rob Collie (00:34:14): But regardless, the perception is that we've got a groove, right? And then when the world completely changes overnight, all of your roadmaps, your travel roadmaps, none of them are valid anymore. And now, you need a replacement and you need it fast. And so, what happens is, is that analytics spending, BI spending, whatever you want to call it, or activity, actually increases during times of crisis. So, you got a healthy baseline business. It's an industry that's not withering and dying in good times, but it actually it's like a hedge against bad times. Rob Collie (00:34:47): When I saw that research years and years ago, when I was working at Microsoft Corporate, we just come out of the dot-com crack up, we'd seen that BI spending it across the IT industry was the only sector that went up during that time where everything else was falling. It's like, "Oh, okay." So, not only do I enjoy this stuff, but I really should never get out of it. It's like one of the best future proofing career moves you can make is the work in this field. And so, I mean, we've seen it, right? The early days of the COVID crisis, you're right when no one knew the range of possible outcomes going forward was incredibly wide. The low end and the high end were exponentially different from one another. Rob Collie (00:35:29): And so, we experienced in our business, sort of a gap in spring and early summer last year. We weren't really seeing a whole lot of new clients, people who are willing to forge a brand new relationship. Again, what happens when a crisis hits? You slam on the brakes. No unnecessary spending first of all. Let's get all the spending under control, because we don't know as a company what's going to happen in the industry, right? You see a lot of vendor spending freezes and of course, to other companies, we're a vendor, right? So, our existing clients, though, doubled down on how much they used us and how much they needed us. Rob Collie (00:36:08): And then later in the year, the new client business returned, and we actually ended up, our business was up last year, despite that Q2 interruption and sort of making new friends. And this year, holy cow like whatever was bottled up last year is coming back big time. And so, yeah. You never really want to be the ghoul that sort of morbidly goes, "Oh, crisis." From a business perspective, yeah, anything that changes, anything that disrupts the status quo tends to lead to an increased focus on the things that we do. Greg Beaumont (00:36:43): Yeah, I think something you said there, too, was when you don't know what's going to happen was when the business intelligence spending increased. I mean, the intelligence and business intelligence, it's not just a slogan. The purpose of these tools is to find out the things you don't know. So when there's uncertainty, that's when BI can provide that catalyst to sort of add some clarity to what you're actually dealing with. Rob Collie (00:37:06): Yeah, I've been using, even though I'm not a pilot, I've never learned to fly a plane or anything. I've been using an aviation metaphor lately, which is windshield is nice and clear. You might not be looking at the instruments on your cockpit very much, right? You know there's not a mountain in front of you, you can see how far away the ground is. And you could sort of intuit your way along, right? But then suddenly, whoosh clouds. And oh, boy, now, you really need those instruments, right? You need the dashboards, you need the altimeter, you need the radar. You need all that stuff so much more. Rob Collie (00:37:37): And so, and our business has kind of always been this. The reason I've been using this metaphor is really for us, it's like given how fast we operate, and I think you can appreciate this having come from a Microsoft partner consulting firm before Microsoft years ago, our business model, we move so fast with projects. We're not on that old model with the original budget and the change orders and all of that. That was all dysfunctional. Rob Collie (00:38:01): It was necessary, because of the way software worked back then, but it was absolutely dysfunctional. It's not the way that you get customer satisfaction. So, we've committed to the high velocity model. But that means seeing the future of our business financially two months in the future is very difficult relative to the old sort of glacial pace, right? If there's a mountain there, we're going to have months to turn around it. Krissy Dyess (00:38:26): To add a bit to your analogy there, Rob. I am married to a pilot and I have gone up in the small tiny airplane. And before the gadgets, there's actually the map. The paper map, right? So, you had the paper map, which my husband now would hand to me. And he'd tell me, "Okay, let me know the elevations of different areas to make sure we're high enough, we're not going to crash into the mountains." Krissy Dyess (00:38:47): What's happened is people just they got used to different ways that they were doing things. They were forced into these more modern ways. And I think even now, this wave of seeing this catalyst we can change and how are other people changing is also driving the people to seek help from others in terms of getting guidance, right? Because even though you've had the change, it doesn't necessarily mean that the changes that you made were 100% the right way and you can learn so much from others in the community and the people that are willing to help. Krissy Dyess (00:39:24): And I think that's one of the things too, that our company provides as a partner, we're able to kind of go alongside. We've seen what's works, what doesn't work, what are some of those pitfalls? What are those mountains approaching? And we're really able to help guide others that want to learn and become better. Rob Collie (00:39:42): Yeah. I mean, this is us getting just a little bit commercial, but you can forgive us, right? That high velocity model also exposes us to a much larger denominator. We see a lot at this business that accumulates. The example I've given before is and this is just a really specific techy, so much of this is qualitative, but there's a quantitative. It's sort of like a hard example of like, "Oh, yeah, that's right. This pattern that we need here for this food spoilage inventory problem is exactly the same as this tax accounting problem we solved over there, right?" As soon as you realize that you don't need to do all the figuring out development work, you just skip to the end. Rob Collie (00:40:22): And really, most of the stuff that Krissy was talking about, I think, is actually it's more of the softer stuff. It's more of the soft wisdom that accumulates over the course of exposure to so many different industries and so many different projects. That's actually really one of the reasons why people come to work here is they want that enrichment. Greg Beaumont (00:40:38): Yeah, that makes sense. Because you see all these different industries and you actually get exposed to customers that are the best in the business for that type of, whether it be a solution or whether it be a product or whether it be like a framework for doing analytics or something like that. So, you get that exposure and you also get to contribute. Rob Collie (00:40:55): Even just speaking for myself, in the early days of this business, when it was really still just me, I got exposure to so many business leaders. Business and IT leaders that, especially given the profile of the people who would take the risk back in 2013, you had to be some kind of exceptional to be leaning into this technology with your own personal and professional reputation eight years ago, right? It was brand new. So, imagine the profile of the people I was getting exposed to, right? Wow, I learned so much from those people in terms of leadership, in terms of business. They were learning data stuff from me, but at the same time, I was taking notes. Greg Beaumont (00:41:33): Everybody was reading your blog, too. I can't count the number of times I included a reference to one of your articles to help answer some questions. And it was the first time I was introduced to the Switch True DAX statement. And then I'd print that. Rob Collie (00:41:47): Which- Greg Beaumont (00:41:48): Sent that link to many people. "Don't do if statements, do this. Just read this article." Rob Collie (00:41:53): And even that was something that I'd saw someone else doing. And I was like, "Oh, my God, what is that?" My head exploded like, "Oh." Yeah, those were interesting days. I think on the Chandu podcast, I talked about how I was writing about this stuff almost violently, couldn't help it. It was just like so fast. Two articles a week. I was doing two a week for years. There was so much to talk about, so many new discoveries. It was just kind of pouring out in a way. Krissy Dyess (00:42:24): Greg, you came in to the role around 2016. And to me 2017 was really that big year with the monthly releases where Power BI just became this phenomenon, right? It just kept getting better and better in terms of capabilities and even the last couple years, all the attention around security has been huge, especially with the health and life science space. And last year, with this catalyst to shift mindsets into other patterns, working patterns using technology, do you feel like you've seen any kind of significant shifts just compared to last year or this year? Greg Beaumont (00:43:05): Yeah. And so something that burns my ears every time I hear it is when people call Power BI a data visualization tool. It does that and it does a great job. Rob Collie (00:43:11): I hate that. Greg Beaumont (00:43:12): But it's become much more than that. When it launched, it was a data visualization tool. But if you think about it at that time, they said, "Well, business users can't understand complex data models, so you have to do that in analysis services." Then they kind of ingested analysis services into Power BI and made it more of a SaaS product where you can scale it. There's Dataflows, the ETL tool, which is within Power BI, which is an iteration of Power Query, which has been around since the Excel days. So, now you have ETL. You have effectively from the old SQL Server world, you have the SSIS layer, you have the SSAS layer. With paginated reports, you have the SSRS layer. And you have all these different layers of the solution now within an easy to use SaaS product. Greg Beaumont (00:43:55): So this evolution has been happening, where it's gobbling up these other products that used to be something that only central IT could do. And now, we're putting that power by making it easier to use in the hands of those analysts who really know what they want from the data. Because if you think about it, the old process was is you go and you give the IT team your requirements, and they interpret how to take what you want, and translate it into computer code. Greg Beaumont (00:44:21): But now, we're giving those analysts the ability to take their requirements and go do it themselves. And there's still a very valid place for central IT because there's so many other things they can do, but it frees up their time to work on higher valued projects and I see that continuing with Power BI, right? But like we're adding AI, ML capabilities and data volumes keep increasing then capabilities I think will continue to expand it. Rob Collie (00:44:46): Greg, I used to really caused a storm when I would go to a conference that was full of BI professionals. And I would say that something like, "What percentage of the time of BI project, traditional BI project was actually spent typing the right code?" The code that stuck, right? And I would make the claim that it was less than 1%. So, it's like less than 1% of the time of a project, right? And everyone would just get so upset at me, right? But I just didn't understand why it was controversial. Rob Collie (00:45:19): Like you describe like yeah, we have these long requirements meetings in the old model. Interminably long, exhausting, and we'd write everything down. We'd come up with this gigantic requirements document that was flawed from the get-go. It was just so painful. It's like the communication cost was everything and the iteration and discovery, there wasn't enough time for that. And when I say that the new way of building these projects is sometimes literally 100 times faster than the old way. Like it sounds like hyperbole. Greg Beaumont (00:45:53): It's not. Yeah. Rob Collie (00:45:54): It can be that fast, but you're better off telling people, it's twice as fast because they'll believe you. If you tell them the truth, they'd go, "Nah, you're a snake oil salesman. Get out of here." Greg Beaumont (00:46:07): Yeah. And I think the speed of being able to develop, too, it's going to basically allow these tools to be able to do things that people didn't even dream of in the past. It's not just going to be traditional business use cases. I know in healthcare, something that's a hot topic is genomics, right? Genomics is incredibly complex then you go beyond Power BI and into Azure at that point, too and Cloud compute and things like that. Greg Beaumont (00:46:31): So, with Genomics, you think about your DNA, right? Your DNA is basically a long strand of computer code. It is base pairs of nucleic acids, adenine, thymine, and guanine, cytosine that effectively form ones and zeros in a really long string. Rob Collie (00:46:46): Did you know it effortlessly he named those base pairs? There's that biology background peeking back out. Greg Beaumont (00:46:52): I did have to go look it up before the meeting. I said, "Just in case this comes up, I need to make sure I pronounce them right," so. Rob Collie (00:46:59): Well, for those of us who listen to podcasts at 1.5x speed, that is going to sound super impressive, that string there. Greg Beaumont (00:47:05): Yeah. I should call out, too, though that I'm not a genomics expert, so some of what I'm saying here, I'm paraphrasing and repeating from people I've talked to who are experts, including physicians and researchers. So, this long string of code, if you sequence your entire genome, the file is about 100 gigabytes for one person, okay? At 100 gigabytes, you can consume that, but if you want to start comparing hundreds of people and thousands of people in different patient cohorts, all of a sudden, it gets to be a lot of information and it gets very complex. Greg Beaumont (00:47:35): If you think of that strand of DNA as being like a book with just two letters that alternate, there's going to be paragraphs and chapters and things like that, which do different things. So, one of the physicians I spoke to worked with Children's Cancer. Here's kind of where the use case comes in. So, you take something breast cancer where there's BRCA1 or BRCA2, BRCA1, BRCA2 genes where if you have it, there's a measurable increased probability that you'll get that type of cancer within a certain age range. There's a lot of other diseases and cancers, where it might be 30 genes. And depending on different combinations of those genes, it changes the risk of getting that specific type of cancer. Greg Beaumont (00:48:17): But this physician told me that there are specific children's cancers, where they know that if they have certain combinations of genes, that they have a very high probability of getting this cancer. And when the child actually feel sick and goes to the doctor, it's already spread and it's too late. So, if you can do this sequencing, basically run it through machine learning algorithms, so it will determine the probability, you could effectively catch it at stage zero. Because these cancers, it's something that could be related to growth hormones and as you're growing up, and as you become an adult, you're then no longer at risk of getting that childhood cancer. So, if they could identify it early and treated at stage zero, instead of stage 4, it sounds sci-fi, but the tools are there to do it. Greg Beaumont (00:49:01): It just never ceases to amaze me that you watch the news and they talk about self-driving cars and identifying when a banana is ripe, and things like that. But it's like, you know what? These same tools could be out there changing people's lives and making a measurable difference in the world. I think just especially post COVID, I'll expect to see a lot more investment in these areas. And also, interest because I think that might be one of the positives that comes out of this whole experience. Rob Collie (00:49:27): I do think that the sort of the worlds of Medicine and Computer Science are on a merging course. Let's not call it collision course. That sounds more dramatic. There is a merging going on. You're right DNA is biologically encoded instructions by an RNA. The mRNA vaccine is essentially injecting the source code that your body then compiles into antibodies. It's crazy and it's new. There's no two ways about it. Rob Collie (00:49:56): mRNA therapies, in general, which of course they were working on originally as anticancer and sort of just like, "Oh, well, we could use it for this, too." And there's all kinds of other things too, right? Gosh, when you go one level up from DNA or some point of abstraction, you get into protein folding. And whoa, is that... Greg Beaumont (00:50:15): Crazy, yeah. Rob Collie (00:50:16): ... computationally. We're all just waiting for quantum computers, I think. Greg Beaumont (00:50:20): Now, I'll have to call out that I'm making a joke here, so people don't take me seriously. But if you think about it, the nucleus in each of your cells contains an important model of that DNA, right? There isn't just a central repository that everything communicates with. You have a cache of that DNA in every cell in your body, except red blood cells, which perform a specific task. There may be more of the power automated the human body. But cheap attempt at a joke there, so. Rob Collie (00:50:44): Well, I like it, I like it. Let's go in with both feet. I've also read that one of the reasons why it's difficult to clone adult animals is because you start off with your original DNA, but then you're actually making firmware updates to certain sections of the DNA throughout your life. And so, those edits that are being made all the time are inappropriate for an embryo. Greg Beaumont (00:51:09): Yep. Rob Collie (00:51:10): And so, if you clone, you create an embryo, right? And now, it's got these weird adult things going on in it. That's why things kind of tend to go sideways. It can all come back to this notion of biological code and it's fascinating. A little terrifying, too, when you start to think of it that way. I've listened to some very scary podcasts about the potential for do-it-yourself bioweapon development. There was this explosion back, in what, in the '90s when the virus and worm writers discovered VVA. Remember that? We call them the script kiddies that would author these viruses that would spread throughout the computer systems of the world. And a lot of them, the people writing these things were not very sophisticated. They weren't world renowned hackers. Greg Beaumont (00:51:53): For every instance where you can use this technology to cure cancer, you're right that there's also the possibility of the Island of Dr. Moreau, right? You go look up CRISPR Technology, C-R-I-S-P-R, where they can start splicing together things from different places and making it viable. And 10 years ago, they had sheep that were producing spider webs in their milk and it's just, there's crazy stuff out there if you kind of dive into the dark depths of Biology. Now that we went down the rabbit hole, how do we correct course, right? Rob Collie (00:52:23): Well, we did go down a rabbit hole, but who cares? That's what we do. Greg Beaumont (00:52:26): Even you kind of step it back up to just kind of easy use cases in healthcare, so one of the ones that we use as a demo a lot came from a customer, and this was pre-COVID. But something as simple as hand washing, you don't think about it much. But when you're in the hospital, how many of those people are washing their hands appropriately when they care for you. And there's some white papers out there, which are showing that basically, there are measurable amounts of infections that happen in hospitals due to people not washing their hands appropriately. So, a lot of healthcare organizations will anonymously kind of observe people periodically to see who's doing a good job of washing their hands. Rob Collie (00:53:04): I was going to ask, how is this data collected? Greg Beaumont (00:53:06): This customer actually had nurses who were using a clipboard and they would write down their notes, fax it somewhere, and then somebody would enter it into Excel. So, there was this long process. And with another TS, who covers teams, we basically put a PLC together in a couple days, where they enter the information into a power app within teams, so they made their observation, entered it in. It did a write back straight to an Azure SQL Database at that time. Now, they might use the data verse. And then from Azure SQL DB, you can immediately report on it and Power BI. It even set up alerts, so that if somebody wasn't doing a good job, you could kind of take care of the situation, rather than wait for two days for the Excel report to get emailed out, and maybe lower the infection rates in the hospital. Greg Beaumont (00:53:53): So, it saved time from the workers who are writing things down and faxing things just from a sheer productivity perspective. But it also hopefully, I don't know if it will be measurable or not, but you'd have some anticipated increase in quality, because you're able to address issues faster. And that's the simplest thing ever, right? You can spend a billion dollars to come up with a new drug or you can just make sure are people washing their hands. Rob Collie (00:54:17): Both data collection and enforcement, they happen to be probably the same thing. There's like, "Oh, I'm being watched." The anonymity is gone. That's a fascinating story. Okay. What kinds of solutions are you seeing these days? What's happening out in the world that you think is worth talking to the audience about? Greg Beaumont (00:54:38): We're seeing this ability to execute better where the tools are easier to use, you can do things faster, but there's still challenges that I see frequently out there. So, I know something that you all are experts in its data modeling and understanding how to take a business problem and translate it into something that's going to perform well. So, not only do you get the logic right, but when somebody pushes a button they don't have to go to lunch and come back, they get a result quickly. That's still a challenge. And it's a challenge, because it's not always easy, right? I mean, it's the reason cubes were created in the first place was because when you have complex logic and you're going against a relational database, the query has to happen somewhere, but like that logic. Greg Beaumont (00:55:19): So take for example, if somebody wants to look at year over year percent change for a metric and they want to be able to slice it by department, maybe by disease group, maybe by weekend versus weekday, and then they want to see that trend over time. If you translate that into a SQL query, it gets really gnarly really fast. And that problem is still real. One of the trends I'm seeing in the industry is there's a big push to do everything in DirectQuery mode, because then you can kind of manage access, manage security, do all of those necessary security things in one place and have it exist in one place. Greg Beaumont (00:56:00): But when you're sending giant gnarly SQL queries back to relational databases, even if they're PDWs with multiple nodes, it gets very expensive from a compute perspective, and kind of when you scale out to large number of users, concurrency is still an issue. So that's something where you look at recently what Power BI has come out with aggregations and composite models. That's some of the technology that I think can mitigate some of those problems. And even if we think about something like Azure synapse, right? You can have your dedicated SQL pools then you can have a materialized view. A materialized view is effectively a cache of data within synapse, but then you can also have your caches in Power BI, and kind of layer everything together in a way that's going to take that logic and distribute it. Greg Beaumont (00:56:46): Does that make sense? Rob Collie (00:56:47): It does. I think this is still a current joke. The majority of cases where we've encountered people who think they want or need DirectQuery, the majority of them are actually perfect poster children case studies for when you should use cash and import mode. Right? It turns out the perceived need for DirectQuery, there is a real percentage of problems out there for which DirectQuery is the appropriate solution and it is the best solution. But it's the number of times people use it is a multiple of that real ideal number. Rob Collie (00:57:17): I think part of it is just familiarity. Still, I've long talked about how we're still experiencing as an industry the hangover from most data professionals being storage professionals. Everyone needed a database, just to make the wheels go round. The first use of data isn't BI. The first use of data is line of business applications. Every line of business application needed a database, right? So, we have minted millions of database professionals. this is also why I think partly why Power BI gets sort of erroneously pigeonholed as a visualization tools, because people are used to that. They're used to, we have a storage layer and reports layer, that's it, right? Rob Collie (00:57:56): Reporting services was Microsoft's runaway successful product in this space. Paginated reports is still around for good reason. And I think that if you're a long-term professional in this space with a long history, even if you're relatively young in the industry, but you've been working with other platforms, this storage layer plus visuals layer is just burned in your brain. And this idea of this like, "Why do you need to import the data? Why do you need a schedule? Why do you need all this stuff?" It's like as soon as people hear that they can skip it, and go to DirectQuery, they just run to

Oatly Group AB, Q2 2021 Earnings Call, Aug 16, 2021

This is another episode of a weekly cryptocurrency news series called Last Week Crypto.We cover the latest global news stories affecting the cryptocurrency markets August 8th through 14th.======== $25 Worth of FREE Crypto from Crypto.com ========♥ Crypto.com Signup - http://platinum.crypto.com/r/cryptocasey - Type in Referral Code: CryptoCasey and we both get $25

The Honest Company, Inc., Q2 2021 Earnings Call, Aug 13, 2021

Coca-Cola HBC AG, Q2 2021 Earnings Call, Aug 12, 2021

Usio, Inc., Q2 2021 Earnings Call, Aug 13, 2021

Schrödinger, Inc., Q2 2021 Earnings Call, Aug 12, 2021

PagSeguro Digital Ltd., Q2 2021 Earnings Call, Aug 12, 2021

Baidu, Inc., Q2 2021 Earnings Call, Aug 12, 2021

Oscar Health, Inc., Q2 2021 Earnings Call, Aug 12, 2021

ContextLogic Inc., Q2 2021 Earnings Call, Aug 12, 2021

Palantir Technologies Inc., Q2 2021 Earnings Call, Aug 12, 2021

Latch, Inc., Q2 2021 Earnings Call, Aug 12, 2021

FIGS, Inc., Q2 2021 Earnings Call, Aug 12, 2021

Eargo, Inc., Q2 2021 Earnings Call, Aug 12, 2021

DoorDash, Inc., Q2 2021 Earnings Call, Aug 12, 2021

Airbnb, Inc., Q2 2021 Earnings Call, Aug 12, 2021

Cricut, Inc., Q2 2021 Earnings Call, Aug 12, 2021

This week Danny and Alex and Chris took to Twitter Spaces to chat about the current state of the crypto economy, and hang out with friends in a live Twitter Space. We're doing more of these, so make sure that you are following the show on Twitter.As a small programming note, I forgot to tell the folks who chimed in during the chat that we were recording it, so we had to cut most the Q&A portion of the show. We got Ezra's permission, thankfully. The mixup was a bummer as we learned a lot. In the future, we'll not make that mistake and keep all the voices.So, what did we talk about? The following:The current state of crypto regulation in America, and how the government may screw everything up. In short, tech moves fast, and government moves slow. This creates friction.Coinbase kicked the ever-loving shit out of its Q2 earnings. But as it turns out the future for trading-powered companies could include a few quarters of slower results.And everyone wants to fund the next Coinbase. You can understand why. The company is printing cash lately, helping drive more investment into localized exchanges in different markets. 

2nd Week of August 2021 ------