How's everybody doing everybody? Enjoy
your lunch.
I think we're getting people gathering
in. Um, just want to say good afternoon
again for those who are just joining us.
My name is Jeff Davidson. I'm executive
director at Sailor Academy. If you
weren't here this morning for a little
presentation, just as a reminder, we're
a nonprofit global initiative educating
people around the world, mostly
underserved communities. We're offering
courses in very key foundational
subjects like English and and tech and
all those sorts of things, but also
career focused opportunities like
decision-m, leadership, and software
engineering. All really interesting
stuff. We've got students in 185
countries who have collectively earned
over half a million certificates across
those areas. And I think I have do I
have a couple slides
up
there
Well, there were supposed to be a couple
slides of showing you a couple stu
actual student um uh that that are
earning these certificates and that we
can we can kind of skip over that. But
whether they're around the world or
right here in DC, there are large
numbers of people who simply just don't
have access to education.
So real quick
here in Washington DC uh a group
faith-based group that works with
homeless people transition back in
society.
[applause]
we have a video coming out soon on that
where there's really life changing
stuff. was very affirming for us to see
the order in the cloud. We got people
taking you see the people signing up and
earning certificates. It was very great
to go meet some people and uh so very
excited to see see the students who are
benefiting you know again we also have
students from 185 countries. So you see
some of the quotes we get emails that we
get from places around the world.
for learning the excitement because
again it's about access for a lot of
people. There's a ton of talent, a ton
of potential, a ton of great people
around the world who need, you know,
that access. Um, you know, there's
future future engineers, future doctors,
future everything out there. Um, if they
can just get that chance and that is
what open education is really all about.
And very few people have championed that
ideal more than our next speaker. Uh,
it's my distinct pleasure to introduce
the trustee of the Sailor Academy,
Michael Sailor. Michael's the chairman
and CEO of Micro Strategy, a global
leader in software, excuse me, and um in
enterprise analytics and mobility
software. We've got 2500 plus employees
around the world. So, Michael's very
going to bring a very global employer
perspective. Earlier, someone mentioned
lack of employer uh perspective in the
morning session. Well, we've got a
little bit of that coming through
Michael. Michael's full bio is in your
program, but you'll note that he went to
uh MIT and earned a couple scholar
earned a couple degrees um through an
ROC scholarship. Uh and so he came out
with no debt. And he's mentioned more
than once that that was his impetus to
try to give back uh to make try to offer
a first class education to people who
can't get to a place like MIT, but also
anywhere just without without the debt.
So you can free people up to go tap into
their potential.
um his philanthropy extends to many
areas, but his uh commitment to
education is just really extraordinary.
Not just giving resources, but time,
energy, and ideas. So, we're very
appreciative of Michael helping us put
this event on and just for his um
continued support through our whole
enterprise and and reaching all these
students around the world. So, please
join me in welcoming Michael Sailor.
[applause]
Thank you, Jeeoff. [clears throat] Um,
and thank you for coming here today. Uh,
I thought I'd uh share a few uh a few
observations of mine about um what's
going on in the marketplace uh from a
technology
uh employers point of view. some
observations I see looking at big tech
right now and then the implications for
what we're all doing together in open
education. Um first uh a couple of
trends you if you look at the year 2019
and you ask how has the world changed in
the past 20 years? Well, there's a lot
more computing power. Like a like a lot
more like a thousandx more, maybe
10,000x more on average per unit.
There's a lot more memory,
computer memory. That is uh I have a
this is an Apple Watch, but it's a
series 5 Apple Watch. It's got 32
gigabytes of RAM in the watch, and the
phone has 500 gigabytes. 500 gigabytes
is um when uh when we used to do data
analytics for the Target corporation
back in the mid 90s, the entire retail
chain could store everything they did
for like three years in 200 gigabytes.
So to give you a sense of of what we've
got, um we're rapidly able to uh keep
track of a lot more information and the
processing power increased. So I got to
say it feels like it's like an order of
a th00and to 10,000. There's a lot more
elasticity now in the marketplace and
especially elasticity as um typified by
uh cloud offerings like Azure and AWS
which are are generating a huge amount
of excitement and interest. Uh what does
it mean? Uh it means that um instead of
taking a year to hire 50 employees and
spending $20 million to set up a data
center in Singapore, you could do up the
entire thing in 12 minutes with a click
[clears throat]
and then if you made a mistake, you can
unwind it. So,
uh what is the implication of all that?
Well, I mean, clearly um
if you've got a piece of software that
does something, you've now got 10,000x
the resources to run the software on.
So, that's really good for people that
have good software. Now, if you happen
to be in the business of manually
laboring to replace a piece of software
or doing something uh using your hands
instead of a computer,
it's just getting thousands of times
more painful for you. Uh it's uh and
it's not going to end. And so what
happens? Um well, what one thing that
happens is the rise of big tech. This is
why Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon
are in essence crushing everybody. And
you know, they're rolling over and uh
rolling up any kind of competitor
because they've got the software and
they and they keep doubling down the
amount of software engineers to make it
better. And as the cost of running the
software falls, the people Why is
Microsoft worth nearly a trillion
dollars today? If you have a lot of
software and the world relies on more
software then you have an advantage. So
so software laden companies are being
lifted and unautomated companies manual
bricks and mortar companies just keep
keep getting hammered and hammered and
hammered and so while we have um more of
one thing we have 10,000 times more
computing power than we had. What do we
have less of in 20 years? And uh this is
best illustrated by the observation that
when I was in high school, there were
three channels and there was prime time
TV from 8 till 11 and there was like one
TV show between 11 and 11:30 and then
there was just a bunch of bars on the
screen.
And if you were technically apt, you
could actually figure out how to get
like the PBS station. So you might get a
fourth
and that was pretty much it, right? And
so at 11:30, you probably just went to
sleep because there was no Netflix,
there was no Amazon Prime, there was no
Disney Plus, there was no HBO Go, there
was no Apple TV Plus,
there was no free infinite, there was no
YouTube. If you actually look at the
most popular websites in the world 20
years ago, um at the top you had AOL
and uh then there was a burst where
Yahoo came on and then you start to see
uh this uh this little engine that could
which is Google that comes out of
nowhere and just starts to get more and
more powerful. And then right behind it
in the caboose is YouTube.
And Google and YouTube run all the way
to the top. And eventually Facebook, the
prodigy comes along. And today it's like
Google, YouTube, and Facebook.
But uh
and it's not like Google's actually
slowing down. Google's actually widening
the gap. In the last three to four
years, they went from being the top with
a lead of this much to being on top with
a lead of this much. In fact, twothirds
of all of the usage as far as I can see
are Google and YouTube. Like this one
company and Google owns YouTube.
Yeah. So this one company has like 70%
of all the views,
right? And and uh [clears throat] it's
it's got a lot of implications like
what is YouTube? Well, YouTube is just
millions and millions of hours of
streaming video, but a lot of it's
didactic. There's a lot of educational
content if you want to learn anything,
right? I mean, a lot of it's some of it
is deep education. I can find a woman in
India that'll give me a six or eight
hour tutorial on selenium and automated
testing if I want. By the way, I'll see
16 other competing tutorials on
selenium. Uh I can take, you know,
courses galore on nutrition or the like.
You know, there's a guy called the
aimator. He's uploaded 1,000 videos on
chess. Thousands and thousands and
thousands. So, sometimes it's pop
culture, it's like look at me, this is
fun. Sometimes it's travel log.
Sometimes it's like serious.
Some uh sometimes it's con academy type
stuff. It varies. But what you can see
is just this enormous thirst for
thematic uh knowledge coming in a in an
easily consumable uh format.
[clears throat] So what do we have more
of? We have a lot more compute and
memory. What do we have less of? We have
less attention span and less patience.
You know, I joke with my customers that
um it used to be if you roll the clock
back 10 to 20 years, a business person
would run a query and they would wait uh
and they're waiting a minute for the
answer and there's two other things
they're thinking about. And today, if
they have a question, they might wait
five, three seconds, a couple of
seconds, and there's 20 things they're
thinking about. Your phone's ringing,
your computer's ringing. There's Apple
like has, have you noticed like they
have all these notification alerts, and
they're like, "Well, you can't we're
turning your notifications off and then
you're gettingounded by every possible
app to get permission to turn
notifications back on." your bank wants
to notify you and your your Facebook
wants to notify you and every other
insta something wants to notify you and
at some point you're like getting
notified about everything everywhere all
the time and you can't keep up.
So what's the most valuable resource on
earth? It's the number of milliseconds
between when somebody wants something
and when they get it. and uh and the
[clears throat] competition or or the
expectation is being set by Google and
Google has created something which is uh
smart and fast. So successful products
everywhere in the world, things that are
working, they they have a couple
characteristics. One is they're smarter
and the other is they're faster and the
last is they're flawless.
And Google is an a kind of example of
that. And that when you start to ask
Google a question,
you know, like uh
who's going to win the baseball match
and you misspell baseball,
you know, Google says, "Did you mean
who's winning the World Series right
now?" You know, and the answer is the
Nationals,
you idiot. You know, like you asked the
wrong asked the wrong question the wrong
way, but I inferred what you wanted to
ask and it's and you're like, "Oh, yeah,
that's what I really wanted to say."
Right? You know, and it kind of, you
know, it's kind of amusing, but if
you're if you study as computer
scientists, you know, you kind of
scratch, you think, man, those those
engineers are so quick, right? like and
then you just kind of feel sorry for
their competitors
because as you're typing sometimes
you'll type three letters. If you were
to go on Google during the World Series
and type B,
it would probably say who's winning the
baseball game right now, Washington
Nationals, you know, like you probably
wouldn't get past B before it's giving
you that thing. It's not waiting. And uh
uh it it takes me to an interesting
point which is if you've got a if you've
got a product or a computer program,
it's waiting for the user to ask the
question or to do the thing
and it's sitting idle.
Like in the amount of time that I've
spoken, my watch, you know, burned off
enough cycles to have like launched 10
trips to the moon, calculate the
ballistic trajectory and come back,
right? Like but it didn't.
You see, like it's just pouring
computing power onto the floor, right?
This is like more computing power than
the Walmart Corporation had 20 years
ago. And as I'm talking to you, what is
it doing? Nothing.
So then you end up with these companies
asking, "How do I get the computer to
work 100 times harder?"
Because the only way to get ahead in the
economy or ahead in the world is I have
to tap into the unlimited infinite free
exploding magical resource of the age.
You know, 100 years ago was oil,
gasoline, internal combustion engine.
Now it's compute engines. How do I tap
into that? Well, how do I make the
computer work a 100 times harder? Well,
how about how do I make the computer
work a 100,000 times harder,
right? How how do I build uh something
which is going to think and then do
before you ask it to do something what
you should ask it to do if you were
sophisticated enough to know to ask.
Well, there are examples of of companies
that the companies that are doing that
and they're making
incredible large heckloads of money.
Google is one example we just talked
about. Uh Google does it in their search
engine and YouTube they do it again.
It's like Lord help you. So if you click
on one one little video on Franklidd
Wright houses and then you look in the
right it's like here's 18 Franklidd
Wright house tours and then here's a
documentary on Franklidd Wright and
here's a documentary on houses built by
acolytes of Franklidd Wright and here's
discussion of architecture and you know
if you click on two it will feed you a
thousand hours worth of this stuff and
it and it you got to be careful what you
click on because it will just overwhelm
you with pet videos, videos on the Ketto
diet, videos on chess, videos on
whatever. And it's infinite, right? It's
like uh yeah, there are guys that do uh
they now do live chess commentary. So I
want to paint this picture for you that
you know two world champion chess
players will watch a game which is going
to take four hours
where the players are moving every 10
minutes and for that nine hours they
will give you a color commentary.
Now, think about how many thousands and
thousands of hours of chess video you
can watch.
And think about what you would
accomplish in the year during which you
watch that. Because there's 10 to the
120 different chess games out there. You
could watch it 5,000 hours a year for
the next 50 years and you won't get
through 1%. It's just
frightening, horrifyingly, terrifyingly
entertaining, right?
However you think about it, you really
want to think what does that mean to
you? Well, um another example
of of um of this uh is Apple,
you know, and it used to be Apple
thought, well, we'll put the camera on
the phone and then they thought, well,
we think we'll take the the picture and
then we'll do a little bit of software
editing on the picture to make it look
better. and then we'll give you a little
filter. And then they thought, well,
what if we actually took two pictures
and then we went through pixel by pixel
and we picked the best pixels of each of
the two, you know, less shaky and we put
together one.
And then they thought, well, why don't
we just take 16 photos? Each one is five
megabytes, and we'll just go and make 80
megabytes. And then in the background,
we'll just go ahead and shuffle it all
together and create this composite. But
we're not going to tell you. And as you
can see, and you can tell this is going
on because in the iPhone 10, you take
the photo and if you click the trigger
too shutter too many times, it's the
machine or the the the camera kind of
stops and it delays. And then the iPhone
11, they improved the chip. It's like I
had to invent some software which is
insanely expensive so that I can give
you or sell you a chip which is insanely
fast so you would upgrade and throw away
your old phone right now.
What's the key to that? Right? You have
to get away from analog and machines and
you have to get into uh software so that
you can make the software work harder.
Right? This
right this has got enough horsepower in
it to listen to me speak. Right.
When is sunset?
Sunset will be at 4:55 p.m. today.
a fishly expensive
use of computing power, right? To listen
to me speak. And you know, like, by the
way, you want want to see something even
more expensive?
What time is it?
It's 1:25 p.m.
Yeah. Yeah. Right. Like I can answer the
question by just glancing at it or I
could look at an analog or I can create
a chip which processes a billion
instructions a second. Listen. convert
your voice into some stream, parse it,
and [clears throat] then reverse it back
into some some English semantic
representation. Look at the thing and
then and then I can do a voice decoder
thing and I can synthesize speech and I
can tell you what time it is.
Is that good for our society?
Interesting. [clears throat] Well, it
has implications.
What are the implications? Right. Well,
first of all, um [snorts]
you really better be educated.
[laughter]
You really better be educated. And uh
there are certain things that we want a
lot more of right now. Um if you want to
if you want to produce this sort of
product
uh which uh which keeps getting better
and better and better which is drives
the engine of the economy then you have
to be very precise
and uh and very orderly in the way you
communicate. [clears throat]
Our company's values are precision,
transparency, engagement,
and agility,
but they're they're very much related to
what you'd have to do if you want to
write a piece of software or you want to
get a lot of people to work together.
Um,
it's pretty Thank you. That's nice of
you. Uh it's it's pretty clear that
if you don't uh if you don't get through
all the basics uh all of the the English
and math and basic sciences and then and
then follow with logical
thinking processes
uh that drive intellectual rigor then
you're not going to be able to
contribute in any of these enterprises
uh that are building these things
because they all are defined by lots of
moving parts like lots and lots of
moving parts at um
at Micro Strategy
um I think we
well the CEO's control freak uh and
and so one thing that the CEO did was he
implemented a rule whereby he has to
approve every single hire and I think we
hired five six hundred people last here
something like that and uh I don't have
time to interview them all but I want
some degree of control. So we
implemented a set of precise assessments
and whenever you want a job with us
doesn't matter where you are if you're
in Poland or if you're in Nigeria or
South Africa or or Malaysia it could be
anywhere Japan Korea we give you um
[snorts]
uh assessments uh that give us an
insight as to your analytic skills, your
business judgment, your coding skills,
your design or or creativity
freethinking and and graphical design
skills.
and um and uh then English and then
after that we might give you a French,
German, Spanish, Japanese, Korean or
Portuguese
test to assess that and then we put that
into the um into the record and then
that flows all the way up the the entire
organization and there's some interviews
like four or five people might interview
someone and the HR people opine on it
and then the manager and their boss and
the department head and it gets all the
way to me.
And uh
what's interesting is
what you find is that the resume very
rarely is that um useful. Um in fact,
the better the resume, sometimes the
more skeptical I am.
Like if you have that good a resume, why
are you looking for a job? Like why do
you want to work for me? Like I don't
want to be a member of a club where they
would have me, right? Like so some I
mean sometimes that's good to have a
resume but sometimes it's not good
because the people that have failed in
the last six jobs always have great
resumes because they had lots of
experience
you know so maybe uh and then the
interviews well I mean some people
interview well but of course the more
you interview the better you get at that
right
and uh
and so what I see is the resume not so
useful the interviews may or may not be
useful. You read a lot of stuff, you
can't tell anything. The assessments, I
look at the assessment and about one
second I can say, you can't write.
You're going to be a great designer. You
should build the graphic interface. You
have really poor sense. You you know,
given given 50 choices of what's
beautiful, you made the wrong choice 25
times. Right. Right. If you if you like
I can see that or I can see like we ask
business questions like you have a
meeting do you show up five minutes in
advance 15 minutes in advance or two
hours in advance right and if they say
15 minutes in advance we we're like okay
that's good two hours that's too soon
five minutes is like cutting it way too
close right do you have common sense
bottom line is uh oh by the way what
didn't I mention I didn't really mention
the university
In fact, uh I don't pay attention to
what university went to. I don't pay
attention to what degree they got and I
don't pay attention to what grades they
got. Uh because they're all
non-comparable. You can't tell. Uh what
I found is that the best single
indicator of success is uh the one
second of the objective assessments that
we have. And uh the uh the negative of
what we do is we make we make people
take two hours of or two and a half
hours of assessments to actually give us
that one second insight. The ideal
situation, as I've spoken about in these
previous events, would be if there was a
universal set of assessments that
someone could take once and they could
submit those credentials to a thousand
different employers and then instead of
taking two hours to go through the
employer's battery of assessments, you
could go through the two uh the two
hours of assessments once uh put them on
the blockchain or upload them, you know,
and then uh you know, if you think about
the implication, it doesn't just speed
up your process by two hours because if
you did it 10 times, it would cut 20
hours out of your life of waste. But it
doesn't just make you 20 hours faster.
When you actually get to something which
is um a public uh a public uh shared
standard, then you could go and post
those assessments online and be
considered by 800,000 employers in five
minutes.
Right? So, you've securitized the
talent, right? Like if you uh
if you tell me you have a bunch of Apple
stock and you'll sell it to me for $120
bucks a share and it was trading at $260
a share, it takes me one second to
decide I want to buy, right? Because
we've got a very precise definition of
the security and the price. So, if you
want to actually buy and sell talent and
you're you're a wouldbe employee or a
wouldbe employer,
right, then um then the best way to uh
to speed that up and create a liquid
market is is to post a public credential
that is well understood and shared. And
uh the the real interesting thing is if
I could go uh if I could go online and I
could pick my city, if I could go to
Hanjo or go to Warsaw or go to Paris and
just hire 27 people that hit these
credentials,
I might do that in a day.
I would do that in a day and I would pay
for the 27 people as opposed to take two
years and hire three recruiters and pay
half a million dollars in head hunting
fees in order to get, you know, half of
that. So the um the market is becoming
uh more liquid and um I'm I'm enormously
excited by um the potential of these uh
public credentials. You know what a
credibly is doing, what we're doing at
the Sailor Academy. It's very very
interesting. Put your credentials on the
blockchain and um you can see um this is
being driven by uh big tech in a lot of
ways.
Google and uh and uh Microsoft and
Amazon are all driving these big cloud
initiatives and one of the interesting
characteristics of that is so a
corporation like Fizer wants to put all
their processing in the cloud once it
goes into the cloud in AWS or Azure
let's say they need people to tinker
with it and administer it and run it
well how do they find those people.
Where are those people? Well, it doesn't
matter where they are, right? Because
it's in the cloud anyway. They could be
in anywhere. They could be in Africa.
They could be in Asia. They could be in
America. So, the migration of all of the
computing to the cloud is a
globalization of the labor pool. Now it
also turns out that um that when we want
to run uh a customer's uh intelligence
environment in the AWS cloud, we have to
take our people and put them through an
AWS set of classes. So we go online in
AWS and they go through like 40 hours or
80 hours worth of classes in Linux and
system administration AWS and the like
and at the end there's a certification
and you take a test and you submit it
and you get graded and if you're
successful you get a certificate and
that certificate you can then post on
your LinkedIn and uh and that uh becomes
a pretty big uh career stamp
and uh you know what happens next our
person gets a certificate and then they
get head-hunted away by somebody else
[laughter]
because there's massive demand for
people that have that skill. So, so, uh,
that's the first order effect. And then
we end up sitting and talking about it.
We go, well, gosh, I guess we better
give them a raise as soon as they get
that certificate. Yeah. So we had a
situation where we were um slow as an
employer. We go to some place China or
Warsaw or anywhere in the world then we
hire a lot of people and then we train
them and then uh they get skills and
then uh you know other companies
competing with us including you know big
tech and all the integrators they hire
our people because they think well this
this is great. You trained all these
people we can hire them. This is good.
So when we're when we uh give them
raises of 5% a year or 3% a year, we
have 25 or 30% turnover. So then we
start thinking, well, we better give
them a career path that's a bit more
precise
uh and say, well, when you hit this
level, we'll move you to here, and when
you hit this level, we'll move you to
here and and here and here. And if we do
that and if we're rigorous about it,
then our turnover goes from 25 or 30% to
5%.
3%.
So, uh what is that? Well, that is the
visible hand of the market spanking us
for being bad employers and reminding us
that if we don't actually cultivate our
talent and take care of them and give
them an inspiring path and then make
sure we pay them, then some other
company will and they will solve the
problem.
And uh
when you put together the idea of
objective credentials with the idea of
globalization with the idea of liquid
you know uh crossborder flows of labor
with the rise of big tech it really
means that somebody in Nigeria can get
their AWS certificate and potentially be
just as employable as somebody in
Manhattan. and maybe I want them more.
Um, and that uh what does that mean?
Well, that means that uh an AWS or Azure
or the like certification is becoming
more important than a Harvard or a Yale
degree because I can tell you like in my
uh meetings when I sit when we sit
around and talk what I hear is well we
need 50 cloud engineers, we need 30 of
these people. We need 25 of these
people. We need 50 of these. There's no
one that ever sits in a meeting with me
and says, "We need five more Harvard
grads.
We need 25 Yale grads." Like, nobody
ever asks for a credential by the name
of a of a traditional institution.
They're wanting a tech capability or and
it's either a basic or more likely it's
an advanced certification. So, that is
driving and you know, uh it's going to
ripple through everything, right?
Because the numbers we're talking about
are
they're not tens of thousands. They
might be hundreds of thousands, but
they're really likely millions and
millions and millions of uh people being
infected and going to tens of millions
and then hundreds of millions. And uh
the um the motive uh or the motor on
this becomes uh a company like Cognizant
with 250,000 knowledge workers about to
hire 150,000 more.
You know, they're uh they're really
wanting to go at this in a in a
machine-like way. So, you know, what
have we done? uh it's driven us to uh
define our roles much more precisely
like now we're all the companies that
are successful they're building software
that's reusable and then building roles
and certificates uh that that are
essential for the ecosystem so that you
can train and certify practitioners to
use those tools and then you want to
build your own ecosystem up and uh after
you've defined the roles you can define
the credentials then you can issue the
credentials then you can issue to them
publicly and uh and then you end up with
you know 10,000 micro strategy
architects or 50,000 hyper intelligence
engineers
um
the the first order observation I have
is that if you've got a product or a
service offering like that that you can
automate and then you can uh massively
we scale up uh the creation of that
talent then you can grow and you can
prosper. If you if you can't then you
just keep getting squeezed every single
year
by someone else that is uh the second
order observation I have is like if I
think about every internal project at my
company like everything when we sit
about and we talk about what are we
going to do to make 2020 better than
2019 or 2021 better when if you define
the word hope
every every hopeful project consists of
in essence the relentless drive to
organize and automate
using some software tool.
We're either trying to build software
faster or writing specifications in a
more orderly uh automated way or
documentation or courses or
certifications, managing projects,
opportunities,
contracts, quotes, marketing campaigns,
schedules, any miscellaneous activity,
any purchase, any hire decision, any
promotion decision, any transfer
decision. They're all just many software
projects using a tool. It's either a
compiler, it's GitHub, or it's
Salesforce, or it's Workday, or it's
Micro Strategy, but invariably we're
building something to build something
else in order to create 10,000 of the
something so that we can do a 100,000.
So, we can squeeze something down from
taking 47 minutes to 4 minutes to 40
seconds to 4 seconds to point4 seconds
till we get to the point we could do
27,000 of them in 4 seconds, right? And
and the only way you do that is just
relentlessly
model,
test, machine,
install, deploy, pilot, rebuild.
If you're not manufacturing
an outcome, then you just literally
can't keep up in the modern world
because your competition is some
enterprise that is manufacturing an
outcome.
So
I guess that uh takes me to my closing
thoughts. Um
it seems pretty obvious uh that if you
want to do a good thing for the world,
it's undebatable that if we can increase
the level of education everywhere on the
planet and whatever it is, if if you
don't have a high school degree, get you
on. If you don't have a college degree,
get you on. If you don't have a master's
or a technical skill get you one, if if
we can create PhDs, create PhDs. We need
to create more and we need to do it
cheaper and and in the limit where we
can offer any type of education you
might want at the cost of zero. And and
by the way, I I can't see any reason why
we shouldn't get there because the cost
to provide
all all the critical types of education
is got to be 1% of what we're spending
right now on on similar things or
irrelevant things. So, and the cost of
the compute power is just falling
exponentially
uh and will continue to fall
exponentially. So,
This is a straightforward thing that we
all I think we're all joined here
together in a belief this is a good
idea. I think uh the success comes one
part marketing. How do we actually
market this and communicate this to the
world so we can do that? And part of it
is politics.
How do we get political accredititors to
embrace uh open learning and endorse it?
And then part of it is the product if
you know it used to be that everybody
used Netscape and then 96% of the planet
used explorer but today 80% of the
planet uses Chrome. Why? Smarter,
faster, better, right? Make the product
better. Make everything better. You
know, you look at your courses, you're
like, are these boring or these fun?
These are boring. We need to make them
fun. Right? It's fun. Is it in black and
white or color? Okay. we love is black
and white. We can make it color. Can we
make it easier? Can we make it uh more
uh more elegant? Can we give it more
feedback? And we're always trying to
figure out how do you create that
awesome
incredible product?
And uh and then ultimately we've just
got we've got history on our side. Bit
by bit every quarter, every year more
and more in the world embraces this. The
world opens up. And I think that uh I
think there's no doubt where the trend
is going. If when we look at our own
stats on the Sailor Academy, it's clear
there's more enthusiasm every quarter,
every year. We're picking up momentum.
So for everybody that's involved in the
in the space or in the ecosystem, uh I
want to uh thank you for having an
interest and and for your commitment. A
lot of people making big sacrifices to
support this particular initiative. Um,
we're happy uh that you joined us today.
We'd love to help and partner with you
any way we possibly can. And uh I can't
think of a better way to spend our time
and our energy than do something like
this. Ultimately, I can't see that
anything but good will come of it. So,
thank you.
[applause]
Well, very good. If you look at your
agenda, we're going to take a break for
about 15 minutes or so and then come
back here at 2:15 for the next panel.
So, thank you everybody. Appreciate it.