Open Source in Finance Podcast: Andrew Aitken - Chief Open Source Officer - Hedera

 

 

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Transcript

Andrew Aitken: [00:00:00] technology and distributed database technology will continue to evolve. But I think there's more opportunity above the chain that the application player, and that's certainly where fintechs can get involved. If you think about this is again, I look at this a little bit like, I looked at open source early on to talk to people.

This is inevitable. We are moving this way. Now, will it transform the entire financial services industry? Possibly, but maybe not. Maybe it's just an evolution of parts of financial services and how financial services are transacted. We still have to see that. I think the possibilities are incredible, but there's a lot of work that has to be done.

Grizz Griswold: Good morning, good afternoon, good [00:01:00] evening, wherever you are. This is Grizz Griswold at the Finos. Hope you're doing well. Today in the studio, we have Andrew Aitken. Andrew. How are you doing today?

Andrew Aitken: I am doing great. I'm looking forward to heading to London and seeing you and everybody else at the Finos Summit next week.

Grizz Griswold: Yes. I can't wait for you to get here. I'm already in town, as I told you. And my son this morning, when I was telling me about the weather, he actually said, how is London cold, but hot at exactly the same time? I said, I don't know. You just have to experience it. So when you get here, it probably hot.

And it doesn't matter because we're going to have a great time.

Andrew Aitken: It doesn't help with my packing though.

Grizz Griswold: No, I know. I've been preparing for cold weather and hot weather at the same time. And it actually happened. Uh, whenever you leave just text me and I'll let you know that, what temperature it is anyway, enough about the weather.

I'd rather talk about you. And I'm. [00:02:00] Going to ask you to tell us about yourself, but but for those of you that don't know Andrew is a board member of the Governing Board of FinOS among everything else that he does for his company, Hedera and this is not the first time that he's been a board member.

Here with us as well. So Andrew, I'd love to ask you about yourself. We did say in our prep call that that you and open source have been around Around the same amount of time. Tell us about Andrew.

Andrew Aitken: Sure. Thanks, Grizz. Haven't been around quite as long as open source, but do go way back around 25 years.

I was. In it consulting, I ran some businesses whose business was providing it consultants for a number of years. And then one of my friends who's actually one of my, my most direct competitors called me up one day and said, Hey, do you want to do Linux consulting? And I was really bored.

And I said, what the hell? [00:03:00] I don't think I could spell Linux at that time. Truly. But I needed a different opportunity and I jumped in with both proverbially with both feet, as they say, and haven't looked back. And it took me just actually relatively short amount of time to really get behind what open source is all about.

I have to point to Eric Raymond's book and a particular chapter called seeding the new sphere. That really, for some reason, just connected with me because I came in like people still do. Why would someone contribute software? Why would someone contribute to these projects where that aren't their own?

But it really, I really began to get the kind of ethos behind open source very quickly, even for a non developer like myself.

Grizz Griswold: So we're not a developer at this time. Do you do development? No. Tell me about that.

Andrew Aitken: No, no one wants me to code a line a line of code. Trust [00:04:00] me. So I did it in college, when it was still.

Punch cards and that's as far as I got, couldn't stand it. But again, as much as a non developer can, I really began to understand and buy into the ethos of open source. And at that time I was privileged to be able to engage with a lot of what we'd call the original founders whether it's Linus Torvalds or Richard Stallman or Eric Raymond, as I mentioned, I had an opportunity to sit down and spend a lot of time with them at the early days and really, Because I'm not a coder and because I saw how they presented themselves actually to executives and business people, I thought, okay, there's an actually an actual opportunity here for someone who thinks more like a business person who thinks more about strategy and can bring that perspective to this ecosystem.

And so that's basically what I built my career on. It's bringing a a rational business perspective to open source.

Grizz Griswold: And like that aspect of it. And somebody who is. Straddled the line of always working on the business side of [00:05:00] technology companies and then being involved with open source, but also I would never call myself a coder, but more of a hacker and not even not a hacker as a hacker, but like somebody who hacks on like websites and things like that, that yeah, I had two requests in the past two weeks to build websites for people and I was like, there are people that are much smarter, much faster at doing that than I am.

Yeah, I and the business side of open source is a wonderful world that I don't think that gets talked about enough but when people start to realize the business value of open source, then everything clicks. Disagreeing on that

Andrew Aitken: it certainly helps. It really does. And I had the opportunity early on when I launched my own boutique consultancy Alliance consulting group in Silicon Valley had the opportunity to actually do some of the very earliest open source strategies for organizations like Intel like sun and IBM even Microsoft.

[00:06:00] We were one of the Firms they engage to help them think through what open source could mean and Nokia and others. And so the, the first stage of our career as a consultant boutique consultancy was with all the OEMs and large OEMs and ISVs out there worked with most of them, helping them develop their open source strategies.

And then as the venture capital industry got the bug after seeing the red hat IPO and other acquisitions in the space they they began to, I heard the best description I've ever heard of a venture capitalist came from a venture capitalist. So this is, these are not words. He said, we are lemmings and wolf wolves clothes.

And I thought that was great. And to that point, what they meant is there was a period of four or five years in which every venture capital firm had to have an open source company in their portfolio, rightly or wrongly, or had to convert one of their existing portfolio companies to open source.

Again, rightly or wrongly, [00:07:00] they had to check that box so that they could play with all the other VCs and say, yes, we've got an open source company. And so during that four or five years, we actually got to work with. startups. Because the VCs would bring us in to do due diligence. In many instances, we actually recommended against the deal and they would 90 percent of the time they would still go ahead.

And then it turned out to be a great business strategy for us because we would surface issues during due diligence. They would make the investment, then they would bring us back in to fix the issues that we found. I didn't plan that. I stumbled on that business model, but it turned out to be great for us for four or five years.

Grizz Griswold: That's good. So where do you, is there a point where you pull out of consulting and then You, where do you go after your consultancy? I don't even want to say ends, but because I feel like you're still doing in different roles.

Andrew Aitken: I still do advisory and it's a little bit of a different different capacity today.

[00:08:00] But what kind of moved things along was after we worked with early stages with the large OEMs and ISVs. And then we moved to the kind of the startup arena. And then there was the next progression was as enterprises began to understand the value and see the value of open source, particularly financial services, which is obviously relevant to this conversation.

People don't realize besides kind of manufacturing companies, financial services was the vertical to adopt open source at scale before anyone else. So a lot of people don't realize that, but we moved from startups to enterprises and most of it early on was licensing IP compliance. So legal would discover that X, Y, Z, they were using a ton of open source and holy crap, we got to block that was at that time.

That was reaction. So we had worked with them to hopefully help. We wrote a lot. [00:09:00] Of pop open source policies. And we always try to bring a rational approach. Sometimes our clients said, no, we need to lock it down and you need to do what your client says. But we would always try and help them understand why a binary approach to open source isn't necessarily the most effective way forward.

And that without trying to sound like an evangelist. We tried to help them understand that open source is inevitable. And so you need to prepare the best you can for that inevitability. And again some clients were absolutely open to that and some weren't. And so that was that stage.

We got the attention because we were doing so much licensing and IP work. We got the attention of Black Duck software. At that time owned 95 percent of that particular market. So through a number of conversations we had with them we actually ended up being acquired by black duck software and I joined them as chief strategy officer, chief consulting strategy officer for a [00:10:00] number of years.

And then after that, after my tenure at black duck I then was recruited by. I was, I wanted to take a little time, but it didn't actually work out that way. I was recruited by Wipro to come on board and build consulting practice and the opportunity there for me, because I hadn't envisioned myself going to work for any large consulting company whether it was an Accenture of Deloitte or Wipro or whomever, but the opportunity that intrigued me was to build a consulting company, an open source consulting company at scale.

That was really exciting. No one had achieved it at that point in time. You're joining an organization that has over 200, 000 resources, of which tens of thousands of them are already doing open source related work. That caught my interest. So I joined Wipro for nine years as head of open source.

Grizz Griswold: And one can we talk be before we [00:11:00] get to maybe the next point along the road, can I ask you some of the things that I think some of the things that you saw along the way, because I think it's very interesting the point that you made about that financial services was actually one of the first industries to adopt open source.

Because, and I'm not gonna say that's, I've heard that differently. It's many times within this community and outside of this community. It's open source in finance that, that we do that. I've heard it said, and I've seen it in some aspects that, it feels like financial services as a whole has been behind the, let's say the technology industry, as far as make, I want to say adopting open source.

And when I say adopting open source, I'm saying. Not only the consumption side, but they can [00:12:00] contribution side as well. And so I think it was interesting that you're saying that there was adoption, earlier on than maybe even I would think. Can we hit on that and then maybe, talk about the other things that you've seen in finance along the way with open source.

Andrew Aitken: Yeah. And it's important to make a distinction. In our language here, I am talking about consumption and not contribution, right? So really, besides high tech and manufacturing, financial services were the heaviest consumers of open source as a vertical earlier on. No, I'm not contribution, yes, there has been and still is resistance to that.

And as you would expect in a highly regulated environment, you accept it when it comes to research, you'll also see this in healthcare, in health IT, in the research areas, there's a huge amount of resource. Today, but in the infrastructure area, there is that industry still [00:13:00] lags again, partly due to the nature regulations in the equation.

Grizz Griswold: Do you think that things have fallen down and maybe if you don't want to talk about financial services, but maybe even healthcare as far as we have, we have the banks, we have the consultancies and the tech vendors. We have the regulators. And who am I missing in this equation that's it?

Like, where do you think? Oh, and I want to say that within the banks, you have the lawyers, you have the technologists, you have the lawyers, you have the business decision makers that are within one, one company. And not saying necessarily where things falling down, but where do you.

Coming from the business side, I think, like I normally have a lot more technologists on so this is fun for me. Where do [00:14:00] you see the, more of the pushback, even now even after finesse has been around for seven years we've seen a lot of change obviously but where did you see it where are you seeing it, and.

Yeah. And then maybe the next question, how do we get over that hump?

Andrew Aitken: The, there's been a lot of change in contribution and Finos has obviously been the leader in helping financial institutions understand the other side of open source contribution. So we are definitely seeing a significant change and that started, I'd say maybe three years ago.

But original resistance came in the form And I had my own personal learning process and experience here when I came when my firm or I were invited into a large bank to help them develop their open source policy, which is usually the starting point for everything at a bank. I came in at as my peers did from, hey, we're going to look at licensing and IP policies and regulations.

That's what it means to our industry. That's what we're coming from. Making sure that you, that our our [00:15:00] clients making sure are adhering to licensing and IP related issues that they are not inadvertently doing anything, uh, outside of the license of particular software. Despite being again, huge consumers and adopters of Linux, they did not like anything that was GPL.

In their environment, except that 1 narrow spot and what we didn't take into. I initially in my peers when we would do this work for the banks was the nature of regulations that we could build a licensing and IP policy for our clients. But. We did not have the financial services background to understand the extra layer of regulatory compliance that is required.

And I have to say, one of the things that one of the elements or aspects of working for a firm like Wipro that has massive resources is that I was allowed to bring on to my team. A [00:16:00] regulatory policy expert, and that really helped change the conversation with our clients and helped us produce much better results and output for our clients, pairing that financial services, regulatory expert with our open source policy experts, and really understanding that you have to take into consideration that extra layer of regulation when you're building an open source policy.

And that, that really made a huge difference.

Grizz Griswold: Because you had people that were talking apples to apples along the way, basically.

Andrew Aitken: Exactly.

Grizz Griswold: Okay. And then I would assume that on the consultancy side, that the, are you getting the, the bank lawyers buy in at that point? Or are you still working through the business decision makers?

You're working through the technologists?

Andrew Aitken: Yes, to all of that. One of the first, [00:17:00] we went into most engagements with the assumption that proved accurate over time, because I've worked with hundreds of clients at this point in time, that a third of our clients were going to be passionate about open source when you got into a client, a third of that client would be passionate, a third would be open and a third would be resistant.

And, to a matter of degrees that proved the case in almost every instance, and one of the first things that we had typically do was that group that was passionate were the ones who were, who brought us in promoting open source and so on. And in so many cases, even to today, they were using their language to promote this The open source case to executives and so typically 1 of the 1st the 1st aspects of any engagement is to work with those and they're generally technologists and help them understand if you're going to try and sell this to senior [00:18:00] leadership.

You need to talk about what matters to them, not what matters to you. And these are very smart people, but they just didn't necessarily think that way. And so helping them understand that you're trying to promote open source because it's a better technology, it's more efficient it'll, it has, it helps you.

With high increases productivity, it increases retention of your developer ecosystem. That's great, but let's take that and translate it into the language. The executives want here ability to enter new markets to build products faster. How's it going to impact the revenue stream? How's it going to extract operating costs, but let's use their language.

And that was, and even again, till today. That's still a conversation you typically have to have.

Grizz Griswold: Is the conversation that we have to have as the, the kind of intermediary foundation to the, yeah, now it's interesting that you put it that way. I like that. That actually, that helps me in my marketing.

Andrew Aitken: And just align [00:19:00] to to our client, helping the people who were promoting open source or trying to get open source more widely accepted across the bank. Making sure that what they're doing aligns to corporate goals, because when you're at the top layer they really do many of those executives, even the board pay attention to what their mission statement is, and there's one.

You can figure it out pretty easily. It's right. It's public. There's one bank who's, Mission is very simple. Helping Britain prosper. That's it. And so when we help the executives align what they wanted to achieve to that mission, open source can help Britain prosper and connecting those dots. It made a huge difference.

Grizz Griswold: That is something. That is something that you get from the business side that sometimes you don't get from the technology side. [00:20:00] Not that they're not smart people. I don't know. I really enjoy working with the technologists.

Andrew Aitken: I'm always trying to learn more and more. So it's just, they think a little bit differently than a business people.

And that's nature, human nature. So I do want to reflect there's one part of my career that I'm particularly proud of that, that I didn't touch upon. And I would do want to mention that. A bit of a wine geek and I'd like to use that term geek rather than snob, the outcome may be the same, but I'm a geek, wine geek years and years ago, I connected with Mark Radcliffe, who's the senior open source attorney at DLA Piper, the largest law firm in the world.

And we just hit it off because he focuses on open source. We began doing engagements together. We began sharing clients. We began sharing our passion for wine. And so I hit upon this idea, I said, Hey, Why don't we do a conference and, maybe, and let's do it in Napa. [00:21:00] So essentially we thought of this idea of creating a very unique invitation only conference in Napa.

So that basically we could write off our wine purchases. That was really the original concept. And if we could break even, that would be awesome. So that actually turned into a 10 year endeavor called the open source think tank, and it was an invitation only event. We kept it to 120 people. We went up to, we always did it.

We did it in Napa for all 10 years. And then we did it in Paris for four years and realize after the first couple of years, Hey, we could do this. We can enhance our wine experience and we can make a little bit of money at but what I'm most proud about is the fact that we really focused on making this a unique event.

So we carefully balanced who we invited. And at this time, this is now going back. 15, 16, 17 years ago, we were really careful to bring a mix of people to this event. [00:22:00] So we would bring people from the legal side. We each year, we got a number of venture capitalists there. We would get executives from the large OEMs and ISVs.

We would get end users and we really, we actually divided people up into teams. And what turned out bad, what was, that exceeded my expectations is that there's a two and a half day event. And at the beginning, we always had a premise. There's always a theme for that particular conference. And then at the beginning, we would say, Hey, we've divided you up into these groups.

Each group had a venture capitalist. Each group had an executive. Each group had a startup CEO and so on. And each group was, about 8 to 10 people. And then in the last day, you're going to present out your findings on this particular topic. And it was just a way to make it a little bit more unique.

And what I hadn't anticipated, but what came clear is that everybody we invited was a type A essentially. There weren't many type Bs there. So when we said that we're going to have a bit of a [00:23:00]competition. Oh, my God. Do some of these people take this seriously? And so that little report out or presentation group presentation on the last day turned out to be over the years.

Kind of one of the key anchor points of the open source think tank. People totally got into it. And that was a lot of fun. And there were some amazing ideas that came from those conferences.

Grizz Griswold: And I'm sure. Now, it depends on when you had the wine, as well, to where the ideas came from, or they devolved into.

Andrew Aitken: One of my, we always had an after event. Anybody was welcome to stay. I remember one particular after event at a winery there was probably 30 or 40 of us, and the debate came up, this highly technical debate came up, Should the toilet paper come over the top or the back? It's an endless debate.

And we had a crew of Germans there, because this was an international conference, [00:24:00] and they got out their phones and did math calculations. They actually got, wrote down a piece of paper. They drew out, and that was definitely well into the wine.

Grizz Griswold: Yeah that's good. That's just a conversation that we have in our house on a weekly basis, actually.

Andrew Aitken: It was one of them. The the evenings I'll remember. It was wonderful.

Grizz Griswold: All right. Let's fast forward. Today, you are the chief open source officer, correct? Yes. Oh, yeah. Actually it says it behind you too, but I was going by memory.

Andrew Aitken: I did read very important title. You need to pay attention to that very important title,

Grizz Griswold: but why?

Andrew Aitken: Oh, heck, I know.

Grizz Griswold: Okay. I was gonna say that I do not see it very often and I, yeah there's only a few of us.

Andrew Aitken: There's only a few of us. So a few years ago, so Hedera obviously is a public [00:25:00] permission blockchain. Not obviously because many people here might not know us. That's who we are.

In a few, and so everything we do is actually public and transparent and resides on the chain. So a few years ago, The council, the governing council, and we have a governing council of 32 members, including the likes of IBM and standard bank and Google and Boeing and others, it's a pretty well distributed governing council made the decision to acquire the assets to the hash graph consensus algorithm, which is like our core IP from the founders of the organization and then open source.

And they then made the decision that at When appropriate, they would move all the software into an independent open source foundation that would govern the software independently. And they were asking some of their governing council members for help. I was still at Wipro at the time and somehow this got to me.

I'd never heard of them. And when they told me that it was a company in the blockchain space, this is. All at the time [00:26:00] when the crypto winner was in full swing, when Sam Bankman freed and all these other headlines were coming out I don't want to touch this. I'm too busy for this, but I was, let's just say, encouraged.

To support them. So for about four or five months on a very part time basis, I worked with Hedera and some others to help them develop their open source strategy and help them do, figure out what direction they should go in. And I was invited to one of so I actually even wrote. The job description, I sourced most of the people they interviewed for this process.

I was not planning in any way, shape, or form on joining Hedera but I remember going to one of their council meetings a year and a half ago. They invited me to it and sitting in a room with. Employees of the art ecosystem participants and invited experts and thinking this is about 75 of the smartest people I have ever been in a room with and it really got [00:27:00] me excited.

So I actually, after that, I went to the chairman and said, you know what? I think I'm going to put my hat. In the ring for this role what do you think so we move forward from there and I was hired about 10 months ago to become their chief open source officer and my remit my charter is to help move this software into an independent open source foundation independently governed now that may mean moving underneath an existing open source foundation or creating our own or a combination of both.

And so that's my role. And I think we'll be able to announce something formal next month. Really excited about, yeah.

Grizz Griswold: Get into two things probably accidentally at the same time. You were, as of the recording of this this is right before OSF of London, 2024. And you are speaking and you're doing. A talk with Duncan, I'm going to mess up his name because I mess up everybody's name at some point.

Is it Moor?

Andrew Aitken: Moor. Yeah. [00:28:00] Moor. With a slight yeah. Moor. Yeah. Moor. I think he's, I, oh I know Scottish writers, God, I better get that.

Grizz Griswold: Okay. Okay. Then it's probably it sounds it's spelled one way and then, I have Niamh that works with me. And it doesn't look like it's, anyway, um, but Duncan works at Everdeen and the two of you were talking about the year of real world ASIC tokenization and so I want, I want to find out two things from this, like why would you want to do this talk at an open source and finance for knowing the community like you have been involved with it, for a long time and be in a board member.

But why would you bring that type of talk to this community, but then. Then I want to do the jumping off point of as you've seen open source as you've seen financial services. And as we start looking to, the future on [00:29:00] different things that this is an area that I don't feel like we talk a lot in our particular finos communities.

Yet. So I hope that's all a pulling in let's go to why is this talk important? And obviously we want people to, join the talk and it's on the keynote stage. So it's going to happen. Um, why is it important to bring this to this community and why is it now?

Andrew Aitken: So good questions. If you look at the technology that underpins the entire blockchain distributed database space, it's all open source. Okay, so that's starting the fundamental pillars of these technologies are open source all virtually that I'm aware of. And so open source in and of itself is extremely relevant to this conversation.

Why? Why the [00:30:00] this particular summit? We're beginning to see a lot more interest and investment in this space by financial services, organizations and banks. It's anywhere from creating from tokenizing real world assets. To figuring out better ways to do remit cross border remittances.

We're seeing national financial institutions looking at creating different types of stable coins. So there is a huge amount of interest in this space. And. Thank you. Most global financial services organizations are engaged at some level, either they're doing pilots or POC. Some even have some activities in a production level.

If you look at who are Hedera's council members, we have Aberdeen as a council member, we have standard bank, largest bank in South Africa. We have Shinhan bank. So they're all here because they're. This is an important space for them to understand. [00:31:00] I hope that helps.

Grizz Griswold: It does.

And maybe also maybe I'm going to just say it's for me, not for the listener, but can you define, you started to pull it out a little bit, but can you define real world asset tokenization. I think that would be a good primary.

Andrew Aitken: Yeah. So it's actually in the title. So it's the ability to tokenize real world assets that could be diamonds, that could be buildings.

But in, in DeFi space, it's also investment instruments that could be tokenized and transacted across. A chain and that helps with efficiencies that helps with speed of transaction. It helps with kind of the record becomes immutable on a blockchain. So you have that definitive source of truth in the transaction.

One, and I'm not [00:32:00] going to go too far into it because. Really want people to be there. But one great example is the ability for an organization to so a lot of funds are, have a very high entry for people to invest million dollars or more. And so I don't know about you, but that's not something that, you know, that I can invest in today.

And so what this gives the ability is for an an entity, a third party to buy one of these very high entry point investments vehicles, and then break it up and turn it and create smaller chunks so that people who can, can put, can start at 25, 000 or 50 or a hundred thousand dollars in those transactions.

So that's tokenizing this asset. So those transactions it's democratized. investment in some cases, right? Then it makes it more accessible to people like myself to get into some of these [00:33:00] high threshold investment vehicles that I wouldn't have the opportunity any other way. That to me is a great use case.

And we'll go into a little bit more detail on that next week.

Grizz Griswold: And so then building off of that, that Unless you're talking about this, but building off of that, as you said that there are a lot of banks, especially and countries that are working in this space and investing in this space.

Yes, future, future looking. Where are we going. Where are we going from here where. Where, I don't know if I want to ask the question of, where and how do these banks get more involved? I don't know if I want to ask the question of, is there space for, let's say fintechs to get further involved in order to, become part of this ecosystem, ecosystem more and more, or, do you think that this is the natural evolution of where we're going in [00:34:00] order to.

Get to where? I don't know with our financial systems. I know those are three entirely different questions that I asked all at once.

Andrew Aitken: Let me maybe sum it up a little bit. So the, there is a huge opportunity for FinTech. There's still a lot of enabling technology that needs to be built.

There's still a lot of Applications, essentially, or DAPs, as they're called in Web3 distributed applications that need to get built here. The technology, blockchain technology, and distributed database technology will continue to evolve. But I think there's more opportunity, above the chain. That the application player and that's certainly where fintechs can get involved.

If you think about this is again, I look at this a little bit like I looked at open source early on to talk to people. This is inevitable. We are moving this way now. Will it transform the [00:35:00] entire financial services industry? Possibly, but maybe not. Maybe it's just an evolution of parts of financial services.

And how financial services are transact. We still have to see that. I think the possibilities are incredible. But there's a lot of work that has to be done. If you look at one of the in the Web 3 space if you look at one of the reports that's produced by one of the investors called electric capital, they produce the electric capital developer report and they're tracking roughly 30, 000 Web 3 developers.

Now by their own account they recognize they under count the number of Web3 developers. But even if they're off by 100%, that's, let's say there's 60, 000 Web3 developers today. Last year, GitHub passed 100 million. Accounts on GitHub, right? So let's put this. Let's keep those two numbers in perspective.

You're talking maybe 50, 000 in Web 3 100, 000, [00:36:00] 000 on GitHub alone, which is in 95 percent of them are web to develop. So there is a massive opportunity. For web two developers to move to web, to that web three space and participate in really help accelerate the capabilities of the ecosystem. And that's a part of what we're going to be working on doing.

And that's a part of the reason for being at Finos and other Linux foundation events

Grizz Griswold: up there. Because you should just go in here, Andrew Duncan speak. And and I would say too, that for people that. I cannot attend the conference. You should be here who cannot attend the conference.

That we will have videos at a certain point of all the talks, including this talk to we will pair up our talk here with your talk on stage with Duncan. And so that there is, context that sometimes you can only get, so much out in the certain time span.

I think [00:37:00] that at some point we should probably revisit this in the future as well. And, it would be nice to know. Every a little bit of time in the future, like where are we you know, has the needle started to move? And what are you seeing? And I'd love to come back to this at another time.

Andrew Aitken: I think that's excellent. The needle is moving, but it will be, it will certainly be interesting to do a retrospective. Yep. Wonderful.

Grizz Griswold: Thank you, Andrew. I really appreciate your time today and I'm looking forward to seeing you in just a few short days, actually duncan will do the high the keynote there.

I'm just as set up here, but looking forward to being there. Sounds good. Thank you again. Thank you. And with that, I'm going to say good day, good night, wherever you [00:38:00] are.

 

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