#156: Giving Back to the Community and Solving Talent Challenges with Rob Jackson

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0:00:04.4 Announcer: Welcome to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. Michael, Moe, Tim and the occasional guest discussing analytics issues of the day, and periodically using explicit language while doing so. Find them on the web at analyticshour.io and on Twitter @AnalyticsHour. And now the Digital Analytics Power Hour.

0:00:27.7 Michael: Hi everyone, welcome to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. This is episode 156. ‘Tis the season for holiday cheer and drinking eggnog and eating Yule logs, whatever that is, and maybe a treacle or a pudding, I don’t know, or roasting chestnuts on an open fire, that sort of thing. Hey, Tim, do you have a favourite holiday song?

[chuckle]

0:00:54.5 Tim: “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.”

0:00:56.2 Michael: I figured that might be right up there for you. What about you, Moe, got a favourite?

0:01:01.1 Moe: I have a whole favourite CD that I play every year at Christmas.

0:01:05.1 Tim: Oh, good Lord.

0:01:06.3 Michael: Oh my goodness.

0:01:06.7 Moe: Yes, but it’s called “White Christmas”, it’s very mellow.

0:01:09.9 Michael: Is it the soundtrack to White Christmas, the movie?

0:01:14.7 Moe: I don’t know. Just as a kid, that was the CD I would go get from the CD cabinet and put on every Christmas and I still do that.

0:01:21.3 Michael: Is one of the songs a song that says, “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas.”?

0:01:25.5 Moe: Yeah.

0:01:26.2 Tim: Okay.

0:01:26.5 Michael: Oh yeah, that’s from the musical, “White Christmas,” probably.

[chuckle]

0:01:29.9 Moe: I’m glad that mystery’s solved.

0:01:31.8 Michael: Yeah, no, this is why we do the podcast, to figure these things out.

[chuckle]

0:01:35.6 Michael: And of course, who could forget the number one holiday single of all time? Of course, my favourite, Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You”.

0:01:43.6 Tim: Oh wow, how predictable.

0:01:46.7 Michael: No, I’m a man of the people, I’m a man of the people, Tim. Come on, it’s a beautiful song.

0:01:51.6 Tim: I should throw in really, “Merry Christmas from the Family” by Robert Earl Keen. So if Rudy Shepherd’s listening, he will be the only possible listener who realises what an awesome song that is, but…

0:02:02.0 Michael: I think you’ll find, Tim, people will pop up in the comments with some love of these various artists that I know nothing about. Alright, but we are analytics people, and one thing that is almost always true of analytics people is they love to share what they know and they care about others. If you’ve been in the analytics industry for a long time, none of us sort of planned our careers out perfectly. We just sort of got chances to get into this field, we were excited to grow our skills and learn. And now as the industry is growing, there are opportunities to find ways to give back, to share our skills and help bring others into our data and analytics industry. So we wanted to talk about giving back and maybe as a product of that, also helping to solve some of the ever-present challenge of talent in our industry.

0:02:50.6 Michael: So we needed someone we could discuss this with. Rob Jackson is the founder of WYK Digital, a company helping young people get their start in digital marketing careers. He’s a non-executive board member at UK Flooring Direct, and prior to that, he founded DBi it’s an analytics and optimisation consultancy. And today he is our guest, welcome to the show, Rob.

0:03:11.9 Rob Jackson: Thank you, Michael. It’s great to be here, mate.

0:03:13.9 Michael: And it’s a pleasure to have you, we go way back. Rob with his company and my old company, Search Discovery, we actually shared a stage at a Google conference where we both won an award at the same time, so…

0:03:26.2 Moe: Shameless plug.

0:03:27.7 Michael: A shameless Google plug.

0:03:30.4 Tim: I shared an audience with Rob at a Google conference a few years before that. We…

0:03:35.4 Michael: Bingo. So Moe, I feel like you need to get out there and win some awards or something, keep it level. No, I’m just kidding.

0:03:43.0 Moe: Okay, I’ll go get straight working on that.

0:03:46.3 Michael: Yeah, working on that, I think you’re winning already. Alright, so…

[chuckle]

0:03:53.0 Michael: Rob, let’s get started with maybe just help people understand WYK Digital with the company and what you started, and then we’ll use that as a springboard into talking a little more about this topic.

0:04:04.9 RJ: Yeah, yeah, sure. So, well, like you said, I’ve worked in digital for a long time. When I launched DBi in London back in sort of 2008-2009, the team we put together, I felt was like a real reflection of London as a place. The team had a very sort of international feel to it. We had young people with British-African, British-Caribbean backgrounds, British-Indian backgrounds, we had Spanish people, Polish people, Mexican people, and I felt like that was a sort of great reflection of the diversity of London.

0:04:40.0 RJ: And then when we got acquired and we moved into one of the big media network groups, what I sort of noticed is that the type of person who works there is pretty similar. There’s a lot of people, I guess, like me, white dudes, who got a good university education. And it just got me really thinking like, “This career that we have is so awesome.” It affords so many advantages in life, whether it be financial or the freedom to travel or working remote. And it just got me thinking, and my best mate actually, he works in youth employability, and he actually raised this with me and he was like, “Rob, could we not do something about this? To create a vehicle that can widen the access for people from all different types of backgrounds, regardless of their income background, regardless of where they’re originally from, their ethnic background, and to widen access to this amazing career and allow people to get onboard with it?” And that was a very simple inception of it really.

0:05:40.2 Moe: So Rob, what are some of the challenges you faced setting this up? Are there particular, I suppose, areas of focus that you need to teach people more, or what’s your experience been like?

0:05:54.3 Tim: Where do you start? [chuckle]

0:05:55.7 Moe: Yeah.

0:05:56.4 RJ: Good question, Moe, and it’s one of the reasons, actually the first programme was just digital marketing, so PPC and Facebook. What we wanted to do is create a really low barrier to entry. And then halfway through the first programme, obviously, I was talking about my career in analytics and the young people in the first programme were like, “We wanna do more analytics. It’s more interesting, it’s more challenging, the salaries are better.”

0:06:21.7 RJ: There’s a real sort of appetite from the young people to bring analytics into the programme. And so, what we had to do is think of a way, because what we want is the programme to be available to all. There’s no pre-requisite for having a maths education or a degree background or college education. We wanted to make it available to mixed ability learning. And so, what I did is, I hired an old buddy of mine, Adam Gutteridge, who Michael knows from back in my DBi days and one of the foremost Google Analytics trainers in the UK, a girl called Nikki Rae. And we sat down and ideated how we could do this and we started by thinking, what are the practical skills that businesses are looking for once they’re hiring people?

0:07:02.7 RJ: And what I did is, we tried to have a think-about when graduates come out of college and they’re applying for jobs, where are they at on a level in terms of the practical skills that they have with going into work. We all remember the beginning of our career, sat in the kitchen making cups of tea and waiting to be told what to do. And so, our idea was to give the young people very practical skill components, that would be applicable straight away, if they were working within an analytics job. The other goal was to I guess ignite the passion and interest of the young people. So when we were doing the selection process, actually, we didn’t really do much competency testing, we weren’t doing any maths tests or anything like that.

0:07:44.1 RJ: We were looking for the attitude. We were looking for that sort of desire and passion to take an opportunity like this with both hands and run with it. So that was definitely one of the key challenges, was thinking about what’s achievable from scratch, because there can be a high skill threshold with analytics. And then, there’s a little pandemic been going on in the background, which has somewhat affected the jobs market. So that’s definitely been a challenge.

0:08:11.1 RJ: I’m very pleased to say from the first cohort we’re nearly at 80% of the young people who graduated on the first programme have got jobs.

0:08:19.6 Moe: Oh wow.

0:08:21.6 RJ: Yeah, I know. In this climate, I’m truly amazed as well. And then, the other great thing is, that we had 28 young people graduate just this Friday, go on and on Monday morning, I found out one had been hired already and seven others are in interview process. So there are real signs of positivity with the employability side of things, even despite of what’s going on with the background.

0:08:45.8 Tim: That’s awesome.

0:08:46.9 Moe: So you mentioned though, that one of the criteria you looked for was I guess an inquisitive nature and eagerness to learn. How is… That’s the thing that I look for.

0:09:00.6 Tim: That’s why we screw up when we’re hiring. How?

0:09:03.6 Moe: Yeah. I’m self-taught. I’m like how did you screen for that?

0:09:08.2 RJ: Yeah. It’s a really good question. It’s something we put a lot of thought into. My belief and the belief of the guys who work at WYK is that with the right attitude, with the right support, the right training, anyone can do well in this space. It shouldn’t be prohibitive based on other factors. So what we did. We’re actually sponsored by the largest UK youth charity, they’re called The Prince’s Trust, backed by Prince Charles and their whole reason for existing is to give young people that first leg off onto a career.

0:09:38.7 RJ: And they do things in music, they do things in retail, in engineering, they do all across all different sectors. And so, they get hundreds and hundreds of applications of young people looking for help and support and then what we did is, they did a safeguarding screening to make sure they’d be right for us on a safeguarding level, that they didn’t have requirements that were beyond our capacity. Then we got them to come to our website and fill out a form. And we were asking, why is this for you? Why do you think it would be a good fit for you? Very attitudinal things. We were asking about what the motivation was, what they’ve been doing in their spare time in the pandemic as well. Looking for people, who have this sort of proactivity, then we invited them to a taster day. A massive webinar. Basically, it was quite scary having 130 young people on a webinar and we were using our volunteer network to help facilitate that. And then, we did some one-to-one interviews as well and the framework was always the same across those three phases.

0:10:33.9 RJ: What we said was that, “We’re gonna give you 60% of your score based on that attitude, that willingness, that sort of passion to take an opportunity with both hands in your life. Then, what we’re gonna do is score you 20% on aptitude and what we think is competency.” So we’re looking at, have you done any… Have you looked into an analytics career previously yourself? Have you played around with numbers? Have you even used Excel? Things like that. And then, the final 20% was on also the ability to finish the course. We wanted to make sure, that they had enough time. They were able to dedicate 10 weeks full-time. Is the programme working remote? Did they have access to the internet, a computer and things like that?

0:11:13.5 RJ: And then, what we did is, we made sure the people who are assessing it were different at every stage. So if you scored someone on the application form, you wouldn’t have been in their breakout group in the taster day and then, you wouldn’t have been in the interview thing. And we made the forms blind as well to remove as much bias as possible. And then what we did, we put our trust in the data. We dropped it into a table with conditional formatting, from top to bottom, in terms of who was doing well. And then, what we did is also we looked at things like income background, people who are from minority communities and what we did was we moved them up in the scoring table to get to a final acceptance of 30. So it’s something, that we put a lot of thought in, because we wanted to make sure that the people we were helping were gonna be capable of benefiting from the programme, but also, like you said, having that curiosity and keenness to wanna take the opportunity was huge as well.

0:12:06.9 Moe: Now. I’m not going to lie, I can just sit here and keep asking Rob amazing questions, because I’ve got a thousand. but, Tim, I’ll let you…

0:12:12.5 Tim: I wanna quibble with that though, ’cause you said you believed anybody with the right support and the right skills and the right tools can be successful, but I think you also undermine that. It’s the challenge for the analytics… The people, who have the right… Who have a core bit of drive and curiosity. I think we’ve had various past episodes, where we’ve wrung our hands. What’s interesting is, it does seem like you are actually selecting at the point, where you have the opportunity to say, “Let’s actually look for those raw materials from the attitudinal piece and then, we’re going to add the skills.” Whereas, so often in the more normal employment, it’s inverted or people even are stumbling around internally and they like the idea of having those raw skills and they don’t actually possess them themselves.

0:13:13.2 RJ: It’s… And that’s a… It’s a super… It’s a really good point mate, and so what… And I agree, analytics isn’t for everyone. There are definitely personalities, there are types of people who are more adept at succeeding on a career level, that’s why we had the… We’ve got three specific tracks. So for the first two weeks, we take all of the young people and they learn the same syllabus. So it roughly follows a bit of the Google Digital Garage marketing fundamentals, so what is a a website? What is search? What is display, what is SEO, what is social? And each of the trainers who are coming from the difference of it… The Facebook trainer got to work with everyone, and the Google trainer got to work with everyone, the Google Analytics trainer and the data science trainer.

0:14:00.6 RJ: And at the end of the two weeks, we had a pretty good idea of who the 10 who were gonna specialise in analytics were gonna be. And so what we did is we gave everyone the opportunity to request what was their favourite track, and then the secondary track, and actually, the guys who were really keen to be on the analytic track were the ones that we were feeling that had the greatest potential. One mistake we did make, however, is that we invited our good friend, Peter O’Neill of MeasureCamp fame, to give a bit of a talk about a career in analytics, and what he did was he dropped a salary progression sheet onto the presentation – which skewed the eagerness of everyone to get into analytics.

0:14:45.6 Michael: And by the way, here’s how much you’ll be making if you get into this field, it’s like…

0:14:51.9 Michael: Oh, Peter, he won’t listen, but Monica will tell how she will… We know who will rat us out for the Peter ding.

0:15:03.1 Moe: But so Rob this just sounds like obviously a huge, tremendous amount of work and commitment and massive applause to you and the team. I guess the thing that’s at the back of my mind is, people will listen to this and be like, “That’s such a great idea. I should… I wanna do good. And I confess it from time to time, I’m also one of those people that has the nicest of intentions at the start, but doesn’t actually have great follow-through or they don’t have the long-term commitment. What do you think has driven you and the team to see this through and to really make a programme out of it, where probably a lot of people would have had that good intention but failed?

0:15:46.3 RJ: Yeah, no, it’s a really, really good question. It’s worth saying, actually, the original programme that was due to launch in March was supposed to start the week the pandemic, the lockdown started in the UK. We had our funding pooled, we had offices rented in Central London, we had our trainer team employed, we were ready to go, and unfortunately, The Prince’s Trust had to pause all programmes because everyone was going into lockdown. And so myself like I guess the rest of us, I sat there and watched a bit too much Netflix for a little while, and ate too much bad food for a couple of weeks. And then one of the trainers who I’d originally hired, we called each other often, and we just said like, “Let’s do something about this, there’s a bunch of kids who are sat at home, whose prospects are becoming bleaker and bleaker and bleaker, what can we do about it?”

0:16:35.3 RJ: And so the first one essentially was a voluntary programme where myself and Ariann Donohue huge shout-out to Ariann, she’s an absolute legend. She’s one of the people who’s really made this whole thing possible, her and I effectively, we had… I think The Prince’s Trust gave us 750 pounds to run a nine-week online virtual programme. You know what, we didn’t have anything else to do because it was lockdown and Ariann, won’t mind me saying that we made it up as we were going along. And those first group of kids, absolutely fantastic, like I said, have gone on to get jobs. But we realise going then and going out to the market and saying, “Look, who wants to hire some young people” in this backdrop when companies aren’t ready to hire remote still at that point. We knew we needed to adjust our asks to the industry.

0:17:23.6 RJ: And so what we did, we went to the community and we said, “Look, we know that you might not be ready to hire right now, but as a collective industry, who’ve done quite well, who’ve had this opportunity, we can’t leave behind the most vulnerable people in society when the chips are down. There’s a collective responsibility of all of us to do so.” And so what we did is we created a framework that we talked to the industry, to the digital marketing and analytics industry to say, “Look, if you can’t hire now, here’s a bunch of other ways you can support us.” So we’re looking for, of course, volunteers. And so we had volunteers. So for the people who were happy to spend an hour or two a week over the 10 weeks of the programme, you can be a mentor, and mentors are so, so important. They’re a real link into the industry, they can help identify jobs, they can help support with the applications, just having someone to talk to when there’s so much that’s new. So they play a huge part.

0:18:14.0 RJ: But let’s say actually you haven’t got that amount of time free, you can come in and give a guest talk or you can come in and talk about your career, you can come in and talk about your specific profession, your company or whatever. Or if I’m speaking to a small business, “Hey, I write… You might not be ready to hire, I bet you’ve got some of your staff sat at home twiddling their thumbs with their hands, and you maybe not as productive as you were outside of the lockdown, donate some of your team’s time to come in and do some training as well.” And what we found was that given everything that’s happening, given that a lot of people have had time to reflect on where they’re at in life, I think that’s one of the things that we’ve all done at a points throughout the pandemic, there’s been a huge surge in people I think who actually wanna do something. They wanted to take some time to give something back to people who aren’t as fortunate as them or people who are starting out in their career. And so I’ve been hugely overwhelmed by the levels of support, and we will always rely on a voluntary component of the industry to keep it going.

0:19:15.4 RJ: But that said, our trainers, the guys who we’re paying to deliver the syllabus, the guys who we’re paying to really own the skill development and the growth of these young people, we’re paying them a solid wage, we’re paying them industry rate, a day rate that’s fair. It’s very important for me that we create something that is sustainable, scalable and replicable, so in nine months time, maybe some of that goodwill following… When the vaccines come out and we’re all moving on and we’ve all got targets, and we’ve all got quarterly growth to hit, maybe that goodwill won’t be there as much. So what we’ve really endeavoured to do is to create a syllabus and a delivery format that allows us to pay expert trainers that the market rate to deliver a quality product, we think that’s really important.

0:20:00.5 Tim: But it does seem like… In this, they’re parts of digital that are reminiscent a little bit of Analysis Exchange when it was part of this is trying to get hands-on experience. Now that was done entirely volunteer… Definitely with really no rigour on the training, it was really just a, “Let’s get you something that not only is giving you skills, but you’re also… Have real experience on your… ” Which is part of the programme, is that they do get tied up with with real… So it seems like if you just go to where you’re picking, you’re getting… They’re still gonna be inexpensive… Relative to market, an inexpensive resource, they’ve gone through a rigorous and balanced set of training, they have some hands-on experience, it’s not that hard to envision that the model becomes a, “Oh, this can actually be self-sustained because we’re moving in… ” You’re not officially doing placement work, or are you doing some of the actual placement?

0:21:02.8 RJ: Yeah, so… Well, technically, this was our pilot, like I said, the first one was a voluntary operation, really, this one was our first pilot and we explored a number of income methods, so we have obviously some funding from the Prince’s Trust. What we also did is that we got some agencies, some corporate sponsors to actually sponsor seats on the programme, again, another shout out to MeasureCamp actually, ’cause they sponsored a couple of seats in the programme in the analytics track. So what we wanted to do is allow businesses to pay it forward as well to benefit either their pipeline of talent, or to benefit the wider community as well. We haven’t gone as far as the recruitment model, some skills… Youth and skills programmes have done that, but we haven’t gone down that route as well. But you hit on a very important point Tim where after the first programme, which was mostly theory with some practical exercises… As part of this programme, we’ve matched the young people to real world businesses. And so the first part of the programme, onboarding, then theory, then they get matched to their clients, they do a client kick-off meeting where they’re asking questions trying to understand what the challenges of these businesses are. And that… These are all young people as well, young entrepreneurs who come through the Prince’s Trust as well, and they’ve got these nascent e-commerce businesses or professionals, they’re really… Some of them are really cool.

0:22:21.3 RJ: And the young people watching them get into teams and treat it not like, “Oh, we just have to set up some reports.” Like, what are the problems we’re trying to solve here? How can we help this brand overcome that challenge and then run some campaigns, measure it, deliver some insights. Seeing the presentations this week that the guys have delivered for these small businesses, it’s mind-blowing, because I remember I wasn’t presenting to a client in that… In year one. They wouldn’t let me anywhere near a client. Do you know what I mean? That practical part is really important. What the future business model will be, because like I said, my goal is to make this scalable and replicable, and to do that, it’s got to be as meaningful as possible to the young people who come on the programme. I think there are some programmes out there where they’re just churning young people through and they’re ticking boxes and you do the training, you get the certificate and off the end of the conveyor belt you go.

0:23:13.8 Tim: They often are named something something bootcamp.

0:23:15.2 RJ: Yes. You got it.

0:23:18.2 Tim: “Just in 10 weeks, we will… ”

0:23:20.9 RJ: Yeah, not naming names. And these things cost a lot of money. You look at some of these courses, there are some really accessible ones like Udemy and whatnot, but these ones where you have in-person trainers, they go from 5 to 15 grand quite easily, and young people who come from a low income background don’t have access to that. But we have to put their outcomes first, so that whatever method that we do, scale it, it has to be done with a balance that it’s still really helping people. Because when people come from places where they’ve got low confidence or they come from low income backgrounds, or they come from minority groups, that conveyor belt at the end of the training programme can be a hard fall. It can be, and it won’t be getting them any closer to a job. So something that we’re actually looking at at the moment, we’re getting ready to launch it, is creating a mini services delivery company at the end of the programme, and that company will be staffed by graduates of… From the young people who come through our programme, and it’s intentionally set up to act as an extended intervention programme.

0:24:23.0 RJ: So like I said, some of these kids are in interviews right now, some of them are getting hired right now, they just needed that little lift up to get going. Some of them are gonna need to develop their skills and their confidence in a safeguarded environment where they feel comfortable to do so. And that’s very hard, I think with… When you’re looking for work as a young person to maybe find that, we’re gonna offer this extended vehicle for them to grow as a young person, to develop their skills and be comfortable in that environment.

0:24:49.5 Tim: And you hope they quit. That’s like, where you actually… Then you’ve hired them and you actually are like, “I want you to quit as soon as you have… ” Yeah.

0:24:55.5 RJ: It’s the best KPI ever. Churn becomes a positive KPI.

0:25:00.0 Tim: Yeah. That’s right. Solving that problem once and for all. It is interesting that analytics and data specifically is not built on whether you have specific degrees or those things, it’s very much, can you do the job. And that’s sort of… It’s sort of like what’s your building there is demonstrating that, and it’s just interesting that it exists that way because it does open up sort of like these alternative paths and ways of looking at it and yeah, I just… I’m struck by that because this is like there’s things that I’m like… Like Moe said like in my head, there’s things I wanna be able to do or ways to give back, and I feel like that’s probably latent in a lot of analytics people, ’cause it’s sort of like “Yeah, I wanna show other people how to get into this.” So I just love the paradigm and the model you’ve created there.

0:25:55.8 RJ: Absolutely. And I think you hit the nail on the head there. It’s a vocational… It’s a hands-on job. I mean, I personally had worked in digital marketing for two years before I actually landed my first proper analytics job, I worked in an AdWords agency, I really loved the analysis and problem solving part, like building hypotheses and creating A/B tests in my campaigns. And that naturally then allowed me to step quite comfortably into an analytics role, but without… If someone doesn’t give you that opportunity to achieve that hands-on experience, how do you get started? It’s very tricky.

0:26:29.8 Moe: And I just wanna say, I love that you’re thinking about the other end of the programme as well. Because, I mean, I remember… And I had heaps and heaps of support when I moved into analytics. My sister worked in the industry, I met Tim very quickly, I had an amazing network of people to help me and I still…

[overlapping conversation]

0:26:49.3 Tim: And despite those two people, you still managed to build a successful career.

0:26:55.3 Moe: But I still remember feeling like I was drowning and failing every single day at my job. And I can imagine for these kids, that real challenge to get up and give it another crack the next day, the thought you’ve put into how you have that supportive environment once they actually start in the workplace, is completely amazing.

0:27:20.6 RJ: And I had to manage the expectations of the young people as well. They were so passionate about wanting to achieve in this, and they’ll call me up at night, “Rob, we can’t get the e-commerce tracking in Google Analytics to match up with the Facebook impression data,” and I was like, “It’s gonna take a lot longer than 10 weeks.”

[laughter]

0:27:38.6 RJ: Don’t you guys worry and they were asking me the things that we take for granted, like scenarios there are things that happen in the basket or on the website, and they’re like, “How do you remember all this stuff?” I was like, “It’s experience, it’s years and years of experience,” and we’re not here to create go-to-market ready analysts, what we wanna do is create that first step and then find individuals, businesses, individuals and businesses who actually care about this as well, and connect those young people with those individuals and businesses to continue that journey as well. This is very much the beginning. We’re there to give them that view of the fundamentals, we’re there to give them a chance at learning some of the core skills that are required to get started. But without the community and without businesses who give a shit, it will be futile and that’s the next step is really building a community of organisations and of individuals, who wanna support that mission as well.

0:28:34.3 Tim: So this does seem like you’ve… You’ve come out of the gate, even with a, even with the… Completely having the gate slammed as you were about, to the opening buzzer was gonna go off in a very… And I’m sure this is hugely to your credit, and largely, I’m sure due to your experience with starting and running companies, it seems like it is very mature and thoroughly thought out, or maybe you’re just a really good bullshitter and it’s like all duct tape and baling wire and it’s all crumbling. But that’s all a lengthy wind up to a question of, when I’ve worked with non-profits in the past, and we start saying, “Okay, what is the data you’re collecting… ” Is that in the plan? Are you doing that to collect both the demographics and needs as well as the outcomes 12, 24, 36 months out?

0:29:27.9 RJ: You’re really good at this podcast stuff Tim, there’s like four great questions in there, and I’m going to have to try to pick them out one by one. First of all, the timing. Is this the worst time ever to start an employability charity when the job market is bottomed out? My answer to that is, it’s the most important time. I think this has to happen now, similar to your side project Mike that you’ve been doing, trying to connect analysts to roles as well. You put that in the context though the e-commerce industry, I know the stats in the United Kingdom, it’s 40% up this year.

0:30:02.4 RJ: I know the e-commerce industry right now in the United States is worth 400 billion. There are growths in jobs out there, the task is that the responsibility we have is to make sure that young people who wouldn’t normally have access to those roles get a chance and get a shot at them. The next point, and this is… I’m so glad you mentioned this, actually Tim because I feel a lot of these non-profit organisations, a lot of these boot camp training things, they’re not aligned with the industry, they’re not aligned with what the day-to-day business owners and hiring managers want in terms of what they wanna see in entry-level talent. My goal very much at the beginning of this is to bring this programme as close as possible to what employers and what the real world demands of young people when they start in a career. So you’re absolutely right, we’ve done…

0:30:52.8 RJ: So first of all, we’ve run the whole thing through Google Classroom, which is a free platform, has been super powerful for us to track things like attendance, for us to track things like attainment and homework and pre-work. Everything is set as what you need to do beforehand, what you need to do during. We’ve also adopted a quite an innovative approach to how we deliver the classes, it’s something called the inverted classroom. I spoke with a couple of education professionals around this about the best way to overcome things like the camaraderie that you miss, the teamwork that you miss when you’re not in a room together. I really wanted to make sure that we were doing something that allowed people who wanted to excel to fly, and then the people that weren’t doing so well, we could identify that, so at the end of… So the way it works is the inverted classroom, we basically sent the young people some pre-work in Google Classroom, so they log on, they see that they gotta come to a class Monday at 12:00 before they attend that class, they’ve got to have watched these three videos, read this case study, something prior for them to get them in the frame of thinking. Then 30 minutes before the class starts, the trainer who’s running that class makes themselves available on Slack to just do a Q&A with young people.

0:32:03.0 RJ: Did you get this? Was there anything you’re not sure of? Again, mirroring real world environments, these are the platforms that they gotta get used the Google Suite, get used to Slack. Then the Zoom session starts, and this is where I had to get the trainers to unlearn how they normally do things I.e if you rock up with 40 minutes of slides, talk in a one-directional manner and expect to get any questions at the end, you’re just gonna get 30 blank young people’s faces on Zoom. It’s not gonna work. We had to make it more interactive. So for the second programme, what we did, is we said, “You’ve got 20 minutes once a session to deliver your message,” then we break the young people into groups, and that process is, you give them a challenge or a discussion format or a way of giving circular feedback on each other’s work and they begin to support and interact with each other around the topics of the learning as well.

0:32:50.2 RJ: The trainers will dip in and out. And then when the session wraps up every single young person receives an exit ticket, which is did you grasp the concept of this session? Sad smiley face, not so sad smiley face, happy, very happy smiley face. And then, the same question second, would you feel comfortable applying this concept in the real world, thinking about the small businesses we’re going to be working with? And then, the third question was, would you feel comfortable talking about this? Like for example, in an interview scenario. We want you to feel comfortable talking about it. And then, the fourth question, is a question that they can get right or wrong about the topic that was there. So we can sort of catch out. And that served two purposes. Number one, we can identify the young people who are feeling confident about the work, who are pushing ahead. We can identify young people who needed further support, but also we can see which trainers were nailing it as well. It gave us very quantifiable data throughout the course of the programme and stacked it with excellent KPIs. We’ve got a…

[overlapping conversation]

0:33:41.8 Tim: If somebody is happy, happy, happy and then, they bust the last, then you actually have a channel into sales too. You can have people, who are dedicated to…

0:33:53.6 Moe: Fuck.

[overlapping conversation]

0:33:53.9 Michael: Oh, Tim.

0:33:54.3 RJ: Exactly, exactly.

0:33:55.2 Michael: There’s a career for everyone.

0:34:00.8 RJ: A career for everyone. We actually did some personality testing as well. I don’t know if you guys have it in the States, it’s called Belbin. It’s actually one that’s geared towards young people specifically, as they’re entering into careers as well. We knew who the extroverts were, we knew who the people with high neurosis were and we also did that as well to say, “Again, this is the kind of thing, that you might come across when you’re applying for jobs in your professional life.” And so, if you’ve got experience working with that beforehand as well, it’s not as much of a surprise, but it helped us create the teams, that we broke people into as well to keep them balanced.

0:34:33.3 Tim: And then, are you actually tracking those out? You’ve said, that you had that first class, you know how many are employed? So what’s the mechanism for, both providing ongoing support… You’ve talked about the additional programme, but even, is there ongoing support as well as ongoing data collection? Are you maintaining employment? Are you happy with it? What’s the plan there?

0:35:00.9 RJ: I’m gonna be honest with you, it’s a Google Sheet right now. It’s a pretty comprehensive Google Sheet, but unfortunately, that’s where we’re at, but I’m actually looking into developing a bit of software to take care of this, because like I said, I want it to be a community. I want there to be essentially an app, where you can register as a supporter or as an individual or as a business, but also were the WYKers, as we call them, the alumni and the graduates from the programme, they can share jobs, they can post things about the industry and things like that. Absolutely, that’s something that I think would facilitate us being able to scale this. Right now, we capture the data and we see the different demographics, the origins and background and we can see who’s in employment and whatnot. It’s manual at the moment. So let’s wait for phase two on that one.

0:35:47.4 Moe: You dropped the word scale there, what are your grand plans?

0:35:53.4 RJ: We’re looking to launch again in early 2021. Our plan for 2021 right now is to expand nationwide across England. So we’re gonna be launching in the Midlands and the north of England as well. Our goal is to train 150 young people across the next 12 months, as part of that. On top of that, we’ll be supporting 75 small businesses as well. They’re our vehicle for the practical work, which is important in these times, we’ve got to help the economy get digitised and help businesses get online.

0:36:25.6 RJ: And then, the social enterprise version, the sort of services company, as I mentioned. We’d like for that to be employing eight people at the end of 2021. So we’re starting with that, and this is… We all know it, the pandemic’s jumped things forward five years. That’s the phrase everyone’s saying. So remote work is now very much a reality for a lot employees anyway. And so, I think there’s actually a really good opportunity for us to take advantage of that. So we’ve actually got trainers who are based in the Netherlands and in Spain and in Portugal at the moment.

0:37:01.5 RJ: So there’s no reason why we actually couldn’t start to look to onboard young people from multiple locations as well. I think very much funding dependent. Obviously, it is tough out there, the funding landscape and whatnot, but if we can get that balance right between private enterprise support, our mentor network and volunteer network and the funding that’s available, I don’t see any reason why it couldn’t be an international project as well.

0:37:24.5 Tim: It is… You’ve mentioned quite a while ago, the part of the screening, making sure that they could actually do the programme from a internet connectivity in a space and then, even as you’re talking now… And just my assumption is that pretty much any country, developed country is not as bad as the US, when it comes to the internet desert type things. And you can’t solve everything, but have you had thoughts about what about the kids, who probably low income, but maybe the hindrance for them really is they don’t have a space, they don’t have the hardware, they don’t have the internet connectivity. Is that a partnering with another programme? Is that a we can’t solve everything?

0:38:15.0 RJ: Yeah. No, you’re absolutely right. So the Prince’s Trust is actually fantastic at stuff like that. They’ll pay for laptops and internet for young people, who we think should be on the programme. It’s more of the space, actually. If you’re in a house with a lot of people, you haven’t got that head space, that’s something we found. And I’m actually in early conversations with a network of co-work spaces, who for the next programme have very kindly offered to give each young person a day and a half free at a number of their… They’re nationwide in the UK. So the…

0:38:45.1 RJ: If we could investigate something like that, whereby they’ll have… ‘Cause I’ve been doing it that on a case-by-case basis so far, Cecilia one of the first graduates, she was absolutely fantastic, she had so much potential, she’s one of our really awesome graduates, but she just didn’t have anywhere quite at home. So I just found a co-work space in her neighbourhood and I paid for it. So what actually, to your point, if we can make that widely available, give everyone a taste of what a co-work space, an office looks like, that could be really powerful as well. Also, touching on that point as well, is the fact that the rise of the digital nomad, again, that is an area of our profession that currently is only really available to a select few. But actually if you’ve you have got the skills, a the laptop and the confidence and the diligence to make sure you deliver your work on time, that could be something that we investigate in the future though as well. I think Michael you know that I lived in Portugal for a couple of years, and the nomad… The digital nomad community there is huge, and it got me thinking why couldn’t we make that available to people who wouldn’t normally get the a chance.

0:39:49.6 Moe: Rob, lots of people are gonna be listening to this and wanting to know how they can help. So let’s use the podcast to help figure out, I don’t know, extra support that we can provide. What are the best ways that people can help out or reach out to you?

0:40:05.2 RJ: I’m so glad you ask that question because with 150 young people coming through the programme, we’re gonna need 150 mentors for the next year, so we want it to be a one-to-one basis. So you can go to wykdigital.com, W-Y-Kdigital.com, and then click on the support button, and it gives you the option of approaching us around support, whether you’re a business or an individual, we have two different frameworks of support around that, pop a note into the field there and we’ll be in touch. It’s as simple as that.

0:40:37.0 Tim: Use offer code… No, sorry.

0:40:38.9 Michael: Yes, that’s alright.

0:40:40.4 Tim: So they can know we we’ve sent you.

0:40:42.4 RJ: That’s great.

0:40:44.9 Michael: We want attribution.

0:40:47.9 Tim: It’s awesome.

0:40:49.4 Michael: That is awesome. And now I’m thinking about changing my last calls ’cause I have some last calls that are like community-oriented, I’m like, “Well, I don’t wanna make people not go and volunteer with WYK Digital.” So I might swap a couple of mine out, this is great, and then… Yeah, if people are like… We’ve got listeners from all over the place, if they wanna try to get more active locally, maybe just explain your journey into this a little bit Rob, where did this start for you? You just obviously saw a need and then you’ve organised so beautifully around meeting it, but how did it start?

0:41:26.1 RJ: Yeah, so I actually come from a part of the UK, which is typically associated with low-income, I’m from the North of Merseyside, Liverpool and I was particularly lucky to have incredible parents who supported me throughout my education and when I was younger, decision… Decision-making… They couldn’t give me any money to make it to college or whatever, but I managed to work my way through. And so I personally have always felt particularly passionate about making sure that access to opportunity is as wide as possible. And I think I had that for a while in the back of my mind. Like I said, one of my best buddies has worked in youth employability, so he was the real catalyst far as like turning it into a reality, but the fact is right now the… Youth unemployment where in the UK anyway, is at levels not seen since in the 1980s, and I know in the US, you guys are experiencing similar things.

0:42:25.3 RJ: I don’t think people are gonna have to look that far to find opportunities to support people… Young people when it comes to entering the job market at the moment, I think there’s gonna be… I think it’s amazing that many communities have been rallying towards good causes off the back of the pandemic and whatever, and so I think there are gonna be plenty of opportunities for people to mentor and support. Of course, we’d love it if people wanted to mentor through WYK as well, but I think you’re not gonna have to look far to find someone who needs a bit of help at the moment.

0:42:56.7 Michael: Yeah, now that’s… That’s super powerful. And I feel the same feeling, and it’s because sort of I didn’t get into digital analytics because of I had skills or merits or some like… I just sort of feel like it just got…

0:43:14.1 Tim: Really? Do you want me to swing at that one, or do you wanna just sort of…

0:43:17.7 Michael: No, I’m serious, I didn’t even… I don’t advertise this, but I didn’t even finish college, I was like… My first… My last job before I started working at a consulting firm and learning digital analytics I was at… I worked at Starbucks, I was a barista at Starbucks, I was not going anywhere in life, and I just found this opportunity and it just sort of like… It’s been pretty amazing, and I feel maybe that’s what inspires in me that same sense of you’ve gotta find a way to give that back to other people…

0:43:50.8 RJ: Yeah.

0:43:51.0 Michael: ‘Cause it’s…

0:43:52.3 RJ: Yeah. I did 10 years working in call centres and cocktail bars at the same time, so not a lot of sleep in-between. And I look at the people I met back then when I was like 18 and 19, and that’s why, like I said, a career in digital affords so many amazing opportunities, and I think it’s… It is that sense of responsibility to get as many people who will take that opportunity into the industry as possible.

0:44:22.7 Moe: But I think it’s even beyond the… Obviously, I love being an analyst, and I find the problem solving really interesting, the thing that I’m constantly working with my team on is always comes down to the communication skills, the soft skills. And I feel like this industry does a really incredible job of like, how do you negotiate when you don’t actually have a lot to negotiate with? You’re normally negotiating like deadlines or tasks, and you’re coming from a position, I guess of disadvantage when you’re in negotiating. And so you’re really as a person, being forced to constantly think about how you’re communicating and whether it’s effective and a different tact that you could try and I… Yeah, I obviously am super passionate about this industry, and yeah, I completely love that you’re coupling that with the community that you’re trying to target.

0:45:14.7 RJ: It’s funny you say that, because even in the beginning, when we meet the young people, we’re like, “That one’s gonna go straight into client services, this one’s gonna be really good with the numbers.” And so, you sort of hedge bets on what types of professional we think they’re gonna be, and often it is that you can see the people who are really good communicators or are really good problems solvers, and then just giving them that sort of boost of confidence that they need to…

0:45:40.6 Tim: Please tell me you’re capturing those predictions in that big Google spreadsheet that you can then actually…

0:45:42.8 Michael: That’s great.

0:45:45.2 Tim: Come on, you got a background in CRO, you gotta pick which test you think is gonna be the winner upfront.

0:45:50.6 Michael: It’s actually a separate Google Sheet where they have a little pool, so they can all place a little side… No, I’m just kidding. All right, we do need to start to wrap up, this has been such a great discussion, Rob, thank you so much, it’s perfect for the season. And I think we can all take something out of of what you started here and try to pull it into our own lives, and I really appreciate you coming on the show. And sharing that with us.

0:46:16.8 RJ: Absolutely, thank you guys for having us. Really, really enjoyed it.

0:46:21.6 Michael: Alright, so back to the action of Digital Analytics Power Hour, which is the last call, which we could still keep a holiday theme, I guess… I don’t know, whatever. Okay, we do do last calls on this show, it just means we go around the horn, share something we think might be of interest to our audience. So Rob, you’re our guest. Do you have a last call you’d like to share?

0:46:41.1 RJ: Yeah, so it’s a podcast by a chap called David McWilliams, I actually got into him just when I started WYK Digital, he’s a quite a famous economist from Ireland. He’s worked for Obama, he’s worked for Bernie, he goes to Davos every year. And he did an episode on wealth inequality, and so the format’s really good, like the format is, he’s like this top top economist, and then he chats with his Irish mate who knows nothing about economics, and the sort of lay person view really, really brings it through really well, and they’re always chatting about how much whiskey they had at the weekend and things like that. But if you check out Episode 27 of that podcast, it’s about wealth inequality and what we can do to solve that. I won’t ruin it for people who are gonna listen to it, but one of the key messages that really resonated with me as I began the journey with WYK is that there was an experiment done in the ’70s where they gave 100 families from low income backgrounds… This is in the United States, so 100 families, their kids, a college fund that they can only access when they turned 18 for a mid-tier college, and they couldn’t get it any other way until the kid was ready to go to college at 18.

0:47:56.7 RJ: They gave another 100 kids, another 100 families. They tracked their progress but they didn’t give them any money. And what they did is they measured the progress of the kids throughout their academic and personal lives. By the age of four, the kids whose families knew that they had a guaranteed slot at college began to massively outperform their peers from the other test group. And that’s because their parents were helping out with homework, they’re giving them encouragement, knowing that they had a chance. And this is the key point for me, if you know that you have a chance, I think people will absolutely rush toward that opportunity, and that’s everything that WYK stands for and what it’s all about, so… Great podcast, great series, I really highly recommend him, he’s awesome.

0:48:40.8 Tim: Wow, that’s awesome. That’s fantastic.

0:48:43.4 Michael: Okay, Moe, what about you?

0:48:45.6 Tim: Follow that.

0:48:47.1 Moe: Well, I don’t think I can follow that one and mine’s such a like little interesting thing that I learned that I’m… Yeah, now I’m filling some big shoes.

0:48:57.6 Michael: That’s okay. Now, you have to remember, Moe, even just sharing that somebody listening might get some value out of it, so it is like in a teeny teeny way. Okay.

0:49:07.9 Moe: A little… Let’s… Yeah. Anyway I am… I was chatting with the senior stakeholder at work, and I was explaining the predicament about when people ask for something, but it’s not really what they want, and then they don’t give enough context and the typical shit that analysts deal with, and I was really banging my head against the wall. And he was like,” Oh, the XY problem.” And I’m like,” Hmm?” ’cause I’d never heard someone refer to this situation by name, but apparently it’s called the XY problem. So basically someone asks about an attempt in solution rather than giving you the problem, and the thing is they don’t even ask for the solution they need. So it’s basically like the user wants to do X, they don’t know how to do X. So they figure out if they can do Y, then they’ll be successful, but they don’t know how to do Y either, so then they ask for help on Y. And so it’s like all these layers of extrapolating out and then somehow it normally lands on an analyst’s desk with some stupid question like, “Can you just figure this thing out? ‘Cause that will suddenly give me all the answers,” but it’s actually not solving the core, the root problem. So I just found it interesting that I’d never heard a name for this phenomenon, so thank you, Adam, for enlightening me on the XY problem.

0:50:21.3 Michael: Nice.

0:50:21.7 Tim: I like it, I like the framing. That does describe really well how… The question isn’t… The question you get is not really the question they’re trying to answer and framing it as the XY. I thought you were just gonna be like, “Well, you should ask them Y it was gonna be… ” It was gonna be the… It was gonna become the five Ys, Why? I need one Y, two Y, three Y or XYs, but…

0:50:45.1 Moe: Oh Jesus. What about you, Tim?

0:50:51.1 Tim: So mine, it’s actually a follow-up to last episode when I did a last call of recommending a book that I had not yet read, but was really excited to read. Now, I’ve read the book. So it is the “Subprime Attention Crisis” by Tim Hwang, 98% sure that I mispronounced his name with my hillbilly Anglican background when I said it last time. This time I won’t make that mistake, but it is only… It’s like 140 pages, so it is a quick read, but it is basically just eviscerating programmatic advertising, and he does a lot of… He is comparing the state of programmatic advertising to the financial markets leading up to the 2008 bubble, which sounds like cutsie and then it is… It’s a 140-page book that has 30 pages of footnotes like it is researched, and he talks about the opacity of the market that nobody… Between the SSPs and the DSPs, there’s the story of what’s going on that you’re matching things up, but you can’t actually see it, which I was like, “Yeah, I’ve actually lived through that of trying to say, ‘Where was this ad actually served?’” And nobody can tell you. So the opacity, the increasing spend in digital, so you’ve got high demand or you’ve got high dollars that are being told to go into it, and then you’ve got the agencies in the middle who have next to zero, zero incentives to actually…

0:52:16.8 Tim: Actually call out what’s really going on and so, he frames it as it is a bubble that is going to burst, and it really goes back to when the entire internet is built on advertising, it’s not like, “It’s gonna collapse.” And oh, well, so much for MarTech and agencies they’re gonna take a hit, he’s like, “No the internet could implode.” So it is dense, I read it with my highlighter, and it was one of those where I’m like, I can use up a whole highlighter on a very small book, but I highly, highly recommend it. I actually think he did not go as deep into some of the problems as I feel like I’ve seen. So that’s my negative Nelly attitude, and he does go after Facebook and Google as is their walled garden ecosystem. So you gotta dance with the ones that brung you, but at the same time, that’s the antidote to Peter O’Neil showing a salary growth. I can say stick with the data science and the analytics, ’cause that’ll still be there, but man, this ad stuff is gonna implode. So I highly, highly, highly recommend reading it.

0:53:25.7 Michael: Alright, nice.

0:53:26.0 Tim: So that’s mine. What have you got, Michael?

0:53:29.2 Michael: I’ve got a couple of things. So first, there’s a couple of things people can do if you’re based in the United States and you have an interest to these things, I actually… Even actually before we had this podcast episode come up as a topic, I had reached out to a friend of mine, Doug Scott, who works in the education space, and he’s in Chicago, but basically creating better educational outcomes, and his work is focused on that. And I asked him for help on how do I steer my corporate trajectory towards some of these initiatives and outcomes, whereas a lot of interest in me and then other people I work with, and it’s sort of how do you take a first step, either individually or corporately. And he shared a couple of resources with me that I wanna share with our listeners.

0:54:19.5 Michael: So one of them is an organisation called OneGoal, and so it’s just basically one goal is getting people through their college education, so it’s like a mentorship programme, and they do a lot of different things, and they have programmes and different communities throughout the country, so that’s one thing you can look at onegoalgraduation.org. And then there’s another one called Opportunity@Work, and they focus on STARS or skilled through alternative routes, and that’s just basically helping people who are in the workforce that are building new skill sets or try to elevate their skills in different ways, and so there’s a ways of volunteer or be part of that.

0:54:54.5 Michael: And then I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the DAA’s mentorship programme, so the Digital Analytics Association. And that’s one that’s sort of in our industry, so pretty much everybody involved with that is already in analytics. But if you don’t know how to take that step outside the space, that could be a little way to go be a mentor or be a mentee, just get a little bit of dribble of that going, and it can be a way to get started. And I feel like as I go into 2021 and I’m trying to figure out my plan, like these are the things I’m trying to put markers and time in, like, “Okay, where am I gonna spend my time.” And make this real because it’s like you said, Moe, it’s sort of… The desire to do it, but it’s hard to know where to start. So there’s some opportunities there, and obviously, going to WYK Digital and sign up for that mentoring there as well, ’cause that sounds amazing. So I don’t know if time zones are a problem or not, I guess if you’re in the US, you can easily be a mentor in the UK, as long as you’re willing to get up early in the morning, so…

0:55:57.5 Michael: Alright, so that’s it for this episode. We would love to hear from you. Are you finding resources or something about this inspiring you? We’d love to get your feedback. We’d love to hear from you. The best way to do that is on the Measure Slack or on Twitter or on LinkedIn. Rob, are you on Twitter? Do you have a Twitter account?

0:56:18.5 RJ: Yeah, @RobJackson01.

0:56:20.9 Michael: @RobJackson01, so you can find him there. And also wykdigital.com is the…

0:56:27.5 RJ: Yeah.

0:56:30.6 Michael: Yep. Perfect, so go check that out, W-Y-Kdigital.com, check out their site, we’d love to hear from you, and if you have other resources and things like that that can help the community, this is a great time and season to share that with others. So obviously, in this holiday season, we can’t forget our own personal Santa Claus, Josh Crowhurst, who is delivering presents of helping us get this podcast out as our producer. Thank you, Josh, for all you do. And Rob, thanks once again, just really appreciate it, thanks so much for what you’re doing for the community and coming on the podcast to talk to us it.

0:57:05.4 RJ: Thank you guys. Absolute pleasure, and I wish you all a Merry Crimbo.

0:57:09.7 Michael: A Merry… That’s right, Festivus is what we celebrate around here. Anyways, so I know that I speak for both of my co-hosts, Moe and Tim, no matter how you can figure it out, keep finding ways to keep analyzing and giving back.

0:57:30.9 Announcer: Thanks for listening, and don’t forget to join the conversation on Twitter or in the Measure Slack, we welcome your comments and questions, visit us on the web at analyticshour.io or on Twitter @AnalyticsHour.

0:57:44.4 Charles Barkley: So smart guys want to fit in. So they made up a term called analytics. Analytics don’t work.

0:57:51.8 Thom Hammerschmidt: Analytics oh my God, what the fuck does that even mean?

0:58:01.6 Michael: Alright, one of you is gonna have to go. My dogs are barking like crazy.

0:58:04.5 Moe: I literally refused to break that time. I was leaving that solely up to you, particularly because you have this line that is perfectly positioned to coming off to that, and then I was gonna say something really negative.

0:58:18.2 Tim: What?

0:58:18.3 Moe: I had this whole script in my head. And you didn’t play your part.

0:58:25.1 Michael: Moe, why don’t you tell me what you wanted me to say and then I’ll say that so you can get your negative line in…

0:58:30.0 Moe: Okay, no, disregard, I’ve got a different tangent.

0:58:34.0 Michael: It is accepted to sneak in a twofer. Well, I say it’s accepted ’cause I’m usually the one that’s guilty of it, but…

0:58:42.3 Moe: And very often.

0:58:49.4 Michael: And we also… We have an explicit rating on iTunes so you’re free to say any language you’d like so…

0:58:53.9 RJ: You should not have told me that Michael.

0:58:57.0 Tim: No, it’s actually… Frankly, I feel the burden to try to do gratuitously drop F-bombs because these other two little lily white…

0:59:06.5 Michael: I pull my weight, okay, so not my problem.

0:59:09.0 Tim: Bullshit. This is gonna be a hard one to get angrily profane. Although who knows? I can get angrily profane at just about anything.

0:59:23.1 Michael: Mexico, gets blacked out.

0:59:25.9 RJ: That was… Re-appear with a margarita.

0:59:29.3 Michael: Yeah.

0:59:33.7 RJ: Yeah my first ever big talk on the analytics scene in London, I thought, “I’m gonna use Prezi, I’m gonna show these people what’s up… ” And the whole thing froze. I asked for it. People told me it was gonna happen. I didn’t believe them, and I just had to make up an entire new talk on the spot.

0:59:52.5 Moe: Oh my God, that’s… You’re terrifying me.

0:59:56.7 RJ: The applause of just sympathy that people gave me as I came off. So you can tell they really felt for me.

1:00:05.2 Moe: I must say I was never a Prezi person, so I count myself lucky.

1:00:17.2 Michael: All I want…

1:00:28.7 Tim: Rock flag and air some grievances. That would be the Festivus one. Rock flag and giving back.

1:00:38.9 Moe: I’m so confused.

1:00:39.0 Tim: It was the Festivus… There was a Festivus reference.

1:00:43.6 Michael: Do you not know what Festivus is, Moe? It’s the holiday for the rest of us.

1:00:46.7 Moe: No because we say Merry Christmas in Australia.

1:00:51.6 Tim: So, it’s a Seinfeld reference.

1:00:52.1 Michael: It’s based on Seinfeld.

1:00:53.9 Moe: Yeah, no I have Seinfeld.

[music]

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