Transcript
(00:01) [Music] okay thanks a lot mike um before we start first speak kudos to you mike and and the whole team who’s organizing this uh handicon right now when you reached out to me like two weeks ago i was thinking like wow this is like really a short time frame you know to set up a conference like this and and actually seeing what’s happening on twitter how you got bit organized how you get like the community support like people supporting you with auction and stuff like this getting all this out of the ground
(00:40) in like two weeks is amazing and now seeing i started joining this morning i constantly constantly see more than 70 people concurrent in the sessions that is that is amazing to see what what you did here why do i know a thing or two about conferences yeah my background is i’m part of a team which is organizing cloudfest and namescon cloudfest is the biggest event for the cloud the service provider industry that is where we have let’s say product managers of godaddy or google cloud or aws or dreamhost like typical
(01:21) the typical hosters basically cloud service providers as our attendees and guests and namescorn is the largest event for the secondary traditional domain market and um we actually each year at our fiscal conference at namescon we also do an live auction and the results are usually between like 1.5 to 3 million dollar in in sales which we see that at these events um yeah so today we would like to talk a little bit uh that is also why leonie is here about um our foundation which is called enterpr entrepreneurs for knowledge
(02:02) and you know i’m a guy which serves certain communities so i serve a cloud community i serve the uh domain community and and and also i see a little bit myself in this role here with the handshake community and we started with cloudfest and namescon but we that we involved companies as well as private people into our school building projects the foundation which we are building or build it is called entrepreneurs for knowledge and leone is working full-time for that foundation and she can give you an overview what we are doing
(02:38) thanks cern thank you henchlik community i personally have literally no idea what you guys are actually doing but it’s really interesting to be part of this today and have this opportunity so we can introduce entrepreneurs for knowledge and the charity and see how handshake and charity actually goes together um so we started with entrepreneurs for knowledge in 2019 because we’ve seen quite an interest in the whole tech sphere the cloud the handshake domain whatever um everybody is kind of motivated to do
(03:10) something good right i think all of you are listening at the moment you also have it in you that you want to give something back and maybe support less privileged people and especially children and so in 2019 we started with entrepreneurs for knowledge and we have a concept that we call foundation as our service so i my background is completely humanitarian work so i lived in several countries i worked in several crisis regions especially around the syrian conflict and i’ve seen many many development aid projects on the ground
(03:43) and what really comes down to it is education is key so people can be supported and that children especially get the tools that they can break the cycle of poverty and not not learning anything and doing something with their life afterwards and being kind of stuck in poverty at the end so we said okay we have this amazing community in the tech world and we also have this huge need of children to be supported in education and how can we get this together and where we’ve seen a big problem is that people don’t
(04:16) really trust ngos anymore and nobody really has the feeling that they know where the money is going at the end right like maybe you donate something and then you see the same pictures of starving children all over and you just don’t know what your money actually did at the end and that’s exactly where we’re gonna come in and we want every euro to actually have an impact and go directly to the communities so we’re trying to work as efficient as possible and i think i just want to show you some slides so it actually gets a
(04:46) little bit more visible what we’re doing um can you see that yes very well perfect okay so that’s the logo so what we were thinking is we want to connect really cool projects like local from the communities together with people that want to do something good but want to do it directly and as easy as possible and so we said okay what’s really helpful and what’s often really needed is actually school infrastructure i’ve seen now in the last years i’ve seen so many places all around the world where schools are
(05:24) broken super small like 70 80 children crammed into one classroom and obviously that’s not a place to learn and the teacher can be as good as possible but if you don’t have a good classroom and a safe infrastructure you won’t learn a thing and so we said okay building schools is actually something that we can facilitate with donations that come from places that are just more privileged like germany europe northern america and so um we are working in these three fields we are building new schools we are renovating
(06:00) all schools that are super dangerous and we are extending schools if they are way too small and then now as a second pillar we’re also working really hard in digitalization because obviously also you can have a really nice school building but then if you don’t have cool teachers or any post education technology computers access to internet i mean you know it best like it really opens a world to knowledge which is really amazing and so we reach out to just gonna attend to this to all of these countries reach out and we’re trying to find
(06:34) implementing partners so we’re working with small organizations on ground directly with the communities we find these projects and then we are trying to build schools in this areas so it’s super down to earth most importantly and i always want really want to emphasize this our own costs are completely covered so we’re really just doing this to get as many people as possible to donate and support this project so we can really say that the donation like if you give five dollars these five dollars are gonna reach it
(07:05) and um there’s no no administrative costs or anything on the way that’s getting lost our own mission is really to support as many projects as possible and so we started this we have different companies as donors but obviously also a lot of private people and um you might be surprised how much how how little the money is that we actually need to really have a huge impact so um this is just a map so you get an overview really work everywhere in the world and it works this way either donna says hey i don’t know my wife is from the
(07:40) dominican republic or i’ve been in holidays in tanzania and i really love it there um do you have a project and then we find projects according to the budget that might be available and then we match this to like the donor and the project and then we take over project management everything that is important our mission is really make helping as easy and as efficient as possible and so these are the countries that work in currently but it’s growing every day like just yesterday actually we started with thailand so i don’t know every week
(08:13) there’s another country where we start working in and um just to give you an example of a project how it might look like so this is the school one of our first schools actually in tanzania and you really can see that before and after effect right like it was such a like not a place to learn i mean imagine you have to send your own children to to a school like this but um there were no means that the state couldn’t finance schools and so the community was just doing something by themselves um so we found this project and we said hey cool
(08:47) with our budget how much was it 36 000 so i know it’s still a lot of money but it’s not millions as you could think if you say okay i’m going to support the school and we often either have private people can afford it or we get groups of people together and everybody donates maybe 2 000 3 000 and then we have this bunch of money and we can support a project with it and you can really see the before and after effect right like there’s had a huge impact for generations of children even that can actually learn now in proper classrooms
(09:18) without being afraid that something falls on their head or something um so this is an example um for tanzania this are a couple of schools we built so you can really see like myanmar was a huge school six classrooms some are a little bit smaller um lebanon for instance in the middle um it was a school for syrian refugees in a refugee camp and this is a tense school because we weren’t allowed to build a proper school but the budget was only 12 000 euros so even with a bunch of people you have this together in in a really quick time
(09:54) and now these children can actually learn somewhere which is amazing and i just have two more slides just to say a couple of pictures because sometimes it’s a bit strange to imagine this for instance is the school in madagascar it was just opened um recently now so this is a before picture and i think they had like 80 90 children and one classroom so we really built another um block school block with a couple of classrooms next to it um and so these children can go and now we’re even looking into building a computer lab which is
(10:25) extremely difficult because there isn’t electricity or anything but um yeah let’s see how that goes solar panels let’s see um and this is the lebanon school which i just talked about in the refugee camp which was 12 000. so um yeah maybe just to close this every budget can have an impact even if it’s 100 euros like there are always small projects be it a water tank or a library or a couple of books or whatever is actually needed that we can use to support those communities and so it doesn’t always have to be this
(11:00) huge amounts of money um coming back without the slides so and i think what’s amazing for private people to actually do that is um i we hear this a lot from fathers right like fathers and mothers and family people that actually then go there if they supported a school and show their children the school and be at the opening ceremony and meet the children and actually see with your own eyes what what you’ve managed to do even with a possible smaller amount of money so yeah i mean siren i think you can tell us a little
(11:35) bit you’ve been in an opening in guatemala for a school there that you funded together with your cloudfest event and all the attendees there it was a really cool project and we went there together in 2019. and how was it yeah good good question i mean um i think i had to collect some donations and money already beforehand before i went to my first inauguration which i did in spanish without speaking spanish by the way yeah and i mean once you see that life on site you know when you’re in the middle in the mountains somewhere in guatemala
(12:17) you see the happy faces of the children of the parents of the teachers you know it’s it’s still shoveling cold among my my back you know when i think back on that and and you know when the lockdown came a couple of months later it was like late 2019 when we opened with school so like three or four months later we had the block down and i thought like how do i stay sane with that whole thing you know and i was still so fulfilled from this trip in guatemala and and during like in early days of a lockdown was when i really started you
(12:51) know to put myself into this project and and i see best like we have these different kind of layers you know if you think about cloudfest so we leverage cloudfest as an event for let’s say for donations which are coming from corporations you know it can be as big as intel or godaddy is actually paying for two schools or some of you know the name name cheap one of the biggest registrars in the world so you know these are the typical guys you know which give or companies corporations which which leverage what we are doing with af car you know
(13:25) entrepreneurs for knowledge um and with the marketing power how we can help them basically to and to to integrate that into their messaging when if we talk about namescon um here it’s here we go more to the private level and i can give you one or two examples so some of you maybe know by name andy boof you know one of the main most famous um domain investors and brokers um always in the top ten in escrow.
(13:54) com each year and um he had like a very cool deal end of last year in december um just before christmas he he had his twitter handle at chain you know maybe you even read about that deal so he sold it for a large amount of bitcoins you know and he was happy you know to give a portion of that to build actually two and a half schools you know um in uh all over world i think we built one with him in guatemala and another one in tanzania right now and uh and so on yeah and when clubhouse came out you know and i got even more
(14:32) excited and like in this german domainer meetup which is like the most boring domain i meet up maybe which exists but but anyway cool people so at the end of that meetup i was like i already had like half a bottle of wine you know and i thought like ah let’s do i have this domain you know crease.
(14:52) de you know which is pretty good actually for for cctld so i put it on the table you know at the end of this clubhouse session and um i said okay everything goes to this project basically or one of our schools i think with senegal in in like a five-minute thing and this is how my idea came with let’s do an handshake auction it’s a couple of weeks ago i think what johnny and kieber built up here now in the meantime is is already more sophisticated but we set something up in like not really thinking how we can clean the names or clear the domains i
(15:25) mean uh transfer them and so on so i firing house for that so that during the clubhouse meeting also basically uh albert names which got donated i put them into into a special name based account like a clean new account with everything uh very similar i think like how johnny set it up this way and so you have them all in this clean account and when like if the highest bidder you know during the clubhouse spins that thing he goes basically to that name in name base and and put in the handshake price which we agreed on with a high spitter in the
(16:03) make an offer field and then i have immediately accepted it and this way we collected the handshake which i still have to move into bitcoin and transfer to leone but it was a test you know i’m looking forward like i couldn’t watch the auction last night but i will do it later today so to see where we are because i really think in this community here in handshake where there is a willingness you know to donate domains especially if you like the early adopters you know who got them for free or or for very little like 1 or 10 or 50
(16:39) handshake or whatever so um you know we did with proof of concept but we were also a little bit busy the last couple of months so i couldn’t follow up on this one we have a big cloudfest coming up cloudfest23 to 25. if you if you’d like to join you can just sign up for free on cloudfest.
(16:58) com but i i will follow up with this one after after this event and and start something again and i’m looking forward to have also more community support in in building something better and a little bit more sophisticated which we did in a very very simple manner in the first place but um i think it’s cool you know to do this together with a community and from the response i saw on twitter and so on i think there is a great support and the ecosystem is rising prices are rising so we see some things coming up we’re now filling up the school in senegal
(17:34) right now we have already money like collected from other channels from our cloudfest community but we have a little bit left you know so if you feel like if you want to donate some money you know ifcar.org or talk to me or leonie but also reach out to me on twitter or or directly by emails we have an s-o-e-r-e-n cloudfest.
(18:01) com if you want to donate um h and st domains for names for one of the next um options leonie any more to add from your side i think what’s just important is really like even small support can help i really want to emphasize this like you don’t have to donate 50 000 and if you have it it’s nice but you don’t have to um if you’re super flexible with our projects as i said like it’s uh we really emphasize direct flexible help so um if you have any idea just uh even a fundraising idea like we have um one donor now from germany as well who’s
(18:40) just fundraising among his friends and i think he’s gonna be the one who’s building a school in thailand and it’s 30 000 euros so he’s just getting together all of his friends and everybody donates a thousand and it’s super super easy to do that actually and um happy to support you with everything as i said we want to make it as easy as possible and to sufficient and the need is extremely high just to drop one number at 258 million children are not going to school if you can imagine that and just imagine
(19:09) your own life if you would have never gone to school like never learned how to read and write life would have been quite hard and so um it’s really a good initiative um and yeah 100 of the money is really going to the children yeah i just want to answer one question which was here in the chat is um like how similar are we to room to read um like what a just very quick one uh what i understand um this is like a project which is particular like helping girls you know with education and gender equality like to answer but very quickly
(19:45) um like all our school projects and the contracts which we do with our local partners like gender equality is always part of a contract so we always say it must be 50 50 at minimum which is important especially in projects like senegal also where girls often stay at home you know and only boys get an education so um so we always take care but beside of educational factor but gender equality is 50 50.
(20:14) thanks and we have a couple of projects where it’s really a hundred percent girls actually you have a couple of girls especially one in south africa that’s really cool where the girls really learn to code from a very early stage on so it’s a pure girl school that’s super into tech and um very steam focused which is really really cool awesome thank you thank you so much both of you for for sharing and yeah i mean i think it’s great to introduce to the handshake community and i’ve been following what sauron’s been doing in
(20:43) the domain world with these conferences and and uh and fundraising is really great and uh appreciate you sharing today to our to our attendees thank you awesome thank you so much for the opportunity [Music] you