You say its not quite there yet. People are trying to recruit talent. There is only a select group, hypothetically there is only a select group of people that one can pull from for this talent. Is that hypothesis correct . Or can you find great engineers across the country . Where would you look . Leslie well, thats a good question. I would just look around. Look around the room. Im sure that there are some of them here right now. I think that where i would look is any place that is doing that type of work, right . And its not just confined to m. I. T. , stamford, cal. Its having it in detroit. Its having in richmond and virginia what capital one is doing for credit cards. Its happening in washington, d c with them surveilling everything we are doing. [laughter] jonathan where are you, at slack, looking for talent right now . What is on your agenda . Like i will speak for me, i cannot speak for everybody there. We have looked for people who are essentially good at what they do, who are good programmers from an engineering perspective. We give everyone a coding i hate saying coding exercise. But it is something that is graded blindly. We dont know who they are. We dont know where they went to school or if they went to school. They are a man, woman, or other. They just know that they did this exercise and we grade them. If they do fairly well on that, based on their ranking, we have a conversation with them to bring them in. Jonathan that is the way that slack has privileged diversity on one level. Managing to create one of the more diverse workforces in the valley, and tech in general. There is also a geographic diversity to the things you are doing. I wonder if you all were looking to expand that at all. Are there places where you would go to try and recruit new talent of the new facilities to get things done . A tough one. We definitely look all over the country for talent. I think i just had somebody coming from tennessee. Since you softballs the question to me, we are opening up a facility with the most diversity in north america. Before everyone tries to figure at what that is, it is probably toronto. It has one of the most diverse populations in the world 47 is foreignborn. It is amazing to me. Were partly a canadian company. It makes a lot of sense to have a presence there as well. Jonathan how important to the companys diversification among economic privileging . I do not think of toronto as a city that is struggling economically or financially. This is just a nod to the diversity of the city itself. Is that why you all are setting up camp . Leslie at the end of the day, we are a business. We have to look for places where we think we can have the best Business Climate to grow at all. Economic diversity is as important as other diversity. There are cities totally left out of the tech ecosystem. What i like to be in other cities like detroit, richmond, nashville . Of course. We can look to do that. Jonathan i was watching an interview that you did a couple of months and weeks ago, you talk about the ways in which oakland is changing. You had harsh words for what is going on in oakland. I am wondering if there are ways to economic urban environment and not do it right and that is what you saw in your experience when you went back or if there is Something Else going on. Lets talk about San Francisco, it is a good example. The area where twitter is, where square and over is, you see there is an increase of Economic Activity but it is really at the highend has left people at the low end out. The area has not changed as much as it could. Not to blame San Francisco but that was not done as well as it could. If you want to blame San Francisco, by all means go ahead. You have Great Companies that are now restaurants. It serves the demographic not living in those areas for decades. We in tech, we have a great opportunity to be part of the solution. We can engage and help people. We can raise everyone up. We need to do it more from how do we get people in the neighborhood into good paying jobs . How do we improve economic position . It is great but you need to raise it up economically. Jonathan you said Silicon Valley is hostile to diversity. How has that not affected this blind admission that you do upfront . Leslie it is that in the intentionality everyone has. We have had conversations i have never had anywhere else. We do not take things like where you went to school into consideration. University of miami, we do not care. This has been ingrained in Silicon Valley. We want you to work at these companies. We do not care about that. That is been a huge part. What has also been a huge part is once once you start early, in an Early Development in your company, it makes it easier because you are not starting from way back. Facebook, google, twitter thousands of employees, they are so far behind. They have reputations. People walk in and they do not see anyone who looks like them. Why would they want to work there . Jonathan because things are so woefully bad, and they really are, any of the Top Tech Companies out here, it is really bad. You look at what is happening with the American Education system and manufacturing, that is what managed to change the game in the Big Industrial companies and American Education. Why would Silicon Valley and not look at that as a simple solution to what is in fact an endemic problem . Leslie quotas are wrong and they are bad and do not work. I do not think they work and in particular, it is another way of saying we will not lower the bar. It is that exact same argument. We will get people who are not qualified. What were saying is we want a level playing field. You need to have a level playing field. Dont go to places like m. I. T. Dont go to places and focus on m. I. T. You do not go to places without diversity. That is about leveling the playing field. You look at the Ethnic Diversity and that is a quota for people who are white or asian. I do not want to have to talk about this again, because i do not believe in quotas. They are inherently wrong and there are Realistic Solutions that do not have these attached to them. Jonathan to a certain extent, there has got to be a better system. It is a blunt system. At the same time, i have seen other interviews with you where you talk about systemic nature of privilege and how people need to actually step back from the table and make room at the table. You talk about that in the interview. This is a tough issue to talk about. It is important to do so. I wonder what this space looks like, when the privileges so institutionalized it is not something most people recognize. Leslie i have a data point to bring up. An organization, a group set up by a Diverse Group of entrepreneurs. Mark zuckerberg. The pages probably looking much like what it looks like. I think it is a great thing. Lets do that. They got together to raise this. The firms for these companies, anywhere between 3 million and 4 million per quarter, you are looking at up to 12 million per year on raising the cap. Why not have Something Like that for increasing diversity . It is a place where you can start. You get people who are doing that and apply it to less diverse areas. You can take another data point where i will try to tie things together, facebook, 37 of their Engineering Team is asian. Twitter, 37 . Look at the amount of money they spend in asia overall. 50 million per year since 2012. Is it any water any wonder they have these . What if we were to spend that in richmond and washington, d. C. . Will we have a more diverse workplace . Jonathan isnt that a matter of Market Expansion . The companies are trying to go abroad and grow in global markets. The way to do that is to reach out to countries. I did a lot of research for this. If the market is so saturated, do the Companies Need to set up shop in different areas. Leslie not at the same scale. 200 is a drop in the hat for google and facebook. It is actually cost competitive. I have managed over 100 people in india. I know it looks like. It does something interesting. Imagine you did go to detroit which google has done. If you go to richmond, large and diverse populations, you see people in the neighborhoods, people see their neighbors and they start to aspire to that. People who want advancement know they have to come back to headquarters. You will have people coming back to mountain view. What happens when you hire Diverse People and create a an inclusive environment . They will hire their friends and they will hire their associates who look a lot like them. You start to make inroads into the problem that these companies have spent the last three years and tens of millions of dollars and have made virtually no impact whatsoever. Jonathan lets go down a level and beat up on other people. It is criticism. Healthy criticism. Is the same true of the Entrepreneurial Community . You look at what is happening with entrepreneurship and investment into tech startups, would you advise young entrepreneurs to stay in the valley to build their company . Leslie good question. Probably not. It is hard to encourage someone to stay in a place that is hostile to them. When you walk into an office and people have a preconceived notion of who you are based on how you look, africanamerican, hispanic, a woman, and i nor, we Woman Entrepreneur talked aboutwho her struggles and she has an amazing platform and an amazing market opportunity. It is difficult for her to get funding. Why stay at a place that is hostile to you . There are smaller markets and private equity firms, shout out to new orleans. Detroit. There are things there that can help. A year or so ago, if i were to create another start, i would go to detroit. Jonathan right. He would be the only investor in town because there are these markets that exist but the capital there is not as extensive, that is just a given. Leslie you are right but if a capital is not available to you than it is. If this had happened, and dimon advisor for some company, mentor, entrepreneur, i have heard people who have gone in say yes, you need a male cofounder and get more what white people on the team because having a team of six black will does not look good. I have heard the stories from people. Things that would never be said to an asian or white cofounder in Silicon Valley ever. Jonathan should they try to ignore the capital completely . Is there a solution or should people just not worry about it at all . Leslie if you have a big hit someplace else, whether or not it is a person of color, and i hope it is, these will follow. They will show up. If it goes big, they will follow. This is what needs to happen. I hope it does. I think that is the fast track. Jonathan we are almost out of time. I think we could just ended there. An incredible conversation that i hope could continue over many events like this one. A pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much. [applause] lets see if we can pit him against david backstage and see what happens. Our next guest is into gaming on the pc. You seem really engaged. Whats up, man . Please welcome to the stage thank you for taking some time. Thank you for having me. So you guys have built razor as a big peripheral hardware company. For gamers by gamers. Gamer is your thing. You are doing Something Different. Why dont you tell us about what you are doing . In the past couple of years, a longer pedigree of sorts. We have been around about 10 years since we were founded and we have done everything from hardware, so will shift more than 20 million we have shipped more than 20 million devices worldwide. We have got a massive platform of gamers who come online every day to connect with us. A question up most in our mind is what else can we do . Today we are announcing a , corporate venture fund. We are calling it v ventures. Really focused at early staged with our structure can bring value add. Ingrid is this razers way of diversifying itself . The ventures is doing stuff and robotics and things like ecommerce. Real investment type of thing. What are you guys doing . Minliang the couple of different focuses over here. We are looking at startups razer can bring value to. Were looking at for example the user base we want to bring across to start up up there. Over and above we have got a lot , of experience in the hardware and the software. Hardware is really hard, everything from prototyping, mass production, these are the things we want to bring across. On the other end of the spectrum we are looking at software that can help us out. Finally i think specific in , terms of companies that want to scale beyond where they are, we have a Global Distribution network we can bring across. One third of our business is in north america. One third is in europe and asia. We work with retail chains like best buy in the u. S. These are some benefits were trying to bring to the startups. Ingrid your target audience are gamers. Do you see yourself aiming at niche specialized gamers . You want to be a main company . Minliang we have got gamers who set up a huge following. That is the core of what the company is. For gamers and by gamers and that is what we want to continue. The gamer who is passionate about design and technology. It is what we want to focus on. We have realized while we do not necessarily want to go mainstream, mainstream has come to us from the premise of, things like pokemon go, people who do not necessarily identify themselves as gamers are slowly looking at gaming as a form of entertainment. To segue back to the conversation, the Gamer Community is a perfect user base. Motion sensing from the nintendo wii. Weve got vr like oculus. Gamers tend to be tech saturday, comfortable beta testing am evangelizing it to the entire gaming community. There will probably be more gamers in the future. Ingrid pokemon go is a huge success. Do you want to build something as successful is that . A pokemon go . Is that in your site and could you do it . Minliang traditionally, we want to continue doing what we are good at, dosing on gamers building Great Software and services for gamers and that is what we will continue to do. When we first started, gaming was not a buzzword. People were like no, that is not something we were interested in. Gaming is getting a lot of time because of pc gaming, it is bigger than movies, bigger than music. There is a huge amount of interest in gaming now. An opportune position to take advantage. Coming into gaming today, the masses will probably leave when something is bigger and newer and shinier to look at it we know what we are good at. We will always be doing that whether or not the industrys big or small. Ingrid does that mean you do not want to build a pokemon go or yes . Minliang if it is something we could build for gamers ingrid did you look at that and think, damn it, we should have done that . Or did you think it was cool . Minliang i think we just build stuff we like. We started as a peripherals company. Candidly, because i travel so much and i am looking at gaming laptops in the past, we built a team in the past couple of years and today, we probably make some of the best gaming laptops in the world. We like to build things for ourselves. I see that there, which is great. We are taking over the world in the sense there and we are hyperfocus on gaming. Ingrid what do you think the next generation of games will look like . Minliang we could be here all day. Ingrid 10 words or less. You guys are doing stuff with vr, an amazing stuff to will it all be in the are . In vr . We have got a lot of consuls still. Consoles still. Minliang gamers as a demographic, it is not just going horizontally. China, southeast asia, these are growing quickly everywhere. Gamers are getting older. They are more familiar playing different types of games. A 2yearold today its likely on a tablet right away. Given the proliferation, we think gaming will go to everywhere and be more pervasive. Emergence is really key. Vr, the most immersive gaming experience. The mobile phone, it tells you to go back to the game. Different layers of vr. Ingrid lets go back for two seconds one category you guys are doing in there is robotics. Are you building a robot . Minliang we are excited about robotics. We have got internal labs and we try all kinds of different things. You may see a big enough sorts. We are always looking at new interfaces, and exciting new area with a huge amount of innovation. For us, we see this confluence between software, firmware, and hardware. It is something we can as a company help do startups. It is an area we are looking at. Ingrid ill take it as a yes. A little bit about razer itself as a company. You mentioned these new areas. A lot of companies are coming into this space. Who do you now see is your biggest competitor . Minliang that is an odd question of sorts. I think were pretty much a Different Company in the sense that we represent probably the company on a newer wave of things everyone is seeing, so traditionally, Companies Back in the days would be great at certain ranks. Great at making peripherals or laptops or what have you. These Traditional Companies would then say, ok. I will carve out a segment for productivity. A laptop. A gaming thing. I will do something for sports people or what have you. But that has changed. Ourselves as a company, we evolved to look at the user with greater affluence, greater focus on getting great experiences. We see these coming about, grants that will say, ok, i will figure it has to do the different categories or one person, a cyclist or someone excited about anything. For ourselves, we focused on one person, the gamer. Do we have competitors . Yes. In the laptop space . Yes. Competitors for example in the software plant one space . Yes. There is not a Single Company that is hyperfocus on the gamer to provide all of it. We do not really have a competitor of sorts right now today. Not toda