We, along with many others, said that we need to be net zero by 2050. There's this pathway going there. Any MSMEs that are in the supply chain of those publicly-listed companies with a public promise, they trickled down, have to do some sort of accounting as well.
Yes.
Of course. [laughs]
I know. No, we're starting with the largest. Not all publicly-listed, just the largest publicly-listed. Then, they go year by year a little bit, covers a little bit more. The MSMEs still have a few years to adapt that.
We're working toward that. That's the first part. What I'm trying to get at is that because teleworking or hybrid work is not just an efficiency or collaboration play, it is also a net-zero play. You can probably prove that it beats driving by car to work and back, and so on. Anyway, T-Cloud will keep expanding. That's my answer to your first question.
That's a good question. If your base is in Taiwan, and you say that instead of flying everybody in from the West Coast to Taiwan for a convention or for training, and things like that, the harmonization rules basically said you can declare it as happening here, but you must not double spend [laughs] at that double game.
We're also working on the international through distributed ledgers, or some mutual certification. We can avoid this double accounting. Currently, even within the EU, those double accountings are common. [laughs] What we're all doing now is to harmonize so it doesn't count both ways.
You mean teleworking labor statutes? [laughs]
It's difficult.
Manufacturing?
On the T-Cloud, I've had a consultation office hour, my office hour, where I think it was a scheduling service provider that specifically said something like what you said where their software can figure out the regulatory compliance level of the schedule.
They specialize in the catering and service industry, and things like that. I don't know the details because I'm not a part of the Ministry of Labor, [laughs] but T-Cloud has a section that is about their regulatory compliance.
Back to the time zone thing. [laughs] From my personal experience, I've been teleworking since 2008 at least full-time, and with the West Coast. Most of the Taiwanese engineering talent who can work on a telecommuting basis probably already did so. They were already very mobile, very flexible, and so on.
The flip side of it is that if you look at where they registered their startups -- maybe Singapore, maybe Cayman Islands, [laughs] any of those places -- they don't count strictly as Taiwanese company. That was the motivation of us doing a Company Act revamp in a public consultation in 2015.
To ask people who crowdfunds, or who registers not in Taiwan what exactly is wrong with the Taiwanese Company Act [laughs] that prevents them from identifying as a Taiwanese company, even though their co-founders, the majority, all of them are Taiwanese.
That's part of it. Back in the better days in 2015, we don't even have the legal underpinning for closely-held corporations, for convertible bonds, for things like that. Those compensation structures are not very friendly to the startup founders. It's strictly one share, one vote. There's no special veto.
Exactly. It's very difficult to make.
That's already changed.
Mostly within the past two and a half years of pandemic. We've got, of course, the Gold Card community for a while, for half a year. A lot of my friends in Silicon Valley are physically in Taiwan and doing their work, [laughs] of course.
Many of them started Taiwanese companies, like Steve Chen from YouTube. Also, I was interviewing Kevin Lin from Twitch, and so on. Of course, they were Taiwanese second generation, or moved to the US while they were young. They still had a social connection in Taiwan.
For these Taiwanese or Taiwanese/American co-founders or founders, they are quite comfortable with starting a local team here in Taiwan. Setting up so that it's entirely telework or hybrid work, and bringing their circles in the Silicon Valley into the operation.
For people who did not have this Taiwanese connection before, I don't think that's a natural choice.
If it's West Coast, it's not too bad.
I know.
[laughs] Yes. When I telework with Cupertino and Palo Alto, I basically allocate it close to midnight time. That's their stand-up meeting in the morning, and it's strictly restricted to one hour. If it's later, then I don't get enough sleep. If it's earlier, they don't get enough sleep. [laughs] It's like that's one hour of productivity. [laughs]
Back in 2008, 2009, because the company I was working with, social techs called Enterprise Social, it's basically trying to take Wikipedia and Twitter, and whatever, into an enterprise setting, like Slack before Slack.
What we've been doing is to make what we call self-describing artifacts in the flow of work, so that naturally, during the course of the daily work, you capture sufficient amount of context. Then, by the time that the other side wakes up, it just takes an hour to transfer the context.
If it's PowerPoint or Google Docs, they're remarkably context free.
You have to actually guess the other side's idea. We're not doing that. What we've been doing in the social text was instead to make sure that, for example, a kickoff is synchronized so that everybody has the shared mind map of what's going on.
It's like a fractal. Everybody has this high-level map of what needs to be done, and so on. On an iteration basis, we use two-week agile iteration sprints. Within the sprint then, of course, each time zone can own one sprint, one small part of the sprint. Where it fits the context is always visualized.
The highest level is maps, and then the second level is a Kanban of cards. On the second level, you can still embed other maps in. Then, on the individual level, it's collaborative documents.
Exactly.
That's right.
Something like that.
Social tech is used also to appliances. On the appliance side, of course, that's the hardware schedule, not the software schedule. Then, it's just that sprints are longer. Conceptual, it's the same.
I've read the material. It's quite interesting. Any of your colleagues want to chime in maybe?
The onboarding experience, during the pandemic, it's all about this tele-experience.
Yeah.
It's strictly online? They can spend seven days a week in their home? Are you fully teleworking?
Oh, really?
You're on the second generation is what you're saying.
For that, do you invite them to your local office or you do it purely online?
I see.
That's very organic, very organic. [laughs]
Just be an adult, right?
Ah. [laughs]
Uh-huh.
In Taiwan, because we've never really had a lockdown during the two and a half years, so there's what we call a T-dash or a T Ambassador -- I think it's 3T.org.tw -- Program that's in compliment to the T-Cloud.
We've discovered that for people who are freshly graduated from undergrad level, they actually are digital-native. They know how to tele-onboard each other. What they don't have is how their relevant culture can fit in an existing, especially manufacturing, but also around service delivery, around catering, and so on.
These people know they need to digitally transform, but they don't have the culture for it. If you directly put these two people together, it doesn't work. It just falls apart.
