Outside the lecture theatre

Joe Nash: It's right there. I'm Joe Nash. Wonderful. Cool. That's my Twitter handle. Please do tweet me especially any feedback, comments, abuse. I do try and act on every bit of feedback I get and you see that people change your time. I don't know if there's one beginning again, we'll try.

I'm going to get to that. So I'm here to talk to you about engaging students, particularly how and why you should do it. The why is really important. I know there's some people in this room who have had trouble doing this. One of the things that we're going to talk about is how students differ from engaging traditional audiences. And although some of the content we'll speak about has will overlap a little bit what Tim spoke about. We're going to give more advanced examples and we're going to talk about it a little bit more in depth for this audience.

So before we start, is anyone engaging students in their day-to-day evangelism book? Okay, cool. That's about the proportion that I was expecting, so that's wonderful. I know quite a few of you are engaging students because that's funny enough how we met. So this will be really boring for you, but please hang around and pinning questions when I need it. I also appreciate this is quite late in the day and everyone's a bit sleepy, hang stick with it. There will be awkward audience participation as has been the theme of the day and as you have no doubt noticed, I speak very fast and do a lot of this, but I am essentially on stage convey information to you. If there is something I say that I say too quickly and don't quite catch it, please heckle me and let me know to repeat it.

If you want me to slow down wave like this, I guess I'll try and take that as a signal and I will try and slow down.

Thank you Marcus. I will start with that now. So start with who am I and why should I be telling you about why you should engage students? I have a beer, a student, so I have a couple of roles. The first one is I'm a developer advocate of Braintree while welcome with people like Christiano, Tim Smit, John Blank. If you want to see any of those amazing developer advocates of Braintree, we have an event tomorrow night. Go check out, they're all there. Got my Inno.

Cool. And one of the things I do at Braintree is that I focus on students. So I particularly into student hackathons. So I do a lot of outreach for students. I go to events. I was at a event last night indoctrinating the new CS pressure of Kings the moment they come through the door. So I do a lot of student outreach for that.

And the other half being awareness tshirt four is I'm in charge of third party events in Europe. Major league hacking. So Tim already spoke a little bit about major league hacking. We're a student hackathon organisation. Effectively we support student hackathons but part of that we also run our own events. We run things for various causes. So we held a event called Launch Hack when major league Hacking first came to the uk. This is like an inspiration event to show students how to hold hackathons.

And we just recently held hack on a year which helped people from spoken that which was aimed at being a conference very in spirit of this one where student technical leaders come together and they talk about comms in their industry. We've spoken quite a lot of other things that have been addressed in this room as well. And between those two roles I have quite a lot of experience with dealing with students with making effective advocacy through Braintree.

I'm obviously firsthand sponsoring have had to deal with just justify my decision to deal with students and have had to justify the metrics. And with MLH, we're effectively a platform for developer outreach for companies that many of you represent. So we have to make sure that what we're doing is effective for you and that can be measured for you and cover metrics you need. But more than both of those things, I'm here to talk to you as someone who came to this industry who's able to speak on the stage today because of people like you. When I was a student, I met people like Christiano, I met people like Michael sitting on the floor over there and Rob and I was involved in hackathon through, I was involved in Twilio heroes, which is been vacant for a bit, bring it back, it's amazing. Changed my life because of these people.

And having been involved at kind of the peak of developer advantages and two students and seeing the effect it having me personally, I'm very, very passionate about continuing that and making sure we can all do that. So speaking of that, there's a nice group of us nodding in more. Happy hackathon having just been evangelised by one of you. So wonderful. So before we get going we should talk about some definitions, particularly what is the student we're talking about? Typical image of a student is someone who's perpetually hung over with blood alcohol, the ground 75% who hasn't eaten beans since, hasn't eaten anything but beans since they moved out of their parents' house and probably has the equivalent life experience of an enthusiastic moss that is broadly accurate. And there's also people talking about, but we're going to some more specifics and this is where if any of you're from America or you're evangelising outside the uk, I may lose you bit.

I'm going to focus on the uk. There is a lot of differences which is why for the sake of simplicity, I'm going to focus down, I'm more than happy to talk about students in other regions and I will try and enumerate some differences as we go through. But for the core, we're talking about 18 to 22 year olds. This varies a little bit. So there are typically, if we talk about the UK, we typically see two types of degrees. Now you see the three year undergraduate and then you see what's called a student finance scan where they have a four year integrated MI at some point the university's figured out that if you build the master's into the degree and only give them one bit of paper that student finance will pay for it. So some people do four year degrees and if you get Scotland degrees are longer but they start earlier.

So you're looking at five years in Scotland between four and five. And then we covered that there. Cool. And then we have another big difference in the US which is that in the UK and Scotland we typically study a fixed degree. We don't have any of this major mine system. You study a pure science, you study business, sometimes you study two together, but you have a very limited number of credits that you can spend in other places. And this has interesting implications. You tend to find, and me and Christian have experienced ourselves when working with battle hacks across the world that students in the UK and Europe are more technically savvy than what you may find in the US because of the major minor system.

But what you lack with that is that they may be less rounded in other ways. In my experience, I think that students in the UK struggle to do pitches and presentations at hackathons for example, and may struggle in culture interviews more than US students because they have that well-rounded nature.

This will be really important when we come to later about one of the reasons you manage our students, which is education, but for now we're talking probably primarily students who study cs though it's important for students who don't. So onto that, they're not necessarily all CS students because they can't as easily take courses outside their own degree. If you deal with students, you may deal with people who aren't computer science students. And we've already seen this. We've heard Tim speak about how he wasn't a computer science student and he came into this industry. He is literally here today because he wasn't studying CS and he met evangelists. He's perfectly my point. So you will find people who aren't Cs, who have no other experience of CS and no way of experiencing CS in their traditional university education.

You aren't that only gateway into that part of their world.

And because they all study one thing, they belong to a department. So we're going to talk about a little bit about the university structure in some more detail, but in the UK you tend to find that students are very strongly aligned with their department. For example, with those student obviously they'll be part of the school of Cs. That's very different from other departments of university. It's a very distinct individual body. And another department they belong to is what called the students union. This is pretty ubiquitous across the again and it's a big difference. And now again between the us.

So every university in the UK is part of the student's union and the student's union represents their interests to the university. And also the main purpose of it is to form societies which are special interest groups. Most of these societies are around getting drunk with a particular kind of people.

Some of them are productive. We're talking about the productive ones in particular. So let's get onto to the why. So who here knows they would have a problem justifying students to their boss, whether it's because of sales or because of long leads and that sort of thing. Anyone raise hands to that? Okay, only one. Funnily enough, I pitch on sponsoring students. So okay, that's what as a hopes, there's maybe a completely wasted talk this go for.

So the first reason you just want students is that students an absolutely fantastic brand. We're going to talk through all these points in more detail, but to give you a brief, they're fantastic for getting your brand message out there. They're also fantastic for testing and product, which is something that Tim touched on and they're very, very good for not only your enrichment but the students in enrichment Education is an absolutely fantastic one and there's so much you can give to students as well as yourself when you do this.

One of the things we're going to touch on very, very briefly, but please come talk to me more about it after is recruitment Again, Tim spoke about this a bit. Obviously if you are a company that's trying to actively recruit, you should be doing university outreach, you absolutely should. That's just obvious. So we're not going to touch on that very much, but on to brand. So let's give a brief overview of what we're aiming to do with evangelise. As we all heard from Rob's talk this morning, we are looking to make connections with developers and to enable them to develop cool things and to enable 'em to use our products in imaginative ways and to kind of get turn 'em into external advocates for our product. And when we talk about students, what we're typically talking about is people who have no idea of for software landscape, especially when need talk about the UK where they're all going to just be cs, a CS degree.

I dunno how many of you came through CS degrees but typically doesn't teach you anything about the real world. You're being taught about finite automato being taught about merge thought and that's great. That's a hundred percent what they should be taught. They should be taught fundamentals which enable them to be portable and successful throughout their software. Developing engineer career. You don't want 'em to be taught react because we all know it's going to be dead in six months and there'll be some new jazzy thing. We're talking about conferences, you don't want to be taught that stuff. But what that does mean is that they've been given all these skills and they've been given the fundamental ability to make awesome things and they're aware that they have the power to make awesome things, but they don't have the practical tools to go and make awesome things.

So bit of story time, that's when I start to embarrass more people in this room. So we look back to when I was at the university in not, we talked about my cohort, we had just started to get to the stage. We were kind of beginning of second year and so far we've been taught a couple of things to start to enable us to open the door into the gateway to doing cool things. We've been taught a little bit at PhD HP and we'd played with putting a slight bit of code online and we've been taught how to make a pop server in Java and Haskell, so nothing useful to actually getting an app up online. And then we start going to events and we start realising that people are making really cool stuff and we want to start getting events. We start getting apps online.

So how do we do that? How do we deploy these things? We're not being taught any of these things. So when we start going to these events and we start going to hack funds, one of the first people we've run into is Mr. John Stevenson, Mr. John Stevenson. Salesforce also represents Heroku quite a lot of events and being students are completely unaware of how to get any of our apps online. Sun must shown Heroku, it's a magical platform to just make everything work and apps are online and people can access them and it's scale and oh my god, it's wonderful.

It seemed to completely defy all of our expectations of what software engineering should be. And the thing about students is that they talk a lot, they converse a lot. John, when was the last time you came to the University of Ham?

Audience member: Two and a half years ago.

Joe Nash: Two and a half years ago. I can tell you in 98% certainty because I asked 'em the other day, students in the University of Nottingham who have never met John, who have never met any of my year, are still using Heroku by default because they listened to older students. We've all graduated, but we dealt with Heroku. So we spoke to all the young students about how magical Heroku was. We've all left. Those students have continued to have that conversation. People still use Heroku because students speak and students trust in the opinion of older students. They're very, very vocal.

And I realised I've just kind of shot myself in the foot because I've essentially said, you can go once and never go back. It's all okay. But there's an important thing here is that you need to reinforce it. We're not all as lucky to be as cool as ERs and have this platform which can change things so quickly.

And you find that although the intent doesn't fade, the message does. So now we're obviously starting to see a lot of alternative, a lot of DevOps alternatives and they are starting to nibble at this market share. That's one thing. And people know that they should do Heroku because it's come down to the students, but the original educational message has kind of died with it. One of the things that John did really well when he came to Nottingham was he didn't just talk about Heroku, he spoke about Git, he spoke about actually good software engineering practise. He spoke about closure, which no one did the GIT one worked. Closure, not so much. He spoke about all these things and that content has been lost, which is a real shame.

However, we are still merit evangelised and this is a constant thing because students are so focal.

We see a lot of, especially in mlh, we see a lot of companies who aren't as traditionally cool coming in and being like, Hey kids, yeah, we're awesome, trust us. And again, of course students are so vocal that works. And I've got a perfect example of this. So one of these companies that does this with ML H is Capital One. Capital One are absolutely fantastic company. Okay, A couple of things about Capital One with Gaza students, most UK students, I'm sorry Rob, we don't have the crippling debt of your country, have no reason to have a credit card. They've never owned a credit card. They have no reason to care what a credit card is.

It's less they're using their parents one, which they may well do.

UK students also VE hate banks as well. Okay, let me clarify that. It's not fair UK students who are in the sort of events that we are going to who are operating this community hate banks, the reason students like that have the agency to come into this community is because they're tired of the computer science status quo, which is you come, you learn Java, you get funnelled into a consultancy or a bank. So if at an event where if they're at a hackathon, if they're at a conference like this and you're a bank, they hate you. I'm sorry they hate you. So Capital One had a couple of solutions to this. The first thing they did is they came to hackathons and they were incredibly chill. They didn't really get up on stage and pitch.

They would just come and sit in the corner with some Lego and they'd bring energy drink and they'd bring fruit and they'd bring snacks and they'd just chill on the corner.

The other thing they did, which was really neat was they had these T-shirts printed, which have all their skills on the back as well as a little bit about them. So as the students wandering around and they're stuck, they've seen all these people that have skills, they've seen these people that said, I'm good at Android and I brush my teeth three times a day. They've seen these people who have these quirky things in the back of their shirts. So they start talking to 'em, they start learning from them. And what you found is that Capital One over the course of the year have become very, very well perceiving around students through doing what is relatively small amount of hard work. Also notice in the back of what is relatively to work and what is a lot of fun, they massively increase their brand perception among students.

And the thing is those students are going to graduate at some point and those students are going to get in a position where they need credit cards or they're going to get in a position where they want jobs and they're going to go to it. And I can tell you it works because in my pocket I have a Capital One credit card, I'm a total tool. I've been exploited by the industry and that was the first credit card I ever owned. And I wasn't even a student when I got that. I just worked with them. So I thought, wow, they're a cool company, they won't scam me.

So I know the strategy works and because students talk, again, I did this exact same thing. One of my friends the other day asked me, ah, I need a credit card, who should I go to? First thing I told him was Capital One. I'm a corporate mouthpiece and that gives me to external advocates. Students are not only vocal within their own communities, they're extremely vocal outside of it. I don't think I'd be saying anything controversial that's going to get me in trouble with my manager if I would say that PayPal is not always a popular company. We get a lot of online hate and the first people I see stand up for his time and time again are funny enough, this guy in the middle hug and a bunch of other students, they always stand up and say, Hey now I appreciate you've got this problem but this group from PayPal, fantastic.

You should talk to them. That helps you out. They do two really interesting things. First, they signposts really aggressively. They always tell people who are in trouble where to go to get the most effective help. They always point people to us as evangelists. Secondly, they're always willing to stand up and be evangelists themselves. I've seen actually, again, God, it's constantly audience examples.

I was late to a hackathon once because of various troubles with transport and funnily enough a person who was recently someone we had advocated to Mr. Tim Fogarty just got up on stage, did my API demo for me, even though I wasn't there, he knew how to do Braintree and PayPal because he's seen Christiana do it so many times. He cared enough about our product, want to do it, and he just got up and did our demo. Never heard of that before.

It was absolutely madness. But this is the sort of thing that students win to do because students are incredibly loyal. So Christiana told you a little bit about that and one of the things about battle Hack which constantly amazes me is how loyal our student hackers are. We get people travelling all over the world, it's absolutely nuts. So one of the things that we do for Battle Hack for student outreach is we use the Facebook group Hackathon Hackers, which I'm going to talk a little bit more in detail about later, but I typically tend to create events within the Facebook group and you'll see, so New York City backpacks aim for about 200 people. This is 134 people signed up on this group. Obviously we then got attrition on this, but that is a student Facebook group and 134 of those students wanted to come to our event just for me creating this group and having just in we our New York based Africa having been to their hackathons and having spoken to 'em, having gone to their events, obviously not all of those showed up, but we did have an intense amount of students show up and we see this everywhere and they do some really crazy things.

We've had this series of Kickstarter campaigns made actually by one of their professors that professor recognised the advantages they were getting from going to these events and start Kickstarters to try and get these students there. And they actually, although it failed on here, they also went on Indiegogo and they did actually manage to successfully make it to every single event. And we see this across the world and we look at London, we had students who had flown over from Venia, from Spain, from Poland and from Germany, Venice, a group of eight from Venia, rented a van and drove down to the hackathon. Stockholm is an English person. We actually Tim as well, we had some English people, Berlin, we had English and Spanish people. They travel all around the world for our event because we've evangelised to them that's in person. They know we're called people.

They know our event is good and they're willing to go to those lengths and that expense to do that because they are advocates of us and of our product. So onto the one that's been more helpful for the API people here and that is product as Tim alluded to. Students are extremely well hackathons in particular, but students in a varieties are extremely good to talk to about your product. Your documentation does not work until you've had a first year computer science student read it and successfully integrate your product. And I know this because I've had this multiple times slide. So one of the problems we had, which has now been fixed thankfully, was that in our documentation. So our documentation doesn't really need things in the top right corner. You can change the language of the documentation and then the programming language and it changes all of the example code fout for one particular combination of client and server code, which was JavaScript and no JS otherwise known as the one that all the students choose because no JS is one true dev language.

We found that the code hadn't been properly adjusted for that documentation. It just kind of carelessly be placed in there. One of the fields you can have when you integrate Braintree is a customer id. And this is that if a customer has paid for you before and they come back later, whatever the payment method is, is remembered really nice to the customers. But in the documentation we had this code in there, this customer ID variable was not explained in any pros, was not explained to anyone on that page. Professional developers were wise enough to recognise that this was obviously something from a later stage in the API or they were just removed the variable students, it completely threw them off. They were putting random strings in there and they were trying to generate it from stuff that made absolutely no sense. And we found that a couple of hackathons which were particularly high in students, I was up at three o'clock in the morning with an actual waiting room of problems, which all turned out to be oh yeah, just delete that variable because our documentation wasn't out to scratch at that one.

And things like that you look at and go, oh that's no problem anymore. We'll figure that out. No they won't. And you also find out some really basic things like whether your actual description of the web requests and the process around that that you're doing in your API is clear because you'll find that these students aren't as knowledgeable about HF simple things like http and you have that wonderful opportunity to provide 'em that vital experience but they're going to trip over it in the meantime, they're going to make a huge mess of things and students will also push our A limits and they will break it. So we made the mistake of telling one particular group of students that there was this weird thing in Braintree called Custom fields, which basically enables you to put a extra field in your credit card form on your website and then that also goes into a transaction.

So if I make a five pound payment for a shoe and I also put my name in there, that name gets stored in my transaction history As a merchant, that was a big mistake because then made site called Nono, SQL, where they essentially generated loads of these custom fields, hid them and then made a database management system on top of our EPI. So they turned a credit card processing platform into a database API, we could input arbitrary data and it would get stored in our transaction history absolutely no cost. It's really slow because they're using our sandbox platform so there's no cost for them to using Sandbox. It's really slow because they're generating forms and by each form is like 24 characters limit. So they're encoding it all in base 16 or something. Absolute madness. But they did this and this is our thing that's out there and although I thankfully think it should a server down, anyone can do this.

And we now know that this is the thing that exists and I'm told apparently people use the name production, not known SQL, but have done it themselves. And this was really useful to me. This actually led to a talk about API design SDK design, which I was able to talk, are these consequences we want to encourage? This is actually quite a unique hack. Do we want to maybe make this into a thing? Do we want to block against this? And I wouldn't have had that capability if I didn't know the things that's existed. So one of the reasons that I've heard before of people not being able to evangelise for students is pretty much just that they don't really generate nice metrics, right?

They're not going to be a sale, they're not going to start making you money tomorrow if your evangelism programme is like that.

I'm very sorry. You shouldn't, you're not sales, you shouldn't be dealing with that. But besides that, it's also completely not true. So again, going back to MLH, we find that we have some really interesting data. So Dell, our headline sponsor in the US everywhere in the us, we are mlh presented by Dell slash Tell. And what we found from doing various things to Dell and for doing events to Dell and doing evangelism for Dell through our platform is that Dell's reputation and Dell's brand awareness increased by five times for our single year. So that's two seasons, that's about 150 events, 50,000 students, 300 events, 50,000 students.

And the amount of people who would choose a Dell computer over any other computer that includes Apple increased by five times in one year just from them having some brand print events and from doing things like cupcakes and this sort of thing, which is actual visible returns on their investment. But this isn't theoretical money that will happen when they graduate that they're buying laptops now. They mean their parents are buying 'em with laptops now because they've chosen them and this is Dell. It's not like they're a sexy brand, they're getting these returns anyone else could. And then we're seeing another areas. So across other campaigns, unfortunately I can't give more details on this, but we've seen for example 40% signups on one particular promotional campaign where we're giving credit to developers use a particular tool on the 40 K students that we put in place in this campaign, 40% of that 40 k signed up to that platform and started using that credit.

That is absolutely massive. They're now engaging with that developer tool. They're now using that platform just because they were given a card with some credit in it in their bag. 40% is huge. And that's something like who actually looks at the leaflet in their conference bag today? Anyone look at any of those leaflets? One, two, maybe. Developers are jaded, students aren't, they haven't been broken yet.

The real software world has not broken them yet. They're still fun and fluffy and want to play with these things and they get a leaflet and they're like, yeah, free things. It's not beans and they have a good time with it and they use it and that's wonderful. And going back to the other side, I love that I can constantly flip flop between data. I'm not sure if you noticed, but look, I'm very well represented, my brand, it's I'm shirt, my brain tree hoodie.

So now Brain Tree. We also have some data like this and this is all public data. This is really interesting. You can go look at I now that one that's in the room. We have a lot to thank for dev post for making my metrics actually nice. Dev post is fantastic thing. So dev post just to fill you in is a platform for basically all sorts of things, but what we use it for is hackathon submissions. So students who have built projects can submit 'em to their posts with various metadata like the companies they've used, the APIs they've used, and then Dev Post provide that data direct to us for free I might add.

And also if the same reason equals a student hacker report. So other student report, they looked at a ancy large sample called 13,000 students across 160 events with nine almost 10,000 projects and they looked at the APIs that were most used.

An important thing, I'm going to note here, this stage you're about to see, bear in mind we have not been from 160 events. I do not have the bandwidth to code 160 student events. I think across all of our evangelists we've probably been to about maximum 30 student hack funds, which is especially impressive when you consider that the top five payment APIs that came out this data free of our products are in the top five Venmos PayPal. PayPal is obviously PayPal and Braintree is PayPal. I mean it gets interesting again when you consider that I only evangelise Braintree, so obviously I'm not doing my job very well. But with PayPal, Venmo, that's really impressive. Then the top two places and the Braintree are far behind. So although we're going to less than a quarter of the events that they ran this data from, we are still massively popular.

And that is again because students have this propensity to talk a lot, they spread the save round, they talk about the favourite APIs and then we look at other big players in the hackathon scene. So people I met when I first started student hackathons, the first two companies I met Twilio sent Grid later on, met mail jet, unfortunately not for any of the advantages in this room. Communication APIs, who's there? Twilio, Ingrid, mail jet, if you interact with student communities it will pay off. You'll get the signups and you'll find that you'll drive pupil platform. And when they do graduate, when they go into these opportunities which we'll talk about, shoot shortly, they will consider using your platform. And Twilio have been very vocal about the support for these sorts of things. This was from the Wall Street Journal article about their investment I believe quite a while ago.

And it has some interesting assessments. So Twilio just in 500 friends last year, that's where I really hope I don't get called out by any Australia Twilio people fusing this quote. And the interesting thing about, so the 500 developer events, five 60,000 developers and then they explicitly call out university hackathons as one of the fundamental reasons for these figures. And Twilio, correct me if I'm wrong, Rob, wrong Rob I think are big believers in these movements. I mean they new evangelists, Sam Nu was recently a student, correct?

Audience member: We're just here to start.

Joe Nash: This is perfect. There's kind of on this note of there not being great returns on the students, there is kind of a secret to students and that is that they do graduate, they do leave universities and sooner than you think, but the time they're going to these events, they're not in their first year. They're not miles away from making you money. They're in their third year, they're in their second half, second year. And in that time it is not that long until they start actually using your product in the wild. And I've seen this, so I had quite a few startups I've helped on board on the Braintree have been student startups or have been startups where a student has joined and said, oh hey, we need a payment integration. I know Braintree that's used that and I'm sure that's the case for many others.

And the other thing is students intern, one of the most interesting application of Braintree I've seen one one I'm really happy about was an app which enabled you to buy theatre tickets from basically every major theatre organisation in London. And they decided on the payment gateway, they happened to have a intern came in who in the product planning meeting said, oh I know Braintree and now they're using Braintree for that product, which is absolutely awesome. And that was a really easy return. He just came to a hackathon, he's spoken to me and Christiano and he evangelised us in between two university years. He isn't even a graduate and he's generated lead for us. So onto what I think is the most interesting point and that's education. As I said several times, these students don't really have a view of the whole software landscape yet. They're new, they've inexperienced and although they're learning very quickly and enormously talented, they can learn a vast amount from interacting with you and you can learn a vast amount from teaching 'em things on the best ways to learn the skills to teach.

And you find that you can give them valuable software engineer skills to future like teaching them again. And one of the other things that I really like is when what you've done has direct repercussions on their degrees on their lives. So if we look at, for example, this case study, so this is by a Manchester student who had came through its final year project and part of the final year project Manchester are very heavy on your final year project actually basically being production ready. And one of the things they're really heavy on is that if you're making an app, it should have an e-commerce solution. So they type brain, and this is the quote you directly sent me. So the typos at his fault obviously didn't learn that much from me. So one first thing to said is too much really happy that they used brain injury because they didn't spend a whole lot of time, a whole lot of that valuable learning time in making some janky form that incorrectly to a credit card and did it unsafely.

They were able to learn about payments in the proper way for reading our documentation. They learned about tokenization, they learned about all the security features of Braintree. So they actually learned something valuable from us. The supervisor was happy because they did this research because they built on that. They actually spoke about how Braintree had was the payment they learned about an actual thing working in industry and I shared that's incredibly appropriate. And then they got extra browning points because the UX is really nice. So they actually got a good mark because of using our API because of experience with us. This actually affected their degree.

And then again, if we go back to Tim, one of the things that Tim said quite nicely, it hack on a you was that part he gave talk about the fundamentals of hackathon organising to 80 students who organise hackathons.

I told this story about how when you were first starting out doing sponsorships, yes Christian actually, well when he first started out doing sponsorships, he was pitching PayPal through Christiano on sponsoring At the time Tim was the student and he'd given them the sponsorship deck and he was given him the spiel about why they should sponsor. And Christiano stopped him and said, do you have no idea what you're talking about, do you And Christian took the time in the middle of a pitch to tell Tim how to pitch him better so that Tim could improve his sponsorship pitch for future events. We then did sponsor 'em and obviously it worked out. We got more sponsorship for future things. Christian took this time to give Tim this learning opportunity. So you don't have to convey technical skills, especially in the UK where they are only learning technical skills, giving them business advice, giving them public speaking advice is a hugely beneficial thing to do.

And this another really interesting location. This is absolutely fascinating. Thank you. It's absolutely fascinating. I absolutely love it. Students taking part in activities related to programme. So this is the module specification of a new course in the University of Nottingham called GFR three dev. This is a result of the student culture that developed in Nottingham from interaction developer evangelists.

Basically hackathons and technical events and conferences and meetups have become such an integral part of student life in Nottingham that you can now get credit for open source projects and building things in hackathons. If you go to a hackathon and you build something, they will basically, this is one course, so that's a 12th of a year. That's a course in, I dunno, business administration. You don't have to take this contributes to the degree it contributes to the overall mark. This contributes to their future success because students in Nottingham were so enamoured by the people they met at hackathons that they made it part of their culture and the university had to change to reflect that.

By talking to students, you actually change the process of education, which is absolutely amazing. Flip for that one. So obviously recruitment if they're coming, the silly thing is if a student's got the agency to come to a hackathon to come to a technical event, to come to a meetup, they are a high performing student, they are self-motivated, they talented. If they're there, you should consider them a candidate. You should recruit them. Absolutely. And the important thing is that obviously there's a lot of talk around hiring now where there's all these ridiculous requirements for experience when no one has the ability to get the entry of experience. If you look at students who are going to hackathons, you can kind of skip some of these steps because if you are going to hackathons, you're going to have technical meetup.

But hackathons in particular, if you're going to hackathons, you're working with students for over 24 hours.

You see them through all periods that you could possibly want to see them. You see them stress, you see 'em working with a team, you see them at crunch time, you see them pitch, you see everything. You could want to see if you have much better impression on those candidates. And they're really valuable events for recruitment because if they're there, they are student leaders, they're going to be the leaders tomorrow, they're going to be founding companies, they're going to be leading technical teams. So let's quick to go for the how. Obviously you all know how to evangelise, how to advocate in some form. I imagine we spoke a lot about that today. So I'm just going to talk through some particulars to student them.

So firstly, university isn't as clear how as symbol as you think you have this really awkward situation of society be departments.

So for example, if I want to advocate to the University of Birmingham, I might think it's enough for me to message the administration of computer science to say, Hey, can you send an email out to everyone? Oh no, no, no. Students don't read their emails, especially not from departments. They know it's going to be marketing spiel from consultancy. But that's where you have societies come in and there are societies everywhere. Societies are student run special interest groups. They have some formal organisations. So they have elected officers who go through some training.

They have bank accounts and these just an example of some of the societies in the country. The fonts don't mean anything randomly chose those. And this is a pretty good spread across country. We've got, well we've got Scotland, we've got Manchester, we've got Midland, we've got south. And all of these societies are actively organising events and inviting external speakers to come and talk to students, most of them for free. This is free outreach you can do right now. I literally saw something go on my Facebook where Bloomberg are coming and talking about functional programming and finance.

That's amazing that students in Edinburgh want to hear about functional programming because they're indoctrinated by Philip Wadler on a daily basis and the company is coming and talking to 'em about that. That's going to be fantastic for Bloomberg. How fantastic for those students. And when it comes to a society, it's much more noticed because they are being led by students. As I said, students trust other students. If a student comes up to you and says, Hey, there's event going on, they're more likely to go to it and to trust the company that's running that event than they would if the lecturer came to them and did it. Let's not say that you should't reach out for lecturers, don't rely on actual primary means. And second thing saying I can see happen time and time again.

Remember that university isn't all year. Students like to slack off.

They do run out of the class. Thank you. There are term times, but it's very easy to find them. Although they're wildly inconsistent across university. All you need to do is Google University whatever term times, and you get the term times come up. Be mindful of that. Be mindful that every May or every April may, you are going to lose every single student to dissertation. Hands in.

Be mindful of January's exams. Make sure you don't do your student outreach around these key times for students. But also be mindful of the flip side. For example, every London, London, every summer in London, there's going to be a horde of incredibly talented students coming in for internships. So you can play on those things. You can strategize around those. So online, and this is again a reaction to saying I had recently, students are a bit odd if you do a student event and you tell 'em your name, expect a hoard of Facebook requests. Students don't do LinkedIn, they don't do Twitter, they do Facebook.

And it's a total pain because I don't know if you've ever tried to manage messaging through Facebook, the search is or for you will lose contact, you'll lose track of conversations. Do you know why that is? I have no idea. I have no idea.

Anymore, so we didn't. And then groups happened. Yeah, it's absolute madness. I'm having talk about, I have nine kids,

Audience member: It's totally messed up the Facebook ads.

Joe Nash: It absolutely is. I get advertisements for wrestling. This came up recently. So Tim, me Smith, my manager, very, very German, gave a keynote, a hack on eu, very reserved, very German immediately gets 90 Facebook requests. He like always going on, I can't do with this. So my advice for that would be to use the privacy features of Facebook, do separate people into lists, make a list for your student engagement and restrict what they can see. Obviously they don't need to be seeing pictures of your kids. That's just weird.

Or you can create a separate account. Again, that's very easy and we talk about online. There's some really interesting things you should know about. So first of all, there's a group would hack on Hackers. So first bit warning, it is Assessible. It is, it's true, it is the new four chat. It's absolutely horrible. But it has 18,750 technical students.

And the really nice thing about Hack on Atkins, although this particular group is assessible, is that this spawn a whole new movement. If you search hh and then anything else, there will be a hackathon, hacker subgroup created to discuss that thing. For example, hackathon Hackers, Europe, non assessable, lovely place. Everyone's happy in hackathon hackers Europe. We've had one argument and after about four comments, everyone apologised and went about their day. Fantastic. It was very European and this is still pretty big. You should be active on these groups.

You can post events. We have some rules about not being scummy, but other than that, it's all okay. And this is the best place to AE students. And there are, for example, there is HH job listings, there is hh, sweat equity. If you're looking for someone to do some work for free, there is all kinds of subgroups that you can find to cleanly evangelise things in a way that they're not going to judge you for.

Obviously if you go to main HH and post about your job, they're going to be mad. Find the right group and that will exist. There is one for every programme language, there's one for everything. Find that group and find a decent, you have an instant made platform to evangelise on. It's fantastic. So events again, I'm sorry, I'm probably go run a bit now. So there's some really interesting things about events. The first concern I've had about people doing student events is that you're worried you're a bit old, do not worry, it's fine.

You can go to student events. They absolutely love interacting with old, weird people.

I've noticed you stopped going, I know your fears, you're fine. We love you. So you can go to student events and they absolutely love that. They love anyone of expertise. They're not going to look down on you because you're not young and hip. It's absolutely fine. And remember that the last spoken about hackathons, it's not just hackathons, especially when you get to this level of societies. There's all kinds of events going on.

There's a conference, student conference in Nottingham next week. There was a security exercise in Glasgow where they basically did pretended they were nation and they were under attack. It was absolutely fantastic. All this crazy stuff is going on and you can find out about it just by talking to students. So one of the first things you'll notice if you go to Hack on Hackers, EU is one of the top posts right now is basically someone asking people to post all of the Facebook groups for their societies.

So straight away you've got a on there where you can go and interact with almost every active group of students in the country and you can ask 'em what events they're doing and how you can get involved. Absolutely fantastic. But when you go to these events, as I point out, capital One, don't just do the product thing. Don't just do the a p thing. Be fun. One of the most successful things me and Ano ever did a student events was to play a game of werewolf. Gave Matthew. We've had this requested at every single event since, and I now spend my entire life talking about putting villages to sleep and who'd been killed by the wealth.

But students absolutely love it and they love Braintree doing it.

Audience member: Is that why the beard?

Joe Nash: Beard is pre that? Maybe you're going to regret that because the other thing students tree like to do is engage in city waste. So as well, setting the Braintree challenge, I always set a challenge for misusing christiano's face. And again, students always engage faces in there too. Yes, I'm eaten by Christiana in this one. Students always engage with this. And we've had some really interesting incidences where students have engaged with us because of this stupid challenge. Literally take a picture of Christiano and Photoshop it on something they've engaged with us and then they've ended up using Braintree because they've spoken to us because they know when I know we can ask us for help when they come to actually integrate the API.

And this has led on to further more useful things.

Audience member: Just want to clarify. I don't mind that. It just always confuses me why people think it's my API and therefore I have a p. I'm the one who understands what the challenge is. Can we just embrace

Joe Nash: It? Yeah, just embrace it. And the final thing, and this is again a point that were brought up to me, communication with students. They're going to assume you're superheroes. When I walked into this King's event yesterday, brand of mine that I go to King's a lot and they will know me. I heard well, I got told by one of the other students that a guide partner and said, how did you get Joe Nash? They're going to think you are God and they're going to send you weirdly formal emails get used to that. They'll be fine.

Just kind of late that you're chill and you have a much better relationship. You're not a business penguin. And I'm done. Sorry Matt. Final quote, this is for their post thing. If you sponsor student hackathons, you will see a payoff. If you sponsor student events, you will see a payoff even if you have done it before. As I've said, don't run away, do this reinforcement.

If you've done it before and you do it again, you'll continue to see an increased payoff. Thank you very much. Thank.