How much viewership do you normally get?

Quite a bit of viewership. We have a dedicated YouTube channel. People who want to lobby me, for example, they often choose the video format. In that sense, they’re also lobbying to everyone who view the channel.

I see. They come in specifically to lobby you. It gets them free airtime…

Exactly. It’s a YouTuber dynamic.

Interesting. Your department is the only department that’s adopted that?

Quite a few, what we call, collaborative meetings. I was just at a yearly talk by our youth development agency, an administration with the Ministry of Education. They have been pioneering this open-government deliberative democracy work for a decade or so.

In a sense, I’m continuing their practice. It is true that prior to me entering the cabinet, this was for specific like the youth-initiated forums, like the multi-stakeholder consultations.

When it comes to digital economy, that was pioneered by Jaclyn Tsai, the previous occupant of the office before I came in, and so on. I’m the first one who said, “As a matter of principle, all the journalist and lobbyist visits are to be on the record.”

That’s great. You’ve seen some of the other departments have adopted partially, but nobody’s gone as far as you have…

Nobody gone as far as this, because my mandate is open government. That’s one of my mandates. In a sense, I’m the pilot, and they take a comfortable level. [laughs]

You can gauge the interest by how many ministries send their secondments to my office. For example, the Foreign Service had sent a lot of people on a rotating basis, because they want to learn that public diplomacy, Twitter diplomacy, and things like that.

That makes sense.

The Ministry of Defense had never sent anyone. I wonder why? [laughs]

That was going to be my question about it is we think about transparency a lot in business. Always, you’re running across these decisions, or HR-related things, or security-related matters. I can only imagine it’s worse in government. How do you get around that? You’re being so transparent, is it?

We’re not livestreaming anything.

You do have the ability to go and…

Right. Even for the YouTube posts, we do that only after the review of all the stakeholders involved. We very rarely livestream. Because of that, this is mostly making the transparency the default. You have to spend a minute or two.

You have to opt-out of it.

Exactly.

That makes sense. Thank you for explaining that. It was hard to understand. I read the Wiki on the process. I appreciate the invitation to come in following the APEC Summit. I’m not on the sales side, so I’m not here to pitch any specific collab. I don’t know. Did you check out any of the material from the APEC Summit?

I did a little bit.

We do two things here in Taiwan. One is the sales side is delivering to try and equalize the big company and little company stuff. We’re always looking for a way to reach out and hit the small to medium size. If there’s any ideas there, I’m open to that.

The other thing is I’ve been trying to develop the coworking model between the US and Taiwan technical resources for a long time. I was curious if you had any insights for me, or potential areas of cooperation with any group here on how to get the two working cultures more comfortable working with each other. Go ahead.

Which time zones? The East or the West Coast…?

It’s all over the place because the time zones are flexible. It’s mostly West Coast.

What it is for me is I’ve had a lot of success in traditional infrastructure work here. We use a JDM model. We practically borrow the teams here. We obviously leverage the factories here. That model has been working, but that’s been Taiwan’s model for – what? – 20, 30, [laughs] 40 years.

Maybe before I was born.

Exactly. I’m taking advantage of that. Coming here for the last 15 years, what I’ve consistently heard is this drive to port Taiwan to more of an information economy. It’s like a wave, it rises and falls, and rises and falls.

I’ve seen it get hitched several times on this idea that US companies are hesitant to use Taiwanese engineering talent, especially the software talent, because of the stigma of offshoring. Even though it’s not an offshoring engine here, people think of it as being all or nothing. You either have a TVC or you have an American center rather than a meshed collaboration.

Even worse than that, I’ve been working with small startups here. The talent pool here is quite small by numericals. They’re very hesitant to try and pull in remote talent.

Pandemic has given everybody a good chance to not care where people are, and start to…I’ll call it onboard Western talent or onboard US talent into a Taiwanese venture, but I can’t seem to get traction for that idea. I’m curious if you have any ideas how I can better evangelize that, or better try and make that connection between the two talent pools.

To check my understanding, you’re saying that to attract international talent with a based-in-Taiwan engineering team? Is that the scenario?

I’m doing two things. One is, personally, it’s bringing members of the Taiwan engineering community into Cisco, or into some of the others I’m working.

That’s working OK, but I’m trying to encourage people who are starting small businesses here, or who are doing the startups here. A lot of the business leaders that I work with in manufacturing are funding these little startups. I’m trying to figure out how to encourage them to look outside this ecosystem for talent.

I think that’s the accelerator that they need to get fully off the ground as a community of startups. It’s the community so small here on its own, it has to learn how to leverage outside.

Of course. For your first half question of getting the message out to small and medium enterprise who want to shift to hybrid work or remote work, or to use cloud-based solutions, and so on, we have a platform for that.

It’s called the T-Cloud or [Mandarin] where we…During the pandemic, we pay up to 80 percent…actually, a flat 80 percent for all small and medium enterprises who want to try out cloud-based solutions. The state absorbs 80 percent of cost.

That nearly doubled the adoption of the, for example, point of service or customer success systems, and so on, of the micro-enterprises like the night markets, and so on. It almost doubled their adoption.

That’s T-Cloud, you said?

T-Cloud or [Mandarin] .

Is there a process to getting qualified and list data as a cloud service there?

There is. Now, we’re back to subsidize 50 percent, because the interest is high enough. [laughs] We don’t have to [laughs] push the 80 percent thing. For T-Cloud, this is the first step. Nowadays, the MSMEs – micro and small, medium enterprises – are also thinking about beyond just this hybrid work thing.

For example, they also need to do carbon accounting. They also need to, across their whole supply chain, account the greenhouse impacts and all carbon-related things like climate action. For that, they can also leverage the T-Cloud infrastructure to buy into the carbon accounting.

Is that a new set of local requirements, the carbon accounting?

That is correct. For the largest publicly-listed companies, they are now under the pressure from the Financial Supervisory Council to do carbon accounting to work.

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.

Is there a tiered set of rules?

Yes.

Thank goodness.

Of course. [laughs]

I know in the US, or because of some of the new EU regulations in that area, the rules are the same for small enterprises as they are for large. I’m seeing a lot of not the very smallest – because the very smallest ignore it for a while – but that Series C transition when they suddenly realize the weight of regulation.

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.

Is it harmonized with the EU regs or the REA?

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 a 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.

If you include foreign remote work in your thing, how do you account for that in the Taiwan net zero?

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.

Out of curiosity, and this is a bit of an aside, are you doing the same thing around harmonizing around international labor statutes as well? Do you know?

You mean teleworking labor statutes? [laughs]

No.

It’s difficult.

Manufacturing labor statutes.

Manufacturing?

One of the things we run across all the time is with the Responsible Business Alliance, which is based on the Euro regs, and the Taiwan local regulations are out of sync. As we try to bring our local partners online, we’re consistently running afoul of what compliant…

I’m compliant with local law. I’m not compliant with what are currently voluntary regulations, but are on track to become required regulations. It’s often put Taiwan at a disadvantage versus China or Southeast Asia where they have harmonized their labor laws.

Some of the same agencies have the net zero or the green recommendations. It sounds like you’re harmonized with those. I was curious if you knew if there was any other effort to try and harmonize on the labor side as well.

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.

Thank you. Go ahead.

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.

There’s some advantage they’re getting like how Delaware companies are so popular in the United States.

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.

I have heard that things like options were particularly difficult…

Exactly. It’s very difficult to make.

…which made it hard. Is that changing?

That’s already changed.

As a teleworker, I’m curious. Did you see folks in the US start to telework in the other direction with Taiwanese concerns?

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 in into the operation.

For people who did not have this Taiwanese connection before, I don’t think that’s a natural choice.

I found out about the Gold Card program myself. It’s pretty exciting. Our local team, it started with these two. Over the pandemic, we’ve gone now probably from 3 to close to 25 pretty soon. It works pretty well.

The model, like I said, a lot of the times, you get this idea that you’re going to do a Taiwan design center. You’re going to be wholly focused on Taiwan. That’s not our model, and it’s working pretty well to have a fully-embedded mix. Time zone obviously becomes a problem, but you get enough blend on both ends that it works [indecipherable 16:33] .

If it’s West Coast, it’s not too bad.

East Coast gets hard.

I know.

Europe gets even worse, right?

[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]

I’ve been trying to figure, too. This is my first time back in Taiwan in about three years. It’s the first time since expanding scope significantly, and I have this exact problem. I have a daytime, and then starting from midnight, if I don’t put restrictions on it, I’m useless in those meetings.

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.

What does that look like? In the past, the PowerPoint was made on one time zone. Then you shoot it over before you went to sleep. Then it turned into active Google Doc things. What do those artifacts look like now?

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 a 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.

It’s an agile cell structure. If you want to drive it at a higher strategy level, you can use something like OKRs, or something like that…

Exactly.

That makes sense. How do you map it on anything with a waterfall? That’s always been our challenge. Agile development works great for software.

That’s right.

Agile development applied to hardware is goofy, but it works. Then, you want to do things like factory rollouts, and stuff like that. Those are very waterfall. How do you map the same thing? Do you apply a structure, and then put multiple sprints underneath the waterfall?

Something like that.

Something like that? OK.

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.

Interesting. Cool.

Any questions out of the APEC material? Any questions about Cisco Meraki? I’m not sure how much context I’m actually bringing with this.

I’ve read the material. It’s quite interesting. Any of your colleagues want to chime in maybe?

What do you guys think? What’s working well about the coworking model? I know we’ve been having a hard time bringing people in. What do you think?

The onboarding experience, during the pandemic, it’s all about this tele-experience.

Onboarding experience?

Yeah.

Onboarding experience, when we onboard, we were before the pandemic hit, we [indecipherable 21:07] to the headquarter in San Francisco. We met specially. We were like already cooperated on relationship with our company before, but we were not the employee. We’re familiar with each other.

We did our onboarding there. We already know the teams and contact window there. Then we back to Taiwan, and like what we just said, we do the remote working here between the headquarter team and the GDM teams here. That’s how we did for onboarding before.

Now, the onboarding with the employees after us, they did onboarding here remotely with the online materials.

It’s strictly online? They can spend seven days a week in their home? Are you fully teleworking?

You can if you want.

Oh, really?

Yeah, it depends. We also have some senior employers here doing the mentorship here with the new coming employees to guide them. We still have some portion of the people have been flew to the headquarter and has seen the [indecipherable 22:40] there. We can do the mentorship here and buddy-buddy…

It’s like we have the first class of [indecipherable 22:49] early, who are training the next class. We’re only going second-generation onboarding now. How is that going? [indecipherable 22:59] , what do you think? Are the newest employees getting decent onboard experience?

You’re on the second generation is what you’re saying.

Yeah. What are you doing?

I’m doing a buddy training [indecipherable 23:16] for a new hire of our compliance team. I know her before. We have a call maybe every week. She has training courses every morning since the beginning of her first day. The first day is about computer set up because they will need to know about computers, so on and so forth. It lasts for two weeks.

Then I will schedule a meeting with them online and also meet up with them to teach them, share the information with them about how we file our expenses and plus the Meraki organization structure [indecipherable 24:01] , just experience sharing.

For that, do you invite them to your local office or you do it purely online?

I invite them to our office. We just [indecipherable 24:14] .

I see.

Also because this girl that I’m buddy with, she live very close to me. I’m going to invite her for a drink out in my neighborhood. [laughs]

That’s very organic, very organic. [laughs]

Yeah, very flexible. At Meraki, they give us flexibility to do things that we think is right. Our bosses, they won’t limit us to do anything we want, as long as it’s reasonable.

Just be an adult, right?

Yeah.

You’d be surprised how long that works or how well that works. I think part of the challenge we’re seeing is so then you can see there’s this pattern. We know somebody a little bit, and we bring them on, very self-limiting right now.

We’ve had couple of early complete rando hires, and at a much lower hit rate. Maybe a 50 percent success rate with the remote onboard.

We’re struggling as we want to go more junior down the talent tree. Right now, we’re cherry-picking people who are mid-career and know the functionality, but we’d really like to kick off the same kind of entry level or university-type program here to ramp people into the role.

What we’ve been doing, selfishly, is we’ve been suggesting junior talent to our partners, letting our partners go through the ramping phase.

Ah. [laughs]

Then brain-draining a little bit

Uh-huh.

They’ve caught on. You would say they’ve caught on, right?

Yeah.

They’ve caught on to it. That’s one of the goals for the next year is to figure out that early pipeline or that outsiders’ pipeline.

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 a 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.

Yeah.

We organized another program, the 3T, the T ambassador program, where it’s a little bit like what you said. The onramping part is two weeks or three weeks. It’s in a professional training center, led by people who have done digital transformation in their respective industry, in a team of five.

Five young people as ambassador from the digital world to the analog gets intensive training on design thinking and things like that. Then, they’re sent on a mission that is chosen by the local either businesses or nonprofits, social enterprises, or are really manufacturing, and so on.

The pain point is already identified. They’re not sending one by one. They’re sending on a team of five.

A small team. It’s like a social problem incubator.

Exactly, and led by someone who’ve done digital transformation before. It led to much less stress because this young person is not alone in bringing a culture in. There’s five like them.

Where do you find the experienced volunteers that lead those little groups or who do that kind of training? Is there an opportunity for some experienced engineers to volunteer…?

Yes, definitely. If you check the 3T website, there’s a process of saying that you make yourself a resource to mentor five young people for I think it’s six months, so it’s a lot of commitment. Then, the young people, of course, get compensated if they finish the six months. It’s like a training course. It also is good for their portfolio, and so on.

They apply directly, or they’re sponsored into it by a company? How does it…?

They apply directly. Then, during those two weeks of initial boot camp, the mentors take on a competitive singing contest style.

Take the team members that they’re comfortable mentoring with. Also, because we want to make sure those five people complement each other in terms of their skill set and peer personality, and so on. There’s some curation going on during those first weeks.

That’s interesting. We should definitely look into that. [indecipherable 29:20] , you got that? You captured that 3T…?

Yes.

It’s called T-dash…

T-dash? Then, you got the T-Cloud comment from earlier about the sales offering and the sales team too?

Yeah, cool.

That’s good. My main question today is how can we get more involved?

These are some great things. Is there anything else you would think of either from a pure corporation standpoint or a personal standpoint to open up areas for involvement? Either with my senior engineering staff here, or especially if there’s any opportunity for some of my foreign engineering leaders. They’re here a lot.

We were on a tour…We did run a very travel-intensive model. Obviously, that got shaken up over the last two, three years. It’s not that I think they need to be here to get work done. That if they’re not working with the local team, or especially with the partners, they’re going to lose the cultural connection.

Part of driving them to do that is not just the work. It’s giving them a chance to hit some sort of cultural touchstone, and provide some value back. Any ideas on how I can get…? We’re talking junior director, director-level engineering folks. Is there a place for them to try and connect into the broader ecosystem here?

There is. The government website in Taiwan are something that gov.tw. If you change the o to a zero, you get into the shadow government of gov-zero.

Gov-zero is a lot of including foreign, but also multinational/transnational digital nomads in the gov-zero community. G0v, the equivalent in the US would be Code for America and/or the US Digital Service, the Presidential Innovation Fellows, and so on.

Gov-zero is a bridge that connects the people who want to do something to improve, for example, how masks are rationed, how rapid tests are done, how vaccination is to be found, and so on, during the pandemic, of course.

Also, if they feel passionate, for example, about education, education technology, or they feel passionate about air pollution and visualizing air pollution, anything that’s in the public service, there’s a counterpart in the civic realm working on it.

The gov-zero folks gather physically every couple of months. Every week, literally, there are people working on, for example, fact-checking disinformation together, working out the trending dashboard of the rumors online and looking at it together, and so on.

Is there a marketplace of projects going on there in the gov-zero?

Marketplace of what?

A marketplace of projects to get involved with…?

Yes. There’s a huge Slack channel, tens of thousands of people. It’s very foreigner-friendly. A lot of people who contribute meaningfully doesn’t even speak Mandarin. That’s one of the good communities.

If you’re an engineer or designer, project manager, you can go to a couple of the hackathons. Then, you start identifying with the local civic tech scene. That, of course, a lot of people who participate in it is in quite senior position in the local like MediaTek or Trend Micro, or even TSMC. You get those connections quite naturally.

That’s great. That’s so nice. Thank you, that’s a good suggestion. I’ve read about the gov-zero, but I have to admit, I didn’t understand exactly what you were trying to do with it.

It’s been a decade, so it’s a pretty vibrant community.

Awesome. Thank you. That’s what I came to ask about.

Cool.

I appreciate your time. I brought you some T-shirts.

Wow. Thank you.

It was Pride Month in the US.

Swag. [laughs]

I sponsor our Pride ERO, so there’s three different ones in there.

Wow.

You’ve got three sizes.

It’s a little bit small for me. [laughs]

Exactly.

There’s a large one there?

There should be a large in the bottom.

Excellent. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you for your time.

Cheers.

We appreciate it.

Interesting.

Can we have a request?

Request?

A request?

Can we do a selfie?

Can we get a picture?

Of course. You can get several.