Quick comment on PPP

hey everybody it's been a interesting news day from Kanye going to something else I've noticed something that came out of coiny desk it was an interesting piece of journalism Inge basically this SBA published some details on PPP recipients and somebody a journalist for coin desh decided to go and take a look at our our ecosystem and see who in our ecosystem received a PPP loan so consensus got between five to ten million and Beatrix cuts of money poly chain capital got some and so forth and of course I which K USA LLC did receive a PPP loan so our CFO and I we had a discussion about this when the program first came out and I said well do we qualify what does it mean for us and he said I think we do let's talk to them about that he had a discussion with Bank America who was a lender and they said sure you guys definitely qualify the point of this program is that when you shut down the entire United States economy businesses of no fault of their own suffer catastrophic either primary or secondary consequences so in the case of restaurants or people in the music business the service industry those are primary consequences because they literally cannot operate they've been shut down firms like IO global we suffer secondary consequences because the perception is that we're entering into a depression all the people that are b2b services arm would normally sell to get very conservative with deal flow so they do two things they first slow down anything that they have in the pipe just an anticipation that things are going to look so good and their own balance sheets are gonna not look so good so they don't want discretionary outflow and then they cancel all new deals and the problem with our industry when you talk about block chaining something you say something we're gonna blockchain supply chain we're going to blockchain medical records or whatever it might be that is not an urgent expense there's not a gun being held to a decision-makers head saying you have to upgrade your medical records today and if you don't do that the sky is gonna fall that's more of a where should we invest money in the next 24 36 48 months to be competitive on a global basis and within our own local market and because of that it's very easy for those decision makers to make a decision to just simply stop spending money so anybody in that secondary category and those can be service providers SAS software infrastructure providers like IO global for example we definitely do see that and we have seen numerous deals be stretched out or suspended as a consequence of the coming global depression of covin the point of PPP is to ensure that firms like us have the capability then to be able to service our existing payroll and continue as existing plans so that it will minimize the economic disruption I was not a fan of this and I've been a big opponent of massive do my employees and as a consequence I have two options option a is to stand on principle and say oh well that's a bad program so we won't participate accepting that all my competitors such as consensus which received somewhere between 5 to 10 million dollars we received an order of magnitude less we'll get that money and then be able to use that money from the federal government to compete with us or I can do option B which is say well we pay a lot of money in taxes every year and we're hiring Americans so let's just take the PPP the insinuation of the article is that somehow we as an industry don't deserve that but I will remind people that the vast majority of the money that's being doled out for the PPP it's going to a syndication of organizations that while they appear small somehow are connected to larger entities and these funds almost certainly percolate their way up and somehow someway will be contributed stock buybacks or distributions or other such things and at the end of the day it will not meaningfully maintain full employment and we've already seen that with the huge spike of unemployment in the United States so it's a bad program but it's a program that does exist and as a CEO I have to make a decision whether to indulge that program or to ignore it if I ignore it my competitors take advantage of it and they get your tax dollars to compete with me some of you probably won't be okay with that and so in the interest of fairness at least we get to play with that and what all that money is completely reinvested into the US economy why because we hire people we hire Americans and we donate to American universities we have American real estate and that basically allows us to re-enter the economy this office here in Longmont I pay rent every month we didn't close it that landlord doesn't have to worry about us not being able to pay every month etc etc this is what always happens with these programs in the moral hazard of these programs is that everybody thinks it's a good idea up front but then when they actually see the programs be executed and understand the business reality the moral hazards and the competitive dynamics that come from it then they start complaining well why did this firm get it that industry seems to be doing okay but well this industry is not doing okay so they should have more help how about we just not do that altogether how about we don't do these things I hate the fact that we live in this environment as much as the people in Major League Baseball hated the fact that other people were taking steroids and they had to make a decision do we be a cheater when everyone else is cheating or do we compete honestly and what we do we lose and they win and so this is the unfortunate problem with bailout culture and what the United States has been living in for a long time at least on our side we know we can put the money to good use for example we've donated more than a half a million dollars to US university and intend on doing more of that and we employ many Americans and we continue to hire more Americans and we continue to Frink outside of the United States take money from the US money from that it was a bad idea to shut the US economy down I've made numerous videos about this throughout the years in months about bad bailout culture and this particularly with covet how devastating this is going to be and all of us are watching this slow-motion train wreck in the next six to nine months we are going to see a very very series of bad events happen and hard times happen lots of mortgage defaults lots of vacant commercial real estate because businesses are getting more conservative with their spending we're gonna see a lot of service providers go out of business and of course every time that happens it damages the economy even more it's a feedback loop that creates a lot of bad problems for all of us it would not surprise me to see the United States in the world enter a depression on the back of Kovan and several economists believe that I saw reports from JP Morgan Chase they're economists believe it will take somewhere between five to ten years for the world to recover from the economic damage caused by the coronavirus shutdowns this is the reality that every business lives with and as a CEO of a business my primary job is to make sure that my business is solvent and my employees maintain their jobs where and when possible we've never laid people off our competitors like consensus for example have and I don't intend on doing that so where and when I have an ability to play fair with my opponents I'm going to take that advantage without apology and I'm not going to be shamed by a journalist into saying oh so sorry this is the environment we live in and we will do what we need to do to make sure that this company can deliver on its vision and its mission and then I can maintain basically full employment and continue maintaining growth we continue to expand we continue to have a very bright outlook and believe our industries quite strong but I will remind you that in the BTB services and this is a very hard sector when things start falling apart it really is and you could have potentially billions of dollars worth of deals lined up and they can all evaporate or be postponed for two to three years which means that we as a company have to be prepared to maintain payroll for years if necessary while we wait for the economy to improve that is a burden on us and it's my job as CEO and make sure that that works and we can figure all that out and consensus has that same problem as do everybody else in our industry so PPP was a bad thing but it's reality and it's the law of the land just the tax policy is the law of the land you can certainly complain about it and that's the point of Elections and that's the point of the ballot box and that's the point of the democratic process to work our way through that but once the law of the land is said it's my job to play within the rules that have been set for my company and I will never apologize for that and I will never apologize for fighting for my employees and making sure that we're strong and we are strong much stronger than many of our competitors so I just figured I'd make that statement real quick because I see Stacey and a few other people commenting on it coin desk is obviously propagating it and it's a very unfair criticism frankly