BUILDING GLOBAL CONNECTIONS | Greg Hilton

¡Hola! You know, it's a big world out there. We have incredible opportunities. So now I'm much more locally focused, but I would challenge all of you in this room to consider that your company, whether you know it or not, is already globally connected. So I run SoCo. We're a hyper-local, you know, shared workspace cooperative work community. Member-based model. But you know what, right? Our coffee, you know, is, uh, is, uh, you know, it's grown in Central America. It is locally roasted in Lexington. Uh, our software that— some of the software that we use, it was designed and built and serviced in by a German company. Uh, made with love in Berlin. That's their tagline, which I freaking love. We need a tagline for that for the city here. Uh, right, our materials come from all over the world, the things that our members consume on a regular basis. So we are a very local company, uh, but we are connected to the global economy. So there's that side of the equation. I want to really challenge y'all, if you are not already thinking about it this way, think about your company from a global perspective and in a global context. Because whether you're selling internationally or not, you are impacted by the global economy every single day of your lives. And I think the last couple of years have proven that. And so the first kind of series that we want to talk about are some of the mega trends happening in the world. We're going to throw some out here: AI, the silver tsunami has been called it, virtual reality, crypto and blockchain, healthcare innovation, climate change, supply chain, and global workforce. These are things that are happening, and this is the nature of the beast, right? We are all linked, whether we want to be or not, whether there's a border or not, we are all linked by this global—