Music Applause Kia ora! My mountain is Table Mountain, which rises out of the sea where the Atlantic and Indian oceans meet. My name is Spencer Horn. I'm from Cape Town, South Africa. I was born and raised there by a single mom in modest circumstances, but through her sacrifices and a great deal of luck, I was afforded educational opportunities that would allow me to escape what one might call postal code determinism. Growing up in South Africa in a deeply divided society, I was always fascinated by the structural drivers behind inequity and poverty and became passionate about addressing those at their root. And it was the sensitization to structural inequality that I carried with me along my path which took me via engineering school in the US to East Africa in 2016, where I was working in a management consulting role and visiting markets across the country. And I became in my travels right across Kenya and into Uganda, sometimes off of the beaten path, keenly aware of a problem that I'd known about and acknowledged but never truly understood. And that was just how bad transportation infrastructure can be in many places and how it acts as a structural barrier to development in those places. And it turns out this is not a local problem. There are more than a billion people in the world today who have no direct access to paved roads and runways. Their lives are fundamentally different from our own. They live in remote regions, they live in island nations and in disaster-stricken areas, sometimes disasters that have been going for decades. What struck me most about being there and finally being able to empathize with the problem in an authentic way was that I wasn't convinced we'd really been working on solving it. It's been known for a very long time. We've had this issue for decades in many developing communities across the world. But what are we truly doing towards addressing that? And this is where I became very, very interested in work that was being done with UAVs in drone delivery and looking at their application to reach marginalized communities. But they have a couple of issues, but one of the big issues faced in drone delivery today is the payload that can be carried and how far it can be carried. Just what can we get out to people? And it all hinges on battery efficiency. So I started thinking about this problem and how we might overcome it. And I wondered, might we use helium balloons to do the heavy lifting? So now our lift energy is free and we can carry a great deal more. We can carry more batteries and we can get further. So could we use autonomous airships to reach these marginalized communities? Some of you know airships as blimps and I've got a picture of one here. This is a lot bigger than the current target that cloud line is looking at. But as you can see, it isn't made of cow intestines like the zeppelons were. So we've had a couple of modern advances. But really the big enabler is the cheap technology that is coming out of the UAV world that allows us to navigate and propel these devices in a precise way today in a way that could not be done before and to do them at a much smaller scale than could have been done before. But most important to me to take away from my work on this project so far is the fact that although the humanitarian use cases are the most pressing and the most promising in terms of an initial business case. People in these communities are not just a charity case, they are very real markets. There are a billion people out there that represent a very real market that want the consumer goods that we have every day and don't want to pay double the price just because they don't live in a city the way we do. I'll be hosting a breakout session this afternoon for those of you who want to chat a little bit more and find out more detail. Thank you very much.