 Good afternoon everyone. As many of you know I'm Megan Garcia, New America's Director of Growth in California. What you may not know is what setting up a new office in California really is about for us. My goal is to help us harness the innovation of Silicon Valley and apply that model to the institutional thinking that pervades Washington DC and the think tank community. It's important for all of us to look at innovation as more than just the next gadget or new technology advancement and see it more as a mindset. A set of principles that dictates our approach to change, to people, to sustaining brilliant thought, and to encouraging a level of risk-taking that allows for the best ideas and policy solutions to emerge. So how do we harness it? We do it by bringing the talent of California's world-class ecosystem of innovators and inventors together under one roof and we give them a simple yet powerful goal. How do we make the world a better place through technology and innovation? Then we connect those innovators with our policy experts so that they can bring their ideas to scale. And I'm excited to announce that working with local partners in the San Francisco Bay Area, we're testing models of how we might best operate in California with the possibility of opening a California hub later this year. And it is with that excitement I'd like to introduce someone who has taken the startup model and applied what she's learned to the World Policy Institute's Global Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Project. She's also the co-founder of Foreign Policy Interrupted and a writer who focuses on global innovations and entrepreneurship. Please join me in welcoming Elmira Bay-Rasli. The next Steve Jobs lives in Pakistan. Yes, Pakistan. He or she lives in Turkey, in Nigeria, in Mexico, in Russia, in India, in China. He or she lives in Detroit, in Cleveland, in Pittsburgh, and in my hometown, Brooklyn, New York. In fact, Steve Jobs has lived in these places for many years. The trouble and the challenge has been, how does he or she emerge? For decades, anyone with a dream or an idea or the desire to build something went west. They went to Silicon Valley. In Silicon Valley, you could experiment. In Silicon Valley, you could build a product or a service that no one had yet imagined. In Silicon Valley, you could innovate. In Silicon Valley, you could change the world. Indeed, Silicon Valley has become the capital, the mecca of innovation, of the cutting edge, of the next big thing. It's produced world-class companies, Intel, Facebook, Google, eBay, and Apple. These billion-dollar enterprises that people have now come to call unicorns. Silicon Valley made it rain, and it became the end of the rainbow. Many people around the world have been eager to replicate this rainbow, to replicate Silicon Valley's success. Sorry, just pause right there for a moment. Replicate Silicon Valley says, governments all over the world have been talking about entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship as the key to creating jobs, to generating revenue, to attracting investments. They've implemented programs and policies that are encouraging people to launch startups, to have people take their ideas and roll them out. Universities are now teaching entrepreneurship. They're launching incubators and accelerators that are investing in ideas and helping nurturing the individuals behind them. The private sector is building funds that are investing in these startups. Communities all over the place, you hear about them. They're launching demo days and entrepreneurial fairs where men and women can come and present their ideas. Indeed, everybody wants to be the next Silicon Valley. Some have even come to say that they are the next Silicon Valley. I think we hear about it all the time. We hear about how Chattanooga, Tel Aviv, Istanbul might be the next Silicon Valley. Some have taken the Silicon name and applied it to themselves. In the Middle East, we hear about Silicon Wadi. In South Africa, we hear about Silicon Cape. In France, there's Silicon Sien. And in China, there is Silicon Dragon. For the past 10 years, I've traveled to over two dozen countries, looking to see how and if these places are becoming the next Silicon Valley. How are they doing it? What I found surprised me. And it wasn't about whether these places are becoming the next Silicon Valley. It's what I found out about what Silicon Valley was itself. Many of us assume that Silicon Valley is about technology. It's full of engineers. It's full of these techies. And they're producing transistors, microchips, software, and all the gadgets that we're using today. The iPhone, the iPad, and soon the IWatch. What I found, and everybody's been trying to replicate this and looking for that, what is that special thing about Silicon Valley? What I actually found is that there's actually nothing special about what Silicon Valley is doing. The secret to Silicon Valley has been in its ability to take this concept of creative destruction, a term coined by Joseph Schumpeter, an economist, and destroy old business models and business approaches. It's the ability of Silicon Valley to shatter the status quo and to overcome obstacles. That has been what has made Silicon Valley its success. And they've approached it through openness, through transparency, by building trust. Silicon Valley ultimately is about community. And community is what Monus Rahman is building in Pakistan. Monus Rahman is a Pakistani entrepreneur who got an engineering degree in Madison, Wisconsin. He then got a job at Intel, working on microprocessing chips. It was his dream job. He loved being in that Silicon Valley world with all of the technology. He got an advanced degree from Stanford University. 10 years ago, he decided he was going to go back to Pakistan, not to replicate Silicon Valley, but to take the technology that he had and to do something in Pakistan that nobody thought could be possible. The internet, Jared Cohen and Eric Schmidt wrote in The New Digital Age is an omnipresent and multifaceted outlet for energy and expression. And he wanted to take that energy and expression and apply it to Pakistan so that Pakistanis could come together to build networks, to come together as a community. And that's something that's very difficult in Pakistan. Pakistan has many challenges. One of them is that there are very few public spaces for men and women to come together. The public spaces that they do have are the mosque, military barracks, and the cricket field. The other challenge that Pakistan has is that the country is split along geographic, ethnic, and tribal lines. There are four ethnic groups in Pakistan, and all of them are isolated in mountainous and rugged terrain that further impedes them by very poor infrastructure. These regions are led by strongmen, some by warlords. And it makes it very difficult for anyone to take an idea and to launch a business, let alone to scale it up. And so what Moniz did is what anyone would do, he went back to Pakistan and launched a dating website. He launched nasib.com in 2007 so that Pakistanis but Muslims all over the world can connect and to build friendships. And who knows, maybe even marry. It became so successful that he then launched his second enterprise, RosyPK. RosyPK is a job search website that he launched because he needed more engineers and technicians to help run nasib.com. Today, RosyPK is actually the biggest money generator for Moniz. But what these two platforms have done is that it served as a model for other Pakistanis to launch startups. When I visited the country in 2011, I found that Pakistan actually did have a very vibrant startup scene. There were many people launching technology companies. But when I asked Moniz, is this gonna turn into the next Silicon Valley? He had his doubts. He said the internet allows people to get information and to share and allows them to come together. But that is not what is going to change Pakistan. What will change Pakistan is the ability for people and the government to come together to collaborate and solve Pakistan's many problems. Indeed, what he said, what will change other places is not technology, it's the human experience, the inability to create a community. And we see that here in the United States with our own entrepreneurs. A number of e-commerce websites that launched a few years ago, Warby Parker and Bonobos, which is a men's retailer, both started out as e-commerce websites. And yet a few years ago, they both opened up showrooms. David Gilboa, who's the CEO of Warby Parker, the eyeglass maker, said that they did that because people still want a tangible human experience. They want connection. It's the ability to connect and collaborate that is the fundamental basis of any society. And it has actually been the key ingredient that has made Silicon Valley successful. People talk about the entrepreneur in the garage, you know, creating something, being alone. That's actually not true. When you look at what happened in Silicon Valley, it's the ability of people to come together and openly exchange ideas, to collaborate with one another, to easily get around, to work with the venture capitalists, to work with the engineers. But a place where people from all over the world eagerly wanted to come together. And it is that, not the individual or the technology that where the next Silicon Valley will rise, the next Silicon Valley will come where there is the next community. Thank you.