 Aloha. Thank you for joining us today for SBA America. Well actually, we're looking at SBA Hawaii. I'm Jane Sawyer. I'm the district director for the U.S. Small Business Administration here in the Hawaii Pacific region. We're here to talk to you today about small businesses and what they're doing in Hawaii and why they have such a big impact on our island state. I'm happy to be here. Talk about this with some of the small businesses that SBA has been affiliated with over the years, how we've watched them grow, how they've done it, and they're going to share some of their experiences with you. SBA is a U.S. federal organization and independently funded and we help businesses start, grow, prosper. That's our mission and we do that by providing capital, creating a better ecosystem for small businesses to thrive and also helping them with contractors, contracting with the federal government, and consulting, training, and technical assistance. We're going to talk today with Tariq Sultan of Sultan Ventures who has been affiliated with the SBA and does a lot of great work here in Hawaii with small businesses. We're interested. Welcome. We're glad to see you today. It's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me. I think we'll really just like to hear a little bit about your business, about you, how you got started in this and where your kind of entrepreneurial adventure really started. Sure. So my name is Tariq Sultan, founding partner of Sultan Ventures. We're a boutique venture firm located here and headquartered here in Hawaii. We work with and invest in startups, primarily in Hawaii, but we work with startups and national entities nationally. Under Sultan Ventures, we say we're a boutique venture firm, but really we're more than that. We're a community startup community ecosystem builders. And so we take a holistic approach to working with the community. So it's not just about investing capital, but it's about investing time, energy, resources, mentorship, et cetera, et cetera. You mentioned you're a co-founder. Tell us a little bit about that. How did you get started? So originally Sultan Ventures was founded by myself, my brother and my sister. We had a diverse set of backgrounds. So sister is an MD, PhD. My brother had a finance undergrad, a decade of IT experience. I was pre-med undergrad when I got my MBA. So between the three of us, we kind of can tackle a lot of different sectors. Sister, like I said, I'm the PhD, so she's a practicing physician now and actually just started her own OBGYN clinic. The day-to-day operations of Sultan Ventures fall more on Omar, my brother and partner in Sultan Ventures as well as Accelerate UH. So you have a very entrepreneurial family. Where do you think that came from? Well, often we hear about people who really have no inclination at all to start a business or want to be entrepreneurial or just never think that they could do that. Where did you guys get that drive? So that's a great question. Originally, like I said, I was pre-med undergrad. The drive for me was about helping others, right? And I think you'll find that as a common answer from a lot of entrepreneurs. They want to do good and do well in the world. So that's kind of where our drive came from, was our individual and collective desire to help others, right? And so whether that's from a medical standpoint, so why my sister's an MD and a PhD, or why we founded Sultan Ventures was to help. We believe in a rising tide raises all ships type of mentality. That's kind of one of the pillars of Sultan Ventures, another pillar is education. So we definitely believe in that type of giving back to the community. And for at least me personally, I believe that the best way to do that is through entrepreneurship, right? You can literally change the world through your vision. I agree with that idea. Were you all in Hawaii, or did you pick Hawaii? Hawaii does have that giving culture, but not necessarily always entrepreneurial. Sure. So no, originally, like I said, none of us necessarily thought we'd go down this entrepreneur path. We moved to Hawaii for a plethora of different reasons. My sister was doing her residency program here at Kapiolani Hospital, and that was kind of the catalyst for the whole family to move out. What really kind of was the tipping point was going through the MBA program at Schuyler College of Business, while we were doing research at the med school for Hawaii. We started to realize how exciting it was to do, to work with entrepreneurial community. Omar had done a lot of work overseas, and even in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. So he had already had a taste of that entrepreneurship culture and that private equity venture capital type of experience, but it was out here in Hawaii that all of a sudden ignited that spark in me, at least. So there was that interest. Was it also recognizing that there's a gap here? Yeah. So there's a gap in not in that that there isn't enough capital, that there isn't enough talent. It's that everything was kind of in its own distinct silos and not connected, and that's where the gap was. So when we started Sultan Ventures, we actually acted as the bridge between a lot of investors and startups. And so it was kind of this pre-accelerator notion. People had kind of heard of incubators, but they weren't necessarily connecting to investors, for example. So we acted as that bridge between startups and investors. So initially we would work with startups, kind of fill in operational roles in management because there is a lack of population density here, not a lack of talent. So we'd work with those teams and help them raise financing. We'd also work with investors and provide diligence for a number of their opportunities, fill in operational goals in their deal flow, and then, of course, because we were working on both sides of the fence, we'd be the bridge between the two. So even when you started with Sultan Ventures, you had that accelerator concept in mind, accelerators. Maybe you can explain a little bit about the accelerator piece. Sure. So accelerators in general, they offer, they're a very distinct, they're more than just an incubator, right? A lot of people think about accelerators and incubators as interchangeable words. Incubators doesn't necessarily have a set timeline. Usually they're either a nonprofit or some type of economic development entity. Accelerators have set timelines with almost always an investment component associated with it. So you can have anywhere from like three to six month programs. There's pretty standard. The standard investment amount is around 20, 25,000. Maybe sometimes you'll see programs that are of 50 in exchange for equity, right? Incubators don't necessarily do that. So it's the very, very core goal of an accelerator is to either accelerate success or to accelerate failure, right? But either way, you want to leave knowing that you should continue working on this endeavor or not. So SBA as a federal agency started getting involved with accelerators in about 2014. So we were very, very pleased to represent Hawaii in that second round in 2015. We had three firms that got Accelerator Award Prizes and one of them was Accelerate UH, which is a newer effort that came out of Sultan Ventures partnering with UH. Would you like to talk about that a little bit? Absolutely. Super, super excited to get that. So with that award comes a $50,000 grant. But for us, the money was nice. But it was the validation and national recognition that we are doing amazing stuff here in Hawaii. And the fact that three different entities got it focused on three different sectors is amazing. And it's a real testament to the innovation that's occurring here in the state. I think people were probably across the country were a little bit surprised to see little Hawaii jump up with three awards. One in multimedia technologies, one for food innovation on Maui. But now you've been able to, how many cohorts or how many classes, courses, training sessions have you produced and can you tell us a little bit about some of your participants? Some of the successful businesses that might have come out of that. So for Accelerate UH specifically, like you said, it's a private public partnership between the University of Hawaii and Sultan Ventures. We've had four cohorts come through that program. And again, a testament to the innovation in Hawaii and especially at the University of Hawaii our cohort, we have over 20 companies so far that we've invested in. And there's not one sector that necessarily rises to the top because there's an incredible amount happening at the University. So we have clean tech, we have biotech, we have ag tech, ed tech, tech tech. I mean, we have a lot going on. And it's because of University of Hawaii is actually one of the top third in the nation in terms of innovation. And most people don't really realize that. Don't really get that. And it's just right in our backyard. And I think here at Think Tech and other programs you always think of that innovation or the technology sector. But technology can, as with the food accelerator on Maui, it can be in a number of different fields. So you've also been very, very interested in beyond incubation, innovation, acceleration is just in keeping current in information and what and how small businesses are working as well. So a couple of years ago, you enrolled in our emerging leaders program, which actually emerging leaders is SBA's kind of mini MBA program. And we run this program each year. We've had it I think for six years now. But we were really pleased when Tarek decided he wanted to see what we were doing, he wanted to participate, and he also wanted to improve his skills. And I have to say we were really pleased to be able to select you and have you in that class. And he not only shared great stories, he had a great sense of humor and really helped us elevate the whole class by sharing a lot of his experiences. Maybe you can speak a little bit to that class. Yeah, it was an honor being selected for that class. Another pillar of Sulta Ventures is this concept called Kaizen, continuous development, continuous delta over time. And so for me, the emerging leaders thing was two things. One, it was my own personal introspective analysis of how we're running Sulta Ventures. It's always good to do those periodic checkpoints and now analyze your own business. The second is Sulta Ventures is all-thing startups, especially in Hawaii. And so although there's the venture capital model for high-growth startups, that isn't the only thing that's important to us. We want to see how other small businesses are, what their struggles are here in Hawaii and how they're overcoming them, and is there any way we can help with them? 96% of all businesses in Hawaii are small businesses. And so there needs to be solutions for those businesses as well. So the emerging leaders program was doubly important to me because not only did I get to analyze my own company and have lessons learned from that introspective analysis, but also get to work with the greater Hawaii community as well. So in this class we select 15 students each year and they come from all different industries. So not only did we have the accelerator venture capitalist in the class, but he also was with food manufacturers. He was in there with government contractors, construction companies, healthcare businesses. So it kind of took him a little bit out of his element to really learn. But the participants in this class have to be in business for at least three years. They have to have at least one employee. They have to have a minimum of annual revenue from 400,000 each year, up to 5 million. It's a pretty big range. So we saw all different kinds of people in and businesses, industries in this class. And then you use your business and have to share what you're using in your technical processes and how you're doing your HR and things like that. We're all learning from each other. So it was kind of a big sharing piece with that. So what is your employee structure look like? I mean, through your work, you're definitely creating good-paying jobs here in Hawaii and encouraging people to get started. How about with your business itself? Yeah, so we have a team over the last couple of years. We kept doubling almost every quarter or so. So it went from... Fast growth? Yeah, it went from the two to three of us to three or four of us to four to six of us. So we're about eight full-time now. But we also, again, education is important to us. So we have a whole army of interns, which is awesome. This summer, I think we had 13 people in our summer fellowship. And that's from all across the U.S. as well. So we had, of course, a lot from University of Hawaii, but we had, or we still actually have upstairs, participants from Dartmouth in our summer fellowship, Cornell, Boston College, UCLA. So we're attracting talent here to Hawaii and demonstrating what we can do here in Hawaii. Yeah, that's great. How do the students or your interns find you? Some of it's organic. So the UCLA one, for example, said, I heard about your firm at the Los Angeles Clean Tech Incubator, which we've never even visited, but they've heard about Sultan Ventures, which is really cool to hear. And he wanted to know if he, he's interested in venture capital. He wanted to know if he can do a summer program with us. So we said, yeah, absolutely. So, you know, that's those types of things. For Cornell, for example, Mellie James, who's the head of New Ventures for Sultan Ventures, she's actually Cornell University's entrepreneur in residence. And so she goes out there, I think, once a semester to meet with all the entrepreneurial students, lets them know about this program, and they actually come out to Hawaii for the summer. Okay. Well, I think it's commendable there that we're expanding Hawaii's reputation and also encouraging youth to get and young professionals to get into this field and show interest. I actually referred an intern to you. That's right, yeah. Several years ago. And his family was calling me up and saying, will you please tell him to get a job? He loves it over there. That's where he wants to be. So I think that's doing a great thing for our state as well. And wonderful your reputation kind of precedes you. Yeah. We're going to go to a quick break, folks. I hope you'll stay with us and we'll be right back to talk a little bit more with Tarik Sultan of Accelerate UH and Sultan Ventures. Aloha. This is Reg Baker with Business in Hawaii. We're a show that broadcasts every Thursday at two o'clock. We would love to hear from you and you can reach us in several different ways. We have a hotline that you can call in at 415-871-2474 or you can email us at thinktechhawaii.com or you can tweet us at thinktechhi. Looking forward to hearing from you and seeing you on our next show. Aloha. For a very healthy summer watch Viva Hawaii. We're giving you the best tips and with our best health coach here. So Viva health coach. Viva la comida saludable. Aloha. My name is Danelia. D-A-N-E-L-I-A. And I'm the other half of the duo, John Newman. We are the co-host of Keys to Success which is live on Think Tech Live Streaming Network series weekly on Thursdays at 11 a.m. Aloha. Aloha. So Emerging Leaders is just one of the programs that SBA offers to Hawaii's small business owners and entrepreneurs to really help them again grow and succeed and accomplish their business goals. We've got a couple of other programs that will be coming up here shortly. Actually, Activities for Small Business Owners. One of those is the Small Business Fair that will be coming up on Saturday, August 6th. And it's going to be at Honolulu Community College. It's free. It's multiple tiers of activities to connect you with other resources in the community, even lenders and other business consultants. So you can go to sba.gov backslash H-I to get some more information about that upcoming program. So one more resource for small businesses here. With the SBA's Accelerator Award, Sultan Ventures and Accelerate UH really kind of kicked off, kind of pushed themselves onto the next level as well. So you've indicated that not only that award helped you launch another cohort, get more people involved, but it also seemed to attract a lot of attention and open some more opportunities, which is definitely one of the things we want to see SBA facilitate. Right. Small businesses. Through the SBA, the 2015 award, we were able to get a lot of the national recognition, like I mentioned. From that, it seems to have kicked off this awesome momentum because a few months later we won the EDA award. So we were one of, I think, 17 entities nationally to be selected for this. So that's bringing more money into the state of why, more towards economic development, more helping small businesses. And those two in turn helped us when being selected in the inaugural Village Capital Communities, another national recognition year. And that's a brand new one, isn't it? That's a brand new one. Yeah, so this Village Capital is a global fund and global nonprofit as well, and they, for the first time ever, kicked off selecting 16 different communities, 16 different cities across the nation to democratize entrepreneurship, right, and to help democratize the sense of geographically, so it shouldn't only go towards the top three cities, New York, Boston, and Silicon Valley, but also democratize it in the form of inclusion, right? So there should be more women involved in venture capital and startups. There should be more ethnic minorities involved in venture capital and in startups, right? So through our work here in Hawaii with the SBA, with the EDA, it's just continuing to build momentum and getting that national recognition here for Hawaii. How do you feel that Hawaii plays in that? You mentioned location, women, minority entrepreneurs, native Hawaiian entrepreneurs who may not really play in the bigger venture capital picture. Yeah. How do you see Hawaii? We are without a doubt trailblazing here because, and I know a lot of these stouts because we just applied for the next growth accelerator word for the SBA, so fingers crossed, 48% of our cohort has been non-caucasian, right? Nationally, less than, I think 3% of VCs are women and 3 to 7, depending upon which year and which stat, 50% of the Sultan vendors team is women, right? I think 28 or 30% of our startups have women in a leading role. So when you look, so forget about us for a second and look at Hawaii as a whole, almost every single startup entity that's focused towards startups, I mean in Hawaii, has a woman lead, right? So HTDC is a woman lead. The Hawaii Venge Capital Association is Mellie James, right? She was also with Sultan Ventures. Head of Hawaii Angels is a woman. Head of Blue Start is a woman. Head of Energy Accelerator, the two founders are women, right? And it just, I mean, the list goes on and on. It makes sense to me. Yeah. So it's amazing. Like, I love our community because we're so far ahead of other communities. I actually spend more time this year traveling than I've been in Hawaii. I've seen at least 15 cities so far this year. You just got back. I just got back from another city. And I, like, honestly, we are ahead of the curve almost in every aspect, right? So we just need to keep doubling down on our momentum here. And that puts you in pretty good stead then for SBA's competition because this year they are emphasizing getting out to, you know, more of that underserved community and will be giving you extra points, so to speak, for, you know, women's participation, minority participation, location, location, location. Yeah. And we should be hearing about that before the end of August. No, I'm nervous. So there were a lot, I think the first year there were about 400. I think we have 800 applications this year and they're looking at still just about 80 awards. Yeah. So you've shown that you can compete. Hawaii has come out, you know, on top with no other states got more than three awards. Yeah. So, you know, it was like great to see that we're up there and it is attracting attention to our state. So is the funding that you receive from EDA, is that going to expand your reach or are you going to be able to be accessible, you know, different islands? So the beauty behind the way we operate our program is we like to leverage our strengths and for whatever we're doing. So the University of Hawaii is a strength in that not only in terms of innovation that comes out, but because of its reach, it's a system wide. We have system wide support from the University, which means we can reach all the islands, right? With the SBA award, we were able to increase our presence from a kind of a marketing standpoint, if you will, right? So letting everyone know like this is nationally recognized. We did some community events, but with the EDA grant, it's actually now instead of pulling people towards us, we're pushing out into the communities, right? So that type of funding and support allows us to get even more deeper, more deeper, deeper into the communities and literally be hands-on. So for example, just past May, we did the first ever entrepreneurship event on Island of the Night. They've never, ever had an event before. That's incredible. What was that like? What did you do? Unfortunately, I wasn't there. I was traveling. You were in Baltimore. Yeah. But the team, they did basically a two-day boot camp of like how to start a startup, right? What are the best practices? Lean methodology and that type of discipline traverses all types of startups, right? It could be a lifestyle startup. It could be a small to medium-sized enterprise, or it could be a high-growth startup. But those best practices need to be known and practiced upon no matter what type of startup. What kind of reception did you get on Lanai? I heard people were crying. Oh, really? They were so excited about it. They were like, you know, I always had these ideas. I never knew how to get started. Again, I'm so annoyed that I missed it. So do you have any idea just for curiosity's sake as well on numbers of people who participated? I think I was close to 50. I'm not sure exactly. Wow. But I know in the final picture, there was over 30 people in that picture alone. And somebody just told me the number, but it's slipping my mind. But I think it was about a third woman. And that's incredible. We hear so often that, you know, it's difficult to connect with people on the smaller islands because I also have American Somalia Guam and Pacific Affiliated Islands in my portfolio or companies and small business owners to service. But it's also connectivity, getting people to turn out, you know, a discussion of their ideas. They sometimes are very proprietary or very parochial in their approach. It sounds like you didn't find that. Oh, no, not at all. They were super excited. And that's kind of one of the things we talk about. It's like you need to be able to share your idea if you wanted to take off, right? So don't worry about somebody stealing it. Don't worry about executing on it and executing on the right idea, what the market wants and what you think it wants. So identifying the right places to go to the gap and be able to get your pitch together to know what your business is doing. And that works obviously with Salt and Venture and Accelerate UH as well as with the smallest mom and pop or a brother and sister, as the case may be. And speaking of sister and SVA, my sister, when she started her practice, actually got an SBA loan to help start her OBGYN practice. And so it's really important for small businesses. A lot of times they'll think, either I have to do this 100% on my own or they watch Shark Tank and think like they have to get invested money. But no, there's a plethora of different capital resources out there and you have to just find the right capital at the right time. And in this case for, you know, our sister, it was partially self-funded and partially an SBA loan. So thank you as well to the SBA for that. Well, it's like we said, it's a family affair there. And how did, how did your sister, Aya, she just knew about SBA? Was it through just her work? So she worked, Sure. So she worked, she went to a few banks and I was actually in the Merging Leaders Program at the same time. So I'm not sure exactly how it came about, but basically at the same time we were like, yes, the SBA loan makes sense. I do all things financials for startups. So I actually was able to put together her financials for the bank and for the loan. So that worked out really well. How did she find the process since you were involved? And that's one of the things we always hear is, you know, SBA financing, lots of red tape, but it's not so much of a thing. It's essentially you put together your P&L projections and statement cash flows and you just, you work with the bank. In this case, there wasn't much iteration because I do this for a living. So it came out pretty much fine the first time. But yeah, and the bank was like, okay, well, this makes sense with an SBA loan. Let's do that. So you'd recommend then, you know, an SBA loan as well as having a small business work with, say, a consultant or, you know, the SPDC or something like that. If you're a small business and you don't know where to start, this is the perfect start. Go to SBA and we have an open-door policy. Email us at Sultan Ventures. Like, happy to work with any and all businesses. And we might not necessarily always work with a small business, but we'll point you in the right direction and I'm sure it's the same with the SBA, right? So it's a plethora of resources there. And we do look at all different types of business. Your sister is a medical professional. We look at funding there. We look at helping startups in pretty much any industry. We look at, you know, mom and pops. We do a lot of retail. We do a lot of restaurants. And it's just the SBA guarantees the funding even when you have the best of consultants and at any stage of the business cycle. So start up will probably help her expand and build that Eva office as well. And she's right here downtown. Yes, she's in this building as well. So her business model is to work with a lot of the downtown professional executive women, right? So you might not have a lot of time to take off of work, drive an hour, half an hour somewhere, wait in a lobby for 45 minutes to an hour and a half sometimes, and then drive back. Who can take three to four hours off of work? Here, you just literally, you don't have to worry about driving. You walk over to the Pioneer Plaza, go up to the 10th floor. So she knew her skills. She knew what she wanted to do. She identified a niche market. And she got her old business model down in and out and under an hour, right? And then the business name is Honu. Honu Women's Health. Honu Women's Health. So congratulations, another family venture. Yeah, we're really, really excited about that. That's very good. And Hawaii has a very strong history of families sticking together and developing businesses and even diversifying that business. It's been a very, very successful model. So it is the mindset. It is how a lot of people work together. So we thank you for everything that you're doing with the community. And we congratulate you as well on your success. Where do you think you're going? And if you gave us a quick sound bite and what's the future? So we get to ask that question a lot. We think the future for Hawaii is, we have a lot of things that we're always testing. Right now we're actually testing a new investment model for small businesses that kind of pivots away from the traditional venture capital. So we're really excited about that model. What we're doing with Village Capital is an energy and ag focused accelerator program. So we're really excited about that. We're working with Energy Accelerator and Maui Food Innovation Center. Maui Food Innovation Center is another SBA growth accelerator winner, right? So there's a lot that we're excited about. And we just, like I said earlier, we just want to keep doubling down and building upon this momentum but as a start-up paradise ecosystem. And it's great because when your business wins, Hawaii wins. Yeah, absolutely. So that's a great thing. And so I think we're going to wrap up today. And thank you for joining. Tariq Sultan, thanks for joining us. Pleasure to be here. SBA Hawaii, SBA America. We'll look forward to talking again with you soon. Aloha.