 And welcome to the fourth installment of our Entrepreneurs' Exchange Web Chat series. I'm the Director of the Global Entrepreneurship Program at the U.S. Department of State. Before I introduce our guest speakers, we encourage you to check out www.startthespark.org to learn more about President Obama's initiative to promote entrepreneurship around the world. I'm excited to be joined live in our Washington studio by our distinguished guest, Dante Despartes, founder and CEO of Risk Cooperative, and Sandra Cojeda, founder and CEO of Pelcor and our IVLP alumni, who is connecting with us from Lisbon, Portugal. Both are here today to share their unique experiences and to answer your questions. I'd also like to extend a special welcome to the International Exchange Alumni who join us from around the world, including those gathered at our American Corners, to watch this live program. Now, while we wait for your questions to come in, let's hear briefly from our guests. Dante Despartes is the founder and CEO of Risk Cooperative, a strategy, risk and capital management firm that focuses on mid-market opportunities, market expansion and innovation. So, Dante, you've built an important business that's useful to entrepreneurs. Can you give the audience more insights into your business model, please? Sure. Thank you. Thank you, Karen. And I should say, Buatarji. It's nice to be here today. So, Risk Cooperative was formed to try to address the issues of a lot of evolution in the capital markets around risk, investment, and funding a business throughout the various stages of its growth. So, from the very early stages, from the startup phase down to I'm finding there's few customers, to now I need to get much more complex longer-term financing to secure growth, we wanted to level the playing field in that because as you may imagine, since the financial crisis, the traditional financial institutions have moved upmarket. So, banks, traditional lenders, investors have made it much more complex and so there's a higher barrier of entry for entrepreneurs and small to mid-sized firms to get capital. And in that void, the second big trend, in that void there's a lot of proliferation right now of alternative funding models from crowd funding to grants to incubators to accelerators to traditional angel investors and friends and family networks that entrepreneurs can tap into. And so, the third big trend right now is an issue of complexity. So, just as in the beginning, so too today in 2015, entrepreneurs around the world are faced with the key challenge of what is the funding source that's right for me? What is the funding source that's available to me locally? How do I secure that for the long term without giving up the business, giving up all the assets and the shareholding that you have in the company? So, at the end of the day, the true solution for most entrepreneurs is their own wherewithal, their own wits and grit that got them started in the first place. Thank you. I met Sandra last year when I led a U.S. private sector business delegation to Lisbon and bought one of Sandra's beautiful cork purses. Sandra, can you tell us about your product lines and explain how you have scaled your business? Hi, Karen. Hi, Dante. For me, it's a pleasure to be with you. Good day and good attack to Portugal. So, my brand called Spell Cork and I began to... 20 years ago, I began to work in a cork industry. I am the third generation of that cork industry from a family business. So, 10 years ago, I wanted to do something different with cork. So, I created Spell Cork and I began to develop a new line of bags, umbrellas versus hats in cork. I was the first one in Portugal and first one in the world. So, at that time, 10 years ago, it was a big challenge for me because here in Portugal, people see it cork like a usual thing, but cork is a unique material. So, use cork and see like a fashion bag, like a fashion brand, or that you can do a fashion brand with it. It was a big challenge. 10 years later, I professionalized better and more my brand, my company. Now, I have a design department inside my company. We developed all the designs of our collections and all the marketing we do at home. And now, we are in the big challenge to export and to export more and better Spell Cork to the United States and other parts in the world. So, now that Spell Cork is a fashion brand in Portugal, we want to make it Spell Cork a fashion brand around the world with cork ski. Okay. Thank you, Sandra. Let's turn to our audience of exchange alumni and entrepreneurs watching from the American corner in Lisbon. Sejam bem vindos. Welcome to the program. I'm sure your group has plenty of questions for our guests. Is there a question from Lisbon? Pretty quiet group right now. In the meantime, we'll take some other questions coming live from social media at the chat space. Our first question is raising capital of the most important component of starting a business? So, I'm happy to take that question. And ultimately, what I always advise entrepreneurs at the very earliest stages of building their business and their idea, that you need to build a business you want to run and not a business you want to fund. There's a huge trend right now among entrepreneurs that manipulate the most successful entrepreneurs that they see around them. And there's a big danger in that because it's very easy to say, I want to be Elon Musk from Tesla or I want to be Sandra Correa in Pelcor. The challenge, of course, is that if you only think about how to fund your business, you're only going to think about the business from the investor's vantage point. And when you think about a business you want to run, you almost don't care whether you have the capital or not. What your primary priority is, I have a solution that the market values. I have customers and I've positioned the product at a price or the product or service at a price that the market can afford. I mean, after all, the greatest source of capital for your company is people buying the goods and services you provide. And that's the hardest test for most startups and most early-stage entrepreneurs to cross, is I have a viable product or service, somebody out there is willing to pay for it, and that's the strongest source of capital. Once you've crossed that bridge, then you could start turning to these other sources of capital that are available to grow the company, to provide inventory, to staff up and things like that and to enter new markets. But the first order of business is, does the market want it from a consumption vantage point? I have a question for you along those lines, Sandra. How did you validate that you had a viable product that the Portuguese would buy when you were starting to manufacture your purses out of cork? Karen, I would like also to complete the answer, don't they, for the first question. Oh, certainly. In my opinion, one of the most important things that entrepreneurs must have in their own business is to have the passion and to be in love with what they do with their business, with their idea, because they can have marketing, they can have sales, they can have everything, and of course, the capital will arrive. But if they are not passionate, they won't go further. So for me, passion is very important. So don't they, this is only to complete your answer. Thank you, Sandra. That's so true. For the second, for the question you did at the beginning, it was like a street work, because people would not use it to see cork like a fashion product. So it took me many years to invest, not in the marketing, but also in a one-by-one connection with people, because when people saw the product, they said, wow, this is cork. And you know, when you see that, imagine an umbrella, a cork umbrella. So they said, wow. And then it's a tale, it's a story that I needed to tell. And until today, each new customer, I need to tell this is cork, and the story from the trees where it comes from and where we want to go. So it was not easy, but I have the passion for this unique material. And because I have the passion, I talk about it with passion. So people got in love. Fabulous. Here's another question from our viewers. How do entrepreneurs raise capital for their business in Portugal? Answer that. In Portugal, we entrepreneurs raise capital through the traditional ways, like the loans from the bank. This is the oldest more traditional. But because we had a crisis, economic crisis in Portugal, so entrepreneurs need to change. And now they are using the investment funds, how do you say, like Portugal Ventures, like Betai, they are investment funds that support the new business. But of course, you need, the entrepreneurs here need to have a good business, a good marketing from their business, and they must have a good pitch. If they have a good pitch, so it will be more easy to have these funds from these investors, capital investors. But in my opinion, I know that in America, crowdfunding is growing a lot. Here in Portugal, we are not using it. But I think crowdfunding, it will be the future here in Portugal. And because in crowdfunding we can have two types of crowdfunding. We can have the oldest one by donation when people can invest and buy a product from the entrepreneurs' company and by donation. Or the new trend, the investment crowdfunding, where any person can be a shareholder of a new project. So I see that, like the future. So in Portugal, we have many work to do about crowdfunding, but I think it will be the future. And now in Portugal, at least at last now we have this year we had the shock tank here. We had five entrepreneurs, the TV Syria here, which is one, so I think that is another opportunity. Tremendous. Before we get to more of our questions, I want to give a shout out to the American Center in Baku. Hello Baku, and thanks for joining the program. Ainez Zeguesi from Benin, West Africa wants to know, how can the government help small businesses raise capital? Dante and Sandra, what are your thoughts on that? That's a great question. Thank you and Benin. The governments have an important role to play in leveling the playing field for small businesses because the truth of the matter is at the earlier stages of your company the failure rate for small businesses is relatively high. And so the role that governments play, and again it's global, in collaboration across countries, is in leveling the playing field, de-risking some of the earlier stage investments, and most importantly, it's about giving small businesses access to markets. Again, I go back to the earlier message that just like Sandra described a moment ago, you need to have products and services that somebody wants to consume. It's not enough to have an idea. You need to also have something behind that idea. And then once you have that, there's a number of government programs globally, and I would like to think that in Benin as well, these types of programs exist, that help create access to markets, that help create access to capital, and that in some respects, the governments also act as a guarantor, a financial guarantor. In the event the small business has any type of financial difficulties in repaying loans and in sort of repaying any of its obligations. So the government is a very important leveler of the playing field. And your thoughts on that question, Sandra? Here in Portugal, government supports most of all the start-ups company through the incubators, but we don't have any big programs in our government policy, because our government policy, as I told you, we had this crisis, so they cut in some ways for that support, but they are supporting mostly the start-ups to begin. If you have a business with two, three years, four years, the help, the support they give are not like the money itself, but they support the project. I can give an example. Here in Europe we have the money that comes from the European community. So if you have a good product, if you have a good export strategy, so you can present that strategy to the government, and the government goes through the European community to support your business in 45%. This is the help. Our government, they don't give the money, but they give you several ways for you to grow up, and you need to show that you have a very good strategy. That's a great answer, too. Here's another great online question for our speakers. What are the qualities of a good entrepreneur? Well, I think the first one is no fear of failure. I think the hardest step often for an entrepreneur is the first one. It's to make the step that that's your life choice is to be entrepreneurial. And then as Sandra rightly said earlier, passion, trial and error, this kind of tireless, tireless dedication to the product. But I think the subtler, those are all sort of the recognized traits of an entrepreneur in the market that we recognize for being passionate risk takers. The subtler traits are probably more important, which is that they're very attentive. So if they get negative feedback from the market, really, really good entrepreneurs understand the value of small improvements and not necessarily trying to leapfrog everything. And that's probably what exactly some of the audience and the participants around the world have experienced in their businesses, they've presented something very little that will make the difference between success and failure. And so really good entrepreneurs in addition to being passionate and in addition to being risk takers and eternal optimist, I think there's also a lot of value that you see in them in terms of subtlety and getting the small things right as well. Perfect. Sandra, your turn. Sue Aves. For me, yes. I'm 100% with Dante. And for me, an entrepreneur must be first a visionary, a dreamer. And like Dante said, must be an optimist because it's not the easy road, it's a hard road. But if we act without fear and if we believe in our business and if we work 24 hours a day that your business from the entrepreneur will succeed. So these are qualifications that they are the basis. Money is not the principle. The principle is to be a dreamer, visionary and believe in your business. And also when you are a older entrepreneur you go to believe in other streams and you go to fund the business of other entrepreneurs. So this is like a great step-working. Okay, onto our next question for Dante and Sandra. What alternative funding models are available? So I think as Sandra rightly said earlier that there is a proliferation right now of alternative funding models. Some of them are very, very innovative and not entirely available around the world but if you look ahead five years I think models like crowd funding are very compelling and they present an opportunity where the playing field is leveled completely. Any organization that has access to a crowdfunding platform of any size can effectively get their product access on that platform and try to raise capital that way. But in addition to that one of the areas that I like a lot is to use the crowd mechanism to test whether your product has interest in the market. So sort of if Pelcourt was developing a brand new product, perhaps a beautiful briefcase that I would love to buy putting that product in sort of a beta test in one of these platforms to see if there's sufficient demand is probably a more interesting funding source than trying to get investors who love your business model. So that's one evolution that I think will continue to see evolving around the world. Another one that is more pragmatic and practical is for small businesses and entrepreneurs to tie up to established companies. So many, many large firms around the world if you look at their supply chains and if you look at all of the firms that feed into their products often those companies are supporting a very, very large supply chain in an ecosystem of smaller businesses and that's a readily available source of capital that in many respects is completely global as well and often the entrepreneurs will have readier access to those decision makers in larger companies to try and promote and sell their products to support those bigger firms and so it's an all ship rising kind of situation. Would you like to add anything, Sondra? I agree 100% with Dante and I can give you an example now on the crowd crowd-rising I have a new product, Dante A brief taste? So it is my new product is not under the name of Belfort it's another name and it is on crowd-rising and I can tell you that in one month it will it's a success so I'm just waiting to produce and to share to launch in the market so even for companies like mine that always have a strategy have their own investment and they are not startups so we can use other ways like the crowd funding in different ways and second just to complete your answer I think I have here a crazy idea imagine we have 2, 3, 4 entrepreneurs they have different business but that business they are in the same business or the same area so if they make an association or if they join together perhaps they can build one business and have more fundraising I know in Portugal association like this it worked on the farmer sector who knows in another sectors if these entrepreneurs can join in one in this case they will have more ways to have the fundraising just a crazy idea I love that, that ties back into talking about how what the qualities of an entrepreneur are and I think that one is definitely collaboration and that speaks to that subject we have another question this is Ricardo Vanea from Argentina and he asks the US has been considered a unique place to start a business because of the capital market structure that facilitates startups access to capital do you think that is still the case today and how can foreign startups utilize this system so that's a great question Ricardo from Argentina the truth of the matter is as Sandra has outlined my own experience in starting my company is that it is difficult everywhere and it's difficult even in the United States so yes we have a very vibrant capital market we have a complete evolution of all of these mechanisms from crowd funding to crowd sourcing to accelerators, incubators and you name it having said that 95% of startups in this country again at the earliest stages do not get funded and so that doesn't mean that every single entrepreneur who sets out in the US and around the world is going to fail on the contrary the ones who succeed are the ones who fail forward as they say the ones who try to raise capital for the first iteration of their business model realize they need it to adapt it either to investors or to the market and then they go out again with the second and third and fourth model and so the reason the persistency of some of these very very successful serial entrepreneurs and clearly there's an ecosystem in places like Silicon Valley increasingly the DC metropolitan area is another hub for entrepreneurship in the United States the key thing is that there's an ecosystem and so what I would encourage around the world is this notion that never go it alone it's so much easier when you have someone to fall back on and you have cohorts that think as groups on how to solve problems whether they're market based or funding based that that's how you overcome many of the obstacles but by default it is it is a business of overcoming challenges to be a successful entrepreneur Dante and Sandra an online viewer wants to know how do you balance the trade off between fending your business and running your business that that is a big challenge because the answer is passion and if I I am in love with my business I have first to look for funds and to run the business first I need to have a great team working with me I need to have professionals working with me I can't do every single loan a telephone is not one person company Belcor it's my company but it's built in many workers I have so this is the first step is to have professional and good co-workers with me that they can support the business at the stage that I can manage the big decisions and run run the business and also at the same time looking for new funds and new products new markets because this never stops I began my my path in the running the business to bigger export to United States so to go to United States to sell my products there to open the market there here in Portugal I need to have a very good team and I trust in my team and they trust me this is for me to move the balance I need to have it's a trust on my team so I can run the business and go for what comes for the funds for new markets like that thank you very much we have another online viewer who has a question for us can I access capital from foreign sources and what are they that's a great question I know that there are a number of let's say U.S. sponsored activities to support small to mid-sized enterprises overseas private investment corporation has established an SME fund that is designed to support small to mid-sized enterprises around the world also that are available to entrepreneurs from around the world I'll give you one example so there's an entrepreneur that I've been working with here in DC originally from the Central African Republic his name is Gabino and he has a very promising start up a very promising technology that will harness solar power and keep store the energy over long cycles which will effectively provide an off grid energy solution primarily in Africa and so upon learning of Tony Elumelu's activities and his entrepreneurship program I connected the dots and this young man was then identified as one of the participants in this program to raise a thousand entrepreneurs across Africa and so in addition to having a little bit of capital to support his business coming again from a foreign source if you will it's now plugged him into an ecosystem of his peers he's working very closely with Tony Elumelu and a number of others in that type of program and so I think these types of models are very compelling but it goes to the real fundamental issue of how do you fund your business and it still boils down to relationships having having people who can help you combat the complexity of what sources do I use from where but there's so much available right now in support of entrepreneurs from around the world another viewer, thank you very much another viewer wants to know how can I take my business to the next level first it is important to see what is the next level if the next level needs a big investment so that entrepreneur needs to first have a good marketing strategy to know the next step what he wants to do so can evaluate it and do a business plan on that the result of that next level and most important is to see and to know if the next level he wants to achieve in one year or five years or ten years and to make a business plan for that time after it it is important to choose different funds if it is a big fund, a big investment that is needed so my advice is to go to the traditional business angels because it implicates a big investment if it is not a big investment it is a small one so that entrepreneur has the crowdfunding and other ways that he can use and she and don't forget in the United States special not in Portugal so much but in the United States if the entrepreneur is a woman so they have lots of opportunities because there are lots of investment funds who supports woman business and growing woman business so you know depends in different stage for me important is to see if you are next level you must study your next level and to see to have a good strategy a good business plan and define if it is only for a year or five years and then you can decide the best fund and like Dante said networking relationships are the open doors so catch any opportunity you have because sometimes we go for an opportunity we see is that probably that business angel and perhaps we have another one on the other side that is the best for our business Thank you so much Sandra Pixie Carlisle on Twitter wants to know from both of you what was your number one challenge when finding funding to build or sustain your business that's a great question for me the number one challenge was once I have identified investors that were ready to support risk cooperative the number one challenge was that I needed to secure funding not to do it alone that for me was the point of no return it was this has to be a collaborative effort hence the name and I didn't want to build a business alone through the early phases so my requirement was I need to bring a great internationally recognizable team with me and from that platform we would then guarantee the investors a strong return so that took time to secure and now that we're outside of the earlier days of the business my goal is not to have to dilute the company any further and get any additional investments and so our plan is really to use the market and to practice what we preach use the market to get the funding to build the business fabulous Sandra my big challenge was my first fund that it was from the traditional bank but in that traditional bank fund my challenge was to speak about products that doesn't exist in the market because my raw material is cork so it was not easy to convict my investors that I want to work cork and they asked me but wow you see that answer so I think it was my biggest challenge is when you have a different product when you have a different business then you want to sell not only for the customer but special to your investors so that was my first challenge was to make that my investors believe that I wanted to make cork into a different product and you certainly got traction with that Sandra, part of Banes before we get to more of your great questions let's go back to our viewing group in Lisbon for a question Lisbon, go ahead and ask that question that's burning on your mind that's okay, hi so first of all, pleased to meet you and thank the organization for this opportunity to have this discussion and to be able to ask you some questions so my name is Antoine Falcom I'm a research engineer here at Union Over and I'm currently also project manager for research groups that we have with the European Space Agency I'd like to know your views we've been discussing here about entrepreneurship and businesses as you know research is not really known to be as profitable but what I'd like to know is your views and Dante's views if possible about research and alternative ways to find capital and to be able to finance the research that we've been doing so that's my question I'd like to know your views on that thank you very much that's a great question we have to remember that the greatest great advancements in business and therefore in society have often come from the silent heroes right, where they were researching a sort of a vaccine or whether you're researching a business model or doing really complex advance engineering often these are the silent heroes I think there's a lot of encouragement at least that I'm seeing in the academic community for example Harvard Business School in the United States is planning a joint campus with the engineering school so to put together the business minds and the lab coats the research minds to start working together and figuring out how to accelerate the R&D process and then to get anything coming out of research labs around the world into the market so the issues there are the same I mean you need to fund your research you need to have long term visibility on the project so you need all of the same ingredients as a researcher as an entrepreneur you need a long horizon you need capital for that horizon for the work and the various stages of the work and you know maybe Sandra in Lisbon you may know of a bit more about where the research then connects to the market and sort of we get we get this great gentleman's work out in open view Ok, thank you Lisbon for the question Dante, like you said here I go to explain not so in an academic way but in the business way how we proceed with research or how we here we help the research to have funds usually and I can share with you in our cork business my company we have a great connection with universities and their labs their labs as you know they do research in different materials and also with cork so when we want something or they have a new research in cork they come to us and they go to sell their research and if that research combines with what we need so we we fund with the research to have the results of that new idea and or new product or because research is linked with innovation it is not a material thing but it is something that every area in the business world needs is research so I think like you said they must have the business model they must be known the companies must be outside their world so the companies here can see and buy their research but my opinion is that the future is hand by hand between the research and the companies that already have the products and how to innovate their own products and research must be continuous also they must do a lot of marketing I would like to add something to that our national science foundation which is also a US government agency is able to pair up with universities in the United States and then those universities have cooperative research with another university abroad one example of this is University of Porto in Portugal is aligned with University of Texas in Austin and they're developing some renewable energy solutions and so that's another way where researchers can internationally collaborate on solutions that can then be capitalized on patented and put into the marketplace we have a question from Venezuela now and Laura Rojas asks Dante and Sandra what is the best source of capital for an early startup angel investors or crowdfunding that's a great question from Venezuela and I guess the answer is it depends there's no as probably you've seen so far in today's program there is no one size fits all approach the good news is that if you get your pitch ready and your material ready for one source of capital be it a crowdfunding platform or an angel investor or a bank or friends often you could use that across all platforms and so what I would recommend to Laura and Venezuela is to get the best business case ready the best description of what you're trying to fund and how and then put it out across all of the options that you have locally available to you and explore the international ones as well because frankly that's how you're going to improve the odds of getting the funding that you need I agree with Dante 100% and Laura if you if you want to look for funds like Dante said that if you have a very good pitch a very good business plan so you go to you go to to try all the opportunities you can try the business angels you can try the bank you can try the crowdfunding because if you have a good business plan or a good pitch you go to have the funds you need and imagine you can have from crowdfunding and you can have from business angels so opportunities are a lot another online viewer asked how do I know if my business has enough capital to sustain itself or if I have to seek outside funding sources Dante or Susan Sandra well you know and and this is this is the truth so most early stage firms and most companies growing you know through that cycle of start up to scaling the business often the there's two things that you can control in your company either you sell more or you spend less and so I would encourage entrepreneurs as they get past the earliest stages and they start to have turnover and sales and operating cost it's very important to have internal controls of your usage of funding right so think of it this way that if your business needs to go to outside funding sources it's often a sign of either much more market demand for your products and services therefore you need outside funding or and this is the risk it's a sign that you're not managing your capital well in the first place and therefore the burden is on the entrepreneur to figure out how to have really strong financial controls great financial reporting internally to understand exactly how long you have how long can you survive if all if the market stops and people stop buying your products and services because you shouldn't go to funding because you've exhausted all of your internal sources you should only go to funding when you really have a very strong market signal that you can grow and then you go outside because remember outside capital always will have a demand whether it's a bank you have to have interest rates if it's an equity investor you have to give up a stake in your firm and then you have another bunch of people that you have to answer to in addition to your friends whose couches you might be sleeping on we have another question oh please Sondra no no I agree with Dante great thank you Pixie Carlisle on Twitter asks in your experience do investors want a complete business plan with proof of past successes prior to funding a business that's a great question as well my advice is again build businesses entrepreneurs of the world that you want to run and you know while I often have and I'm probably the last and only person here to say this I've often enjoyed the process of writing a business plan I've never written it from the vantage point of I'm going to present this hundred page document to an outside investor and I think that in this day and age investors are much more savvy than asking you for your hundred page business plan if you can't say your business model and your value proposition very briefly I think you already lost people's interest at that point and so don't build the hundred page business plan build very succinct very crisp stories of why you what are you doing why the market loves you the track record behind you matters but if you focus on the market all the rest somehow I don't want to say that it's easy at all but all the rest somehow falls into place thank you very much I can for me for me Karen the market is also the big answer and for any business when you do a business plan another issue that is very important is the the volume of the market, the market volume because the potential market to see the one the entrepreneur has already in their business and the one that the entrepreneur can achieve and how he goes to achieve that market because the the volume of the market is very important to make the scale of the future of their own business thank you so much Jaffer an online viewer wants to know do you have any recommendations for young entrepreneurs are there any specific funding sources for those under the age of 18 that's a great question so I think twofold I mean one entrepreneurship by default knows no age no national boundary either and I think we're in an encouraging era where we're solving very big problems through entrepreneurs energy scarcity income inequality we're solving some of the world's key issues and entrepreneurs are front and center on that stage and so it's encouraging to see that there's a young viewer out there who's asking this question and my view would be your most important attribute as a young entrepreneur is not to have any fear of failure and that to believe that no matter what happens that you could reinvent yourself because one your age and hopefully a long and promising career will prove that you would have gone through many many many versions of yourself and therefore versions of your business now can you fund the business under the age of 18 I suppose it depends on if someone younger than 18 could enter contracts and sign agreements and work with a bank and have collateral and so if you're under 18 and you have all of those things in place then call me because you're so far along the line already I have some experience in this there's actually a really great source that you can look up online and if you Google teenage entrepreneur there's this American entrepreneur who's really fabulous who does these podcasts and they're specifically targeted toward that age group also in Denver, Colorado in the Mountain States in the United States there's an America town and they have banking legal advice everything and then they kick you out when you're 21 and so you've got to get it while it's hot I have a friend who has a 13 year old who has started a company called SoupCoup that is that goes to that bank in order to get loans and scale his business and so there are resources in the US but then you can also go on Google to Teenage Entrepreneur and listen to those podcasts they're really effective it looks like we're running out of time now so I'd like to ask Dante and Sandra one final question today Ines Aguayse from Benin wants to know if Dante or Sandra have any suggestions of resources specific to entrepreneurs in Africa Dante let's start with you on that one that's a great question I think the first step you know to quote Nike is just do it and as I mentioned before Tony Elumelu has recently launched this challenge and backed it with a hundred million dollars of his own money to support a pan African era of entrepreneurs and I'm very very enthusiastic about the work that he's doing and I'm very enthusiastic because he represents someone who not only has been very entrepreneurial in his career in banking and in finance but he's now putting back so to speak and a lot of African diaspora around the world and I've managed to connect a few of my friends and network with Tony he's looking very much inward across Africa and so that was a very encouraging model there's a hundred million dollars of potential support for early stage companies and that type of effect can really create an entire generation of entrepreneurial leadership across Africa do you have anything to add to that Sondra? Yes I can share that I don't know in Africa the details but I can share what I am doing here in Portugal after my IVLP program that I did in the United States the new beginning I create a new beginning for Portugal and what we do in the new beginning for Portugal we join entrepreneurs and we mentoring them to the next level and we help them to be more professional without money it's only a mutual seeing it's a share not a charity but we help each other and with our networking and we make all the development of their dreams to come true and to their business to grow up so this is a method this is a project that we are developing in Portugal and I think this method can be we can develop in Africa we can develop in any part of the world because it's made of human beings and human beings that they have they are entrepreneurs and they have experience and they can share and mentoring others and also raising money if they need fabulous thank you so much and thank you Dante and Sandra before we close I'd like to hear your final thoughts and anything you'd like to leave with our viewers today Dante let's start with you okay so let me create an analogy on how to think about capital in your business so your business is the airplane long runway capital is a fuel that you're putting into the airplane too much of it in the beginning will make it harder for you to take off ironically because you're not focusing on the right things and the road ahead of you but obviously you need both you need a long runway and you need the fuel sufficient to take off and to make your business work and so I would say that right now we're in a very very promising time there's a proliferation of models that are blossoming literally all over the world from crowdfunding to early stage opportunities to fund a business to different banking and collaborative models that Sandra described with associations and clubs and the best entrepreneurs are the ones that aren't afraid of failure and that they literally expose themselves to all of it every one of those relationships every one of those funding opportunities opens up entrepreneurs to probably the most important element which is a little bit of luck serendipity right that if I didn't have this conversation today I would not have had that funding source and so I would encourage people to really put themselves out there and to put their ideas out there and their businesses out there and to do it as Sandra said earlier with passion and that's the key Perfect answer and your ads Laundra I subscribe everything Dante said and for me my advice is that entrepreneurs you must share your thoughts you must tell your needs and you must be also persistent you must be resilient if it is your dream if it is what you want you don't give up you go and you share with other people because don't be closed on your own open to the world and one one last idea act with passion and when you create something or your business don't think only in your country think that you are in the world and the world is bigger so you can also scale your business for different countries with different cultures so you have a big market value waiting for you thank you thank you very much that wraps up our web chat for today Dante and Sandra I'd like to thank you so much for joining us it was truly an engaging discussion and one that I hope will leave you inspired I'd also like to thank our live audience in Lisbon our viewing group in the American Center in Baku as well as all of you who joined this program from around the world a recording of this program will be available on international alumni exchange website and our Facebook page if you want to keep learning about entrepreneurship the 2015 Global Entrepreneurship Summit is happening in Nairobi, Kenya on July 25th and 26th this year it will be the sixth annual gathering of entrepreneurs from all stages of business development business leaders, mentors and high level government officials for more information visit www.ges2015.org although it's too late for entrepreneurs to apply now there are still some openings for investors stay tuned for our Entrepreneurs Exchange interactive program thanks again and have a great day