 As Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs at the U.S. Department of State, which sponsors the Global Innovation through Science and Technology, or GIST, initiative, it's my pleasure to welcome you to this GIST Tech Connect event. We are pleased to feature this program during Youth and Entrepreneurship Month. As President Obama said, we believe entrepreneurs can create jobs that fortify relationships between countries, build global markets, and help fulfill the dreams of all who desire the freedom to make of their lives what they will. In December 2012, the United States partnered with the United Arab Emirates on the Third Annual Global Entrepreneurship Summit. This event united entrepreneurs, innovators, and policymakers from around the globe to discuss ways to build partnerships that strengthen innovation and entrepreneurship in the region and the world. We are excited today to continue the conversation that began in Dubai. At the summit, we were proud to feature the important role that youth play in making this goal a reality. Winners of the GIST Tech Eye Competition held at the summit, including Khalid Wajdi from Egypt, who invented a new 3D motion capture system, are strong examples of the innovative youth in the region. Entrepreneurship requires powerful ideas and networks to help young men and women turn their ideas into products and companies. An integral component of our science diplomacy efforts, the GIST Initiative links technologists, entrepreneurs, and financiers from across the globe. Today's Tech Connect program brings together over 20 universities and incubators in the broader MENA region to discuss the important first step of entrepreneurship, developing a viable idea. After today's discussion, I welcome you to join the 120,000 other members of the GIST network. I want to thank our panel of experts for joining us today to share their experiences in creating technology ideas and answering your questions. And now, I'm pleased to introduce Obidiu Bujorian of CRDF Global, our partner in the GIST Initiative, who is today's moderator. Thank you, Ambassador Schmierer. It's great to be with you. We are excited to welcome entrepreneurs from all around the world for a conversation with very successful entrepreneurs here with us. Today, we connect people who speak the same language, people who believe in the power of entrepreneurs, the power of you, the power of young and dynamic people to change their communities, countries, and region. I'm Obidiu Bujorian, and I manage the GIST Initiative. We are very proud to partner with the State Department on this initiative to help youth around the world to power up their dreams and turn their technology ideas into reality. CRDF Global has been a proudly supporting entrepreneur in more than 40 countries for the past 15 years. We have worked with entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs support organizations, incubators, universities, you name it. Always believing that tech entrepreneurship is a great source for prosperity, growth, and personal fulfilling. Today, we are thrilled to host in partnership with Connex, a virtual conference connecting entrepreneurs, mentors, investors across the world. And it is wonderful that this level of outreach is possible because of the partnership between CRDF Global, the State Department, and a very good number of local partners in the countries that we are working very close with you. I would like to ask you to use the hashtag at GIST Connect. When talking about this event today, you will see this name also online. So I would encourage you to tweet about it. And also, I would encourage you to submit your questions that you can ask your panelists later. Please feel free to start questions now as the program goes on so that our colleagues will process those questions and they will be sending it to us during the program. I personally look forward to a great event and it's wonderful to be here with three amazing entrepreneurs. And today's session of GIST Connect will begin a dialogue between the panelists, the successful entrepreneurs, the mentors and investors in America, as well as the MENA region to exchange perspectives, experiences and trends, especially in the process of generating an idea for a technology-based venture. We are excited that this event is actually a continuation of the first event we have done with Pakistan, GIST Connect Pakistan, which energized more than 1,000 entrepreneurs in Pakistan. The topic for today, GIST Connect, is ideation, the process of generating new ideas. How do you come up with an idea for a new venture? I wish there was a formula or secret potion that helped with idea generation. I'm always working on finding one. Maybe you have some of your own secrets. All of us would drink that potion every day and I'm sure that it may help to a certain degree. I think that idea generation is an inability. Although there is some truth to this, I think there are a lot of things that can be learned. A lot about the process, a lot about the experiences of the people that were there. And we are very fortunate to have the three amazing entrepreneurs, people who have a lot of practical experience of actually testing new ideas, testing new methodologies, new processes. And it would be great to facilitate this interaction with entrepreneurs, people who are at the beginning of their journeys, to help with their idea formulation, answer the questions about the road maps that they may have. We have with us today Jeff Hoffman, who is a founder and partner in Colorjar, a venture accelerator firm that helps entrepreneurs and small business owners launch and grow their new business ventures. Hoffman is perhaps best known as a co-founder and former CEO of the Priceline family of companies, currently valued at 34 billion, where he led the development and launched a Priceline consumer company, Priceline Yard Sale. He's also launched successful ventures in the entertainment sector, such as Black Sky Entertainment. Together with us we also have Nolan Bushnell, the father of electronic gaming and engineer and entrepreneur who founded Atari Incorporated, an enormously successful video game and home computer company. In school, Mr. Bushnell was learning the basics of computer graphics, managing an amusement park and playing in tournament chess on the side, talking about multitasking at the same time. Fascinated by a combination of computers, images and fun, Nolan went into creating the first computerized video game and two years later he invented Atari. In addition to being named one of the Newsweek 15 men that changed America, he has founded more than 20 companies integrating science, technology and entertainment, including his current venture BrainRunch education software. He's also famous for funding Chucky Cheese, a family entertainment center that's very popular with kids and grows up alike in the United States. It would be great to hear a few words also about your upcoming book later on if you could share a few stories because I think it's directly related to the subject of this event. And also with us we have Magid Abraham, originally from Lebanon, who co-founded ComScore, an internet market intelligence company where he remains president and CEO. ComScore provides market intelligence for companies in internet and traditional media, retail, telecom and other industries, spending six continents and 41 countries. It's great to see that global perspective also in terms of your company. He was selected as a technology pioneer by the World Economic Forum and in 2010 ComScore was named a global growth company, a program that recognizes companies that are influencing global trends among growth technology companies. To get that started, I want to ask each one of our panelists how did they came up with their ideas for their company and words of wisdom for our entrepreneurs. I would like to ask all of you to kind of connect your process of starting new company with the topic of this idea, which is idea generation, how you come up with an idea for your venture, things that you think would be relevant for our entrepreneurs in the audience. Sure, so I'll start. Entrepreneurs are idea farmers, and the more I thought about that analogy as I was an entrepreneur for my whole life, the more I realized that that is what we do. Our job is to harvest ideas. But in order to harvest ideas, you have to plant seeds of ideas, water and feed them and hope that some of them will grow. So there's a process that I use that I just want to share for planting the seeds of ideas in my mind and hoping that some of them grow. And for lack of a better word, I've just called that process info-spunging. But here's what I do, and it's a deliberate process to increase the odds that I might have another good idea at some point when we do this in my company. I take the first like 15 minutes, 20 minutes of every day, no emails, no texts, nothing outside in my business. And I take 15, 20 minutes every day to just explore the world around me. I go online and I read articles that are not in my industry, that are not relevant to my company. I let my mind wander. I explore things that just catch my attention. And as I read these things, each day it's only 15 minutes of the day, but I write little points down. Anything interesting that's going on in the world, a new technology was released, a new trend in a certain country. It might be every day twice a day I check on Yahoo, the top 10 internet searches. What are people thinking about? What are they researching? So the idea is to take a few minutes every day to this info-spunging process to look at a broader world around you, to make notes of things that are going on in the world that at that moment don't seem relevant to you. But if you do that every day, and at the end of the day I literally pick up that sheet, look at it and say, did I learn anything? Literally I ask the question, what can I do today that I couldn't do yesterday? What changed while I was asleep in the world? Because the world moves fast. It creates an idea that I might be able to jump on. So that's a process I use literally every day to try to keep ideas flowing through my mind. So you use this to generate the idea of price line with your colleagues? Sure. So price line was an example because if you took, there were a bunch of separate points going on in the world. There was stories about distressed inventory. There were stories about articles about yield management systems. There were consumer trends. And if you were to keep looking at all those independent data points separately, it might not mean anything. But if you think of them as puzzle pieces, put all the pieces on the table, move them around. One day you wake up and you say, wait a minute, I could create this thing that couldn't have existed yesterday. Great to hear this idea of sponging and it would be great to have your thoughts later on on how you actually implement this. We could share with the entire audience. No other place? First of all, I want to say double and good on you, Mr. Hoppen, because it's a really good process. I'll add to it because I think that the other thing that you can do is what I call mash together. A lot of very interesting things happen at the boundaries. You know, that's where all the earthquakes are. That's where the volcanoes are created. They shake things up. But more than that, what happens is, what happens when you mash the coffee cup business up with a pen? Is there such a thing, you know, and that may be a silly one, but how do you mash an amusement park up with a TV studio? Could that lead to a video game? And so sometimes when you take disparate things and then just let your mind sort of wander as to what does this intersection speak to? And you can end up with an awful lot of very interesting things. The other thing is, I like a quote from Linus Pauling who said, if you want a good idea, get a lot of ideas. And I didn't do this at the beginning, but I do now. I have probably seven or eight business plans going all at the same time. And the business plans choose me. I don't choose them. And what I mean is that the world kind of moves to where all of a sudden one of them becomes more relevant and more interesting and more powerful. Because timing is really, really important. If you get the timing right, then everything works. If you get it wrong, you can't work hard enough to make it happen. And so by having several, you don't get so tied into something that's just the wrong time, wrong place. And so I really like this idea of be a relentless business plan writer. And take it to the point where you get an idea of how big the market is, what the product may cost or the service. And so you sort of sketch it out. It's two or three pages. It's not a big deal. And then you find it away for a few days. Mashup idea is fantastic. If you're in your mind places you don't know why you're going, it wouldn't be obvious to go to and see what happens when you get there. No, it's great. All great ideas, and they build on top of each other. Would you share with us some thoughts on how you came up with your idea of ComScore? Well, let me start with ComScore. And I think all ideas, all successful businesses, are ultimately about solving problems that nobody has solved or solving them in a differentiated way. So in 1999 the internet was at the peak of rational exuberance. A lot of companies were getting incredible valuations on the internet and going public without having any revenue or whatever. So the world was crazy about measuring eyeballs. So how many visitors you got will determine how valuable you are as a company. So we thought that at some point the rationality would prevail and people are going to ask the question, what are those eyeballs worth? When they go online, what do they buy, how do they transact? And so we got the idea that instead of just counting how many people come to a website, which there were a couple of companies doing that, we're going to solve the problem of measuring how many people or what people buy and how they transact. And our target customer was actually the Fortune 500 companies, which when they want to invest online or they want to use the internet to advertise to consumers, they really want to understand the ROI on their investments. So that was the origin of the idea. As I said, we started in 1999. That was a particularly different class of companies that were venture funded. About 95% of the companies that were funded that year failed. And the reason is that in 2000 the internet bubble burst and there was what I call the nuclear winter land of the internet that lasted two or three years where it was very difficult to get funding and the market dried up, et cetera, et cetera. But we somehow endured, we adapted, we went on to measure web audiences around the world. So by expanding globally, by measuring not only what people do on the web, but what video they consume, what search they consume, by measuring advertising campaigns and providing ROI measurements. And now we are into on-demand analytics. So it's an idea that got started and then evolved as the market conditions changed and as we had to deal with it. Now I want to echo what my colleague said. So my son is an entrepreneur who started a company at the age of 22 and actually was very successful. He made about $30 million by selling his company at the age of 24. So clearly... Like father, like son. At least he doesn't ask for an allowance anymore. Yeah, that's right. So I was having dinner with him a year ago and he said, so I'm saying, what are you going to do next? And he said, well, I have a whole bunch of ideas that I want to pursue. I have, in fact, 148 ideas. And I said, what are you talking about? So he pulled his iPhone and he has a list and every time he is doing something and he runs into a problem or he identifies a need, he writes it down. That's a great insight. And that's how he essentially creates this portfolio of ideas and eventually he will decide which one has the best chance of succeeding. It's connecting to what you were mentioning and exposing yourself to a lot of ideas and then analyzing and see how they connect and which one will bubble to the surface. Thank you very much. All of you great insights. And now let's hear about just one of the many great ideas that are coming from the MENA region, the same region. Mahgid is coming from JIST OPEKA. It's one of the most successful JIST Transformers and Lebanese entrepreneur who has turned her love of engineering and swimming into an exciting new product that will be in stores very soon. Her invention is that it was recently recognized and the consumer electronics shows by the Huffington Post as one of the top 15 gadgets at CES and also she was covered in Wired Magazine, BBC and Wall Street Journal. We would like to play now the question from Hind. My name is Hind Hubeika. I am the CEO of InstaBeat, a sports technology company based in Beirut, Lebanon. InstaBeat is developing a heads-up display for swimmers to monitor their training stats such as their heart rate, their calories, their number of labs and so on. I got the idea while training with my university's varsity team. I built the first prototype at the Stars of Science competition in Doha and I won the third prize. Then I got some funding from Veritech, a renowned Lebanese incubator and since then I gathered a small team and we've improved the product so far. Our plan is to take it to market. My advice to all entrepreneurs is to keep their eyes open, to keep breathing, trying new things and to always be critical. Nothing is perfect out there so as soon as you find something that you think can be improved, try it out and see if you can take things forward. Always apply to competitions, always go to meet-ups, meet other entrepreneurs. This will give you a lot of confidence and will help you know if you're thinking in the right direction. Good luck! It's great to see Hind serving as a great inspiration to young entrepreneurs and innovators around the world. We hope that her story would encourage everyone viewing to pursue their dreams of creating the next big tech idea. Now let's open up to questions for our panelists from the Mina Entrepreneurs. Please remember that you can send in your questions by tapping in the chat space below the video. Here's the first question from Perihan Abouzaid, the CEO of Kabila in Egypt. My name is Perihan Abouzaid. I'm the CEO of Kabila Media Productions from Egypt. My question is for all the panelists to consider. I already have a company. How do I know this is a good business idea? Thanks a lot for your time. Thank you, Perihan. I think it's a great question. So the question is, I already have an idea. Do I know it's a good idea? Sure, I'll take that one. And by the way, hello to both Hind and Perihan entrepreneurs that I've worked with, both and are very impressive global entrepreneurs out there setting a great example. So here's the thing, when most people have an idea, the mistake that they make, and I'm going to use that word, is that they go into their office or their conference room and immediately start working on it. People take an idea and say, I'm going to develop this thing, push it out into the world and see if people like it. And the good idea is to get out of your office immediately and go into the marketplace. Whoever it is that you're building this idea for, go see them immediately. So what we always did in my companies was we were never in our conference room. We were out in the market with the customers finding out, is there somebody that values this idea and is there a value equation? Is there somebody that will pay for this idea? So the most important thing you can do when you get an idea is figure out who the buyer of that idea is and how you can right away to make sure that you even have a real business there. A great answer. Let's move to the next question. That's an excellent question, Peihan. Now we have a question from Said Habdani, who is the program manager with the Algeria Startup Initiative, one of the partners of the GIST Initiative. Please. Hello, GIST Connect. My name is Said Handani from Algeria Startup Initiative, an organization aimed to foster entrepreneurship in Algeria. My question is for all of the panelists to consider. Can you please share a story of when the business idea failed and why? And then do you think you could have done anything different that would have led to a greater success? Thank you very much for your time and all your commitment to young entrepreneurs. Bye. Thank you very much. Nolan, would you like to address? It's a great question. I've probably had as many business failures as I've had successes. Well, not quite as many, but my biggest failure was actually a small personal robotics company that I tried to do in the early 80s. And the idea was sound. The market wanted something like I was describing. The technology just would not allow me. It was too soon, and I don't believe that there was anything I could have done other than figure out that the technology wasn't ready yet. A lot of the things I wanted to do, I needed multi-threading operating systems and I needed a whole bunch of servos with costs that were less than they were, things like that. And so getting your idea at the right time is really important because if it's at the wrong time, all you can do is wait. Like, right now, I think if I were to try to do my robot company again, I think it would be a massive success. In fact, I might do it. In fact, I might join you. Great. Thank you very much, Nolan. Thank you for the question, Said. Our next question is from Ziad Sankari, CEO of Cardio Diagnostic in Lebanon. It's just a coincidence that he's from Lebanon and our speaker is also originally from Lebanon. Let's play Ziad the question. My name is Ziad. I'm the co-founder of Cardio Diagnostics, a company that develops technology to monitor heart patients outside of hospitals for a long period of time so that we can diagnose patients and help them and save their lives. I have two questions for the panelists. The first, can you share with us a story about how you moved from a simple idea into a successful business? And the second is, how do you validate your venture ideas, especially in regions where data and statistics are lacking? Thank you very much. Thank you, Ziad. Magid, would you like to address the questions of Ziad? Ziad, great to meet you and great to meet successful entrepreneurs from Lebanon. So in terms of ideas, I have tended to basically solve business-to-business problems. And usually I find ideas in my employer, let's say, I would basically find problems that we're trying to solve that are still unsolved or by talking to customers and identify a need that is not solved or identify a need that is different from the way they're expressing it and there is a solution to it that is actually ingenious and can have an application that they are not directly asking for. Now in terms of new ideas, obviously I assume that the first thing is you would use the resources available on the web. There are many research companies that publish research for free on the web about market trends and statistics on different market sectors or different segments. ComScore, for example, we have a lot of research that we provide for free that's available on our website and there are a lot of other companies like that. There are a lot of news articles that the discipline of new product research usually starts with something called the focus group which is basically you identify 10, 20 people and you explain your concept and you try to get reactions to it. Now one of the things that you have to do is if you are the one that's kind of trying to collect that feedback people will be reserved about telling you it's a stupid idea. So you have to say oh a friend of mine I've heard this idea or something to give people the permission to give you true feedback about the idea. No one and I would be happy to tell you this statement by the way so just call us when you're not sure. Sometimes I even say I think this is kind of a crazy idea what do you think? Sort of prompt them to be negative because false positives are more expensive. People are uncomfortable telling you particularly if it is your idea that it is really something that doesn't work. So I think that that's in terms of evaluating the market. The other thing that you need to do, I mean ideas are a dime it doesn't. So the question is how defensible is the idea? Anybody else has it? If you were to adapt it is it going to be a local adaptation or is it going to be something that's global and what kind of differentiation you're going to add to it and also very important is that what would it take to get that idea to work and very often it's really important to have a team you might be a technical person somebody else might be a marketing person or a sales person and you cannot really create an idea in a vacuum as a single person you really have to have the team that will help you take it to market and if you really don't have that no matter how good the idea is unless you have VCs that will pair you with other people that can help you with that and the last thing is that if you can't really get immediate funding do you have the wherewithal to get a prototype? People react a lot better to something tangible that they can see rather than just a concept. Excellent insights and now we have a live question from Egypt from Cairo I have an idea but I'm hesitant to share it with anyone because I'm afraid it will be stolen do you have any advice for me this is actually through the just initiative we have seen it in other countries that we are working with it's like the concept that an idea can be stolen how do you share how much do you share do you share I actually want to jump on that one and welcome the question from Egypt I spent a lot of time mentoring entrepreneurs in Egypt and it was interesting that one of the best ideas I ever heard I had just come from Silicon Valley flew to Cairo to mentor entrepreneurs in a young Egyptian and shared it with them here's my answer to that question I have an idea and I'm afraid if I tell somebody they'll steal it this is going to be tough love but here's the answer if your idea is so easy to steal that you can tell it to me and I can move ahead of you get another idea an idea should be something that you have some amount of unique qualification to succeed at you have relationships in the industry and you believe you are well suited to execute that idea and everybody else isn't if it is an idea that's that simple then like I said you probably need a better idea you have to share your idea to get anybody to engage in it we won't give you money, we won't work with you you won't get people to work for you if you're not willing to share the idea there's no way you can build enthusiasm around the idea so you have to I will add to that it will be important also that idea and actually starting to implement that idea and a lot of the difference will be also in the execution of the idea provided that idea is a great idea and we'll talk about this in the next Gistek Connect Ghassan in Oman has a question for Nolan how did you come up with the name Atari I'm curious what are the steps to brand the start up well I my company originally was called Sysigy it's the last S in the dictionary and I was a techie and I thought it was a cool name but nobody could spell it nobody could say it the S company and so when it came to naming a the other Atari I decided that I wanted a short name short names are better and I wanted it to be easily pronounceable and easily spellable so that if you hear it you could probably find it in those days it was you know in the phone book but I was a play I played Go and I played the Japanese version of Go and Atari is a polite warning to your opponent that you're about to take all its stones oh so I thought that's a cool very aggressive name you know I'm about to take all your stones his other company was originally named Charles E. Cheese correct and you change it to Chuck well you know up Chuck is one of those things that anyway that's another story it's a great story to learn it's all about strategy too Mickey we'll take the next question Ali with our group at the Moscow College of Business and Sciences why do 70% of new companies fails how can we prevent these failures how do I know when a business isn't going to work would you like to say to respond to that question Magid well I wish that there was a formula that would prevent this this is really a statistic that has been going on for a long time it's just the nature of entrepreneurship and it's the nature of you come up with an idea there are execution problems there are market problems that can come up that are unanticipated there are also management and team problems so I suppose you can work on these two lower your risk but I have to tell you that in a lot of cases the line between success and failure is a very very thin line and you could be on the verge of failure today and on the riding the thrill of success a week from now or two weeks from now a lot of it has to do with perseverance and figuring out well if this idea is not working how can I adapt it modify it to be able to come up with a twist that has a better chance of working now that said that and I think this is really important in a lot of companies outside the US the fear of failure tends to be a great inhibitor for entrepreneurs because the culture doesn't really encourage that but I think that that's it's a badge of honor to have tried something and if it failed you learn from it and if you learn from it your experience would be very valuable for your next job or your next venture there are actually some venture capitalists will not invest if you have not failed previously I mean it's really crazy because the other part of that is if you never fail it just means you're not trying hard enough but leaders are people that push the edge a little bit so by definition you're going to stumble and fall and if you've never failed it just feels to me like you're just not pushing that hard you had also an example last night about Atari and AMD at a very turning point and that talks about importance a little bit if you could share that example was people think of Atari as being this huge success but we were really on the knife edge a couple of times and it failed and Jerry Sanders from AMD I went to him and I said I need some of your parts and yes the parts that you ship me before I still owe you money for them and it's over 90 days and I said but I can get through and I can pay you all of it and he said okay and as a result I gave him orders from then on and it was this community of help I didn't deserve the help at that time but he gave it to me and it was good for him talking about the building a community of support for the entrepreneurs and the importance of actually having a supportive customer that can help you through the tough times and it can go the other way too you know it's really interesting you say that because what a lot of people don't think of as their customer as a partner and maybe even an investor in some cases can solve all these problems somehow so the customer doesn't know about it but the smart thing that you did is sometimes when you go to the customer and say look if I can build this stuff you'll benefit from it but I'm not going to make it without a little bit of help there's a lot of great examples out there where people went to the customer and the customer said we'll help you get there but a lot of entrepreneurs don't even think of that as a customer as a source I hadn't thought of it but I was desperate Desperation helps you become more creative too International Islamic Marketing Association is there a way for a company to be for profit and still address societal problems in our countries? Sure, in fact you know earlier at the end of last year I hosted in the White House the Impact Awards which were Social Entrepreneurship and it was very interesting because the lesson learned was people think of Social Entrepreneurship as the company, the product we're planting trees, our company does that they think that the product or the service will be something that in itself does good but in fact one of the people that we gave one of the big awards to in the White House was a guy that sells wine on the internet, it's a company that sells wine selling wine on the internet is not in fact feeding the hungry or clearing pollution or anything that's not the point, the point is what he does with his profits so Social Entrepreneurship is not just about your product it's about what you do with your success he was an example of a company that takes their profits and goes out and reinvest them into the community around them, they pay for mammograms for homeless single mothers they pay for school lunches for intercity kids there's a lot you can do as a Social Entrepreneur with a social conscience with a for-profit company so it's not just about that your product has to be the social piece I think it's okay to do good while doing well and I plan to do very well in my education company right now but I think I can accelerate learning for every country in the world through the nature of your product enabling learning evolution, human growth okay, no that's great participants in our group at Muftak Solutions in Pakistan ask is it better to address an existing need or to create a new market like the iPhone did I would say an existing need is always a safer bet because when you are investing something totally new you really don't know how it's going to play out but if it does play out it's usually a much bigger success so you invested in Facebook when Facebook was starting it was kind of a wild idea there was no precedent for it not clear how you would make money on it in fact Google also took them about four years to figure out how they can make money on search so I think an existing need particularly in countries where the support infrastructure for entrepreneurs that don't really exist is probably a safer way to go than just starting something from scratch now I'll go a little bit deeper on that one because I think it's important when you find a need how do you are you looking to identify the needs how do you qualify a need I think that would be interesting because let's say I have your son mentioned you have a list of problems that he identifies it's important how do you do the next step in assessing a little bit that specific need you kind of go deeper how would you you just have to talk to people you have to talk to your potential customers you have to talk to potential consumers you have to do what I call the focus group or the poor man's focus group and ultimately will you find somebody that will pay for it somebody that will invest in it that's kind of the ultimate test is validation validation when someone pays to acquire your product exactly you know to that question I think Nolan said it best to the viewers question of how do you decide which idea to work on I completely agree with what Nolan said ideas pick you in the end you look at a bunch of ideas and one becomes obvious and in fact at my company color jar we do this thing we call the golden purpose helping people find their golden purpose in life or companies that's the thing that you are best equipped to succeed at so you might have 148 ideas but there's going to be some ideas on there that are just obvious that you are like robotics for you that you are a really good fit to pursue that idea the more you research ideas the more you find the one that is your golden purpose and it becomes more obvious it doesn't matter so much whether it's an existing need or a new market it matters are you a person that's able to succeed in that space with that idea I also think I also think ideas you need to think of them multi-dimensionally for example every idea can be a great big idea that is has the character this will be really good if it's really successful if it's really successful but the pathway to success is impossible are very expensive I think every idea has characteristics how much is it likely to cost to get started like I can have the idea for the best car but to start a new automobile manufacturing company is really tough and what you want to do is right size your idea to what you are doing and so I put several characteristics what the marketing is this an easy marketing problem is it a hard one is it cheap to finance can I finance it out of my back pocket can I you know you need to assess a lot of factors great is it better to do the small quick to market projects or large scale projects that might take more time and involve more risks and actually we anticipated the question I think that you always want to get into business and the quicker and faster you can get into business selling anything building anything getting a team together you can look at it as your first step I completely agree with that in fact one of the things I always tell entrepreneurs is you are trying to get credibility as an entrepreneur in the community with investors, with customers, with employees the way you do that is to win a gold medal in something when you see a gold medal athlete in any sport you know that they know about commitment forming under pressure so I agree with that get into business somewhere do something really well win a gold medal so when he says to you what have you done lately whatever it was big or small you did it really well and your last effort was a success it's important to get out there and get something done keep in mind that consumer oriented ideas may be easy to execute but very hard to market I find that in the business world if you are working for a company and then you have a customer that has a need that's unfulfilled and you just branch out and have that customer be your first customer, your first revenue source that's a great way to launch an idea and many, many successful companies have done that all great insights now off the mascot college of business and sciences if I have many ideas how would I know which one is the best and in what should I depend on in my selection to a certain degree we address but if you would like to know I think we said that there were two things one is getting immediate market feedback going out to customers right away to determine if there's a real market of people that actually value your service and will pay for it and then the second half of that was even if that's true you can't even execute this company do you have skills, experience, resource, relationships do you have any reason any unique assets about you that make you believe that you can actually execute this plan I think those are two important things in idea selection I tell people that they should build their product last that the first thing you do is you put it on a website and build, you know a website is real cheap you do it yourself and that or you do a one page sell sheet first one has the price and a rough picture of what it is and a little bit of a description and the idea of the sell sheet is the front is to attract you and the back has all the details and and you try to sell you know a lot of products are sold from a sell sheet and you go out and you try to sell it and and if that doesn't work then you build the box and you put a brick in it and it looks like the product and everything you know and the same thing it's just about communication if you can't sell the box with a brick in it they don't know that there's a brick in it but it has about the same thing if you can't sell that don't build the product of course it's an intermediary step great it's really important to realize that venture capitalists don't invest in ideas they invest in people and so we have to temper the enthusiasm I have this great idea or this and that by what makes you unique as no one said to be able to execute that and if you really don't have that move to the next idea that will make you and then I would also say that you really need to have a team around you that believes in that idea it's not just enough that you have that idea because it's not a one man show it's going to be a team show a lot of times venture capitalists are looking at you and saying what's this company like if I have to fire that guy great good insights now for all panelists from our group at the embassy back that do you have to be in the USA to be successful I think Jeff loves this question in fact I just over about the last 14 months kind of did a world tour of entrepreneurship right where I went to literally every continent some of those with you and the gist effort which were fantastic but also working with the State Department of the White House to look at exactly that question what does it take and here's the great news no you absolutely do not need to be in the USA to be successful nor by the way does your company have to immediately launch in the US in fact we tell people in their regions become successful in your region prove out your model right show that you can launch this business and then scale it don't start with the world on day one do something in a market that you can absolutely win at and prove your point but here's the thing idea generation right and the support that it takes today technology social media connectivity changed everything so today you could take a course at Stanford online for free that you could never do before you can access experts I actually use WhatsApp and Skype to mentor entrepreneurs all over the Middle East North Africa region all over the world on a regular weekly basis you can access expertise you can access tools you can access mentors so there's no excuse anymore when people tell me well I'm not American I tell them that you're just looking for a reason to fail but good ideas occur everywhere all the time and the support structure the infrastructure is there it's just harder to find in other countries but it's doable even more than that like in the video game business the Japanese have done a great job of exporting their culture in the form of games and right now I would love to play a Turkish game that has something unique about Turkey or a Pakistani game we have several sites in Turkey actually in the audience but what I really want to be able to do is I want a geography and a cultural lesson while I'm playing my games which helps with your learning exactly and I just think that you're going to get really unique stuff if people get proud of their culture and want to say hey there may be a world important of that so Chuck E cheese is going to want Chuck E falafel is what I'm hearing we will connect with our partners in Turkey and we have done a lot of great work there you have any thoughts on this or well I would say one of the formulas actually that has proven very successful is what Israeli companies tend to do which is they have the engineering and product development done in Israel where there is a lot of talent to do it and they almost very quickly open a commercial office in the United States so they kind of the investment and the validation of the idea happens locally but in order for them to shoot for the global stage and the global market they can have not necessarily a very expensive presence but a presence in the United States to get their initial idea launched and I think this plays to the idea of if you come from a country that's relatively small you can still use that as a kind of development base if you have technical talent which a number of the countries that we are working with have and then if your market is in the nearby countries but still you have to test just quickly I think it's a great idea I recently went on an entrepreneurship mentoring tour in countries like Slovenia and Kosovo countries with under 2 million people in it it was interesting because some people said well and I said well you're looking at that as a disadvantage the advantage of if you live in a small market country is it's easy to actually control launch test really get a full understanding of the market in a small market because you can dominate it do it really well and then expand Sami at the Muscat College of Business and Sciences asks Mr. Bushnell you started in an age where entrepreneurship was foreign the entrepreneurial ecosystem in many countries not as developed as in the US how do we keep trying well one of the things that's happening is that a lot of countries are starting to become aware that their laws and regulations are actually toxic to startups and we are trying to move that and I've been giving lectures about what is toxic in terms of that and I believe that if you happen to be in a country that is toxic to entrepreneurship I think it will be changing but more than that I think that this whole idea of entrepreneurship is one which is growing quickly and I like the maker movement which is for very young kids as well as older people to start building things the internet is democratized marketing in a very important way and the things like the Raspberry Pi and the Arduino has enabled a great deal of invention to be taken place with very very small amounts of technology in reality and so what we're having is this acceleration that is just being incredible and I'm very optimistic that everything is going to get better tomorrow great thank you I think it's important to differentiate between entrepreneurship which is much broader than high tech entrepreneurship entrepreneurship has existed for the last two centuries I mean if you think about all the American companies and a lot of the European companies think about a Renault or a Peugeot or Henry Ford they all started as entrepreneurs there are 11 million small businesses in the US and a lot of them are very successful and they can scale to something so it doesn't really have to be high tech think about Starbucks what's high tech about Starbucks nothing think about I met the other day the owner of a chain in the US called Haircuttery it's about cutting hairs at a relatively low price started it with one salon thought that it's doing well he started opening more and more stores and then it became a very successful chain so I don't think it's we should kind of limit ourselves in defining entrepreneurship to being the next Facebook or Google entrepreneurship entrepreneurship comes in different shapes and forms and even the technology companies they have different market sizes you know different needs that they address not they are only few of the big ones that you can call like Facebook and Google but there are a lot of needs local that can be addressed to technology and sometimes just creating a brand where people have an expectation and it's fulfilled which is a process or a new model all that's entrepreneurial yeah great Jeff you talked about identifying new trends in technology what trends do each of you see as the next big things and this will be a kind of I think one of the last questions trends in consumer I'm not sure of sort of what what angle in technology what sort of big trends in technology so you know we're seeing a few trends obviously there's some that get a lot of media like big data the fact that people are getting more and more engaged about the intelligence that's in the data right when you're running a business somewhere out there is enough data to launch a company on that I think even though we've talked about it before it's still a big trend in getting better because the tools are getting smarter for doing that and the truth is in the price line case the whole reason the price line was able to succeed was because we had the data to show hotels and airlines the money they were leaving on the table with empty hotel rooms and empty airplane but we just added it up here's all the money you're leaving on the table and we can get you that money data was I think that's a huge trend but we're seeing other really interesting trends the obvious ones in social media and social buying the ones we still don't know what they mean like all things geo right the fact that we used to you know an application sit on a computer on a server somewhere there's no idea who you were aware what where you were now we'll see more trends and things like geo that wherever we are our phone will change the apps will change their decision making based on literally where I am and what I'm doing so I think there's any number of trends but I think those are some of the interesting ones what about you guys well I think that in the game space the oculus riff is going to be a game changer for the video game side of things I actually think the google glasses are going to be a game changer in the video game space and these are both at the time when you jump in by the time they really come along you will be wouldn't you have loved to be the first app on the iphone you'd sell a lot of things you know and I feel like those are important the other one I think is going to be an important thing is what does the google car auto drive automobiles what does that imply for ancillary services that is if you have a car that's driving itself can you can you give it a hamburger while it's driving at 60 miles an hour or what have you there's a whole different kind of environment that's going on that's a big trend well I think the mobile internet is going to be a lot bigger than the desktop internet so mobile and applications about mobile are going to be very popular in particular exploiting the local aspect of what mobile can enable another trend that I see is you know using sensors about the body to be able to make decision make health decisions etc and I think it's interesting that the two examples here that we had today had to do with leveraging sensors about the body to provide useful information to the user thank you our group in Bangladesh asked if any business idea fails the entrepreneur may be mentally shocked how do you deal with failure let's go the other direction let's go this way well you just have the resilience to to pick up and to pick up and go there is you basically try to find out what went wrong what can you learn from it how can you apply it in your next job or your next venture and I also think that the notion that failure is shameful is something that antithetical to really being an entrepreneur and taking risk if 7 out of 10 ideas fail the people who are in all of the people who are in those in those kind of ventures are not stupid they are actually they have thought well they have a lot of skills and expertise it just it did not work and they pick up and go that's really what differentiates ultimately somebody who is really successful versus somebody that gets crushed under the weight of a failure thank you and we'll get the last questions from Pakistan sometimes a great idea needs someone else to do it how do you find someone to take on the task of turning that idea into reality and how do you separate yourself from your idea okay I think that's absolutely a great question because you pointed out already you cannot well let me say it this way you are never as smart as you think you are no matter how successful you've been you need people smarter than you in the areas that you're not an expert in to launch it's always a team effort the best team wins you have got to build a team to be able to succeed and find people smarter than you in those areas and to answer the second part of that question how do you build a team like that you build a team by asking people what their goals are the mistake entrepreneurs make is I go to Nolan and say I'd like you to work 7 days a week around the clock so that one day I can buy a boat Nolan every day he's working for me because someday I want to own a big boat if I go to Nolan and say tell me your dreams your life plan what you're trying to achieve and then I say look I can draw a map from you to your goals by working on this project with me that motivates people I have a funny story my sister boss at some point basically she had a nice house near her desk and her boss comes if you work really really hard you and your team someday this house will be mine talking about nice alignment of motivation and I'm afraid we're out of time and thank you so much for a wonderful panelist and everyone viewing we have viewers from 25 countries around the world and Tech Connect is a great platform that allows us to kind of share ideas and experience and expertise and inspire entrepreneurs I would like to thank all our partners around the world that helped made this event a possibility the partnership with Konex, the State Department, CRDF Global the George Washington University will be heading for to take live questions the North American Arab Chamber of Commerce and to the Ventures type Egypt Innovate Tepav Algerian startup initiative and CTIC in Senegal. I would like to encourage all the viewers to join our community you have 125,000 entrepreneurs online on our Facebook and we leverage this to share opportunities about our upcoming events we can continue to help one another in our local entrepreneurial community by actually connecting with just and thank you all for for the time I would like to just do it and just do it and basically I would like to emphasize that we start to see results with the just community the top 100 entrepreneurs in our network raised 21 million and generated almost 400 jobs so all our efforts here talking and sharing ideas and experiences ultimately would lead to a transformation and a positive change in the communities and I would like to emphasize that this is just the beginning of a conversation there's a long road and we started to walk that road together with our entrepreneurs and there are a lot of market problems that wait to be solved and many ideas waiting to materialize there's our panelists said before be aware of what is going on around you talk to people read a lot open your mind and if you have an idea do not wait too long it is better to test it now and see if it works believe in yourself and do not let anyone discourage you and think big there's nothing you cannot but remember it's not just about having an idea it's also about making it happen and we will organize the next series of the tech connects exactly focused on the next steps the bootstrapping how to raise capital for your ventures how to get customers and in the end I would like to thank you again and also our team just Fidan Amanda Natalia Anna Catherine Jeff thank you this program has been brought to you by connects