 Hi everyone. My name is Elmira Bay-Rasli and I am a visiting fellow at New America. I'm also the co-founder of Foreign Policy Interrupted and I'm excited to welcome you to today's GIST group program and today's program we're going to be talking about overcome challenges facing your startup. For the next hour my colleague and my friend Habib Haddad and I will be fielding and answering your questions. Let me just introduce you a little bit to Habib. He is a serial entrepreneur. He's an early-stage investor and he's currently the managing director for the E-14 fund. You can join our discussion by sending us your questions and comments through the chat roll on the side of your screen or through Twitter at hashtag GISTGuru that's G-I-S-T-G-U-R-U. So while we wait for your questions to come in let's start talking about some of the unique challenges faced by entrepreneurs in emerging economies. Habib would you like to kick it off and dive into it and tell us about your background? Thank you Elmira. It's great to be here. So maybe I'd like to tell you a bit about my journey and kind of my weird winding road into the world of entrepreneurship and sort of investing in all of that. I grew up in Lebanon and after my undergraduate studies I decided to move to the U.S. to study at USC to really work in Hollywood in the graphic industry. But little did I know that actually an Arab can find a job in Hollywood right after 9-11. So at that time my ex-girlfriend was at MIT. She was much smarter than I am but I had her username and password. So I used that. I logged in and I found these three people wanting to spin off a company based off of a PhD thesis and the work was a really interesting research around transforming pictures into 3D models and that was before the iPhone and before the GPUs on that time. So I flew to Boston, met with them and decided to build the company. We raised a bunch of money, hired a bunch of people, but we kind of did it all wrong. I walked into the office and the ventures the VCs have taken over, the investors basically, they fired everyone including me and so they said you know we're actually changing the model because we don't believe you're running the company in the right way. So at that night I did what the only thing I could do so I flew to Vegas. I decided to kind of forget about it and kind of come fresh. I remember vividly as I was going back to the airport, as I was walking through the airport between all the slot machines that are in the airport of VCs Vegas, they called me up and they say hey we're actually assembling a small team together to revive it and we'd like you to be part of us again. And I was like okay perfect. So I flew back, I joined the team again and found a job meanwhile at a company called ATI. The reason why I wanted to find a job is the culture, the startup changed, but also as an immigrant entrepreneur you want to find a place where you have safety on your on your status. So I joined the company called ATI but we got bought by AMD at some point and that also allowed me to get my green card. Meanwhile, my entrepreneurship itch was coming back and I decided to start a company in linguistics called Yemli and that's an Arabic linguistics company that transforms phonetic language, phonetic sounds into real Arabic language. And when we launched in 2007 we became one of the most doubted innovation in the Middle East. We had millions of users, we grew up very quickly. We couldn't fundraise from the Middle East actually because in emerging markets at that time there were very few institution investors that would invest in consumer companies. So we raised from the valley, built the company in Boston and as we were going super well and we're doing rapidly, we weren't able to monetize. We were earlier than what the online advertising space would accept. We couldn't make enough money and so I remember actually at some point we ran out of money, I went to my online account using this tool called Mint that combines all your credit cards and all your bank accounts were in place and everything was read. And I only had 150 bucks or something in my bank account and it was really scary but also at the same time challenging and in a weird way funny, maybe now, maybe not back then, but I wanted to take a screenshot so I could remember and mine myself is wrong about that situation. I was too afraid to do that because I thought I'd jinx it. So anyway, I remember that being pushed and being really cornered into that situation pushed me to be very creative and to think about hacking my way into it and hacking sales. So what I did basically that week was we had this amazing technology, a lot of user base, zero ways to monetize it. So I decided to figure out a different way to monetize it. So I went online and started thinking about all the ways we could sell our technology licensed to other companies. So eventually it turns out that Boston has a very strong linguistics community and I was able to identify a few companies that were able to sign and deal with us for less in a week, give us a half a million dollar check and then we were able to pay our debts and take it up from there. So that led us to really building a proper business from there, from then on, eventually we sold the technology to Yahoo in 2011. In 2011 something else was happening in the world and that was the Arab Spring Revolution. And I was actually in Boston but all of my friends, the tech leaders, the entrepreneurs in the Arab world, found themselves as leaders in Tunisia and in Egypt and in places in other places as well as Syria and early on and then decided to take it up upon themselves to build the right tools and push people on the streets doing Facebook groups or Twitter or building some custom bespoke tools. And I found myself completely in the middle of it, we actually at some point built this tool that combined a thousand translators live to transcribe voice calls that came from Egypt when the internet was shut down in Egypt by the government. The protesters would call this number, we would transcribe them, push them on Twitter. And so that opened up my eyes to the emerging talent and the amount of creativity that comes from emerging markets, especially from the Middle East. And I was so excited and so hopeful, obviously the outcome was not exciting and hopefully was disappointing, but at least we saw that there was a lot of emerging talent there. So I decided at that time that maybe my next chapter in life should be to go back to the Middle East and have bring this talent under one roof and build a community that would push the energy into productivity rather into movements but more into communities. Movements are short-lived against something and communities are for a bigger purpose and longer. So I decided to do that and Fadi Rando at that time wanted to do something similar as well. He said, why don't you come on your partner. And we eventually did one though, which became the largest platform focused on creating at the biggest media on focus on entrepreneurship in the Middle East where we spotlight them as heroes of emerging markets. We have a fund that invests in early stage companies and we also do a bunch of mentorship and support to both governments on a policy level. So after I've done that for about five or six years, I also noticed another trend globally, which is technology. Technology especially is moving super fast when you talk about artificial intelligence, when you think about biology and the intersection of biology and the digital world, when you think about advanced manufacturing. And I thought that the next 20 years are going to be very different from the past 2000 years. So then I decided that I've achieved my mission in the Middle East and I wanted to learn what's happening more in the world of technology and science and try to influence that for the better of society. So as of two months ago, I'm based now in Boston and today there's a snowstorm so I'm talking to you from my home. I'm based in Boston building an early stage fund that invests in MIT spin-offs focused on some of the life-changing technologies of breakthrough innovations. Great, well then that serves as a basis for a really rich discussion in terms of how you can overcome challenges in building startups. You started out with a failure, you did manage to not be discouraged and get into something else as an entrepreneur and succeeded that. You've done a little bit of investing and now you're back doing some more investing in a totally new field. So I think that that's a great basis for us to dive a little further. So looking forward to the audience questions and please send them in. Again the hashtag on Twitter is just guru and you can send them in on just screen to your right. But I'm going to take the moderator's prerogative and I'm going to ask the first question. I think entrepreneurs wherever they are they face challenges. But let's be honest, the entrepreneurs in places that you and I know well like Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey and other parts of the Middle East face more than those in Silicon Valley or in Boston. Are there specific strategies or resources entrepreneurs outside Silicon Valley whether they're in the Middle East, Asia, Latin America or even Europe should utilize when confronting when they confront the challenges that entrepreneurs normally face? Yeah I think usually challenges they're very similar across countries and borders but obviously as you said some of them become much more acute in emerging markets. So there's a few challenges that are at least from my observations and my experience in the Middle East were much stronger. The first one is around stabilizing cash flow and stabilizing your investments in general and managing your company from a financial perspective. As you build a consumer-based company it's very hard to let's say think about building a Twitter of the Middle East because you won't have enough investors that will keep on pumping cash into your company hoping that at some point you can figure it out and then make an IPO and all of this. So therefore building companies startups in the Middle East or emerging markets you have to have a much more focus on profitability early on on a solid on a sound business model early on and really thinking about about how to manage risks. So from that perspective some of the strategies for that is figuring out how to hack your cash flows and by that I mean figuring a way to get sales very quickly early on and and really and really not not just rely on investment. I remember this story when I was in I was I went to Techstars the first Techstars demo day in Boulder Colorado and we we took it afternoon day off and we drove up the mountains and there were this sign that says beware of the mountain lions in this area and it's and it said basically how to fight mountain lions and one of them said if your mountain lions comes and you see them you have to pretend you're bigger than you are so you have to stand tall put a jacket on top of your head and you scare the mountain lion and and I think startups do that every single day. Startups have to always pretend they're bigger than than what they are and they have to kind of you know really hack their way into being able to sell to sell large deals with big companies and and be able to eventually get to the next level. So number one is cash flow that's a big challenge number two is talent. In non-mature markets there isn't enough companies to push a talent from talent that you want that's used to culture the startup culture that's also self-driven all of that so you really need to build your own culture from scratch you need to hire people early on you need to have to be much more purpose driven and need to focus much more on your people focusing on your people is much more of an important thing in the start of the emerging markets than other places because you are one of the very few ones doing that whereas in mature markets there are so many different opportunities for them to go and learn through startups or conferences or programs but in emerging markets you have to take it upon yourself as a startup founder to really invest in your people and the third thing I think is is scalability in the US you have one big market for 250 million people in it in emerging markets often you find you're in fragmented countries and you have to jump borders so how to do that and and again going back to hacking your way in there are ways to do that through working with large established businesses that have access to those markets but are also scared a bit of the innovation coming into their coming in their way where they find potentially you as a founder a potential partner in entering that and the last thing I want to add as a challenge is a challenge that's more like as a founder yourself as your own person growth often it's always the journey is always up turned downs and often entrepreneurs there's the fear of talking of entrepreneurship and depression and the fear of talking about entrepreneurship and really you know issues where you especially when you're down and you want that community around you you want people who went through it and you want to find that mentor that can tell you this is that's fine it's totally normal this is how you kind of fight against it so that's kind of support network and support system might not be directly available but it's definitely there so then entrepreneur in emerging markets have to do an extra effort to make to make to do a conscious effort as well to build their own networks around them as mentors supporters advisors or just peers as well where they can always bounce ideas off us great and I think you know the example that you just gave about having you know going out there and seeking the mentor network I think that that is really important in helping entrepreneurs really overcome their challenges and as you just said you know there are ups and downs in in working on a startup can you also in addition to the men you know finding mentors are there any other tips that you can provide about how to be persistent and not get discouraged when you're faced with all these challenges that that entrepreneurs are yeah so I mean I I mean I think at the end of the day it's it's the support network is there to kind of make sure that you have the mental stability and strength to go at it right so I think number one is the mentors number two is really important to have your own personal balance as a founder so I think investing in yourself and your own personal growth is something that very few people work around and often when I talk to my full of companies I push them to take some days off I push them to to go and get inspired because the thing is you don't want to be too focused because if you're too focused then you lose out on the peripheral vision and you lose out on being creative and getting inspired by by by and furthering and furthering your company or your product but if you have a very wide peripheral vision then you get diluted and you just go over the place so it's about finding that balance between too focused and peripheral vision so that you're able as an entrepreneur to grow yourself but at the same time and get inspired and and not lose track of what you're up there to build so really I think investing in yourself is a very important thing so it's about pushing yourself putting yourself where you think you feel in areas where you might feel you're stupid I think feeling stupid is actually a good thing this is how you are growing this is when you know you are learning new things and this is where you become as a kid working around and trying to put Lego pieces together and coming up with something that looks super quirky but eventually becomes creative that's what you need to be you need to be a kid every single day as a founder but at the same time you need to make sure that you also keep things together and focus so that kind of balance is very hard to maintain but there's one I think that's very important to keep great okay yeah I'm all about self-care so that's great suggestion so we've got a question from Twitter from Alice Matenga and Alice asks if I want to partner with a local municipality to provide new technologies that solve a problem but the local council does not understand my new innovative approach do you have any advice on how to best pitch the idea in a way that allows them to see the benefit absolutely so I think number one is sometimes you just do it you know I think I need to be careful on what and what advice I give as long as you're within the legal premise you can sometimes just do something that proves it often it's much harder to pitch and prepare this business plan and prepare this presentation and go and figure out who to meet and convince them that you can do it sometimes much easier to just do it they're much cheaper actually so rather than really try to focus on how to get into the municipality early on from the get go why not actually figure a way to pilot this on a small scale one of the companies actually that is one of our portfolio companies here in Boston is called Sufa and Sufa builds those benches and those signs that are solar powered and they work they have also they track people around them so they can map what's happening in the city the pedestrians and all the data so eventually obviously they need to deploy those those benches into into the city so they have to talk about municipality and the mayor of Boston and Cambridge but before they were able to do that they actually talked with their MIT graduate so they talked with MIT to put them on campus and MIT was friendly enough to let them do on campus so is there some is there a way where you can find a friendlier entity that's not a municipality where you can start proving it on a small scale a community a building your friend's office whatever it is something where you can start doing that without having to go the wrong route and use it as a case study to go to the municipality also always think about what they care about sometimes the municipality cares about press and looking at as an innovative so if that's what they think they care about then make sure that you actually play that angle quite well and play it very well it might they might care about saving you know being friendlier and have a much better customer service maybe there's there's an upcoming inaction so list all the things in priorities of what you think the municipality people care about and always think about that every single person has a boss even the head of the municipality has someone to report to so think about all of those and then and then break them down and see how you can match those and you can actually again engineer your way into it put on a pilot stage if they care about press maybe get someone to cover you on a small scale and then go to the meat prices seat if we actually take this to a larger scale you can you can you can make a big impact so I don't know exactly what the situation is but break it down and then and then draw your path from there great thanks Habib we have a question coming in from the international resource center at the US embassy in kongali and they ask how do you ensure that you're able to deliver a product or service that meets a critical need better than anyone else does when there is little market research available regarding competition price points and other other issues that's a good question and the easy answer is you just do it uh I think spending too much time on competition and price points and all of that early on as again is is is is not the best use of your time because the cost of innovation and the cost of building a product and if we're talking about I'm not sure are they saying if it's a technology product or a physical product or it's not clear um I think they're looking I mean I think their question is is how are you able to deliver a product or service that meets a critical need right so technology or can it can be anything really right so maybe maybe I should touch on both on both things if you really get technology product it's actually much faster much cheaper to do it and then as you're building it you can start testing and iterating and also and obviously the competition is important you need to understand who's around there who put uh who is competing with you but you don't need to go and really obsess about your competition really if you think there's a critical need as you said that's not being met then obviously there's a demand for a product now on the physical if you're building a physical product as well there's also ways to do it on a small scale I think I'm a big fan of um of letting go of the business planner Leon and just going ahead and and just building your product I think what you'll notice that you find a lot of interesting insights from your user base and you might even adapt and change your product completely so it really it's about just applying some of those basic lean methodology principles as you build your own product earlier okay great um so that's yeah and touching on that I think you're I think you're right I think you just you just have to go out there and and do it we have a question coming in from our a group in Honduras Unitech and Honduras at Unitech underscore and they ask how did you use your setbacks to push your company forward um it is a very good question I and it goes back to the own personal goals um and trying to be balanced I think it's so first of all I think you shouldn't look at them as setbacks it's a change of mindset they're learnings and think of yourself as this empty cup that you're filling and then every every time you're doing something you're actually filling up the cup more and more and you want to make sure that you keep on filling and that cup is endless it's not like a cup that has a limit it's going to keep on filling and filling and you need to do that and in this world day and age um with the technology rapidly changing and all sorts of different things happening it's very it's very hard to keep up so you want to keep on moving keep on moving and just and learn from what you're doing and keep on and keep pushing pushing forward but practically speaking how I learned my first failure uh from the uh from the first company in Moxley where we we kind of all got fired is uh in fact I came very close friends with most of the founders um one of the founders they became my co-founder of my second company uh the the idea what I understood and the insight was that so the the issue the main issue there is what what is that we set out to build this amazing technology in the product but we spend so much time over engineering it only if we do this pretty better well let's do that let's do this let's do that like a typical engineer really making sure that product is perfect that we forgot to actually talk to the customer and see what they wanted and how much and how much they would pay for it and all of that so that iterative process did not was not something that we included in our first company and so that was before this whole methodology uh you know phenomenon was was launched but still so that's a big learning that I keep I take forward with me and I really cherish during during my my my empty days one of the biggest failures was to uh to not have that peripheral vision to be very just focused so we we did this this this company and we said we're we're going to be a search engine we're going to we're going to own uh um uh the user's attention in arabic online want to think about information but then we forgot we actually forgot that we have this amazing technology in the background that could be utilized for many different applications in fact today our business model has nothing to do with our initial application our initial application was typing using phantic languages and right now our business model is around selling this linguistics platform to banks to airport security to all kinds of of companies that really care about the linguistics and the intelligence that you can extract from from from from the technology that we built so having a peripheral vision is very important and the way we actually kind of stumbled upon it and something that I learned they draw is we opened up our we had some of our product opened up so that people can come jump on it and and use some of our apis free of charge to build their own tools and one of the companies actually built something that eventually inspired us to do our business model they used that for for elections in lebanon as they wanted to go on the on the figure out where the election the actual uh voters they would put their first and last name and the tool would actually expand their first and then last agent all the variations that they could be spelled into an english find the database and then tell them where to go to so that preferred vision approach is something that I learned a lot from from my uh second experience at me so about keep moving forward but using these setbacks as a learning mechanism to move forward I love that I love um you know not looking at it as a setback but actually um you know actually saying like okay like what can I learn from this and looking at it as an opportunity and I think you know at least in my work that I've done around the world with global entrepreneurs I think the most successful ones or or do exactly what you talked about they're the ones that don't necessarily think consider challenges to be roadblocks but say like okay so what are the opportunities and I love I love that vision that you just laid out about the the vision so it's not focused head down but it's it's head up and move forward so that's great in fact in an emerging markets and you find and you know this quite well you find a lot of companies as they build their own core models they start building peripheral companies around them so for example slug.com which is the Amazon of the Middle East they initially started by building the e-commerce platform but then they figured out there's a big challenge in payments so rather than say it's a setback like I'm not going to be able to actually figure it out they built a solution to fix payments using the scratch card kind of you know the the buy off of a in a grocery store and then eventually this become its own company payforge also a big you know substantial company they also built their own logistics platform because last month delivery was not as efficient so as company as an entrepreneur you always have to take challenges and build something out of them if you've watched the movie matrix there's at some point where you know when they throw things at you and you have to do this like move and the the bullets come come right next to you this is kind of an entrepreneur you have to like dodge the bullets but you have to do it graciously and kind of come back from it and learn and move forward. Yeah and I'm glad that you brought up Suc and the different Suc.com is one of the highest valued companies in in the Middle East and they you know they recognize kind of what their limitations are and and working to overcome them and one of our Twitter viewers Arnold Jean Pierre he has a question about what he asks you what do you think Habib is the most significant obstacle Middle Eastern entrepreneur space? If I want to pick one it's scaling across borders because you have 22 countries with with with borders and you have to do business from one country to the next it's it's tough you have to set up new infrastructure from scratch again not not always from from complete scratch but from close to scratch so it's how can you enter new markets so that's the biggest challenge and so the challenge becomes on your sales your business strategy your business development strategy your partnership strategy as you break down your scalability. I think fundraising is an issue but it's getting solved because you have more and more funds right now and you have international investors also putting in some money the talent is an issue but there's always solutions around that you can really build up your talent from scratch and it's going to take you more time but you also bring loyalty with your team and you bring your family together but scalability is the main issue and so so far some companies have been doing them on their own like Souk for example has done it the tough way and he actually wrote on the wave of Aramex but eventually he started doing it under their own way Aramex is kind of the DHL of the East and so but and then as they do that you also there's the flip side of that is as you do that they also are building very long compared to walls because it's very hard for others to come and compete with you because it took you so much so long to get to go to other markets now you can do it the tough way the hard way or you can do it a slightly easier way which is find someone you can ride the wave of so let's say you are again example of Souk and Aramex but also example of let's say you're in a fintech company and work with a bank that has branches all across the East or let's say you're a loyalty program and you work with a mall operator across various countries so three about finding your way into to scale so scalability and access to markets that's the part I see in emerging markets and in the recent years okay so I think related to scalability we actually have a question from a viewer who and the viewer asks do you have any advice on how to approach larger companies you wish to partner with to help your startup yeah so I think uh large large companies are this crazy weird beast that is that is that's not very that I'm not you don't find there's not two companies that are the same each company is different and the thing at least this is this is why so so let's let's talk very quickly first about the situation of large companies it's come to innovation small companies uh large companies historically have not really played too much in that space very few have played in that space and the past five five years or so they're realizing how how how fast the business model are changing and technology and how fast they're getting disrupted obviously the example of Kodak is the the infamous example that gets me repeated but there's many more examples like that so then companies said we want to start doing an innovation one more get we get in over some of them decided well let's actually switch this we have a head of business development of some unit let's make them head of our innovation unit and then from way in the suit this guy goes over goes and wear jeans and jacket and they feel they think that they are innovative and they think they're cool but they're actually just using all techniques into new under a new package so so so then others are trying to actually start a startup program where you can where you can partner with them some of those are are just at the PR level and they're not very deep so they're they're just enough for them to write the precedence and say we have something independent that doesn't talk to our core companies so we have this company and we have a small thingy on the side of CSR that you can operate with but if you can't work with us actually it's just there you can give you mentorship and access to space and whatever and and then the third category is actually where they really believe in it and they and they're trying to embrace it so GE is one of those examples where they're doing a lot in that space investing partnering with startups reopening up their doors and building platforms for that so when you first understand you the other party and you put them into kind of different buckets then you know how to to address them because you want to address them again you always want to think what the other side is cares about and you want to understand where you enter because as a large company there's certainly doors to enter and you want to knock on the right door you want to find the right champion because that champion will help you navigate then of the the weird world of of and the bureaucracy and the processes and this champion eventually you want to build a strong personal relationship with because that champion eventually will will will tell you what where to waste your time what not to waste your time and give you the heads up on stuff happening so so number one is find your champion within a company number two is also make sure that whatever you propose really is aligned with what the company's at KPIs and goals are so always ask what are your KPIs like what's your strategy with the engagement with startups what if we were at work together what does it mean what does it mean for us for this to become successful and then also think about try to understand the the the kind of where we're eventually gonna lead again as I mentioned there's a three buckets are you gonna lead into the core business or are you gonna get stuck into this PR bucket and or are you gonna be actually be able to get into it with them and then lastly I think if your first customer is gonna be the toughest but once you find that once you're able to to kind of unlock the door on that then you have to focus on one then the other doors will be will unlock much easier then you figure it out then you become more of a peer trying to figure it to enter the door rather than the small startup trying to figure out how to navigate that maze okay great um we've got a question from Muhammad and in Muhammad asks how do you expand your company from the Middle East to outside the MENA region is it as hard as it seems and he's particularly concerned with the cultural differences yeah so um there's a bunch of startups that I was invested in and on the board of that did that and first of all you have to decide if it makes sense to extend or not sometimes it might not make sense so if you have the right talent in the Middle East if you have the right team the culture you might just want to expand the business front-facing office and you don't want to expand your whole operation um so there's this company called Calculate Diagnostic for example Lebanon that produces this highly accurate um sensors for the heart and they all of the technology is built in the north of Lebanon a place called Tripoli and they only expanded their their sales and front office in the US where they are actually able to go and sell and talk with hospitals and kind of have that kind of credible presence if you want in the US other companies have moved completely there's this company called Instabit that I'm also on the board of that's a wearable for swimmers um and you put it on your goggles as you swim it gives you your heart rate they were trying to build it from scratch in the Middle East but they couldn't find all the right partners and especially with a with a specific experience in hardware and in particular case of of some electronics so they decided actually to move all of the company to Silicon Valley where they were able to get partners but then this is one category but then yeah so one is keep your kitchen wherever you are expand expand your front office the other option is move all together to to to wherever you be your biggest market there and and the last thing again I I want to stress on is think about if it makes sense or not to expand international to which markets some markets are easier than others if we if you talk about some of the similarities of culture at least from a user perspective consumer perspective we can think about Middle East North Africa Southeast Asia Turkey Africa in general so you have to think about where what where are users facing the same challenges and again and I end with one last point is if you have if you built existing partnerships with your company then with these see where those partners have actual presence in and try to write their way to enter new markets they can open doors much faster than going into a new market from scratch I'm I'm going to jump in here um because there's there's a question from a group in Monrovia and their question is about people are hesitant to work with startups how can one gain trust from clients and investors and you talked a little bit about trust just earlier but I think there's also the stigma of you know if you are an entrepreneur from the Middle East there's a stigma of you know are they reliable and you know you know is it stable is it stable to work with entrepreneurs from the Middle East so how do you how do you cultivate trust in situations like that yeah I mean that's a very good question and unfortunately it's it's in many regards it's true but this is where again as a startup you have to build you have to remember the lion example that we talked about earlier you have to do the lion thing and the way to do the lion thing here is to to build a good advisory network around you so board members to to be able to enter some networks there's a lot of like networks where like the endeavor network for example if I'm part of the endeavor network uh then you have some credibility uh if you if you're part of some investors uh if some particular investor put money in you that you have some credibility if you have someone on your board advisory board then you have a credibility so as you build your support network and you group around you figure out how you what can you use from this network to increase your credibility often it's also about press releases and awards I really dislike awards by the way um I if it's if the award is the purpose the word is only a tool that you can use it you can step on I think the worst thing you can do as an entrepreneur or the worst thing you can do to entrepreneurs give them awards because like the award is very much later down the lines when you retire that's maybe life achievement award but all the award that you get early on I think sometimes you tend to overdo it my gaming awards really dampen the spirit of entrepreneurship but that's a footnote but you can use that word for credibility and then the last thing is as I mentioned is use build a very strong relationship with one company so one or two or three or four companies whatever it is with that champion that champion eventually will get you in the door one last great oh okay sorry is a lot of companies have programs some of them are used for some of them or not so try to find those companies so GE has a startup program Emirates Airlines friends that I know the startup program quality lots if you try to join some of those programs you might be able to start warming up those relationships I think it's very important when you think about relationship building with corporates it's not binary you don't go and knock on the door when you need it you knock on the door much early on than when you need it and very slowly you don't that trust and relationship uh moving forward great um our twitter viewer Eduardo Vasquez he asks can you provide advice on how to overcome challenges facing Latin America that come as a result of globalization uh and globalization in what sense in terms of uh competitors entering the market um I think I mean it's it's it's not I I don't have the specifics here but I think you know I think one of the challenges that we have as a result of globalization is increased competition and so I think bigger countries certainly like we've seen with China and India and countries like Brazil they just by their very nature of their size um you know they have a competitive advantage over countries like Lebanon or or Uruguay so um how can smaller countries um overcome the challenges of that's that's a very good question and actually applies not just to Latin America or emerging markets also applies to technologies in general because if you think about startups even if you let's say you're building a company in in the US around around AI you're competing with the googles of the facebook's and the idm's of this world who have tons of data and are able to really build the the most massive machine learning tool that can compete with you and crush you same thing and and and if you're building a company in brazil or uruguay and you're trying to build the amazon of that region and amazon can come in and really really swipe you so I think as as entrepreneurs it's becoming there are new doors opening but also all doors closing and you need to be very careful and pragmatic about on those so trying to compete on a platform basis is becoming tougher but trying to build a platform that's a general purpose use case for e-commerce for general purpose AI machine learning is becoming less so of something that's attainable and more so something that large companies can easily grow into because it needs a lot more money needs a lot more uh more more resources however there's always niche applications and niche use cases that eventually could become really large but this is where your entry point should be so really as an entrepreneur it's not about saying well I think I want to build the uber of latin america because maybe it's two years late into it but it's about maybe I need to build the technology that is really really something if you're building a safe latin america it's like a particular use case where I'm taking advantage of of a cultural cultural behavior or a cultural challenge that I'm really focusing on initially but eventually I'm going to go into so think about cash on delivery in the middle east I'm trying to find solutions for that or maybe last time delivery in Brazil using the the people on the bicycles so really it's about finding your niche initially and then scaling up from that and again even applying to technology let's let's take the example of artificial intelligence if you're building a kind of a general purpose artificial intelligence and technology let's say for for text or for information retrieval then it's very hard because again you're going to compete with all the googles of this world but let's say you focus only on the pharma industry or you focus only on the logistics industry then you start building a much more stronger bias and stronger focus on one element that you can really own and then eventually grow from that so again it comes back to the balance of the periphery and the focus but really it's about finding that niche entry point for you as I want to start the great we have a question coming in from Cairo one of my favorite cities the international resource center center at the US embassy in Cairo asks Habib you mentioned it's it's hard to find the needed talent to to staff a startup in countries like in developing countries like Egypt and in Egypt people tend to join existing companies rather than taking the risk to join a startup so the question is is it better to fight the building to to fight the kind of the status quo of you know wanting to join existing countries companies or do you try to build the culture that attracts the the talent um or do you go if you're a company in Egypt or do you go out and try to find freelancers and outsource it so that's a a a very interesting and dear challenge in my heart because the past six years in the Middle East I I I think I managed with a really cool culture and equal team with with my company and it's really about having some sort of a longer time frame of patience and I think as a startup we don't obviously don't have patience and you're running on a very tight schedule so you need to balance it so number one is higher people that are hungry high people that are really purpose driven and get excited about what you're building and often you find that the earlier people who are younger tend to have more propensity for that because they don't have a family to to kind of feed and they don't have as much responsibility so they have the ability to take risks at the same time you need you need to get your start up keep going so you always have to balance it with some senior maybe that senior talent is not full-time with your team maybe it's not it's only enough to help you solve a problem so it's maybe advisors or maybe it's a freelancer or maybe it's someone you hire a part-time from uh Ukraine because they have the some of the best talent that's saying engineering whatever it is you kind of have to at the beginning peace and positive but why building your base your new base would be your own people your own team the culture should you should focus a lot on that one of the questions I always ask some of the team member who joined before is what is the one thing you want to do after you leave the company and that's actually very important let's say you're joining a company so what do you want to do after you leave the company you know what I haven't even joined and the thing is it does a few things number one it aligns us I know that I am telling you transparently that I know at some point you're going to leave that's fine because this is the the world the world we're living in number two I'm aligning myself to what you care about let's say well you want to build a startup on your people or a non-profit whatever then I know what you care about and you tell me very very clearly and number three it's also like me like you know kind of start an open dialogue and transparency from the beginning so so so you have some of those tactics that you can use here and there to prove to your team that you really care about them growing and then pushing and you'd be surprised how much young talent can really quick and rise up to the occasion so so in conclusion really focus on building your team on your culture and if you need to to to fill some gaps in the meantime you can fill it either by hires or if you can't find hires and by finding consultants or freelancers from other places great now we're gonna we got a question from Jose Mendoza from Honduras and he asks do you have any recommendations on how to promote my product for customers out of my country so that they can trust my product in business yeah so I think I mean I mean there's obviously the traditional ways of pushing your products and initially you want to start with a very small group of your friends or very small group of your community so if depending on what you're building find 100 people that from your Facebook friends from your neighbors from your from you know from your high school friends whoever it is and get them to use a product and get them to be part of the the building process this way they feel ownership over what you're building and they feel that they're in it with you and then keep it keep some sort of a of an exclusive feeling to that so that people actually do feel that they have a an end to it an insight to it and then when you decide to launch prepare some of try to get some if you can get some press coverage or try to get some sort of a of a you know of a catalyzer for those hundred people to become a thousand and a hundred thousand very quickly so that's on the on the press on the on on getting the word out but then also before you get the word out within your product it's very important that you think about embedding the DNA of network effects and what I mean by that is that if if you have people using your product what kind of would it add more value so if a mirror as a user of your product would be around me to be also used over the product because if I'm part of the product a part of the network it adds more value to the network so the simplest example of that and most used example is chance so if a mirror is using WhatsApp I need to use WhatsApp to talk to her that's a very simple example but in any kind of product you can also engineer that so that you can actually if I'm part of the network it add more more value to the existing users so that your users become the people who are going to push for you so that's something you have to think about very early on because it's not a feature it's part of the product it's not it's not something that's on top of the product it's something that's within your product so think about that early on and look up how to do some some of the tips online on how to focus more on network effects great um and I'm loving the questions that we're getting in we've we've got questions coming in from Liberia Egypt and now we've got a questioning coming in from Nicaragua the Nicaraguan American Cultural Center in Managua asks what is the most common error that entrepreneurs make in developing countries when launching a business they ask for money first and then they want to do that's something I you see a lot is when so they're like they it's really it's really boils down to fear of failure and manifests itself with the different things one of the things it manifests itself into is I'm an entrepreneur I have an idea and I say well but I need some seed money to start or I need someone to back me up or to start thanks to only some clients you don't need that you can actually again like it's the idea of hacking your way into it the idea of of I know that sometimes in emerging markets people have a tougher time to fix to just make ends meet but then you need to figure a way out to work nights and weekends so that money's not going to flow and come and come on you just because you have an idea ideas are worth nothing it's all about the execution right so how you actually get into that and the worst case scenario if you try to do a company and it fails and early on is that you've actually have learned something and you think about it as a free self-taught MBA course you're pushing yourself to do stuff and you fit in green and then you fail and then you can learn it for the next one so really I think one of the biggest mistakes I find is that people don't take that first step that first step is tough and it's often about like running them and pushing them so you don't need a safety net for that you can do that because especially when building technology products it becomes it became so cheap and you can start ascending early on so I think that's one one important common mistake that people do let me think if there's another common mistake as well I think the other common mistake is is that they don't think about revenues early on as well that's another thing like thinking about about how you want to keep your company towards what's your long term you or they often read TechCrunch too much because then you see well this is an Instagram that got sold for nine billion dollars I can build the Instagram of of Lebanon now you can because it doesn't matter because the strong network effect that's competing with you so building the X of Y is usually tough unless you have that very unique angle and that's what Jose asked us earlier on the last time example is that finding your unique niche angle to enter rather than try to go oh well Amazon works in the US and I build Amazon of whatever so I think those are at least the two challenges that come to mind or the two common mistakes that come to mind you know one thing that I can add to that and and Habib I think you'll agree one of the the other mistakes I see a lot of entrepreneurs around the world make is they're very focused on you know getting the technology right so they've got the engineers and they're very focused like you know and here's where your the peripheral vision comes in and your great advice about having your head up and really kind of seeing the opportunities I think one of the biggest mistakes a lot of entrepreneurs make is that they're so focused on getting the technology right that they forget about the different aspects that make it a startup successful like marketing so if you have the best technology it's not going to matter if you don't have a good marketing and sales team you've got to be able to get that that product or service into the hands of consumers and they need to know about it and so I think you know one of the biggest mistakes is people are too focused on getting the right engineers and not actually having diverse talent yeah absolutely and that probably comes from the just I mean it's a very simple the reason for that is very simple is that because the startup community is starting to flourish and historically look at smart traditional businesses traditional businesses are very silent so you have a team a department on engineering that's only focused on engineering so you tend to to build up talent that's focused on one particular area rather than a talent that kind of you know see across departments and so that's one of the kind of the side effects of not having enough small companies that kind of where people are jacks of all trades working on different aspects but I think in in one thing is that emerging market entrepreneurs why do they face them when they have common common common mistakes they probably have one of the most resilient and most the strongest characteristics ever especially because they're finding so many different challenges they are living through tough conditions the they are they are figuring out what the governments are changing as policies every single day and how to go through two markets that actually builds a very strong characteristic and I've seen some of the strongest entrepreneurs even when they're based in the US and the strongest entrepreneurs come from emerging markets India Pakistan Lebanon Iran you know Arab world in general you find some of the strongest entrepreneurs come from those markets because they have built that resilience because they they have to they have to keep their peripheral vision on a day-to-day basis because you don't know what hits you what happens every single day so if you can keep move that that kind of characteristics that you build as an individual in society and move it to the startup world and forget the text work and forget that crunch and I think entrepreneurs in emerging markets would be the entrepreneurs that would rule the world especially if you start thinking about the tools that are going to become at the disposal very very soon AI for example right now is this fancy world that we're talking about as a technology but very quickly AI is going to become a tool we're not going to stop thinking about today as startups think well do we have a mobile strategy we have a social media strategy you know that's kind of old saying but still people think about that well I think very soon people are going to say do you have an AI strategy and what kind of off-the-shelf things I can use my advantage and so imagine market entrepreneurs have to also think about what's coming their way and try to try to predict what kind of areas they need to focus on so that they build that competitive advantage before before other people come to their markets okay well we're coming close to the end of our hour and that's gone by really quickly so we're going to do rapid fire so we're going to we're going to try to get as many questions here as possible and we've got a question from we've got we've got a watch party in Kigali hello Rwanda and so the question is how do you inform the public about your product or service when mass marketing either on television or radio is not sustainable due to lack of funding and if you're not an influencer in the social media so how do you how do you do marketing if you don't have an advertising budget and if you're actually not big on twitter yeah so a few things number one is as I mentioned earlier it's about thinking about embedding the network effect within your product that's very important that's more of a strategy not a tactic it's actually your product in itself has to give the ability for your users to become your own marketers and need to give them an incentive for them to market other to others and the incentive here becomes much more useful for them is if others join the network or it's like when uber launch they had if you refer a friend you get five dollars off of uber off of your next ride so there's a number of tricks of how you can multiply one user into ten users either by by them bringing back incentive or by giving them money or by giving them some sort of a credibility and special status on your on your platform number two is you start with a small group and as I mentioned earlier you make them keep part of building the product with you and that allows you to kind of build that small group that that that would scale and number three is try to build a relationship early on with a with a press and usually it's not like a press outfit it's usually pick a journalist find a journalist and some of your favorite press outfits and reach out to them and you find that usually they're very nice and tell them I just want to get your advice get your thoughts I'm building this eventually we're gonna launch and and have a conversation with them because you sometimes they're looking at different angles maybe they're looking at an angle of a husband and wife who built this up together or maybe they're looking at an angle of a particular product or a particular need they're filling or some I don't know what it is but use whatever you think they're looking at story and fit yourself into that angle the third thing is they're usually or fourth thing is usually the waves that are coming so for example let's say there's you know the during the elections there was a debate and yes between President Trump and Hillary Clinton Secretary Clinton there was there was a company called Effectiva that's based here basically it's based on an addiction entrepreneur that measures the reactions of the people as they talk on tv and so they had the two cameras watching Trump and watching Clinton and kind of matching the two and obviously can tell the results of the findings which were quite insightful for many people like the Washington Post and others but I mean that's some of the stuff that you want to use kind of and feed the press with that they cannot take off out so your product your early adopters and finding a finding a good press and the way to write down is also very important. All right so the last question is our group in Monrovia asks as the managing director of E14 fund are you aware of any platforms that incorporate business ideas from entrepreneurs around the globe and help entrepreneurs get investments? So they're looking for in general like platforms for investments in companies? It says are you aware of any platforms that incorporate business ideas from entrepreneurs around the globe and help entrepreneurs get investments so yeah I think funding. Yes so I think there's a number of interesting opportunities for entrepreneurs that to get money that's actually not equity diluted so when you get money from a fund like E14 fund or others you're actually selling a piece of your company and an investor comes in and they're partnered with you that's one angle and usually funds are focused on either regions or or industries mainly because the investor themselves like myself we have to be close to our companies and be able to help them. When you think about someone at the head on a global scale it becomes more here you think about competitions or you think more about challenges and there's a number of those that are very important for you to look at. So one is called Solve it's an MIT initiative called Solve SLMBE like MIT.edu where they're actually sourcing challenges from all over the world around particular challenges and mostly on emerging markets actually so you should check this out Xprise is another one but there's also the Open Society Foundation is launching a fund to invest in emerging markets as well so there's a bunch of those that you want to start and as you start doing your research when you find one you can jump to the other but as sources of funding you need to be as an entrepreneur you need to be creative and not just look for one particular type of funding it could be an investor it could be a ground it could be a competition or it could just be hacking your way into revenues but that's I think I think isn't very important that you think about especially emerging markets. Great thank you so much Habib I'm afraid that's all the time we have today and thank you to all the viewers who tuned in from around the world and all of your questions thanks for joining us please tune in again on April 4th. JustGuru will be hosting a discussion entitled building and supporting your startup community and it will be available in English, French, and Arabic. Thanks everyone.