 Greetings. My name is Fatima Sumar and I am U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs. I want to thank you for tuning in to this ReConnect Tech Connect broadcast on Building the Dream startup team. The panel of experts speaking today will bring their unique perspectives, that of the entrepreneur, investor, or lawyer. And I hope you will find this discussion to be a useful starting point in your journey to gather information, share ideas, identify partners, and play your important role in creating a brighter, more connected future for the people of your region. The United States is committed to fostering economic prosperity through greater connectivity between South and Central Asia. Our ReConnect program has done just that by connecting bright, ambitious people like you with experts throughout the region and the United States. Our goal is to help you build the skills necessary to take your venture to the next level. Just as important, we hope ReConnect will link you with others like yourself who have the ideas and the vision to innovate and play a transformative role in the region. Your entrepreneurial spirit will help connect businesses and people and build regional markets along the New Silk Road and the Indo-Pacific Economic Corridor. There is enormous promise in linking growing markets through energy, trade, transit, and people-to-people connections spanning from Central Asia through South Asia and all the way to Southeast Asia. Your efforts and applying what you learned today are keys to unlocking this potential. Initiatives like ReConnect are part of the U.S. commitment to share prosperity around the globe. In the 21st century, we are all linked together and we strongly believe your economic success is integral to U.S. and global economic success. Again, thank you for joining us today and I hope you enjoy the program. Welcome to the second ReConnect, ReConnect live broadcast. We're very excited to welcome our viewers to today's conversation about building the dream startup team. We have a great panel with us today to speak on the topic to provide their own experiences and also to answer especially your questions. I'm Ovidio Bujoran, the senior manager of entrepreneurship and innovation at CRDF Global. We are proud to work on the ReConnect program that empowers entrepreneurs in South and Central Asia to turn their ideas into viable ventures that catalyze economic growth. Today, we are very pleased to host a virtual IAP interactive web chat connecting entrepreneurs and innovators across geographies and continents. In today's conversation, please use at rec.tech.connect hashtag when tweeting about the event. We are collecting your questions to ask our panelists later in the program. So I invite all of you to start sending us questions now and throughout the program by typing in the chat space below the video or by tweeting using the at rec.tech.connect hashtag. Very pleased to have with us in the studio today, John Burke, the founder of True Ventures and Ogie Racco, lawyer for startups at Oric. And also joining us on Skype from Pakistan is Rabia Garib, chief rapper of TofiTV.com. Hi, Rabia and hi to our friends from Pakistan in the audience. As we wait for our questions, I would like to start off by asking each one of our speakers first question. Ogie, you are a very successful lawyer in California, especially working with startups from the San Francisco area, but also with international startups that are looking to build a presence in the US. In your experience, what did you find some of the key principles in team formation for a new venture? Sure, nice to meet everybody. So I see founders as they're first coming together, as the companies are first starting to get formed, and then also see them when they're having troubles. And so I see a lot of the ways that founders tend to have troubles. And one of the things that I would recommend to everybody who's starting a new venture and who's recruiting someone to their team is to, well, first congratulations on having found someone who you'd like to build a company with. It's very important to have a very frank, honest discussion about how you see your roles in the company, and in particular, how you plan to divide up the ownership of the company. Now, this is particularly when you're talking about really a co-founder, someone who you're launching the company with. Not someone, maybe an employee who you hire after running the company for a while, but somebody who you're really launching the company with. You want to have a very frank discussion about the ownership of the company. And what I recommend to everybody is to just jot down on a piece of paper and an email the percentage ownership that each person is going to have. And just don't rush off to the lawyer and draw up documents and contracts too quickly. Just write those down and just live with it for two or three months. Keep working together, see if those percentages, you're going to have 50%, I'm going to have 50%, or you're going to have 60, I'm going to have 40. Just write those down and live with them for a few months and come back to them after a few months and see if it still feels right. Great. Thank you very much, Ogi. I would like to move to Rabia. You are our entrepreneur in the panel of speakers today. In your own experience, you worked with a couple of ventures. How did you go about building your team? Your team of founders, your team of experts, mentors, advisors, what sort of key ideas did you look at when you went about it? Hello to the co-panelists and thanks for the opportunity to be able to speak on a forum like this. I think the one thing I did was I stopped making decisions. Like a lot of entrepreneurs, I think I suffer from something known as being a control freak where I want to do each and every process of the business. My most recent co-founder who's sitting right next to me, Talia, she and I have known each other for a number of years and it took her a great deal of time to convince me to stop making all the decisions and stop doing all the work because it was the one thing that was keeping us from being able to build the team. It was also the one thing that kept us from scaling up, from doing everything that we wanted. And we did exactly what Ogi said was we put down a list of things that how we wanted to run the business, divide the partnership, create the work. But it took me a lot longer to follow that simply because I felt I could do everything which doesn't make sense. So I think the one, the best decision I made was I stopped doing all of the work and allowed my co-founder to guide me through and explain every business process and then hire the right kind of people once we knew exactly what was required. Wonderful. Thank you very much, Rabia. Moving to John, you as an investor, you are looking at thousands of ventures that are pitching you for funding, especially in the early stage phases. In your experience, how do you see the team evolving from the initial phases to as the company grows to the next phases of development in terms of the makeup of the team? Let's start with the first and the team in the beginning. What sort of specific qualifications, specific profiles of entrepreneurs or founders are you looking at in general and how they connect with one another? So thank you for having me here. At the earliest stages when we're looking at founders, venture capital is a game of pattern recognition. So we're trying to recognize patterns of success that we've seen before. So we see lots of deals and we're trying to pick out obviously the ones that match something in our history that has been successful. So, for instance, the single founder can be very difficult. Starting out doing a startup is very lonely. It's very difficult. Unless you're connected to a larger network, it can be very hard to succeed. So being a single founder can be very hard. And then on the other hand, having founders of greater than four, having a team greater than four can be very, very hard. As Augie talked about, splitting up that equity, it can be very difficult and arguments can arise and it's just harder to be successful with greater than four founders. So we tend to look at teams that are sort of two to three, maybe four founders. So that for us has been more successful than a single or a larger team. As the team grows, as you go from a startup to a growth company, it is, I don't wanna say it's the rare CEO or founder that can succeed across all stages, but it's the unusual one. I think if you're a founder and you're the primary idea person for the company, I think you need to be aware that you may not be the CEO forever. And you should embrace that, because you want success, you want success for your company, you want success for your investors. And if another person to come in and be the CEO is the right thing to do, you should be open to that. You'll be better off economically with that. So I think that, I mean, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of a very famous company, you know, he's the rare one that can go from a startup or a Bill Gates to go from a startup to a very successful public company. That is unusual. Don't have that expectation. Have the expectation that you can get it off the ground. It's your idea. You can work hard, you can build a team, but you may not be the person that exits the company. And some of the entrepreneurs actually like starting new companies. They don't like actually scaling up, taking a hundred million business to like one billion. They like the thrill of the beginning of starting a company. In my personal experience when I started my company, I love starting companies. I love creating something of value from nothing. For me, that was very exciting. I did not like managing a team of a hundred people. Yes, great. To come back to you, in terms of the profiles of the different types of founders in the makeup, do you see like a diversity or what sort of profiles? Of course, this depends on the sector or on the stage of growth, but in general, do you see any specific ideas here? So we are looking, so there's always some technical founder, typically for us. It's very, very rare, I would say, I can't name one, that has only business people as a co-founding team. There's always some technical co-founder. We're looking for a passion. We're looking for somebody who has a domain expertise. We're looking for somebody who can build a team. Very often, when we look at founders and nobody comes with them from their previous employer, it's a red flag. It's a red flag. It means that wherever they worked, people perhaps won't want to follow them. So being the ability to lead a team, the ability to build a world-class team is critical for us. It's critical for us. Wonderful. Do you, would you like to add from your own experience what sort of roles or profiles on the founders team? Sure, sure. Well, you know, what's interesting about startups is, I mean, many things are interesting, but one thing that, a theme that keeps coming up across lots of different topics that we could talk about is the fact that startups are, by their nature, building something and trying to sell something that doesn't exist in the world. And a lot of the customers may not even know they need it. The people who you might hire to work for you might not really realize the utility of what you're doing and kind of how the mission of the company fits into kind of the broader economy. And so the person who has really the vision for the product and where the company is going is often seeing much further than everybody else is. And so as you're putting the team together, it's very important to find people who will fill roles that take some of the work off of your plate so that you can focus on the things that you are uniquely talented at. So if you have a very unique product vision, it's really not so great for you to be spending your time doing the accounting for the company or to be in charge of the legal stuff for the company or maybe even to be doing the fundraising or to be doing some of the administrative stuff. You want to focus on building a team that can share the burden of taking care of the tasks that are not particularly your strength so that you can really focus on the things that you're uniquely talented at. And for startups, especially startups with a technical aspect to the product they're building, the thing that the main founder is really talented at, is really uniquely talented at, is often the product vision and pushing the product forward and seeing how the product can fit into different parts of the rest of the economy. And so you want to find a team that can take the other burdens off of you so that you can focus on those points. Great, and I think this builds also on Rabia's point earlier of actually this was her first decision of actually sitting down and seeing what sort of other specific roles in the founding team that she would have. How difficult and how do you see entrepreneurs going about recruiting great people because there's a competition for the best talent. You have the big enterprises that have more resources to pay them, but you know that some of these key people could be instrumental for the development of the venture. Would you like to share a few ideas, Rabia, on this question? You're actually touching a really raw nerve because we're currently in the process of hiring another wave of the team. And you're right in saying that when startups are competing with large enterprises, even mid-range enterprises, those that have the money will get the better people, but at the same time, as much as we'd like to go and recruit fresh graduates, especially in the field that is so specialized in what we do at Toffee TV. So we're looking with, for example, for someone who has not only a strong aesthetic background, but also a strong technical background, that merger of talent and skill is very rarely found in fresh grads, which means that we might be able to recruit a lot of fresh grads, but we will be investing a lot in training them. When we try and recruit from an experienced pool, it is often much, it's too difficult to hire them simply because the pay grade is something that we cannot match. But at the same time, I think if you are trying to build something world-class, you have to find a balance and either you work with institutes and universities and you give them a prerequisites or you have to convince the experienced lot who do require a large salary base and you do share your dream with them, but then you may have to share a few more incentives within your company in order to recruit them. Wonderful, thank you very much. Would you like to add? I mean, that's exactly, when you said share the dream, that's exactly what we talk about because in Silicon Valley, and I can certainly talk about this as well, we compete with very well-funded public companies that can pay 10 times what we pay. But in everybody's job, everybody's a sales job. Everybody has a sales job, right? And if you can't impart the same passion that you have to a future employee, you're probably not in the right spot. You're probably not in the right spot. And that's part of being able to build a team. You're not gonna be able to pay. And if somebody's coming to you, excuse me, if somebody's coming to you just based on salary, probably the wrong person, probably not a fit, at least for the very early stages when you're building that initial team. So you really gotta sell them on the passion. You've gotta sell them on the dream. And that's really the primary job of the CEO. Great, I totally agree with this. Please. Building a startup is tough and most of them fail and so you really have to be working on a product that you're passionate about and that you care about and you really wanna be working with people who you enjoy working with. The process really has to be fun because a lot of times the outcome is not what you're hoping for. It's a tough business. So the team has to be people you really enjoy working with. And we see this across our network of portfolio companies and founders all the time. These questions come across the email platform and it's all sorts of incentive. It's not just monetary incentives. It's the work environment. It's the flexibility. They're working on something that they really believe in. So it's not, like I said, if you find yourself arguing about pennies or dollars, it's probably not the right person. You want people behind you who completely believe in the passion and the dream of what you're doing. Wonderful. To build on also on what Rabia said, basically you need to provide them with a vision but as well as with some potential incentives for the future. How would you structure this process of additional incentives? What sort of additional incentives, both of you, you see talented founders that are able to sell a vision can deploy. Would you like to? Yeah, there's a lot. I think a lot of times people who, they're various different things that you can offer to potential employees. One of them may simply be the opportunity to take on more responsibility than they would be able to take on at the companies they were at previously. They can, if they were at a larger company, they may be siloed into a more narrow functional role. You allow them the opportunity to work across, work on product, work on marketing, work on finance because you have to do so many different functions early on and that can be a great growth experience for someone. On the legal side, there's a mechanism that we use in the US, we call it vesting and the idea is that you divide up the equity of the company, you divide up the stock of the company, let's say 50-50, but you have to earn that percentage over time and typically it'll be over four years and so the idea is that after four years, you earn that 50% stake but if you leave after two years, then you give up half of that 50% or if you leave after one year, you give up 75% of that 50% and so the idea is that you earn the equity over time so that you don't just create the company, let's say you split it 50-50 and then one person leaves the next day but they still earn 50% of the company which would be a terrible problem for the company so this idea of vesting is a good mechanism for tying the reward to the amount of contribution that someone makes to a company. Typically for us, here in the US, we use that for almost all the employees. It's very common for all the employees throughout the organization to have that vesting of equity. Absolutely. And do you tie that specific vesting to milestones in terms of their own performance or how is normally done? Yeah, the vesting can be structured in multiple different ways. It can be time-based vesting or what we call milestone-based vesting. Time-based vesting is by far more common. 99 out of 100 would be time-based vesting. Okay, great. If they aren't working out and their performance doesn't work out, they get fired. Right, they no longer vest. Yeah, I think the firing thing works easier in US than in other parts of the world but that's a key factor. Okay, thank you very much for your insights. I'd like now to move to our audience and ask a couple of questions of their questions. One of our online viewers asks, what is a good leader for a startup? Well, yeah, you know, there are many blog posts on this topic of what is the single thing that you look for in a startup founder or leader. Some of my favorites are you're looking for someone with the formulation of remarkable people working on a problem that everyone else is ignoring. I like that. Remarkable people working on a problem that everyone else is ignoring. That's something. Another one I've noticed is there's a kind of when I look at clients that I represent, there's a kind of a sense of momentum in the companies that seem to do really well. There's just, the momentum comes from a lot of different places and it's hard to really put your finger on it but this sense of momentum, sense of things actually getting done and happening, that's a key thing. And then really the vision and the ability to sell this vision to customers, to investors, to employees, it's the visionary plus salesman quality that we see in CEOs of successful startups. And I would just add that it's a sense of urgency as well, that they feel so strongly about solving this problem that this problem is so large that they have to solve it today and that they will stop at nothing to accomplish that goal. And when they're sitting across the table from you and you get the feeling that whether you fund them or not, they're gonna be successful. That they are gonna keep going until they finish, until they complete this goal. That you can feel that passion. Passion and persistence. Rabia, would you like to add what makes a good leader for a startup venture? You're asking, that's such a tough question. I know. Because amongst other things, I think, I've actually got a two-sided answer. One is, yes, someone who will also allow, not only sell the vision, but allow somebody else to take ownership of the vision. At the same time, it comes back to your previous question in our previous discussion that if you don't hire the right people, then you're sharing your vision with the wrong people who are just gonna abuse it and flush it down the toilet, which doesn't make much sense. So if you are hiring the right people who will look at you and say that, okay, our founders are people who not only trust us, they've hired us for the right job. They're allowing us to take ownership of this. And then let us do our job so that they can do their job and collectively, we move ahead. So I think that's a key ingredient for a leader. Wonderful. Thank you very much. Let's move now to the second question. Do you find there are different types of leaders at different stages of development of the startup? John? Certainly. There are, as I mentioned before, it's the rare individual that will go from the beginning to an exit and stay as a CEO or founder, or stay as a CEO. Percentage-wise, how many, let's say, 5%, but it's less than 10%, right? Really, to a big exit, I would say it's probably 10%. Yeah, probably, 10% or less. Yeah, there's a fine line between crazy and genius, right? And most of the successful founders that we've been involved with, you really some days can't tell whether it's crazy or whether it's genius. But they can get people to follow them, they can get a product out the door, and they can convince people to give them money to do that. That is a very different skill set than Manage You to Development team of 100 people or 1,000 people, very, very different skill set. And very often they don't want to do that later part, as you mentioned. So yes, there are different, there are Steve Blank who said that a startup is really a temporary organization in search of a business model before the money runs out, right? And so a person who can work in that level of ambiguity is very different than who somebody's gonna execute on business plans and sales plans and quotas and revenue targets, very different kind of person. So there are really three or four distinct stages that a person can go through. Some people grow and some people do perfectly well doing it, but it's the rare individual that will go do all of it. I think it's very clear to know from the get go that as the company, if one entrepreneur is successful, then you will face this potential problem slash opportunity where you reach the limits of your own capabilities or interests, because you may not be interested in continuing, and seeing what sort of capabilities there are needed for the next stage of development. And I think that's if you are successful as well. And you need to understand that you will be better off economically if the company does better, whether or not you're at the head of it or not. So if you can get it started, you have your stake that all you talked about, but if you step down or somebody else takes over, the company does and the company does better, you are economically better off. It's all ego at that point. It's the philosophy of having, what do you prefer to have the biggest slice of a very small pizza or having a small size of a very big pizza? It's better to be rich than king. Yeah, okay. Great, these are great questions. Please keep them coming. I encourage our audience to continue to send us questions. The next online question, is there a type of DNA that people on startups usually have? Rabia, would you like to address this question? God, I think so. They're different kinds of people. They're almost alien. And yes, I think they have the passion, the drive to do something different. And I think as Augie said correctly, they have the desire and the understanding and the desperation to solve a really, really tough problem which nobody else can see. So those are qualities which you don't see in everyone. I know a little while ago, while we were waiting for you guys to log on, Li Ping had asked this audience, how many of you want to be entrepreneurs and how many of you just wanna have a job? And there were some hands that went up for both in response to both questions. And it's interesting when you talk to the kinds of people based on their responses, you're talking to two very different kinds of people and it becomes very apparent as they become more and more seasoned in the work that they do. Wonderful. Thank you very much, Rabia. You wanna end? Yeah, you know, I'm curious who asked the question. If it's someone who's kind of thinking of maybe starting a company, they've seen the various movies and TV shows lately about entrepreneurship and they're kind of curious about whether that's, if they're really an entrepreneur or not, it's a personal question, it takes a long time to take, can take while to figure out. But I think one of the differences, one of the kind of traits you see in people who are drawn towards entrepreneurship is they don't really tend to think of the world in terms of like sort of set projects or set assignments. But let me just, people have kind of more of a job mentality to their career, who want to get a job at a company. I think are often, people who did well in school are good at kind of doing what they're asked to do, can take on, someone else can define responsibility and give it to them and they take that responsibility and they satisfy it and maybe exceed expectations and they're very good at working on problems that maybe someone else defines or are good at mastering skills that already, that exist, that you can sort of learn in a book. And I think the people who have more of an entrepreneurial bent tend to, not to think in terms of kind of mastering known skills or kind of doing a lot other people's projects that they give to them, but at kind of seeing their own problems that need to be solved and it's just, it's a different kind of way of looking at things and sometimes those people have kind of more of their own view of what kind of problems need to be solved. They're sometimes terrible employees and they're often terrible students and they're often, sometimes they can be good at both but I always feel like one of the key differences is just kind of whether people look at, have their own vision of what needs to be done versus kind of, yeah. And neither is right or wrong, right? So don't, if you feel like you just want to get a job and work in a startup or work in a startup environment, do that because you will be utterly miserable as a founder, utterly miserable and you will probably fail. So it, like I said, being a founder of a startup, it is not for the lighthearted. It is a difficult, lonely, arduous thing where you wake up at two o'clock in the morning, almost every morning worrying about something. So, and if you don't have that DNA and you don't have that built in, don't do it. Work in a startup, it's a great life. There's a funny story. A few years ago, I visited the Ben and Jerry factory from US and the two founders, they tried to get jobs repeatedly. None of them got jobs and they realized that basically the only option they have is to become entrepreneurs. They wanted to buy a license originally for pretzels but they did not have enough money for pretzels but they had enough money for an ice cream. They bought the license and they build one of the greatest ice creams in the world as an example. Rabia, do you wanna add on the question? I was just gonna also add that in places like the Silicon Valley, that's a very, very unique ecosystem. Especially when you come down to places like Pakistan and even others, I'm sure a lot of other countries. An entrepreneur has to be able to figure out in addition to solving that business problem and meeting that business need is also how to manage the chaos. We don't often have a legal framework in place. We often don't have documents which are templates of specific documents which we require. I mean, these are really specific things but it's how do you deal with the chaos of the ecosystem in addition to trying to do really, really great things. I mean, that's also in the mindset of the entrepreneur. I think that's a great point and combining with John's point, in addition to the challenges of being an entrepreneur when you function in an ever-changing ecosystem and climate, it becomes even more difficult. So you require very strong DNA persistence, ability to thrive, survive. They are becoming more and more important. Let's move to the next. We have a question on Twitter for John from Sakib from Bangladesh. You mentioned patterns at the beginning of the web chat. Can you please elaborate in terms of the pattern recognition when you look at startups both as a team and also as a venture itself? What sort of, how do you go about that? Well, the team, for us, the team generally has to be somewhat matched to what they're doing. There has to be some sort of domain level expertise. You've got to be able to sit across the table and sense that passion of what they're doing. For me, it's very difficult to evaluate a business that we might invest in by looking at a business plan. Most of the businesses that we invest in don't really have a business plan per se. They simply have a PowerPoint presentation that they'll walk us through. And it's sort of a five to 12 slide deck that they'll walk us through. And so it's, you know, it's really recognized. It's sort of, it's seen that from them and it's sitting across the table from them. I mean, there are some, this is for me personally, there are some things that are red flags that if I see, I will just not do the deal and don't take offense to this. But if there's a married couple in the management and the co-founding team, for me, that's been a bad thing. I've always had to fire one of them and it's awkward and it's awful. And so when I see that now, it just, for me, it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. And I would extend that to siblings. Sometimes, I'm looking at a deal right now that actually has two brothers as founders, but it makes it difficult, it is a yellow flag. So it's that sort of thing that I'm talking about. If somebody is coming from a service business where they perform some service and they now wanna create a product, that's difficult, right? That's a very difficult transition to go from a service-based business to codify into a product and then sell that product. So that to me is just, I see that and I think, oh, that's gonna be hard. We have a different sales philosophy. We have a very different product philosophy. It's just a different revenue model. Everything's different. So when I see that, I think, oh, okay, this is gonna take longer and cost more money. So it's that sort of pattern recognition I'm talking about. Thank you very much, John. You wanna add a few thoughts? No, it's okay. Okay, an entrepreneur from Georgia writes, the next week I'll be pitching in front of potential investors. I would like to get any of your recommendation for the best way to prepare for that type of meeting. That's a great question. We actually spend the rest of the time talking about that. But well, first of all, I would make sure that what you're doing is consistent with what that investor wants to invest in. And that is they like to invest in the industry you're in, they want to invest in the stage you're in, they want to invest the amount of money that you're asking for. And you wanna make sure that there's nothing competitive in their portfolio for that meeting and for what you're doing. So do your homework. Make sure that you're a match for what you're doing. Don't give them a reason to say no. If there's a competitive company in their portfolio, they'll just say no, they won't do it. So don't waste your time doing that. The other thing is what Augie said at the outset, make sure you have all of your stuff, your legal stuff, the equity stuff, all that kind of thing codified and you're completely in agreement, right? You don't wanna go in and have an argument in front of the investor, right? So don't be co-CEOs, you can be all be co-founders, but don't be co-CEOs, co-presidents, make sure everything is clearly delineated before you go into that meeting. Then know your business. You won't have all the answers. It's clear you won't have all the answers and admit that. There is nothing wrong with saying, I actually, we're gonna find that out. We're gonna use your money, we're gonna build a model, we're gonna figure that out. So you don't have to have all the answers, but at least understand, have some goal with the money. You wanna get out 18 months, you wanna get out a year, whatever it is, you wanna get out some timeframe, you wanna achieve some milestones. You may not achieve them, but you wanna at least have that goal be clearly laid those goals out for the investor. Wonderful, Rabia, do you have any insights from on pitching, especially in Pakistan and the South and Central Asia? Well, actually, we don't have much of a culture of venture capital. What we do have here is a growing number of angel investors. And that's because majority of the companies either are a family-owned businesses, at least at the larger scale is concerned. But even when you're approaching anyone for an, any investment, like John correctly pointed out, you have to have your business sorted out, pat down. So you know exactly what you're asking for, you know exactly what you need, and you know exactly when you wanna get out and what you want out of it. You also have to be sure and be convincing as to what the investor will get out of it. If there's no incentive for him or for them, they probably won't be looking at you for very long. Rabia says something really important there that I just wanted to touch on, that when you take money from an institutional investor, this is not true from an angel or friends and family and that kind of thing. But when you take money from an institutional investor, you need to understand that they are gonna get out of this investment one way or another. They are not in this to just share revenue with you for the rest of your life, even no matter how much money you're making, they're not in to just get a dividend out. They are in this to sell this company either to a private, to another shareholder or to public shareholder. So in least in the US, that investor wants to get out. You'll hear the word lifestyle company and lifestyle companies are fantastic. They support millions and millions of people around the world. It's tremendous, but if you're taking money from an institutional investor, they need to get money out to return to their investors. So just have that in mind if you're gonna take institutional money. Great, thank you both of you. Trang from Vietnam asks, how can I encourage the right people to stay with my business? They may like me, but they may choose another opportunities. Sell, sell. Oh, that's a tough one. You have to ask yourself, if you be honest with yourself about the cold hard truth about what's going on there. And it may be that the people just are not seeing the opportunity. They're not seeing an opportunity to advance their own careers working on that project. It may not be a project, it may not be, it may simply be a project that they aren't as passionate about, but don't BS yourself or kind of tell yourself what sounds better or what's easier for yourself to hear. It may be that they just don't share the passion, but it may also just be that they are not convinced that you've figured out how to make money in this business. They may think the product's not that great. They may think that you're not good at selling it. They may like you personally, but they just don't see the opportunity there, so don't be afraid to ask yourself that. And make sure you connect with the team. There's something very common here in the Valley that doing off-sites has been super successful for a lot of the early stage startups that we have. And when I say an off-site, it's where you actually go out of the office, you go to some other location, and you do something fun, and you spend time talking about, strategizing about, thinking about what you're doing as a business and as a team. And so those sorts of team-building exercises are very popular here and have been very, very successful in kind of creating that cohesive team feeling. You want people to feel like they're contributing, like they're valuable, and like you want them there. So anything you can do to do that, other than just paying them and giving them equity like we talked about, anything you can do will pay you dividends along time in the future. But all great points, would like to connect your points with Rabia's earlier point. So I think when you are pitching for a potential co-founder or someone in the founding team, you can approach this like pitching for an investor. You need to do your homework. What is this person about? What sort of capabilities they have? What sort of interests they have? Because it's like a human capital investment that they are making and you are kind of buying. So you need to make sure that there is a very strong connection between what they are hoping to achieve and what you are hoping to achieve as a founder. And I think that you do this in the earlier phases of the company. It's the first type of capital that you need to secure to be able to take the venture to a certain level that you can actually pitch to an investor. So moving to another question from an entrepreneur in Islamabad. What is the best way to resolve conflicts within teams? I see this a lot. I see this a lot. Rabia. Okay, so there are lots of different kinds of conflicts. There are healthy conflicts. People have different views about things and you discuss them and you share them. There are also other kinds of healthy conflicts when you have a very quickly growing company. Each different kind of part of the company can kind of go off on its own a little bit and it's one of the risks of hyper growth that you have to manage. Again, this is a good problem. I suspect what you're asking though is not about those kinds of conflicts but they're more about disputes over who should own how much of the company, who's in charge, what kind of product you're building. And my first two thoughts on this are, one, these kinds of problems almost never get better. They almost never get better. I cannot think of any example of a company that I've worked with where the founders have had a real problem and then gone on to work well together later. I just, you just almost never see it. It's almost like young, if you see young couples arguing, it's tough, it's a tough situation. Same true with founders, hard for it to get better. Other thing to think about is if you are working to resolve these differences, I like to advise people to find some third party, somebody who both people know or who they both respect, who someone who people will be on their best behavior in front of. And often the negotiations, the discussions will be more productive, will be more friendly, will be more polite, will be more civil. If those discussions are held in front of or with some third party who both people respect and want to be respected by. Wonderful. Rabia, would you like to add on the question? Well, I think first of all, having all your documentation in order really helps because the more vague you are in the foundation in the setting up of your startup, the more problems you'll run into. There's too much gray area, especially in a lot of the kinds of businesses that are now coming up. You don't know whether kind of to use the word loosely, you don't know what is kosher anymore. So first and foremost, have your documents in place. Second, I was actually gonna talk about remediation and arbitration also. Like I mentioned, lack of legal framework, especially for specialized businesses, often create the opportunity to have more conflict. So if you do have somebody who you respect and who understands hopefully the nature of the business and the field that you're in, that usually works in your favor. But if you have your blueprint and your documents in place, that should be enough to deter the senseless conflicts and all the other kinds of conflicts will hopefully help you grow. Wonderful, thank you. Irene from Nigeria asks, what do you do if your remuneration is quite low, but you need the people to put their best effort for the company to attract better income? Getting to the tough questions. Again, so if the revenue of the company is low, but we don't have any money to pay people, is that the question? Yeah, so at the beginning, before a pre-revenue company has that issue all the time. That's by definition a pre-revenue company. And it is, again, as we've talked about, you can't make money out of nowhere. So if they absolutely need the money to survive, it's a tough reality. Maybe they can do something on the side, lots of people who are consulting on the side, doing a startup is generally a younger person's game before they have families and houses and all that kind of thing. So in all sorts of other financial burdens, there's lots of things to do on the side, but it's the other things that you can give them the flexibility to do. Let them off and let them have that other job, let them have that side job, let them work on a side project. But you can't make money out of nowhere. You just have to be creative about it. Great. Question for Ogie from Bangladesh. What legal issues should founders be aware of when they build a team? Yeah, I think that there are unique things in different countries. And I don't know anything, I know very little about Pakistan. I've done actually one or two deals in Pakistan, but I know very little about Bangladesh. I'm sorry, excuse me. I was looking at Rabia. This point about being clear about the equity up front, I just, that's very important, write it down, send it in email to each other and just live with it for a few months and see if you're still like those percentages after a few months, that's really the main thing. Another thing is, take this with a grain of salt. There's very different cultures and different legal climates in different countries, but a lot of the legal problems will follow the business, or let me phrase that differently. The legal, I get a little nervous when I see a founder who's too focused on the legal stuff early on. You get people who, maybe someone who wants to learn how to ski and they buy all the ski equipment, every the fancy jacket, the fancy skis, the fancy everything before they even know how to ski. You see that with founders too sometimes. They wanna have this ornate complicated legal structure, they wanna have all these different things in place, but they don't even really have a very mature product idea. And so one of the most important thing is to develop a product that people really, really want. If you can develop a product that people really, really want, a lot of your other problems will get solved. If you have a hot product, good revenue, you can pay to solve the kind of legal problems. I advise people to more than anything focus on building a killer product that's getting tons of traction. Be clear with your co-founders about what the equity breakdown is and with those two things, you'll be able to solve most legal issues that will come up. And I am not a lawyer, but- Disclaimer. But one issue that we see a lot is people coming from larger companies want to do a startup. Just absolutely make sure, and I can augment this, but just absolutely make sure that nothing you've done for the startup is on a laptop or on a computer or is on anything of the larger company. Larger companies can be very litigious. We have gone down the road and once we found out that, gee, they developed some of the prototype on a laptop that's owned by such a large company, we passed because they will eventually get sued, at least in the U.S., but just make sure it's a very, very clean line from where the development was and where it happened if you all come from larger companies. Great point. Nazik asks, with limited resources, is it a better investment to train current employees or to recruit new ones? Rabia, do you have any insights? I was hoping you'd ask one of the other two. What I said, we'll have to figure out what your game plan is. What is your vision for, oh, sorry, what is your business plan for the next, not, sorry, let me rephrase. What is your roadmap for the next six months, for the next one year or two years? If you know what your sustainability and what your rate of survival is, you will be able to make, to answer that question. If you're only in it for the short run, hire the best and get in and get out and shut down the business later on. And if you're in it for the long run and you're still, you know, you want, you have time to develop a product for let's say two years, you might want to hire, you know, a greater number of fresh grants for a lesser salary maybe, and then train them and then have them once again sell, buy that vision, buy into your vision and then work with them for the next two years. But whatever payback and return you'll get will be a little bit more delayed. So it's a decision you have to make based on what your business roadmap for the next short-term, mid-term and long-term is. Wonderful, thank you. I have a client where this exact question came up in a board meeting last week. It's a company, very hot company, young founders, the whole technical team is very young. They're just on fire. Their growth rate is phenomenal. And they've hired a new CTO to come into the company. And one of the main objectives for the CTO is to pepper the technical team, this young technical team with a couple very experienced people. Because this young technical team, they work hard, they work 24-7, but it can take them a while to come up with solutions to some complicated problems. And so if they want to ship an update to the software, it can take them too long to get this out. And they have a great team and they want to grow this team, but they need a couple very, very senior people who can point to shortcuts and can get the young kids working on understanding the problem in the right way. And so you really need that kind of blend, I think. It's a wonderful insight. Thank you, Ogi. Mahira Maniar from Karachi asks, if two co-founders have different passions and interests, should this raise a red flag for an incubator? No. No. I think complementary. You don't want everybody the same within the organization or the founding team. You want to have different viewpoints. You want to have different passions, different interests. Absolutely. Complimentary. Absolutely. That's not a red flag at all. It's a good thing. Wonderful. Entrepreneur from Pakistan asks, what advice do you have for introverts, aka IT Geeks to best express their excitement, passion about their startup work? Interesting question. Yeah. Stop looking at your shoes and get out of the office and go talk to people about what you're doing. Great ideas need sunlight. Great ideas need other people's input. Don't keep it to yourself. You need to get out of your comfort zone and go talk to people about it. That is the best thing you're going to be able to do. You're going to get great feedback. You're going to get great insights. They may not like it, but you're going to find it out. Wonderful. Yeah. Resist the temptation to look for someone to sell the product for you. I've never, I know very few examples where that works, where a technical founder has developed the product. They understand why there's need for the product. They understand who uses the product. They understand who you should sell the product to. They have this very unique vision of how this product fits into kind of where the economy is going or where technology is going, but they don't like to sell. So they want to hire someone to go and sell it for them. I've just never really seen that work. Thank you. A group in HyperCube hub in Zimbabwe is joining us online today. Hi, Zimbabwe. Hi, everyone. The viewing group writes, our question is about founder syndrome, also founderitis, a difficulty faced by many organizations where one or more founders maintain disproportionate power and influence following the effective initial establishment of the project. Have you come across this and how we can best address this? Stuff on. Robbie has sort of talked about it at the very beginning about it. Robbie, I would like to. Control. Thanks. You get the easy questions. Yeah, exactly. I think I went through this and it was a very painful process trying to let go of the company. But I think I had enough trust and faith in my co-founder for us to work out and understand and make me understand like a little child, that if we don't let go of the control that I have on the various business processes, we are not going to grow. So it was either are we going to just be kings and queens, or are we actually going to go out there and do some actual work, scale up, make some money, which will benefit everyone. And I think having somebody you trust really, really helps you to figure that out and to suffer from less founderitis. Wonderful idea. It sounds like the question's coming from someone who's not the founder, but someone who's working under the founder. If you ever end up starting a company, you might take this lesson with you and do things differently in your company. Wonderful. Thank you very much, Rabia and Ogie. I want to give a shout out to our viewing group in Sri Lanka. They sent a picture, I think. Hi, everyone. I would assume it's Colombo. So basically, I'm afraid we are out of time. And thank you so much to our panelists and to you, to Ogie, John, and Rabia for this live broadcast. A special thank you to the Tech Connect viewing site hosts around the globe. I want to thank you for mobilizing the entrepreneurial community. Few words now about the ReConnect program. We build capacity and strengthen the entrepreneurial ecosystem in South and Central Asia. This initiative, which is led by US Department of State and CRDF Global, identifies and supports young entrepreneurs through practical skills development, networking, and financial advice. We can continue to help one another in our local entrepreneurial communities by staying involved with ReConnect. Please be sure to visit our website and follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Thank you very much. Take care and keep in touch until the next one.