 Well good morning good afternoon and good evening depending on where you're watching from welcome to the U.S. State Department's interactive web chat in our ask the entrepreneur series and which you'll get to ask experienced entrepreneurs questions on anything from developing a business model to raising capital to growing a business. My name is Andy Ravens and I'm the special advisor for global youth issues at the State Department in the office of the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs where I focus on helping the U.S. government better engage young people internationally to help solve the pressing challenges of today while also building greater global connectivity and networks to shape the world of tomorrow. Today I'm really excited to be joined live in our Washington studio by Evan Burfield of startup incubator 1776 who is here to answer some of your questions on entrepreneurship. Evan Burfield is the co-founder and co-CEO of 1776 where he works with startups from around the world to help connect them with resources and to tackle important challenges in areas like education, health, energy, transportation and smart cities. He's a frequent speaker and contributor to publications such as the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and the Huffington Post. He's also an active angel investor as a co-founder of K Street Capital and he's an accomplished entrepreneur himself. Now before we begin today's discussion I'd like to extend a special welcome to all of the entrepreneurs and the aspiring entrepreneurs joining us online from around the world including those gathered at the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh and the Singapore Management University. We're looking forward to everyone's questions. For those of you who are viewing online, please ask your questions in the chat space or in Twitter using the hashtag Ask the Entrepreneur. Alright? It looks like we already have a number of questions coming in so let's field the first question from our online audience and this comes from Anant. Anant asks Evan, I'm working with the Asian Youth Social Entrepreneurship Association and we're trying to empower youth through entrepreneurship. How can entrepreneurship be a skill set that is valuable for employment and what overlap is there? Wow. Thanks, Andy. And for all of you watching in Phnom Penh and Singapore, thank you so much. I'm incredibly inspired to get the opportunity to talk to you guys and see what you're working on. So the overlap between entrepreneurship and job creation. You know, let me sort of maybe address that first from just sort of generally what are some of the trends that we're seeing in terms of the workforce here in the U.S. and the developing world and sort of how those will continue spilling out around the world. So it's an overly used idea maybe but if you sit around in San Francisco or New York and you're talking to technologists nowadays, the way that they generally think about things is that almost any task that can be automated, almost any task where you could write it down and go first do one, then two, then three, then four, then five, whether physically or even in the digital realm, is probably going to be automated sooner rather than later. And this represents a massive, massive shift in the nature of work, not just in San Francisco or New York but ultimately in China or Africa or France or in Singapore or Cambodia. Because you can ultimately produce machines that can produce this kind of work product at incredibly low cost. And so the consequences of that are that if you're thinking about what the nature of work means, if you're 18 years old today and you're thinking about what the nature of work means over the arc of your career, and you want to make sure that you're not being pushed down to the sort of lowest commodity of labor and competing with machines that are automating tasks, you have to be able to essentially solve problems. You have to be that person that's able to take complex pieces of information, complex challenges, put that together, create new things. And in our society, we call that skill set of being able to sort of take all these different pieces of information, see something that other people don't create something new, we call that the entrepreneur. And so whether your goal is to ultimately build your own business, whether it's to join somebody building a business, whether it's to even work in a larger organization, having that sort of basic core entrepreneurial skill set. Being able to identify a problem, see a potential solution, pull the resources together, create something is just critically, critically important in our economy as it's emerging and changing. The way I would often describe it is we get large corporations all the time coming to 1776. And we have here in Washington DC probably 260 startups that we work with, five, 600 entrepreneurs, and then globally we work with maybe another, you know, 950 or 1,000 startups. And we get corporations come to us all the time and go, listen, we would be really, really interested in hiring any of your startups that aren't successful. Even the ones that fail because they're so desperate to get that kind of entrepreneurial skill set into their organizations because it's becoming so critical. So to answer the question directly, you know, teaching entrepreneurship to youth today is not just about empowering them to go build their own businesses. It's about using the experience of thinking through building their own businesses to give them the skill set they're going to need to be effective and successful in the changing economy over the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years. Whether the way they do that is ultimately building their own business or their own social enterprise or whether it's helping someone else or some large corporation solve these kinds of problems. Thanks Evan. That's a great case for power of entrepreneurship. So we're now going to turn to our viewing group joining us from the U.S. Embassy in Penang, Pen, Cambodia. Penang, Pen, do you all have some questions for Evan? Good to see you. I see a couple of you too from the YCLE generation workshop back in Singapore from a couple of months ago. So good to see you guys. Penang, Pen, can you hear us? I'm from an NGO. I'm really impressed by what Evan just said. You said that to talk with us this evening, starting to make us see that to become an entrepreneur with the basic entrepreneurship skill as well as what you really want to give to us, it's just like share your experience in changing the economy from now for the next 10, 20 years. So I would like to ask you to mention from your experience what are the basic entrepreneurship skills for the young people, especially for those who never done any business or have any kind of entrepreneurship plan yet. So could you share us this kind of basic skill that you just mentioned? Thank you. Great question. So really I think what seemed to be asked in Evan is what are some of the key skill sets for entrepreneurs, young entrepreneurs, particularly women, looking forward at the next 10 to 15 years based on Evan's experience as an entrepreneur as a leader of 1776? Okay, great, over the heaven. Yeah, it's a broad and open question. Before we get into skills, we just talked about sort of attributes to be cultivated. You know, it's difficult because these are, there's this question that we grapple with a lot in the U.S. in a lot of the entrepreneurship programs that we work with with youth in the U.S. around, you know, can this be taught or are these attributes that you just find in people and sort of help to cultivate? And I often bounce between the two schools of thought periodically, but you know, the most essential aspect in my experience working with all these startups that any successful entrepreneur has to have is just an unbelievable level of persistence. And it's difficult because, you know, you're going to encounter a tremendous number of obstacles. Building a startup, you know, building a startup in New York or San Francisco or Washington, D.C., even more so if you're building it in a place that doesn't have kind of all those resources immediately available to you, you're going to encounter just a tremendous number of barriers and obstacles and rejection and failure on your path to eventual success and you may not eventually succeed. The only chance you have to eventually be successful is just being incredibly stubborn and incredibly persistent about pushing through these barriers and, you know, for me it was, I sort of almost describe it like developing a muscle, like training. The more barriers you encounter that you're eventually able to break through, the more you know that you can break through barriers, the more persistent you can be the next time, the more you can train and develop that, but it's hard to sort of, it's not just a skill that you can read about and check the box and go great, I've got persistence, but it is the most essential attribute that I think any entrepreneur needs to have. You know, I joke there's this idea that gets, is very commonly talked about in American entrepreneurship circles that, you know, we need to celebrate failure, that it's very important to sort of have a culture of risk, that part of what makes America unique is that, hey, you can fail and it's okay and you can still go on and do your next thing and that, you know, in other cultures failure is much more stigmatized and that's absolutely true. It's also true that almost no successful entrepreneur that I've ever worked with or when I look in myself in any remote way likes to fail. In fact, they're massively viscerally competitive individuals, men or women, who hate to fail more than anything else and will just fight through all this sort of pain to eventually get to success. So it's a tricky question. Another really core attribute that we look for in entrepreneurs that we invest in, that we work with in our incubator program is the ability to communicate effectively. In almost every case, whether you're doing something that's very complex and based on a technology and as entrepreneurial or whether you're doing something on the social entrepreneurship sphere where you see an opportunity to bring people together in a new way, when you're first starting out, you have this idea in your mind that's pretty intuitive to you and is just not intuitive to anybody else. And it's complex and it's difficult and in order for you to build the sort of coalition of people around you that you need to be successful, whether it's the employees who are going to work for you or just advisors who are going to make connections for you or customers or investors or whoever it may be, you're going to have to get really, really good at figuring out how to take all of that kind of complex not yet formed ideas and tell it in a really simple story. And I think those aspects of persistence, being able to communicate very effectively, the sort of ability to solve problems when you don't have all the information available to you. To me, being an entrepreneur often feels like you're in a dark room feeling your way through a problem. If the lights were turned on and everybody could see what the problem was, it'd be easy. What makes it hard, the reason you have such ability to create values as an entrepreneur is that you kind of are able to feel your way through and figure it out first. Those are all the core attributes an entrepreneur needs. In terms of skills, things you can teach, I get more and more boring the longer I've been at this. You really do need to understand the basics of kind of economics and accounting. You've got to be able to talk about how much money you're making and how much money you're spending and whether you're actually generating a profit or not in a way that sophisticated people can understand. Nowadays, you need to understand distribution and digital distribution in an awful lot of cases. Whether that's WeChat or Viper or WhatsApp, whether it's Facebook, whether it's email lists but how are you going to kind of reach your audience? Whether it's depending on where you are in the world, just being really effective at using SMS but sort of how are you going to engage and reach your audience? Part of what's made it so much easier to be an entrepreneur nowadays is the fact that you can reach people so incredibly effectively and precisely using these digital channels and yet it astounds me how many entrepreneurs we meet up with that aren't using those channels and aren't using them in a particularly sophisticated way. And then if you want to do so many things nowadays, having a good grounding in technology and engineering. You don't necessarily need to be the engineer but being familiar with the potential of what technology affords even if your product isn't technology per se, just being able to use technology to do things more efficiently and do things in a way that scales more rapidly is just incredibly powerful in the modern world and if you have skills in that area, it's going to be a huge advantage to you. We're going to turn now to a viewing group that's joining us from Singapore Management University. Singapore, do you all have any questions for Evan? You talked about connecting to clients, to entrepreneurs using digital technology. But I've noticed that in the central Asia a lot of people are resistant to change because of our culture and because of tradition. So how would entrepreneurs go around facing this challenge? How would we encourage people to use new forms of technology when we come up with different ideas that require the use of this technology? Thank you. Challenging question. So you're asking in Singapore and some Southeast Asia how do you get people to really embrace some of the new technology platforms to be able to use some of the entrepreneurial ideas and startups that you are thinking about? Great question. So every once in a while, maybe every decade, someone through some level of intention and some level of luck invents something like Facebook that just, you know, goes so fast, transforms the way so many people communicate and connect or live their lives or do business. And it just grows like absolute wildfire. Those are very, very, very rare. And even in those cases, you watch it go through a cycle where a relatively small number of early adopters become fanatical users of it first. In the case of a Facebook, it was college students, right, who were really just trying to figure out how to date better. You know, like how to figure out who was available, who was doing what, you know, on college campuses. And then it was the college students who had recently graduated and started to enter the workforce a little bit. And then, you know, three, four, five years later, your grandparents were getting onto Facebook. But it went through a progression of early adopters to sort of early majority users to sort of that really mainstream market and then eventually to all the laggards where it becomes almost impossible, even if you hate Facebook, to not be on it. That's, you know, a technology that's grown more rapidly than almost any other in the last, you know, few decades. For the vast majority of entrepreneurs, those dynamics, right, identifying your early adopters, really, really doing an incredible job of delivering for them, making them evangelists for your product, using them to slowly bridge into kind of that early majority of users with more mainstream requirements, really doing a great job of servicing them than using their kind of reference to move into more of that mainstream market. This is a path that almost every entrepreneur should go through in terms of their market development. So, you know, it, nobody, almost nobody really embraces change for the sake of just embracing change. We might think that we want to, but the vast majority of people are only really going to change their habits and behavior in terms of adopting a new technology or solution if it's really, really valuable, right? If it really solves a painful problem, if it really removes a frustration point. So you need, you know, your job, if you're introducing a really new disruptive technology, is to figure out that very, very small subset of people who do just want to try something new just because it's new and cool or who have such an incredible pain point that they're willing to try something just for the sake of it. We call those kinds of people early adopters. And being able to sort of identify and understand who your early adopters are is just incredibly, incredibly important. And so when we work with entrepreneurs a lot of the time, they want to talk about their product. It's great, or their service, whatever it is. We want to talk about, as investors, we want to talk about their understanding of their customer and their ability to really, really clearly identify who their early adopters are, what their pain point is, what attributes they have so that you can easily identify and reach them, the channels you're going to use to reach those early adopters, because until you can really dominate the early adopters and whatever your segment is, it's going to be very hard to move on to the rest of your early business. My experience with startups all around the world is those same basic dynamics of having to figure out who your core early users are first and then expand, holds true regardless of the technology, regardless of where you are, even if the particulars of who your early adopters are different. That's great advice. For folks at SMU at Singapore Management University, can you guys hear us? Are many of you on Facebook? Can you just raise your hand if you're on Facebook? How many of you guys are on... All right, you're all on Facebook. How many of you guys are on WeChat or WhatsApp? Yeah. These are technologies that have grown unbelievably fast, but if you look back at their growth curve, there was some small core initial user group that were like the rabid adopters early on of those technologies. In terms of the whole idea of market expansion, I'm dating myself here, revealing how old I am, but there's a really, really great book that was like just required reading back in the 90s if you're building a startup, and people don't read it as much now, but they should, called Crossing the Chasm. And so if you go back and look up Crossing the Chasm, it really does a great job of sort of laying out and explaining how market cycles develop and where some of the really tricky points are in building out, you know, introducing new technologies into new markets. And I'll just say from a personal experience, back in high school in 2000, I remember that I thought I was hip on technology when I had my pager that I could call people back with in my MySpace account and far before Facebook and Twitter and all these other technologies platforms took hold. So it's a fascinating area to look into. Things change quickly. So we're going to take a few more questions now from our online audience. This is from Ketsu in Cambodia. Ketsu asks Evan, could you tell me about how to manage a team? Any key advice for management skill sets? Yeah, so, I mean, I think you need to divide up two different skill sets or two different functions. One is leadership and one is management. I mean, in my experience, they get conflated together a little bit. Leadership is about being able to inspire a group of people to come together, overcome all of the frustrating reasons why no group of people really want to work together as productively as they could, get people to work incredibly hard, get people to put all their creativity and ideas into something. And that really is about being able to craft a vision that people find inspiring. It's about being able to build trust so that people believe that if they sort of sacrifice their own personal ambitions a little bit for the greater ambitions of the team, that they'll be rewarded for that. It's about people, I think, sensing and recognizing that you're sincere in whatever values or vision you're putting forward for the team. You know, all of that's the leadership component and it's really important because I think without that basic bedrock of, you know, why are we all going to pitch in to create something that's much more powerful than any one of us individually could be, you don't get very far. Management is much less sexy. It's much harder. It's much more tough day-to-day work. In my experience, you could divide, you could really just rephrase the management question into how do you build a team that communicates incredibly well? You know, if you think about what we do at 1776, I'll sort of take you through some of my management challenges right now and how we think about stuff and how my co-founder, Don, and I think about this. So, you know, we run an incubator program that spans multiple different geographies in cities. We have a whole set of different functional things we do. We write articles about what's happening. We do research. We work on a day-to-day basis with individual startups. We work with corporate partners. We do all these functional things and we do things focused on a set of industries, right? So, we do all of those things for startups in the education space or the healthcare space or transportation. So, you could look at it and say there's at least three different ways in which you could think about the structure of 1776. You could think about it by geography. You could think about it by industry. You could think about it by functional area. Generally, you can only pick one way in which you sort of set up a standard hierarchy, right? You decide that everybody's going to report to each other based on function or based on geography or based on whatever. By and large, as soon as you do that, that's going to become the dominant way in which information flows within your organization. Rarely, right, is whatever hierarchy you pick. Rarely is that actually the only or even the best way you need information to flow. So, your challenge from a management standpoint at the ultimate level as being a CEO is to figure out where information isn't flowing, where people aren't communicating, where they aren't collaborating as effectively as possible and create those pathways. Whether that's through informal communication, whether it's you personally as a leader being a great communicator. Ultimately, you've got to scale beyond that. So, it's figuring out different processes that you create to make sure people communicate in the right ways. It's figuring out how to set up different kinds of groups. And so, to me, the essence of management is being very thoughtful and intentional about how people are communicating, where communication is breaking down and constantly looking for those points where things aren't working as smoothly as they can and creating new structures to drive that communication. If you want... So, kind of the pro tip on market development and early adopters was the book Crossing the Chasm. If you haven't read it yet, the best book of the last 10 years on sort of management, particularly management in startups and technology is Ben Horowitz's Hard Things About Hard Things, which is just an awesome, awesome book. And he kind of goes through all of his really kind of gritty experiences trying to build and ultimately successfully, you know, manage a technology company through a full life cycle. Great. This is good. We're going to have some follow-up reading for folks off of the chat. So, we have a question now coming in from Trang in Vietnam, who asks, Evan, what are the mean types of business models and any suggestions for how we should think about what to employ as entrepreneurs? Yeah, main types of business models. So, your different types of business models generally flow out of an understanding of who your customer is. When we think about business models in general, we think about how a whole set of different pieces fit together. So, it's who your customer is, how you reach your customer, what you're selling your customer, what you're charging for that, how you're charging it, the messaging you wrap around that, all of those components fit into your business model. But the main types really flow out of the type of customer you have. So, if you are selling to consumers and you think you will have hundreds of millions of customers, each one of which will pay you at most a few dollars, then you need to really think in terms of what we would call a B2C business model. Really, business to consumer, where you have to figure out incredibly efficient communication channels, almost certainly digital, how are you going to reach people, how are you going to deliver your product, and you've got to be incredibly, incredibly efficient about it. The other extreme, you could have a classic B2B model where maybe you have 100 potential customers and you're going to sell a million dollar product to each one, in which case you're going to assume that you have one or a whole team of people going in and spending months or years selling that product to the customer. If somebody's buying stuff for millions of dollars, they're generally going to expect a very high level of customer service. People that are there attending to their every need, and you're building a different kind of business, we see in our industries a lot models that might be called B2B2C, right? So maybe your goal is to reach patients and offer something that helps sick people a solution. You might go to them directly, you might do a B2C model, or the right answer might be to say, you know what, I need to sell something to hospitals that they can put in the hands of their patients. In which case you need to really understand what you're ultimately getting paid per patient and the relationship that you might have with that intermediary, in this case the hospital, and how you reach that patient and how there's value creation for the hospital and value creation for the patient. So we generally classify business models at the highest level, really around who the customer is, how many of them are, what they can pay, because everything else kind of flows backwards from that. Great answer. So we have a question now from Maktar in Senegal, who asks Evan, can anyone become an entrepreneur? Well, that's a very broad question. Again, I tend to think that some people take to it much more naturally. You know, in retrospect, looking at my own life and experiences, I became, you know, we were talking about this story before we kick off. I graduated from high school in America and was all set to go off to good universities and just woke up when I was 18 and said, eh, everybody else is doing this college thing. I don't want to do it. And I had happened to have relatively supportive parents, but at the time I would never have thought of myself as an entrepreneur. I wouldn't have described it that way, but I found school incredibly tough. I was constantly questioning my teachers and getting yelled at. I was constantly getting in trouble for stuff. I was constantly just not fitting right and the first possible opportunity that I could, I got away from that and went off and started building my own stuff. So I raised my first angel cow. I raised a million dollars when I was 19 years old. I raised 20 million before I was 23. I sold my company when I was 24 and for me it's funny because no one ever told me, gosh, Evan, you should be an entrepreneur. That was just never something they even thought about telling you in high school. Even in the U.S., even in the 90s, that just wasn't even in the realm of what they were thinking about. But the first opportunity I had to not have somebody else telling me what I had to do, I went off and became one. For me, clearly I had that sort of basic DNA of wanting to do my own things, wanting to solve problems inside me. And I wonder, can that be taught? I don't know. But for what we try to do when we work in 1776, when we work with high school students, when we work with college students, it's to make sure that those people who do have that kind of persistence, the desire to solve problems, the ability to communicate effectively, make sure that they understand and see that there's a broader range of opportunities in front of them. Because I probably could have been forced to go off down the traditional path and you have to go conform and go off and work for a big corporation and all that. And I would have been miserable and I think my talents would have been underutilized. And so I think anyone has the potential to be an entrepreneur. I don't think everyone should be an entrepreneur. I don't think everyone should run out and say, gosh, I'm going to start my own business because it is difficult and if you aren't suited for it, it's likely going to be a very frustrating and painful process. Great answer. We have another question from Vietnam. One of our colleagues asks, since all customer relationships are different, how do I engage customers at a broad level while tailoring to their different needs? So I guess really customer, how do you differentiate among customers and target your business to meet particular needs? It's a great question. If I'm understanding the question correctly, I think maybe the frame through which you're looking at it is maybe a little bit wrong. When you start out and you're first building your business and you're first getting off the ground, one of the most dangerous things you can do is defining your potential customer set too broadly. When we hear this all the time from startups that we work with and we say, who's your target customer? Tell me. Tell me precisely as you can the attributes, the pain points that your customer has. And they go, well, my customer is everyone who wants to communicate better or everyone who wants to learn. And that may be true. And it's good that you have a vision that broad, but it's almost impossible to act on that vision. So we want to see an entrepreneur who's able to go, you know, my eventual potential market is everyone who wants to learn, but I know that starting out, I'm really, really focusing on people who are trying to, and I'm just using learning as an example because we work with a lot of stripes in the education space, with people who are in this age range, they've just left high school or they've just left college and they want to learn this topic and they haven't been successful for these reasons here and the more precisely you can define who your customer is and how you reach them, the more successful you're likely to be in terms of how you target that person. Because if you're going out, I mean, building any business is super, super hard and if you're going out and saying, okay, we have to serve as every different type of customer relationship, every different type of customer need and we need to reach customers that think of themselves differently. You're creating a problem set for yourself that's likely to be almost impossibly difficult. It goes back again to the fact that, use the iconic Zuckerberg example of Facebook. Facebook started out as a way for college students at a small subset of universities to share pictures with each other and they absolutely nailed that use case and that target segment and then they just kept expanding from there the definition of exactly who their customer was and exactly what their problem set was and adding in features and building more stuff but as rapidly as Facebook grew and as pervasive as it's come, it started out with an incredibly simple idea for a very, very narrowly defined set of customers. Absolutely. I think if I remember correctly, you even have a .edu website that then prevented who could actually be a part of that initial... You had to be a college student at a subset of elite universities if you wanted to join. And that's... It's certainly not because Zuckerberg lacked broad transformational vision for what Facebook could potentially become. It's that his instincts were right in going, we have to get a particular set of people fanatically loyal to what we're doing and then we can grow from there. Great advice. So thank you again to all of the online viewers for the great questions. Keep them coming. Feel free to comment in the chat space or again use the Twitter hashtag AskTheEntrepreneur. Now we're going to go back to our viewing group in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Folks, colleagues in Cambodia, do you guys have any more questions for Evan? And if you wouldn't mind just introducing yourself as well. My name is Gisopin. I am also one of the alumni of the study department and it is great that I hear a lot from you and as an educator, we're going to place a lot of programs and barriers. So would you like to share of some of your barriers that you have faced before and how do you overcome that? It is like the technique of you to share us as a youth that you're going to start up something so that it could probably... Sorry, can you just repeat the end of that? We're having a little bit of trouble hearing you here in Washington. Would you like to share of some of your further experience and how did you overcome that? Is it how to share some of the challenges he had or the challenges and how he overcame them as an entrepreneur? Is that what the question is? Your prior experience. Your prior experience? Same question. I think I have an easy part. Challenge, experience and challenge. Okay, great question. Sorry, we're just having a little bit of trouble hearing in Washington here, but the question seems to be for Evan. How have you been able to, both as an entrepreneur and also as a leader of the Incubator 1776, how have you been able to overcome some of the challenges and to be able to help your team also overcome those challenges and move forward? Boy, that's a... And maybe what are a challenge or two that you face either as an entrepreneur or as one of the co-ceos of 1776? I think in general, it's really useful to remember when you're an entrepreneur you're going to fail along the path to success much more frequently than you succeed. It feels oftentimes like you're... if you set your goals for the week, you sit there at the end of the week and you look back and you're like, all the things I didn't get accomplished, all the things that I got my ass kicked at, all the things that I lost at, and if you look over the course of a month, but then when you start looking over the course maybe every three months, every six months, and you look at how far you've come as an organization, you're like, wow, it kind of blows you away and it's the ability to sort of keep... to fight through all those little frustrations and failures and no's along the way to get to success. I'll give you a simple example. So we invest into startups as part of our program. So we help startups grow and scale and as they start to get traction, as customers start to buy their product and things are starting to come together, we'll often step in, not with all of them, but with ones that fit our profile and say, hey, we'd like to invest in your business. That's what we do. But of course, where does that money come from? We have to go out and raise capital ourselves from corporations, wealthy individuals, wealthy families, they give us money so that we can go invest it into the startups. And that's called a fund. So we go out and find a fund of wealthy people and we bring it together. And when we first started out, we were saying, look, everybody else wants to focus on startups in Silicon Valley or Silicon Valley in New York and everybody else wants to focus on areas where you don't have to deal with a lot of complexity and regulation and government. Everybody else is looking for the next WhatsApp. We want to do different than all of that. We want to go all around the world and find startups, maybe some that are in Silicon Valley in New York but particularly startups that are in all these other places. And we want to actively look for startups that are tackling these really complex and really difficult challenges and that nasty regulation and government plays a big role and traditional and trench interests can stop success and that's what we want to do because we think that's where the next really big opportunities lie and we think we're really good at helping startups be successful in those areas. But going to wealthy people and wealthy corporations and saying we want to do something really different from what everyone else seems to be successful doing right now is really hard, you face a lot of skepticism. And I remember when we were pulling together the fund in the early days, we were first getting entrepreneurs to invest and we kept getting lots of them going, okay, some of them would just say no, which is great. But a lot of them would say, you know, yeah, I'm interested. Yes, maybe, maybe, yes, maybe. And those yes, maybes would kill us, right? Because no one would say yes well, you know, who else is invested in your fund? And for so long, we could say well, you know, a lot of people have said yes, maybe, right? No one has actually said yes. And it was just this incredible, like incredibly difficult challenge of like just being so frustrated because every time you'd get a no, it was like, ugh. And every time you'd get a yes, maybe, it just added to the frustration of kind of going. And you know, I remember just sitting here, I was asking lots of our advisors and we had lots of great advisors that I was before successfully. And I'm like, what am I missing? Like, what's the magic formula for cracking this? And they're like, there's none. It's really, really hard. Like, you have to gather as many of those yes, maybes and keep pushing and keep adding pressure and you just have to wait for it to all come together. You know, and then eventually, we pitched one particularly family for whom I will have undying loyalty. And they looked at it and said, wow, this is great and it's important and somebody should be doing this stuff. And yes, we're in. And we're in for more than you're asking for. And then we were able to go back to all those yes, maybes and go, hey, these guys are in and they're really respected people. And everybody else was like, well, good, I'm in too. And then the whole thing came together incredibly quickly. But it would have been so easy at any point in that process of going, well, I'm getting a lot of no's and a lot of maybes and no one's willing to say yes and maybe this entire approach is wrong. That would have been really easy to do. But as an entrepreneur, right, you've got to be good at just barreling through all of that frustration and kind of not letting your own emotional state, which is one of screw all of this, right? You can't let your own emotional state get in the way of like where you have to lead your organization and what you have to do to get to what you think is the right answer in the end. Yeah, just to follow up on that, because a lot of the young people who I've talked to in Southeast Asia have constantly said and myself included that there's a lot of pressure to follow a particular path. You know, go to school, go to university right after, make sure you have that stability and security in your job. And as a younger person, you know, you kind of took that risk and convinced your parents and the people in your inner circle that this was a worthwhile venture to take on. Do you have any advice for young people overseas in Southeast Asia and elsewhere in Africa about how to approach that risk and also convince people around you that this is something worth pursuing? Yeah, and I wouldn't, you know, again, we were talking about this, but my own background was, you know, went to pretty elite high school in the U.S. I learned to code, I learned engineering, I learned technology, I learned all those things when I was really young. So by the time I reached 18, I kind of already had that grounding in tech. So, like, my own story, it's easy to tell it, but it's easy to forget the element where, oh, by the way, at 18, I could just already go out and hack together a first prototype of an application. That's hard, right? Yeah. So, you know, I had that grounding. I didn't like people telling me what to do. Even in the U.S. in 1996, when I built my first startup, Netscape had just gone public. The Internet was just becoming a thing, but it was still looked at as a pretty crazy thing to do to not go to college. You know, and I knew, right, it was easy for me, right? I knew that if I really screwed up, I could always go back to college. My parents would always be there to support me. I had a strong network around me, right, which made it easier to kind of fail. I had no living expenses at that point, right? I could kind of basically sleep wherever and eat ramen noodles and little chicken pot pies. You know, that was easy. And then I ended up building the company, and we ended up selling it when I was 24. And then I went off and got my undergraduate from Oxford in philosophy, politics, economics, and, you know, like, I would never discount the value and the importance of a strong education. And, you know, I think there is an element of truth to the idea that making sure that you have given yourself the tools and skill set to be successful in a whole range of environments is just smart and it's sensible. And a great education is going to be critical to you in being an entrepreneur. It's going to be critical to you if you decide you want to go work for a big company. But make sure as you're getting that education that you're also getting educated in entrepreneurship. You're getting educated and you're starting, as we talked about earlier, you're starting to work those muscles that you need to be an independent person that can solve problems. I think the sweet spot for an awful lot of people to really take the plunge in entrepreneurship is when they're in university or maybe just after university where you've got that network of support around you, you've gotten the basic education, but your living expenses and your costs are still really, really low. I have a mortgage now. I have a wife. It was a lot harder making the decision to jump into another adventure like 1776 when I was 36 when we started that. It was a lot harder when you have a wife and a mortgage and responsibilities than it was at 18. At 18, it was like, I won't go to college. I'll start a company. What's the worst that can happen? As you get more and more responsibility in life, you're like, no, the worst that can happen is pretty bad. It's pretty real. So there's a trade-off in all of this stuff, but yeah. What? Perfect transition to a group who is exercising their entrepreneurship muscles at Singapore University. So we're going to go back to Singapore Management University and see if any of you all have more questions for Evan. Can we see him? Hi. Hello. Hi, guys. Hi. I look awesome. Hello. Hello. Can you hear us? Yeah. Hi. Okay. Just a quick question. We... Can you just speak to me? Okay. We in Singapore, some of our friends in Singapore have businesses which have expanded across the border from Malaysia to Indonesia to Vietnam and some in China and India. So some of the challenges that businesses in Singapore face is that of managing staff in these overseas countries. And all the staff who try out with them, staff who manipulate accounts, staff who manipulate resources for their own gains. And how do you... What's advice in trying to counter this but at the same time keep these staff motivated and productive? That's a great question. Thank you for the question. So the question is really for companies in Singapore and elsewhere that have staff and have expanded across borders, across countries, across communities. How do you keep staff both motivated, engaged? How do you do the management piece when you're dealing with staff that's across countries, communities, cultures and make everything work together? Any advice? Great question. I should be asking them for advice. We're just starting to deal with that at 1776 where we actually are having teams in multiple cities and it's an awful lot easier to build culture and keep everyone motivated and drive communication when everyone is sitting around the same table every day and that kind of communication is much more organic. That goes back to sort of the question of good management which is creating good, strong structures to make sure that kind of communication occurs. In general, the more that you can get in the early days when you're building that culture, when you're building the vision, that you can be working with people who are sitting across from you like we are where you can have an idea or it's a thought on a feature, an insight about a customer and you can just go, hey, you know what, what if we did this, that kind of organic collaboration is really, really powerful. With that said, we see more and more startups nowadays who in the very early days are being built, spanning different cities, different countries, different continents where they might have, maybe it's an energy startup where you've got one person in Washington, you've got somebody who's really like the domain expert sitting in Houston and they have two developers in the Philippines and that's an increasingly common pattern and the companies that do a good job of that almost over-correct for communication. You can't, if you know the biggest challenge is that it's really easy for people to feel isolated, feel disconnected, not really know what's going on, as the person who's really leading that, you need to go out of your way to the point where it feels almost silly to really get that formal and informal communication going, to make sure that you're sharing, what did I just learn from this meeting? What did you just learn from that meeting? But also just getting on to Skype or Google Hangouts or WeChat and just sharing, hey, what are you thinking? How are you feeling? Just building that kind of connectivity. One of the really, really simple, and it seems almost silly, one of the really simple kind of customs we've developed inside 1776 because we have people now who are regularly traveling all around the world, is just whenever you've wrapped up, maybe I was just in San Francisco for the last week and I flew in yesterday evening, back into D.C. And I took almost that entire flight and just wrote out, this is what I learned from every key meeting that I had. This was the insight, this is what I learned and I just blasted it out to the entire team. There was no specific purpose to that other than just making sure that everybody else was seeing what I was seeing, could come back and ask questions, could drive that kind of communication and that's one of the things that, you know, Donna and I, my co-founder, Donna and I sort of started doing that and now everybody else has kind of picked that habit up and it ensures that now that we're not all sitting around one table, we're all over the world, we're in airplanes all the time, we all can still have some version of that just, aha, this is what I learned, how does that fit into what you're doing? Yeah, and they feel a part of your trip probably in San Francisco. Yeah, totally. And like, yeah, I'll include the narrative, I'll include funny stories and the narrative and like, but it is, at the end of the day, it's about making sure that everybody feels connected and everybody's getting the information they need. Great. And let me just make one plug also. You know, part of the Y ceiling network, the Young Southeast Asia Leaders Initiative that focuses on our 10 ASEAN countries, is they try to build some greater connectivity and networks among the young cohort of entrepreneurs who then, as they're growing their businesses, have contacts and if they're in Singapore and Malaysia and Cambodia and Vietnam and elsewhere around the region to really push forward together. Yeah, and following up on that, I mean, I'll say we work with lots of startups and, you know, when you work with hundreds and hundreds of companies, you start to see some pattern recognition around what habits tend to lead to success. And, you know, one of the things we see is companies that are able to build a strong, not the people that are inside the company, but a strong network of advisors and supporters and champions tend to be more successful and the entrepreneurs that are particularly successful, the ones that almost treat that extended network as just part of their company. So regularly just sharing that kind of informal communication, letting their advisors know what's going on, I know in our incubator program, you know, we exist to help these startups. If we're investors, we really want to help the startups because we want to see our money do well. And it's amazing to me the number of entrepreneurs who don't let us know what's going on in their business. And it's not because they're hiding anything, it's because they're just so heads down. And then you find out two months later, something where you're like, man, I could have made one phone call. Or if you've just done this a little bit differently, you would have saved yourself so much time. And I think a lot of the entrepreneurs don't want to feel like they're, you know, bothering their advisors, or that they're bothering those people who want them to be successful, when in fact it's always easy for me to just not read an email. It's impossible if the information's never been shared for me to get it otherwise or do anything about it. Great advice, great advice. So we're going to now take a few more questions from our online audience. And we have one from Pandu in Indonesia who asks, Evan, what advice do you have on branding the product itself? Oh, great topic. One that we're very passionate about at 1776, particularly because the problems that our startups tend to be solving, their solutions, tend to be pretty complex. And so getting that brand right is critical. I think, and Don and I talk about this a lot, I think the best way to think about a brand is in the simplest way, the story that you tell about your business, and therefore the story that other people over time are able to tell about your business. If that's done really well, the story may be a gross simplification. It may be just a tiny subset of what you're doing, but it needs to be something that sticks, and it's easy for you to tell and therefore becomes easier for other people to tell. So we do all manner of things at 1776. We work with startups in all kinds of different ways. We bring all these resources to bear. We work with big corporate partners in hospitals and schools. We do all this stuff. But the story that we tell about 1776, and we tell it consistently over and over again in a predictable way, is really simple. The story is, we go around the world, we find the most promising startups that are tackling the problems and the challenges that really matter to all of us in the world. That's the story. And we tell that story in somewhat different ways, but we tell it consistently. All those other details don't really matter, and what's important about that story is that, one, it lets people know what our values are. We are looking for startups, we're looking for promising startups, but there's an implicit intentionality to our brand at 1776. We're not just looking for the next startup that's going to scale up and be massively successful. We're looking for a startup that's going to do that and tackle a problem that really matters to all of us. It lets you know that we're implicitly global. It lets you know that we will be open to ideas from anywhere. And it's a very simple story, where I think a lot of people get really confused. One, they create a brand or they create a story about their business that's devoid of any sense of value or any sense of personality. I think particularly in this day and age, people want to associate themselves with brands that mean something more than just, I want to be massively successful and sell you as much as I can. They want to be connected to something. They tend to make it way too complex. They tend to change it way too frequently, whereas just finding that simple story, telling it consistently, making sure it shares your values as a founding team is pretty much key to success. You've been just taking a quick step back on that to follow up. You know, 1776, the name by itself and kind of tagline on T-shirts as where revolution begins and just kind of the value is underlying just the brand, the name. Is there anything else kind of, when you guys were thinking about that, that would be worth passing on to the audience? Yeah, we did that intentionally. I mean, like, we debated a lot. And for all of you guys, so 1776 was a pretty seminal year. So it was the year that Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, which lays out the basic tenets of sort of a capitalist economy. It was the year that Thomas Jefferson wrote The Declaration of Independence, which was the basis for American democracy. And in The Declaration of Independence, Jefferson writes that when government, when institutions no longer serve the needs of the people, it's the duty of the people to rise up and in essence launch a revolution, right, to create new institutions, to create new forms of government. And like, that's what we wanted. Like, we wanted to create this brand that said, look, we have institutions all around the world that are no longer serving the needs of the people. In healthcare, in education, in transportation, right, these things are broken, the system isn't working. And we're looking to entrepreneurs all around the world to rise up and solve these problems. So it's a pretty bold name to take for yourself, right? You don't take the name 1776 if you're going to go do something small and incremental or quiet. And so that was, you know, that for us was really, really conscious. Like, we wanted it to be a signal that said, this is about revolution. It's about solving problems that affect people broadly. It's about reaching new people, activating them and helping them to be part of this revolution. Great. So we're going to take in our question now from Ryan Louie in the Philippines, who asks, Evan, how did you get your first clients to talk maybe a little about the pitching process as well? I'll, yeah, no. I'll go all the way back to my first startup Net-to-Side. And the simplest answer is through a tremendous amount of just hustling. You know, so my first startup Net-to-Side was in financial services. And, you know, we had this concept that we were going to help people manage their personal finances, their savings, their investing, better. And we kind of built the problem. We did everything the wrong way, right? So everything that we would, we did everything in a different way than we would advise a startup to do at 1776. So we built the whole product, and then we started looking around and going, gosh, I wonder who wants to use this product. And what we found out was not a lot of people, like no one. So then we were like, well, that's a problem because we think it's a really nifty product but nobody wants it. And so, you know, I was leveraging my advisors, you know, I built a pretty good advisory network, pretty good board. I was leveraging them to try to get in front of clients. I was doing like everything I could, and I realized when I was sort of going in front of clients that I kind of sounded like an idiot. Like, I didn't actually understand their business. I didn't understand the language they were using. I didn't want to talk to them. I didn't know who the hell our clients were, supposed to be, like any of this stuff. And so, finally out of exasperation, so we sold to financial planners, right? So we weren't selling directly to individual people who wanted to manage their wealth. We were selling to people who advised those people. So finally out of intense frustration, I just, like, this was before the internet was pervasive. I don't know if the reference will make sense in Singapore or Cambodia, but we have these phone books, we have these phone books back in the day in America called The Yellow Pages, which listed, like, every business in your city. And so I literally just opened up the phone book and I started going through every financial planner in the phone book and just calling them. And going, look, I think I built this kind of cool thing. Can I just come and talk to you? And, like, one in ten said yes. Luckily there were a lot of them in the phone book. Like, one in ten said yes. And I just went and it took, like, months and just went and asked every one of them, like, what is your business? Like, what do you do? What do you struggle with? We already had this product, right? And it became really obvious that, wow, there was some really powerful stuff in what we did and there was a bunch of stuff that was totally off base and there were other things we were going to need that we hadn't even thought about. And through that process, like, I learned so much. And by the end of it, like, I just sort of instinctively when I could use the right terms and the right language and I could sound like somebody who knew all this stuff. And then it still took more hustling and it was, like, one of those random meetings my advisors set up. And it was, like, again, the frickin 25th one of going into a financial planning firm and going, hey, like, now that I've learned all this stuff, now that I understand it, like, I could describe it in the right way and finally one person said, wow, this could be totally revolutionary to my business. We want to buy it, we want to help you to build it and, hey, can we invest in your company? But it took a tremendous amount to get there. That's one of the reasons why we spend a lot of time with startups in 1776, like those kinds of experiences that I have that Donna has that lots of entrepreneurs have had. We spend a lot of time with our startups going, yo, slow down the product-building experience a little bit and really focus early on in what we call customer development. So really going out and talking to and understanding your customer so that you're not going down the wrong path and building that product, but you're really aligning it well with what your customers actually need as early as possible. Great, great answer. So I think we have time for just one last question here. And this actually is from another colleague in Vietnam who asks, Evan, it takes me a long time to develop a good pitch. I commonly have to record it again and again because of mistakes. Do you have any tips to make it faster and easier and any public speaking tips as well? No. Actually, you're doing it right. It is hard. I mean, getting a good pitch, the essence of a great pitch is whatever allows you to explain your business, whatever that simple story is that allows you to explain your business and the way to get it right. And we hammer the startups that we work with on this over and over again. The way to get this right is to practice and practice and pitch everyone you know, and more importantly, everyone you don't know, every chance you can get so that you get that pitch really, really tight. We give our startups assignments, so we work through it. We'll go through pitch coaching workshops and we'll help them with their story a little bit. And then we'll go, okay, now, like, when you're getting your hair cut, you need to pitch the person who's cutting your hair. When you're at the grocery store, always pitch your taxi cab driver. If you're in a taxi, always pitch the person driving your taxi. It doesn't matter if they know anything about your business or not, because you need to get to the point where you can explain your business to the person who knows nothing about your industry, nothing about your technology. You got to get the story that simple and clear. More broadly, some just generally good pitch techniques, a great pitch really is a great story, a great story about your user, who your user is, talking about your user in a way that almost anybody can immediately empathize and connect with. We should all be able to recognize ourselves in some way in your user and the problem that they have. You need to make sure to explain this horrible, frustrating, expensive, awful problem that your user has. That's the tension in this story that you're telling. Then you don't need to give a list of the 25 features that your product or service has that solves it. What you need to do instead is describe how much more wonderful your user's life is once your solution or product comes along. If you can tell your business almost invariably, the easiest way to tell that story about your company is by sharing that perspective of the user, the user experience with your audience. You need to hit on basic things like how do you make money, how big is your market, how do you scale, but the essence where I think most entrepreneurs get it wrong is that they forget to ever really explain what it is that they do. We hear so many of these pitches where you're like, wow, that's really awesome, it seems cool, you're super excited, I have no idea what your business does. It's really hard to go forward from that. I don't invest in a company if I don't fundamentally understand what it does. I'm probably not going to advise a company if I don't get what it does. So if you can just explain that simple story about your business, practice it, practice it, practice it, you'll be golden. Great advice, great advice. Well, folks, unfortunately that's just about all the time we have for today, and thank you everyone for the great questions. I think hopefully people have learned a good bit on how to be a successful entrepreneur. Kevin, do you have any last thoughts or final takeaways for the group? No, these have been great questions. I have the privilege to travel all around the world, meeting with entrepreneurs. In the last six weeks I've been in Nairobi, Bangalore, Berlin, Dublin, San Francisco, New York, Austin, Boston, which I'm feeling exhausted just recounting it all. And there's resources now in so many different cities that make this possible. So those of you guys sitting at Singapore Management University, Singapore has this great growing, vibrant startup community now that maybe didn't exist three, four, five years ago. Take the time that you have while you're sitting there in university and don't just sort of play at it as a game. Go out, engage in that community. Intern, volunteer, help, connect in any way you can, learn about this stuff because it's becoming incredibly globalized. If you read the media you would think that everything interesting that's happening is happening in Silicon Valley and it couldn't be less true. There's an incredible number of interesting things happening in Silicon Valley, but the vast majority of the interesting stuff that's happening in startups around the world is not happening there. It's happening in places like Singapore, in Cambodia, and Nigeria, and the Philippines. And so kind of go out, find whatever that community is, and get as connected up as you can with it while you have the flexibility to do so. Great closing remarks. Well, many thanks, everyone. And closing, I'd like to thank firstly, Evan, for taking the time to engage with everyone who came online today, as well as a special thank you to the groups that gathered at the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and at Singapore Management University. My great thanks to all the other viewing groups and online viewers who participated. A recording of this program will be available on wiseli.state.gov. Check out wiseli.state.gov for more entrepreneurship content, and follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Thanks again, everyone, and we look forward to talking again soon.