 Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks very much for the kind introduction. Before I get to my speech, and it's going to be disruptive a little bit compared to everything we've heard. It's not a reflection on it. It's just a new line of thought. But before I do that, please allow me a moment of silence remembering the victims of the Boston event. The reason why this event, and I did not make it up because I'm here in the US, but the reason because it touched me personally so much is I'm a marathon runner. I did marathons. And I studied at MIT. And I lived four of the best years of my life in Boston. And I would never imagine accidents like that come so close to places that I loved and to people that I lived with. And particularly to two types of events or things that we thought were immune against any kind of terrorism, which is sports and academia. In those two types of places, you meet races, people, gender. You meet everybody. And you get to make friends, both at academia as well as in sports. Nevertheless, this accident tells us that the world is not immune anymore. So that's the reason why I just opted to start with this, although it's not related to my topic. Now, moving along, I would love to talk to you about entrepreneurship in Egypt and how is that affecting what we're doing and so on. But before I do that, I tell you I was coming here in the plane. And we sat down. It didn't take off yet. So I asked for newspaper. I opened the newspaper and on the front page, first page, 25 Egyptian politicians going to the US today for think tank discussions and so on. And I looked at this and I said, oh my god, what did I do to myself? So I called the attendant and I say, I want to get out of this flight. She says, why? I said, I'm on the wrong flight. She says, show me your boarding pass. I said, no, no, I don't mean the boarding pass. I mean the place I'm going to is not the right one I was supposed to. She said, why? I said, look, newspaper, 25 politicians. I'm not one. So she says, so what are you? I said, I'm an entrepreneur. She said, what is that? I said, entrepreneurs are people who just grab opportunities and build value on top of that. She said, so why don't you travel and grab an opportunity and build value on it? I said, get me an orange juice. So I arrived here to listen to politics, economics, and things that are a little bit remote to me. But it all fits together. And I want to add to all what we discussed, a bright side, which is entrepreneurship in Egypt and in the Middle East, which I'm following, not just Egypt. So entrepreneurship started a while ago in a different way, but there is something new happening. And that's what I want to tell you the story. The start is the revolution. The revolution itself is an entrepreneurial act in my interpretation. And allow me, I will always, and you've heard me, I like to simplify problems, complex problems from my business perspective. I like to simplify them, make analogies, and draw conclusions. So to me, any revolution is an entrepreneurial act. Somebody feeling pain and opportunity, making a change, trying to get better. Basically, that's what a revolution does. That's what also an entrepreneur does. An entrepreneur, by the way, is not necessarily somebody who starts his own company. Entrepreneur could be an employee. Entrepreneur could be a president. All of those can be entrepreneurial in the way they think, or can be not entrepreneurial. So what happened in Tahir Square is, on the first day, young, on average, very young people gathered. Not old, no legacies, no ideologies. Young people gathered to make change. That was the starting point. They had slogans and slogans, and they still have slogans till today. But I call the main slogan was, we want change. Nobody chanted that. But inherently, if you think about it, that's what they wanted. The people who are shouting and asking for bread and justice, most of them were wealthy, or above average, and had bread. Very few people I've seen who asked for bread were in need for bread. They were really chanting because they wanted change in this country, change in the whole system. And people were fed up. And that's very entrepreneurial. But very much like startups, revolutions make a lot of mistakes. And early-stage startups, in particular, most of them fail. So are revolutions. History tells us, typically, about the few ones who succeeded at the end. Very few of us read history about failing revolutions. There are hundreds and hundreds of revolutions all over the world that have failed. Similarly, startups, 10% success rate in early-stage startups. So again, there is some similarity there. Now, look at the reasons for failure in startups. The most one and two reasons for failure in startups are either the plan is not good or not accurate or not correct. So you come up with a plan, I'll sell this much, I'll do this much, I'll do this. And the plan turns out, sorry, not realistic, not correct. That's number one. Number two. And there are only two. You can enumerate hundreds. But to me, there are two. This is one. Number two is a debate between the shareholders. Shareholders disagree on what they want to do. I've seen those two break down 95% of startups, those two reasons. And revolutions against, very similarly, in a very clear analogy, fail because of those two reasons. The stakeholders, like the shareholders in a startup, the stakeholders fight. Oh, I thought we were doing this. No, I thought we were doing that. I want to become the CEO. You want to become the CEO. And so on. Or the plan was not clear. And again, the 2011 revolution, characteristically, did not have a clear plan. There was no plan. There was only a will to change. That is it. And not just to change Mubarak, by the way. I mean, this evolved with time. On the first day, it was not even Mubarak. On the first day, it was just give us some change. Had the guy shown up on the 25th in the evening on TV and made two, three small minute proposals, people would have gone home. So it was something that evolved over time that people wanted more change, more change. But there was no plan. What do we really want? Where do we want to go? And did these stakeholders sit together like in a successful entrepreneurial case and design a roadmap, a business plan? That's what we look for when we judge startups. And the answer is no. And we're suffering today because of the two reasons. So it's not done yet. The jury is out. Startups can pivot. Pivot means change course until they find the right way. Startups can find new shareholders that can inject new blood and succeed. There are many ways, and I can go on and on and on in the analogy about how to save startups because that's the business I do when I mentor my companies that I invest in. I save them, I mentor them, I help them. And in a very simplified way, I know most of you or everybody will say, oh, this is a country and this is a startup. What are you comparing? I'm sorry. Again, I like simple ways, simple-minded, call me naive, but that's the way I am. So the bright side, what's the bright side? The bright side is we went in September 2011. First of all, before that, I had my own bright side. Let me just take a minute to tell you about that story because in 2003, I started up a company in Egypt to do technology, very high technology. I mean, we did chip sets and the chip design and the sophisticated embedded solutions for what is called the next generation mobile networks. Something that at that time was unheard of in a country like Egypt, and the players were known. There is Qualcomm, there is Broadcom, there is Intel, there is 10 players, each of them is billion-dollar company and above. And we decided to start something in that area with four engineers inside Cairo University in a small room. Not too long ago, like in 2008, five years after starting it, we had 120 engineers and we were the number one in the world in the technology we were developing. You would Google and say this name of the technology, next generation mobile, or you call it LTE, and the first entry in Google for over a year and a half would be SISD soft. And people would say, where is this? Egypt, Egypt, why Egypt? Where did you get engineers from? Oh, we have engineers. How did you dare to do technology? No barriers, why can't you do technology elsewhere? And so on. And at some point in time, I don't know how to judge it now, maybe in hindsight five, 10 years down the road, I'll be able to judge. We sold the company to Intel. My argument was that raises the ceiling of the company, it can now become more international. Many of you will have its products in your hands and in your pockets. Probably around 200 million handsets will have the technology developed by that company very soon, but it gave me hope on a personal level. Gave me hope that there are no barriers to success for startups. Now, after the revolution, that hope went up, I mean, tons of times, because the old regime, despite not affecting me personally to start up my company and to succeed, was depressing the whole mentality of people. There was sense of somebody's in charge of this country, somebody's doing something we're isolated, we have no say anyway. And that made people, particularly the young, very isolated. And I was so astonished and surprised to see the young as the first people go to the streets, because I thought they were isolated, they didn't care anymore. You would see them sitting in coffee shops and talking anything but about their country. And all of a sudden, with this revolution, they woke up. Now, we went in September, we said, this is something we need to capitalize on. So with the help of, I don't wanna make propaganda for Google, but with the help of Google, we took a bus and we toured cities in Egypt. Not Cairo, not Alexandria, those are served. We went to Tanta, to Mansoura, and to Port Said, and to Asyut, and everywhere in Egypt. And giving lectures and discussing with people, entrepreneurship, start up your company. What does it mean, how to do it? Do you have an idea? Is there any problem you're suffering from? Did you have any problem coming here? Yeah, I had this problem with traffic. I had this problem with this and that. Why don't you solve it? Think with your friends, come up with an idea, and give us a proposal. So we really pushed people to think out of the box, simple, problem solving, and build companies on top of that, and we received 3,000 proposals. 3,000, something before the revolution, we would not even get 30. We got 3,000 proposals. The biggest challenge was how to evaluate, because we promised them the winner will get a million pounds. That was a big, big stake, and everybody wanted the million pounds. I said there are 3,000 of you, so statistically, the chance that you get the million pound is low. You still wanna come? Yeah, we wanna come. So anyway, we took them to 200, from 200 to 50, and at least, at the end of the day, we managed to choose the winner, and it was a seven-month period where these 3,000 have learned something. They have interacted. They have thought out of the box. Some of them started with an idea and ended with a different one. The winner is now growing. Some of the Egyptians here know B'Olek. B'Olek tells you about the traffic in Egypt while everybody's checking B'Olek before he goes anywhere back and forth now. That was the winner, but there were many, many others. So the bright side is that the young people, and sorry, Amra again, don't care about politics. They want to see change in their country, and now they are taking it in their own hands. They've lost confidence in everything else, but different from before, different from Mubarak's time where they gave up, this time they're not giving up. This time they are taking it in their own hands and trying to do something. And the number of companies, I see them in the entire pyramid because I established after that an angel investment fund for early-stage startups. So I see the early-stage, the ones that barely have anything but an idea and a business plan on paper, and I'm the chairman of Endeavor. Endeavor claims to be the high-impact entrepreneurship organization. So it's not for profit, and we take the ones that already have existed for a couple of years or three years, and we help them do double-digit growth really very strong because those ones are more secure, less risk, but they need mentorship. Mentorship is key. This country has lots of talent. What it's missing is mentorship on all grounds, not just in business. In business, in economics, in politics, and so on, this country needs mentors who can help. And when you're stuck, that's where the mentor has the highest value because I don't mentor a company by calling them every morning and saying, hey, what are you doing? Or waiting for them to come and say, hey, we don't know what to do today. That's not mentorship. Mentorship really comes at the right time with the right question or the right guidance and lets them go. It's not there to solve the problem. So in that sense, I think, again, coming back on the analogy, the country, the deadlock we're in, is a common thing in companies, is a common thing in startups that people face a deadlock, and you need to behave like an entrepreneur to solve deadlocks. An entrepreneur gives up things. He says, okay, I'm willing to sacrifice one, two, three in return for four, five, and six. That's, again, very naive, very simple-minded, but without giving up something, a deadlock is never resolved. You can stay in a deadlock forever, typically in startups, the company collapses. In a country, the economy collapses if the deadlock stays too long. So the analogy holds, even in that case, and we need to learn, as much as we mentor and help the young guys, they come to me and say, so why are you doing this? I said, guys, I'm very egocentric. I like myself, I want to learn. And every day, when I walk out to the street, I want to learn more. And when you come here and you walk here, I learn from you. Trust me, it's not me giving you all the way, it's you also giving me. These guys are techy. The one thing I learned from these guys most is the sense of time. These guys have a sense of time that my age, my generation doesn't have. A second means something to these guys. And look at them. Why are they, when they are chatting or doing four or five sessions at the same time? Why is technology now enabling them to chat with five or six people on the same session rather than one-to-one? Because of time, think about it. They could do it one in a row. But they don't have time. They want to talk to each other. They abbreviate every word. Every possible word. You see Arabic plus English plus abbreviation, a lingo that you would never imagine. Adil is smiling, right? A lingo that's really very, very interesting. But it's driven by time. They have a sense of urgency. They want to see change. And why aren't we, our generation, learning from them that urgency, that sense of time, in order to move forward? This is very crucial to where Egypt is today. The entrepreneurship will continue regardless of the political deadlock, regardless of what's happening in this country. This is, in my interpretation, an irreversible happening. The spirit in the young Egyptians today is irreversible. Despite of everything, they will continue and they will continue to grow. Institutions, Sharif is nodding, institutions are endorsing that now. The AUC is taking leadership. Others are doing, there is an ecosystem that amazingly grew so fast in a year, in just one year. Right, Sharif? A year ago, we would not even find anybody talking today when we hold any event where the word entrepreneurship is mentioned. It's a big gathering. And people want to come and people want to help. So we will build that ecosystem. We will build it. We will build it big time. And in my mind, the success or failure of this revolution in Egypt as well as in the Arab world will be only judged by one thing down the road is whether we will empower the young people. One day, we wanna see a president, a prime minister, people in charge, a governor who are 40 years old, 35, 42. Guess what? In Egypt's elite managing positions, 95% are above 60. Men above 60 and not women, men. Men above 60 in Egypt are 3% of the population. Men and women below 40 are 80% of the population. Why on earth would 3% rule 80%? It's not intuitive. And this will change. The 40 and 30 years old will not let that happen. Trust me. And if you continue the debate and the deadlock continues until everybody debating is 60 and 70 years old, somebody will react to that. So I will not hold you too long. I hope I just send a message that there is a bright side of this revolution. I call it entrepreneurship. It's gonna drive not just startups, it's gonna drive the whole country. It's gonna drive the mindset. It's gonna drive even the economy. And eventually it will drive politics. We are witnessing the start of that. Parties are having problems because the young are revolting on the old within the same party. And this will evolve. Trust me. The older guys sit back, mentor the young. That's your role. Mentor the young. Don't take their positions. Don't rule for them. Don't tell them what to do. They are very bright. They have energy that we don't have. They still have memory that we're losing with time. So please have hope. And trust the guys and trust entrepreneurship as a driver to Egypt. Thank you.