 Welcome everybody. We are about to get started. My name is Mary Alcantara and it's my privilege here to be here today as the moderator for the Bootstrapping and Connecting Ecosystems to Access Needed Resources power session. So I'd like to welcome everyone today. I hope you've been enjoying the forum so far. There's been lots of exciting discussions and knowledge being shared earlier today and we're excited to continue with this session right now. So my panelists, my fellow panelists are here with me. I think we have a couple, maybe slight camera issues, but we should be okay. So I'm going to go ahead and get started and just give a short introduction about the organization that I'm representing today and the topic itself. And then I've asked all of the panelists to do the same. So we're doing a little bit of a hybrid model here with some presentation and then some discussion afterwards and I hope it will be good. So let me go ahead and get started. So like I said, my name is Mary Alcantara. I'm representing Inputs. It's a Hungarian government program. I'm serving there as accelerator in residence, so bringing my experience running different accelerator and incubator programs for startups over the past nearly decade. And at Inputs, we actually, the whole program is really based on this topic of bootstrapping and connecting to other ecosystems. So I was really excited to be asked to be here today. We have five different pillars of activity that are really all around providing support to startups in the earliest stages of their life cycle when finances and time are really short. So the topic of bootstrapping I think is very near and dear to my heart. And then alongside that, really expanding their access to other ecosystems. Hungary is a small country. We have about 10 million people. You have to think global from day one if you want to make it out there. So you've got to always be thinking about how can you expand beyond the local ecosystem. And that's what we try to do. So we have five pillars of activity. There's 19 different counties in Hungary. So we have a nationwide coordinator network throughout those 19 regions. We provide hands-on business development services to companies. We have an international soft landing program, which I have a one slide about that I want to share with you. We do mentoring, pro bono mentoring for startups. So again, really focusing on making the best use of their resources and provide trainings and workshops all free to companies on topics that they need to get to the next level. We have a database that we maintain of ideas and startups that's over a thousand now. We have 16 different coordinators across the country. We have almost 70 mentors in our network of which we have a certification program, which we've sent about half of them through. So we really take this topic very seriously. We also have different subject matter experts on everything from business development, accounting, legal sales, you name it. We have somebody who can cover that. We organized almost 300 events and trainings. We've had 5,000 participants at our events. We've had several different business consultations with over 400 companies and we've taken over 200 startups to our international events. And then quickly, I wanted to just say a word about our smart landing program, which is our program that really focuses on the second part of today's panel, which is the connecting ecosystems. So we have built up a network of partners, experts, professionals, other government organizations, chambers of commerce, economic development groups in 12 different markets worldwide. We're focusing mainly on Hungary moving to those countries, but we'd like to develop this program even further and have people from each of those markets interacting with each other as well. So we can imagine Finnish companies going to Poland or German companies to China and this network will grow and be able to support all of those things. So if that sounds interesting to anybody and you'd like to join and learn more and you're from one of these target markets, please feel free to reach out to me. I'm on the swap card, you can find me there, or on LinkedIn, or I'm happy to chat at any time. Okay, that's a little bit of a, the little bit of a blurb about input and myself. And now coming back to the topic, so yeah, we're talking about bootstrapping, we're talking about connecting ecosystems. And I mentioned I'd like to have my panelists introduce themselves a little bit and give their opening thoughts on these topics from the perspective of their ecosystem. So everyone has prepared a few words about that. And first up, I'd like to invite Valentina Stadnich to please introduce yourself and say a few words and here's your slide, Valentina. Hi everyone. I was thinking about this introduction and while that one, I remembered about a TED talk that I heard like a while ago when a guy was expanding on the multitude of introductions that we tend to make throughout our lifetime. And actually, what was interesting in that moment is that when you start your career, you tend to associate yourself with the work that you're doing at that particular moment of time. And I'm from Moldova, I'm coming from Moldova and I have tried on different kinds of hats throughout my career. And yes, I started in an NGO, then I worked for six years in a government. And then right now I'm finding myself as part of the support network organization. So basically, it's been more than 10 years of work experience, which were totally different in their way. But there was one common thing that I have faced throughout this career path is the wonderful people that guided me and that were kind of a mentors to me. So today I'm really proud to be also and I'm a mentor to the ITU-Ecosystem Innovation Challenge and to actually mentor the ecosystem best practices for ITU. So yeah, saying this, I just wanted to finalize my thought by saying hi everybody. I'm Valentina and I'm passionate about the ecosystem building. If you do too, please don't hesitate to connect with me. That would be wonderful. Thank you. Great. And you're in Moldova, you said, and is it the same time as in Hungary and in Geneva, in ITU headquarters? It's one hour difference, but that's not a big deal comparing to the other speakers. Great. Thanks Valentina. Okay, next up we have Tomás Javor. Tomás, please introduce yourself. You can let us know where you are and what time it is there. Hopefully it's not too brutal. I don't think so. Well, good morning everyone because I'm in New Haven, Connecticut, some on the east coast, on the east coast, eastern standard time zone. So I think you are five hours ahead because you just switched over and we haven't yet. As you can tell by the difference between the live feed and my picture, I got a quarantine beard simply because I don't know, I just wanted to check out a new look. But in terms of my background, I really am a finance guy by trade. So I've worked as an investment manager in Hungary managing money for institutional clients and that was a highly rewarding career and job, especially right out of college. It's such an honor to manage money for people, but what I realized is that I really have a desire for a global career. So I started thinking about like what I want to do next. And I realized that I wanted to move to the United States, you know, the center of the finance universe. So I was looking for scholarship opportunities and I got a full right scholarship to do my MBA at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. So I moved to St. Louis in 2015 and I got an amazing education there. But while I was in college, while I was doing my MBA, I met a successful entrepreneur who was an alum of the university and he returned because he really wanted to start an entrepreneurship center on campus. And I knew that think that companies were eating my lunch at the time. So I really like jumped on the opportunity. I interviewed for the job and I got the position. So I was his number two and the two of us started building this entrepreneurship center on campus, engaging with the ecosystem. And in three years, we built that program up to more than 200 students in different courses. We had a corporate sponsor. We had a corporate accelerator. They gave out tens of thousands of dollars in grants to students to start their businesses. We engaged with local startup companies to do advanced research, IP transfer, a bunch of exciting stuff, which was really cool to do all that in three years. And then in 2020, I joined Techstars to help Techstars build their higher ed program. So right now, we are running a pilot program with the university here in Connecticut to figure out how we as Techstars can help them get more entrepreneurial. And in case you're not familiar with Techstars, Techstars is a worldwide network that helps entrepreneurs succeed. And what we do is we have offices all around the world, you know, in different cities, and we have corporate partners as well. And what we do is we collect startup companies in a cohort program, tender at the time in these different accelerator programs, we invest money, mentorship and education into them. And throughout a three-month program, we have them accelerate their businesses in exchange for a small percentage of their equity. And what I'm doing right now, I'm on the product team helping, you know, the organization figure out if we can create more experiential learning opportunities for the students to become better skilled for the labor market. Because like 90 or 95 percent of the students, they will never start a business themselves, but they can learn useful skills while they are in college. But at the same time, some of these companies may get off the ground and they might apply for our accelerator program. And so thus we can create an early pipeline, which is really exciting. And the reason why I'm here is because I'm really passionate about cross-ecosystem collaboration, you know, like I moved around in my life a couple of times, and it's always nice to get plugged into the ecosystem by vacuuming people. So I want to do the same. That's why I joined the input global mentor program. And I'm really excited to be here and talk to you about like how we can do this better and how we can be more intentional about having startup companies access other markets outside of their country of origin. Great. That sounds amazing. Thanks for being with us, Tamash. Okay. Next up, I'd like to welcome Hubert Andjewski. And he has a few words he'd like to introduce us. And I noticed Hubert and Valentina are doing great with the backgrounds from ITU. I was trying to get it to work on mine, but I had, you know, it wasn't, I don't have a nice green screen, so it wasn't working out. But thanks, Hubert, for following the template and welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Always with pleasure. Hello, guys. Hello, everybody. My name is Hubert Andjewski. Thank you for invitation. Thank you for being here. So just in a few words, what could be interesting for you and for the audience? Generally, I'm a serial entrepreneur with 20 years of experience working and living in different parts of the globe. It was Emirates, it was US for a while, doing business for the last 10 years, most internationally. I established about 10 companies. I got successful exits from about three of them, 10X Plus, CoC. What else? I generally focus on FinTech and Mettech industry and climate change. These are the three industries that I'm focusing mostly. I have this privilege to receive the international awards, just for example, for best digital banking globally and best digital banking in the C region. I was managing VCE. I built and managed Accelpoint as Accelerator. We are managing almost 10 million USD in acceleration programs. And we are investing, we are accelerating and scaling projects from all Europe, but mostly from C region on different markets. We are focusing mostly on Singapore for a few years, and we are cooperating with partners there, with government as well. We are providing a special program dedicated for European FinTechs, which we can scale in Singapore. We are international partner of SFF. This is Singapore FinTech Festival, so this is the biggest event for FinTechs globally. What else? We are also incubating projects. Right now, at the moment, I'm establishing my own VC, because in my past life I was a managing partner in one of the VCs. But right now I'm establishing my own VC with, of course, partners. It will be like 20 million USD early stage found for investing to the European FinTechs and scaling them on the Singapore, UK market, Canada, and Israel. These are our main focus. In the background, I've got product design. I had this privilege to establish a few initiatives around UX and product design, so this is deeply in my heart. I was a Google expert globally. I also received a few awards, and I established one of the biggest UX studies in the region, almost over 1,000 graduations on product design studies. I'm also a lecturer for like 15 years and mentoring for like 15 years, but right now mostly moving myself to the investment side and focusing on this one. I think that's all. What could be interesting that I think that we are international collaboration and building products fit to the market. This is our main focus, and this is the main focus of Axelpoint and my VC. What could be also interesting is that I had this privilege to be in different roles, because from one perspective, I was a founder. I was pitching. I was receiving funds. I was also managing the funds, not mine, but the other people in the VC, so I was spending money. I was also in a role of partner in Deloitte Central Europe, so one of the most significant consultancy big four company, but also I'm investing my own money for like eight years or something like that as an agent investor. So I think those perspective is quite interesting because I've been on the other sides of the river. So I would love to share that. Thank you so much. Great. Welcome. And good luck to you with Axelpoint. And I love how everybody is sharing their advice already and open for connections. I think this is exactly the spirit of this discussion. So thank you. Okay. Next up, we have Mike from the city of Summerside. Mike, take it away. Awesome. Thank you, Mary. And thank you, panelists. So Mike DeSosca, I'm director of economic development for the city of Summerside, Prince Rhode Island, Canada on the very east coast of Canada. I am by tradition an economic developer. I've been in the business for about 30 years. I've worked in various parts in Canada. And one of the unique things about Summerside is we're a small city with sophisticated infrastructure that allows companies, in our opinion, to utilize our infrastructure to do test and validation. And last year, we were lucky enough to win an award for our living lab, which we created. So one of the things that we've tried to do as a community is to try and foster de-risking entrepreneurs as they try and move into the North American market. Given the fact that we're a small community. And as I say, our infrastructure is robust as Budapest, as Toronto, as Montreal, as San Jose, as New York City. What we position ourselves as is a community where we'll open up that infrastructure for collaboration. So we're pretty excited about that. We've done about 15 projects in the last two and a half years. And we collaborate on everything from physical infrastructure to software development, to anything related to innovation, I guess. One of the things about Summerside that is unique is we're basically an export-based economy. Certainly we are known for a couple different sectors. One of the proud things that we are very proud of in Summerside is that 70% of our energy currently comes from renewable technologies. And we're seeing a lot of innovation being driven right now in the renewable technology platform. The city just announced this past winter a $70 million solar battery project, which will drive our renewable energy. And one of our comments that we like to say, if Airbus, Honeywell, and Samsung can do business in the city of Summerside, we're pretty much sure that any company can. And what we try and do is suggest to companies that if they're interested in trying to break into the North American market, maybe we could be that soft landing comfort zone for folks to help them grow their business. And then IT and the marine sector, aerospace, all fairly big industries in Summerside. So we're pretty proud of our little city. And the good news about Prince Edward Island is we're small enough that you can access decision makers quickly. We get to decisions very quickly. And the fact that we're able to sit around what we call the big boy table in Canada, being one of the provinces in Canada, allows us and affords us the opportunity to make different decisions quickly and effectively. So that's kind of in a nutshell. And I know we're going to talk a little bit later, but we're one of the things we talk about under our living lab is although I work for a government organization, we think like business. And we understand the challenges that businesses face. We understand that, you know, what we're trying to do is reduce as many barriers as we can. So there is that collaboration that takes place. And there's a sharing of knowledge, which is very important to us. And what we try and do is shorten investors' time to market. And if we can do that through applying, you know, skills or infrastructure or whatever the case might be, or even for that matter, networking, luckily, there's another role I hold is I'm a past president of the Economic Developers Association of Canada, a 500 member strong organization across the nation. So that affords me the opportunity to connect different people with different resources throughout the country, as well as I do that in the States. And I think I might have one little more slide there, Mary, and we'll wrap it up. So one of the things that we're excited about is our partnership with Input Hungry. And the thing that we're working on right now is creating a new accelerator, and we're calling it the Exchange. And one of the things that we think is going to be unique about it is our ability with a technology rich environment, and coupled with our living lab program, bringing key collaborators, key players together to drive, I'll call it real life workshop experience in the community. And so we're pretty excited about that. So with that, Mary, maybe I'll just stop there and let some of the other panelists have a discussion. Okay, yeah, I tried to keep up with your slides while you were going. So that's just for the audience, that just gives you a sense of one of the things we did early on in summer side is try to understand the power of our infrastructure and what it meant to business. And so basically, you can see we own our own wind farm, we own our own solar farm, we own our pollution control facility, roads, water, sewer, you name it, we own it. Why not open it up to companies to try and, you know, do some validation and help them grow their business. Great. And actually, you just finished right in time. So there was about 10 seconds left. So perfect. And I didn't even practice. So yeah, there you go. Yeah, natural. All right, well, thank you. Thank you, Mike. We're looking forward to having you in the panel. Okay. And here's Mike's contact information so that you can spam him as much as you want. Okay. Last but not least, it's my pleasure to introduce Laila Alhadrami and she's going to tell you a little bit about her ecosystem project. So Laila, please, the floor is yours. Hi, Mary and everyone. And it's still my pleasure to join everyone today in this session. And just let me know why not you want me to go to the next slide. Sorry, I forgot to mention that. So just say my name is Laila Alhadrami and I am from Oman and I hope that all of you know where is Oman. In case you don't know it, open Google Maps so you can know it and it can be the next visit for all of you after COVID-19. Sure. My story, I would like to start with a story so I can introduce myself more about it. My love of story started with community of practice when I did my master in online learning. And community of practice, one of the courses in my master. And I was always fascinated by community of practice because you know, it's very interesting because you can build a smart ecosystem during these community of practice. And I always dreamed to be a part of community of practice. So when I finished my master degree, I was dreaming to join information technology authority, which is, you know, the official authority in Oman that is responsible about the automation of the e-services in Oman. So and it has the vision of e-Oman, which is, you know, the electronic Oman. And luckily I joined the digital transformation team in 2012 and we started the journey. And when it comes to the building capacity, we all have one pay. You invest a lot on the, you know, different employees and so on. But what's happening later on? Everyone returned back to their office and the knowledge vanished. They say, hey, we invested in you. What happened? They said, we cannot convince our management so they can let us work in our projects and so on. And I felt really sorry because we are investing a lot of our money. In 2016, all the world got caught up financially. And most of the building capacity programs, you know, postponed or we don't have any more building capacity like the way we use it in the luxury time so we can travel a lot, have more speakers to train us and so on. And then we thought about it. Should we stop the building capacity and the building capacity, you know, is the most powerful way. If you want to empower any sector, you have to invest in your people. And that is how South Korea, they succeed because they used to suffer from the wars and everything. And when they become one of the leading countries in technology, one person was asked to them, how have you succeed? And they said, we invested in our people. So we come back again to the same thing. How can we make the building capacity sustainable and we don't have money? And from there, the idea came of the Smart City Impassagers. So we can start to the next, yes. So Smart City Impassagers started in 2017. It started as a small program. Can you go back to Oman because it is from there, so I can show it to you. When we started, you know, the idea, we are based on Muscat. And Muscat, it is in the north of the map. So you can see the map of Oman. It has like a long coast. That's why I'm also encouraged you to visit Oman. And it was really challenging. How can we reach the rest of the cities in Oman? So we thought about it. We are in Muscat. How can we go to the south of Oman? And if you want to drive from Muscat to the south of Oman, you have to drive more than 10 hours. So you can see the efforts and the money and so on. Then we decided to launch our Smart City Impassagers, which is based on a community of practice. So we can move to the next slide. So from there, the vision came. How can we have impassagers who can be the core of this program, who can help us to spread the knowledge area when it comes to Smart Cities? Because we want to empower all the cities around Oman, not just in Muscat, because we care about the others. So that's why we have launched this program. It was really challenging to start it because not everyone believed on the idea. They said, how are you going to succeed and what the role of these impassagers will be? So let's go to the next. So we can show you how we really started. So the objective of our impassager, it was to create a database of expert impassagers in Oman. Because what happened, it is this pain. It is not just in Oman. It's in every country. You finish your school, your master degree, but nobody know about you. You just finish your school or your college and then go back to your office or go back to your room and hang your certificate on the wall. I'm sure everyone have this issue. So we decided that we should empower, we should search for all of these people. And if you are going to speak about emerging technologies, do we have expert people in Oman? And luckily, we were shocked by ourselves that we found some people who are already specializing in blockchain, IoT and AI. That really was a shock for me and for all the team. So imagine the database that we started creating with my team and big salute to my team because we are four dedicated team working the executive team of Smart City platform. And we are not, you know, we are just working as a part time. But even though we have worked successfully with this program. And also, when we started creating the database of our impassaders, the other entities, they started coming back to us. They said, we need a help please. Do you have somebody who's expert in IoT? So we can, for example, deliver a session to our employees? Yes, we do have. So we just go back to our database and share it with them. And then next, okay, let me go to the next one. Yeah, I'm sorry to interrupt. We're about almost out of time for you. But let's look, if you want to finish up in the next 30 seconds. And like different categories, if you want to think about a smart ecosystem, you have to think about the differences required in your ecosystem. So we have the individuals, the academics, the business partner, the financial sector, and so on. So this type of ecosystem, you can implement it anywhere in any organization. And it's zero cost. So if anyone wants to know more of this, we'll be really happy because, you know, our smart impassaders can be involved in knowledge cafes, online activities, kind of as consultants, and so on. That's all. And these are our impassaders that shared with us, you know, sharing the knowledge we have in the blockchain. And we have also impassaders in IoT and big data. And those are all our success factor. And thank you all. Great. Thank you so much. Okay. So now that we went through and had a round of introductions, I'd like to have I have some questions for you panelists. So starting with Valentina. So you are a previous challenge winner. And you've been through the ITU mentoring program and your past winner representative ecosystem. So I'd like to ask you about specifically the topic of mentoring and how does how is mentoring helpful for bootstrapping and for connecting ecosystems? Thanks for the question. I indeed had a chance to see this community evolving like a while already. For several years, my first experience started a while ago when I was working for the government. And back then I had a chance to familiarize myself with the concept of the ecosystem while being part of the country ecosystem review. And that exactly brought me to the idea how complex all of our ecosystems are and the complexity of the interactions that we need to take in account when we kind of look at at the ground base of our work. Afterwards, as you mentioned, I represented the one of the organizations, actually the Moldovaity Park, which was awarded as a best ecosystem practice last year. And it was a totally different experience with the community where I was exposed to the international colleagues and partners, which were also the winners. And they brought a different perspective to the complexity that I was already aware of. And it was a great amount of interaction with like-minded people. But this year, I have seen a totally different experience from the perspective of the mentoring program that was implemented by the ITU. It was a different kind of support put in place by the ITU team to actually give an understanding to the current winners of these complexity that we were exposed previously. And as well to connect the current winners with the community itself, with the global community, I would say. So I have managed to see the great amount of interactions that were happening between the current winners, the last year winners, the mentors, and the community was helping itself and people were helping each other to expand their ideas, to improve their concepts, to grow in their own ecosystem and to connect those ecosystems. And this is a way that basically, yeah, the ecosystems can connect and it maybe can also save startups resources by having them being part of a network like this. Great. So let's hear from another one of our challenge winners. So Mike, turning the questions to you. So how would you say that being connected to this global community of innovators has helped for SummerSide Exchange? Thank you for the question, Mary. Being part of this network has allowed us to become smarter. I'm just going to play it simple. We think we have all the answers for sure. But in essence, learning from not only this event, but learning from these panelists that being part of this network helps to validate ideas, helps to seek out different options, helps to seek out different ways to do things, find out what works, what doesn't work, and learn from the experiences. So from SummerSide's perspective and from my perspective participating, just being part of this global network has been really powerful and empowering for me in terms of trying to move our community forward. And can you share a little bit about how being recognized in this community has helped you develop the living lab concept even further? Yeah, I think too full. Being a small city, we often I'll call it have a confidence issue at times. And winning this award and being part of this ecosystem has allowed us to kind of say, yeah, we're on the right track and has helped us to attract different clients and companies that want to participate with us. So instant validation for us in terms of the things that we are doing, which has been hugely significant in trying to move things forward. And the accelerator that we're launching here shortly is just another example of how we've taken best practices from around the globe and embedded them into our ecosystem and built different things around that ecosystem to help further launch companies is what we're doing now. So it's pretty exciting. Great, I love it. So speaking of another award winning program. So talking about tech stars, Tomash, maybe you can share with us a little bit about how does tech stars help its portfolio companies access different ecosystems and resources? Yeah, but thank you for the question, Mary. Like, there are many, many different ways, you know, we have our portfolio companies. So obviously, we have the local teams are managing directors and program managers in different cities. And obviously, they are well connected in the ecosystem, but also as tech stars, we talk to different service providers, like how they can provide free or discounted rate on cloud credits and different services. And we also have a really vast subject matter expert mentor bench, who actually come in and provide pro bono services for our portfolio companies. So that's the those are the obvious benefits. But at the same time, when you become part of the tech stars network, you know, if you're a portfolio company and you join or you are an employee and you join, you get invited to an internal, like invite only basically social media network. So you can network based former founders, you know, like investors, former employees of tech stars. So it's a really cool and vibrant curated community. And that can be like tremendously helpful, you know, especially if you want to look for like a warm intro or or someone who has walked the walk and and and has experienced similar things that you are going to right now, you know, like now they are in a later stage founder. And at the same time, the awesome thing about like working for tech stars is that it's a globally distributed team and it always has been. So we really embrace, you know, this remote concept and and the internal culture is really open. So we have an internal select channel and I can just hit anyone up from around the globe and and they are extremely responsive, they are extremely open. So even if it's on an informal level, you know, like you want to just help out, you know, a portfolio company or a student or you want to bring in a speaker or you need a panelist, like people are just extremely ready to say yes. And I think that that has been enormously helpful for for everyone involved. Great. Yeah, I love the idea of having multiple channels and ways for people to reach out to each other. So you have your kind of part of this umbrella group, but you have this global snack slack channel too for people to reach out to each other. That's really interesting. So so Lila, maybe you can tell us a little bit more about your smart ambassadors because you're also building kind of a network in a community of people to help each other. So what are some of the elements of your program that make it unique and sustainable as an innovation ecosystem? Okay, thanks Mary for the question and actually what really make our smart ecosystem sustainable, that we are having a volunteer ambassadors. And you know, that is, you know, what make it really sustainable because we are trying to get help from the ambassadors who are exporting these technologies from the society itself. We started first, you know, at a small portion of ambassadors joining the smart city. And some of them, you know, at the beginning, it was really difficult to convince them. Some of the people were really excited, but some of the people who are highly, you know, specialized in these, they told us, are you going to pay us and say, no, sorry, we don't have money, but we are going to market for you. Because some of them, it was like a passion for them to speak about these technologies, but they are not working. So when they joined us, it was a good marketing for them. Because, you know, they started because they share their success story. They started to be asked by different organizations so they can, you know, speak about their experience and deliver also awareness session and so on. And such ecosystem can be used in any sector. And that's what I feel that make it really sustainable. And because, you know, you can empower different people who are really interested in that sector to be your community of practice, and they are going to empower it by yourself. All what we need to do is just to have our social media and human resource so they can manage that ecosystem. Great. Yeah. You're speaking to the choir about it, how sometimes it can be tough to get people to sign up. But I love how you kind of shifted the focus and thinking about, okay, what's the value that you can offer to your community members as well. And I think that's really great. Cool. So, Hubert, turning to you for a moment, I almost hesitate to bring up this topic, but I guess we would be remiss to not mention good old COVID today as well. So, how do you see that? You have a lot of different investment activities. How do you see that? I mean, I see there's clear parallels between that concept of bootstrapping during these times. A lot of companies, a lot of sectors were hit really hard. But what are your thoughts on COVID? How's that impacted investing in your regions and kind of, you know, how does that relate to the panel discussion today from your side? Thank you for the question, Mary. It always depends on which angle are we looking on a topic because from one hand, if you would like to see what's going on in Poland, right now, I'm staying in Warsaw, capital city of Poland. So, for example, in Poland, we've got the biggest numbers of the investments historically. But of course, it's correlated with some kind of a government support and union support. So, it's not just, it's strictly connected with those elements. But on the end of the day, most projects, most valuable and legit and interesting projects have access to fundraising. And it's not a big issue to find a, especially early stage, press it or a seed investment ticket. It depends on the occasion. It depends on the situation. But let's assume that the average, average ticket on this stage is something around one million USD or one million Euro. So, it's doable and it's not a huge problem. If we will, if we want to see it as a Europe issue or a Europe topic, as I know, it's more difficult because most of the VCs, and I also heard the same from the side of our partners from abroad, especially from other parts of the globe, in most cases, VCs funds are investing, but they are curious how looks the business model and how it's going to look like after the COVID. So, they are preparing, first of all, they are trying to cover the investments in the portfolio because in many cases, you need to support them and you need to spend more money on those investments and they are already in your family. So, first of all, the first rule is to cover your investments which you already made. So, this is the first point. The second point is that VCs and other other organizations who are investing or the angels, they are investing, but they are looking on the market and they are trying to find, first of all, a good opportunity and good moment so that decreases number of investments a bit, but from the second point of thinking or from the other angle, which I think is very interesting, investors are looking for the interesting business models which could be, which could look promising after the COVID because COVID is changing the situation. Of course, all of us are hearing all of the information and scanning the markets and so on and so on, but I think that we can agree that the market, the industries and the business models are changing in most of the industries. So, there will be something new after the COVID or right now it's something new and there will be something new after I don't know one year, two years, three years. So, generally, as I can hear and we've got the same point of looking on that, that we are thinking which business models will be the best one after the pandemic phase. So, I think it's very interesting to see what's going on, but to sum up, there are investments. There is a possibility to grab an investment ticket, but I think it's tougher. It's not so easy as it was before, but it's doable. It depends on the market. It depends on the country. It depends on the situation, of course. And Poland is bleeding the way, I guess. I've also heard this that Polish VCs are still very active in this time period, so that's great. All right. Well, we are going to switch gears now and take some questions from the audience. So, the first question we have, I guess, is for me. What are the biggest challenges for the Hungarian ecosystem? So, I would just say quickly, first of all, it's always hard. Everybody has a different idea of what are the biggest challenges, but I think for us, it's really kind of around two things. One is around business development knowledge and know-how. So, this is a topic that's just now starting to be taught in universities very rarely in high school. I think technically we're very strong, but we need to learn how to sell and market ourselves a little bit better. And the second challenge is really around international access, and that's really, that really is one of the biggest challenges that we are specifically trying to address with inputs and with the smart landing program and with partners like many of my friends and fellow panelists here. The next question is for Hubert. What interests you in the European startup environment? How different or connected is it to the other markets that you're a part of? Thank you for this one. So, generally from the, maybe I will put it that way, my whole life gave me this lesson that it's good to be focused on something. It's hard to be alpha and omega on everything and just maybe focus on the Poland example. There are many cases, I love my competitors, but there are many cases where, for example, accelerators or the VCs I want to focus mostly on the accelerators are doing or covering every industry and every part of technology because we can accelerate everything and we've got methodology to do that. In my opinion, that's not enough. In my opinion, you need to have the skin in the game. You need to have the industry focus experts and you need to have your expertise in such industry as well if you want to provide those projects effectively because it's not about the acceleration. Acceleration is the step one. The precede phase is a step one to make the MVP and to make the POC and to test something. This is just the entrance to the game. As an accelerator, we used to think and we used to work in such a way that we have a success when somebody is signing the commercial contract after our acceleration. These are our KPIs. These are our metrics. It's very hard to do so if you are not focused on specific industry. Just to give you the highlights, for example, we are focusing on free industries mostly. For example, in FinTechs, in one of our acceleration programs, half 50% of the accelerators which enter the program, on the end of the day, they go out with a commercial agreement with an international corporation. To do so, the average statistics, the average KPI, the average performance is like 20% in the region. 50% is super nice. We are very proud of that. It's not happening themselves. You need to be engaged. You need to have a skin in the game and so on. We know about FinTechs. We've been driving and managing the FinTech companies. That's helping us to help the founders. I think this is the first point. The second one is that we strongly believe that C region, not only Poland, because we are not focusing only on Poland. We are focused on Europe, but mostly on C region. It's very promising. Probably most of us know the statistics about the unicorns, about the scientists in the region, about the students in the region, about the founders, and so on and so on. Generally, this is the region with huge potential. Technological one, because we've got one of the best technical people globally. Poland is number three, but there are Czech Republic as well, Slovakian, and so on and so on. These are very smart people. We've got also very interesting scientists. In most cases, in the past years, there was a problem with financing. Maybe not even with the money, but how to manage the money. How to invest in a smart way, how to prepare the next rounds, how this relationship between investors and the startups should work, because the C region and Poland included haven't got a huge experience in doing that. Our VC market is like 15 years old or something like that. We need some time. That's the reason why we are focusing on building projects here from day one with founders open-minded and hungry for the international business. We are doing that in the partnership with Singapore, Tel Aviv, London, and we focus on those three hubs. We've thought about this for a long, long time, and we choose those three hubs because they are most interesting for us. From day one, we tried not only to focus on the product, not only focused on the MVP, but also on the scaling projects from the region on those markets, so to build the bridges, so to help with next rounds and so on and so on, to scale up, to help people to scale up. I think it's working quite well. If somebody is asking on which industry, I mentioned three, and we are focusing on scaling projects on those three markets, which I mentioned, but of course it's not a close catalog. We've got very interesting links also in Canada, in the US. It will be great to collaborate with colleagues from in this panel, of course too, but everybody are saying that they are going to the US. They are going on the big market of the United States and so on and so on. In some cases, this is a great idea, but for some cases, for example, Asia and Singapore, which is the entrance to Asia, could be more valuable. In some cases, collaboration with, for example, Nordics or German market, it will be better, so it depends on the case. Great. Okay, we have time, I think, for just one last question. It's for Lila. Question is if you have a list with all of the ambassadors in your program online, where we can take a look. Sorry, can you say it again? Yes, sorry. Yeah, if you have a list of all of the ambassadors in your program online, you have a website, basically. Yes, we do have a website, yes. You can join us. We'd like to see the picture or just share with you the name of our website. Yeah, that's fine. The name, I think, would be good. Yes, because you can find all of our ambassadors in smartomine.om and luckily we are not just having now just ambassadors from Oman. We started going global, which, you know, proved that our initiative, our smart ecosystem is becoming more successful. And, Alhamdulillah, and now we are also going to have a new initiative, which is part of smart ambassador initiative. We have basically three initiatives. The coming initiative is will be on November. It's about smart cities around the world. So we are going to invite a successful story about the smart city from different cities around the world. And we are going to start from Oman and then next will be Sudan and then Qatar and so on. So we are going to have more projects to be shared so we can support the light on it. So it will be like, you know, a great opportunity for everyone, for the global, so they can listen to different stories so we can, you know, expand the network and also exchange the experience in these different sessions. And another initiative is will be on December. It's also dedicated for our ambassadors. We call it smart ambassadors cafe. So it will be like a cafe. Our ambassadors will, they will have like two sessions for every month. For every month, our ambassadors themselves, they are going to, you know, invite some successful stories, whether it is with technology or they have like a small business in technology and so on or in smart cities. The ambassadors themselves, they are going to lead these initiatives. And we have also another initiative. So I'm speaking about three different initiatives. The third one, it will be about the smart initiatives in Oman because what happened, we always heard about the new technologies, the new initiative and so on. But we don't have a centralized place for all of these initiatives. So we are going to start first from Oman perspective, then we are going for the global because we are also going to recommend the projects which are in the smart cities around the world because, you know, whenever you come to a new project, you feel excited to know more about it. So we can, you know, get the experience whether it is from the financial sector, the challenges and so on. All of these will be documented in our smart oman.om and we hope that we are going to be like a global smart ecosystem that can be adapted by different organizations because we believe so much in the success of this smart ecosystem and we love to share it with everyone so they can be empowered and successful in the organization. That's all what I can share about our smart ambassadors program and thanks Mary and everyone for this session. Great, thank you. So I guess that was your closing thoughts. So I'd like to give everybody the chance to share their little 30 second kind of final statement about the topic. So thank you Lila. Hubert, let's go in the next with you. Sure, so keep it quick. Yeah, sure, sure. Okay, I need to collect my thoughts. So I think that maybe one thing to put on the table because generally I've got a product in my heart. So a product from my perspective and the value for the users of course is and the customers is of course the most important thing but I think that from the perspective of the accelerator, I would like to address one thing or put it on the table. I think it's very crucial to build the business models in our region is not such a popular thing because it's very difficult and it needs an engagement from the partner side. For example, if you have a program because there are different programs in accelerators but if you cooperate with the with the corporations, we are doing such thing. Of course you need to engage and invite managers in some cases even a board of a bank to accept such a business model or to feedback such a business model. But I think it's one of the crucial things because you can build something, you can scale up something, but on the end of the day you need to have a business model how you want to cooperate with the partner and those business models are changing all the time and the corporate. So keep the product in the in the center and focus on the business model. I like it. Yeah so I want to encourage everybody to try to build as much as we can business models with our startups with our investments because it's very valuable especially for them. Great. And it's not the easy way to do. All right thank you. Valentina final thoughts? Well from the mentorship perspective I would like to say that mentorship is really key for both trapping the ecosystem and that we have discussed a lot of different kind of investments. So I really see this mentorship as the kind of a first level of investment that you can do in order to give the access to different kind of resources and knowledge and this is exactly what happened in the ITU challenge when the winners have received an access to the resources that they might not even have heard of. And when it comes to mentorship I guess my last thought would be that mentorship is for everybody and I guess that's a global thing and there is such an untapped huge resources in terms of the already existing best practices like the input international mentorship program. There is a huge potential of replicating them and there is also great potential to tap into the diaspora in order to also boost your mentorship programs at the national level. So that would be it I guess. Great. I love that. Mentoring is the first form of investment. I like that. That's great. Thank you. Tamash closing thoughts from your side. Sure. Absolutely. Thank you so much. So I'm going to be short and sweet. What I think is that there has never been a better time to be an entrepreneur with all these changes going on in the world. So I want to applaud ITU for inviting us to talk about the right problems in the boot strapping and connecting resources to help elevate all boats. So thank you so much for inviting us. Great. Thank you. All right. And Mike take us home. Awesome. Thanks Mary. I echo Thomas's comment as well ITU allowing us to get together here but what we're trying to do is we think we understand the barriers that entrepreneurs face and what we're trying to do is de-risk their access to market and Hubert mentions the U.S. It is a complicated market and maybe look at Canada as an opportunity in our free trade agreements to access those and certainly with challenging times with COVID and market movements. We're doing our best to create that ecosystem for success and just closing. You know we like to take a hands-on approach with a tailored focus on who the customer is to ensure their success and we believe we're a small city to get things done but big enough to get your first North American validation. So awesome and I really appreciate being part of this panel. Great. Thank you so much. Thank you so much to all of our panelists today. I think one of the common themes that everybody touched on a little bit was this idea of you know do it for free and pay it forward and I think you know you can tell from the people here everybody's super passionate about what they're doing and I think it all starts with sharing our experiences and boosting our own our ecosystems and bringing in the best from around the world. So I hope everybody got a few ideas from this session today. Thank you so much for your time. That's it. We have the next session coming up is a networking session at in about 25 minutes from now so if you can stick around we'd love to have you and otherwise see you tomorrow. Thank you everybody. Take care.