 Hello, everyone. My name is Lisa Mitchell and I'm a managing director of Techstars, an accelerator and global ecosystem providing founders a lifetime of resources and the network to support and scale their companies. I'd like to welcome everybody to today's gist. A program focused on incubator or accelerator. Does your startup need one. For the next hour, my colleague, yeah, Wang, and I will be fielding and answering all of your questions. Yeah, as the founder of the hatchery and organization instrumental in developing the New York technology ecosystem. You can join our discussion by sending your questions and comments through the chat roll at the right of your screen, or through Twitter at hashtag just guru. While we wait for the questions to come in. Let's start by talking about the difference between accelerators and incubators. Yeah, would you like to go first and talk a little bit about the New York technology ecosystem and how the hatchery is operating. Yeah, sure. So the New York tech ecosystem has been growing for many years. I got involved maybe about 10, 15 years ago, when even then it was really not much happening. Technology was very young and people were trying to literally reinvent the wheel every time they started to come. There was no sharing. Whatever I knew, I wouldn't tell you whatever you knew, you held to yourself as very guarded. And so we went out into the ecosystem and said, you know what, the best way to teach people how to share and how to change this behavior is to just show them and do it ourselves. So we did it through events initially. And we gave away all of our relationships, all of our knowledge for free. And it really kind of shook New York City at the time to its core because that was not what New Yorkers did. I would just help people for no reason. People are just very suspicious. Why would you do that? I was like, you know, maybe you'll be back some days. It's kind of a karma philosophy. And it worked. We did that. We're up to about 20, 80 events a year, depending on the year. And this sharing mentality really got people to pay it forward. More events, more community events and activities and organizations started to form over the last 10 years. I really think that New York City is a very different place now. There's access to all sorts of information. There's general assembly to get knowledge for very specific technical skills. There's a ton of accelerators out there. All the universities are getting involved. The city is getting involved and the ball really just started to get rolling a lot more in the last few years. So can you tell us a little bit more about, so, as this discussion goes, it's about what is an incubator and what is an accelerator. So in your mind, how are you different than what the accelerators are doing in your ecosystem? Sure. So most accelerators around the world, including in New York, they're short term programs. They're meant for first time entrepreneurs to learn a bunch of things. They're very verticalized here in New York. I know other places I'd be more general, verticalized meaning there's ones just for fashion, ones just for nonprofits, etc. Three month programs typically with some monies to get you started and a demo day to conclude. Ours was kind of built from scratch, our own model geared around what we thought would lead to more successful exits. So we said, well, why don't we just build them backwards? Why not build with the people you're going to eventually sell to perhaps or the market that you're going to sell to. So we partnered up with corporations and we figured out the problem is with the market. So if everyone in this room likes chocolate milk, I'm going to make chocolate milk, right, kind of like that. But with more text, which tech means is artificial intelligence, machine learning data. So when in there we worked with some big companies and we would spin out startups together. And we've put founding teams together. And in New York, there's a lot of people like people want to leave their jobs, a lot of people who want to do startups. So I find those who have expertise, passion in the area we're about to go venture into and say, look, you can have your idea or look, I have one that I have 20 companies that all want to buy this product that doesn't exist. Why don't we all go build it together? And that started to spread overseas as well as we incorporated more people with same thinking of I want to build something I might not know what or I might want to build something I've got an inkling. But yeah, you've got all the customers, you've got them ready to come on board. And we essentially stir the soup with all the players from the very beginning and not waiting until products develop to then go to market to realize we have to adjust or pivot. This kind of shortens a lot of that timeframe. We also don't do classes. We pick companies and we do projects as we find up good opportunities. We look for white space. We tend to work with people with skill sets already established. And we stay until the company sells. It's not short term. It's a very long term will stay for years. And we're here as you know, like a founding team member where customers are brought funding is brought additional human resources abroad. We've got tons of engineers for those who might be more business centric and need some help there. So the best way to describe it is that we reverse engineer these these projects. That's amazing. And you mentioned that you're operating also outside of New York. Where else are you operating? We're out of Prague in Istanbul as well. A little different for a lot of Western Westerners, but we find that there's a lot of opportunity there. Eastern Europe, great engineers, fantastic minds. And they really, really passionately want to partner for the business side of things. And it really helps them that there's a New York presence so that it reduces the amount of funding needed to grow into the US market for a lot of them. It's a big hurdle to raise that much. It's usually the second or third round. If they can make it there to then even consider the US Istanbul. A fantastic city, very entrepreneurial. They've been entrepreneurs for years, maybe not tech as much. So it's refocusing that the the young there, the people coming out of school, the people who have a lot of energy are very interested in tech and what it can do. They're very mobile centric. In fact, a lot of what they already have in that country is more advanced than some of what our US infrastructure has. We're finding a lot of funding opportunities there and private public sector partnerships. Oh, that's fantastic. Congratulations on everything that you guys have accomplished. So let me talk a little bit about tech stars. Tech stars is an accelerator. As I said, we're also an ecosystem. And when I say ecosystem, I mean, we host startup weekends around the world. We host startup weeks around the world. So we very much focus on the ecosystem building. In addition, we have an accelerator in our case. It's an accelerator that invests in and takes equity from companies. To date, we have more than 1000 companies since 2007 that have gone through the tech stars accelerator. Those companies have in total raised over $3 billion. We are running today. Tech stars started small in Boulder, Colorado in 2007 with its first cohort. Today we're running over 25 cohorts around the world. We have offices from Adelaide, Australia to Cape Town, South Africa, Berlin, London and all over the United States. And our goal is to find amazing founders that are in some cases super early could be two people that haven't raised funding. In some cases, it's a team of people who have been working on something for a while. But essentially need to grow, need growth, need to perfect their business model, need to get investors, etc. We have two kinds of programs. One is vertically focused and the other one is not. Vertically focused programs include the Barclays, Spintek accelerator that we have in New York and London and Cape Town or in places like Kansas City where I am. We're a city program, which means we're not focused on a particular vertical. We're looking for amazing founders from anywhere in the world. And what we do with those founders is obviously you go through an application process and are vetted. If you take investment from and or apply and take investment from and are accepted by the Tech stars accelerator, you come to that location and you spend 90 days with us. It's an immersion. As part of that immersion, we have a very mentor led accelerator model, meaning we bring in 50 mentors to every accelerator program. Those 50 mentors are serial entrepreneurs, investors, heads of business development in large companies. And we spend the first month of the program helping you kind of peel back the company and put it back together again. Month two, we focus on developing either your your minimal bioproduct if you're early or if you're further along, that's when the focus on growth and business model happens. And in the final month, we focus on strategic partnerships and investors. We couldn't grow and scale these companies without the ecosystem. So we not only engage the ecosystem wherever the location is, but we engage our global ecosystem. Tech stars leadership were originally engineers, as you can imagine, after this many cohorts, we collect every bit of data on every company that goes through what we're doing and what's successful and what's not. And modify our programs based upon what works best for founders. And we also use our global ecosystem and network as a mechanism to help founders reach out and meet business development people in companies around the world based upon where they want to scale. And so the beauty of having locations in so many places is we're able to use their ecosystems as well. And so I'd also like to ask another question now before we go on to the questions from the audience. What are the what are the best examples of the kind of companies you alluded to in most cases your founders are a little farther along. What are great examples of companies that have gone through the hatchery. Yeah, sorry about that the video disconnected. So we tend to work with technical co-founders or experienced experts in some domain. We focus around artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, the ability to manipulate big data for some insights or it could be in healthcare, it could be in finance, it could be in legal tech. These are all kinds of projects we've worked on. Advertising tech, they tend to be things where there's a lot of strength of the US market representative out of New York City. It's just easier for us to get a lot of the deals done. And the kinds of projects we work on, the kinds of companies we work with tend to go like this. One, we either meet with a lot of these founding teams and it could be just an idea. It doesn't have to be something that's built or it could be something that they've been working on. There's a little MVP. We sit down, we see how unique this is. We don't want the fifth iteration of something that already exists. We want something that if we were to build and go to market, there'd be no competitor or very few would be able to challenge this. It'd be one of a kind, some white space. And we would spend three to six months building it out. We have engineers who could do this. And while the engineering is happening, we would go negotiate some contracts and some partnerships early on. And then once that's all sorted, we'll go to our investor syndicate to go bring on investors. And this just continues. The other flavor is that we work with a corporation and we sit down. Similarly, we go through a problem, fantastic problem. We then go out with the market to see if this has been done before, really no competition here. Then we'll throw our engineers in the pool and start working on this again. And then engineers could either be ones that we have or maybe ones that want to join. So maybe you're one or two guys and you're like, you know, I would love to build something here in my skill sets. We'll include them in a project. And now they can be part of a founding team of something that has a lot more legs, the backing of a corporation, but done as a standalone startup. Yeah, so you're hatching new companies. Exactly. Hatchery. So to answer the question from the tech star side in terms of what kind of companies, you can go to techstars.com and we are 100% transparent and click on companies. And you can see every company that's ever gone through tech stars. You can also see how much money they've raised, but just to give like crazy across the board examples, Pillpack out of Boston, SendGrid out of Boulder, class out of New York. There's not a typical tech stars company. It's a, I think you could almost say there's typical founders and they're people that are wildly aggressive about global scale and really want to go all in on global scale. But the kinds of companies vary from robotics to software platforms to sensors to class pass. So it's all over the place. Yeah, a question is what should entrepreneurs look for when choosing your model? Do you want to make revenue soon? Do you want to get lots of corporate partners on board? Are you enterprise? We don't do consumer. Sorry. Right. So enterprise. And do you want us to do that for you? Do you want us to be part of your team? Right. We're not going to be standing on the sidelines. We're going to be involved just like we would treat a co-founder. We bring in a ton of team members to co-participate. So it's like going from a team of two to three to all of a sudden 10 to 15. Right. Do you want to be international? Right. We have international footprint. We have capabilities to sell into entire verticals in some of these places. Turnkey. And is this something that you are okay with selling, exiting in the next few years? We may not take this all the way to IPO. Is it okay that this is not going to be a billion dollar company? Are you okay with not being on the cover of Time Magazine as a Mark Zuckerberg? Because you know what, 80% of U.S. companies sell below $200 million. So just a game of odds, you're more likely to get a base hit than you are going to get a home run. It doesn't mean that it's a bad thing. It's only in this country that $10 million makes people cry. It's really sorry that you only have $10 million. There are cases where smaller exits like a $10 million exit could make sense if you didn't take that much money. You take $10 million of money, exit at $10 million, you're in big trouble. But if you know that the exits are below $200 million and that you might have that exit at $50 million or $80 million. You only took, say, a couple of million dollars. Everyone at the table is going to win. You're going to have a nice multiple. And you could actually mathematically arrange for these situations to work out. And then work on another one. I think people could be entrepreneurs for life, constantly building things. And it's a fantastic set of experiences. Yeah, totally agree. Next to our perspective, what I think entrepreneurs should look for is understand the background of the managing director of that program. Because that is going to be your partner for three months. And the mentors that are part of that program are essentially your network for the next three months. And so I would make sure that you understand that, understand what the managing director is interested in. Most of us have kind of a pseudo thesis in terms of our own personal background, what kind of companies we're looking for. My specific interests are companies that are focused in the design and build place that need customers that are global engineering firms, global architecture firms, global construction firms. And the reason that I'm interested in those is it Kansas City is one of the top three cities in the world for those kinds of employers. So I can go out the door and allow you to do proof of concept with a number of the customers. We built 75% of the stadiums around the world from here. And so I'm interested in design and build for that reason. I'm also interested in ed tech companies because I have a strong background in the ed tech space. But I find frequently yesterday I met with a young man that flew in from India who has a massive, interesting network theory kind of a model that he's developed. I've spent years funding research on network theory, so I'm super interested. But I would make sure that you, when you're applying as an example to tech stars, we have an online application and you can note any of our accelerators that you're interested in applying for. And as I said earlier, some of them are vertically focused. If you're interested in, if you have a consumer play, we have a wonderful retail accelerator up in Minneapolis that all of the partners are obviously target and other retail outlets. Similar to Jenny's model in New York City, which is Internet of Things that has partners like GE and Autodesk and others who again can be first customers. So do a lot of research. Our site has tons of information on it, so you can pretty much find out everything that you need to know. A first question from the audience, Nicholas Bauer from South Africa asks, is there any concern that an organization will lose its identity if they partner with the wrong incubator or accelerator? Yeah, I'll let you take a crap at that. I don't think so as a quick answer. It's a program. You make what you want out of it. And I'm very familiar with the tech stars program as well. You know, besides from that, do the research. There's plenty of material out there about all the programs for these people. Can you hang out with them? Go grab a beer. Get to know these people if you can. You know, with us, it's a little bit longer commitment. We're here for the long haul. I would say if you feel like you're going to lose something, then you probably were not really into your own company to begin with, because you're not putting your 110%. At least that's in our case. We're putting our 110%. You got to put your 110%. We're going to go build this company. So the only way it would it would not work out is if you completely lost interest of your initial project. At least for us, I think you can just must speak to the tech stars and that program. Yeah, I completely agree with you. I don't really have anything to add. I mean, I think it's completely up to the founder what they get out of going into a program. There are multitude. You know, you can simply do a Google search feedback on tech stars and you would find thousands of people who have written on Cora feedback on different programs of, you know, the hatchery tech stars, whatever. There's even a wonderful blog post that someone has done that has been through both Y Combinator and tech stars that says here's the difference of Y Combinator and tech stars and I totally agree with everything that he wrote. And so you just do your research and you'll be good. We also have a question from Kenya. How can less develop places such as where I'm from in Africa create policies that will allow incubators to start and grow. I'm going to take a first hit at that because I spent a ton of time in Africa. So I think there are some really interesting things already going on in Africa. Tech stars has Cape Town accelerator Nairobi has I have that has something like the last time I was there 120,000 members or some insane number like that. Google has a really interesting Google for entrepreneurs going in Nairobi. So there's already quite a bit going on. And what's awesome about because this question is really about policies. I don't think there's any policies that are in place that are keeping you from starting accelerators or incubators. That's what's kind of awesome about different developing economies is there's much less rigor in policy for you to overcome. You just have to do it. But I do think if you're going to start something like that from scratch, reaching out to the ecosystems that are already in place, whether you are in South Africa or Nairobi is probably the strongest ecosystem in place or even Nigeria reaching out to who already is in place and linking with them versus kind of starting something on your own is super important. Any thoughts that you have on that topic. Yeah. No, I completely agree. Okay. We have a question from Unitec and Honduras. What tips do you have for building a successful incubator? I think actually my answer is going to be what I think is going to be successful for all ventures. I think it's relationships. Your Rolodex, the people that you know, the people that will come out and support you and do things and partner. If you don't have that, it's not going to go anywhere. You're going to need to do partnerships with corporations. You're going to need advisors, mentors. You're going to need to hire salespeople. You're going to hire good people. You're going to need to put engineering teams. It's all people in the end, these things, all these tech, anything, it still rolls down to people. And so do you have enough relationships there to feed the well of 10, 20, 1,000 companies, right? And don't you think I've seen in countries all over the world, not just developing countries, people start an accelerator or an incubator program that have actually never been an entrepreneur and or, you know, a business person in general and it doesn't work. I mean, if you have not seen a movie play out in terms of how to start and grow something, I think it's super hard to be the expert and try to help others to do that. So I would find dysphora, people who have left Honduras that have become entrepreneurs and see if you can recruit them back. You use a network in that capacity. I think they've done a great job of that in South Africa and in Kenya of trying to use the network of entrepreneurs that have left to come back and coach and mentor and things like that. And it's worked pretty well. An online viewer is also asked, is there anything entrepreneurs should know or any steps they can take to make their time working with an accelerator or incubator most useful? It depends on what stage. I mean, I'll speak for ourselves because I think your program will address the other half of the question here. For us, for it to be useful, you need to be able to come in with a skill and get ready to build stuff. There's no breaks in the beginning. For the first six months, everyone's working their asses off. After that, once the product's up and running, you have more people on the plate, it starts to get a little bit easier. Wanting to be open, working with a team. You can't be closed off. You have to be a little social. You're going to be working with a lot of people and maturity actually on our end. We're dealing with enterprise. We're dealing with much larger companies, more serious people. And yes, we may come from tech where it's T-shirt and jeans all day, but you're going to have to work with these people that might be very different. Yeah, and I think all I would have to add is we spend a great deal of time through our recruiting and application process with founders. I'm really interested in what is your motivation. And frankly, I don't care if you're in this for the next 10 years and you want to build a global company or you want to do something for the next five years in exit. I don't really care about either of those things, but I care how much you know about the problem that you're trying to solve. I care how much you understand and have paid attention to what else is in the marketplace. If you don't know who your competitors are, that's like a warning signal to me. I care that the founders have worked together for a long time or known each other for a time so that they have experienced good and bad because the life of an early stage company is a roller coaster and you will want to jump off the train on many days. And so you need to be able to fight and be okay because it's essentially being married, being co-founders. And so I care much more and I think Techstars in general, we care much more about the founding team than we actually even do about your company. Because companies can be molded to different things based on like your overall vision and goal, how you get there could be completely different. But we care about you and what you bring to the table. Okay, IRC Kinshasa, I'm sorry if I've screwed up that name, asks after a company goes through an incubator, they will need money. What's the best way to get connected to a network of investors in the developing world? Do you want to go or you want me to? Let's say three-part question, right? So with us, you don't leave, we're married, we're not dating, we're married, so that's a little different. You guys are slightly different so you can answer to that part. The second part of the question is the money, well we'll bring the money, so that's for us, that's what it works. But if you're trying to go out and get money, you need to, there's web platforms you could do, that's global. So in developing worlds, honestly, the people with the money are the people you're going to talk to, so the first step is usually the angel network. Angels in translation are rich people, that's it, very bluntly, okay? So it might be a business owner, it could be a very prominent lawyer, it could be find someone who's passionate with your project and see if this is something that they're interesting. But you want to go about it as you are building a relationship, this is not an ATM machine, you just walk up to them and stick your hand out. Again, relationships, right? And the last part is maybe your country doesn't have that, and you might have to go to a bigger city, a bigger country. And this again is where relationships come into place, because you may not know anyone, it might be you sit back six months, eight months just trying to meet the right people. It's good to see if you have advisors that could help you into these new countries, it's good to maybe think about this before you get started. If you're trying to build something that's going to take $20 million in order for you to be successful, right? $20 won't cut it, $2 million won't cut it, you need $20 million. If you don't have a plan for that, then this may not be the right fit for you at this time, right? Or maybe you're a way to build your company in smaller tranches and smaller steps. And maybe you can prove that it works in your region, in your city, and then grow out to your country or the rest of the continent, or maybe another country, another region. It can be done in baby steps and you can raise a little bit of money along the way, and that's fine as well. It really depends on what your goals are, how fast you want to go, and how hard and how long you can stand out for all this. But funding in the end, funding, I think, despite the technologies that are out there, is still, again, a network of relationships, people you know, people who can introduce you to others, people who believe in you, people who, when they hear your project or your company think that this is amazing, I need to tell everyone else about this. So you either have that capability to persuade or have those networks from the beginning. Some of these programs could be helpful as they do the demo days. But beyond that, you've got to figure it out and best to do that before you get into it. Yeah. And from a TechStars perspective, I mean, this is a piece of our program. If you applied and we invested in you, we would essentially teach you how to develop a strategy on raising money and use our network to help you raise money as the outcome of our program. I would tell you that there are great examples in developing economies of companies raising capital. One of my favorite entrepreneurs is Eric Persma, who's in Nairobi and is on second company, not as first. Both of whom raised angel capital from the United States and has raised a significant amount of money and is on to an ed tech company all from the base of Nairobi. So as Gail just said, it's about having a network of entrepreneurs and frankly, I mean, investors and frankly finding investors who understand the problem that you're trying to solve and immediately say, I'm totally in for that. And I want to solve it in your part of the world. Other examples that we're seeing and this, you know, I think people didn't think this was going to work at what time, but it's working now. My favorite company is called Paula. It's on the ground in LA and its market is continent of Africa in the Philippines and very, very small team in LA founded by Sharon, Shivani Sharia. And it is completely focused on ex US market, but she started it here because she can get the right investors. Google Ventures is one of her around investors and so that she could frankly get the right access to the right talent and team. But the market is on the ground in Africa in the Philippines and it's amazing and she's doing great. Let's see a online viewer ask how does an entrepreneur know when they are ready to break from working with a accelerator incubator and move out on their own. Well, okay, so with us you don't break. We're part of the team, right? So we're going to solve whatever problem we're going to do together. But with programs that are out there, I don't think it's a break. It's the next iteration because you can still they can still call you or there's other programs out there. You still have a connection. There's still alumni network. Don't think of building a company as like a three month process and then I stop and I enter another six month process and I stop and I go into another 17 month. It's not like that. You decided to build something. That's it. This is your new life. It's like having a child. It's not like, oh, it's two years. This is your child. This is your baby. You're going to feed it. You're going to grow it. There's going to be more people. It just moves into transitions. It might get larger. And the whole time all you're doing is thinking, how am I going to get it more customers and audience? How am I going to grow it so that there's more employees to do more work and help me make it bigger? How can I get into more places? It's just really the expansion of opportunities that I don't think there's a start and a stop anywhere in the middle of all. It's just the expansion of opportunities. Yeah. Totally agree. And my response is the accelerator programs of tech stars are 90 day programs. So you come, you live with us. We are together for 24 seven for 90 days. And at the beginning of that, you obviously become alumni of tech stars. We believe tech stars is tech stars for life. We've had multiple examples of founders coming back through with new companies. We have a new engine that you have access to once you are accepted and part of tech stars forever. We have annual business development days where we bring corporate partners together. We just had one in October. We had something like 80 corporate partners from across the country. Entrepreneurs show up to do office hours. We have investor days. And those happen ongoing and you can come back and participate in that at any time. We have tech stars alumni events in once a month in cities where we operate. And so as founders move around, they then create linkages to cities where we have tech stars and it enables them to build their own network as well. The innovation center in Kosovo. And I have dear friends in Kosovo. I hope this is you. How do you engage with companies and smaller incubators and companies in countries like ours? Is there a proactive approach or do you expect companies to come to you? So we did choose some, maybe not the obvious cities, Prague. I mean, these are capitals, right? So we're in Prague. It's smaller compared to New York. We sit near people. I literally just make myself available and I listen to smart people talk. We found a team of engineers and all friends. They wanted to build something. They tried doing a startup of their own. And we found them. It's like, wow, you guys are really smart. I like you. We get along over beer and love their ideas. And so just got to know them over some time and said, why don't you join one of our companies that is just starting out? Let me introduce you to the CEO and then they form a team. They don't have to leave their homes. They stay in Prague. We have an office there. They work out of there and the US executives are selling the product and they're very excited that because it's something they never would have been able to do. It would never have been able to get themselves over to New York, you know, do all the things of being in New York and then figuring how to sell to these large agencies and media companies. Those too many steps would take too long, right? And so we've now we have a US prompt team and it came because we were just like each other, right? Constantly looking for individual technical people. At the same time, we meet with startups there as well that may or may be doing well just in within Prague or Czech Republic. They've not grown out very far out. The pricing model might be really inexpensive for a global market. So we start to work with them because we like the technology, like the people. It's simple, same model. It's just like a dual city launch of founders kind of we found and the market is always always New York, always US at least to start. And then we then we look abroad. But I think what's happening now for us in Turkey is that we can actually take our products and launch into entire industry verticals out of there. And it's going to open up a lot more opportunities for that region. That's awesome. And for tech stars, yes, you would have to come to one of our locations. We recruit globally. I have a recruiting trip to South Africa in March. I'm going to North Carolina this week. So I'm absolutely location agnostic as are my colleagues around the world. And so we accept applications from anywhere in the world and look forward to them. I have another question from in this time. I can I can pronounce it correctly. IRC can Shasa. Yeah. Do you have any Africa continent experience? I do not. Okay. Done. Okay. Alexander from Russia asks, do you have any experience accelerating tech companies focused on providing services and partnering with NGOs? Partnering NGOs, it really just depends on what you want to do. I mean, we do a lot of partnerships. That needs to be a little bit more specific, you know, business wise, probably not event wise, programming wise, probably makes a lot of sense. From the investment standpoint, sure. We don't have any like NGO products, although I'll say something. We are trying to build a new application to help reach more voters in the US to make voting more efficient and probably throw that out as a nonprofit. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. Tech stars does infrequently, but we do accept not for profits infrequently. But in terms of working with NGOs, I think there's been multiple occasions of companies that have been launched who will partner with NGOs, especially in the healthcare space in places like Africa. There's also even some interesting, I think drone models out there that are partnering with NGOs who will be first customers because they're part of the supply chain in those kinds of countries. So yes, but probably not as a customer, but more as a part of the supply chain process in most cases. Yeah, an online viewer asked, can an incubator help my small startup expand my market access? That's the point. That's all we do. But I just need to know who you are and what it is that you do. I can tell you in five minutes if it's something that we think we're going to mesh well with, you know, just have to know what it is. People approach us all the time. We're very accessible online in person, easy to talk to. And but we're very, you know, specific in the things that will work. Yeah. And I would say the same thing for tech stars, obviously, but we also are finding more frequently that as an example, a company that wants to scale maybe has already scaled in the US, but wants to scale in Eastern Europe, or as we will find with us. Australia wants to scale in that part of the world will join a tech stars accelerator in that part of the world to get like massive quick access to the market and scale in that way. Same thing with companies that are located outside the United States but want to be able to scale inside the United States. We have a significant high percentage of Africans that are from outside the United States for that reason. Another question. Yeah, I think I don't see any more questions online. But another question that I was thinking about is, are there resources that entrepreneurs can use to decide an accelerator to help them think about how to start up and grow their company. Oh, there's tons of workshops. I think they start up have some programs all over the world and read a book, watch a movie, you have your mind into it like wanting to do it is step one. Yeah, having a good idea step to and look, it doesn't have to come from your head. They can come from a partner or someone else. In the end, you're not going to be there by yourself anyway, but if anything goes right, you'd be surrounded with another 100 people, and you're going to have to accept other people's inputs. And so, maybe it's you and a friend, it's friends idea and you guys do it together. You know, there's a ton of events everywhere. Maybe you live in a part of the world where it's not as easily available. If you can afford it, get on a plane and go somewhere for a couple weeks and immerse yourself, if that's what you need to get to get motivated, join a program. But understand this, the world is global. I don't think anyone can stand in their own little part of the world and think that that's all it's going to be. So, experience it, see what's out there, you know, travel, meet other people, make friends. At some point, you're going to need to leave for good reasons, you know, to grow. And so, you know, start with that early. Okay, great. I see one more question on here. Does Techstars have a incubator accelerator program in South America? And the answer is not yet, but we have a significant presence in South Africa through our startup weekend network. And so, I would reach out to there's people in Brazil, in Mexico City, in Chile, in Argentina that are all attached to startup weekend or startup week. So, simply go online and you can ask that question on our Techstars website or you can just search for them. And I think you just heard from, yeah, the importance of Go Global and do all of your research. Some very specific resources I would suggest is, as she said, Eric Reese's Lean Startup book, amazing. The Kauffman Foundation is a great resource, founder school that's all online stuff. I would say if you're raising money and you have to take outside investment, the very most important book that you should read is Venture Deals by Brad Feld. He provides complete transparency into all the things that have ever gone wrong for everyone else, so that you can learn from other people's mistakes and hopefully not make them yourselves. So, I think that's all we have time for today. Thanks for joining us. And please tune in again on March 14 at the same time for a discussion titled Overcoming Challenges Facing Your Startup. It will be available in both English and Spanish. And thank you, Yau, for participating and be awesome. Thanks for having me. Okay, thanks guys. Bye-bye.