 limited access to healthcare. A crisis in education. There's no question that we have a multitude of problems on this planet. I think we have the potential, not in centuries, but in the next two or three decades, the ability to really take on the world's big problems and solve them. Now some of the biggest and brightest innovations come from young people. Well today we're going to introduce you to the Cairo Society. You're going to want to check this out because the people who are members of this are the CEOs of the future. Student founded actually and the whole goal there is take on the big challenges in the world with entrepreneurs. There's no place on earth, there's so much freedom of mind from around the world. Young people come together and they have so much of ideas. The company was founded in Tel Aviv and Israel. We started in Portugal. I'm at Stanford. We're from Germany. I'm from Shanghai, China. There's never been a greater need or a better time to innovate. Innovation is the process by which we change the world. Innovation, to put it simply, is about making things better. These students want to solve problems and they're already solving problems in their own right. The question is which problems will they solve and what do you focus them on? How do you focus the next generation of entrepreneurs? That's what we do. I think the guys are going to find the next innovative solutions to some of these big problems like clean tech, education, healthcare. This is why some of the world's most influential leaders, individuals and corporations alike, are looking to carry off scallows for a fresh perspective on how to tackle the next generation of global problems. The tremendous advances in science and technology offer unprecedented opportunities to make a difference, especially through engagement with young entrepreneurs and innovators, such as those at the Carrier Society. Just check out some of the mentors of this group, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Peter Diamandis of the X Price Foundation, Duncan Niederauer. He's the CEO of the New York Stock Exchange. Over the past four years, we've seen the growth of over a hundred companies coming out of Cairo's, taking on the big challenges like education, clean tech, healthcare, clean water. A diet taken in four and a half million in revenue in 30 days of being in production. Cairo's really over the years has been the pivotal thing that's helped me get to this point. The college entrepreneurship was confined to campus borders and most entrepreneurs were confined to national borders. But Cairo transcends these boundaries because in our interdependent world, there are no borders when it comes to the pressing issues we all face. Hello everybody. So Moot and I are thrilled to be here, especially with so many young entrepreneurs that we've met over the last 24 hours. But we're also thrilled to be here because I think this is one of the most important times for all of us as entrepreneurs to take a step back and ask ourselves why we do what we do. Because somewhere over the last 10 years, things have changed and where entrepreneurship started off being about solving problems, we seem to have lost our way a little bit and started chasing hype cycles. And so Moot and I wanted to talk a little bit today about what's happening in Silicon Valley, where's the future of Silicon Valley and what do we need to do as entrepreneurs to actually build the next billion-dollar businesses that will tackle these big problems? Moot, you still live in the Bay Area. What do you think is causing this change? You like to rub that in. Anker just moved to New York, so he's got this connectedness to the real life and real world that I don't because I still live in Silicon Valley. So what's happening? What's been happening over the last five, 10 years in the Valley and why is there such a backlash that we're seeing today against the technology community? I've been investing in innovation for 15 years and you've been building innovation during that same time period and so I think we come at it from different vantage points, but I think it's a similar conclusion. For me, the reason I live in Silicon Valley and I love Silicon Valley is it still has that magic of being the epicenter of where innovation is, where most of the tech platforms are and to really understand and have a connectedness to that sort of cradle of innovation, you need to be in the midst of it. In spite of that, over the last, I would say, decade, we're detached from the real world and so we're culturally detached. If any of you have been in Silicon Valley or tried to live there, it's sort of hard to live there because it's so expensive. There's this culture of kind of wealthy nerds that live there, that the products we use, the way we talk, how we dress, how we interact, it's become a very insular world and when you become more and more insular and detached from the mass market, it starts to then contaminate your understanding of what products will resonate on a global scale. That's why I like coming to cities like Helsinki. That's why I travel globally because it allows me to reconnect with what's happening in our world broadly and I think that connectedness is what we're missing. Each year that goes by, we're becoming more and more detached as a culture. So look, how many people are entrepreneurs in this audience who are not from Silicon Valley? Let me just give a quick idea here. So what's amazing now is that we have an opportunity to build companies not just in San Francisco Bay Area but around the world and the reason is for a few things. Technology used to be its own bubble. If you talk to folks in the traditional sectors, they always thought of tech as tech and then there was retail and housing and everything else. Now technology is everything and so a lot of the next big opportunities are not in building deep software or AI but it's in tackling those big issues that affect the billions of everyday people like housing. Like the issue in the United States of over a trillion dollars in student loans. These are massive markets. The housing market alone is over a trillion dollars and there hasn't yet been much technology innovation in these areas. And so as entrepreneurs, as we think about where we should focus our time, where should the next generation go after? Like is it just another buzzy AI meets blockchain? I mean when we're in the valley, how many times do you get pitched AI plus blockchain? I literally don't have a company meeting in which either AI or machine learning or blockchain is mentioned. It's just, it's gotten out of control and I think it's easy as an entrepreneur to get sucked into these hype cycles because it seems like that's where the money goes. And I think it's important when you have investors like Mood or partners like my partners at Kairos who can say, start with what is the problem? Something so obvious. I mean entrepreneurship has always been about solving problems. Now people start with what technology they're doing that's the latest buzzword and how much money they've raised. And that's a cultural issue that's plagued our community and everybody here has an opportunity to start changing that. Because both of us want to see entrepreneurs coming at these things saying there is a trillion dollar market where people are spending 50% of their income on rent. That's not sustainable and here's a new model. And by the way that's a problem that most people, especially entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, they don't feel that problem. They don't live it. Which is why I think entrepreneurs in cities globally who live those problems who are a part of that sort of mass market, they get it more. And so you always want to live in a market that serves as a microcosm that's the right test bed for what you're trying to solve. And I think cities like San Francisco are more disconnected from that than cities like Helsinki, cities like London, frankly cities in Europe. You guys have seen the HBO show Silicon Valley. It's a little bit of a joke but it's also a scary reality where you'll see entrepreneurs in San Francisco today genuinely believe they're changing the world because they built a $700 juicer. The perspective on what real problems are has been lost. And that's why again we need, like Mood is saying, we need people to come out. So I mean one of the things that we've both been working on is through Kairos and Mood's been a close advisor to. As we've said, what are five areas, five markets where we need entrepreneurial solutions? And I've mentioned a few of them already, but I'll lay them out here. And I think if anybody here is working on tackling these problems, like we're both here to support. So one is how do we address the cost of education and make this accessible to everybody? Make sure that you know your degree is worthwhile, that it's actually moving your career forward so that our communities aren't saddled with billions of dollars or trillions of dollars of debt. Number two is when you then get to the next stage of life and you move to a city, anywhere in the world, Europe, Asia, United States, Latin America, how can you afford housing? The third thing, when you then decide to start a family, the cost of becoming a parent today, there hasn't been much innovation in childcare. So can we do that? Fourth is when people are losing their job because our technology will be automating at least 10 million jobs over the next five years. So how do we solve that? And lastly, as we retire, how do we make sure people have savings? How do we handle elderly care for these folks? Again, each of these markets are hundreds of billions of dollars or trillions of dollars in existing business. There is not a technology winner in any of these spaces yet. And these are real problems that everyday people are facing all over the world. You know the nice thing about tackling those problems, which again, normal cities throughout the world, these are the issues that people are facing. So there's a massive addressable market. The gap has been the lack of tech and product talent that coalesces around that, where those problems reside. But I think today, as opposed to 10 years ago, that gap is a lot, lot smaller. So it used to be that Silicon Valley had a monopoly on tech talent. It's no longer true. Companies like Google, Facebook, others, they've got campuses established globally. Engineering talent has never been something that's been just in Silicon Valley. That talent, just from a skillset perspective, is scattered throughout the world. Ukraine has got a ton of that talent. So it's connecting that talent in a product way around innovation that's happening now, that now allows that talent to reside globally. Secondly, I think you mentioned deep tech. This is no longer the era where every innovation is a platform. The platforms have already been created. So we're in a world now, unlike 10 years ago, where AWS exists, Facebook exists, the App Store exists. That means your ability to create a company on someone else's backbone and then discover your audience through the App Store or through Facebook. It allows you to basically start up a lot more quickly and do it anywhere on the planet. And it's funny because I think Silicon Valley has in many ways become an outsourced R&D system for the big five. So it used to be that the vision, the dream of a founder was to go out and create the next Facebook. Now the conversations are all about building something to flip. And that means that while Silicon Valley has become this giant R&D system for Apple and Google and Microsoft and Amazon and all these guys, that means there's an opportunity, again, for us, as entrepreneurs, the rest of the world, to go build the next Facebook of housing, the next Facebook of education, et cetera. And so, again, there is this momentary change. And I will caution all of this opportunity with a sense of warning, which is that if we don't do this, the backlash against the technology industry will be swift and large. You're seeing this today. People are furious about the way that social media has affected elections around the world. People are furious at the way people handle privacy. People are furious at the way that technology companies are leaving so much of the population behind. And when tech plays such a critical role in our governments now, in our societies, it also comes with the responsibility to address the needs of the community. And so, think about this not just as an opportunity, but also as a responsibility for all of us as founders. Hey, Ankur, if you were to give advice to people aspiring entrepreneurs in cities far away from Silicon Valley, what are they missing? Because, again, 10 years ago, I thought there was this cluelessness of entrepreneurs in cities that were far away from Silicon Valley. They just didn't get it sometimes. I don't think that's the case anymore. But I still think there are some things that entrepreneurs that are really far removed from Silicon Valley could still benefit from in terms of getting up the learning curve, where there is still a little bit of a gap. Yeah, so I think the biggest opportunities now for founders outside of the valley are, again, because it's no longer just a technology software game, right? So five, 10 years ago, a lot of that gap, I think, was you weren't necessarily solving the problems for your own communities. You were building software that kind of lived outside of it all. And I mean, whether it was social networks or whether it was travel sites, I mean, these were all internet properties that didn't have direct defect. They were nice to haves that became big. So I think the gap is actually, the gap is happening when people chase what they think they should from a hype cycle. I mean, four years ago, it was drones. Then it was VRAR. Then it was Chatbots AI. And now it's blockchain machine learning, right? And I think the biggest gap is that when people think that that's where the opportunity is, because that's what you read about, that's what you see financed, you miss the big opportunities right here at home. And a lot of the best companies, even the ones in Silicon Valley, started by solving problems for people right in their own backyard. Yeah, I think from a product perspective, there's something psychological about, you know, European cities, frankly, cities outside of the United States, that don't embrace this consumer-centric view of everything. I mean, one of the criticisms of America is it's such consumerism without any limit. And it's true, there are a lot of bad consequences associated with that. But one good consequence is, as you're building a product, you're obsessive about the consumer first about everything. And there is a mentality, I think, in cities outside of America, outside of Silicon Valley, where you don't think, you think about product in terms of the utility of the product. It should work this way. But not in terms of, I don't care as long as it's what the consumer wants. And if you break free from the shackles of whatever is constraining the use and the functionality of your product from a consumer's perspective, I think that's going to really allow your product to proliferate on a massive scale. The other thing is, I think there's something psychological about maybe the socialist mentality in markets outside of the United States that says growth has a limit, like this is enough. In America, there is no limit to growth. And so I think that mentality helps disruptive entrepreneurs break rules, break rules without any limit, be disruptive, break glass. And I think there are restraints that entrepreneurs have in markets outside of the United States that prevent them from growing on that level. So that actually brings up a really good point, which is one of the questions we should also all ask ourselves is, as an entrepreneur, you're putting your life and your team's livelihoods on the line. And it's inherently risky and most startups fail. So where are the areas that we as founders have systemic advantages against governments, incumbents, NGOs, et cetera? And here are a few tips that I think Mood and I would like to share with you guys. So number one, to his point, focus on the end consumer needs. What are the unmet consumer needs because of outdated or broken industries? Because when you build something that consumers love, there's a pull for your product. You're not reliant anymore on governments or enterprise selling your business. Number two, I think times have changed in that you can no longer try to win by building just a purely deep tech solution against a tech incumbent. Because five, 10 years ago, the incumbents you were fighting against weren't tech driven and they weren't run by the founders. Today, when you build a tech company against Facebook or Google, they're still run by the founders. They're willing to cannibalize their business to try new things. You see that with Facebook against a lot of startups today. Plus, they have billions of dollars in R&D money. So think differently about the product experience or the business model change that you can create because that's a defensible mode. And no incumbent will try to copy you until you've already proven it works because they don't want to risk cannibalizing that in a non-tech world. This is really the first generation where disruption is happening by disrupting a tech company. Whereas generation one, when eBay was disrupting kind of a very old school offline method of buying and selling, Yahoo was disrupting yellow pages. Now the disruptors are trying to overthrow generation one of what's happening in the Internet. That's what I want to push back on a little bit, which is I think there was a ability in the even over the last five years to overthrow Yahoo overtook Alta Vista, then Google overtook Yahoo. You saw that with Facebook over MySpace over Friendster. Today, the big five tech companies have network effects and competitive moats that are not easy to overcome. We aren't going to displace Amazon overnight, but we can apply technology to these fragmented sectors. Like in elderly care, you have 8,000 home care agencies in the UK alone, which means that a patient coming out of a hospital is waiting an average of three weeks from the time they're ready to be discharged to the time they can find a home care worker. That's crazy, right? So it's like we used to disrupt services, we're now disrupting traditional sectors that touch government, that touch regulatory spaces. You dealt with some of this when you were helping build Uber, right? You're going after traditional areas. So I think probably the last thing I would add to that is as a founder, places like Slush are critical, not because of the other tech founders you meet, but because of the government folks that are here, because of the creative folks that are here, because of the folks from completely different industries that need to work together in order to solve these problems. Yeah, you talked about government and you mentioned Uber. So many of the great consumer innovations that are happening today are changing the way cities work. And so you're having things that used to be thought of as public utilities like transportation, where innovation is coming in and really driving adoption. And so, cities that have history, that have urban density, that have cultural diversity, like Helsinki, like a lot of cities in Europe, I think that's where if your product is going to proliferate on a mass global level, they better work in cities like Helsinki, like London. And in those cities, cooperation with governments I think is going to be key over time. I agree. So look, we're about out of time. So I urge everybody here, we have an opportunity to take on some of these big problems. We have an opportunity as entrepreneurs to stop chasing the hype cycles and solve real industry needs. And if people in this room, if even 10 folks go after it, you're talking again, if this is trillions of dollars of market value untapped, there is no tech winner in these spaces yet. And so for people here, don't get enamored by the stuff you see coming out in techcrunch.com. Focus on the issues that you see people actually facing in our communities. And you will build the next big company. Couldn't have said it better. Thanks, everybody.