 Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Melanie Selick, and I am part of the Y-Li Network team here at the Department of State's Bureau of International Information Programs. It is my pleasure to welcome you to this live interactive discussion here in Washington on creating a culture of entrepreneurship in the hemisphere. I'd like to extend a special welcome to our viewing groups in Havana, Managua, Guayaquil, and Kingston today. In April 2015, President Obama launched the Young Leaders of the Americas Initiative, Y-Li, to expand opportunities for emerging entrepreneurs and innovative civil society activists in Latin America and the Caribbean. The Y-Li Network is a community of thousands of young entrepreneurs, changemakers, and aspiring leaders from across the region. The network is open to anyone interested in acquiring the tools, skills, and connections to foster positive change in their workplaces, communities, and countries. I'm joined today by two distinguished guests to discuss some of the shared challenges that entrepreneurs and innovators face in Latin America and the Caribbean. How can some of these obstacles be overcome by thinking about how we create a culture of entrepreneurship? We'll explore these topics and take your questions. To ask questions, you can log in as a guest or via Facebook or Twitter and type them in the chat space below the video player on your screen. But first, I'd like to introduce our speakers. Here with me is Ambassador David Thorn, Secretary Kerry's senior advisor. He leads the State Department wide effort to position economic and commercial issues more prominently within the U.S. foreign policy landscape. Ambassador Thorn is also working to elevate the importance of entrepreneurship, technology, and innovation in the State Department's promotion of global prosperity. He brings a wide range of public and private sector experience to his role. Most recently, he served from 2009 to 2013 as the U.S. Ambassador to Italy. He's also been an investor and entrepreneur in a wide variety of business ventures, including marketing, consulting, real estate, publishing, and financial services. And joining us from California, we have Debra Magid. Debra is Director of Software Strategy for IBM's Venture Capital Group. She's responsible for sharing insights about emerging technologies, markets, and business models with venture firms and entrepreneurs around the world. She scouts for emerging business opportunities and shares views on innovation and growth areas of the market. And to get us started, now I'd like to ask Ambassador Thorn to share some of his initial thoughts for our discussion today. Ambassador? Great. Thank you, Melanie. And hola, my friends from Wiley. It's really great to be with you. As Melanie said, I've been very involved in trying to promote entrepreneurship and culture of entrepreneurship throughout the State Department, and in particular in South America and in the Caribbean. As she said, I'm a senior advisor to Secretary Kerry, who has been my friend, very close friend, for over 50 years. I myself have been an entrepreneur for many years before I went into government service. And it's great. I always enjoy talking to a group like you, who are interested in starting businesses and being entrepreneurs, and to not only encourage you along that path, excuse me, but to also tell you a little bit or share a little bit with you about things that I have learned along the way. One of the essential parts of, I think, what's interesting is that entrepreneurship and starting new businesses has at least been, in the last 10 years in the US, been the principle and the sole really net job creator in this country. It's very important to the future of America. It's very important to the futures of your countries that people like yourself get this kind of activity going and encourage this kind of activity in your country. And in order to do that, excuse me, you need a supportive entrepreneurial ecosystem. So I wanted to talk a little bit today, just as a way of introduction, I wanted to talk about what that really means and ways that I think that you guys can help yourselves and help your own country by encouraging both your own activity, but the activities and the policies of your country to create a more supportive business environment, entrepreneurial environment, that you will be able to work in. One of the things is that, as I said, I've been an entrepreneur, but I've also been a government official, and I'm going to try to share both points of view on how we things that I think can be helpful to you. One is we talk a lot about protecting your ideas, not talking to anybody, and not sharing ideas that you might have with others. In the States, in fact, there's a different kind of culture. These kinds of things we share all the time. A lot of kids get together and talk about what they're doing, share best practices, things they've learned, things they failed at, all that kind of stuff, which is important. Just for the energizing of an idea environment. But the important thing to understand is in a way to help yourself is to move fast. That is the determinator. I'm going to talk a little bit about IPR in a second. But when you have an idea, first movers have a huge advantage, and it's important that if you have something you really believe in, you want to move on it as fast as you can, because it inevitably will not be the only idea around. It will not be the first time anybody thought about these things. And your maintaining an advantage in this will be up to you to move on it as quickly as possible. The other thing I want to say is seek a mentor. Because friends with a group called Endeavor, who has done a lot of work in the social venture advisory firm, really. And they've done a lot of work in Latin America, and they've tried to find out best practices. And one of the key things that they've learned is that people, young entrepreneurs who are able to find a mentor, who has been a successful entrepreneur within their country, improves their chances of succeeding as a successful entrepreneur, or in getting their enterprise going, by about tenfold. And so I encourage all of you to seek out those people who have succeeded in starting a business in whatever country you're listening to me from. And to try to encourage a relationship with that mentor, both in terms of getting some money, but support, and especially best practices lessons learned that will help you enormously in your efforts to move ahead and succeed. I also want to encourage you not to use borrowed money. I know in a lot of countries, and this country, it's not common that people would try to use borrowed money to start a business. But in other places in the world, Italy, for example, where I was ambassador, it's very much the practice. It adds a burden on your enterprise that you often will not be able to overcome. And therefore, seeking out friends and family, angel investors, encouraging startup venture firms and things like that in your country is really the way to go. And it's just a warning that you can encumber yourself in a way that will hurt what may be basically a very good idea by not having it financed properly. Not to say that raising money is one of the great difficulties, as Deborah will tell you. And it's not something that comes easily and usually very hard to do. And especially sometimes not the first money, but the next layer is what's hard, to take an idea that now you've developed and then get it to a place where you might be able to raise real venture money, that's the hardest layer of capital to raise. Now, I want to talk to you as a government official. Because one of the things I've tried to do, I've led these innovation roadshows. Deborah from IBM has been a stalwart on those innovation roadshows. We've been in Asian countries in Indonesia and the Philippines and Vietnam. And we've also been in Latin America and Colombia and Mexico. Where we go and try to talk, well, we try to encourage our embassy to get involved in this area. We try to support the young entrepreneurs who are working in these areas. And lastly, we really try to push the governments that we meet and the ministers we meet into thinking about ways that they can create more supportive policies for entrepreneurial activity. And one of the interesting things was when I was in Spain, I met with a representative from the big firm, Cisco. And one of the things that they said that we don't look just at entrepreneurs and ideas. We look at business environments and entrepreneurial environments. And places that have policies that encourage new startup activity are places where we're more inclined to take a chance on someone than just, well, we like what he's trying to do because he or she is trying to do. Because if they're in a really tough environment, that would be a disincentive to necessarily try to go there. So it's another reason for encouraging a more entrepreneurial environment. And I think that one of the things, there's a number of areas that I don't want to mention. One is keeping down bureaucratic processes needed to create a business. Make it simple. The governments can create a policy where you can start a business in a day. You can start a business in America. I think it costs $200 or something like that. And a country that manages or makes that easier to start a business are ones that get a lot more entrepreneurial activity done. Secondly, stopping a business. I know that may sound funny. But one of the things that is a disincentive, one of the things that discourages people from starting a business is, oh my god, what happens if I fail? And what kind of a burden am I going to have, my family going to have, my career going to have, if I have this huge thing hanging around my neck and I can't resolve my problems, we manage bankruptcy in a very efficient way in this country. And therefore, efficient bankruptcy laws are really equally as important. And finally, tax incentives, tax code can really be encouraging this kind of entrepreneurial activity. There are other things that are sort of much more broad, but very important. An educational environment that breeds a high level of advanced degrees and other kinds of things like that that actually lead to R&D and then technology transfer from universities and all that kind of thing. Usually there's a direct kind with the level of advanced education and the amount of creative startups that occur. And the other thing is labor loss. I can speak to that in Italy. They have labor loss and really discouraged starting up a business or growing a business because once you get over 10 people you can't fire anybody. So you have no very, very little flexibility. And so it's very discouraging to start an environment. So these are things that countries can really help, country governments can really help encourage an entrepreneurial environment. Intellectual protection of intellectual property is, of course, I mentioned this idea of starting fast, which I think is important, which I think is the best security you have. But the other thing is if you have protection and patent protection and other kinds of things for ideas, it's also very conducive to encouraging the entrepreneurial system. I think that I just I'll mention this new area of financial technology, fintech. The US has invested over $20 billion in the last year in this area. Almost every day you read about some story where people are looking at blockchain, technology, Bitcoin, all these kinds of things. I think if any of you out there, it's not something government does, but it's something to be mindful of the fact that there is a changing environment about how money is handled, both for the consumer but the investor and everything else. And I think that the more you can learn about that from how we're doing it and how other countries are doing it, it's where the future is going. And lastly, I want to just say, certainly in the countries I've been, the Latin countries I've been in, failure is a great disincentive, this idea that somehow there's a huge stigma to trying something and failing at it. The answer is in America it's really something that's viewed as a way of gaining experience. It actually makes you, often anyway, a more valuable commodity, more valuable to invest in you the second time because it shows that you've had experience. And it's just a way to, it does not preclude you from future success. In fact, it probably enhances your ability to have a future success. And most entrepreneurs in America try three or four or five times with things before they find something that really takes off. And I just want to encourage you to, I know these different countries' environments are not easy in that regard, but try to do everything you can to sort of overcome this sense that just because you're taking a risk does not mean that you cannot continue to take risks and move on. So with that, those are some initial ideas. I wanted to turn over the mic to Deborah, who I see on the screen but can't hear. And she's much wiser than I am in these things. And she's a lot of experience because she does this all over the world for IBM and encourages this entrepreneurial spirit. And so Deborah, I'm looking forward to hearing you as always. Thank you, David. It's really great to hear from you too. And I look forward to seeing you in Argentina next week. I'm here to represent two institutions. One is IBM and one is Silicon Valley. And IBM is over 100 years old and has 380,000 employees but still manages to be entrepreneurial ourselves and to support entrepreneurs in other places. And why is that so important to a large corporation like ours? That's because we gain several things from sporting entrepreneurs in many places around the world. We get to meet startups who might in the future become business partners or even targets for acquisitions. We get to learn about what new business models, new technologies, new ways of doing business are happening in other countries and other places. And we also get to learn something about what startups are doing, where is money flowing, what are venture capitalists investing in, what are the new things that are happening. And we also get to help the entire industry because if we're good citizens of the tech industry and we support people who are building new businesses and using new technologies and new ways of doing business, then everyone benefits from that. It's good for the industry. It's good for our own company. And so the ambassador had mentioned mentorship and we feel it's important to be mentors ourselves. In Silicon Valley, where I'm sitting right now, there are a lot of lessons to be learned. There are a lot of things that you can take and apply to your own environments and your own businesses. It's a mistake to try to duplicate it. So you don't want to be the Silicon Valley of Havana. What you want to do is take lessons from Silicon Valley and make it your own because you have your own culture, your own way of doing business, your own neighbors and your own ecosystem. There are lots of things you can learn about Silicon Valley and we can talk about some of those things during this call. And the ambassador mentioned a couple of those things. One is how open people are here. They're very willing to share, to take care of each other, to learn from each other, to share their experiences and that kind of transparency and openness is very culturally embedded in the Valley here. And we also do have a large set of people who act very fast and are very ambitious. So the degree to which you care about building a big business and being very successful and hiring lots of people and supporting the community, those things are very important here and it's one of the big drivers for why there are so many large businesses in Silicon Valley. It's because of people's desires. I will say though that working in a large corporation, you can be entrepreneurial even if you don't start your own business. So we have groups of people within the company who develop new things, who share new ideas, who propose new businesses and sometimes get them funded. So that can happen in many different ways. It can happen at the university, it can happen in large corporations and it can happen in the startup ecosystem. So the idea that you have a nice context in which to create new businesses because of what the government is doing but what you also do for each other is very important. So I'll say two things about that. One is when you are successful, I would ask you to make a promise that you will be mentors to other new businesses and that you will take care of the new entrepreneurs who are coming along and share your experiences with them and coach them. And you can do that in school as well. One of the wonderful experiences we had in Jakarta in Indonesia was to visit a vocational high school. There were girls, it was mostly women. So there were 16-year-old girls who were presenting their business plans and they had products and business plans and some of the products were even being already manufactured and these were kids. And a woman got up on stage, she's 16 and she said, I am the VP of marketing and here is my vision statement. And I almost wept because that's so encouraging for how entrepreneurship starts and where it can go. And so I would encourage you to when you're successful and when you're learning more about how to do these things to go into the schools and help other young girls. Thank you so much, Deborah. I think between the thoughts from Ambassador Thorn and you, I think we've got a lot of good fodder for conversation and I understand we have a lot of questions out there. So I think we'll jump right to it. We're gonna go ahead and go live to our viewing group in Havana for our first question. My name is Oleg Islam and I have actually four equations, but you know, I do the first one. Does IBM have a startup incubator inside the company? That's the first one. Great, we'll go ahead and start with that one. I believe the question was, does IBM have a startup incubator inside Cuba? So maybe Deborah can go ahead and take that one. We do not have a startup incubator inside of Cuba and in fact, we do not have a startup incubator anywhere because we feel it's very important to work with the incubators and accelerators that are the best ones every place they exist. So I'm going to Burma next month and they have a beautiful incubator in Yangon and so we would partner with them. We wouldn't create our own. Even here in San Francisco, we do not have our own incubators. We partner with the many really well-known ones that are here like Y Combinator and 500 startups and many others. Some incubators are run by universities. Some are run by the government. Some are funded by private individuals like venture capitalists and angel investors and we try to partner with the best ones, meet people, hold office hours, visit, be as helpful as we can be. Great, thank you. We're going to do one of our online questions from our viewing audience. Our first question comes from one of our Facebook followers. How can the Y Life Fellows, which are part of the exchange program under the Young Leaders of the America Initiative, contribute to a culture of entrepreneurship in their respective countries and our hemisphere as a whole? So I'll start with Ambassador Thorne. How do you think people who are participants in our exchange programs can help create this culture of entrepreneurship? Well, I think first of all, network with each other. I think that by and large, you're sort of a self-defining group and I think it's, I think, you know, entrepreneurial activity really is built on a supportive environment and network. You need the support of others in order to take some of these challenges on. So I think to the extent that Y Life Group can be in touch with itself, I think, and share experiences and practices and conversations and stuff like that, I think that's a really important first step. And then I think that this idea of creating an incubator, which Deborah addressed, I think that if, you know, to take that on and whatever you can do, your group or something can find a space and get, invite other people into that space to try to incubate ideas and get, you know, small ventures going with each other. I think it's really important. I don't think that's something the government does very well. I think they can provide, they can support you by providing spaces, but it's you guys have individuals that have to support the energy. And then of course, as you develop that, I think that reaching out to government groups and community groups and other kinds of things that would then push you to, you know, if we'd begin to seed some of these ideas that would create a more healthy and supportive entrepreneurial ecosystem, I think that would be, you know, that would be the next step. And of course, the other thing is to try to find sympathetic investors who like this kind of activity to invite them into your incubator and group to begin discussing ideas. You know, there's nothing, you know, a lot of these things are very organic. You begin talking about ideas, you start talking about people that have some money that want to help you do this and then you begin to develop an idea that's actually going to become a business. So I think that, you know, I'm sort of describing it sort of like an organic process, but you guys have to be the driver of it. And I think it starts with getting together with the young leadership group that has already been identified in the YLI arena. Great, thank you. All right, I think we'll go ahead, Managua is ready to ask our question. Managua, we're ready for you. Go right ahead, thank you. Hi, in general question, I used to work for Retropreneurs, but I'd like to know what do they mean when they say, owner of businesses are not here to cover payments? When they say that business are running by the outside bosses or managers, do you have any explaining about those entrepreneurs that claim that bosses and managers are outside the country while we do our jobs working, trying to grow our incomes and finally they don't pay by the law and they are established in this city, even the contact centers and some other business are running by the entrepreneurs. We're trying to get out of the businesses in order to what they guide and sometimes they make us go backwards because we never get the agreement they supposed to give us. Do you have any information about it? Because they don't give us the most information we need. Thank you for that. So I'll just rephrase the question a little bit. I think the question was about how can we sort of work with entrepreneurs who are in the country and people who are working outside of the country and so if they're working together and there's a sort of tension between what's happening outside the country with companies from outside the country and then also sort of working to cultivate that sort of up and coming culture and people who are entrepreneurs who are emerging in countries while working with folks from outside the country. So maybe Ambassador Thorn or Deborah is something to think about there. Yeah, I can start off but I'd love to have Deborah chime in too. I think that one of the things I've tried to do with the State Department is actually make these innovation roadshows. I haven't gotten to Ikoragra and I haven't but I have been in Cuba and to begin to energize in the sense the way the government can kind of help bring together groups like this to encourage this activity. And one of our great skills or at least one of the things that we do best I think is to convene meetings and to bring people together to talk about this kind of stuff. And one of the things our innovation roadshows do is to do several things. One is to encourage our embassies to get more involved with the community to be a bridge between what's going on in America and what's going on in the country. And therefore to learn about where the incubators are to perhaps learn who the possible investors are and to try to provide some kind of networking practice between the embassies interest and the entrepreneurial environment. And then of course the other thing that we can try to do is as part of the innovation roadshow we try to bring people, the government to be more aware of ways that they can support creating an atmosphere of places that people can meet to meet up, to invite young entrepreneurs down to the, you know, to Nicaragua and other places to just interact with and share stories and things like that. So I think, you know, your governments can help you do that. And, you know, well, I'll stop there. I mean, you know, there's so much that you, if you bring energy to what you're doing, it's sort of like the vision statement thing that Deborah talked about. You know, you'd be surprised how much that attracts other energy of that nature. So the more you guys can put that energy into creating a group or something like that, you know, it will attract other energy. So those three areas that I've just discussed, I think are important to, you know, to begin to build bridges to the US and what the US is doing. Deborah, you may want to add to that. Yeah, I do want to add to that because I think the question had a lot to do with what it's like to be working for an entrepreneurial organization that is not co-located with you, is that right? So there are two cases in which this happens. One is the model that you often see in Israel and other small countries where a group of entrepreneurs create a new business, but the business can't really grow there. And so they move the management to the US or to London and manage the business remotely while the engineering work and a lot of the work of the company is still done back in the original country like Israel. In that case, there's a close connection and a close tie between management and the people doing the work for the company. And so you usually do have a pretty good set of policies and transparency that keeps people connected and keeps them on the same page and working for the same goals. Another situation is when entrepreneurial companies create a new business, let's say it's in France or let's say it's in the US, and then they hire people in another country to work for them. And in that case, the connection between the employees and the management is not as tight. And I think in Nicaragua and other places where that's the case, it's time to use the network, like the Y-Line network, like the embassies like your own government and try to maybe bridge a set of communications between yourselves and the people you're working for so that things are transparent and everyone's being treated fairly. Great, thank you, Deborah. Thank you, Ambassador Thorn. We're gonna go back to a question from one of our online viewers. We have a question from Alex. Getting access to the banking system is harder than raising money. You can't charge through PayPal or Stripe without a Latin American bank account. Ambassador Thorn, could you talk a little bit more about the impact financial technology has on the way we're doing business? I think that the way I understand it, I must say to confess that I don't practice Venmo and things like that, but I think that what I find, for example, my daughter, who's 27 years old, she does not have a checkbook. She barely has a bank account. So much transaction is just occurring between her friends and her vendors and other kinds of things like that. I am not sure how the practices in your country's work vis-a-vis needing a bank account in order to transact money. What the new financial technology is doing is allowing for much easier transaction and transaction of movement of finances than whatever occurred in traditional banking. And I think it's worth going on to some of these fintech sites to try to find out how they are solving this problem. I think there may be some answers that you can gather online. And that's about as far as I can take the answer to that question because most people have bank accounts, so I don't know about not having a bank account. Deborah, you wanna answer that? Yeah. You have a bank account. Globally, most people do not have bank accounts, so it's a common problem. There are startup companies, and some of them are more mature now in the African continent, but also in the Americas and Europe and other places where there are a couple of different kinds of companies. One is you can transfer funds from one business to another using a mobile phone. It completely bypasses the banking system. It's actually run by the telcos themselves. And I don't know if the telcos in Nicaragua and the Caribbean use those systems, but they're very common. And the second thing is that there are some new ways of doing business where individuals can text payments, just using text messaging from one individual to another. There's a new, we met a new company, the Ambassador and I, in the Philippines that does this. The Filipino expats can text money back to their families or to businesses back in the Philippines. And the way they did that is the company created relationships with the credit card companies and with PayPal and so forth, but individual startup businesses, small businesses and consumers don't have to do that themselves. They use this company and their system to do it. So I agree with what the ambassador says, go check out online for alternative payment systems. Mobile banking is one of the things that it will be called and see if you can find something that would work where you are. The last thing I'll say is there are also companies like TransferWise in London who will do cross-border remittances because paying someone within your country is very different than trying to get payments done cross-border. And if you use the banking system, it's very expensive. And so there are a number of startups who bypass that to keep the cost down and make it happen faster. Thank you, Debra. All right, let's go ahead and check in with our viewing group in Havana to see if they have another question for us. Havana, are you ready? Yeah, well, alternative for developing countries in Latin America, to borrow money. Alternatives to lending for borrowing. So options that would make sense, perhaps in the context in Cuba, in the absence of other options. Yeah, well, you know, Cuba is complicated. There's, you know, it's just beginning to have a more ownership society, if you will. And I think that, again, I don't know specifically how the banking system works there. I don't have it operated there. Of course, as I said, it is much better to have a group of investors that usually starts with families and friends who support your enterprise, at least to get it off the ground to have proof of concept. And I think it's going to be very hard to get some institution to loan you that money. It may be easier to get individuals to loan you that money, but then again, you have the same problem I talked about where you will have to pay that money back. And I think that, look, only a couple of, you know, startups out of 10 actually work. The likelihood that it's not gonna succeed is significant. And I think that you don't want to burden yourself other than all the time and energy you're gonna put into making this thing work with, you know, then having to repay investment. I think you want to find people who want to share the experience with you that are willing to invest in your company and your enterprise. Usually it's not a lot of money, at least to get the first phase done. I think that in Cuba it is just more complicated because there's not a long experience with private endeavor, cuentopropistas. And I think that means that it's a little bit more complicated for you and your environment to necessarily to just create a private enterprise. So I think the government's learning about that. I think that they're beginning to encourage the cuentopropista environment. I have not tried to start a business myself so I don't know all the things that you may be encountering, but I do really recommend the support, the investment support of family and friends as a way to start a business. Deborah, anything to add before we turn to Monograh for our next question? Yes, there are a couple of alternative forms of capital that are widely used throughout the world. And I don't know if they're available in Cuba or not, but if they're not now, they will be soon. One is there are over a thousand corporate venture groups in the world. They're in every industry, banking, telecom, communications, entertainment, material science, everything you can imagine. And if you are in a particular industry, you can look at companies who would be your potential partners or customers to look to them for funding. They will take equity in your business, but that's a way to get them to be a partner for you. The second form of funding that's very widely used in the world now is crowdfunding. There are a lot of crowdfunding sites. Kickstarter and Indiegogo are very famous, but there are hundreds of them in the world and some of them are local to Latin America. So you should look at crowdfunding and corporate venture and see if those things will work for you. Thank you, Debra. All right, we're going to Minagua. We're ready for your next question. Hello, my name is David. I wouldn't like to, I mean, I don't want to ask something. I would like to share a little bit of my experience that I know we don't have too much, we don't have too much time. Go ahead, we'll keep it. I'm sorry? I'm sorry, please go ahead. You just try and keep it brief. Thank you. Okay, so a few seconds ago, I heard something about how to start a business, something like that. And again, I heard the ambassador talking about he has no work to do on that, he's not an investor or something like that, so he didn't know how to share this, but I would have to share a little bit of my own experience about businesses. When I started, a few years ago, I started to think about learning about how to make business and I learned from the nature about how to start business because when we see, for example, a seed of mango, we have a fruit in Nicaragua called mango. It's very popular, I guess. We see the fruit before the seed, but then we have the seed, right? So what we do, we supposed to do is to get the seed of every fruit and to plant a tree. Then in the future, we're gonna have more fruits. So this is the same when we get capital, if you wanna call it this way. For example, you have a job, and you don't get too much money from this job. You get the money to pay your bills, you get the money to pay your food, everything you need, but you have to get apart the seed so may you start the business. For example, you can start a small business with publicity, but also with the product. So I think, thank you for that. I think that's an interesting analogy, I think a really sort of different perspective to share. So Ambassador Thorne, any comment on the idea of the seed of the business and the fruit and sort of how it all comes together? The only thing I would add is you gotta water the seed and you've gotta put your energy into this idea. But the process, the natural process you speak about is certainly relevant to starting a business and getting an entrepreneurial activity going. And it's not natural like it is growing mangoes. It's got to be something that you put together in ways that we've talked about, but I appreciated your analogy to growing a fruit. And yes, I hope you all find the seeds that you want to water. Great. So since we have some more questions and our time is growing short, I'm gonna keep on moving on. We have a question from our viewing group in Kingston, Jamaica. What funding opportunities would you suggest for social entrepreneurs? I'd say Deborah or Ambassador Thorne, any suggestions there? Maybe we'll start with Deborah. Yes, that's a really great question because social entrepreneurship has become very well understood and more popular therefore over the last five years. It's taught at many universities around the world. I actually went to get together at the University of San Diego about three years ago just about social entrepreneurship and there were deans of 150 universities sharing their experiences and teaching how to do this. So of course there are more opportunities for funding. There are certain, and you can Google this on the web, there are certain venture firms who act like classic venture firms like any other VC, but they will only fund things that are for the social good. So they're not charities. They want to make a profit. They want you to be a big successful business, but they will only fund businesses that are for the social good. So it's a perfect method of funding for social entrepreneurs, as is crowdfunding by the way. And so you can find these on the website. One is invested development another is the Acumen Fund, which operates globally. There are quite a few of them now, more than there used to be. And so I think it should be possible to find something. Anything to add, Ambassador Thorn? No, I just, it's actually just to say that I find it very encouraging that people are as engaged in social entrepreneurship as they are in whatever you want to call it for profit entrepreneurship. I think that both are extremely important. The principles are the same. And I'm always inspired by the fact that young people really want to have an impact on their communities through an entrepreneurial endeavor and process. And I agree, I forgot to mention crowdfunding, but it really is becoming increasingly an essential part, I think, of how people are getting some of these things done in America. And I would hope also in other parts of the world. All right, we're going to go ahead and take a question now from our viewing group in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Hello, Guayaquil. What support does the U.S. government provide for business incubators in Latin America? Can either of you speak to that in any? I'm not aware of any specific programs except where the embassy is getting involved with trying to encourage meetups, trying to encourage hackathons, which is something I did when we were in Italy. And a hackathon is where a bunch of college kids get together within an educational environment within the college classrooms and spend a weekend drinking a lot of beer and eating a lot of other food pizza to come up with solutions to problems. And it's fun. And a lot of times it generates a good idea. And I know as part of the embassy that I was ambassador of, we sponsored a number of these kind of hackathons. There isn't any formal thing that the U.S. government and the U.S. State Department is doing other than the fact that we, through my efforts and my colleagues like Deborah, are trying to talk this up around the world. And as I said before, one of the things is to encourage our embassies to get involved in paying attention to this arena. Because a lot of times it's new. It's not something that they've had a whole lot of experience with during their careers. And yet, all over the world, we see young incubators and these kind of startup environments thriving and developing and burgeoning all over the world in any country you want to think of. There is a fascination with this kind of activity. And while it's a long way from Silicon Valley, it is extremely important to both the social entrepreneurship part of your nation and just the building of the prosperity in your nation. So I just think that more and more, I think the State Department is beginning to find ways to sponsor this kind of activity through the embassies. All right, we're going to go ahead and go back to Havana. Havana, do you have one last question for us? I'm Sandra Zutolondo. I am a accountant. And my husband and me, we are the social community project. And this community project is like with seniors, kids, all the community in ecological so far and sport, for example. And it's difficult for us to have the profits, the financial. So for that reason, it's a question. So she has a nonprofit organization and she's saying, what are the best forms of sustaining a nonprofit organization so you can invest for a nonprofit organization? Because a lot of investors are looking for a profit investment. So the question is about attracting investment in nonprofit organizations because there aren't going to be profits that investors will share in. Well, it's a little bit like social entrepreneuring. There may be some profits in that. But largely, the success of a business helps drive the business forward and therefore has more and more impact on your community. I think that it's your energy that helps to attract the kind of interest that you need and obviously financial support that you need. The crowdfunding piece that Deborah talked about is real. Again, if the mechanisms for actually transferring money and stuff like that are not well-developed, it's going to be harder. But there is a growing tradition in a lot of countries, even countries that are not rich like the United States, where people would like to see things develop and they're willing to contribute some money through crowdfunding sources. I don't have, there's usually not an easy way to do this. A lot of times it's asking for support and working until you get it. Deborah, any advice to nonprofits who are looking to really sell themselves to investors? Yes, I do, because I'm on the board of a nonprofit here in Silicon Valley. And I will tell you that it's hard work, but what we do is we find sponsors. So we have sponsors, some of which are large corporations. Some of them are young companies, startups that are becoming successful. Some of them are venture capitalists who are not making an investment, they're making a partnership or sponsorship. So if you position what you're asking for as a partnership, then you're not giving away a piece of a company because there are no necessary landing profits to share, but there might be businesses around you who want to participate in doing something nice for the community. And it's a lot of work to go and find those people, but they usually do exist. I think that's a really important point to keep in mind. Thank you, Deborah. So unfortunately, we've gone through a lot of topics today and it looks like we're running out of time. So I'm gonna go ahead and give Ambassador Thornan and Deborah the chance to sort of summarize for our viewers. Any sort of final thoughts? I think you both have made some excellent points about seeking out mentorship and considering how failure can be a help as well as not something to be afraid of. So I'll let you each take a minute to go ahead. Well, I'm gonna repeat just a couple of things. One is to really work to build a network of like-minded people that will help you and support you in what you're trying to do. It's not easy. It's not easy in the U.S., don't believe it is. There's lots of competition for money and ideas and everything else. And in your countries, that may not be the source of competition, but that's societal resistance and people not used to this kind of activity. So you're really the pioneers. You're important to your countries. I just encourage you to keep trying to make things work. I encourage you to use your energy for what you're trying to do and not get discouraged, not worry about failing. But it is hard work. There's no question about it. It requires courage and effort. But what you're doing is very important for your country as well as for your own well-being and your family, so keep going. Great, Deborah? I agree that the network is the most important thing. IBM actually pays me to travel around the world and meet people and build a network myself for our company and for the people in the network. And that has often unexpected and wonderful consequences. So you can't always predict what the outcome will be when you meet lots of people, but the best way to be successful in business is to know as many people as possible who are likely to be able to help you. They can help you hire. They can help you get clients. They can help you find partners. They can help you get funding. Some people find it very difficult to build a network, especially in certain places. And the best way to do it is get out and about if your university is holding a meetup or a reception, go to it, meet people. If there are groups that are getting together for breakfast to talk about this or that, you can meet people. In fact, you can create one yourself and invite the right people. And that's one way to be in the middle of it and create a context where the network will happen. So that would be the smartest thing to do, I think. I think that's a great final point to keep in mind. And we're really excited that everyone has been here with us today. We've had a wide-ranging conversation, lots of issues, lots of really interesting food for thought, and any final point about how valuable being part of a network and even part of the Y-Line network can be for everyone. So thanks again to everyone who joined us from our viewing groups and online today, especially our Y-Line network members. And thank you to the students at Kaiser University, Latin American Campus also for joining us today. A good shout out for you. If you all have not already joined the Y-Line network, you can sign up today at Y-Line.state.gov so you can be sure to receive the latest updates. And you can also continue the discussion with us on Facebook and Twitter. We're looking forward to your continued participation. Thanks again.