 Hello and thank you for joining us today. I am Pedro López-Sela, Chief Imagination Officer at Fomento Geek. I will be your moderator for today's global innovation through science and technology or just TechConnect, conversation on failing forward, using setbacks to drive success. Today's program is being held in conjunction with the Global Entrepreneurship Week. You can learn more about other programs taking place this week by visiting www.geusa.org. Please go ahead and submit your questions on how to learn and succeed through failure in the chat box beside the video player or via Twitter at hashtag justTechConnect. In a few minutes, your questions will be answered by our entrepreneurial experts. Our expert panelists will share strategies they learned along the way and provide advice on how to fail forward. For those of you hosting viewing groups, we encourage you to send photos early of your group for a chance to be featured at the end of the program. Now, let me introduce our panel of experts. First, we're delighted to have Joanne Corcoran, a managing partner of Golden Seats, one of America's most active early-stage investment firms focused on women-led businesses. Next, Ryan Bobino. He's a co-author of Fail Fast, Fail Often, How Losing Can Help You Win, and founder of Essentials Smart's LLC. Finally, joining us virtually, we have Leticia Gaska, the global director of the Failure Institute, which is the first research center in the world devoted to studying business failure. Thank you all for joining us today for this exciting conversation. I'd like to kick off the discussion by asking what failing forward means to each of you. Leticia, since you're joining us remotely, let's hear your thoughts. Hi, Pedro. I'm so good talking to you. Well, first of all, as you already know, failing forward, it's so hard to translate to Spanish. Our Spanish people that are part of the panel know, probably fracasando positivamente might be the most correct translation, and after talking to more than 1,000 people whose businesses fail, I can tell you that definitely there is a way to fail in the right way, but you can also fail in the wrong way. There are many different ways to fail in the wrong way. Probably two of the most common ways are, first of all, lack of transparency, not being transparent about the real estate of your business. For example, to your investors is one of the best ways to fail in the wrong way. The second one is the blame game. What I mean is that when failure happens, we tend to look for someone to blame. And if this is your case or you're hearing and you feel identified with this, I invite you to think deeply about how the business went wrong and write it down and ask yourself if there is someone to blame or do you have yourself to blame? It's a hard question, but not answering is a good way of failing in the wrong way. Thank you, Leti. Ryan, what do you think? Well, let me respond by giving an example. And a great example of the idea of failing forward can be found in the way that professional comedians prepare their routines. So if you take, for example, someone like Chris Rock, if you ever seen one of his national shows, they're just fantastic. You know, every word, every moment is perfectly timed, perfectly choreographed. Well, how does he get at that perfection? Well, what he does is he carries around a notebook throughout the day and he writes down little notes for ideas for his routine. And then he'll show up at some small comedy club, oftentimes unannounced, you know, go up in front of the audience and he'll try out these ideas. So he'll, you know, read one and he'll see how the audience responds. And he might cross it out or take some notes. He'll go on to the next idea. And the thing is, these ideas he's trying, they're just half thought out. You know, they're not, most of them are bad and they're bombing again and again in front of the audience. And, you know, in the audience, meanwhile, they were so excited because Chris Rock was coming. Now they're just kind of like, oh, God, this is terrible. But, you know, he gets to the end of his list. He goes home. The next day, he tries some more ideas or the ones that showed promise. He'll work on them some more and he'll show up in another comedy club. He may do that a hundred times to come up with a material that ends up going into that fantastic national touring show. So that is a great example of failing forward, which is at least how I define it, which is when you deliberately use your imperfect efforts and your mistakes as a way to rapidly learn and develop your ideas and get to the point where you can do your best work. Thank you, Ryan. Joining your thoughts on failing forward. I would say that my thoughts on failing forward have more in common with Chris Rock than I thought. I've been investing in startups for many years, too many to mention. And it is the very rare startup that goes straight up. Invariably, something doesn't go according to your plan. And, in fact, most of the time I would say multiple things don't go according to your plan. And each of those things that are different from your expectations is a little bit of a failure. And when you're in a startup, you have limited time and limited money. And how you react to each of those small failures, the people who can react positively, thoughtfully, and quickly, that's a failing forward. That's a responding to what didn't go right in a positive way. And I would say it sounds pretty much like Chris Rock and his failed joke. But it's not a joke, particularly when you're doing it with my money. So when I talk about failing forward, it's quickly reacting to small things that weren't what you thought. Thank you, Joanne. Some other things that I've been thinking about, again, talking about the failing forward. And one of the examples I really like is the Apple failure with Newton, which is actually one of the companies that we usually don't see failing. But what these guys did in 97 by killing a project because of a PDA that didn't learn about the handwriting, I think it was very interesting, especially because after that, what we see was basically the development of the iPhone and the iPad. So I think that what you do after the failing, it's a very big part of what you can do for going forward. This has prompted a few questions from the viewers and examples of failure in the startup world. So Joanne, do you think you can give us an example or a couple of them? I can give you one quick one. I worked with a market research firm that had sold a way to parse data to a cosmetics company. And they had this cosmetics company and wanted them to parse this data. And then they would do targeted sampling of cosmetics. And they thought, oh, this is great. This is such a lucrative contract. We'll sell this to every cosmetic company. And they built an infrastructure to fulfill this targeted sampling, which took them about six months and quite a bit of their available capital. The problem was they couldn't find anybody else who wanted to buy it. And it was looking pretty bleak. But one of the things that I think was a good rebound and a good way to react to this failure was that as they were talking to customers who wouldn't buy this product, they started to listen very carefully to why wouldn't they buy it? And were they interested in micro-targeting? And they were, but they just didn't want to send physical product. They wanted to use the micro-targeting to extract other data. So the company took what it had built, wasted a lot of it, and then turned to use what was salvageable. And it set them back a couple of quarters and made them struggle. But it was a learning exercise that you don't just build without information about what you can actually sell. And I think that's very similar to the apple, although it was a cheaper failure. Cheap failure is a good failure. Thank you, Joanne. Ryan? Yeah, I can think of a pretty famous example. There were a couple of young guys that had this idea. They wanted to start a kind of dating website, a social media site where people could post videos. The idea was you could post videos of yourself like talking or maybe dancing. And other people would come online and they would vote how attractive you are. And so they started this company. And it turned out that no one was really interested in the dating component. I mean, nobody was posting videos. But it turned out that people were very excited by the opportunity to have a place where they could easily upload and share their videos. So the company pivoted, changed their focus, and they became, I'm sure everybody's heard, YouTube. The rest is history. So I mean, that's a great just example of how every startup, you're constantly changing along the way. You always get it wrong and you're failing in some way. But that doesn't mean your whole enterprise has to fail. You just have to be able to shift your focus and keep going with your strengths. Thank you, Ryan. Letti, do you have any examples you could share with us? Yeah, in fact, I was thinking about an example I recently heard. It's about a Mexican entrepreneur called Mariano Latapi. His story started when he was working at a video games magazine. And he decided to quit in order to found his own business. And he had not actually idea about what to do, but he knew that he has really good contacts in the video game industry. So he started talking to his contacts and someone he met asked him to organize a massive event about video games in Mexico. And he started organizing everything, even he was bringing to Mexico the composer of the songs of many, very, very famous video games that I will not name. And basically what happened is that when he was about to buy the flights for these speakers and the composers of the music, the contact that proposed him the project disappeared. And of course, he had no money to pay for the cost of the event. And in the end, he decided to keep up working in this project to conserve some of the sponsors. And he sat it down. He just organized a concert of video game music. He ended up losing a lot of money. And what is interesting is that finally he decided to recover from this big, big failure and to recover the trust of his sponsors. And he decided to do it again. But now he has a very clear business that is a peer agency for Mexican video games. And what I found really interesting is that most of the entrepreneurs, mainly the ones that are focusing in the tech industry, they decide to try it again after failing. A couple of months ago, we presented a new research about the main causes of failure of tech startups in Mexico. And what I found really interesting is that only 50% of the entrepreneurs that fail decided not to do it again ever. So most of them are very resilient. Thank you, Leti. Now let's go to some questions submitted by viewing groups around the world as well as online viewers. The viewing point that the US Embassy in Dakar, Senegal, asks, to manage is to plan ahead. So is there a way to prevent failure? What do you think, Ryan, about that? Well, is there a way to prevent failure? No. I mean, the whole lean startup methodology is based on the idea that you're going to get things wrong because the world's messy and complicated. And you think you know what your best product should be and where your opportunity lies, but you don't really know until you do something and you get it out there and you get some feedback. So I mean, of course, you need to do some planning, but the companies that win in these quickly moving, complex industries are the one that can get something out there right away, get feedback, and iteratively improve. Thank you, Ryan. Any thoughts, Sean? Well, I think you can prevent spectacular failures, maybe, but no, I don't think you can prevent failure. I don't think I have anything to add to what Ryan said. Things are messy, and you can set yourself up to try to be able to respond, but no, you can't prevent failure. Unfortunately, because I would be a much richer person if you could prevent failure. I completely agree. And maybe one of the things is that it's not about not having failure at all, but about minimizing risk. And then whenever you think about that, one of the ways that maybe we can take one of them that I really use is actually the customer discovery process. And in a way that minimizes the risk, because in the end, it allows me to talk about the stuff I want to do and push to the market, and then talk to the guys that usually are more interesting and more intelligent than I am. And that allows me to know this thing about the knowing of, the not knowing of, not knowing, right? And which is actually an art, but it's very useful. We're gonna go to the next question. The viewing group from the Innovation Village in Kampala, Uganda asks, how do you inspire employees during difficult times? What are your thoughts that the on employees? That is so hard. In fact, at the Failure Institute, we are developing now a tool to measure the culture around failure in different businesses. And we found that there is obviously a big correlation with this culture of failure and the motivation of the employees. If there is a lack of a good culture of accepting that failure is part of the process, keeping the team motivated in the hard times is so difficult. So I think it's really important in order to continue the motivation and to promote the work thing, to accept that failures are gonna happen. As John said, are really hard to avoid or to prevent, probably you can minimize the risk, but it's really important to create a culture of accepting that failure can happen and that you have to share it because it's an act of generosity. When you share your failures, your errors to your team, you are also sharing what you learned and you are preventing other people from committing the same mistakes. Thank you, Leti. And I would agree. I think it's important to set people up at the beginning that everything's not gonna be perfect. And I also think it's really important to not blame people, but to analyze what happened just to get to the root cause of what decision was made that was wrong. Because one, it's good for morale to know exactly what happened, but it's also extremely good for you as a professional and for your team as professionals because if you know what you did wrong, you can avoid doing it the next time. Any thoughts on this, Ryan? Yeah, I just continue with some of the ideas that were already expressed where, I think the key thing is to just have an organization where you understand failing is part of the process. You're doing something that's challenging and you're gonna fail and have a kind of culture in your organization where that's accepted, it's made visible, meaning you don't try to hide your failures, but you actually look at them, you talk about them, you even put them up on the wall so that you can see that they happened and just make sure that everybody understands that's something you have to deal with along the way. It's not a celebration of failure, it's a recognition of failure and a learning experience because we don't wanna celebrate failure. Failure is nothing to celebrate. We wanna accept it, learn from it and move on. Exactly. Thank you, Johan. Ibrahim from Egypt asks, what are the possible ways to promote a culture of risk-taking and accepting failure as a component of success? Who would like to take this one? Leti? I think that a really good first step is to identify in which type of process the error or the mistake or the failure is happening. I like to think about two type of processes. One are those processes that are in innovation modes and the other ones are the one that are in execution modes. When a process is in innovation mode, it's a new process. The execution mode is a process when we already have manuals and we're supposed not to commit mistakes, right? If the mistake happens when we're in a process that is in innovation modes, it is really important to recognize the mistake and to share it. I consider that it's important not to celebrate failure just to share it with the crew. And when it's a process that happened when we were in execution mode, it's really important to go deep and to really find what happened because probably in order to prevent this mistake from happening again, we are gonna need to change some manuals. And that is a different type of change and a different type of process in order to learn from failure. And what about other parts of the equation when you're talking about the failure of innovation or execution? I mean, is there a possibility to minimize the resources that you put in there or the amount of time that you get into a specific process? Would it be a better way to fail maybe cheaper or maybe faster? Yeah, of course, that's a central idea in the lean startup approach, which is what they call the minimal viable product. So you could invest millions of dollars in the next three years coming out with this, what you think's gonna be the ultimate product and then you put it out there and it doesn't work out. And so it's much better if you build the minimal product with the least features and you get it out as soon as you can and you find out right away, well, here's what we got right and here's what we got wrong and now let's go fix it and make it better. Yeah. But I think Letitia really hit on something. There's a difference between failures at the ideation stage and failures at the process stage. I'm on the board of a company and for the first time in six or seven quarters, we missed the sales targets this quarter and it was a big miss. And one of the things that the sales management did was go back and figure out, well, when should I have known that we were gonna have this miss? And we probably could have known very early on at the beginning of the quarter as opposed to not figuring it out until two thirds through the quarter because things that were in our process where we knew that we needed to have X amount of customers at various stages in the sales process, the beginning of the quarter, there weren't quite enough at the top of the funnel. There weren't quite enough in the, just being whittled down into the market qualified leads. We could have known that right away and work to fix it. So that was a real process failure and perhaps it was an execution failure where we need to change personnel. This is a very different thing than you had a wrong idea about the way the world or a product worked. It just may be people weren't up to the task. And so that's a different kind of failure when maybe you need to shuffle personnel as opposed to change your product. Thank you, Joanne. Next question. The viewing group and embassy man, I'm asked, is there any correlation between an entrepreneur's age and their likelihood of failure? Ryan, are any thoughts about the age? That's an interesting question. You know, I would think that it's more related to experience than age. I don't know that I have a, I know of a specific study or anything that shows the actual correlations. But I think I've met very young entrepreneurs that when I was in Silicon Valley, I was teaching at Stanford, I'd meet these young students there that had already failed at three companies by the time they were founded, three companies and failed by the time they were undergrad. And then you can have someone who's 60 years old who's still never tried anything. So I think it just depends on how many times you get out there and you try and you learn. And you can do that, that's kind of under your control and that can happen at any age. Just think, as you age, you get more failures. It's as simple as that. Nothing, things don't always go right. I'm not sure that that correlates to your ability to have a successful startup though. I'm not sure, I don't see it. Neither do I. And actually it might have also to do a bit of resilience as well. I was seeing a graphic the other day that shows the different ages of different entrepreneurs and when they started their projects. And what I thought before I saw that thing was that most entrepreneurs might be in their 20s, maybe 30s. But then you go there and see examples like Sam Walton or you see the guy from Starbucks and you start watching that guys over their 40s and even their 50s are doing it and they're doing it okay. So it might be something more than an age and maybe a bit of luck and maybe a lot of other stuff that has to do more than aging, right? And also I know because our investment thesis is we invest in women entrepreneurs and women entrepreneurs tend to be older when they start their first company. Does that make them more or less likely to fail? I don't think so. Is there a reason for the age difference? It's probably around they dealt with their kids first before they took risks. That makes sense. We have had the same question at the failure institute about if there is a correlation with age, with gender for example, with geographical region and we're developing this project called the Global Failure Index. It's a data mapping platform that analyzes the information we gather from all over the world. This is more than 60 countries. What is really interesting is that we have not found a correlation with age, you know, with failure and age. It is more related where experience and the number of failures. And we have also found that businesses founded and led by women fail less and for different reasons. We will have more news about this next year. We're running an experiment right now in order to have more clarity about the, you know, the role of gender in the failure of a business. What about the different regions? Is there, in the study that you're conducting right now, is there a difference between maybe continent or cultures? There are differences mainly in cultures. To give you an example, we have found that there are, probably one of the areas where it was more difficult for us to launch the failure institute in general was in Asia, specifically in Japan. To give you an example about why this happened, the US has a culture focused more on achievement and success. The Japanese culture is much more concerned about failure avoidance and team accountability. Probably because of this reason, it was so hard to find a team working in Japan. And it was even harder at the beginning to find people willing to publicly share their business failure stories. But we are doing it and the truth is that it's working. But of course, the culture makes a huge difference in the acceptance of failure. Thank you, Leti. Retta from Nigeria asks, what do those who fail forward have in common? Do you have anything in your study related to that? Is there a characteristic specifically? The main characteristic might be that they are resilient and that they have a network of people that could support them in this process of grief. That might be the main characteristic of those that are good at recovering from failure. Thank you, Leti. Our next question, the viewing group Youth Network for Reform in Liberia asks, if the business is a complete failure and left with nothing, should the entrepreneur try again or go back to the drawing board? I think that would be a great question for you, Joanne. I think it depends on why did it fail. So let's say you had an idea and you raised a little bit of money around it and you couldn't complete your tech project fast enough and you ran out of money. Well, the only way I would go back to that, I would go back to that one if I still knew that I had potential from customers to sell it. Because there my failure wasn't that I didn't have a good idea. It's that I couldn't execute it quickly enough or maybe I didn't have enough money or I didn't identify the right programming talent or something like that. If I had a failure because I just couldn't sell the thing and I did a lot of work trying to sell it and I couldn't find anybody who wanted it, then I think I would erase that one from the board and put a new one up. I think it depends on why you failed because you can't create customers out of thin air. There has to be something that people want to buy. They have to be a reason for people to give you money in exchange for something. And if you actually have that, then maybe you can go back and try again on that one. But if you don't have that, I think you just got to chalk this one up to experience and go on to the next one. What are your thoughts, Ryan? Or maybe not even just going back to the drawing board, maybe just quitting and getting another job instead of starting something? Yeah, that's a tough thing. I think I like Joanne's response that a lot of it depends on how you failed. Sometimes an idea is bad. A lot of the times, you know, just our ideas aren't as great as we think they were. They don't work out the way we want, and you got to give up on it and go to the next thing. But hopefully you learn something in the process and you can do better next time. You'll realize, well, here's how my idea didn't work out, but here's how I need to approach it differently next time. And sometimes you may go back and get a comfortable job for a while so you can get reset and get yourself in the position. But, you know, I think that's just a normal process of life. We're always trying things, we're always experimenting. Some things don't work out, but you got to keep living. You move on to the next thing. Thank you, Ryan. Haruna from Bamako Impact Robin, Mali asks, how can you bounce after your first failure, especially when you have never known a real failure? I think that's a good one for you, Liddy. Well, I think that the first thing is to recognize that the stages of grief and loss are very similar. You have this stage where you are going to live in denial and isolation, then you're going to be angry, you can feel sad and depressed, and you're going to accept it at the end. And it's important to say that people who are grieving do not necessarily go through these stages in the same order or experience all of them. It's important to say also that these stages of grief and mourning are universal and are experienced by people from all walks of life across many cultures. It's important to recognize that you're going to suffer for a while, it's not going to happen really fast. And also that learning and failing are not the same. In order to learn from your failures, you have to wait and wait in order to feel and leave these stages. And at the end, you're going to be able to ask yourself, what did I learn and what can I do in order not to do the same in the future? Thank you, Liddy. And also you can feel good about the fact that you've never had a failure up to that point because I don't know anybody who hasn't had a failure. Exactly, maybe you're not trying too hard, you know? That's a great point. Or maybe you're in denial. Pablo from Buenos Aires, Argentina asks, can you share any advice to avoid frustration when facing similar failures several times? Is that? No, you should have frustration when you fail several times, okay? We talked about this a little bit yesterday. In my old job when I was on the trading floor at an investment bank, and since I have transitioned full-time to investing in startups, I keep a notebook of every mistake that I made and I analyze why did I make that mistake. Because I'm gonna make mistakes. I'm gonna make a lot of them. I wanna make different mistakes. I don't wanna make the same mistake twice. So if you're making the same mistake, you should be frustrated because you haven't profited from that failure. So yeah, I don't think you should not be frustrated. I think you should be frustrated. You're entitled to that, actually. Yeah. The viewing group at the Consulate in Jerusalem asks, how do you seek feedback from others after failure while still keeping the confidence in your idea and project? This is, Letitia talked about this. I'm an investor and there is, there's a way where you can lose my money but you can still come back to me. And there's a way where you can lose my money and you don't even wanna be on the same street that I'm on. And that's the difference between a good failure and a messy failure. And a good failure is where I knew, and your other investors knew all along, what was happening, what was going wrong, that you didn't go silent, you didn't just keep banging your head or my money against the wall with an idea that wasn't working. You were trying to fix it, trying to fix it and it didn't work out. If that person I very well may invest with again, if somebody goes silent and they haven't made attempts to change things, then they will lose my confidence. So I think the best thing you can do to maintain confidence in your investors and your employees and your supporters when things are going wrong is to open up the kimono and let them in to see what's going wrong and how you're trying to fix it. It's when you close people out and then they're surprised at your failure that it's really hard to maintain their confidence. And in your experience, Ryan, and we were talking yesterday about communication, which other stakeholders do you have to have an open communication about the failure process? Well, I think all of the stakeholders, I mean, I just think you need, I think Joanne had a great response. I think the key thing is you don't put your, hide and shame and run off and try to ignore everything that's happening, but you're just honest with all the different people that you may have to work with who are going to suffer the ramifications of what's happening. So everybody, and that includes all the people that are professionally connected, your investors, your vendors, your employees, you could even tell your social network, your friends, your family, everybody should understand what's happening. Just be honest and smart about what's happening. Don't hide it. Thank you, Ryan. Lettie, about that, and talking to the stakeholders, is there a specific time or a way to tell all those guys that you're failing? Probably is before failing. The truth is that you don't need to look for advice or to look for the opinion of your main stakeholders when things are going wrong. The truth is that you have to do it continuously, even when things are doing right, according to your point of view. Because it is so common not to be objective about your own business. What happened here is that when you create a new business, it's like if you had a son, because it's like your new baby, you are not objective about it, you think that it's gonna be like the fastest and the brightest, et cetera. And the truth is that the things are not always the way you see it. That is why it's so important to have probably every two months or every three months meetings with your main stakeholders and your investors to tell them, how is the business doing? What is going, what is doing in the best possible way? And what is going wrong? To be totally transparent at all times, I think it's the best advice. Thank you, Leti. Joanne, the viewing group at TED University and in Qatar, Turkey asks, how can we take smart risks to have a cheap failure? Well, I mean, that's sort of, it's a title of Ryan's box, so maybe. I think that you wanna, if you're gonna fail, you wanna fail fast and you wanna fail cheaply. I completely agree with that. I think that I wouldn't plan too far ahead. I might have a vision, but I would keep checking my vision as I go towards it, because you're not gonna go straight there, you're gonna attack back and forth. And so I would do a lot of A-B testing, I would do a lot of going back to my potential customers every time I have a little feature built. I would take small steps and check, but there are some things where you have to spend money to get an answer and you could lose that money. So being judicious, I don't, take small steps, not giant steps. As any individual investor, do you have any tips or any suggestions to the people that you're funding in regards of doing it in a cheaper way? A cheaper way? A cheaper way is to just do things, is to have an exact roadmap of how you're gonna get from A to B, because there's lots of little steps in there and to keep analyzing those steps. You might take all those steps and analyze them and you still don't get where you wanna go, but at least you had a chance in between to make some adjustments. You spend money and you lose it sometimes. You just don't wanna spend it in judiciously. Ryan, I think you're the guy for this question. Well, I love Joanne's response. You know, if you look at research into successful entrepreneurs, well, I should say that there's this stereotype that entrepreneurs are these huge risk takers. They have some idea and they'll mortgage their house, they'll quit their job and they're gonna put everything on the line to try to get this business to take off. And if you look at what research says, it says no, good entrepreneurs are actually risk adverse. They find a way to quickly test their ideas at the minimal cost. So instead of saying, am I willing to quit my job and invest all of my money in this idea, they'll say, am I willing to spend the next two weekends building a prototype so I can show it to five potential clients and five potential investors, they find a specific immediate step that they can do that they can get feedback. So what you can do to be better at failing forward is develop the skill to learn how to take the actions at the least cost, least investment that allows you to as quickly as possible test your assumptions and test out your ideas. So it has to do a lot with taking baby steps and then just testing as quickly as you can, right? Yes. All the time, right. Global Entrepreneurship Week in Kosovo asks, how can you prevent failure from a company that is scaling very fast? No, this is a different situation. There's a difference between a very early company where you tend to have ideas, you tend to have mistakes of ideas. When you're in a company that's scaling very fast, you already know that you have a product that somebody wants to buy because you have lots of people who wanna buy it. And the way that you tend to have problems there is you have people who wanna buy the product, can you deliver it fast enough? Can you service it fast enough? And can you iterate on it to meet the people's needs for something extra on it? It becomes, there's still some ideation there, but there's a lot of process. And process is a different kind of skill set. And at this point in your company, you have to make sure that you have a set of people who you can delegate to who can follow a process and check on the process to make sure that it's working. It's a slightly different thing. No, you have to have customer success when you're scaling, you're much more focused on how the customers are actually using the product, how they're onboarding it. So I do think when you're scaling, you also start to need more people. You start to have people management issues in a way that you don't when you only have three women sitting at a table throwing ideas around. So I think it's a different problem when you start to need to bring in other skill sets. Thank you. Let the, I'd like to hear your thoughts on this question. I totally get the question because we have been at the same point. We're now in more than 60 countries and at some point we faced this challenge of scaling really fast. And what works for us was to understand our processes and procedures really, really well and create manuals, create lots of manuals and think about these manuals of procedures as a startup in itself, you know, like to try to test the manual and change what is not working. You know, like to always keep in mind while growing, while scaling this mindset of prototype test pilot, prototype test pilot. That's what worked for us. Thank you, Leti. A viewing group at the US Embassy in Burundi, along with several other online viewers, are asking what are the most common errors which an entrepreneur can avoid? And I guess it has to do a lot again with the checklist if there is something like that that you might want to look at before you do a startup. Are there any tricks or any tips that you could give us, Ryan? I think that, you know, the biggest trick I could give you, it goes back to what I said a moment ago, is don't over prepare and over invest before you seek feedback. So I see people, they think they have some great idea and they spend lots of money and a whole lot of time working on it. And then they go out and like, oh, we got it totally wrong. You know, or we didn't realize, you know, some fundamental assumption that we had did not work out the way we thought. And if you spent a year or two years, boy, you're in bad shape. So again, I think it goes back to, it's a very central idea. Find a way to get your idea and your work out into the messiness of the world and get some real feedback. There's even a quote, I think, from one of the co-founders at LinkedIn that says something like, if you're not embarrassed about your first release, then you're releasing too late. And the way it has to do a lot with timing, I mean, if you don't move quickly, especially when you're in the starting phase of the project, then you're probably gonna see a lot more failure than you would like to. The viewing group in Monrovia, Liberia asks, once a failure happens, what are the key areas to assess before starting over? Leti, would you like to share? I think that, you know, the financial part of the business is so important. Sometimes mainly, this happens a lot when I am talking with social entrepreneurs, for example, or entrepreneurs that are so passionate about the mission of its business. It's easy to forget the importance of, you know, getting a good accountant and learning the basics from finance if you are not business saving enough. Because we have discovered that one of the most common causes of failure among every type of businesses is the lack of entrepreneurial preparation. Mainly those skills, the hardest skills related with finance. Thank you, Leti. That's a good point. I, when, you know, I see 30, sometimes 40 entrepreneurs a month, I mean 30 to 40 entrepreneurs a month. And if a founder or a co-founder can't talk cogently about money and about the finances of their business, I would never invest. Because the thing with startups is you have a certain amount of money and it's either your own money or your bootstrapping money to get to some place. And that place is either where you're profitable, it's probably not there, or to get to a place where somebody else will give you some more money, will invest some more money because you've built something of value, even if it's a small thing. The time is now. So at each and every time you need to know how you're gonna get to those next steps. And a lot of that is how long does the money last? So I agree with Leti Shea. You need to be able to, you need to, and particularly my money. So as an investor, so I really wanna know that people are good stewards of money. And is there a way maybe to grow the team with the capabilities that you don't have as the founder and maybe just fulfill the holes that you have as a startup? Yeah, and you don't necessarily have to bring people into your team either. I mean, one of the things that I look for when I'm thinking of making an investment, one of the things Golden Seeds look for is we look for who's on the founding team, what people can you attract? So you have to have some kind of magnetism to get people to believe your idea. What kind of advisors do you have around you? These are people who you go to for, business advice, maybe you give them a few, a little bit of equity in your company. Who's your board of directors? Who did you get to publicly say that I'm affiliated with this company? And don't just look at them on paper. I call them because I wanna make sure that they're involved because they like the idea, they like the entrepreneur, not because it's somebody's nephew. So the amount of people and the quality of the people and the experiences and the advice that they can bring, they don't necessarily have to have quit their job to work for your full time. But I want you to, I wanna be able to know that the entrepreneur can bring that kind of talent around them, that they have that, whatever that je ne sais quoi that brings people around them. Thank you, Johan. Rene from Cameron asks, is it more likely that startups failed in developing countries rather than in developed countries? Do you have any information on that regarding the research you were saying, Leti? He's totally true. The failure rate in developing countries is higher. I don't know if there is something else I should say. This is related with many things, a part of entrepreneurial preparation, part of policy, part of external conditions that impact the business. The answer is yes. The failure rate in developing countries is higher. Maybe with the ecosystem as a whole, maybe not mature enough, maybe not having all the players that the entrepreneur might need in order to create an idea or a startup? Found that the internal factors have a larger impact than the external ones. So of course, the ecosystem and the socioeconomic status of the country have an impact, but it's not the only reason. It's multifactorial. Thank you. The viewing group at the U.S. Embassy in Dakar, Senegal, asks, how should one address failures due to lack of financial means? Anyone in the panel would like to. That's a tough one. I think it's like every failure. You want to look at why you failed, study it and learn how you need to improve. So if some people are in tough situations where they don't have the resources to follow through with their idea, well, if you fail in that way, then that means you need to get better at getting the resources. And in some places, that's really hard to do, but there's still usually room for improvement. As far as think of it as just another skill you have to learn, I have to get better at bringing in the resources and connecting, finding potential investors so that next time I won't fail in this way. Maybe the reason. Sometimes you just fail because you can't get money. I mean, in the states in 2007 and 2008, a large part of the ecosystem in the United States is wealthy individuals who invest their own money in startups. I mean, it's a $25 billion industry in the US. And in 2007 and 2008, wealthy individuals weren't feeling that wealthy anymore because the stock market had declined and lots of startups failed. There was a blip in failures because they couldn't get money. Not because their ideas were any worse than the set of ideas in 2005 or 2006. It's a hard fact of life. Capital doesn't always flow to where it should be flowing. And in a way, I also think that the financial challenges that you might face as a startup is not necessarily a cause of something. It might be a consequence of something else. Maybe you don't have a proper business model. Maybe you're not doing a good communication of the projects or your storytelling might need some work. Maybe the MVP needs a bit of work. So maybe it's not the reason for, maybe something else is happening that is preventing you from getting the money you need to push the startup forward. Maybe the idea is just bad. Yeah, could be. The impact coven Bemaco Mali asks, what are the main causes of failures? Aside from what we've shared already, Leti, do you think there's something else that might be the reason for failing? I will talk about the main causes of failure of tech startups. If you want to find more info about it, just go to thefailureinstitute.com. But talking about failure startups, the most common cause is lack of entrepreneurial preparation. The second one is related with not estimating in the right way the timing and effort required. The third one is more related with lack of soft skills, social abilities, et cetera. And of course, capital is also always important, but the causes of failure change and vary according to the industry we're talking about. Country, because I just saw a study from the US and actually it says that I think 35% or so fail because of lack of customers, which is pretty interesting because... That means lack of product. If you're working on something and then you didn't do things quickly and iterated and pivoted quick enough so that you can have someone that cares about what you're trying to solve, then that might be something. And then the second one was the capabilities of the team. That was 20-something percent. And the third one, which is very interesting and has to do a lot with the entrepreneurial skills and mindset of the people that are pushing on a startup is lack of focus, which usually happens. At least it happens to me sometimes. We can take one more question today. A Ted University in Ankara, Turkey asks, how should an entrepreneur do in order to regain motivation after failing a business? I think this is a good one for you, Ryan. Wow. Well, I think a big part of that is what you do before you fail. And I think for everybody as a human being, you should be trying to make your life happy and fulfilling, have a great family, be living in a way that you feel like you have a good life, you're happy about who you are. I mean, this may sound like a funny answer, but I mean, if you have a good basis as far as who you think you are and what your life is, then when you have a setback, you'll feel the sting for a while. But then you'll carry on forward. So I think a lot of being able to deal with failure is just living in the right way as you go along. Thank you, Ryan. We have a tradition with our online programs that we ask each of our panelists, what is the most important takeaway they have from this discussion today? So I'm gonna start with you, Leti. What's your takeaway? I was thinking about two. One is, of course, a cheap failure is a good failure. That is so important. And the second one is that once you understand what happened with your failure and how to do it differently, really try again. And if you decide not to try that particular project again, make sure it's because you've honestly determined that it's not something you want to do, or that it's something which you're unlikely to be successful, rather than not doing it because you're terrified that you will fail again. Try to learn, you know, like, try to do it again. I think that's the key. And try to fail cheap. Thank you, Leti. Ryan. Yeah, I think my take home point is that failure is just part of the process of any worthwhile challenge. So no matter what it is you want to do, if you want to, you want to learn how to play chess, you want to learn a foreign language, you want to found a startup, you have to fail oftentimes lots of times before you can get good at it. It is just part of the process. So the key thing is, is not to try to avoid failing, not to go, don't get so hung up and worrying about failing, but try to learn how to fail in a smart way at a low cost, you know, quickly so that you can land on your feet and you're always moving forward. Thank you, Ryan. Joanne. I guess I would say the most important thing is don't fail for a dumb reason. And don't start a company if you haven't read Lean Startup. Don't think about starting a company if you haven't been to my website and to Brian's website and to your website and Latisha's website and all the other myriad of resources that are out there because the main reason that the failure institutes determine that people fail is lack of preparation and this isn't the 70s. There is so much information that you can get sitting in your bedroom with your computer about how to do a startup. Don't fail because you didn't do those obvious things. And I highly recommend this and I have no interest in this book but I highly recommend everybody to read Lean Startup, everybody to read the business canvas. I mean, come on, these things are out there. We know they work. Thank you, Joanne. And I would add that I think there's a big difference between a small failure and a big failure so just do the work. I mean, you have to bootstrap and you have to do it and then after a while you get good at it and for me the second one might be you have to learn from it. It's the most important thing, think positively and learn from it so that it doesn't happen again. Unfortunately, we're at the end of the question and answer session for today's Tech Connect. Thank you so much for our wonderful panelists and everyone viewing today. I also wanna give a special thanks to the hosts of the viewing groups around the globe. We have with us U.S. embassies and consulates in Abuja, Nigeria, Baghdad, Iraq, Dakar, Senegal, Guatemala City, Jerusalem, Israel, Johannesburg, South Africa, Coror, Palau, Maserau, Lesotho, Monrovia, Liberia, Nukchot, Mauritania, Bujumbura, Burundi, Embassy Yo Wundi Cameroon, Rosa Parks Library in Soweto, South Africa. We also wanna thank local organizations for hosting viewing parties, including Protek Innovation Center in Tirana, Albania, Tecnova in Medellin, Colombia, Injas Egypt in Cairo, the GIST Innovation Hub in Nairobi, Kenya, Berry Tech in Beirut, Lebanon, Youth Network for Reform in Monrovia, Liberia, University of Malawi, the Polytechnic in Blank Tire, Utec Ventures in Lima, Peru, Lead Africa in Johannesburg, South Africa, El Ghazala Technopark in Ariana, Tunisia, the Innovation Village in Kampala, Uganda, Ted University in Ankara, Turkey, American Space in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, and Centro Venezolano in Caracas, Venezuela. Thank you again, and please join us for the next GIST Online Program, a guru interactive web chat on December 13, and become a registered member of the GIST community and the GIST Network.org. I hope you found your insights today useful, and please stay tuned to listen about traditional resources from Zied Heider, US Department Special Representative for Commercial Business Affairs. Until next time, I wish you all the best of luck. Hello, my name is Zied Heider, and I'm the Special Representative for Commercial and Business Affairs at the US Department of State. I trust that you enjoy this global innovation through science and technology tech connect program. Please join me in thanking the panelists for sharing their knowledge of how to learn from every experience, even failure. This message rings true as we celebrate Global Entrepreneurship Week, the world's largest celebration of the innovators and job creators who launch startups that bring ideas to life, drive economic growth, and improve human welfare. During this week each November, GEW inspires people everywhere through local, national, and global activities designed to help people, especially women and marginalized groups to explore their potential as self-starters and innovators. These activities, which range from large-scale competitions and events to intimate networking gatherings, connect participants to potential collaborators, mentors, and even investors, introducing them to new and exciting possibilities. Now, science and technology are foundational components of innovation, leading to new products and companies that fuel economic growth, create jobs, and address important socioeconomic developmental challenges. Looking forward, we are delighted that the government of India has agreed to host the next Global Entrepreneurship Summit in 2017. In this week devoted to entrepreneurs, I challenge you to use your creativity and your persistence to solve the problems in your community. One way to do this is by becoming active and engaged in the GIST community by registering at gistnetwork.org. There, you will find up-to-date information about upcoming online events, as well as in-country opportunities. Thank you again to our TechConnect panel of experts and to you for joining us today to share your experiences and your questions. Good luck with your entrepreneurship journey and please keep in touch through gistnetwork.org.