 Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the state of the startups. My name is Mei Lee, and until recently, I was the dean of the School of Entrepreneurship and Management at Shanghai Tech, a brand new university in Shanghai that I helped start. I'm very pleased to be here with all of you and with this extremely august panel. You've read all of their bios, so I'll simply introduce your name and make a couple of comments. To my immediate left here is Tony Alimilou from Nigeria, Alice Kess from Imperial College, Will I Am, Needs No Introduction, and Bada Jeffer, a businessman and philanthropist from the United Arab Emirates. I'd like to actually note two specific things about this panel and what makes them so extraordinary. What you have here is a group of people who have found excellence in that excellence, passion, and then purpose. And in many ways, that is the definition of the most successful entrepreneurs. And I see in each of those, each of these individuals in their own respective areas of expertise, extraordinary success. But I think second, and perhaps more importantly for this panel, is the fact that you have three individuals who are successful business people in the private sector, who have then taken a new lens and view on entrepreneurship from the perspective of development and inclusion. And I think that private public partnership and perspective and strategy is something that I'd like to talk about today. We spend a lot of time talking about entrepreneurship through the Silicon Valley narrative and increasingly through the Chinese narrative, which I'm most familiar with. But today, I think we have individuals from different regions of the world, particularly the Middle East and Africa, and then of course from the inclusion perspective in the United States and the UK. And I'd like to use today as an opportunity to share some of those stories and experiences. For the panelists, I'd like to encourage you to engage in a dialogue, feel free to interrupt or ask each other questions. And the last thing I'd like to say is a thank you to Tony. This was really his brainchild, this particular panel. I think he was very anxious to bring forward this narrative of lessons from different regions and institutions to share with the WEF. So with that, what I'd like to do is I'm going to actually start with Badr on the far side. Entrepreneurship and innovation, topic of the centuries, topic of the moment. Entrepreneurship is very broad, means very different things. Could you share with us the type of entrepreneurship that you're focused on in your endeavors and then the type of programs that you've instituted and where you've seen success? Sure. So, I mean, broadly speaking, there's four types of entrepreneurship that we see happening in our markets, probably around the world as well as your legacy company entrepreneurship. These are your larger incumbents that in order to stay relevant, they have to keep innovating. So they implement entrepreneurship and there's a stat which in the 60s, the average lifespan of a company was 60 years. Apparently now it's less than 15 years. So to put that into context, more than 40% of Fortune 500 companies will be dead within 10 years. So it's a kind of innovate or dive model. You then have the small business entrepreneurship. This is the majority of companies out there. They're not trying to take over the world, but they have to act or at least the founders have to act like entrepreneurs because it's a pretty crowded space. And then you have the scalable startups and entrepreneurship. These are the unicorn wannabes. They are trying to take over the world and when the world's not enough, they go to Mars and the moon and asteroids. And it's an exciting space, but it does get, I think, a disproportionate amount of venture capital and perhaps also media attention because of the perhaps overinflated or oversized valuations. And then finally, my favorite category, which is the social entrepreneurship and that's just people who just want to make the world a better place. We at Crescent Enterprises or CE try and be active in all four of those categories. I'll just quickly give two examples. So we recently, a couple of years ago, set up our corporate venture capital arm and that really invests in startups around the world. It keeps us relevant and excited about what's going on, but I think it also helps to raise the activity within our startup communities. We've invested million dollars over the last couple of years in startups around the world. We've committed another 150 million over the next three years. We'd like to see at least 50% of that being invested in the Middle East and North Africa. And then finally, there's our corporate incubator or CE creates. And that's really just nurturing a pipeline of new businesses and new ventures, again, within the company, but giving a space for entrepreneurs in the region to come and set up their own businesses. It's a higher risk of course venture in itself, but again, in the space of not too many years, we've been able to nurture a few companies that have instituted, I guess, dozens of entrepreneurs and created hundreds of jobs. So that's also an exciting way, I think, to promote entrepreneurship within communities. So, Will, you are a businessman and an entrepreneur, as well as a philanthropist, encouraging entrepreneurs. Could you talk a little bit about how I am plus and then your foundational work integrated work together? Yeah, so, like most urban musicians or athletes, we come from poorer neighborhoods where education was low funded and the teachers in our schools weren't the best crime drugs in our communities. And the way out was either sports or music. And I got out, moved my whole family out, and took me around the world. And whenever there's a tsunami or an earthquake or some natural disaster or someone's running for president, they call the world of music or the arts to raise awareness on the issue. And we would show up. When it was Bandeache tsunami there, I was there. I spent my birthday there doing tsunami relief. And there's Katrina, we're there. But I realized in every single ghetto there's a tsunami and an earthquake every day. It's a tsunami of no opportunity, an earthquake with no funding, and terror with just the conditions of the living. And I wanted to change my neighborhood by not encouraging kids to be musicians because our industry is not healthy anymore. I wanted to encourage my kids to be computer scientists, engineers. And so we started a robotics program, a computer science program just under 10 years ago. But when I would leave after I would encourage my kids, they would look at me like, really, well, I mean, you're not doing it. I want to do music. So I realized that I had to lead by example. So I took my earnings from Beats and started my own company and went out to a new Silicon Valley was going to take me serious. So I went to Bangalore, India in Israel and started acquiring talent. And in the past six years we built a voice operating system, artificial intelligence platform that is currently being used by Deutsche Telekom in Austria for customer service. We got an investment from Salesforce every single round. We've raised $117 million to date. But as exciting as that sounds, you've got to see it from my perspective. I'm in the public's eye and I'm failing in front of everyone, risking failing in front of everyone. And so that's what I tell my kids, like, you have to be fearless. You can't be comfortable. You have to have the thirst to fall and get up. You have to want to fall and get up and learn. And so because of that, the performance that the kids have and how we transform their lives is significant. We go to kids that are underperforming in and out of juvenile and crimes way and rehabilitate their grades from one point failing GPA to 3.5s and 4.0s. 100% of our kids graduate to go to college, 80 of which are going to school for robotics, computer science and engineering. Because they see, well, if Will can do it and he's from our neighborhood, we can do it too, because who are the role models? If you tell a kid, hey, you should be like Elon Musk. He's like, well, what are you talking about? Well, I'm Latino. Like, okay, well, then you need to be like Carlos Slim. If I tell a kid, you need to be like, you know, Michael Dell, not Michael Jackson or Michael Jordan. They're like, well, who do I have to follow the path of? So with African-Americans or folks from Africa and the world of, you know, tech, who do you have? So that's the reason why my entrepreneurial activity and philanthropy is the why to my what. It's to lead the way and not be afraid to fail. And the milestones that we have where there's not, it's not like operating system come around every month. So we have certified and passed, you know, TA and AT&T and 3 and EE, and it's pretty significant to have a voice OS. We acquired a company called Wink, and that's the hub that Google Home uses and Alexa uses to connect the house. And that's pretty significant from someone who was a statistic to fail, riding around the projects on a bike, sitting in welfare line with your mom for cheese and milk and wick checks. So we are at a crossroads where this new technology is going to create jobs that come from folks that have been left behind if you encourage, inspire, and support nine-year-olds to take an interest. And you have to go that early, nine, not 13, 14, 15, it's too late, nine years old. Every single ghetto, village, slum, and protect them, encourage them. And that's the purpose and the path. Thank you. So we're going to go from one educator to another, and that is Alice. Can you talk a little bit about Imperial College's work? I mean, obviously it's an engineering school, you're educating STEM students, but I think that you have embarked on a number of initiatives that go beyond that around the issue of inclusion and enfranchising students in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Sure. And thank you very much. And, well, you're terrifically inspiring, and all I can say is thank you for what you do. Both of you, it's really exciting to see this kind of engagement beyond the traditional. So let me just start by saying Imperial College London is one of the top research universities in the world. And so, of course, when you talk about the state of startups and you think about things we do, our academics, staff, faculty, and students, post-docs, and graduate students really do a lot of work in the startup world. And this is incredibly important. And I think it's important that we get the discoveries in research out into society as quickly as possible. And sometimes that's through a startup because a corporation's not interested, other times it's through a corporation. But it's an important mission for society. More and more you'll see some of our academics really working hard on frugal innovation on low-cost solutions to world problems. We had a wonderful ideas lab, one of my colleagues is here. And that's an important element of how we get things out to society. The second area I think that is growing in importance and has in the last five to ten years really blossomed is our own students. Giving students the freedom to take those risks while they're in university, they should have the opportunity to try some really outlandish things, some risky things, and really learn about how to get their ideas out there. And so student entrepreneurs are incredibly important. Now for both students and staff we have mentoring, we have incubators, we have spaces. For our students we've created an enterprise lab where they can meet one another, they can meet with mentors. They will get that kind of support and input that they need. And importantly we started a program for women entrepreneurs. We found that the Dragonstons were being won by the men. And we found that when we put up a prize for women a whole bunch of them showed up. And that's what they started winning the Dragonston. And our other, our venture catalyst challenge are we innovate for women entrepreneurs is going strong. And what's exciting to me is even if that idea doesn't fly they go on to do other things. They have learned that they can do this and they try other entrepreneurial activities and you'll see them winning other prizes. So those are the traditional areas but we've also been working very hard on a new campus in a part of London called White City. Named for the 1908 Franco-Britannic exhibition and the Olympics were there. It's the first Olympic park in London and it's a very deprived neighborhood. If you take the tube from the central line from Bond Street to White City the average life expectancy drops by nine years. It's a neighborhood like you grew up in. And we recognize that the kids in that neighborhood are not likely to come into our normal science outreach, our normal schools programs. They're not even that engaged in their schools. They need other things. We took some space and we created what we call the invention rooms. These are maker spaces where the community is welcome to come in and work on projects. They can follow their own ideas. They can get help from Imperial students and staff. They can really follow their dream and be inspired by will and go try to make and do something. We have maker challenges and it's so exciting to see these kids working on their project and how often their ideas are related to their lives and how they aren't the kind of things that our university students would have thought about. But what I'm most excited about is we have maker spaces. We have maker challenges. We have hack-a-thons and hack spaces for older community members. What I'm most excited about is I think that making something changes your view on your capabilities. It gives you confidence. I'm a big fan of the concept of the Ikea effect. If you've made one of those little shelves and you take it with you because you're attached to it because you made it, even though it's not really very shabby, you hang on to it and you're proud of it. These kids come in and they make something and they're proud of it. They realize, hang on, I could do this. They start to see themselves in a different light. And then we have the ability to help them in their schools and in their communities. And immediately in the first months we had a kid already wanting to mentor other kids in his school and bring them in. So this is the kind of thing that I think is really important. I think every institution, corporations, universities need to figure out how to provide help and provide new opportunities for these kids. And I guess my question to my colleagues are for later is how to scale it? It feels like a drop in the ocean sometimes. And can we get others involved? Can we get others to follow our footsteps? So Tony, you are the chairman of one of the largest banks in Africa. You've grown it across, I think it's 22 countries. And you've used that platform then to move into encouraging entrepreneurship again across African countries. And I wonder if you could share with us the model that you've used and the motivation for how you think about entrepreneurship. Thank you. So first I'd like to commend Klaus, Klaus is the chairman of WEF for making this possible. I had written to him a few months back after the last year, I was to say that for this kind of global guardian of political and business leaders, something was missing. What I thought was missing was conversation and entrepreneurship about startups, about the future business leaders. We all are here today, but at some point in time we're just startups. And I also felt in particular that African entrepreneurs needed a voice at a global stage like this. And it was kind, gracious enough for this team to make this possible. I'd like to say, well done to him. More importantly, the case of entrepreneurship in Africa is huge. It's an interesting environmental continent. We have very young population, 60% of our population under the age of 30. And you know the consequences of this. Africa is not yet industrialized. Access to electricity on the continent is very poor. In fact, over half of our people don't have access to electricity. You know how that empowers entrepreneurship. So to me, the issue of unemployment that is a natural consequence of high population, low industrialization, low economic activity, is one that needed and demanded everyone's attention and attention at this stage. Because if we fix it in Africa, the world will have peace. There will be a lot. There will be a better place. And looking at our own lives and how we've come to where we are today, we started to cover a distressed bank some years ago, turned the distressed bank around, grew to the level where it became one of the biggest banks in Nigeria and West Africa, and now a leading Pan-African institution, serving over 14 billion customers across Africa with over 1,000 branches. And this bank united back for Africa. We didn't get there overnight. And so the case is, how do we challenge, how do we replicate ourselves? How do we make sure we have great companies like this that can help create employment for our people? And that's why we started the Tony Elmelo Foundation Entrepreneurship Program, which is, we committed $100 million to the program to have a decade-long entrepreneurship program, to have trained, provides capital, mentors, 10,000 Africans, 1,000 every year. A bigger issue that came up from this is, first, we realized that capital was not everything about entrepreneurship. People have to be trained. People have to be mentored. People have to be hand-held. People have to hear stories, success stories as well as challenges and sources of failures. These are things that motivate young people. We need to create economical for them. And so we designed the program in a way that, we have a 12-week training, online intensive online training, and I'll engage you later to see how a para-collect can be part of that. We have pointed 400 mentors across the world, and those of you who are here who are interested in becoming mentors for these young Africans, please visit the website of the Tony Elmelo Foundation app, and you see, you get access to it, because we need support from everyone. We also created and continue to create networking platform and opportunities for them. They can trade among themselves. And then we provide seed capital, non-refundable $5,000 for them, each of the 1,000 young Africans, because across the 54 African countries, is sector agnostic, all you need, as we say, is that your ideas can transform Africa. Because we have realized that, for a long time, donor funds have come into Africa, a lot, billions of it. But fortunately, we have not, for example, moving the needle so much. And so to us, it's a question of what's next. And we have seen that entrepreneurship start-off is a way to go. And I want to use this platform to encourage everyone. We do say, or some people say that web is like a talk shop. Okay? We need to begin to change that narrative, and this should be a call to action. Everyone should commit to supporting start-offs. They actually have the future of the world. If we fix it at that level, it will calm down, and so many challenges we have in the world to do will be in the past. Thank you. I think it's a very important point, because entrepreneurship is also somewhat a buzzword. It's kind of cool to do, and old policy makers want to be involved. But any you take, for example, technology today, it kind of seems sometimes where you can't help but feel that Silicon Valley is the only place left on earth not trying to become Silicon Valley. But you ask yourself your question, if you are able to replicate the Silicon Valley, take the Middle East and North Africa, for example. If we do have a Silicon Valley in the Middle East, will that solve all of our problems? Probably not, because technology itself doesn't drive change. Technology enables change. Technology is a tool, and we, the connected people, are the real agents of change. In time, I guess we'll tell whether we've used those tools for the betterment of humanity and our habitat or for the exacerbation of our own human flaws. So moving from really those entrepreneurship hubs for the sake of it to really purpose hubs or human-centric hubs, which are really tackling the challenges which Tony was mentioning, which exist, of course, in every shape and form, unfortunately, in the Middle East and North Africa, is really where the sweet spot is. So actually, I want to key off of that comment and maybe something that's related to what Alice talked about, which is the scalability. So SMEs, and that term is defined quite broadly, let's say, above 50 employees. In certain economies, employees, 60% of the population and drive over 40% of the taxable revenues. But we also know a similar statistic, which is over 90% of startups actually don't make it. And so I wonder how, particularly Tony, Will and then Bader, how you guys think about measuring success of your efforts, right? How you move those people from a startup of one or two people to an SME. They don't all have to be unicorns. They don't all have to be a will I am or any of you, but I mean, they aspire to be. But for our economies, for employment, for retraining, how do you think about success and how you measure that for your efforts? Can I...? Yeah. Look, I mean, sort of an extension of my previous point, it depends what challenges you're trying to address, right? So you measure them against those challenges. I don't want to use the term KPI. So you take... I mean, you mentioned they don't have to be unicorns. Well, I think with all due respect to the unicorns out there, it's not about chasing the next billion-dollar company for the sake of it, which might only employ a certain number of people. It's about really identifying and nurturing those companies that are going to impact a billion people. So Tony and I in our respective regions of the world share a very youthful, a very energetic, but an under-utilized population. And if the businesses we're generating are not really creating opportunities for those people, for masses, hundreds of millions of people, especially when you consider that according to F, 85% of jobs in 2030 don't even exist today, then you're not achieving anything. So you just have to start off with really the problem statements, not pretending you understand what the problem is, so doing proper assessment of what those issues are. And then building business solutions to address those challenges, and then you can measure your impact over time. Will, how do you think about that? Well, my reason is clear and laser-focused, and it's how can I continue to be a beacon of light to the kids that I committed to? And they're not my kids. I don't know them now, but now they're family, because I've chose to apply myself. And my mentality is if you start up, and if the start-up isn't working, you shut down and you start up again. And you start up, shut down, and start up again. You keep going, right? There's the whole... I come from a place where it was already hard then. I already came from a hellish place. So going through the motions now is actually luxury to be able to start up, shut down, and start up again. Because I have to do that for my kids. Tony, your foundation is, I think, similar to Baader's efforts around employment, solving particular problems that are endemic to Nigerian and other African countries. But I also know that your foundation, as you look at the applicants to your foundation, how do you choose those particular individuals to enter your program? What metrics do you use to do that? Okay, so every year we create awareness to these young Africans. And they apply. For the last year, we got 98,000 applications. And unfortunately, we were able to select a thousand, which is another talking about scalability. We would like to scale it further, because our commitment is just $100 million, but the needs are granted a lot more than that. And so from when they applied the 98,000, we have partnered with Accenture, Accenture Consulting, the consulting firm, who pass it to Accenture. And they help us go through this based on certain criteria. One of the criteria is scalability of the business. How sound the business is, is scalable? And equally important is you look at the SDG, the goals. And say, which of the SDG goals does the business initiative you have seek to address? And then we capture all of it. And these are the criteria that help to select the 1,000 that benefit from this. And we have seen that these young, energetic, intelligent Africans, male females, in fact, this is quite interesting, because now when we started, it was less than 30% female participation. But now, this last year, 2017, female participation was about 33% so it's coming up. And the interesting thing about it is you see people who are interested in agriculture, technology, in entertainment, and even sectors that you ordinarily advertise in different people, because we don't believe that ideas, we have great ideas. We don't know what can make it to the top. And so scalability starts from creating opportunity for people. People have to be given the opportunity, brought it to the mainstream, and then they prove themselves and you support them further. So it is important to all that the SDG goals, we see how we support them, and that the people who are training, who are helping, who are trying to help them to become self-reliant, independent, and also hopefully in future, help to replicate this across the continent and other parts of the world, so that collectively all of us will bring an end to poverty, which has been a major challenge for all of us. I think we have the opportunity to look at scale-up in two ways. One is this issue of how do you scale up the start-up? And I think that's very important and the opportunity to collaborate with others, to collaborate with corporations. Sherry Kutu was formed, I think it's called scale-up.org or scale-up, which is connecting small enterprises with talented people looking for jobs, because they don't have the recruiting budget to go out and hire the talent and going beyond the mates they know from university. They can actually use this online approach. When I mentioned scale-up, I was thinking more of the aspects of how can we have more will-i-hems and more invention rooms. What we're doing, I think, is very important and very exciting. We're scaling it to the maximum we'll be able to have in our building with the people we have in our neighborhood, and it's a very local phenomenon, because we want kids to walk down there, feel like it's part of their space. They can come in there, they can spend their time and spend their energy, and it's a challenge to think about how it scales to get to other neighborhoods that we're not touching. There, I think, there is a call to action, much as there is with what you're talking about and what you're talking about. We can connect people further across the world, and we can also think about how we can benefit from copying one another and replicating some of these things and having other people of will-statue get inspired to get back in there and do things like this. I actually have a question, particularly for Will here. I view you as the ultimate educator. The educator. You're educating students through your behavior, your role model. I talked about the Silicon Valley narrative, and I think that there are certain things that are universal to entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs are always looking for talent and capital. That's a common thing. What's important on the Silicon Valley narrative that we've heard today is that we have business people selecting entrepreneurs based on goals other than the unicorn, right? Inclusion goals, sustainable development goals, and I think that's a really important message to take from today, but there's one Silicon Valley narrative that I as an educator rebel against, and that is the concept that failure is okay. And I say that for the following reason. You didn't actually fail. It's a massive success as is every person on this panel. You have encountered obstacles, you've encountered difficulties, you've encountered circumstances that were unexpected, but I don't call those failures, and I wonder how you think about that as an educator. Is there alternative language that we can use? As someone who teaches students, particularly in China where failure is really not acceptable to any Chinese parents, is there, you know, I teach entrepreneurship, right? I tell my students it's okay to fail. I don't, right? So I wonder, and we come from a different place. The United States has a different narrative. I wonder how you think about that, and are there ways that we can think about a different framework for that particular experience that all entrepreneurs face? I have dignity, and I love my mom. And because of that, and moving forward, I need failure. Because it further reminds me of my purpose. You can't be afraid of the word failure, no matter what country you're from. Right? There's slow points. You're climbing up a mountain, it hurts. Think about going for a hike. It hurts when it's a steep hill. Do you stop? Even if you walk back, it's gonna hurt. Downhill hurts more. So you can't be afraid of those pains when you're progressing. You can't be afraid of falling down because you're gonna fall down. But falling down is not failure. No, it is. There's nothing wrong with it. Let me share. So this is a very interesting question you asked, actually. Most of the time when I give speeches, people ask me this question. Two weeks back, they ask me the same question. They say, what are your failures? Okay, share with us, share stories. And I say to people first, okay, you were talking about the narrative. Failure, you can modernize it and say challenges. What the truth is, for every successful businessman you see, you've had many failures. Behind that person, or even others who have failed. But with the world's celebration, it's just success. Which is good. But it's good to tell people about resilience, about tenacity. When you fall, you continue. That's what makes entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship journey is not a linear journey. It's up and down. By the end of the day, when you plot it, you see an upward movement. And finally, what I say, by what advice is, and maybe you can try this yesterday, it's good to share my failure points. But more importantly, we should be interested in how do you overcome failures? And what are the learning points from failures? Yes, it should be given. And there are basic principles that guide you. One, you must be very, very resilient. Two, you must think long-term. Because if you think long-term, short-term failures don't set you back so much. Because the journey is long. The journey is a long journey. And most importantly, you need to laser focus, tenacity, laser focus, and just know that your success will come by then, if you're disciplined and you're focused. So I think we should talk to people about how to overcome challenges and failures. So I agree. Look, what you have described, and the reason I think that when people ask me how do you teach entrepreneurship, there is a mindset around entrepreneurship that defines the very nature of human existence and a successful responsible citizen, which is the tenacity and the focus to deal with challenges. So I think that piece is important. I think it's maybe just a case of nomenclature here. I understand cultures where failure is taboo. But really, for me, failure is only when you stop, to Will's point. So it's more if you look at a kind of entrepreneurial journey, it's more really iteration. It's creative destruction. You learn why something didn't work, you pivot and you try again. And then if you keep trying, and there's no telling how many times you have to try, you eventually make it. And so that's, I think, important. But to take a practical case, and sometimes you learn the hard way why this is so important. In the Gulf region, there are examples where governments who really wanted to try and give young entrepreneurs a chance, they started giving them interest-free loans very easily and very quickly. Really on production of a business plan that wasn't vetted or tried and tested by anybody. That was a disaster. In fact, it killed, in many cases, the entrepreneurs' chances to actually establish a successful business. And they learned over time that actually the journey an entrepreneur goes through having to iterate their business model and business plan through multiple rejections from financiers and from peers was an essential part of the creation process. So now we've sort of tweaked those models in parts of the Gulf which I think is great. Well, I have a confession. I'm trained as a lawyer. So for us it's all about definition and I think that maybe the question I was really asking is how do we define failure because it sometimes has a very negative connotation. And I think what you've described, I think quite accurately, is that it can be very positive for people who matter. Alice? I'll just take a little bit of this on ourselves because I think the higher education system has created great opportunity, great goals. People drive themselves to get into the best universities and do the best they can and always score well in everything. And parents are certainly very focused on that. And I think that we don't want to get rid of a system of excellence in being able to push people and have them really strive and reward them for doing well. On the other hand, I think we have to break down this cultural and real the way that drives one into a fear of failure. And I would contend that what we've heard from all our colleagues is it's about lessons learned. And lessons learned in all the different things we've experienced in life. So perhaps one way to break it up a little bit, students are free from their parents unless they're on the phone at the university for a few moments and have them reflect on life's lessons that they've learned if they can actually embrace their own ups and downs in their lives and really look now at their life not that they have this polished resume and they got into this university but actually that this happened and they really kind of did learn that that wasn't a good thing. It really gets students to kind of personally internalize the idea that all through life we have decisions we've made that didn't work out so well and we had to learn something from them and make a different decision the next time. And then I think the role models talking about their stories is incredibly important and you standing up and telling your own story. Yeah, so I think lessons learned is really for me is the key and I want to I think there's a Chinese story actually a fable that sort of sums up what this group has said and I think some of you may know it so there's a fable around a Chinese farmer and he is in the field plowing and his cow dies, his oxen dies and everybody says oh my god that's awful how are you going to harvest and plant and he says well I don't know we'll see tomorrow you know and then the next day the army comes through and they say oh we're taking all the oxen and I died so everybody says oh you're so lucky and he said well I don't know we'll see right we don't know and then the day after that his son breaks his leg so his son can't help in the fields everybody says oh that's terrible he says well I don't know and again a week later the army comes through and says we're taking all the eldest sons his son's leg is broken it turns out to be a good thing the point here being is that things don't turn out the way you expect and you don't know what's good or bad so you have to stick with it and I think that's the lesson I hear from each of the people on this panel with a slight twist because we can't you know you must be purposeful so I don't I don't quite buy the idea of you don't know you must be purposeful but just know that failures can only help you you don't know if it's good or bad you have a purpose but you don't know destination will go ahead and then there we're in a really amazing time in life right now in society where it's reflective of like 1918 where electricity was coming into the world lights automobiles airplanes all that stuff has happened in the early 1900s and Africa wasn't a part of the conversation African Americans were not really a part of the conversation and women were not a part of the conversation the world that we live in today this thing that we're experiencing with these lights the plug phones was popping off in the early 1900s this is the world that we're living in it's based on all the ideas that came from early 1900s there wasn't no music industry, there wasn't movies if you were an actor, you were a theatrical person, if you were a singer you were singing the opera and all that dreams and imagination and JP Morgan and Westinghouse investing in all the thinkers and dreamers early 1900s 2018 it's a whole new fourth industrial revolution just want to see why we all have to apply ourselves to acknowledge the power of the woman not men give power to women acknowledge the power of the woman we were born through a woman and we need a balance to see the world that we live in today and we the Elon Musk's of 2040 is a woman the Steve Jobs of 2040 is someone from Africa we haven't seen an apple from Africa it's south southern hemisphere has not contributed to the world yet think about that one so we are going to see the next Googles come from Africa and Brazil if we do our job and protect and encourage and inspire nine year olds today so 20 years from now they're going to blossom and remember the efforts and the laser focus that we did there's enough money, there's rich Africans there are rich African Americans it makes no sense that the Bronx is the Bronx and Watts is Watts and Louisiana after the Katrina is what it is but meanwhile Shenzhen time is Katrina was a swamp too and now you go to Shenzhen they're making everything right that's the possibilities you could change the whole entire region you know when you inspire them encourage them and when I go to China I'm like inspired I'm like yo this place is popping and the day that we were just talking the day that we all know the contributors of the phones that we make is the day that China is going to really be not the American dream but the China dream you want to make something I don't go to America to build our stuff I'm going to freakin Shenzhen in China it's amazing this globalization and the folks that are leading in the shift it's awesome and it's going to take collaboration, tolerance understanding, appreciation you know equality looking to the next and you know the answers aren't going to come from yesterday's leaders they're going to come from the folks that are going to solve their own problems when you encourage them and with today's tools that will change tomorrow okay so we have a little bit of time left can I just see a show of hands of how many people have questions in the audience okay so before we get to the questions I know I want to spend just four minutes around the topic that Alice raised which is scalability how do we scale each of your efforts do you have lessons that you have from the UAE that you can share with Tony or Tony to share with Alice just four minutes on that topic after Butter no sure no I don't want to belabor this point but it goes back to the thing of failure and you know I think it's celebrating the lessons learned as opposed to failure in itself and I recall an amusing experience where I don't know how many people have heard of failcom but it's basically this conference where people go and celebrate failure and I went there I was very curious so I went there and I think they were taking it a little bit too far because there were examples where someone was like you know and I lost 10 million dollars and they go is that it I lost 100 million dollars and so there was a little bit missing the point but it was it was exciting because there was I guess there were some lessons being learned so yeah it's just not missing the point on that but there is another aspect to failure which I think is important and that's making sure that the enabling environment which is in many ways nurtured by policymakers doesn't persecute failure and there are examples again I say from my part of the world where in some countries up until not that long ago and in some cases still today if you failed in your business and your business had taken out alone you're personally liable you go to jail so what does that say about a lesson to entrepreneurs to you know go ahead and try and if you fall down get back up because in this case you fall down you're behind bars so I think that's just an important point to make I think there's a lot that we can do we don't have representation from policymakers as such but there is a role that they have to play in creating that nurturing environment yeah I think in fact the point that I hear from all of you is what we don't want is to have people discouraged from trying we need people to get out and try and to take the risk I think that's the environment that we're trying to nurture and I think that's what I hear each of you talking about in your initiatives but let's just spend three minutes if we could again let's start with Tony and work our way down how you think about scalability what are your challenges what have you done that's worked so for us our entrepreneurs the Tony Elmillo entrepreneur we have about 30,000 of them now across Africa what we're saying is they need an operating environment to succeed and so I would say we need a government to to help capacitize and create the right environment for these entrepreneurs it's very very important to give them all the money but if they have to take off electricity themselves water themselves then the money cannot solve the problem so that's what to second point is we need to encourage women to continue to show more interest in entrepreneurship as I said when we started we had less than 30% interest from women and what we did was to go all out and create more awareness and now a lot more participation so we need to encourage them we need more female mentors to share their success stories and encourage these females very very important and last point is from reviewing our previous past four years we realized that in the rural areas the is queued more towards people in the urban center than the rural area rural people need entrepreneurship more than even the urban people so we need collectively to create more awareness in the rural area so this year we're going to give more some a little more opportunities to put in the rural area because some of them don't have access to internet to even apply and so the challenge in the rural area is quite a lot fix unemployment, poverty address inclusive growth and development if we do not first mainstream and prioritize our women participation and to people in the rural areas those are the areas we're going to Alice? We're in early days with the invention rooms we've had our first we just opened about six months ago first groups of students in our first goal is to scale down to younger kids mini makers, micro makers nano makers get younger kids involved because the sooner you get at these kids the sooner you change their outlook and have them help have them change their trajectory and become a new level of participation in the opportunities available beyond that if it works well if we can learn from this and we can certainly enlarge what we're doing there in that community but we could also replicate it elsewhere it's not clear yet but hopefully so Will the only thing I can think about for scaling you is to clone you but you might have different ideas so Mark Benioff is my hero and he doesn't have to do the things he does and he's I'm a clone of Mark I'm an early Mark he built his company Salesforce after working at Oracle and chooses to use his success to help out those with hospitals police academies and investing in entrepreneurs that are trying to change and leave a purpose and I think the only way to exist as a company in the future is you have to have be a purposeful company with seeing how governments aren't governing properly they leave holes for companies to fill these voids like you wouldn't I wouldn't have to have an after school program if government had proper schools it's true I'm from California so in California there's Google or Apple's all the big giant companies you would think and be mandatory in seventh grade everybody learns iOS and Android or Linux, Unix, or DOS or Windows guess what in every single school people have a football field and a basketball court two companies benefit from that investment NBA and NFL there's not even a competitor in the NFL so think about just how backwards our world is today we cannot sustain that moving forward and companies are going to be a lot like what they were in the early 1900's like Ford's look at how many jobs Ford created it wasn't government that did that people and companies are going and this is a new jump off that we have right now but instead not just teaching alone is going to solve the problem you need inspiration to inspire people to do the impossible add a little craziness into you know inspiration because that's what you need when you fall you need to be crazy enough to get back up so I just a reflection on the technology point because I think one of the benefits of where we are with technology today is it actually reduces the importance of the economies of scale so you don't necessarily need scale to be competitive and the other aspect of course is borders become obsolete in some cases you can transcend borders both physical and rhetorical a much easier but look there's all the typical things you know you already talked about it's access to capital, access to talent it's good infrastructure, a level playing field one important thing which is potentially underappreciated because it's seen as the domain of large companies and that's corporate governance so I set up about seven years ago something called the Pearl Initiative which really focuses on the business case behind good governance so why it's in self-interest of business people to adopt good governance beyond regulations and rules and we realized we did fall into the trap of just working with large companies but working and sort of as a preventative measure working at the start up phase really at the seed phase to try and institute certain measures and they could be basic things like formulation of a board and outward facing board you know boards are like particle physics you know they behave differently when someone's watching them yeah and the other issue and you know things like delegation of authority manual shareholder agreements risk analysis basic things like that I think are critical and crucial to help companies scale faster so we've been doing an experiment with small businesses and startups now it's actually more than an experiment now it's 2,000 entities across the Middle East that's joined the survey to really understand how they view governance and more often than not they see it as something that they'll get to when they get big so I just think that's a point worth making okay so in the remaining time I've got a question over here I think in the corner thank you very much everybody just a very quick thing on failure I think failure is relative and I in one of my lifetimes taught children from very underprivileged school and you know failure is not a good word because by the time they're three or four years old they actually see themselves as failures and they don't even try to be able to fail you know the inertia and anger that comes out of that is really really damaging so that's just a small thing about failure this is once you get to a certain stage this week I have been with a lot of social entrepreneurs outside the Congress Hall there are some extraordinary things being done and scaling is one of the big things but you know from the big ones from Tata from Violia from and then from the smaller ones bring Accelerator lots and lots of people she deserves movement they are really pushing through you would have thought by now we would have an amazing amazing planet very successful planet but I feel that is underlying all this is yes corporate leadership counts but their political leadership despite what's going on today really really counts you know you can have the political will but the political leadership is not there and kids are not being trained to understand what political leadership means whatever governments are going to look like in the future is a different thing as long as we're people and we're functioning as people in different entities we have a political part to how we function and I urge you if you could to start political entrepreneurship training and I really mean scaling this up and training people to understand how to enable you know we should be this planet should be booming now it should be blooming and it isn't and that's political leadership failure now that's a big failure I urge you to focus on that not just social entrepreneurship I don't think we're all going to do it so political leadership please thank you Trisha I think there's a question gentlemen in the middle here so we have a minute so quickly okay so first of all my name is Reneer I'm a student here in Switzerland and I'm very very honored to be here at the World Economic Forum so I have a business idea without any details I want to create an app which will improve school productivity my problem is I have no idea how to program and I have no idea how to create an app and my question is how do I pursue something and something being the app which I have no idea in how to create I'm fascinated by programmers and developers I'm always blown away by how people can create something from nothing just by code but to you you just have to learn how to network and find talent and with a good idea you're going to attract the right talent and you don't have to learn how to code to be able to learn how to bring together the folks to manifest that idea so we're actually we're out of time I apologize this has been I knew that an hour wasn't going to be enough time with these four people but I want to thank all of our panelists as I said at the beginning they're extraordinary so please