 and welcome everybody to our panel, which is entitled Developing Your Ecosystem Funding to Accelerate Scale Up. So this morning, this afternoon, this evening, we will be exploring how to enable a continuum of resources critical for any innovation journey, especially in developing countries where there are very few ecosystems. So I'd like to welcome our truly international panel here. We have Robert Orr from Bedford, Nova Scotia, Swethaal Kumar from the UAE, Sophia Sedum from New York here in the United States, and Yulia Shahoyda from Budapest, Hungary. And I will be your moderator and I'm based in Silicon Valley, bright and early 5.45 in the morning. So delighted to be with you all. So let's start first of all with you, Robert. Can you give us an overview of the equity loan and grant type funding opportunities in your ecosystem? And can these funding sources be combined by a startup looking for funding? And if so, how? Well, Ron, I participate in a few different ecosystems. We have the Ocean Supercluster, which is a fairly new initiative trying to develop ocean related technology and building a cluster for that in Atlantic Canada, the four Eastern Canadian Atlantic provinces. Then I also am chair of a national organization called Natural Products Canada, which looks at building again an ecosystem and a center of excellence nationally for natural products specifically. And then obviously I participate as someone who leads the fund who makes investments in sustainable ocean technologies. But let me start locally. And I think I wanna talk about that overall ecosystem and one of the things that Nova Scotia and Halifax in particular, which is the largest center, but not a huge center, population half a million in as the capital of the province of Nova Scotia. They participated a few years ago in a program out of MIT called MIT REAP, which is a regional entrepreneurship acceleration program. And it focuses on this total ecosystem. And sometimes we think about ecosystem quite narrowly just in terms of risk capital and entrepreneurs. But what MIT has done in studying this and studying successful ecosystems and entrepreneurship specifically around the world has been that there's an existing corporate piece of the ecosystem. There's risk capital availability. There's entrepreneurs that are required. There's the university sector which is required. And then there's the government impact on the ecosystem. And if these five component pieces, and there's a component of the community at large that determines the success of these ecosystems. And it's the integration and the collaboration between these five areas of existing corporate entities, government, universities, how big is the entrepreneurship base itself and the access to risk capital. So I think when you're looking at ecosystems, what is the interface and collaboration that exists between those five sectors and how well can they collaborate and align behind building out a successful entrepreneurial ecosystem if you wanna call it that. I think that's Robert very valid. Of course, I've been in Silicon Valley since the 60s and I think it's been well documented that all of those factors were at work here to really start and promote entrepreneurship here in Silicon Valley, dating all the way back to early, even before World War II with government and university, of course, Stanford University and risk capital and so on. So I think your points are absolutely valid. Other panelists' comments on that question before we move to the next one? What I can add is typically when ecosystem is seen, a lot of people see this more as an incubator, but I think in my view, and in fact, last year when we were setting up Hubsan 21 in Abu Dhabi, what we're looking at that, how we can bring together all the key stakeholders, right? I think how do you kind of doubt till the key stakeholders likes of regulator, government bodies, corporate innovation labs, or maybe the research facility in the academia or bringing the venture capitalists or investors and the mentors all put together, like how can you synthesize and then support those kind of creative, beautiful ecosystems and that's my take on when it comes to the ecosystems and creating, adding to the investors, talking about the equity or maybe the venture debt bringing all under one roof. Okay. Well, I'd like to add to both your comment in the fact that Robert described the many components, five of them actually that helps an ecosystem be brought to life. For all those components to be able to interact together, then it's to be people working towards us, people connecting one component with another and that is usually not a profitable job. So there has to be somewhere a political will to try to aggregate all the powers, all the strengths that a local place have. Yeah, I would definitely add to that what Sophia was just talking about and what we see here in the CE region, the Central European region is that this whole startup ecosystem started out with a lot of public funding and a lot of money coming from the EU and governments using that towards funding startups, but the whole ecosystem is and the different factors are not connected. So there are a few incubators already, a few mentors, very, very few and not enough at all angel investors. So all these different players are not connected well enough. And right now there is a lot of capital in every single country in the Central European region, but all of this is usually public funding, not a lot of funding from outside private investors. And there's not enough deal flow coming to all this capital. So not enough incubators bringing that up to the capital. So it's definitely something that somehow should be connected this whole channel. I heard the tail end of the previous panel and someone was counseling patients. We have to remember, you know, Silicon Valley got started, you know, in technology in the 30s. And, you know, the miracle didn't really happen until the 60s. Now I think the world is much faster now, so it shouldn't take 30 years to develop new ecosystems, but it does take time. Well, listen, let's move on to the next question. And I wanna remind the audience that hopefully you all have questions and please type them in the chat window. But Yulia, what are the main challenges of VC funding in your ecosystem and what types of methods do VCs apply for valuation of early stage companies and what funding routes are typically available in your ecosystem until companies become self-sustaining? Okay, so the challenges of VCs as I just mentioned for the previous question is actually most of the VCs in Hungary and in the central European region are funded mostly from EU funding that then governments allocate. So it's mostly public money, a lot of regulations that come with it, a lot of regulations that it has to be spent within that country, not really be spent on export and taking the startup international. So it goes against what a startup should be doing and going international really fast and spending the money on that. So that's a big challenge. It's also a challenge that there's not that many incubators, accelerators, age-old investors who would be bringing that deal flow ready for a VC. So when we as a VC get startups, they usually don't have any documents ready for actually coming to a VC. We pretty much have to help them get their business plans, financial plans ready for that quality that we would actually want when a startup comes to us. So that's definitely challenging. And yeah, and then what was the second part of your question, sorry? Another question. You know, how do startups get funded until they're self-sufficient? Yeah, so, and the valuation methods. So that's also, I think a problem here and a problem how they can then connect to international markets and international investors. So since there are very few angel investors, now there's a few also state-funded programs that finance very early-stage startups. So that's a possibility, but then they already have state funding with a lot of requirements, a lot of different problems that they take onward with them. And what we see is that the valuations are much lower for same quality startups here than say in the US. And this definitely is a problem because I think we are really looking at this and trying to take those percentages down. But you know, when this whole startup ecosystem started here, we saw VCs taking 95% of startups for first funding round. And you know, where do you have any place for next investors? But even now for a seed around, a lot of investors will take 35% of the company. And you know, how do you still then have place for next round investors? So this definitely is a very huge problem. And I think one of the obstacles of startups then going towards next round international investors. Great, well, I would say two things, Yulia. One is as a partner in a venture firm here in Silicon Valley, it's amazing how unprepared, many of the entrepreneurs are when they come into our offices too, either not a well-designed pitch or not a well-thought-out financial plan. So that is an international problem. I would also say there's an opportunity in lower valuations, which is, again, we run a cross-border fund. We got started many years ago investing in Israel. And we're always looking for places where valuations are less frothy. So if you can get connected to the international ecosystem and promote startups and kind of act as that connector, that could be incredibly valuable. Other panelists' comments on that question? Yes, Robert. Yeah, look, there's always a challenge at every level of this ecosystem that's related to risk capital, whether that seed capital, whether that's capital that's missing in almost every system, which is the traditional valley of death when early seed capital from friends and family or even angels gets exhausted, but there isn't enough traction in the business to get it to more traditional venture capital or even a series A. And I think that building both policies as well as programs, the one thing about government is, government isn't good at creating capital or creating wealth. I mean, that's a known fact. They're better at redistributing wealth than they are at creating it, but they can create programs that can encourage investment. So for instance, you can have significant tax breaks for early stage investing up to a quarter of a million or a half a million dollars. And say you have a region where there isn't a high level of sophistication for early stage seed investing, but there's still some inherent wealth there, then if you create these tax advantages, and this was done successfully in a state like Arkansas as an example, where they created, in essence, a bank. And so you could attract investment capital, seed capital from out of state. And so how does an out of state person get the local tax credit because you're not living in the state? So they created a pool where people who didn't have the knowledge, know how or risk appetite could in essence bank or create a bank so outside investors could get, let's say there was a 35% tax rebate, they could get 30% of it and give 5% to the people who were in the bank who were prepared to get a slight reduction in their taxes by making this and contributing to the whole ecosystem. So I think that there is, again, these are innovative government policies where government shouldn't be in the business of trying to figure out who and what businesses to invest in, but can create policy and create programs that can attract both local capital and out of state or even out of country capital by creating those discounts until you build up an ecosystem and then you can roll back the program or change the program. So I think it's getting innovative and understanding who can play what roles in building up these kinds of ecosystems. And Robert, do you see those innovative programs expanding your example in Arkansas? Do you see that happening in other regions in the world? There are a number of regions and even including Nova Scotia where there is now a program for local in-province rebates. In our case, a quarter of a million dollar investment can get a 35% tax reduction. Because they've been able to kind of fill that bucket with local investors, haven't created a program where you got out of province or out of country investments. So I mean, it depends a little bit on how big and how active your own community is. But for communities that don't have a lot of active investors who would take up that tax rebate, then you can bring in these other programs. So I mean, I'm not tracking these programs all over the world, but I think that you don't have to reinvent the wheel. There are examples when you do a global scan of things that work and don't work. And again, of governments. And another area that I've seen that we did talk about in the ecosystem is philanthropy. So government combined with philanthropy, again, philanthropists may want to do social good so they can invest in building accelerators and incubators or partner with government. You can go to some of these philanthropic organizations and have them work on incubation and acceleration in ways where they don't have again the risk appetite to be the actual investor in the company. So it's building this entire network that's where you have as I think Sophomore was saying earlier, you need some champions in the community who will start to bring these pieces together for the benefit of the community and then start to bring the players bringing those policies and programs together that start to create the fertile ground for a healthy entrepreneurial ecosystem. I will say from my perspective, as terrible as this pandemic is, I think we will look back on it and see that it dramatically accelerated the globalization of entrepreneurship. Every board that I'm sitting on, companies are looking far and wide for talent, for technology, for investments, for acquisition because we've really been liberated from bricks and mortars in many respects and we're learning how to operate across borders and virtually through sessions like this. So, and we are seeing governments, engaging more in promoting entrepreneurship and technical innovation in local areas. Any other comments on this question before I move on to the next one for Swephal? I mean, look at this startup generally go through what you call is a better morphosis process, right? But every stages of their life cycle, there's a challenge, right? I mean, we, even in the UA, it's not an exception, like we have a large, large sovereign fund, we have a large fund who can cater to the need of cities and everything, right? But when it comes to even like looking at the pre-seed or seed, they're not enough angel investor or there are, but there's not enough awareness there. The family offices that they're kind of look at mostly like co-investing, which means you need to still find an investor, right? To go or tap them. And so there are amazing like early stage to kind of a growth stage startups are there, but they're not enough funds are there to kind of support them. So like Robert mentioned, it's like a kind of phenomenon of value of debt or like missing the middle, right? So there's lots that vacuum needs to be filled to attract more and more funds to comes to this region. I wanted to comment also on what you both just said about what government can do, how can they reduce the boot wealth in a way that's effective? So you mentioned partake in incubator accelerators. True. There are also ways that would foster investment that costs nothing virtually. Like I have the example in France that a few years back just passed a very simple law about dividend taxation and how you would be taxed when you exit your company. And this was very simple, flat tax, that's it. You know exactly what you're getting into when you exit. And because they committed to make that a stable framework, people decided to that, yeah, they have the stability and now they're willing to invest more. And that stability did more to push the amount of investment that the tax break they gave to people who invested in startups. That's one example. Another example that could foster entrepreneurship and push startups beyond the value of death, this one costs money, is unemployment. Both in France and in Germany, as instance, after you leave your job, you're entitled to unemployment. And during that time, you can start your own company. So basically you're paid by the state to run and operate your startup. Can be up to two years. That kind of safety net really empowers the entrepreneurs and founders to go reach and fetch the success that they want. That's interesting, we have an office in France and we've seen an explosion of entrepreneurship in the last three or four years. And valuations which used to be incredibly low as in Hungary have exploded. So government policies seem to be working because 10, 15 years ago, you wouldn't do a startup in France. Yeah, and the virtual circle have emerged whereas the entrepreneurs that have exceeded and have made money from themselves contrary to all money where it was more real estate and capital market, they put it back into startups, a lot of them. This regarding the traditional allotment of your wealth that you would do conservatively. They're very aggressively invested into startups and that fuels the machine. Good, so it can be done. Okay, let's move on. So, Swethaal, how are regulators in your country supporting the development of ecosystem funding? So I think the regulator here is doing quite good. One example which I could share is with, and I spent time between Dubai and Abu Dhabi, but especially in Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi global market, ADGM, has been really attracting a lot of funds to these regions. They have made the whole region very investor-friendly where investors were not required to any put to share capitals, or even in terms of the manpower or the team needed so you can outsource, like for example, finance officers or compliance or MLRO rules. So there's a lot of benefits or attractions for this startup. It's a very tax-attractive region. And also if you look at the cost of setting up the fund is very, very reasonable, nominal. So that's sort of where you can see the regulators playing a role as well as creating their own sandbox, whether it's a fintech or rec lab. So I could see that would create attract a lot of funds from different part of the world to look at entering into the UAE. Mm-hmm. Other comments on regulators? Yulia, any observations in Central Europe? Yeah, yeah. So a lot of regulators are working on building ecosystems and providing funding for these ecosystems. And I think it's definitely helping. So we see that the ecosystem is growing and there's more and more startups, more initiatives. So that's very good. I think one important thing that is still missing the link is that all this capital, public capital should be spent in a way that it attracts also more private capital. So that link is still missing how to attract both. For example, how it was done in Israel back in 93 with the Hosme program where government was giving public money with the requirement that each fund has to bring in private investors from abroad. And that really helped all that international capital go into Israel. So I think in our region, this is one thing that's still really missing and a lot of VC funds that are fundraising also run into challenges of investors still being a little bit cautious about the Central European region. They don't really know much about the Central European region. So that's definitely something that it's great that we have a lot of help from regulators in terms of funding the ecosystem and having programs, but it should somehow be connected more with international private investors down the road. Did you see those trends changing at all? Any examples of moving more towards an Israeli system? To be honest, regulators are not really, unfortunately. So most of the capital is still just mostly public capital that is going into the ecosystem. And we hungry in itself, as previously mentioned for startups, for example, it has great tax advantages for startups developing their IP here. So that's great. It also has very good quality of engineers at a very low and good cost, but they're not regulators and aren't really focusing on tax breaks for possibly for investors bringing their money here. So that, for example, could be something that we've been trying to get through to regulators to somehow help the ecosystem this way so that we attract capital from outside of this region and outside of public money so that this ecosystem can grow in the long term. You know, some of it comes down to also just good marketing. And having watched Israel grow over the years, of course, the military intelligence and the technology coming out of there was kind of bigger than life, all the way over here in Silicon Valley. So some of it is just, government's also sort of promoting, particularly the technical talent, the low cost of doing business, government programs and so on. Definitely. Other comments, Robert, regulators in Nova Scotia and Canada? Yeah, I think it's a little bit of a slippery slope because we can't become overly dependent on the regulator or on government. And I think that, again, getting back to this idea that Sulfan was talking about earlier on, if you can find champions and they may be in government or they may be in academia or they may be in the private sector, but again, bringing these groups together for the common purpose of building, you know, a entrepreneurial ecosystem in the region and developing, you know, sets of activities where there's an alignment. And this is what, if you look at Norway or if you look at Israel, is this ability to align, if you like government, academia, the larger private sector, to align them around the commitment to the development of the ecosystem. And that starts to de-risk the capital because people see a collectible aligned approach. And so this enabling role that I would say, again, government or regulators can play in developing, yes, policies help the right kinds of incentive policies, but then getting creative with them and building this overall ecosystem. And I think there, again, there are things that can come out that help when you look at the mechanisms, particularly, again, in early stage, there's a program that grew out of the University of Toronto called the Creative Destruction Lab process. And this is an important part of the ecosystem that doesn't get talked a lot about that helps the U.S. ecosystem be successful. And that's the process of mentoring. So it's intelligent capital, this isn't just the capital. When there's a low level of experience in even as Ron says, even in Silicon Valley, they've got entrepreneurs coming forward and they don't know how to write a business plan, they don't know how to identify their value prop, they don't know how to do a market scan to understand what the competitive set is when they're bringing forward a proposal. But that's part of learning for a first-time entrepreneur versus a serial entrepreneur. But I think having a system where you're combining mentorship and capital even at the early stages, and this is a disappointment that I saw, particularly with tech investing, part of the capital, I've seen funds where they even a relatively small fund, say 10 or $20 million, we say, okay, look, what we're gonna do is we're gonna look at all these various opportunities and we're gonna make 30 or 50 bets. And all we need to do is get one or two of those bets to come through and we're gonna get a return on capital. But what I observed, which was much different because I come out of a more of a life science background, is that there was no very little mentorship there. They weren't helping the thinking processes of those investors and there were a lot of good ideas that went by the wayside because the entrepreneur wasn't provided the guidance along with the capital. It was kind of like a survival of the fittest and I thought that that was a missed opportunity. And when you get to higher levels of investment, VC capital or private equity capital, you see in the US funds, you almost never go in there without there being someone in that fund who's actually built a business. So they're not a lawyer or an accountant or an MBA grad who does analysis. They actually understand how to build a company. And that level of mentorship is completely invaluable to an early stage company. Yeah, I 100% agree. And I guess on that point, the good news here in the valley is there's a trend to investing earlier in startups. Again, kind of promoted by the pandemic. We can't do the kind of diligence we used to do, go on site to spend time with the company, get to know the entrepreneurs and so on. We're really relying on Zoom and other techniques. So we end up getting involved with entrepreneurs much earlier and really mentoring them to develop their business plans and their go to markets and so on. And there is more of a trend towards operational partners, if you will, and venture firms here. I spent 30 some odd years running companies and now I'm a partner at an early stage fund. So that's a positive development from my perspective and then programs like Input here that really promote mentorship. But I think that's absolutely a key point. Let's move on, Sophia, and apart from funding, what do you think an early stage company needs to do to scale up on an international level? And can you please describe accelerator or incubators in your ecosystem? Sure, just before I insert two comments about framework, I work a lot with Africa, mainly in West Africa. And we've seen that position adopted by government to name them Tunisia with the startup act and Senegal with their equivalent startup act have helped push the agenda because now it's easier to invest from a foreign, if you're a foreign investor, it's easier to buy and share, it's easier to do rounds, less bureaucratic formalities to go to. Now in Senegal, you can set up a company in two days with very little capital. This used not to be like that. So that's quite a progress. And to jump to say, I quite agree with you said, Rob, about mentoring, one of the things we're trying to do now with our new fund is to gather a pool of entrepreneurs that have exceeded themselves to co-invest as angels and mentor in the companies we bring forward. That's the condition. They have to be able to dedicate a little bit of time to the entrepreneurs and funder to support them. And this is actually what is much needed for early stage companies. Money is essential, but smart money is way better. Knowledge, no one can deprive you of your knowledge and you will use it. It's not for this company, for the next one. If you don't learn anything, we can give you as much money as you want. Will not help. And so really this guidance is key. We've seen many companies approach us saying we need that much money. And then we realize, well, first, if you do that, you're gonna be totally diluted and they're not gonna be any more round after that. But most of all, if you come to think about it in a strategic way, you don't need that much money. What you need is access to skills, access to talent, access to knowledge, access to partnerships, all things that a good VC plus a pool of mentor can provide on the way to the scaling up. So you say that mentorship is one of the most important elements to successful international scaling? I'd say access, access knowledge, access ways to reach out to the missing pieces of your machine, of your startups. I can give you many examples where technology was key and it had been imported from one country to the other where people didn't speak the same language, didn't have the same cultural background, and yet the pieces fit together perfectly. And this bridge wouldn't have been possible if this mentor was not there to put two and two together. So it's about access. Yeah, I like to say in my role as a mentor, my goal is that my entrepreneurs don't make the same mistakes that I made, they make new ones. Okay, I'm gonna ask each of you to tell me a story of your most influential or unique global investment that was boosted by your ecosystems, or an example of a successful startup in your ecosystem. But before I do that, I wanna remind the audience that we're open for questions. If there are any questions from the audience, we'd love to take them and get some audience interaction going. So Yulia, you wanna start with a story about a successful startup, ideally on a global scale? Sure, from Hungary, we have a few success stories, maybe names that you have heard of as well, for example, Prezi or Ustream. And these are some names that have gone global from Hungary. For all of those stories that went global from either Hungary or from the Central European region, I think it was key that they got international investors, private investors into that capital quite soon and they hustled to get that. And I think one thing that they had in common is that they were working with good mentors, good help. So that's, I think, definitely important. And we as VESPA two partners here in Hungary and in the Central European region are really working on connecting to the Central European region with a bridge towards mostly towards the US. And we're really trying to build out these hybrid models where we have the Startups Development Center stay here in the region, but take their sales, marketing management as soon as possible towards the US market or the other way around. So we actually have a company that we invested in, they have their Headquarter in New Jersey and their sales management is there and all their development is here in Hungary. So this way they're saving a lot of costs, taxes with having their development here. And we invested last year in December and they had no revenue at all then and they're about to have $2 million of revenue this year. So they're growing quite well and they're saving a lot with having their development here. So this international hybrid model works very successfully for them. And as previously mentioned, I think one really important thing guys we're helping our startups go global and a lot of startups have that kind of challenge when from this going from the Central European region it's all small markets. And to jump to that level of going international then to one bigger markets just the US they definitely need mentors and help and smart capital. Great. Swetha, a story from you. In middle list, we don't have many unicorns, right? I mean, we have seen two successful stories here by, you know, soup which is acquired by Amazon and Karim which is acquired by Uber. I think it was more of those success story because there was like, you know, these guys I mean, the investor really have them sort of reaching out to that level. And then we came to the international joint and came and acquired by, you know, I entered into this market by acquiring them. So these are the two success story which I've seen and there are many coming up. So it's a very young ecosystem which fledgling there's a lot of opportunity. So I think more and more we could see in coming years in the UAE. Great. Good. And you know, unicorns are, you know of course get all the news but it's, you know, non-unicorns that make up the bulk of anybody's portfolio. So many definitions of success. Sofian, sorry, sorry from you. In Africa, what's been very, one of the segment that has been very booming is the FinTech segment because mobile money is developed in the whole continent like no other places on earth for historical reason. And so we've seen recently a huge success. So we could think about the pay stack that tribe just acquired but even in the Francophone region that I'm really focusing on there is this company called Intouch and they went on the whole continent developing the services with the help of foreign investment that was key in their scaling up. We ourselves are trying to replicate this success with a company called Simwa doing exactly the same thing bringing money from the US into this West African company to help us scale it all over. What did Intouch do, Sofian? Payment solution, multi-canal, like if you think of one way to pay digitally, they have it from anywhere to anywhere. Yeah, it's actually incredibly impressive how Africa is innovated with digital payment systems almost out of necessity. And that's the beauty of global entrepreneurship is that solutions necessitated by local conditions innovation can happen anywhere these days. Indeed. Robert, story from you. Yeah, I can give you a couple of stories that are in different parts of the ecosystem here that are not unicorns. One is a company that is just a couple of years old out of rural New Brunswick and a small group coming out of the university they're developed and now all natural preservative for shelf-stable drinks. And through the natural products Canada network, we invest but not as a lead investor. So we have a small fund as well as the ecosystem development projects that we undertake as a center of excellence. We were able to attract with them well, the company attracted them but based on our commitment to the project, they were able to attract over two million dollars of capital and there are two other major investors came out one out of San Francisco, the other out of Boston. A company called Agfunder who understood natural products and agricultural technology emerging. And then that group was able to make a link and their first major customer was a major beverage company out of Japan. And so here's a technology platform, natural products developed as a small extract that gives us all natural. And so that's being introduced to different shelf-stable drinks in a way that keeps them safe biologically coming out. So there you've got a product through a network in the early stage incubation that they got along with an investment with us without being a leader that they could leverage into US capital and a Japanese customer as their first breakthrough. Similarly, another group that was in the CDL system in Halifax who came in with a technology that was a tagging technology meant to potentially look at tagging fish and so forth. That company soon identified that their technology and did a complete pivot out of that space that there was a big breakdown in the blood collection system across the world as blood moves, a lot of the samples of blood get destroyed because of inappropriate movement. They could start to tag and even in hospitals who are now trying to move blood samples to a blood lab through different systems, moving them very, very rapidly but with no quality control. They developed a technology where they could tag the blood samples as they flow through tubes and so forth through the hospital with massive quality control systems and improvement. And again, their early stage funding came out of CDL, a group of entrepreneurs getting them entering applying some early stage capital and then their first major customer were hospitals in Denmark. So you can take these systems and apply them and use the infrastructure that gets created where these small companies often your first major market is not your local market depending on what your technology platform is. So again, those are just a couple of examples. Great examples and also examples of how distinctive competencies in a particular geography can play out globally. Well, listen, I'm really excited now because we have questions from the audience. So I'm gonna ask these and I'll just let you all jump in with answers. So the first is what is one piece of advice you would give entrepreneurs who need funding right in the middle of a pandemic? A good internet connection. Ah, okay, good, necessary, absolutely necessary. Yeah, and that probably actually no laughing matter because we're still nowhere near a hundred percent in terms of penetration of broadband even in developed countries. Other pieces of advice? And all of them. I'm sorry. Just to follow on being persistent because no, from an investor today, means no today. Maybe in six months is different. Maybe in three months is different. So try and try and try again. If you have something new to show up for, go ahead. Yep, as I like to say, you've got to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince. Yeah, another thing I would say is definitely what we see is a lot for a lot of our startups. It gets harder to close deals, but you can still work on building your sales pipeline. So when you go to an investor and because of the pandemic, maybe you have a difficulty with actually showing revenues as you expected before the pandemic and maybe it's slowed down a little bit but really try to work any angle any creative angle on traction even if it's a little bit different kind of traction. Maybe it's your sales pipeline growing with actually closing deals as much as you wanted before but still somehow showing that investor that you're not lost and you're coming out on the other end that there's still a large potential in your startup. Okay. I think if you look at startups, they need to assess their own cash flow projections. If you look at what's your runway, right? Do you have enough dry powder to sustain? If not, can you be for girl, run the business more for girl, they save more costs before you go for tapping funding because during pandemic, it's not that there's no fund with the investor. Do they, some of them raise the fund before pandemic from LPs? So they some of them have money to deploy but it's look at from investor perspective also, I mean, it's a paradox like whether to kind of bail out some of their ailing portfolio companies or to look at investing into new opportunities. So I think it's a time where it would say needs to be looked at very carefully, especially the startup really come with a great plan, great cash flow projections and the great strategy to attract the investors. And I would also say definitely look at what, where the world is going to be after pandemic. So post pandemic, obviously we don't invest for half a year, one year, but we're looking at five to seven years of ranges but definitely try to look at where your industry is going after the pandemic, post pandemic. And if you have to, if you need to then definitely pivot and show the investors that you're ready for the post pandemic world and how you're gonna excel afterwards. Great, let me get a few more now. The questions are coming fast. Let me just say something here about mindset. Let me get a little philosophical here for a second. You know, the pandemic created a lot of uncertainty and what most people's mindset is that they're thinking about uncertainty or as something that is a problem that they need to solve to get to back to a more certain place. The truth of the matter is uncertainty is a fact. It's not a problem to be solved. And so your mindset has to be one is that I'm living in an uncertain world. There's a lot of unknowns. And then in focusing back on, you know what is the quality of my offer? All the pandemic does, all COVID does is reveal and accelerate. So it reveals the truth of a situation and accelerates life or death more quickly. And so the quality of the offer that you're making is to go back and not be thinking about pandemic. There's lots of capital available. All of the capital that's available is trying to find deals the same way as deals are trying to find capital in a largely now online world. The issue still comes back to what is the quality of the offer that you're making? Are you able to clearly articulate your value proposition and can so look at yourself, you need to get better if you're not raising capital. That's the bottom line. Well, I'd say the corollary to that Robert is there's opportunity in anything. And, you know, as an example telemedicine has been dramatically accelerated. You know, here in the United States, you know, no one delivered healthcare, you know, over video that just wasn't, you know, hip all these regulations and so on. And then of course the pandemic hit and all of a sudden, guess what? Everybody's delivering medicine over Zoom and other technologies. And that's creating huge opportunities. You know, remote, you know, remote learning many other areas there's opportunities. Let me move on because we've got a lot of questions now which I'm thrilled about. Here's an interesting one again for all of you. Do you think that the media as a stakeholder has a big role to play in bringing in other investors? Media, comments on that? Media plays a big role in creating a lot of awareness. Like what are the deeds happening? What's, you know, what startup is doing? You know, what are the new opportunities? What's happening in other part of the world? I think it is media plays a lot of role in that sense. I think that creating the awareness is most important. I have not seen where it can attract the investors, you know but I would like to hear from other panelists but I think awareness is most definitely important in that way you can attract even maybe the investor from other part of the world look at, you know maybe for example, seeing, oh, there's a lot happening in UAE, you know, why not look at investing in the UAE? For example, if media talks a lot about this the startup growth, you know, the traction is in the market. Other comments on media? I would definitely agree that, yeah, media and branding is very important both for say a country to attract capital also for a startup to be able to attract capital because it really brings awareness and you might have a hidden gem say technology or something, but if it's hidden somewhere and no one knows about it then it's hard for it to attract capital and investors but obviously if it gets a big awareness you know, just thinking about a few startups in the past that had this, not even all of them were successful but I think definitely having media and bringing awareness can help bring in investors. I would agree with that and that's another piece of advice I would be keen on giving to entrepreneurs communicate about what you're doing don't just do that yourself or your team and try to have the perfect project because before you talk about it, share your vision there's something you want to accomplish that's why you're funding the startup why is it, tell people about it and the more you talk about it the more help you're going to get along the way. Yeah, look, I don't fully understand the question but you know, having been there myself particularly in ecosystems that are just emerging everybody's eager to find a success story and my view would be to not seek out media to talk about your company particularly in a local context depending on where your customers are the thing is to focus in on creating value for your customer and anything that takes your attention away at an early stage from focusing on the value creation and building your capacity to create that value for the customer is distracting you and wasting time and ultimately wasting capital. So focus, don't get distracted by shiny objects and if you're doing a good job and your company is building a success story media will come and local media and talk about that and that will be a distraction because everybody in the local community will want to talk to you about and you hold you up as an example and have you off speaking all over the place. So I think you have to be careful. Again, I don't know the exact context the question was asked but the most important thing is figuring out who your specific customers are and how you can create value for them. That's the most important thing an entrepreneur should do and anything that's taking them away from that is not time well spent. Yeah, I certainly agree that that's first and foremost. I thought the question is quite interesting because I have come to believe in my career that media exposure, especially popular press, general press and business press is kind of the best marketing money can't buy. I've had two instances, one early stage startup that got a very large exposure in the popular press and that led directly to funding interest and then in another case a general article that appeared in Fortune Magazine led to a very accretive acquisition by one of my companies. So obviously if you don't, Robert have a fundamental story to tell that the press can get excited about you're not gonna get the press and it's a waste of time. On the other hand, if you can engage the popular press with a compelling story, it can be hugely beneficial. Let's move on, another interesting question is does dependency on government funding create long-term sustainability and competitiveness issues for an ecosystem? Julia, what do you think? Yeah, I'll go ahead and answer this one. That's quite common here. It definitely creates challenges and it definitely decreases competitiveness in my opinion. So I think all funds, even if it's not regulation led and not government led should focus on creatively bringing in capital, private capital and not just from within their country but possibly from international investors because it also helps then the investors help their startup scale to next level bringing in a bigger network and with a bigger network more help, more mentors for their startups. So I definitely think that if it's just public money in a market, then public money doesn't necessarily invest for the same reasons as private money as previously this has been. We talked about this previously and with public money, they don't definitely look at returns. So obviously it might not be as competitive. So definitely yes. Other comments on the risk of government funding? Yeah, I mean government funding, there's in this region, there's several funds that are if you like pseudo government, they're funded by government even though they've got non-government folks managing those funds, early stage funds. I think the biggest risk that I've seen isn't so much reducing competitiveness is that the ecosystem over time, the early stage companies can get a little bit what I call lazy and so they'll go back for multiple rounds of smaller investment and get trapped in this kind of small cycle of raising a half a million dollars and continuing on. And one of the things with these government funds even if they got some professional managers is they don't like to kill companies or ideas. So every idea is not worthy. Every startup company is not worthy because it's an idea, it's a possibility that needs to be brought into fruition. That doesn't mean that they were bad or stupid. It's just, hey, there was an idea and then either the market didn't evolve or the product couldn't evolve to address the market need. And so this unwillingness to kill bad ideas but more significantly getting trapped in this cycle of kind of constantly raising small rounds of funding to stay alive rather than what's my actual value proposition that I can give you an example of a company that I was board chair for early on and they got trapped in that cycle, forced the company to look at what were there was their true valuation. Then they broke out of that small cycle, did a series A at 7 million and a year and a half later did a $30 million round all with international financing. So they got, it's breaking out of that local, that addiction to the local small amounts of capital that kind of keep me going. And I haven't really as a company being able to articulate where's this really going and is it worthy of follow on investment? So that's the danger, I think. Other comments on risks of being too dependent on government funding, Swetha? In my view, if the government funding is in the form of sort of a free money or grant, right? Where there's no clear measurable KPIs of gold, then it's dangerous because that leads to, startup kind of generally leads to complacent goal-setting, ineffective management, inefficient operations, I think. That's very dangerous zone. But if the fund is very innovative fund where it can help scaling up the business, for example, there is a one in Dubai called Mohammed Bin Rashid Innovation Fund. They support startup providing a very, the venture to a debt, it's kind of without any collateral security, right? And that's a very, very cheap interest rate. So those kind of debt which can motivate and help them to bridge the gap before they raise their equity. Also, because it's not an equity, it helps them to build their valuation. So those kind of a fund, I believe it's in most innovative fund is very helpful for the startup. Okay, another interesting question for you all. Is there a hype in impact investing and funding? Julia, you're nodding your head, yes? As far as I see, definitely, yeah. So this impact investing has definitely seen a hype. Both from LP sides also down to VCs investing into startups, so I think impact investing has definitely seen a hype. I think it's an interesting thing, an interesting concept. And our fund has actually dedicated to investing at least 30% of our fund into green technology. So we somehow are also working towards this. And yeah, I think it's a very interesting new component of investing not just for a return, but for other specific criteria. Interesting, here in the United States, of course, there's lots of talk about impacting investing and VC funds are starting to kind of modify their investment criteria. On the other hand, LPs all want maximum return on invested capital and IRR and so on. And we're still wrestling with how to kind of bring the two together. They're really conflicting in many respects. Are there comments on impact investing? Yeah, you're absolutely right. For many years, investing have been seen as low return investment or none at all. It was close to philanthropic investment. And now LPs want to get into impact investment, but they still want to keep the return they had. So there's a contradiction in term that we struggle to accommodate here. Robert, what's happening in Canada? Well, I guess I should comment here, given that I run an impact investment fund. So I think that we have to be careful about definition here. And I think what is an impact investment fund, the definition of that is morphing. Like Sophia was saying, the fund that I run is targeted on trying to create a paradigm shift related to the ocean. And that requires more patient capital. The timeline and the return on that capital are much different than a traditional PE fund or VC fund. And we have had dialogues with lots of funds who have, if you want to call it eco-friendly or understanding that there's an emerging market where consumers understand, I mean, what the pandemic has shown us is that we live in an interconnected world. And that quite frankly, as humans, we have had this kind of blind spot that somehow humans are one part of the global ecosystem and all other animals and nature are kind of a separate ecosystem when in reality we're all interconnected. And so there was an emerging awareness that we need solutions that are respectful of the entire environment. And so in traditional funds, they're going to have a renewed focus or a new focus on those, if you wanna call it circular economy objectives or things that are related to ocean sustainability and so forth, what we have to keep in mind is that do those traditional funds still have the traditional returns on capital that are required? And so where you're going for funding, you have to understand that, yes, they're going to look for opportunities that are in that eco sphere, if you like, and they're still gonna have to have the traditional returns. And so is what you're trying to do, going to fit inside that mandate or does it require some longer, more patient capital approach? And you still have to make the case for it. So I think it's separating, making distinctions into what you're actually calling impact investing. Well, look, I wish we had more time to dig into sort of the conflict between maximizing returns and doing good for the longterm, but we have five minutes left and I'm gonna ask each of you to summarize in 30 seconds, your overall view on building and using ecosystems to develop and accelerate startups. Before I do, we may run out of time and I wanna thank you all and the audience for a terrific panel. Your contributions have been really helpful and all the questions that came from the audience was really encouraging to me. So 30 seconds on a summary here. Who wants to start? Considerably for a soundbite that can appear in the ITU newsletter. I can start. I think, of course, startups needs to tap on the very good network of the ecosystems. Talk to the key stakeholders of the ecosystem, key player of the ecosystem, but even if there's not a right ecosystem, be a hustler, be a street smart, find your way to navigate into the, to scale up your business. Okay, very good, very succinct. Thanks, Sweepal. I would say that startups should find investors that then have a channel to other investors and then can help the startup scale. So not just one investment, but from there on, they're put onto a track where they're not alone with their fundraising, but they do get help to go forward in that channel. Okay, Julia, thank you. Yeah, I'll offer two pieces of advice. One for the startup, the startup companies themselves. The biggest question you have to ask as early as you can is who cares? Who cares about the product or service that you're providing and your ability to identify who cares and how you create value for them determines whether you've got a business worthy of capital investment. In terms of the ecosystem, I think the ecosystem requires for seed capital, you need champions. And those champions then have to build collaboration across the entire community to build a larger ecosystem than just seeking out capital. So there's a larger ecosystem supporting the building up of an entrepreneur set and an entrepreneurial community inside that startup community. And I would say that, of course, ecosystems are needed and essential to support the startup growth. But this pandemic for me, I see it as an opportunity because your ecosystem now is not local anymore, it's global. And through this new habits we're developing, you're able to find people that cares, like Robert said, anywhere in the world. So if you don't have a local ecosystem, reach out worldwide. You'll find people that care. Yeah, and I would offer three things. One, and really we talked about them all is there's opportunity in everything, including a terrible global pandemic, you just have to look for it and take advantage of it. Second is, even as sort of maybe nationalism is taking hold in many parts of the globe, entrepreneurship is really going global and we're distributing entrepreneurship in a way we never have before. And then finally, seek mentorship. Seek people who have done it before who have connections in the global economy. Just reach out to everybody you can and be a sponge. Well, listen, we're at the top of the hour. I wanna thank you all very much. Thanks to the audience. This has been a terrific panel and you all have a good morning, afternoon and evening. Thanks very much.