 talk to you today about why Go Global, the opportunities and challenges of changing the world at scale. My name is Allison. I'm a managing partner of Fresco Capital. We're a global early stage venture fund and innovation studio. And our mission is building global ecosystems. But first, I want to tell you a story about how I got here. This is me looking super awesome. And this is where I come from. I was born and raised in a place which was not very global at all. I'm from Illinois. The town where I grew up was the same town where my parents grew up, and their parents grew up as well. And basically, everyone was exactly the same. But for some reason, I've been trying to do global business since I was six years old. I've always been very interested in people that are different from me. And so when I was six, I did a project in school on Tanzania. And I was fascinated to learn that in Tanzania, they don't use toothbrushes. They were instead using these really cool twigs to clean their teeth. And I thought, I'd really like to learn more about this. So I wrote a letter to the embassy, and I asked them if they could kindly send me some of these toothbrush twigs so that I could distribute them to my friends and family. Obviously, no one ever wrote me back. Then I kept trying. And when I went to summer camp and I was 10, I met a girl who was here from Tokyo, who was there from Tokyo. And she started teaching me about Japan. And I was fascinated, because as I've learned over the past few years, the way you do things here is very different. So I started an aggressive campaign toward my parents, asking them to send me to Japan to learn more. But unfortunately, we couldn't afford it, so I had to keep trying. After I got to Harvard, I studied Japanese for a year, and I thought, great, this is the time. I'm going to go work in Japan. I ended up getting an internship at an architecture firm, but it was unpaid. And I figured that if I needed to come here, I should probably make a little bit money so that I could at least afford somewhere to live. So then I tried again, and I applied to this small company called Goldman Sachs. And it wasn't because I had a big dream to work on Wall Street. It was largely because they had international offices. And I wanted to go work either in Hong Kong or Tokyo and finally have that experience I'd been dreaming of. But they took one look at me and heard my Japanese language skills, and they said, nope, you got to go to New York. You can't come out here. So I went there, and I started building my reputation on Wall Street. And I thought, OK, people know who I am. I've done a good job here. It's the perfect time to start pitching them on transferring out to an international office. But we were in the midst of the financial crisis. We were in the midst of the financial crisis. And the firm was under siege from the regulators so the timing wasn't right. So then I thought, OK, maybe I should go to a place that's faster moving and innovative and more willing to move fast and break things. So I joined an early stage startup based in New York called General Assembly. General Assembly started as a co-working space but then was launching at the time an education business to train working professionals in digital and entrepreneurial skills. Our mission was to empower people with the skills they needed to pursue work that they loved. So I was an early member of the team. It was an amazing experience. We developed those programs and launched them in New York. We had just raised a new round of VC funding, and I thought this timing is perfect. Now I'm going to pitch them on why they need to be a global business. So I put together a beautiful PowerPoint, and I went, and I met with the founders, and I told them all of the reasons why they should go global. And the answer was no. So we sat there and we had a conversation about, even though it sounded really great, there were tons of reasons not to build a global business. It's actually insane. The first reason is that nobody knows you. It doesn't matter how famous or beloved you are in your home market. When you show up in a new place, none of that matters. I got a call from one of our founders based in Silicon Valley the other day because a Japanese corporate had reached out about meeting with him about a potential investment or acquisition. And he said, Allison, I'm really busy building our startup. I have no idea who these guys are. Is it worth meeting with them? And I look at the email, and it's actually one of the most famous well-known companies here in Japan, and the CEO is somewhat of a celebrity. But that meant absolutely nothing to our founder in Silicon Valley. So I had to explain to him just how important this meeting could be. The second reason is what you did before won't work now. When you launch in a new place, it's guaranteed that things are going to be different. And localization is required for your product, for your team, your business model. And there's a million other reasons why it's totally crazy to build a global business. And I've heard them over and over, over the years. But as I was sitting there talking to our founders, I kept thinking at the time, I kept thinking of this quote from Steve Jobs, which is that the people that are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones that do. So I decided to do something crazy, and I told them I was gonna do it anyway. So I bought a one-way plane ticket to Hong Kong and decided to move out there to launch these education programs. At the last minute, they realized I was both crazy and serious at the same time, and they gave me the go-ahead. And that's what I did. It was an amazing time. We launched these education programs. In our first year, we empowered 2,500 people in Hong Kong with the digital and entrepreneurial skills they needed to pursue work that they loved. And over that time, I was able to build a team, and I could see that the opportunity was so much greater than I had ever realized before having landed on the ground there. But the challenges were great too. And one of the biggest challenges was convincing our founders to give me the kind of resources and flexibility that we would need in order to truly pursue this opportunity. So I went and sought the advice of some people that I trusted. They were my friends at the time, and now they're my partners at Fresco Capital. But they also had experience building global businesses. My partner, Steven, was born and raised in New York, and he is the technical co-founder of five different VC-backed startups. His last one was a developer tools company called Telerik, and he had run around all over the world, setting up their international offices and connecting with local developer ecosystems there. Before that, he had done something similar for Microsoft. Antitis, my other partner, was born in Poland, grew up in Canada, and had spent time living all over the world, scaling financial businesses once for HSBC and once for himself. And we realized that there was a gap in the market. Most early-stage investors are very local. They think only in terms of their local ecosystem, and that's very important, especially at the early stage. But we felt we had something unique to offer that we could leverage our experience, our network, and our capital to help companies go global. So we set up our first fund, we raised the money from some other globally-minded investors, and we started making investments. We made those investments in companies no matter where they were based, and then we got our hands dirty helping them go global. That meant getting them their first sales customers in Asia, or helping them negotiate with manufacturers in Shenzhen, or helping them move their engineering team from San Francisco to Europe in order to save on runway. And then we started making some more investments and learning in the process of what our companies needed and what their challenges were. And through that, we started to build a really amazing team of other people that were just the right amount of crazy, just crazy enough to also build global businesses. Started to notice some patterns. So we've now invested in over 50 companies around the world. We've helped about one-third of them launch internationally in some way. We've co-invested with 600 other investors, and we've even started working with our LPs and other strategic corporates who are looking for help helping their, creating their business at a global scale. And that's what I want to share with you today, is for every reason there is not to go global, there's plenty of reasons to go global. The first is there's a larger market size outside of your country than inside of it. I don't care who you are or where you're from, even if you're from the US, China or Japan, your market is larger outside. Take Facebook, for example, one of the most powerful companies in the world. It's worth about $400 billion, and they have 1.23 billion daily average users. It's definitely known as an American company. It was founded at my alma mater. But they created this beautiful map of where their daily active users are based, and as it turns out, 75% of them are outside of the US and Canada. Second reason is optimizing your operations, no matter what you want to conserve your resources, as well as leverage the unique offerings that every kind of local ecosystem has to offer. Take a company called Automatic. I'm sure many of you have never heard of it, but they actually power about 25% of the internet through wordpress.com. They have 175 million monthly unique visitors, and they've been able to do that with only 540 employees, which is drastically less than other companies that experience the same amount of traffic. And they've been able to do that because they have a 100% distributed workforce. We have another portfolio company called Spire, which is building a truly global business. They've launched about 25 small satellites into space, and they're collecting the best cheapest data about what's happening on the earth right now. And they've only been able to do that because they've built a team that's truly global and they've leveraged the talent that's available in each unique ecosystem. So they built a software engineering team in San Francisco, a weather science team in Colorado, a space team in the UK, and business development teams out here in Japan as well as Singapore. The third reason is you can have a first mover advantage. Whatever you're trying to do, if it's a big opportunity, I guarantee there are other people trying to do the same thing. And showing up first globally can make a big difference. Take Netflix, for example. They made a dramatic move in January of 2016 by launching in 130 new markets overnight. Thank God one of them was Japan because I'm a big Netflix fan. But the number one way they were able to justify this to their investors was by saying it was the only way they could get a head start on their competition. And their investors are happy because now they're getting 73% of their new users from international sources. And the stock is trading at 340 times earnings per share which is one of the best performing stocks on the NASDAQ stock exchange. The fourth reason is access to capital. The most successful and powerful companies are staying private for longer. And they've been able to do that because they brought in large later stage investors from international sources. It's estimated that 26% of US unicorns have at least one investor from China. And that's ignoring the huge pools of capital that are now becoming available in the Middle East as well as here in Japan. The last, one of the last reasons is better exits. So I'm sure you're all on a mission to change the world, but we all want to make a little money in the process. And if you have more options for exits, that can significantly improve your valuations. In fact, five of the top 10 deals done last year were cross-border. SoftBank bought ARM, which is a UK-based company for $32 billion. Samsung bought Harman Industries, Micro Focus, a UK company bought Hewlett-Packer Enterprise out of the US for almost $9 billion. And 10 cent from China bought Supercell, well, most of Supercell for almost $9 billion. So whether you're on the acquirer side or you're looking to get acquired, having a global strategy can significantly help you. Another important reason is that we're living in times of unprecedented uncertainty. So whether it's natural disasters like the earthquake that hit Japan in 2011 or unnatural disasters like Donald Trump getting elected as president or the recent financial crises that have been happening in South America, you need to diversify your sources of capital as well as revenue if you're gonna stick around to solve the problem that you're hoping to solve. Another great reason from my main man, Tony Robbins, is you have to grow so you have something to give. No matter how well you're doing in your home market, if you wanna keep growing, the only way to grow up is to grow out. And most importantly, and what I wanna leave you with today is that we can't afford not to. We are facing some of the biggest challenges that humans have ever faced, whether it's the global refugee crisis, the threat of nuclear bombs, technology changing the nature of jobs, or the pension time bomb that's being passed down from generation to generation. The fact that we have an outdated education system that was built after the Industrial Revolution and is no longer relevant for the technology driven world we live in today, or cybersecurity, cyber terrorism, fake news, there's a million problems that we need to solve and the only way we can do that is by working together. We spend time in all different ecosystems around the world and I see so many people trying to reinvent the wheel. We need to work together to find the best solutions to these global problems and share them with every ecosystem if we want to move forward. So my last point that I wanna make today is about the top lessons learned throughout this process because there's no doubt that building global businesses is incredibly hard but also incredibly rewarding. The first lesson is that creativity is required. You're gonna have to start from zero no matter what you do and you need to think outside of the box. You need to be willing to get your hands dirty and figure out what works and test some things. Second thing is to invest in what makes you different. When you're a company showing up in a new market it's important to understand the local ecosystem and that's a huge part of our strategy. But whenever you show up there I guarantee you people are gonna tell you that you have to be like them in order to succeed. But in fact what's most valuable about you is precisely what makes you different. So don't forget that instead invest in it where you can. And the third thing is that you cannot do it alone. No matter what you're doing or how famous you are or how much cash you have on your balance sheet it's impossible to build a global company without the right partners and the right help. So whether you're a corporate or a startup or an individual if you're interested in solving problems at a global scale please join us. We'd love to work with you. And I just wanna leave with this last quote from Steve Jobs. We're here to put a dent in the universe otherwise why be here. So let's do it together. Thank you.