 It's a great pleasure to be here. I think I wasn't speaking in front of students maybe for 20 years, so for me it's quite new. But I think the development of any country or nation starts with education, so I think you are the future. So for me it gives a great pleasure to speak in front of you today. I can't say I have all the technical knowledge that Vorebaka has in terms of business concepts, etc., because I'm not a BA, Business Administration student. I was always political science and I think you can feel the way I kind of approach things is more from a political philosophy perspective, but I think a lot of my knowledge comes from philosophical kind of concepts. But I can probably just, it's like free jazz, right? I didn't prepare for this because I had no time. So I will probably, I just want to kind of maybe divide the lecture into three parts where I will probably in the first part I want to talk a little bit about your development, education and your learning, which I believe will help you succeed in the future. Then maybe I will talk more about my recent experience with what Vorebaka said in terms of attracting investment to Uzbekistan and sort of preparing necessary conditions for investors to come to Uzbekistan. And in the third part, since very recently I left government, maybe I will speak more about the private business and consulting that I'm now trying to develop and what challenges I'm facing there in private business as well. So roughly we will divide the lecture into three and then maybe ten minutes I'll leave for questions. What I mentioned about your, why I believe whatever you do, here I will probably write also self. So whatever you do, this will be fundamental in your success. So, you know, it's like, you know, Jack Ma, right? Jack Ma said, I mean I don't fully agree, but he said something like, until 20 you need to study as much as you can and from 20 to 30 you need to find a boss that you will follow and learn from. From 30 to 40 what you learned with your boss in a private corporate setting, whatever, you need to apply in your own business and then 40 to 50 you need to develop your business and then 50 to 60 I think he said you need to like teach and 60 plus you need to travel. But roughly that should, there are some things that I would kind of twist. You can also open a company when you are 20 if you are confident enough. But generally speaking, a lot of knowledge that you will apply from now to your 60 will come from this, from this, you know, from each other, from Holi Baka, from university, from self-learning, from internet, from books, etc. So how you succeed here will probably determine a lot of your success later. That's what I know from my kind of experience. And here what you need to understand is, you know, out there, everywhere, there is a lot of knowledge, a lot of knowledge, right? You need to understand how to sort of get it. First of all, you need to be passionate about something. You know, you need to kind of focus and study a lot, etc. A lot of this knowledge, you will come, you will get from, I don't know, from books, from internet, from university, from your colleagues, etc. But to get all of this, you need to kind of learn and this is what university will help you, how to think, okay? How to think. Probably you have a lot of like critical thinking classes now and strategy classes, how to sort of develop your ideas. Ideas is very important. Your ideas will come mostly from the body of knowledge that you have and the knowledge you will get from books, from everywhere. But if you kind of stop this process, I don't think you will actually succeed very much in the later stages. Because if you take Warren Buffett, 80% of his time, he's not looking at stocks, he's just reading books. You know, classical, modern, newspapers, that's all he does. He doesn't even have a computer. All he does is books, newspaper, etc. Why? Because this, this helps him to succeed and this will also equip you, you know, the word equip. This will equip you with the skills and knowledge that later on and actually throughout your life. Because the brain is like a muscle, okay? If you don't train it, it won't be strong. So this you have to do probably your entire life but now is the most critical time for you to do this. Because in your next stage, when you go into career, when you go into career and in liberal economics, you know that what's the main principle of capitalist economy? Competition. Exactly, competition. And people are ready to compete all the time. If you are not equipped with skills, can you compete? Probably not, you know, you will start with some small time jobs. But what Jack Ma said, that means between, I don't know, 10 and 20, you didn't study. So if you want to compete, you need to have ideas, knowledge, skills to succeed, right? I mean, obviously you shouldn't stop at, like Jack Ma said, at 20, I would say never stop. Always learn new things, languages, cultures, new skills or I don't know, cooking, traveling, etc. So this whole thing kind of adds to your development that will help you compete in a career. You want to be better than somebody else, right? And this kind of natural selection will help you be, you know, one step like better and then you will probably, I don't know, some of you want to buy a Ferrari or somebody wants to be a house or a private jet, they want to travel. I don't know, you probably have a lot of kind of, which is fine. More material things that you want to achieve. You don't want all of you want to be Tibetan monks, I guess, right? You don't need clothes or anything like that. So it's okay to be competitive, to succeed because with success you will attract more capital, more money, more interest from others, etc. You'll be popular, maybe you'll be a star, etc. So this process is very important. But the knowledge that you get, I mean, this is probably like another lecture on how to think. So you need to always have critical thinking. This is very important. Critical thinking will help you question everything. Even what I say now, you can question. It's fine. Question and doubt everything. It's okay to doubt, it's okay to question because if you question and doubt, you will never stop finding out more, learning more, going after more knowledge and that more knowledge will bring you more expertise. So this process doesn't take everything for granted. Whatever you hear out in the world and there is a lot of information, especially currently with social media, somebody says something, you don't have to believe. You can go through these cycles of is it really so? How is it? Is there evidence to support this, etc. And then overall you will kind of establish a certain kind of body of knowledge that will help you to develop kind of more stronger, let's say views and then sometimes opinions about something. It's quite important. Otherwise you will not be able to sort of develop your own, I would say, value system. It's important to have a value system. A value system is something that you base your actions upon. This is also very important. I'll come back to this, to value system. It all comes from sort of critical thinking and then knowledge development that you kind of develop. How do you know that you know something? Because you arrived at it after questioning, after learning, after reading, after understanding, big leaders, philosophers, politicians, etc. Values are important. I will come back to this. So as I said, it's important that you always keep self-development, knowledge, books. These things have to always continue in your life. Without that, I don't think you will be very successful. You can probably quit university now, like some people, some IT guys do it, I don't know, Stanford. But there's probably another one million guys who didn't succeed. So you can do that. It's no problem. But this is a conventional way of how to progress. And for now, we don't really yet have universities like Stanford yet, which kind of will generate those type of... But I hope in future, we will have maybe British University, we will have those kind of unique people that can jump. After this, they can jump straight. In 20 years, they can immediately go jump to the top. This is what I think is important to always keep in mind. Always learn, etc. Now, when you start your career, and this is where you probably want to stay within business, where do you usually plan to go to after university? Do you have any kind of plan? Who wants to do what? What do you want to do? Investment banking. Investment banking, it's good. That is great. Who else wants to do what? Government or teaching or... Own business? This is all this year, students. So this is only the start of the second year. Second year, okay. Finance, marketing. For now, they are still in the development kind of stage. So, if we come to career, I mean, I will speak about career. And for the past... I came back to Uzbekistan in 2019. Like Kholibakar, I was also abroad for many years. For about 19 years, 19 or 20 years. And I came back, I was working... First, I was working at the Minister of Investment, Foreign Trade at the Investment Promotion Agency. Then I was working on this street. There is an agency for information and mass communications where we were developing a kind of informational background and sort of coverage of what's happening in Uzbekistan in the last four or five years so that investment bankers come to us. So we wanted to show that we are ready for investment at everything else. And then I worked in the State Assets Management Agency. We were privatizing government assets to private sector. You probably know already that less government, more private sector, more prosperity, more or less. If you move from state economy to private economy, there should be less government. I will come back to this. And most recently, I'm now consulting on project financing in energy sector and then investment migration. Maybe somebody knows what... But I can come back to this as well. And also developing my own private business. So when you come to this active stage of your career, when you want to attract capital, when you want to develop your own business, there is a whole new set of skills and challenges that you need to have. Technical, that you will learn here in terms of financial analysis. Probably they will start learning sometime soon. In terms of legal analysis and then tax, probably you will also have any business or any actually country has a set of norms, set of rules that define how this business or country functions. And for you to be able to choose where to invest, I don't know, or who to partner with, you need to understand this kind of technical side of business. These ideas will give you intuition of which sphere to go to. By the way, when it comes down to money, to private capital, you know, equity, that always any money, any investment is linked to risk. Risk of losing that investment. You probably understand, no? So in order to not to lose money, which you don't want, you want to accumulate money, you will need to be analyzing kind of risk. You need to have always risk analysis. It doesn't matter if it's on the level of a country or if it's on the level of a company. So when investors come to Uzbekistan, they want to understand Uzbekistan's investment climate. So what does investment climate consist of? What do you think? Political system of the economy of the country. What does it mean, political system? Let's say the stability of the, let's say, the government in the country, the case for the investors to analyze. Is there any stability of, let's say, the control of the government or the businesses? Control of the government or the businesses? I mean, mostly you get it right. So they want to invest in countries that are politically stable. There is no war. There is no conflict. There is some sort of projection of peace over next, I don't know. Five, ten years they do like in a more stable setting. But what else do they think of when they want to invest? Political stability? Yes, please. Taxes is important, very important. How is, okay, okay, political stability is very important. Taxes. And then you mentioned how easy it is to open business, etc. Yeah, procedures. I think there was a, World Bank had this rating, which is now closed. Yeah, doing business, doing business report. I don't know, I mean, it got closed because it was, I don't know, it was like manipulated or something. But that was a very good indicator of where any country is in terms of doing business for investors. Probably there was like political stability, taxes, etc. I think we were at level 69. We were always, we were promoting that very much because we jumped from, I don't know, 20 places in the last like five years. It was quite a jump. But I think Georgia is in top ten, for instance. Yeah, I mean, when the, when the, when the, when this rating was still, was still there. So what else, what else is important? Taxes. What are the financial markets of the country? Capital markets. Capital markets is important. Why do you need to develop capital markets? Because as the naturally, investors are investing their capital in the country. So they have to be sure that there's quite trust in this and the capital market to increase this capital, capital even more. Yeah, this, this, so when you move from, when you move from state-owned economy to private, entrepreneurial economy, this is where you raise money. Or this is where you multiply your money. So a very developed capital markets allows your investment, your equity to come to a country and then, and then in this market, multiply, especially in developing markets, like I don't know, until recently, I don't know, Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, the rate of return can be very high because the country is developing very fast. So you understand what frontier markets are, right? Frontiers. So there is like a general known markets in the West. And then there are markets that are on frontier, a bit, just a bit right outside, but they create more opportunities. Why? Because there is less competition there. Less competition. All the companies haven't established their businesses there yet. It's meaning that, you know, it's untouched market and with the right system, it can generate very big profits. That's how we were also kind of promoting, you know, come to Uzbekistan, the market is still untouched, we don't have McDonald's. If you open a business, you can become a millionaire very fast because you don't have to compete. I don't know, I think Burger King is opening here, etc. But this is important. What else? Transparency. What's about transparency? Can you elaborate? Transparency about what? Information about entry and financial reports. Okay. There should be government assurance that investment to make sure that we can get money back or in case something is going to happen to government, government shouldn't take his assets, you know, like the same happened with Turkey before in Uzbekistan. Expropriation. Yes. And about the current sales, I think in front of the issues, investment is not sure in which currency is going to get the best money, sometimes the best is difficult. So what does this, why is this important? That somebody doesn't take your business. What's one of the most fundamental concepts of capitalism? Private property. Exactly. Private property. This is very important. You want to make sure that your property is well protected. Okay? By this political system. Private property in the West is like sacred. So when you bring your equity, first thing you think, okay, I don't want anybody to take over my land, my buildings, my company, my ideas, just because somebody in the political system decides, okay, now you brought your business, now it's mine, bye-bye. But to do that, to do that and to have investor confidence, okay, investor confidence, you need to develop a system where all this is understandable, political stability, laws understandable, so that businesses that came here in the last four or five years, they grew, you know? So if you invest in Kyrgyzstan and you become rich, we will look at you and we will say, okay, he became rich in Kyrgyzstan. What's happening in Kyrgyzstan? I want to go there because it seems like this is working, my capital is growing, I want to go to that market, right? So this investor confidence about the market is very important. There are a lot of ratings, but generally speaking, this is generated through track record, okay? Track record or the so-called success stories. More success stories you have, more interesting your market for investors, more businesses come here, more will follow because everybody wants to follow the money, all right? Everybody wants to follow very high return, not 1%, not 0.5%, 10%, 20%, it's interesting. Capital will move where there are good conditions to grow, okay? So it is true, it's upon us and our government and our political system, our tax system to create certain conditions for business, for capital, especially foreign capital that comes with a lot of fears, you know, your market, yeah, we're not sure yet, et cetera. So do you think our system is already very attractive for foreign investment? I don't think so, sir. Because I think in terms of the financing, we don't have solid developed financial right that can satisfy all the investors that are coming here. We don't need to have... I mean, you have Wall Street, but at that level of development, there are only very few, I would say, financial markets like that. Dubai wanted to develop into a proper financial market, but it's not there yet, I would say. I mean, you have London, it's true. You have Japan, Hong Kong, but it's very difficult. Investors don't expect us to have developed financial markets that quickly. I think we also need another specialist who will qualify for work in this field and who will give the best. So you need to have human capital. Human capital is very important. And this is where British management university is important. So you need to have human capital. You guys, or I don't know, maybe foreign specialists come to the country, usually they say trade follows investment. First, when they come to a country, maybe they don't want to invest. First, they say, let's trade a bit. Let's see how reliable you are. If we can build trust, building trust is very important. Build trust, okay? So this, you can apply in any career or sphere or personal relationship as well. Trust will help you build a certain relationship upon which you can act. You're not afraid so much. You know what to expect, okay? You know what to expect. So you know that if we are in a trustworthy relationship, I know that you will go straight in two, three years.