 It's my pleasure to welcome you to this GIST Tech Connect event. My name is Jonathan Margolis, and I am the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Science, Space, and Health in the Bureau of Oceans, International, Environmental, and Scientific Affairs at the U.S. Department of State. The State Department leads the Global Innovation through Science and Technology Initiative, or GIST. I want to start by thanking the GIST team here at State and at CRDF Global, our partner in the GIST initiative, for their hard work in putting this event together and for their efforts to build innovation ecosystems around the world. As President Obama has said, we believe that entrepreneurs can create jobs that fortify relationships between countries, build global markets, and help fulfill the dreams of all who desire the freedom to make of their lives what they will. The GIST initiative is based on a simple idea. When young innovators have the skills and mentoring they need, they are more likely to take the risks that can turn their ideas into startups and ultimately successful businesses. Through a range of competitions, boot camps, and programs like this Tech Connect event, GIST provides skills development, networking opportunities, and financial advice. The GIST network extends through Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, and includes over 150,000 entrepreneurs. We work with U.S. and local experts to ensure that GIST participants have the support that they need to help take their ideas and innovations to the marketplace. GIST celebrates those innovators and entrepreneurs who, even though they may fail, are willing to take the chance to make their dreams a reality. I want to thank our panel of experts for joining us today to share their experiences and answer your questions. And now I'm pleased to introduce Ovidio Bujaran of CRDF Global, who is today's moderator. Thank you Deputy Assistant Secretary Margolis, we are very excited to welcome our viewers to today's global innovation through science and technology, also known as GIST, Tech Connect Global Conversation about Bootstrapping your venture. We have an incredibly knowledgeable and dynamic panel with us today that includes three very successful entrepreneurs. They are here to offer their insight and to help answer some of your burning questions about how to bootstrap your venture. I'm Ovidio Bujaran and I'm the senior manager of the GIST initiative. We are very proud to partner with the State Department on this initiative that empowers youth around the world to turn their technologies and science ideas into viable ventures that catalyze economic growth. CRDF Global has been proudly supporting technology entrepreneurs in more than 40 countries for more than 15 years. Our programs are centered on fostering and identifying the most promising tech entrepreneurs and supporting them through practical venture development training, in-depth mentorship and access to networks, capital and global expertise. Today we are thrilled to host the third virtual connex web chat connecting entrepreneurs and innovators across geographies and continents and we have many participants around viewing science around the globe. This level of outreach is possible because of the partnership between CRDF Global, the U.S. State Department and more than 25 local partners organizations with similar missions with the GIST initiative. We'd like to ask you to use the hashtag GIST Connect when talking about the event today and share with your colleagues all the lessons learned so that the impact is broader and at the same time we are collecting questions to ask our panelists later in the program but feel free to start sending us questions now and as the program continues we'll start getting the questions that you send us. I would also like to request that you take out some paper and a pencil and to jot down some notes because an idea may come to you during this conversation or something that one of our panelists says may resonate with you. This recording will be available to watch again at any time after May 20 and we'll also provide a summary of all the conversations in a visual format as well as the transcripts of the event. Among other things you are going to learn how to advance your venture to a next stage through bootstrapping which is a cost efficient and network oriented method. I'm personally looking forward to a very productive, inspiring and engaging conversation with our guests today and also with you the audience. Just for a context for background today's session, GIST Connect will further the dialogue between our panelists, entrepreneurs, mentors and investors in America, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Turkey with the purpose to exchange perspectives, experiences and trends in creating and advancing science and technology ventures. We are very excited to continue the conversation. We started with our first Tech Connect that was focused on ideation and now we are building on that topic adding the bootstrapping your venture that builds on the last topic of the conversation we had. The previous conversations energize thousands of entrepreneurs across the globe through the outreach of GIST and we look forward to kind of building on that excitement and also on the knowledge we have built. There are some distinct advantages of bootstrapping your ventures and it would be great to talk with you as we go through the program. The reason why we chose this topic is actually in the countries that we are working with, some of them they have access to risk capital, to venture capital and angel either like established venture firms or in more of the cases are like government bank venture funds. A good number of other countries there is a lack of presence of risk capital so the reason why we chose this topic is to kind of indicate how an entrepreneur that do not necessarily has access to risk capital can bootstrap their ventures and can grow their ventures by bootstrapping them. So that was the reason why we chose this topic and the next one we will have will focus more in depth into actually raising capital but even for ventures that may raise venture capital I know that investors they do prefer to kind of see very good signs of traction. So bootstrapping even for ventures that may raise capital later is very important to indicate there is a traction in the market so would be great to kind of start the conversation to kind of provide a little bit more of a context starting with why bootstrapping first of all. So Susan if you would like to share with us a number some of your insights why bootstrapping how is this helpful for an entrepreneur? Well it all starts out with when you have that idea and it's just consuming you and you have to make sure that it comes to fruition sometimes people just don't have access to resources and so bootstrapping allows them to really start testing the market as well as then when it is off and running making sure that you do as much as you can with as little as possible and it really does show investors or anybody possibly coming in as a customer as an investor that you are going to try to be as sustainable as possible. There are incredible stats to show that companies that started during recessions actually ended up having greater success later because they knew how to do more with less from the beginning. So the whole concept of bootstrapping is finding ways to do more with less at every turn and we found that even companies that have a lot of capital from the beginning they typically don't always think about those little bits of savings that really do add up in the end so bootstrapping is all about keeping it simple and doing as much as you can. Great so excited to get into the topic so that we went before introducing our speakers which is great. I would like to introduce our viewers to the three speakers we have for today. We are very fortunate to have all three of you with us three very successful entrepreneurs to share your experiences in generating new ideas on how you can grow the business and also answer questions from our viewers. Sherry Lozberg to my left is a seasoned entrepreneur in the U.S. and emerging markets. She has lived in Moscow for over five years while building the leading Russian equity house. Sherry has been at MIT Sloan School of Management for ten years teaching about U.S. venture capital investment and emerging market entrepreneurship. She also consults on domestic and international startup issues. Her specialties are in the emerging market entrepreneurship and investment, U.S. venture capital investment, strategy and negotiation in funding U.S. high-tech startups, domestic and international corporate governance and Russian capital markets. We also have Raj Kumar, founder and president of DevEx. He has been profiled in the Financial Times, foreign policy, Forbes and Washington Post where DevEx was called the Bloomberg of foreign aid. Beginning as a student project while he was doing his graduate studies at the Harvard Kennedy School, today DevEx is a social enterprise that operates the most popular international development website and has offices in five countries. Prior to DevEx, Raj co-founded a successful internet startup, Smart Portfolio, which was sold to TheStreet.com in 2000. And finally we have with us Dr. Susanna Matt, the co-founder and executive director of the Launchpad at Topol. The Launchpad is an entrepreneur and innovator resource center at the University of Miami considered the international model for entrepreneurship education. The Launchpad has been replicated with support from the Blackstone Charitable Foundation, creating the only network of collegiate entrepreneurs. A serial entrepreneur, she has also founded Venture Hive, a technology accelerator based on economic development principles, recruiting new talent in focus verticals based on the strengths of Miami, healthcare, travel and hospitality and creative industry. Dr. Amat was honored at the White House as a champion of change for her work mentoring entrepreneurs. To get us started, I want to ask each one of our panelists, viewers, how bootstrapping a venture can help advance their company and offer some words of wisdoms they have for entrepreneurs listening to us today. So Shari, if you can share some of your thoughts from your own experience in bootstrapping some of the ventures you work with or in working with some of the ventures that bootstrap, what were some of the key insights that you kind of use so as you? So first of all, I want to say thank you so much for including me in today's panel. This is something that I feel very passionate about and I know the rest of today's speakers do as well. It is bootstrapping is, and first of all I just want to say bootstrapping, everyone has a slightly different definition of just what we mean. I would really focus on, as Susan said, getting the most value for as little as possible and that can be both as little money and also effectively using your time. Those are both very scarce resources for entrepreneurs. For me, when working with technology companies in particular emphasize the importance of being able to generate some kind of revenue while focusing on your big picture. If you have a longer term project that will take months or perhaps even years to fully develop, it is critical to be able to generate some revenue on the side that is not your critical focus but that will allow you to pay the bills. This gives you breathing room, it gives you oxygen and I strongly encourage entrepreneurs to explore opportunities to generate revenue even in the early days to allow you not to have to go out and seek out venture capital earlier than you need to. Great. Thank you, Shari. Raj, you are here. The great comments made by my fellow panelists here. I think what's great about bootstrapping having done it is that it forces you to ask some pretty tough questions of yourself. You come as an entrepreneur with a lot of passion and an idea and you think this idea is perfect and it's going to work. What bootstrapping forces you to do because you're really relying on few resources is to really find out is there a market for this? Is it practical? Will it work? In the dot-com days here in the U.S. where there was lots of risk capital available, anybody could get it, what you saw was a lot of people spent that money quickly and realized at the end that they really didn't have a viable business. Being in a situation where you don't have abundant resources where you have to bootstrap can be good because it can get you to the nub of what your business opportunity really is. You might decide, well, this isn't a business opportunity or you might decide it really is, but I need to tweak it, adjust it, change it in a way that makes it more marketable and commercial. Great. Great insights. I'd like to get back to Susan and ask, who can bootstrap? Is bootstrapping for all the ventures? Do we see bootstrapping? Some specific type of ventures doing more bootstrapping rather than others. Is bootstrapping not applicable to any venture that can be started? I think anybody can use bootstrapping. It really is kind of a philosophical view of how you want to run your company from the beginning. We have thousands of entrepreneurs who have come through our doors in the last few years, everyone from that restaurateur who can start doing catering, start figuring out exactly what the market interests are. I think your comment is really important because a very simple way to start with the bootstrapping mentality is, before you even start the business, go talk to customers and really make sure that you're creating something that makes sense to solve their problems. Even while you're going to market with whatever it may be, having that constant customer dialogue, I think both of their points were really well taken especially the cash flow is really the only way you have a business period. Finding those early wins, finding those early customers who understand that you're a startup, understand that you're there and are building something from scratch so hopefully they understand that they're really partnering with your business from the beginning to help make it possible but that you're going to be able to customize your offerings to their needs. Bootstrapping is about having that mentality from day one that you're really in touch with the easiest way to get a solution to your potential customers as efficiently and effectively as possible. Great, so if I'm a young tech entrepreneur and I have a great idea, I might have started to develop, how do I know that bootstrapping my company is the right choice for me now? Why not just go straight to VCs and our angel investors? Well, so first of all, many times there is no VC, right? Many markets around the world and in many sectors, even in markets like the United States, there is no venture capital easily available. If it's at a very, very early stage, there is no more expensive money in the world than venture capital. What you will give up at a very, very early stage to that investor will be enormously, enormously dilutive taking away what you retain in your company. That is, in my opinion, rarely worth it. But being able to look beyond and find advisors to build out a network who can provide support without the money, but the information, the market insight, the product insight, who can make introductions to potential employees, potential customers, potential vendors. Those are the kinds of value that come from bootstrapping. It's not an exchange of capital. It's an exchange of information and of support. And that is critically valuable at those early stages. Great. So basically, as an entrepreneur, how do you start to bootstrap? Where do you start? Where do you go? You have a great idea. We established through the first Tech Connect on ideation. You have your first great idea. You know you have something. Day zero, what do you do? I think the way most entrepreneurs do it is that they start out in a job. So they've got a job. It's their day job and they have an idea for a business. And at night and on the weekends, they're looking at ways to develop that business. And the question is where do you go from there? How do you get to the next step where maybe you leave your full time source of income to get into this business? As Sherry said, you try to find some angle to generate some revenue on the side, perhaps keep the business going. That's usually the starting point. It's usually the big hard choice for an entrepreneur to make. Do I give up my day-to-day job and move into this business? Or do I keep just doing it a little bit on the side? That's kind of the tipping point. And as an investor, what you're looking for in part is that level of commitment. So if you have an entrepreneur coming to you with a great idea, great business plan saying please invest, but they haven't yet been willing to do their own hard work of leaving their day-to-day job and taking the risk, then you may be less likely as an investor to invest. So this is an important moment, I think, for an entrepreneur to decide when do you begin the bootstrapping process. Much of it, as has been discussed, is going after customers. And you can do that early on. You can go and talk to companies. Talk to potential clients and say, hey, this is the product idea I have. You may not have the funds to prototype it yet, but you can show a design. You can describe it. You can talk about pricing and determine is there really a market. So that can be the beginning of your bootstrapping, really, with no cost other than your time. That's great. And basically, I'd like to connect it with another point now with the crowdfunding platforms. We have an entrepreneur of ours, one of the most successful, who is taking Hubeika from Lebanon that has a device that allows swimmers to monitor their progress by tracking their pulse. She went on Indiegogo, and I think she raised about $30K. And those sorts of platforms also are very helpful in actually getting orders. So that's a good way to get customers and get feedback. So I think it's very important, like you said, that turning point when you kind of go, commit yourself for a certain course of action for this venture. And that will be actually based on feedback from the market, when you actually know that you have something, because you know you'll be asked by the investors and the other people that you want to attract in your own to support you to build your venture for that purpose. Now, going from that moment on, from our work with GIST, we saw that basically you cannot do it by yourself. So you need to kind of look at building a team and trying to see what sort of complementary set of skills you can have. We like to ask a question of our panel on how you can bootstrap by actually recruiting a team that will start working with your own that specific venture to bring it even to the next level of development. If, for example, you don't have, you are not multitasking and you can do all those things by yourself, you know. And also, even if you can do it, it may be smarter to do it together so that you can actually accelerate your time to market. So we would like to... I can handle that one. A big part of that is your own vision and leadership for what you're doing, because if you're still at the early stages of figuring out exactly what it is, the kind of team members you're bringing on are going to be full partners in that and help develop what that vision will be. So you want to get people who are going to be able to go through the long run with you and not just kind of be there for the simple solution of, right now I need X, so I'm going to bring that type of person on. If you know that you have a worldwide, huge international vision, you want people who are going to subscribe to that and follow you in it. So the question really is, are you leading a charge of this solution or are you putting a team together to truly be a team and develop what that product or service and vision will look like together? The bootstrapping mentality there is also really important. If you're truly going to try the philosophical approach to bootstrapping, you want to find people who are going to understand that they're probably going to have to work night and weekends for very little pay, if any, and they're going to be looking to be partners from that and understand what that means, which is a pretty big commitment through thick and thin, putting a business together. And can I just add, and that's a critical piece to build on what Susan said, really making sure that every member on that team shares that approach, because there are lots of different approaches to entrepreneurship and to how a team ought to work together. And so really drilling down and making sure that as you build your team that there is a great consensus, that there is agreement on that bootstrapping approach, because it's not for everyone. If I may, we have a company in our program right now that is doing incredible things and really doing an international approach that's really, I think, going to go very well. And the founding two or three team members have been working for a couple of years for nothing, reinvesting every cent they make. And the new CEO they're bringing in wants a big salary from the beginning plus equity. And so it's becoming a challenge, because it is so different from how they've been running their business for a while. And they have major concerns about if that person is going to be able to help them remain lean through their development. Let me just add that the most important issue both of my fellow panelists have commented on is getting those early partners, the full-time people who work with you on the business. But one new innovation I've been seeing, which I think a lot of entrepreneurs can learn from, there's a particular business that I've been looking at as an early-stage investment. And they know that their market is with tax advisors, tax attorneys. So what they've gone out and done is solicited a lot of these attorneys for advice. And people who are in certain industries want to be on the cutting edge. They want to know about the latest technology. And so they've generated a group that they haven't paid anything to, but they've invited out to small meetings. They got them on an email list. They send them updates about their new business. And so they now have a group of tax attorneys around the world that are really interested in this new business they're developing and this new technology they're developing. It's very early-stage, but when they approach investors, they can say, look at this group of potential customers who already know the technology, understand it, and are influencing its development. That's something you can do today. You couldn't have done a decade ago because of social media, the ability to find these people out there. You can do that on your own, sitting in your living room. I think that's a great point. And one of the questions I had was actually how you can do your research, your researching the market, seeing the trends by also involving the specific set of advisors or experts that you connect with. So in a way, you brought the two together. And I think especially through the cost-effective way because the entrepreneur did not pay them anything. And as an entrepreneur, you try to imagine yourself, who may need this? And you connect with them earlier on. You get their expertise and their input that could be really helpful in designing and customizing what you are preparing in a better way. I think. So to build on that, I just wanted to emphasize the importance of your informal networks. Wherever you are, and Ovi has heard this as a student at the Sloan School, but your informal networks, not just where you work, but where you went to school, who your neighbors are, people you play football with, your connections that are part of your daily life, in addition to the more formal networks that you or professional groups that you may belong to, those are incredibly rich places to draw on for advisors, for market insights, customer insights to help you validate your idea, and also to build support that through social media can exponentially grow. So look not just to the professional groups, but really go back and look at who do you know, how do you know them, how can you connect to folks who you know socially and informally. They can be one of your greatest resources. You'd be surprised how many people I connected with on the soccer field. I did, even like in Tanzania, now one of my friends who I used to play here is actually relocated to Tanzania, and we just came from a regional East African bootcamp, and also entrepreneurs, Voice of America reporter. So it's very interesting how you can use your hobbies also to kind of advance some of your passions and ventures you have. What are some of the key areas for bootstrapping? How can your customers help you bootstrap your ventures? Let's go a little bit deeper on how do you go to kind of select the first potential customers? How do you kind of go after them? How do you do a little bit of research? Who would be the most appropriate? Are you going for the ideal customer first, or you are doing some trial outs with customers that are maybe not ideal, because in case you don't have your product or service ready, you don't want to ruin a potential relationship at the beginning of the initial phases. I think it's important to kind of think through a little bit the mechanism. You are an entrepreneur, you are a pull-up potential customers, how do you go about it? Well, let me just think about one business that I'm involved in right now. Two partners worked for about a year together developing a piece of technology. It's a web-based application, and they just did that with no revenue, but they built this up on the side while they had other jobs, and now they're at the point of wanting to put it out in the market. So what they've done is developed a beta version of the product and gone out to a number of customers that are well-known in their market and convinced them to sign up for free. They're not getting any revenue from this, but they're getting some early customers that can put their product on their website with their brand, that they can then go show their second phase of customers, look, this works, I've got some beta customers using it, and they can then start charging. So part of it is kind of how you pace out the development of your business. It varies a lot based on the kind of company that you're building, but that is one way to look at it, beta products for beta customers. Okay, great. And the earlier example of the crowdfunding platforms where you can put your product on the market and see who would respond to that, and you can connect it also to the different social communities online that you can see that could respond to what you have. If I could add on to that. Sure, sure. You also have to look at, is it a business to business product or service, or is it a business to customer, to consumer? If it's B2B, business to business, part of what you're looking at though also is, are there thousands of potential customers or 10? If there's thousands, you can find the first few because you may not have your pitch worked out 100%. You may still be trying to figure out and learn from your customer as you're doing that development. So finding a few early customers, I think your point is really important. Finding those first few customers who will help you build it, especially if you're from that industry and you've worked in that industry, you probably have great contact socially that you've met over the years that would be excited to be part of it and let you experiment with it. But making sure that you spend the time strategically looking at, there may be companies who won't wanna work with you if you're working with one of their big competitors from the beginning. So a lot of it is really what your solution is offering. Great, these are all great points and I'd like to now move to our audience and ask a couple of questions. Now we have a live question, Mohammed in Egypt. He has seen bootstrapping a software startup and before starting generating revenue from our main project, some good revenue streams can be generated through developing custom applications that might not be related to the main focus. What should we do? Should we take these projects and use them to grow the team and gain more development experience or should we simply denounce them and focus on our main product? I think you mentioned a little bit tangently at the beginning this question but it would be great to kind of go in more depth. So Mohammed, I would be 100% behind you and your team generating this revenue on the side. It comes at an opportunity cost because you're not able to spend 100% of your time on developing your main project. On the other hand, you generate revenue, you're able to put food on the table at night but you are also gaining experience, you have the opportunity not just to develop the product but also you have teamwork experience that gives you and your team an opportunity to work together. Overall, I believe that as long as you identify a percentage of time, 20%, maybe 25% of your company time can be devoted to current revenue producing projects while you retain that primary focus on your longer term project. Some sort of balance that you as a team agree on that's the winner, that's the winner. Great, we have a quick comment. If I can add on to that, I totally agree that you should take those extra projects. The diligence that she mentioned is very important. So it's not just about a time percentage which I think is extremely important but also make sure that you're charging enough so that you can have that extra person working for you. So you can use those resources well to create that long-term goal. If possible, what you mentioned specifically is that are not at all part of the focus of the main product. If you can, try to have those outside projects move into the focus of your main product because then what that looks like is you're developing already for that industry which may, again, be a great way to build the brand up of what you're building on the outside for your product. Great, our group in Uganda asks what are the different ways of saving money when I'm just starting a company? How can I be cost effective? Well, I'll just tell you from my own experience, the classic one is to work from home. Start your business in your own kitchen or your living room. Don't spend a lot of money on real estate or rent if you can avoid it. Use an internet connection. Use your laptop if you've got one or whatever resources you might even have at your current day job. So if you have access there in a responsible way to whatever products or technology or telecommunications they have that helps, it's a lot cheaper now to start a company, to Bootstrap than it was a decade or two ago. You can really connect to the entire world in a way that you couldn't before. So you really don't need that much money at the very beginning. Of course, depends on the type of company, but in general, you don't need that much money. So really look at every penny, every dollar that you might spend as an opportunity and don't just spend it. Think of how can I avoid spending it, especially at the beginning until you see real revenue coming into the business. Great, and Anthony, we move to the next question. Anthony, David from startupmalasia.org, our partner in Malaysia asked, is it healthy to pivot our business model each time we Bootstrap? And how many times should the business pivot? Because that's a key question. I think it ties a lot to that prior question from Mohamed in Egypt about what your focus is. And I do think this is one of the big challenges when you're an entrepreneur because from day one, as soon as you have an idea, you'll get lots of people coming to you with other variations on your idea and saying, why don't you do it this way? Why don't you do it that way? Then of course, you have the financial pressure wanting to earn revenue and perhaps having the opportunity to do that on things that are on the side. So what I would suggest is make a decision about those new opportunities one way or the other. Either decide, as Susan said, that they're close enough to your main idea that you can incorporate them and really unify your vision or push them to the side, give them a separate name, even just for psychological purposes within your organization, name it something else and be clear that this is a separate focus. It's not the core business. And I think that's important when you're bootstrapping again and again is to say, what's the focus? Why am I doing this? If they're really separate companies, then treat them like separate companies. Yes, yes. Although, if possible, leverage. Leverage those customer relationships, try and always bring them back to the larger goal. It is, I think the hardest job among the many hard jobs for being an entrepreneur is to know when to pivot, is to know how to listen to all of the market information you receive and say, oh, okay. I guess we need to turn the page because our first business plan, we missed it. Now we know more. We have more operating experience and in fact, we should shift. We should change our focus. We've learned more or the market has changed, but knowing when and how to react to all of the different kinds of data, including on this separate line of revenue. It is one of the single biggest challenges an entrepreneur faces. Great. Participant in Cameron asks, is it ever impossible to bootstrap? It's an interesting question. So I think if you want to build some extraordinarily capital intensive kind of business, if you want to build a rocket chip, if you want to build a nuclear accelerator, chances are you're not really going to be able to bootstrap it. But in 21st century, much technology can be done on that granular level where an individual can at least make a very good start. It's funny because as soon as that question came up, I immediately thought of one of our students who actually did bootstrap building a rocket. So he started as a freshman and he came in his first day and said he needed $5 million to build his, it started with $600 million and now it's down to $5 million. But over the four years that he was doing his undergraduate degree, he has three patents in his name. He built an 18 foot rocket for under $30,000 with a team of volunteers. So student interns, students who became his partners, masters and PhD students from neighboring schools and people donated materials to him. So I don't think, I can't think of a single thing where you couldn't bootstrap in some way. Space, the last frontier of bootstrapping. That's right. Never tell an entrepreneur. So our group in Muscat Oman, do we look for various investors or focus on a select few to support our project? I guess this is a connection to the next technique we'll be doing on raising capital but would be great to cover. What criteria do we use to select potential investors? So let's say you bootstrap successfully, you have some customer traction, you have a validated product. How do you look around for the first kind of? I would say that we kind of made a mistake in my own business, which is that once we got through the bootstrapping phase we thought we've got to go to venture capital firms. And so we spent a lot of time, I think we probably wasted four or five months talking to venture capitalists, which were really not the appropriate investors for our business, certainly at that point. And so had we been smarter about it early, we'd have saved a lot of time and gone directly to a few angel investors that were more aligned in terms of their investment vision with the kind of business we were trying to build. And I think that's an important thing. So the question is right, when you're ready for investment, although you might just think, well, it's my time, it's not that significant, it's really significant at the beginning of a business. If it changes your focus and your main focus becomes raising money, you need to think through carefully who should they be. If it's easy enough to raise investment capital for you, you want to find those strategic investors that bring something beyond money. Maybe they open it toward customers, right? Maybe they work in an industry, maybe they give you credibility. So you want to be thinking through those kinds of investors if you have the ability to really go out there and raise capital. That's great. So I would just build on that and say, what do you need? It's a different way of thinking about this thing. What do you need? Do you need access to foreign markets? Do you need introductions to customers? Do you need credibility or legitimacy? Different kinds of investors can help bring different things to your operation in addition to their money and their advice and support. But it's up to you to identify what is most critical for this next chapter of your company's life and the right kinds of investors can be much more useful than just the check that they write. If I may add, one of the challenges if you have bootstrapped your idea from the beginning, your ask of $500,000 or a million dollars or whatever it may be, may seem like it's too low to investors who haven't necessarily worked with a lot of companies that have bootstrapped. So be very careful about finding investors who understand that you have been lean going up to it and that money know exactly how it's gonna be spent and make sure that it seems realistic to them as well because if they think that your goals are very big for the amount of money you're asking for, you wanna find an investor who's gonna be right there with you to continue to bootstrap it if that's the choice because that is a way that you can continually add value to your company so that you're giving away less and less when you do take investment. All great points. Our group in Kuwait asks, what are the chances for a full-time college student to start up and bootstrap a venture and keep it running successfully? Any examples of success stories? So I have hundreds of those. We've been incredibly fortunate at the launchpad to have college students from all over the world use our program and we're in 10 schools throughout the US now but many, many international students end up using our program. Depending on what the industry is and again from restaurants to rocket ships, there are many, many ways that they can bootstrap and for college students it's especially important you can stay in school while you do your business. It shows a great amount of tenacity that especially to investors and your parents which is very important that you finish your college degree. So the goal should be in finding the classes that help get your business further along as you go and that may mean access to professors who have contacts in the industries and access to lots of students who may intern for you, potentially maybe be your partners depending on what you're studying, looking at those MBA programs or industrial engineering or whatever it may be that can help you get your business further along in a shorter amount of time. So totally possible and can be done very successfully but focus on finishing your degree as well. One follow up, thank you Susan for Sherry. It's like I know through the Global Entrepreneurship Lab you also match students from top MBA schools with most promising ventures in the emerging markets. So I think that will all be also interesting to learn some of your examples of how you matched some of these most promising ventures in the emerging markets with expertise and talent from US. Some of the students maybe are even coming from those countries. So we are delighted to be able to work with incredible entrepreneurs this year. We'll be in 25 different countries and including many of the companies that are watching us today. It is for me the most important thing is to find projects and companies for whom outsiders, for students coming from a US business school, can arrive at an inflection point in the life of this company where outsiders can come and bring perspectives. We try and provide, for example, global best practices surveys. We help them understand what competitors are doing. If it's a company in Brazil then we often look to Indonesia because I think that there are wonderful analogs there or between Turkey and Columbia. I think it's really important to understand markets totally unrelated to the United States where in fact there are greater trends that we can connect the dots and where you can learn from one market to another. It may be a little bit further advanced or it may be taking a slightly different path. We try and help our G-Lab host companies in your markets understand what other people around the world in the same business as you but a different geographical market, how they're operating and what kind of insights that can give to you. Great, we have talking about Brazil. We have participants in Brazil and Muscat who ask what do investors look for in entrepreneurs and in startup companies and how do I show that I have these qualities? To the earlier I think you have to say. I guess I'd say that the idea is probably the least important element of your pitch. I mean it matters that you have a good idea and it may get investors interested in your business but in the end they're investing in you and so the reason bootstrapping is such an important concept is it shows an investor what you're able to do with very limited resources and that gives them a sense of confidence that you can actually proceed with the business and fulfill that business plan that you set up. So investors are looking for key, tangible traction points. They want to know have you surveyed the market? Do you have some market research you can show that suggests customers might use this? Do you have a prototype or design, something beyond the idea stage of your product? How much have you built of the product? They want to see that you've actually built a team around you. You're not just one individual but you have some people around you, partners or advisors that support you and believe in the concept too and that gives you some credibility as you're approaching investors and then ultimately they want to see how you do in the fundraising process too. They want to see that you don't just know one or two potential investors but you can bring together many and that there's real interest. Investors are looking to reduce their risk and the way that they do that is to see that other investors are part of this process too. Great. Can I briefly add to that? They also want to make sure you're not so in love with your idea that you're not going to pivot when you need to whether it's because of market conditions or if somebody comes in as an expert and is able to help shape your vision you have to be open to that. Investors are going to want to know that you're going to listen to them to some extent. So being able to be honest with yourself about the realities of your business opportunity is really important. Great. Thank you. Hulk from Malaysia asks, am I more likely to succeed if I bootstrap or raise angel funding? It comes back to the angels so we have some bridge questions to the next day. Sure. So I might say, Hulk, how good an entrepreneur are you? That there is no one answer. Bootstrapping is the most appropriate for certain kinds of companies. Angel funding in particular angel groups provide a very rich and dense set of resources, advice and networking opportunities. And obviously they provide money which would allow you to grow more quickly. But then you have given up a chunk and in some cases a significant chunk of the ownership of your company. So it's always a balancing and it turns on the facts of your company and what your company needs. Thank you, Shariah. Participant in Jakarta asks, when is the right time to bootstrap? I mean we spoke a little bit about this but is there an ideal time to bootstrap or all throughout the life of the venture? Yeah, pretty much from the beginning. If you, when you're ready to start the business you want to bootstrap. And I think if you want to build a culture, I think Susan talked about this a little earlier, a culture within the company which suggests that you focus a lot on cost savings, on efficiency. That's an important thing to maintain. So my business we've been around now over a decade but we try to consider ourselves still a startup. So you bootstrap still now. Even now, yeah, we want that culture to maintain because if you lose that culture it's very easy to lose focus about what the point of the business is and to kind of roll back some of the gains that you've made. So you want to create this idea even when you bring out a new CEO for example who might get a salary and get equity that it's a different kind of business. This is a startup culture. Okay, great, yeah. I might just add, but there does come a time when a company, if it is rapidly expanding or if it is profitable and there is actually now an opportunity to seek commercial lending from a local bank. One thing I tell my students is it is so easy to be in love with the stage of zero to one in doing a startup. Where you have the idea, it's where you are bootstrapping. It's where it seems most exciting and glamorous. But you know that the real difficult part in growing a startup is that stage one to 10 and that is not nearly as glamorous. It's building the institutions. It's building the structures. It's making the HR department and the other sort of plumbing, the guts of a company to build that out is absolutely critical. It is beyond the startup phase. It's beyond the fun and the glamour of the startup phase. And it's important to focus on that as well as an entrepreneur. Great, participant in Jordan asked when do I decide to stop bootstrapping and go looking for investments? So the earlier question. I don't think it's an issue of stop bootstrapping to look for investments. I think it's something that should be done together. If you're able to show fiscal responsibility to potential investors, that makes you extremely attractive to potential investors that you can show how you've been able to find ways to save and economize. It doesn't mean that you're not gonna expand but I think your point is really important. You do have to have the infrastructure in place to be able to scale. But that doesn't mean you have to spend a lot of extra money to do it. It's finding those economical ways as you're building your business. It's never a good idea to throw money at a problem. If you spend the time to be strategic and find solutions that make sense for the company at the stage it's in now but also something that can work for the next few years so that you don't have to reinvent as you scale, everybody wins. Great. Zeeshan from Komzad's Institute of IT in Islamabad says, I have bootstrapped the business and run it profitably for two years but I wasn't making enough money out of it as I was not saving anything rather reinvesting what I earned into the business. At what point do I make a go or no go decision? I think that's also a critical question. Yeah, I think the point is now. I mean if you've been in it two years by now you should know what is the market for your business. And so if you really believe there's a much bigger market that you simply cannot connect to without funding that funding is truly the gap that you've got then you should go out and seek investment and continue to build the business. If you knowing the market as well as you do now two years in think that's not really the problem that there's a problem with the market or with the product or the service then maybe you decide this is not a business is viable to expand beyond its current point maybe it's still a viable business at its scale but at a very small scale. But this might be a good opportunity for you to go and talk to your current customers because if you have good relationships with some of them they may tell you that they'd be willing to pay 20% more or 50% more. So really looking at that before you decide to leave the business I think is very important. Great, James Cole, former GIST winner from Malaysia. My question, if my idea solves a real problem but the revenue model is still not clear how can I determine a better revenue model as I continue to bootstrap? Yeah, this is often the kind of business idea that does go directly to investment. And these are often the businesses that get a lot of attention especially here in the United States. Big companies, the Facebooks and Googles of the world that only make money when they reach a massive scale. And those are tough businesses to bootstrap but even then you can still use bootstrapping to show investors that you are serious, that you know how to work with limited resources before you ultimately go and start to raise money. But if there really is no revenue model until you have millions of customers then you've got no choice but to have investment as part of your plan. OK, questions from Kuwait. I know many young entrepreneurs started with only Facebook or Instagram. How do different social media channels can be leveraged when one bootstraps a venture? This was also on my list, which is great. How do we use social media? So it is the echo chamber. It builds, it takes the idea and in a viral way is able to deploy that information to validate it, to gut-check it against the target market that you are seeking. So it is an incredibly powerful tool. If what you are trying to build will reach an audience that uses social media. So it is enormously powerful in the B2C context. It is less, can be less important in a B2B context. OK, great. A participant in Turkey asks, what are the differences in bootstrapping region in various countries? For example, comparing US bootstrapping from those in emerging markets. Any differences, similarities? I guess what I would say is that bootstrapping doesn't mean no resources. It means very limited resources. And so oftentimes in the United States and other advanced countries, we say, oh, we're bootstrapping. But we have to realize we do have a lot of advantages in that process. We might have relatively inexpensive internet or other telecommunication services. We may have the opportunity of having other friends or colleagues in university who don't need to earn a salary right away. You talked about a business where that didn't happen for a couple of years. So there are resources that are being used. In the emerging market context, there are resources too. They may just be more constrained, more limited. So it's the same basic principle. But you've got to be clear about where you're getting even the limited revenues you need to be sitting at the kitchen table, using your internet connection, using your laptop, making sure you're thinking through even those very basic costs. But still bootstrapping makes sense. Maybe it makes more sense in those contexts of limited resources. One thing I would add is there are differences in the richness of the support networks and of the ability to find resources. In the United States, for example, we are very lucky to have a number of platforms like Launchpad or Tie, which is active around the world. In the United States, in markets outside of the US, there are organizations like Endeavor that operate in a number of the markets I think you guys are in today that seek to help provide some of the support that bootstrapping requires. So it varies from market to market. And if I can just add, Sherry's program to have the caliber of students that you're able to connect with these emerging market entrepreneurs, I think the opportunities for programs like that, which may actually start in the US but support emerging market entrepreneurs, but beyond that, the incredible grant programs that a lot of the governments provide and helping the businesses start, I think, are really exciting. Great. Our last question of the day comes from Barama Innovation Center from Azerbaijan. Could I apply with my project to today's speakers? Could GIST support me in this initiative? That's a good entrepreneur. That's the right spirit. She's using the opportunity. That's the right spirit. Great, great. So I think you should check the gistinitiative.org. We have an upcoming competition for the most promising idea startups and also early-stage startups. And we will be providing, we're collecting all the remaining questions and we'll be sending to our speakers. I'm afraid we are out of time. And thank you so much to our wonderful panelists and everyone viewing today. Special thanks to the hosts around the globe for mobilizing their entrepreneurial communities. We can continue to help each other in our local entrepreneurship communities by staying involved with GIST. We have more than 170,000 members in our Facebook community globally. To find out more how to get involved, please check the website or click one on one of the links inside this chat window. GIST builds capacity and strengthens entrepreneurial ecosystem across Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Turkey. This initiative, which is led by CRDF Global and the US State Department, identifies and supports most promising young entrepreneurs through skills development, networking, and financial advice. GIST programming includes a technology idea competition, TechEye, in conjunction with the annual Global Entrepreneurship Summit. You can apply for the TechEye competition on the gistinitiative.org site. GIST also includes TechConnect that you are experienced today, interactive webcasts that brings together very experienced entrepreneurs and connects them with most promising entrepreneurs from around the world. We also provide startup bootcamps for entrepreneurs in the country. We just returned from East Africa, or we did one for entrepreneurs there in Tanzania. GIST has connected over 2.5 million youth with entrepreneurship resources through State Department social media platforms. It's trained more than 3,000 startups and has created a global network of more than 160,000 members. Members of the gist community are eager to take on challenges and joys of translating their innovative ideas into new companies. They are very action-oriented along the way. And we see our role with the GIST initiative as providing a lot of support in the form of expertise, opportunities to learn, interact with the most promising entrepreneurs, connect with investors, connect with mentors. But most importantly is participating, attending these sort of events, exposing yourself as an entrepreneur to these ideas. To close, I'd like to emphasize how important it is really to test your venture. History of success is full of entrepreneurs that have tried and failed numerous times before they finally succeeded. It's the really good ones that don't give up. They continue to work on their idea very persistently and then create a venture and make it successful. This doesn't happen overnight. It takes a lot of determination, hard work, and we at GIST, we know that you can do it. And we have examples of successful entrepreneurs that are now role models for their peers, entrepreneurs. And we are here to provide the tools to make your dream come true. We hope to see you again for the next GIST Tech Connect this fall. And we have confirmed Brett Feld, one of the co-founders of Techstars and also MIT alumni for our event, where we'll be discussing raising capital for your venture. And remember to apply for the Tech Eye competition. And last, sign up for our newsletter. You'll find the link to the right of your screen to stay informed with the next GIST Tech Connects and other GIST activities. Until then, take care and keep in touch. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. This program has been brought to you by Kinex.