Develop and Successfully Implement an Effective Innovation Strategy

Hi everyone, how's it going? My name is Eyan Isaacs, I'm the head of global growth for the Founder Institute, super excited to have you all today. We have yet another amazing webinar planned out for everyone. For those of you who's gonna be watching the recording, thank you for taking the time. Today's session is all about corporate innovation and developing and successfully implementing an effective innovation strategy. We have Abe with us from Rainmaking, he's the original rainmaker, I would say, from the region. He's been a very active mentor, so Abe, thank you, with Founder Institute Middle East, Founder Institute GCC, Founder Institute Silicon Valley, so he's a very active mentor within the Founder Institute, and he's also a very active mentor within the region. I'm sure he'll talk about his biography and like his experience with Startup Bootcamp, and some of the amazing things he's done within the region, so you know, you folks already probably know me because I've hosted hundreds of these, but Abe, do you want to unmute yourself and let's get things started?

Yes, thank you very much and thank you all for attending. Let me jump— let's dive right into this. Let me just share my screen so we can dive right into this and hopefully this will be a very good session for everybody and my hope is that you guys would have benefited tremendously from this. Okay, so let's talk about what I've done before. I'm gonna briefly just skim through what I've done. So I have, I am the CEO of Startup Bootcamp and Rainmaking in MENA and Africa. We have been in, well, I've been with Startup Bootcamp for the last 5 years, and we've done quite a lot of investments and acceleration and even incubated a lot of companies as well in different verticals. We specialize in fintech, tourism, hospitality, and sports tech. We've done other projects like smart city and e-commerce, but this is what I'd like to say. My personality, apparently I'm a rainmaker, which is, you know, always funny because I work for Rainmaking, so I guess I help a lot of companies make money. Here's a bit of my past. So I was one of the— I've started my own companies like Crystal, ZenHR. Crystal today employs around 2,500 employees. ZenHR was one of the first HR solutions in the MENA that introduced different types of business models, plus really were one of the first companies to to offer cloud-based, SaaS-based HR services. My earlier career, I actually worked for a couple of telcos. The biggest one was Verizon and Vodafone. And now I'm currently at Rainmaking. I went to school in a couple of places. I have a degree from University of Western in Canada, but I also have an associate innovation degree from MIT and business transformation from Columbia. As you guys were aware, I do actually help a lot of accelerators, and I do mentor in a lot of them. Founders Institute is one of them. I also have a couple of podcasts if you guys want to check them out. I have the ABC Show. I have also a show called the Pivotal Show, we talk about tech, and we also did a podcast series for the Big Five in construction and property tech with Startup City. Here are some of the companies that I actually started or invested in or very active in. Some of them are no longer here, some of them are there, some of them have been exited already, but these are the— some of the experiences that I've had. Okay, so let's dive right into this and go into what is innovation. And so innovation is an improvement of a product or a service or a business model or strategy. But it has to be useful and novel. So sometimes things do not make sense, but it, but it, you know, you're building onto it, and that's why innovation can't really be very well defined. But this, but actually, this is the HBS definition, and I genuinely like this definition, where it is an improvement of some sort of the business, whether it comes to product or offering or business or model. So what are the types of innovation? One is sustaining, where it's a small constant improvement in the product, you know, like small enhancements. And this is what, you know, happens for its existing. The other one is disruptive, and this is where in technology you keep hearing the disruptor. Disruptive is usually what, you know, something new coming into the market that is completely different, not the same way that things have been done. When companies entering and claiming a segment, so a lot of times disruptive, they're creating a new segment as well, right? At the bottom of the existing market or creating an additional segment to serve the, the customer base, uh, where it wasn't there before. So that's really called disruptive innovation. So in disruptive, um, it goes into two parts. There's low-end disruption and there is new market disruption where they create a complete new, um, path to innovation. And in the low-end disruption, you know, there is always, you know, very minimal changes, effects, low cost to the business. So it's like the evolution or the optimization of a certain process or a certain business. So usually the innovators own that segment, you know, like you want to talk about, you know, like I have the examples as Toyota and General Motors, they own it. So they do incremental disrupt, low-end disruptions, you know, changing, tweaking, better fuel efficiency, but nothing crazy. While new market is when they create a brand new market, you know, like what smartphones did 20 years ago, what shared mobility like Uber and your Uber alternative in every country did to the taxi service. Even here, your EVs, your electric vehicles, to what they're doing to the traditional auto market. So that's the new market disruption comparing to the low-end disruption. Again, let's talk about the disruptor and the disruptee. So Sony with the digital photography, what they did with Kodak and film photography, you know, they came in and they you know, with a lot of definite disruptive innovations to really take the film industry to challenge them. And again, if you look at the chart, so Kodak was the aqua blue line on this chart where they were, you know, slowly disrupting by low-end disruption, while Sony is the yellow line where it came in with like a big disruption index, and you know, at the point where they meet is where, you know, one creates either a new segment or wins the market. Same thing what Netflix did to Blockbuster renting DVDs, what Careem in the Middle East or Uber did globally to the normal taxis. So here are the 3 components that make successful disruption and innovation. One, enabling technologies. What new tech is out there that can enable either the mass adoption or make things more efficient or faster or, or makes more money? Also, coherent value network. Make sure that everybody is aligned and creates value for everybody. And that's what happens, you know, like you talk about shared mobility. Now they gave access to everybody to become a part of a major issue in every city, which is logistics and transportation. And then always an innovative business model, you know, you pay per ride, you don't have to subscribe. So that aspect always comes in. So usually disruption there's always a business angle to it. Why would people switch from their regular to something new? It's usually either more efficient, cheaper, or people get more value. So again, in a— so I just honestly explained the next 3 slides, but I'm going to go through. So enabling technologies, you know, will obviously— it'll be much easier to scale, and that's why it's more affordable and would actually access to more wider parts of the population. Innovative business model, how do we bring in low-end customers and how do we bring non-consumers into the segments? You know, a lot of people started using stuff that they've never used before because now getting into that is much easier, you know what I mean? And the last one is suppliers and all, everybody's benefiting, so it's a win-win for everybody, so that's usually when disruption is really, really effective. So here's a glimpse on a fintech industry, whoever is in fintech, this is a small business case. So, you know, there are trends in the fintech industry, you know, some of them were revenue-based fintech platforms that actually gave access to lending instead of people going to the bank. So now they have alternative companies globally, that are actually into the lending space without you going to the bank. Foreign exchange solutions, you know, you download a million apps that can now do foreign exchange. And again, you don't have to go to your local exchange office or the bank to exchange certain money. So it makes it much faster and quicker. Regulation, you know, every country has its own regulation. But with that comes different aspects of innovation because some markets are ready and prone to do certain things other than other markets, you know, how do they prevent fraud? How do they implement, you know, authentication or biometric authentication? How do they know it's you, you know? So this is something that RegTech is definitely something that is growing. Open banking, more and more now we're seeing more companies getting into fintech because they can do some kind of financial institution kind of route instead of going to the traditional bank, plus banks themselves now are offering services directly, not only just doing banking, but they're helping companies get into other things like lending, like remittance, like, so now they would have and infrastructure, and that's where open banking comes in. Again, digital banking, more and more you're hearing about these neobanks that are coming up globally, you know, from the Revolut to your people in MENA, there's a couple of local banks that are completely entirely online, and they're pure digital banks. Again, the buy now, pay later is coming up. This is something that we didn't have 5 years ago. And this is some stuff that we are now, every company, every part of the world, there is a player like Acclaim, sorry, Reclaim, or in tomorrow, or Tabby in the MENA. And then there's other real-time, trends that are happening globally and regionally when it comes to fintech, you know, real-time payments. You know, I remember when I went to university a long, long time ago where, you know, if the family wanted to wire me something, I'd have to wait 3 to 5 days, while now there's actually real-time payments. And then also a lot of cloud-based core banking, which helps, you know, build up either banking apps, or you can log in online and check everything. You don't need to, you know, they've kind of eliminated you visiting the branch kind of thing with more and more cloud-based core banking coming in. Okay, so innovation as a necessity. So I know these are a bit of complex slides, but actually they're very simple to explain. So companies usually focus on sustaining innovation to make their, you know, so these are what we talk about, you know, the smaller changes, you know, when you get updates, daily updates like your iPhone does, you know, every week you get a new update, but because they're sustaining innovation. So the performance and improvement of, you know, gets better and better as you're, you know, with time. Usually custom companies focus on sustaining innovation and focusing on their, you know, top-end customers. And now let's talk about the lower-end disruption innovation. Lower end is good enough for the traditional metrics, you know, if they increase slowly by slowly, it's fine. But it's not— sometimes it plateaus because, you know, and some of you who are old enough would remember, I remember when I was a kid, you know, CPU power, oh, this was an Intel, you know, i3 or an i5 or even Pentium 1, Pentium 2, go back there, but they were slowly plateauing. And that's why they needed the new kind of technology that would come in and actually offer the innovation that is needed or the processing that is needed back then. Again, so, and then companies that need, that usually do not see it coming, they because, you know, let's talk about companies like Nokia, like even Kodak. They're working on their day and they're slowly growing, and then there's a new disruptor that comes in from nowhere and overtakes them. And that's why companies need to keep in mind of what's happening out there and to keep their ears on the ground, I guess, to hear what's happening in the market. Um, why is there a threat? So companies usually focus on sustaining innovation, um, on their top clients, and they don't think about the bottom. And a lot of times people in the bottom are always looking for a, a better, cheaper, and faster way to do it. So you have to look at your whole customer base and see what are these people looking for. And the overall, uh they overall perform customer needs, tax needs, and then as the tech follows an upward trajectory, opportunities of those operating on the lower end. So the object of the game obviously is a lot of times innovation strategies try to engage the lower end of the customer base to move them up to top tier customers. Okay, um, again, so this is the what, like what's an innovation strategy? You know, it's a system that dictates how a company really works. You know, you search the problems, you create concepts. It's, again, it's for most of you that are in tech, it's like agile development, and then select which projects that we really need funding. It's exactly the whole agile process of building anything. So it's usually never a waterfall approach. It's always, you know, we're strong in these 3 fields, let's see what's out there globally in these 3 fields, and then let me, you know, come up with the top 2 ideas in each field and then test them. Whatever scores the most, you know, gets a bit more budget and then hopefully either adds to the bottom line or takes you to a place where you want to end up in. Again, this is why with innovation strategies, different parts of organizations are— usually you need different parts of the organization to actually get the ball rolling, or the, you know, like the flywheel as I have here, you know. Marketing always listens to all their customers. It goes to— with the findings, then research looks into what needs to be done or suggests what paths, if there's a path that we can improve. And then it goes to sales, where sales talk to the customer and say, would you like me to do this for you? And, you know, and then Once we get, you know, they'll go ahead and how much are they willing to pay, then it goes to business heads and then gets solidified and the cycle keeps on going. And that's how usually innovation is done. There's different types, there's different ways. Sometimes people start at R&D and then end up in marketing, but again, any part of the cycle you can start from, but it's always in that pattern. Um, okay, the how. So connecting innovation to your strategy, understand how to achieve a competitive advantage. Uh, to do so, you really need to ask these 3 questions. How will innovation create value? So again, you know, how Is this new product that is being offered gonna really affect our customers, and would it create more value, or is it just going to create more work for us? What type of innovation will create more value? Okay, and how will you capture that value? So a lot of times you say, um, companies will build something that nobody wants, you know, so Is there value there? It might look cool, but people don't want it. And there's quite a lot of examples for that, where people launch a brand new tech or brand new innovative business model that nobody subscribes to. Okay, how, how will innovation create value for potential customers? You know, you must know the value that we created through innovation? You know, would customers end up paying more? Would customers save money? Would it have a social impact? And a lot of them do. And/or would the product become more reliable and more durable? So you need to figure out that, and if you can do 2 or more, you know, that's usually a winning formula. But a lot of times innovation is based on those 4 pillars. And so, you know, like I'll give you an example. Apple created these make— so they came up with the strategy, if we get everybody, you know, if it becomes very easy to use their products, they'll try to onboard as many people as possible and people would be easier prompt to move to their products.

When—

but they took the whole ownership of building their hardware, and then on top of that, building a software, which makes it much easier for people to control what they want them— what their customers need to see. What are the types of innovation that will allow you to create value? So this is— I think this is one of the most important slides, and I think it comes down I'll come back to this slide, but see, there is 3 fields on this graph. The first one is called core innovation, and that's usually enhancing a feature or a product that the company does, you know, like making things more efficient, faster, a bit cheaper to run. Okay, and then the next bracket is adjacent. How do we, how do we connect, you know, peripherals? Like, you know, how do we jump into something different? I'll give you now examples of all three. And then the last bracket is transformational. How do we change people's mentality? And how do we add new products? I'll give you an example of innovation companies, innovation in a company that are core and out there or transformational. If you look at Michelin tires, you know, they're a very well-known tire company and they keep improving the tires, they keep improving all of that, but they also have a very distinct business that is no, is not anywhere to do with tires, which is the Michelin StarChef, sorry, Star for Restaurants, where they rank and rate restaurants. It has really no common grounds between them. But if you want to look at another example, you know, like a bank with its core products, even if they add a digital bank or they add an app to their offering, they're still in the core. But once they like adjacent would be them getting into insurance, Okay, and then that would be an adjacent mark. So again, going back to that side— sorry, um, where it's core, adjacent, and transformation. So there you can, a lot of times, especially with startups, and they tend to deal with the whole chain, like they would want to know what inputs they would need so they can take out an output, and a lot of them try to tackle the whole value chain, while very established companies, they know where their data or where the input is coming from, and then they only deal with the output. So, and so this is where the core, uh, like very big established companies— that's why you don't see, uh, big established companies like Microsoft making cars. They might actually, but, but they only focus on core and adjacent. Only companies that are trying something completely different and they're very entrepreneurial, they will get into the transformational part. So this is a very brief on what, you know, how to capture value and where do— and it really depends on the talent in the company, their attitude, and their ability to accept failure. And then the third thing is, are, you know, what kind of businesses do they want to actually venture into? You know, a lot of times they will always play around the same area and not go something completely different. Let me give you Apple as a study case. So again, how will innovate— sorry, so the— as they make the products easier to use, it gets people, A, whoever is on their products, really harder to switch, and B, they can onboard customers much faster because everybody has a unified user experience. And then again, then they adopt, okay, so what do we do? What does Apple do? Do they develop a core and adjacent and transformative innovation solutions? And then they build the ecosystem around all three, and that's what happens. So, and how did they do that? Clean designs, their detail level is great, and then since they've built the hardware, they can just build the software on top of that. Again, if you look at Apple, core is when they build new phones, iMacs and Macs and iPads. The adjacent is when they, you know, they've released the AR/VR headset, they're getting into machine learning and AI, you know, digital health, and then transformative is when they're going to build a car or they get into fintech. Fintech can be adjacent because I know they have a wallet, but fintech is more when they get into lending and buy now pay later and stuff like that, so they get into that. Again, if you look at their strategy map, you know, here are some of the companies they've actually invested in or acquired or did partnerships with on every one level of the transformational part. Again, um, so companies can capture a share of the value of innovation generated by doing 3 things usually. and this is what Apple did, actually, they did some venture building that created the Moonshot Labs, which is where they create brand new products, they test different things, they play around with a lot of startups, and they engage with a lot of startups, and they've created the Apple Entrepreneur Camp, where they invite founders from a lot of cool companies to come in and speak or to come in and showcase some of their startups, and they do a lot of scouting as well, And then they do co-venturings, they enter in partnerships with Volkswagen as an example, or they do, you know, the CarPlay product was actually done with somebody. So they do a lot of collaborating projects and co-venturing. Okay, how do you measure efforts? And honestly, that really depends on the company and the company culture. But usually, These are like, it's relevancy versus difficulty. And again, there isn't a proper way to really measure innovation success. Sourcing, you know, like the lowest one is obviously if you invent something and patenting would be the easiest one to control because you know who's using it and you know exactly. But as you go into difficult, And how do you maintain the cultural factors in keeping it very innovative? I know as an example, to add to the Apple one, I know they have the Apple campus where it's like super secretive to get in. And so it's very hard to maintain that whole innovation spirit within a company that's scaled to thousands and thousands of employees. Also, the stakeholders, they need to have that innovation and the quality of thinking built into it, you know what I mean? Like even if you look at Apple, you know, like Steve Jobs left Apple a couple of times but came back because he is the, you know, the person that kept pushing them. Also, customer satisfaction. Are customers driving you to do better or they just don't care? So there's a lot of ways you can measure that. I'm not going to go into those because there is both— there is a formula. I don't want to scare people when I show you guys this, but the formula is actually this one. So the formula for, you know, it's a— sorry, it's not this one. It's a fitness ratio. Again, it's depending on what are the key goals of the company. And usually there's a revenue component, there is an index of people on a level of accepting new things plus level of how innovative people are by how many projects they add on and how many projects they test or they agile, so they enter the agile system. That all depends on what you guys are trying to do. Again, I can— I don't know if, but I can share this presentation with you guys. This is the formula I kept talking about. And that's where we talk about fitness ratio, how fast a company has the stamina to keep pursuing these kinds of projects. Management span, how innovative the management is and receptive to new ideas. Our equity fraction is usually how much time and effort is spent into every project, and the salary growth is the actual growth of the cap, you know, the bottom line of the company. Are we adding 1,000 new engineers to come up with something? So that comes in from there. That's it from my side. I know, I'm sorry I had to rush things in because of But I think we have a couple of minutes for questions. Do we? Yeah.

Yeah. So let's do a couple. I'm going to use this feature. By the way, great presentation. I love talking about this stuff and hearing—

I'm sorry I rushed it a bit, but I think I got my point across.

Yeah, no worries. I'm going to use this feature. I was feeding questions, Bella, and I was thinking of them. I know you talked a bit about this. Sorry, how are you for time? Do you have a hard stop?

It's fine. It's fine. Go on.

Okay, perfect. I'll ask maybe 3 questions. I know some people are trickling in and we have some stuff, so maybe if somebody has a question, they can throw it in as well. One thing is you briefly talked about this, but this whole notion of open and closed innovation models. I know that's something a lot of like the people that we work with here apply and like it comes up quite a bit and like you alluded to it but you weren't using that terminology. But maybe like, can you just like briefly, you're looking around open and closed and maybe you just make reference again to like, you know, you talked about venture building, venture studios and stuff like that.

Sure, sure.

That would be helpful.

Okay, so open innovation is something that is like— I'm a big fan of open innovation because it's very collaborative, right? So it's when you have multiple ideas being flown by from different parties, and usually, in my honest opinion, from experience, not from like— I'm not any data-driven, but open innovation is what really, really drives innovation, right? Because then you'd have different people from different environments with different experiencing experiences put into an idea. And then it's actually outlined in a certain manner where it's measured, what is the easiest, where is the low-hanging, where is the lowest hanging fruit? And how fast can we get there, right? While closed is more from, again, from experience is where one person owns it and then doesn't really do much until it's presented. And, um, but they've had successes, you know, certain things need to have closed innovation, you know, especially when you're like building a new chipset or building, uh, and I don't mean by one person, it could be like one department or one, one entity, right? And so closed innovation is something that we don't see as much anymore, unless it's— ironically, big enterprise loves closed innovation, and they will include companies that they acquire into the closed, you know, they go out, they say, we would need this, and they would go look for a company, they say, oh, we like the founders, we like the team, let's bring it in, keep it closed, while open is like, okay, don't, again, don't quote me there when I say this, but it's like, you know, it's like GitHub, You know, everybody writes codes and throws it out there, right? And people, you take from here and you throw here and you cook something up. While Clos is like the old school, you know, let's think of a room, think in a room and see what comes out of it. Again, I can go very technical and explain, but I think that's very high level what I wanted to do. No, that's perfect.

I think it's always a great place to start with the open and closed thinking, right? It's okay, well, you know, you have an individual speaking and it's like, well, where do you start, right? There's M&A, let's create the new technology, let's acquire it, let's incubate it and all that. All right, so the second question I have is our audience is obviously, as you know this from Mentor, is like startups, right? So like Let's say I'm a startup based here in Dubai or Singapore or Hong Kong, wherever, and I want to get involved with a corporate that's running a foundation program, right? Or vice versa, I'm a corporate that wants to engage a startup. Yeah, what's a good starting point?

So, um, see, this is where I think programs help a lot, right? Because when you have, like, you guys run programs, we run programs, but when they are POC-driven and where there is companies are actually offering proof of concept or getting involved with the startups to show how they can benefit, I think that's the beginning tip of that whole aspect of how can startups get involved with corporates because they need each other, right? Because innovation, because usually corporates have the budgets and startup would have this innovative, usually tech when we're talking about the tech space, but they don't have enough data points to feed it in to get to where the results are, right? So it's more like let the corporate bring the data, bring the customers, and let the startup, you know, is the engine, and let's think about it, right? So that's how, so programs is one of them. Number two is literally competitions where you'd enter, you know, I know like in, I know in Dubai and in Singapore, both Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Singapore, they do challenges where a corporate or the government does a challenge, and then they invite startups to come in and challenge, and then from there, either the government or the corporates learn how to collaborate, and how to have this open innovation space between them and their startups. So those are usually good places to start.

Awesome, that's a great one. We have a question here from Hadi, let me just read it out loud. He's asking, how can companies balance the need to innovate continuously while maintaining their core business operation? And this is a tough one. Interesting one because it's like, yeah, like, hey, we want to innovate, let's go, let's go, let's go. But it's like, oh, we're all allocating, like, or it's like, hey, we want to innovate, okay, I'll allocate one developer, half a designer, and 3 hours of a marketer, go innovate. What? So I would love to get your— I'm sure you have some clients. Would love to get your take on this.

So honestly, every part of the company, from the CEO and founder to the developer, really, really needs to get involved in innovation. And I'll tell you why. Because the CEO would hear, would obviously usually hear what his competitors are doing, and so they want to know how they got into that space, right? or, um, even the developers, even, um, the marketing team, they would want to know what's going on in the market. And, and this is where the core and adjacent that what I'm talking about. So sometimes, you know, you know, and I know a lot of startups pivot, you know what I mean? And they usually pivot into the, the adjacent side, you know, they start with a fintech, suddenly they become a regtech, suddenly become the insurance tech, right? So because their clients are telling them, "This is not what we want, this is what we want," and then they slowly pivot into whatever that needs. And it's the same thing with innovation, you know what I mean? If, you know, if your developer is online saying, "Listen, I found a new tech stack that we can build that's efficient, more cheaper to host, faster to fix," like that, so people do that. At the business level, you know what I mean? Like, you know, if we implement certain processes, We can drop the cost by 20%, 15%, 15%, 20%. Okay, that's another huge disruptive innovation, and it's really, really hard, like from the 4-people startup to 1,000 people, how do you cap it? Where do you play? But it depends on genuinely the appetite of the company, you know, like if the founders are very— usually when the founders are very innovative, they will hire people that are kind of like them, and it'll be a part of their culture. While when you talk about huge customer, new companies like the Microsoft, like the Apple, who have huge innovation departments, but there's a lot of people that are just there to do 1, 2, 3, right? So it is a struggle, but I would say, especially for— because keep in mind, the tech industry is a disruptive industry, because they are disrupting the banks and fintech, they're disrupting logistics companies, they're all of that good stuff, becoming more efficient, better business models and stuff, so they just need to keep their ears on the ground to see what is happening in the market.

Awesome. I have one more question and then I can kind of let you go. But I think I heard this recently, interviewer, and I think this is a great way to always end a segment. But I was like, do you have something like a qualitative insight or a gut insight in the corporate environment you're seeing, but you don't have the data to back it up just yet? Or like, what are some of the early indicators of some of the trends that you're seeing?

Honestly, right now I actually spoke to a couple of our corporate clients, and they still depend on the old school way of listening to what is happening on the ground, you know what I mean? Like the marketing team, listens to the customer saying, hey, by the way, the similar product in another geography is adding this, is this coming to Orthos? And then, you know what I mean, are you ever going to localize this feature? Stuff like that. It's usually feedback is the first catalyst to innovation, right? So it's something that a lot of corporates have been implementing, the feedback loop, you know, from the, from NPS to your basic voice of the customer programs where they really listen to what's happening, and then come and adjust accordingly. And this is like, I've literally heard more and more companies talk about voice of the customer, programs in the last year than I've heard in the last 10, and maybe because COVID and all of those did affect it, but that's where they started from.

But is that— that's not necessarily a negative, that's a good thing, like the more— okay, got it.

So yeah, positive because the feedback tells them where to go, and then people adjust quickly, you know what I mean? And then they can save not only save, but usually upsell a lot of businesses, because then they're like, okay, we'll give you this, how much money would you pay for it extra? And then people would say, yeah, okay, I'll do this, and then, and that's where it goes from there.

Got it. Sorry, the only one thing that I promise you, you talked a little bit about Startup Bootcamp, but you'd like, just like grazed over it, maybe for the audience here, just as we wrap up, like, what it is and just kind of the genesis. Yeah, just, just—

yeah, yeah, sure, no problem. So, so, okay, so Startup Bootcamp is, um, is one of the largest accelerators on Earth as well. We're actually Europe's largest accelerator programs. Uh, we only do verticalized programming, so, uh, what we do is we usually, like, when we launch a program, it'll be themed And it won't be just like, we won't do just do fintech, we will do something like payments or B2B payments. They're very challenge-based. And why do we do that? We do that because our corporate clients would come in with certain challenges. And we would want the end of the goal is there is a bit of money that we give to everybody that comes in. But we also would like our startups to grow with our corporate partners by getting them on the table with them face to face for a couple of weeks until we can get a contract from them, and then the corporates would benefit from the learnings from working with and stimulating the ecosystem, the startup ecosystem, while the startup would actually grow in revenues, and, you know, everybody wins. So we are POC-driven kind of programs. We have been running programs since 2010. We have invested in 1,750 companies approximately globally. We've been very active, as I said, in Latin America— sorry, Europe and Latin America, and we've been quite active in the Middle East and in Japan. We had a program in Korea. We've had a couple of programs in Taiwan. We've had— and then obviously Australia. And we've been wanting to get more programs everywhere else, but those are usually theme-based. So Our programs consist of 3 months, usually 3 to 6 months depending on the type of program. They're, as I said, they're partner-driven, so that means that there's challenges, there's exact challenges that we want to fix real-world problems. And graduates from that join our alumni, our alumni network, and we try to help each other by, you know, connecting different sides of the world to each other, hoping that the community grows bigger and bigger and more business is exchanged between both. Awesome.

That's super awesome, very insightful.

Thanks so much.

We're just coming up to time here.

The way I like to end these is just like any words of wisdom?

You've been in this space for quite some time, over I think 10 to 15 years or so. Yeah, any words of wisdom for the audience?

Honestly, so I would only give one, you know, um, I can't talk about feedback, and honestly, always listen to your customers and your employees because they are the ones that driving you know, the company. Always have this balance between gut feeling and data. Obviously, as the company grows bigger and bigger, data becomes a bigger play. But in the beginning, especially in launching anything, if you believe that you need to be there, I think you should always follow your heart. And I think that's something that nobody talks about is failure. And it's okay, you tried and that product or feature or idea didn't go through, but that's what innovation is all about, right? And that's what you guys are all venturing in. So take the chance, you know, when it hits, it hits big, but if it doesn't, it's okay, you try another idea and you move on. So just keep that tough skin and move on. I think that's something that I'd want to give everybody. Everybody.

Perfect. That's perfect. Words of wisdom. All right, folks, we'll wrap up here. If you want, we'll send out the recording. Abe dropped some great nuggets here. Yeah. And then we'll also get the deck from you, Abe, and we'll— so hopefully in the next 24-48 hours. Uh, with that, everyone enjoy the rest of your day. And, um, yeah, uh, I guess we'll just chat shortly, but take care everyone.

Take care, thank you.