Sustainable Economic Growth in Emerging Markets, Featuring Sameer Sortur, Faris Alami & Paul O’Brien

that second poll question and the results from that second poll now as we explore a little bit more what is it that everybody actually thinks they need. I want to encourage you again, if you think it's capital, you're actually wrong. We know this for a fact. It's been studied. There have been some papers about it. A lot of times founders will say that what they're struggling most with is capital, and it's actually not capital. You have the money there. It's something else that's wrong. And that's why we're having these conversations about capacity building and how to better serve local communities and governments to increase the amount of entrepreneurs that they can capably handle. Good morning. Good afternoon, I suppose. I'm in Phoenix, Arizona, where right now it is noon. So I suppose it's a little bit of both, especially considering the fact that Founder Institute reaches folks and runs programs throughout the world. It's probably even good night. For some of you, so thank you for staying up so late in the evening. My name is Paul O'Brien. I run public affairs for Founder Institute. If you're not familiar with what public affairs means, think of it like government relations with a little bit of lobbying, with a little bit of strategic communication, trying to help cities, states, and national governments throughout the world figure out how to better serve entrepreneurs and startups in the venture capital community. I love the work that I do, and it's an honor to be here today. We're going to talk a little bit about what's called capacity building. And if I can frame it for us before I introduce my guests, think of capacity building in the sense that most cities certainly have a coworking space, perhaps a tech district or an innovation district. You'd likely have a startup hub or an innovation hub as well. And you probably have an incubator or an accelerator, also perhaps what's called a venture studio and some labs. I would imagine you're looking local college or university even runs an entrepreneur program. What we've found in the last 5 years, 10 years or so though, is that many cities are struggling to increase the throughput, the volume of entrepreneurs that actually exist and are in need of help. Some simple ways to think about it would include the fact that if your startup hub is downtown, as is often the case, most cities are neglecting or underserving the depth and breadth of their ecosystem in the community that is actually looking for support. We also have what are called silos, where the university might not be working well with the accelerator, which might not be working well with, I don't know, the Chamber of Commerce or the city's small business program. Those silos also create complexity and make it difficult for us to drive more volume and more resources to the entrepreneurs in your community. So we're going to talk about that today. For the most part, I'm not going to say much other than facilitating the conversation. Encouraging questions from you all. We're going to run a couple of polls as well to get some feedback from you during the hour. I would love to encourage you first to add in the chat a little bit about yourself, share an introduction, share a LinkedIn link so we can connect, and we can start to break down some of those silos by connecting right here. For the most part, I'd love to turn over the hour to Samir and Feras, who have joined me today, Feras Alami and Samir Sattour. To give you the best sense for why I've asked them to join us today, I'm gonna let them introduce themselves, and then I'm gonna kick it off with a question about what we refer to as startup theater and whether or not we're actually serving startups as best as possible, or we could be doing some things more meaningfully. But before we do that, Samir, would you love to start us off with an introduction and a hello to the room?

Paul, my pleasure being here today, And thank you, Faris, for joining on this interesting topic to discuss capacity building. As Paul mentioned, I am in the other side of the pond in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where a lot of interesting activity both on capacity building, innovation, AI, phenomenal work going on in terms of technology development, entrepreneurship development. I've been here, parked here for the last 21 years, going strong. And essentially at Square Circle Ventures, we're looking at interesting companies from the US to launch in this region, in this developing emerging market. Along with that, I'm also fortunate to be the managing director for GCC and India for Founder Institute, where we run about 2 cohorts a year, and some small, very smart founders joining us from over 17 countries to participate in our program. So essentially, we're actually setting up a strong foundation for global capacity building within our individual emerging countries so that we can populate more and more entrepreneurs across the ecosystem. And I'm gonna, as we talk along, I'm gonna share some excellent examples on how this is being done in our part of the world and some comparison to the US as well. So handing it over back to Paul. Paul?

Handing it over to Ferris. How are you, Ferris? Good to see you today.

Always good to see you, and it's always good to see you, Samir, as well. And thank you both. This is really an interesting topic, and I'm so delighted to be part of the discussion. Personally, I run a company called International Strategic Management and a nonprofit called Connecting Dots Globally. And the work that I do under the ISM umbrella is we support organizations launching entrepreneurship and training programs in their local communities. So I've been fortunate to interact with Fundraiser in different capacity, making sure that they're launching in those communities because such a great programs. And of course, I've been fortunate to have touched 100 and I think exactly 103 countries so far. So very lucky and very fortunate working with both on one side on policies and design of the programs and what does it look like, who should be involved and how long, and what should be the outcome, and so on and so forth. And on the other side, working with entrepreneurs and the small business owners to scale up. We just actually launched yesterday a new program, which we've been running for almost 10 years now, called Capacity Building Tour. And this, we're rebranding it called Yalla Global. And we are starting with Jordan, taking companies from Jordan to take them to the global market. So excited to be here. We actually have a program in Saudi right now running. So it's Always just good to hear what's going on everywhere else and looking forward to our discussion. Thank you so much.

Fares, before I kick it off to our first question, you noticed that we published a piece about Riyadh this morning and the Founder Institute team is going to be there this weekend if anyone is in that part of the world to say hello. Let's start. Welcome everyone again. I know some folks joined late, so certainly hop in the chat, introduce yourself. Feel free to ask questions as well. We'll try to weave in good questions as they're appropriate. I wanna frame the conversation with the simplest considerations possible first, and that's to help people understand what we mean by capacity building. We often find in cities that the government, even the community itself, is focused on demo days. They're focused on a lot of meetups. They're focused on what you might think of as activity, or what we call startup theater, rather than outcomes and the objectives that the entrepreneurs and the venture capital community is really trying to achieve. How do you guys think that we can help communities shift their priorities and shift their focus from what appears to be meaningful to what is in fact meaningful? What tends to hold ecosystems back from really building the foundations of capacity so that they can actually accomplish more for founders rather than simply having events and meetups and making connections for folks and then getting them on stage to do a demo and cross their fingers and hope they get funding. Why don't we start there? Either one of you who would like to chime in first, please.

Por isso, go for it.

Sure, I'm happy to start it, kick it off. So I think it's, you know, You know, these events are of course important and, you know, I think they're important to continue, but I also believe what happens all the way to the lead of that conference or slash demo day or activity, and then what happens after is really where they're, you know, in Michigan we say where the, you know, the rubber hits the road, right? Because of the tires. And basically one of the things that I usually say is Yeah, sure, we have a big demo day, but then what happens after? Are we offering anything beyond it? Is there actually— at the end of the day, we are in the people business. It's good to have a big thing, celebration, but then you got to really follow up, because without the follow-up, those— I'm gonna— you know, I like what you said, it's like a play or a stage, but then what happens behind the stage? What happens before you go to the stage? What happens after you clean it up? Those are the things that are really what's going to make an ecosystem, you know, continue to grow and continue to prosper and continue to make things happen. Having this kind of conversation today is a great day to do that. And then what do we do after that? Do we— and you said it beautifully, Paul, right away, right? Let's stay connected. Let's make sure that we find each other on LinkedIn. Let's, you know, let's, you know, if you're in Riyadh, come see us. These are the things that make ecosystem prosper and grow. Versus just a one-time event. Because if you show up and just watch it or demo it or do whatever, then it's over. And then now, you know, that moment is now— I usually say it's time now to work. Now all that work that went into it is awesome, and it's just now it's about time to work.

So yeah, um, I think a lot of ecosystems, um, look at these very shiny programs as a PR, because they're built on PR machinery. The whole startup ecosystem has to churn out content over content as a way of activity versus velocity. And what I essentially think where we miss the bus is at a point where we start confronting the hard truths, where we start believing that activity means progress. Right. And I think the ecosystem within us, which is our heart, should start realizing that real progress is built on real people and real organizations only grow when they show real economic activity. Real economic activity comes by deploying talent, ensuring that the talent which has been created by years and years of effort remains in the company, remains in the ecosystem, stays and helps grow the ecosystem. So I think this is a very solid point to consider, um, to, uh, to Can— how many in your startup ecosystem, how many people are there who are actually challenging the ecosystem to do more? I mean, I see in, in our part of the world here, there are hardly less than 10% of the people who are actually doing that confrontation. So I think ecosystems will grow this way. On long-term capacity building, I think Events are important because events build the ecosystem but don't build the infrastructure. So in order to display that, yes, this country has talent and this country doesn't have talent, this has amount of capital willing to be deployed versus actual capital deployed, right? So when we start making these comparisons, then we are actually working on the shallow end of the tunnel, actually, you know. So I think what would be best would actually be do an internal analysis every quarter saying, how many entrepreneurs did we create? Out of those entrepreneurs, how many did prosper? Did we make the life of that entrepreneur in our ecosystem easy to operate? Were they able to hire easily? And then could they then give opportunities for 10 more entrepreneurs? I think that pipeline, if we can build through talent development process, that will sustain an ecosystem. Instead of activity.

That's, that's a really wonderful observation because we've been, we've been socializing the idea to economic development offices that we know for a fact that startups actually create most of the new jobs, not, not existing companies, not even small businesses, but the startups. And yet most, most cities, everybody, most, most cities are still looking at startups from the standpoint of number of startups launched through an accelerator or through an incubator, or funding perhaps, right? Funding announcements love, love to get headlines, and our PR office certainly loves to make sure that those funding announcements are out there. But the metric that actually matters, and the metric that in fact could be more meaningful for a local community, is the fact that if you are focused on job creation, understanding whether or not your entrepreneurs are successful whether or not they're hiring, how well they're hiring, and how substantially they're hiring is in fact the key metric. And I was going to ask about a key metric at the end of the hour, but that might be it. So I'm going to plant that one. Folks, if you're just jumping in, please introduce yourself in the chat. We're going to run a poll. Sanna, if you want to drop that first poll to get a sense for what everybody's working on and what they do for a living, that might give us some good context. We'll drop a couple of polls, everyone, to get a sense for what you all are up to. And by all means, too, use the Q&A function. Go ahead and throw a question in there. If there's something relevant that we can weave in, we'll try to do that. I'd love to ask about a different consideration, or rather a concern I frequently hear. Folks that aren't familiar with Founder Institute, we operate in about 300 cities throughout the world. So we're constantly talking to different cultures, different ecosystems, different economies. And the consistent narrative that I'd like to touch on is the fact that entrepreneurs almost always express a concern about what you might think of as silos, that we have, we have this program over here and they have some wonderful mentors, but that program doesn't interact with or engage or work with this program over here, which is the one that I need to be in. And then there's a, there's an angel group or an investor network over there, and they're not participating. They're doing their own thing. And of course, the university has a wonderful entrepreneur program, but it's just students, and I'm not sure why it's just students, because there's a commercialization office that has a tremendous amount of IP and wonderful research that we could develop, and it's also separate. Talk about those separations in a sense for whether or not that observation is valid. I think it is, but talk about, too, how we might start to break them down by way of the cities and governments, since that's the context here, right? We're not talking about whether or not the community can fix these things so much as whether or not a city or a national government could involve themselves in some way to do that. Because you do have to appreciate that if we're breaking down silos, if we're creating more collaboration, there is a challenge with regard to the fact that a lot of local programs don't want to compete. They don't want to cede their authority or their control, which, granted, isn't in the best interest of the founders, and yet they still do it. How do we push more collaboration and try to break down these silos if they really exist? Fares, you want to kick us off first?

Yeah, I can go on this one. I think what does collaboration mean to a city is important. When a city is designed, it's designed like infrastructure. We have roads, we have traffic lights, we have airports, we have communities living there. There are more infrastructure. They're not built as communities or ecosystems. So when I come into a city and I'm engineering, and in our part of the world, we are building towers and mansions and great concrete infrastructure. But what is important and which is happening significantly faster now, is they've started looking at urban planning and agendas around urbanization. So in Dubai, for example, there's a D33 economic agenda, which is fantastic, and there is a 2040 urbanization master plan, which is basically giving you an opportunity to work like a cohesive ecosystem. Within 15 minutes, you have access to everything you want, so there is no commute. And I think if you start looking at ecosystems not as infrastructure, but as communities, I think people will start thriving more. Now, taking a step back, what happens in these specific or purpose-built communities, purpose-built ecosystems? By cities. And Singapore is a great example of this, where they have designed such kind of independent hubs where a founder can operate. One is collaboration significantly increases and founder capital within, I would say founder knowledge capital increases significantly between that particular city or particular ecosystem of people. Second is there are more chances of success because now there will be— I was just reading before I came here, a $23 million mansion in Silicon Valley, which is hosting repeat founders who are unicorn founders to build their second and third and fourth startup. Which is fantastic, right? A purpose-built residency for repeat founders to become unicorn founders. And I think this is, if we start thinking in this fashion, a lot of cities will progress significantly faster to achieve their, both their capacity building goals, economic agendas, because SMEs and startups contribute over in any part of the world. Over 70% of the GDP contribution is by startups and SMEs. And now we're seeing, because of that large contribution, there are more efforts to— a lot of countries are attracting now, giving digital nomad visas and, you know, come work and live and prosper in our country. So I think the ecosystems are being designed around capacity rather than earlier it was particularly designed about technology or infrastructure, I mean. So that's changing rapidly.

Thanks, Sameer. I think, you know, I want to build on that actually. That's great, great, great points. One of the things I've noticed, and I've been lucky to work with economic development agencies for the last, I don't know, 15, 20 years, maybe 22 now, and what I've learned is a lot of times, unfortunately at least, and, you know, having touched different countries in the US, it, uh, you know, I call it the shiny object symptom, right? Because they're being elected, they want to get like a big win really fast. And Paul, you said it beautifully, building infrastructure, roads, and cities. It just takes time. It's not going to happen overnight. If you want to build that freeway, I mean, you're in Arizona right now, that 101, I think it was like 10 years in the making. So someone has to— I call it someone has to be brave enough to say we're building an entrepreneurial ecosystem with small businesses. Nothing will shine today. We might get lucky to have one something that will shine today. But most likely is 5 to 7 years, probably 15 to 20 years, and you gotta create that momentum for it and you gotta, you know, build that foundation to be able to build something stronger. So the first thing I'm gonna say is that unfortunately a lot of times you're looking for quick wins, and in the economic development space, I always tell people, like, economic development really space is a 10-year run. If you're looking for a 1 to 3 year run, And you fund projects and programs. And I think this is why, Paul, you said it beautifully earlier. And I same thing with Samir. Like when you, when they're looking for activities because they're just trying to say we spent money, we did these things because they wanna just be able to report on it versus the actual results, which we should all be paying attention to. But those things take time and then someone else probably will benefit from it. But you gotta start it. If you don't have that, I call it the gutsy feeling that you gotta stand up on your feet and say, you know what? Hey, I understand your frustration today that you want 10 companies to start. They will, it might be next year this time. It's just not gonna happen. Or if it does happen, it's because, yeah, that big event helped bring that attention, but now real work has to go into it. Someone has to support them, someone has to build it. The second thing I'm gonna say is, unfortunately, a lot of times when we say the word ecosystem, And depends who you ask, you're going to get 5 different answers. The whole idea of the reason why they're solos, of someone working in the university versus someone working in the neighborhood, is they don't talk to each other. And it's not necessarily intentional. Sometimes some of it could be, but a lot of it is really just everyone is like, you know, focusing on what they're trying to accomplish, and they have their own— I'm going to call it ecosystem— without overlooking or saying, okay, what else is going on that I could potentially tap into. I've been fortunate to see few organizations do that, to say, hey, we got this ecosystem, where can we interact? I think the cities, the counties, and the government agencies could potentially play a role because they could also say we don't fund projects unless there's a collaboration effort. That makes things much more harder than for someone to say I'm going to do this on my own. All right, good luck on your own, but if you want to do it in our city, in our space, and you want our money, Show us the collaboration that you're bringing together to make that ecosystem talk. And especially if they could identify what are the holes that are happening today, which most of us know them just by walking in because we've been doing this for a while. But if you don't, you could easily figure it out really fast and then figure out, all right, let's make it work. The third thing I'm going to say is entrepreneurship and small business, there are lots of myths out there about them. Not only from the government and the people who are running it, but also from the people who are supporting it and also from the actual people who are going through it. And that takes time for education, for information. And it's also— I'm going to call it— there's a life cycle of its own that we have to accept and be able to challenge. I like what you said, Samir, earlier, challenge the status quo and challenge what we're thinking about it because It's not necessarily what you may think. It's a little bit more, maybe a lot more work than what you think it is and a lot more talent needed to make it work. It's not going to take one person or one institution. It's going to take a whole community.

Wonderful, wonderful couple of thoughts. And I say wonderful, in fact, because I'm looking at the chat. Thank you, everybody, for participating in the chat. Continue to throw questions there. I'm looking at the chat, and I see that Peter, in fact, seeded where the next question was going to go anyway. Before I get there, though, I want to acknowledge to Rob, that's a great question about AI. We'll see if we can get to that. And Jack, of course, is asking a wonderful question, too, about university systems and being able to even get to Series B capital. We often refer to that as a missing middle. We'll try to get there, but they all sort of lead to what the next question was going to be anyway. So let me do that before we open it up too much to the community and audience for questions. It's that I've been in Austin for 16 years— Austin, Texas. It was said that I'm in Phoenix. I'm in Phoenix for the holidays, Arizona. But I've been in Austin for about 16 years. In the time that I've been in Austin, there are only maybe 10 of us that still show up just as we did 16 years ago to every single event, every program, every venture capital networking event. And we refer to these generally, we refer to these kind of people as ecosystem builders. But the point that I'm making is that there are only 10 that still show up so many years later. And the reason for that, we keep hearing, is that these people in particular are the least supported, but perhaps the most important, right? That you have an accelerator in town that makes money somehow. Of course, you've got a venture capital firm that makes money through their thesis and their investment model. The university is obviously making money. The glue that ties everything together are these people, though, who put together events. They run the Facebook page. They promote. What's going on? Almost out of an innate need to play that role in the community. You see them constantly doing it regardless of selling something or promoting their business. They're just the startup person in town, but they're under-supported. They're likely not funded. They're not sponsored. The city isn't taking care of them. They don't actually have a job, or maybe they have a job, but not enough to to do what they're doing. Can we change that? Guys, what do you think about how we encourage the audience, the cities to put together perhaps long-term programs or different roles or grants or sponsorship for the people that you would consider ecosystem builders who help break down these silos? And before we get to perhaps that question about AI, of course, AI being a technical solution, The reality is you need people first involved in the community. How do we make sure that these people are supported and keep showing up and are valued more than they are now for just being participants, but they're actually valued in some perhaps economic way? Any thoughts?

Yeah, I can again take this one, being in the ecosystem since 2010, being, being before in our part of the world, before the word startup was even known since 2010. And one event actually called Celebration of Entrepreneurship, which spanned across one full week of celebrating the top traditional legacy entrepreneurs that laid the foundation of where we are today, you know, from a Middle East perspective. What you said, Paul, is interesting. And I've been since 2010, me and a group of colleagues, business colleagues have been kind of showing up to all events irrespective of our time commitments and ensuring that we're physically and mentally present. But then Sarcastically, somebody commented one day, and it was very funny, but also it kind of touched my heart, saying, welcome to the zoo, right? Where welcome to the zoo means, right? When you become a frequent visitor to a particular event or set of events, you're kind of being a watchful person where you go and see the same people, same animals in the zoo, irrespective of the time of the day or time of the night. But that led me to think, saying, you know, what other people say or hear or do, should we as ecosystem builders or capacity builders pay attention to these sarcastic things? I think we shouldn't. Because there are a lot of naysayers. If you believe, strongly believe that your job or you want to create an impact on your local community, then you have to commit your time. Now, there could be ways to monetize it. I think we have to think differently on how these could be monetized. For example, I do a lot of these monetizations through companies which are Series A and above, where we do soft landing for them. And that money which is earned through soft landing, I put it back into the ecosystem. Part of that compensation is put it back into the startup community, organizing events and things like that. So part of that budget goes there. So, you know, whether I'm there or not tomorrow, those activities keep rolling. There is no economic pressure on that. Now, how the governments view ecosystem players is a little bit different. Governments have their KPI saying we want to produce 200 jobs. When we receive, we receive certain RFPs which are very funny, also thought-provoking, saying we want to, we want to create 200 jobs and you should submit this RFP, and every startup gets $50,000 to produce 5 jobs per startup. Now, when the startup takes $50,000, uh, US dollars And then after they finish the program, I have seen 90% of them go into hibernation mode. The problem is they are not taught continuity, they are not taught capital efficiency, but they're just given capital to, to produce certain outcomes without coaching them on how these outcomes need to be achieved. So ecosystem players or enablers like us, like me and Faris and yourself, Paul, can play an important role coaching not only these founders, but also the heads of government or the state saying, what is the best way to deploy this capital? There are programs which can be structured. There is marketing budget. So I think we can come in and help actually deploy in various buckets those kind of capitals, capital allocation, so that the machinery which has to run on startup events and everything continues smoothly. This is my thought process.

Yeah, thank you. So, Paul, to your question, how can we get them supported? I think, you know, the idea that, you know, there are the 10 to 20 people that are always circling. I'm going to build on what I said earlier that sometimes have the people have myths about the entrepreneurship and small business development. So they come, I call them, they come in and out through a revolving door because someone thinks that they could come and consult small business or startup, get rich or get paid, or they're in transition between jobs. And they're just coming for— I'm going to call it for the ride. They're not really coming to, to build the ecosystem. They're just here for the ride. And I think they're important because we do need people to ride the ecosystem, but also we need people who build it. And I think your question about how can we get these people to, to, to really pay for it is really key. And I think, you know, you have to have— I'm going to call it a long-term vision. To build it and to have ways to support it. Because a lot of times they, you know, they want to, you know, Samir, you said it right, you are— they just want to give you this money. You're like, oh, we give half a million dollars. Okay, well, good for you. What happens after that? Okay, the people who are building this ecosystem, they're the ones who say, you know what, you got to talk to this person, you got to go here, you— there's a big conference that you need to go meet 3 people there, let me arrange that for you. Those things take time. Unfortunately, a lot of times people just don't value them as effort to be done. And I usually tell people, listen, it's just like anything else. You could Google if you're sick what to take. I'm not going to tell you you shouldn't. I'm just going to say, listen, if you have allergies to something and you don't know, you're going to find out later when you're in the hospital. But if you go to your doctor, yes, it's going to cost you a little bit of money. But the doctor within 5 minutes can ask a few questions. Some of them might be frustrating to you, but you have to go through it. But once they ask— you answer those questions, they're gonna probably give you something, not necessarily the answer, but this is why it's called practice. And I feel entrepreneurship is also the same, it's a practice. But you're going to give them a smaller percentage of chances of failing that medicine or acting that— making that medicine work on you. So the key here is we have to have a belief that these entrepreneurship ecosystem builders are really important part of our integral growth for the community. And we're gonna be able to fund their time and fund their effort because it just takes time and it takes effort. And I think, you know, the cities and the countries that I saw that did really well, those economic development agencies and the governors and the government officials understood the idea that I gotta scale it up by having infrastructure of institutions that have good people in it that could work together, talk to each other, and I'm gonna foster that by offering incentives for them to stay, but also incentives for them to continue building, not just to do it once, do that one big show and take off, but for them to continue the work behind it.

You, you make a, you make a wonderful observation that I find myself repeating constantly when people reach out to me, uh, which is that trying to find a job, a job with a startup is a terrible idea. Folks are, are constantly asking if I know somebody hiring. The last place you want to look for a traditional real job is in a startup. So imagine that these ecosystem builders, these these folks who are constantly showing up, they're clearly doing so because they're passionate. They know that that startup that they're helping is not likely to be successful. It's not likely to be able to pay them anytime soon. Identifying those folks and investing in them is really critical. A whole series of wonderful questions. Thank you, everybody. A lot of these questions, I think, stem from the planned question I have next. So I'm going to point that out because I want to push off that question just a second. I want to, I want to point out two things. Number one, I'm actually giving you an experience in what founders go through when they struggle with capacity building. And that's because I've heard it said a couple of times, so I'm just pointing it out. Apparently my internet here sucks. And so I might be blurry. You might be getting some, some silence from me. Let that soak in for you. That's what founders feel every day in your city when you are not streamlining and making it ridiculously easy for them to find mentors, connect with all of the investors, get into the right programs, and hire talent. And I guarantee you, because literally in every city I've ever spoken with, you are not doing a good enough job, including Silicon Valley. You are not doing a good enough job. That's why we're having this conversation. How can we make it easier for founders and entrepreneurs to get through the system that you put in place as your economy for startups and be productive and meaningful? I have one other question that comes from the community that I'd like to deviate us to because it seems relevant just to better understand what capacity building is. This is from, from Leslie. Leslie, thank you for this. In cases where capital is available. And I like that the question was framed that way because we actually find that capital is in fact usually available. Lack of capital is not the problem, everybody, even though you think it is and even though you often say it is. There's usually capital available. But in those cases where that capital is available and yet the outcomes of the startups or even the programs are, are still underperforming, underperforming? Can we identify what's missing? Can we identify in this concept of capacity, can we identify the aspect of capacity that's not in place, that's not helpful? And do you find that there are some signals that, hey, city, hey, ecosystem, if we had only addressed those issues in the ecosystem itself, in the capacity itself, we could close that gap, we could help move those startups forward to get at that capital that's there. Is that pretty easy to identify? And give us a sense for how you might work through that kind of, kind of issue for Leslie.

Yes, uh, I'll start this one, Samir.

Yeah, but it's, it's your slide.

Yeah, well, I'm not sure. Uh, I'm gonna say, um, I think this is why Founder Institute and others like it, and, you know, need to exist, right? Because you need to have that matchmaking, you need someone to assess it. I kind of— I'm going to call it triaging, uh, that you need someone to triage the— what the entrepreneurs need and connect them with the mentors and connect them with the resources that they need. What I'll also say, this whole concept of mentorship, and, you know, just like you, Paul, and Samir, I've blogged a lot about the whole idea advising, mentorship, consulting, and counseling, and the differences and what's in common. The one thing I do like about the mentorship, there are lots of ways that we could look at mentorship or connecting them to resources. And that is one of them would be, is that one of the ideas I usually like to say is that mentorship does not have to be long-term. It could be one thing and it's over, and it's a one thing and it's done. Or it could be one thing that could be lasting for a couple of months before it moves on. Or it could be something that could last for a year, just depending on the situation and what we're trying to accomplish. And I think to your earlier question, Paul, that could build on this whole idea is that if you're really funding an institution to really build this mentorship pool, well, now you have— I'm going to call it consistency of building this pool to continue. And now you have the talent— I'm going to call it depth, right— versus the shiny object or shiny event to continue building that ecosystem. In a much more meaningful way. And then those who are coming for the ride, maybe now they could be parked somewhere and then bring them back as we need them to take another ride or to be part of another journey for a short-term or long-term. So that would be my short, quick, uh, uh, respond to it.

No, I think that's, I think that's a good response, right? The, the challenge, Leslie and Yolanda, I'm seeing some of your questions as well that are good if, if we can find the time to get through them. The challenge is often that we're not supporting the right people who are those ecosystem builders that we were talking about, who don't have a bias towards a specific program or a specific venture capital firm, that they really just want to see everyone thrive. And those people are the ones that will make those connections, that will introduce the mentors who want to be involved in a lot of things, who will who will ensure that someone who was helpful in the past is again helpful in the future when it's appropriate, who will help the founders get past prejudice even, or cultural separations that enable people or could enable people to get into the right communities or the right part of the ecosystem. Yolanda asked a question, by the way, I'm just going to point it out, Yolanda asked a question about how startup networks can often be limiting or inaccessible. And I'm just pointing it out because we're sort of touching on it. I'd love to encourage you all to appreciate that your startup network is in fact the entire ecosystem. It's the entire economy. If there's anybody in your community who has their own little siloed network, that's a problem. I don't care why it exists. It's a problem. You need to— you need to criticize them and break that. Because everyone should have access to everything as appropriate and as best as possible. Let me jump to the next question because— that I had, because I think it addresses or might start to address some of the other questions from the audience. And it's that we've talked about outcomes, we've talked about how ecosystems help bridge some of these gaps, ecosystem builders bridge these gaps. If we could rewrite the KPIs metrics for the startup community. What, what would you like to define those metrics as? What would they be? How do we tell everybody, here are the things that you should actually be focused on, here are the numbers that actually need to move, stop paying attention to the other numbers that you constantly promote in, in, in the Wall Street Journal. These are the metrics that, that matter. Give us a sense for the numbers since we're talking about outcomes, we're talking about how to close the gap on more more funding? What are the metrics that actually matter for a city?

So, um, uh, Paul, uh, first let me also quickly address the earlier question because I was quite anxious to have not have the opportunity to address that one because a lot of, uh, city startup programs are handed over to the Big Five consultants. You know, the Big Five consultancy companies have no idea on how to operate startup programs. And this is where even if you have capital provided or budgeted by the state and you have a billing with these Big Five consultancies, you often are— it's just like working capital you're taking from a bank and recycling that capital. So I think that is the biggest mistake made. If you go to any developed or emerging economies, they're often hired to reduce their own risk that the city or the state might fail. They hire these consultancies to run startup programs. And that's a very wrong thing they do, right? And then after 3 years, they say, we no longer require consultants, we have learned the hard the lesson the hard way. That's number one. This— the, the second question which you brought in is very interesting. How do we measure? What do we measure? Um, what are some of the KPIs? One is, what does a startup require actually, you know, to sustain in a, in a very competitive environment? It requires revenues. So if the startup in Dubai requires revenues, have you as a city or an emirate broken down the procurement process for a startup in such a way that it could benefit very quickly from your special procurement policies, right? So I would say the time required for, from procurement to payment is have you made it minimal for if you are buying through startup program or a startup. So that is number the first KPI. The second KPI is, and I mentioned this before, is repeat founders. How many of the founders have already exited their first startup in your same ecosystem and are now building the second or the third startup? Like we had the PayPal mafia, like we had the other— have you created that cohesive environment for founders to continue thriving in your same city to build startup number 2, startup number 3, and so forth? That's point number— that's the second KPI. And the third KPI, I would say not the final one, is from a corporate perspective. We— and I was also involved in a corporate innovation accelerator or a CVC fund, right? Now, when the CVC fund operates, they invest in startups and startup programs. Now they look at, um, as a CSR activity It's more like a CSR activity. So can it now be considered— can we start looking at it more into a talent development pipeline rather than just a CSR activity? Because CSR benefits the society while talent will build capacity. So I think that, that is a more— and the last one, the last KPI is How many of your university students have actually gone and started a company? These 4 KPIs, I truly believe that a city should measure.

Paul, I think this is a loaded question. I don't know. I think we could spend a whole nother session just on this whole idea of KPIs that should be measured. Because I'm going to say it depends on the community that we're targeting and it depends on exactly what we're trying to do. One of the communities I worked with was refugees coming to the US. And one of the things we learned really quick is that a lot of them are ready to open a business because they may have owned a business, you know, from wherever they came from, but they don't really know the environment or understand what's happening here. So we saw really quickly, although you might have educated them on how to start a business, you— we did not really educate them on how the business works here. So they just open a store and they're like, people will show up. Well, it's not your little town where you came from. This is the USA, and unless someone knows who you are and what you're doing, they're not going to show up, even if you have a big brand or not. So I think from a KPI perspective, I'll start with that first. Uh, I think I'm gonna say it depends on what you're trying to accomplish. So one of the things I don't see measured is like the survival rate. So a lot of times people say 80% of businesses fail. According to whom? According to which study? There's really, I have not seen a study that studied exactly this number of businesses that opened versus closed. The studies usually show how many companies are registered today, beginning of the year versus the end of the year, and what percentages of them stayed open or not. We don't know if they were bought. We don't know if they exited, to your point earlier, and they started another business. We don't know if they were bought by another company and then shut down. So there are lots of things that are just really— I'm going to call it brushed off without really noticing. If you want to measure, you know, the easiest two measures for any place to measure is revenue per company and number of employees. That's it. That's economic development right now. You could measure other things— survival rate. You could measure the growth rate percentages for the businesses, right? You could measure that. You could measure number of jobs created versus number of jobs retained. You can measure not only the capital access, and I would actually challenge, yes, we may need capital, and you said it beautifully earlier, not everything is all about the money. But I'm gonna also say that really the money that's available is still hard money to get. And therefore, if you don't, if you, when it's time for you to need the money, to get the money, no one's gonna give it to you. And they only give it to you when you don't need it or want it. So, you know, it's this catch-22. And even though I work with a lot of CDFIs and other institutions, my impression has always been that their threshold of— I'm going to call it tolerance for risk— is still very low, maybe 7% versus the 1 to 3% of what a bank would do. And I feel like we could do better in letting them go to the shark money where it's a 50%, you know, they don't even do interest rate, they just do factors. So they'll tell you there's interest rate, but it's just a joke. So, you know, I think there is an opportunity for that. I really thought one of the things I wanted to just bubble back up, and Samir brought it up, this whole notion of the ecosystem has to work together and has to find ways to collaborate. And I think the money part of it could definitely help and the KPIs need to be, I'm going to call it adjusted based on what you're trying to accomplish. So for instance, there are some programs that will measure number of export versus numbers import. But usually they're not talking to the rest of the ecosystem that is involved. So can we find a way to get them all to talk to each other, connect with each other and building each other? I think that would be my, like, you know, so if there were 5 KPIs or 3 KPIs, I would say, you know, think about revenue, think about number of jobs, think about survival rate, think about exit versus number of, you know, like one of the things we were challenged here in Detroit before was like, if someone failed, they're like, now failed the business. So therefore nobody wants to talk to you, nobody wants to fund you, nobody wants to work with you, to work with you. And we all know from other ecosystems, it doesn't matter how many times you failed, do you get up and do it again, or do you go get a job? That's really the difference. And if you could get up and do it again, you actually have some great insights that could help the next one do better, and then third one do better, and so on and so forth. So I'm gonna go to the idea that if we don't invest in our own communities, talent and infrastructure, then why are we expecting someone else to do it? So that would be my closing remark for that one question.

Yeah, yeah, good, good, good one. Good one. You know, investing in infrastructure, for the— for those not familiar, and, and I'm going to bring up my last question, everyone, uh, for those not familiar, Founder Institute is, is well known for running local programs, and, and we've got roughly 270 cities now where there's a local chapter. One of the reasons we're having this conversation, though, is that we've spent the last year pivoting rather, rather substantially to providing infrastructure to your local government, to the national government, to run programs of their own, or to have a foundation to your startup ecosystem upon which the existing programs could all better connect or access more mentors or run what we refer to as an entrepreneurial DNA, run a profile assessment of your entrepreneurs so that you can better figure out what kind of culture, what kind of values your community has and how that can drive what both of these guys are talking about with regard to how to put in place the right best practices and the right programs for your special, unique use cases in your part of the world. That's, that's the last question I'd like to ask. And actually, we're going to drop one more poll, everyone. If, Sana, you could drop that poll for us. I want to ask of the community, the audience, what, what they think they need most, what, what's holding back their capacity most and what they'd like to see put in place. But Fares and Sameer, as we wrap up with about 5 minutes left, I'd love to ask you both. What do you think are the most important best practices that you've learned, or tools or resources that you've found that can help a local community increase their capacity and serve more entrepreneurs and investors, frankly, so that we can create more jobs and bring more startups to the, to the ecosystem? Any thoughts on the best, best resources, best practices?

So a lot of entrepreneurs, Paul and Paris, have started a movement called Building in Public. Building in Public is basically sharing all your knowledge which you've accumulated of building a startup through LinkedIn, through Facebook, through Instagram. Basically, you are creating an FAQ of all your startup Building in Public knowledge, and I've hosted a few events of successful founders building in public, which actually has become, is becoming a movement globally. And what it does is it creates a momentum or a huge exponential velocity of founders learning without intermediaries, allowing founders to learn from founders, allowing corporate executives. For example, in the cohorts I run across GCC and India, our average age of the founder is between 36 and 42 years. Right. So these are accomplished executives, corporate executives who now want to do a startup. Now they have no— they have very little knowledge, but when they start looking at some of the LinkedIn content founders who've done this before and learned and built capacity. It's like watching a YouTube video and learning to cook. And this is what is happening. This will give you enough momentum and trust, build trust between even the funding community, your VCs, your angel networks to actually see what you're building because End of the day, it's all about whether your capacity or a startup product or your fundraising, it's all about how successfully you have built the product and how collaboratively you build the product. So to close out my point of view, I think building in public is a great movement if founders want to learn from other founders and literally build a rocket ship within no time. I think you should also, as a founder, when you build something, start sharing that knowledge in public so that it becomes quite a life learning experience for everyone. Thank you, Paul.

Yeah, I feel like there's so much we could just talk about that one question alone and on all the things that we talked about. So I have a blog actually. I say, if you want to do something, if you want to go somewhere, you got to start doing something. But if you want to grow somewhere, you're going to have to start reflecting. And I think when Samir said earlier that many of these government agencies— and I work with a lot of them, over 100 of them over the last 10 years or so, cities or government agencies— what I noticed, the reason why they hire those big corporations, big consulting firms to do entrepreneurship activities because they're looking for— I call it scapegoat. They're looking for someone to blame. We hired them, they have all the money, they have all the knowledge, we give them all this money and they didn't deliver. And versus saying, let's do it correctly. And or they'll go the other extreme and hire someone that doesn't really know entrepreneurship ecosystem building. And not saying that you shouldn't give them a chance, but Also, maybe you wanna hire someone who's kind of like, you know, the founder has been around for a while. ISM has been around for a long time. You know, these are institutions or others like us, right? There's so many great, wonderful organizations. When you hire them, yes, it might be a little bit more, but then maybe you could have someone get mentored to learn how to do that slowly. Because I also feel if I make it sound so easy and so simple, kind of like what you said, Samir, you watch a video, you're like, oh, I could cook it that way. Till you start doing it, you have no clue what else had to go through and all the things behind the scenes that had to go into it to make it work. So the recipe is simple, but the actual cooking of it is much more complex. So I'm going to say to build the sustainable economic growth through capacity building is engage the people who are playing in the field that you are looking for. And I will say stop trying to copy other places. Paula, I love what you said, you work locally. Because if you try to just copy paste a program or an activity, I'm not saying that you shouldn't look, you should learn. I'm just saying that you should look at what maybe Silicon Valley or other or Austin or any other city is doing, but also say, what can we be learning from that to do it here? And this is what I mean, like you do to go and you reflect to grow. You just don't wanna do it. You wanna, you know, reflect on it, say what's working there, what's not. And remember, a lot of these things, they might have started 20 years ago and you're trying to benefit from where they are today. Well, you have to look at where they started because unfortunately, you maybe could cut some things, cut some corners, but it's a process that we all have to go through it.

Wonderful, thank you both. For the sake of everyone's day as they hang out with us in the audience. We're gonna wrap up the panel officially at this point. Sanna, thank you, is gonna share that second poll question and the results from that second poll now as we explore a little bit more, what is it that everybody actually thinks they need? I wanna encourage you again, if you think it's capital, you're actually wrong. We know this for a fact, it's been studied. There've been some papers about it. A lot of times founders will say that what they're struggling most with is capital, and it's actually not capital. You have the money there. It's something else that's wrong. And that's why we're having these conversations about capacity building and how to better serve local communities and governments to increase the amount of entrepreneurs that they can capably handle. Ferris, Samir, thank you so very much. I presume, I expect, and in fact I know everyone can connect with you both on LinkedIn. If you all are not signed up through Founder Institute, I encourage you to go to fi.co and at least just get registered, get registered as a mentor, perhaps a local director if you'd like to run a program, even apply as a founder perhaps, just so you can get into the network and into the community. That's a good way to connect with us all as well. We're going to kick everybody over to a bit of a networking event right here. So while the panel is over, if you can and want to stick around, Some of us, I can, some of us can talk a little bit more and get to know you a bit for the next half an hour or 45 minutes or however long folks want to stick around. Any other closing thoughts, Ferris or Samir? Otherwise, we'll say goodbye and thank you for the panel at this point and wrap it up.

Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Ferris.

Yeah, thank you both.