Tim Draper discusses expanding Draper University internationally, noting requests from China, Singapore, Korea, Europe, and Dubai. He says they're not ready to franchise yet while still experimenting, preferring to bring diverse international students to one campus for cross-cultural collaboration, with possible expansion around 2018.
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Hi, Tim.
Hi, Ling Ling.
Ling Ling, this is— so I have a question concerning about, like, here we're in Silicon Valley. It's a hub of innovation and entrepreneurship and also investment. Those investors and entrepreneurs come all over the world, come to see Draper University too. They are mesmerized by how we teach entrepreneurship here, and then Like, my question is here, do we have any intention or plan of how we can bring this to extend our influence or our education to the other part of the world, which desperately wants what we have here to spread in their countries?
Yeah, so we've had lots of requests to do a Draper University in Various parts of China, in Singapore, in Korea, and some parts of Europe. We've had a lot of requests for that, and clearly there's a demand. I think in our case, we are still— we're not comfortable franchising because we're still in experimental mode.
Yeah.
We want to make sure this thing works and works perfectly, or at least work— nothing's ever perfect— works well before we start thinking, yeah, we can tell other groups how they should be educating their students. In the meantime, it's kind of nice to be a lightning rod for all the great potential entrepreneurs of the world to come to a place where they can they can get a little bit of an encouraging boost. So we're not doing it right off the bat, but we are definitely considering it. And I think maybe 2018, you know, if you were talking to me in 2018, I think we'd probably have a couple of different campuses. One of the great things about this place though, and I hope you students are taking advantage of it, is that the students come from all over the world, and you get all of those cultural changes, and they, they all mix it up, and then they start to understand what different parts of the world are thinking and how people operate in different places. In China, it might be that we would want to recruit from other countries so that the the people weren't all from the same country. So we might do something like that. Singapore is already a melting pot, so it's probably a good potential location for this. And Dubai might be a good location where they've already got people coming from all over the world. So I kind of like that. I want that as a part of Draper University, the Strength in all of that diversity and all the different upbringings. Everybody, you know, we just make sure your roommate is somebody very different from you. We make sure your team has people that are from all over different places, and we just want you to sort of feel that you are a part of something much bigger and much more Unusual and confusing than you— than maybe you think it is when you're just isolated in your own family or your own state or your own country. So, long, long answer to the short question.
