Christopher M. Schroeder

Transcription

JONAH BERGER: I can't thank you enough, actually, for spending time on this because, obviously, you don't have to be a great lover of the news to sort of wonder why would anyone be talking about startups in the Middle East with what's going on right now here in Syria, and Egypt, and that kind of stuff. But I can tell you from my experience, and the journey that I've been on to see what's been going on on the ground, it's actually the perfect time to be talking about it. Because there's a phenomenon that you guys know very well, but a lot of people don't know very well, about how technology has unleashed incredibly powerful things. I don't want to take away one iota of the seriousness of what's happening here because, obviously, we know how serious it is. And I can tell you that there are entrepreneurs that I know, amazing entrepreneurs who I met in Damascus and in Cairo, who died in the last couple of weeks. So it's a very, very real thing. I'm not going to be talking about here's something nobody knows about-- it's the only thing that matters. Both matter, both co-exist, but it's something very powerful. I'm not an expert in the Middle East, per se. So one of things I can't do is tell you what's going to happen in the next six months, or what's going to happen next three years. But what I can tell you with pretty close to 100% certainty, which you guys, I think, live in a very powerful way, is that in three years there's going to be a lot more technology in a lot more people's hands. And there isn't any scenario I see where that's going away. Marc Andreessen wrote the forward to my book, and he wrote it how we are moving, within the next 8 to 10 years, to a world of 5 billion smartphones. And that almost becomes a throwaway now. Eric Schmidt's used five billion people with broadband. I mean, everyone sort of throws it out as kind of a rough number. But it doesn't cease to amaze me, whether it's in Washington, in politicians, and investors, here in New York, or in Silicon Valley rock stars who've invented so much of the stuff that the real ramifications of what that means is not as well understood as one would hope. And in fact, even the question of what does a world of $5 billion smartphones look like is not something that I think a lot of people spend as much time thinking about overall. Broadly based, not in a technology worlds like you guys, I think that, in many ways, folks just think they are highfalutin telephones or entertainment devices. David Stern, who just is about to step down as the head of the NBA, is actually going to retire from the NBA and travel all over emerging markets because he knows that a lot more people are going to be able to watch NBA games on a going forward basis. So there is that connectivity. But what smartphones really are, of course, is supercomputing capacity, if Mark is right, in the hands of 2/3 of humanity. And I could tell you among the mobile providers that I've met throughout the Middle East, most of them thought that Egypt would have 50% smartphone penetration in the next two years. In the Gulf right now, it could be 80% in places like Dubai. And you're just going to see, I think, an incredibly powerful world. Internet penetration is unbelievable there right now. There are huge per capita incomes. Unlike Turkey, which is a fantastic ecosystem of startups, it is actually a very large market of Arab speakers around the region. 350 million. Their location is just unbelievable, North, South, and East and West. And so, in some respects, it's not surprising that in that kind of locale, even with the political instability, something incredibly powerful will happen when people have access to computing technology and can begin to bottom up, do things in terms of innovation and problem solving, which would have been unimaginable in the narrative that we have there. My journey, just quickly to share it with you, I've run several internet companies. I've outsourced technology to pretty much every corner of the Earth. I've traveled all over the world. And I've even been to the Middle East as a tourist. But my narrative has been so strong in terms of one view of the Middle East, and the Arab world in particular, that it really did not fit my thinking that, in the early days of my journey, Mubarak's Egypt or Saudi Arabia would really have a technology ecosystem at all. I knew about Israel. I'd outsourced to Israel. But I just couldn't get it in my mind, despite all my experience in outsourcing technology to so many parts of the world, that, of course, it would be happening in the Arab world as well. In 2010, I was invited by some very dear friends of mine who'd been talking about the ecosystem to one of the first large gatherings of startups in the Middle East, or in the Arab world, called celebration of entrepreneurship. And, in many respects, my view of the world I think of as before and after that event. Because it was 2,400 young people, from North Africa to Yemen, 2,000 person waiting list. Nobody really wanted to talk about Israel. Nobody cared about Obama's Cairo speech. These are guys you know, right? And women that you know. I mean, that's the other thing that surprises everyone. Almost every gathering that I go to, and now studies have backed it up, 35%, 40% are women. And you'd feel completely at home in these events, and in the problem solving, and the challenges that they were thinking about. And it just made me wake up to my own stuckedness in the narrative that I have and made me start to think about the world. I expanded that trip and started traveling around Cairo, and Amman, and other places where I'd heard it was real. And I just saw it over, and over, and over again. And I got called back to be a judge of a startup competition in January of 2011. And again, from all over Egypt, these amazing young people building amazing things. In fact, one of my favorites was a guy who kept talking about this great, highest paid-- he said it was the highest paid weather app in the world. And I looked down at my, forgive me, I have an iPad. But I looked down at my iPad. And I had downloaded it six month previous, and had no idea that it was 30 young people in Alexandria, Egypt who had build it. And I'd paid $0.95 for it, or what have you. But when that was over, I went to Damascus. And when I was there, I saw, again, these unbelievable young people. And that's when Ben Ali of Tunisia left Tunisia and left the country. And it just changed the entire dynamic. And when I got back to Cairo to fly back to the United States, I could just see all young people are saying, this is something big. This is bigger than us. And of course, every one of the entrepreneurs I met, a week later, were out in Tahrir Square, changing everything that happened overall. So that's it. I was hooked. It's a different thing about the world. And it's an obvious place where the world is going. And the caliber of the kids that are building stuff in a world where the ecosystem, which I'll come back to in a moment, is really a bottom up ecosystem. I mean, the infrastructure of education, government supporting this, is, to be kind, the minimus. The headwinds that these young entrepreneurs are really important. But again, if you have ubiquity of access to broadband technology, mobile devices, you just build stuff anyway. And in every country that I've seen, they've done it in the most powerful way. The kind of startups that I've seen, I'd bucket them in the book into three categories. And they'd all be familiar to you based on the things that you use, overall. The first is also very familiar in emerging markets generally. I call them the improvisers. They're often called, elsewhere, copycats, which I think is uncharitable because I think these companies have done an amazing amount of effort not just to merely take that which has worked in the West and bring it here, but they're incredibly sensitive to the dynamics of the region and unique needs to it overall. But as you know, Baidu in China, and e-commerce companies in Brazil, and everywhere. It's not surprising that in risky environments, people take something that's already worked and ameliorate some of the risk by customizing it to the market. So Matu was a Yahoo of the Middle East, which was bought by Yahoo for almost $200 million a couple of years ago. Souk.com, MarkaVIP are these juggernauts of e-commerce which would look very familiar to you, to Amazon and that kind of stuff. There's a WebMD of the Middle East. There are probably 20 of them. And they're doing very, very well they've raised some capital. They've been very successful. And they've been scaling in powerful ways across the region. The second category of people that really have almost blown me away personally, as much as from looking at it from a business perspective, I call the problem solvers. And these are folks who look at these infrastructure challenges, and where guys my age or older say, oh, it's going to take a generation to fix it, and the governments are too fucked up to figure out how to do it, they're like, we'll solve it. It is an area that we're in that I see in startups who pitch me here. And it's something that's amazing to watch in emerging growth markets, which is to look at infrastructure problems and software problems. So traffic is terrible. People say, well, you've got to fix the roads. Well, you've got to fix the roads. But that doesn't mean that they're not ways, like navigation devices and crowd sharing, that allow people to navigate traffic the way they never could before. Garbage and recycling is in its infancy, to be generous. And again, amazing young people from all over the region who are saying, I've got a great idea to build a platform where people know where to deliver their garbage. And I'll figure out a way to send to China. Because then I'll make some money on it. And we can get the garbage clean while building a really great green company. We can do amazing things and solve that problem overall. As you can imagine, there's just amazing amounts of sun there. So solar, there are unbelievable ideas. Not just big infrastructure in solar, but really kind of basic, small use, like in agriculture and cities, which are really very powerful. And I'm going to come back to that in a second. But it's very moving. Probably the most moving of all, because it is, in many respects, the biggest challenge of that the region faces, is an education. I was very surprised to find, when I was over there, that, actually, a significant amount of money is spent on education. But it is almost invariably the wrong education-- very heavy on rote learning. Particularly in the poorer parts of some of these regions, there could be a classroom of 70 kids with not really any discipline. They're all taught to tests, but the tests are pretty much for the 20th century, not for the 21st century and all. So this is a very, very significant infrastructure issue that pays a multiplier price, as you guys know so well. And again, if you're in your 20s, you say, well, that's terrible. So I'm going to hack the system. And the number, probably in Egypt, 15% of the startups I've seen have been some form of use of video or other social capacities, even at the texting level, where people could help tutor each other, share each other course curricular, and put it up online. And it's just been unbelievable to watch. And it's getting amazing traction because Egypt alone, in response to the problems with education, Egypt alone is somewhere between a $2 and $3 billion tutoring country-- $2 to $3 billion. And as you can imagine, most of the people who are forwarding the tutoring are pretty well heeled. Well, all of the sudden, you have these Khan Academies in Arabic that are springing up all over that are really not charging anything for it. And instead of the elite being able to get tutoring to get around a lousy system, if they haven't already sent the kids abroad somewhere, you now have anybody, anywhere, who can get ahold of it, share it, and do really kinds of interesting things with it. And so it doesn't solve things overnight, but most people don't focus on it. And it's just a very powerful, powerful thing. Third thing, the third group of companies I call the global players. And they not unlike the app guy that I described to you before. They know, as you all know, we all know, the world is literally a click away, which means that, literally, women at home who have little crafts business that they used to sell within their neighborhood are now shipping stuff around the world. And larger, scalable businesses are creating really, really interesting enterprises that allow them to do manufacturing in Asia or sell things on platforms all over the world. And so I've talked a lot about difference of them as I've been going about over the last few months. But there's this wonderful woman from Beirut who is just an awesome swimmer. I mean just like college grade college swimmer. And it drove her crazy that there really was not a great way, while she was training, to watch her vital signs. Like most of the stuff, if any of you guys are swimmers, you know this, still now a lot of ways you can do that is devices that were for running, then they adapted them to being waterproof. But if you're swimming, who the hell wants to look at their wrist to see what's going on. So she-- forgive the analogy-- but she build kind of a Google Glass of goggles. So it's a very smooth, very easy thing, very streamlined. And you could look up to it and you can see your vital signs in real time as it's measuring off of your temple. She's being manufactured in China. And it's big distribution contracts now in the United States, all done out of Beirut. She thought a globally from the beginning. She had a very local need as a swimmer. But she immediately said that, in the age we live in now, we can become global players in very, very interesting ways. I want to not blow smoke at you, as generous hosts, and as a shareholder, I admire you guys greatly. But I can tell you that in these ecosystems, the value of big technology players to have an enormous impact is unbelievable because, as I suggested to you before, the ecosystems really are still unbelievably nascent. They really are happening autodidact, right? There are all these wonderful, wonderful, and some of them enormous, conferences that happen that gather people. There are startup competitions all the time. There are startup weekend all over the place. The last Startup Weekend in the Middle East, last weekend, or the weekend before was in Gaza-- Gaza. Entrepreneurs in Gaza cut through all the stuff that they're dealing with and said, we're going to host this thing. We're going to invite some unbelievable entrepreneurs from Jordan. They are going to come here, and we're going to make this whole thing happen. 250 young people in Gaza showed up to Startup Weekend. So it's happening. The education institutions are beginning that significant investment in technology and infrastructure, particularly in the Gulf. Entrepreneurship programs are building. So there's something in motion. But there's a ways to go. So when you have a group like Google over there, it just makes an unbelievable difference. An a lot of tech companies, now, are doing this. Though first and foremost, they're obviously a sales operation, which is completely understandable. But when you look at Google, if you look at Paypal, if you look at LinkedIn, they're all doing what they're doing for their businesses. But they're saying, man, if this ecosystem grows, we're all going to help each other in unbelievably powerful ways. So Google Egypt was a mine blower. The guy who runs it is just an amazing guy, very decent man, very creative. And they put together, two years ago, this thing they called Ebda2, which was the first major startup competition put on by a great technology company anywhere in the Middle East. And this wasn't just a startup competition, right? They either bought or rented buses and drove all over Egypt to effectively evangelize about entrepreneurship, and startup, and tech. So a lot of times, what happens is people go to Dubai, or people go to Amman, or they go to Cairo, and Alexandria is an amazing thing. But no one goes to Tanta, which is actually an amazing engineering town, kind of a little town two or three hours outside, let alone to other parts of the rural areas. And the team at Google Egypt literally just got in buses, went around, had thousands of people who came up with ideas and competed. And they had a big event in Cairo and picked 5 or 10, I can't remember, finalists. And the winner, who got $250,000 or something, and that's a lot of money for the ecosystem there. So it's about the money. It's about awareness. It's about helping each other out. It's about bringing people together in physical ways. And the multiplier effect of that is hard to describe. But you watch it happen. And it's just wonderful. It's a mind blow. Investment money is still pretty nascent. I mean, the Middle East there's been a tradition for some time of sorts of private equity-- in other words, a cash flow business of a certain size that you can put money in. There have been a few venture capital firms that have been there. There have been some Western venture capital firms, certainly, who have dipped their toes in Istanbul as a platform for the region, but others who are looking at it in very powerful ways. But, excitingly, in the last two years, there has really been a rise in angel investing-- so really, really early stage stuff. You've got kind of the late exit stuff. You've got the early, early stuff. What they're really struggling on now is what we, here in the states, call the A round. So in other words, a company may raise a couple hundred thousands dollars. They are starting to kick ass. Things are looking good. Now they need that one the two, what would for us would be three to five, maybe one to two over there. And where do you go? And that's depressing if you're ready to take off and you have that thing. And so they're coming. They are building. I know several multi $100 million funds that are being raised solely for this. They are a lot of main companies, like mobile players and all. Vodafone is an example of this, is actually funding now in the early stage, but moving to the A round. So it's all happening in really, really interesting ways, despite the chaos that is also very real and very tragic at the same time. That chaos cannot be understated. These amazing entrepreneurs face real headwinds, and I would suggest that any entrepreneur in an emerging growth market faces headwinds, right? It's not easy to do a startup in India. It's not easy, lord knows, to do a startup and then to repatriate capital in China. Friends of mine who are investors in Brazil have armed guards when they go to the movies. I mean, emerging markets are not for the faint of heart. But as we all know that there's an incredible rise of middle class and an amazing ability of technology for people to see how each other live and to share different ideas and collaborate in different ways. It's not going back either. So it's just a different kind of mental outlook to the challenges, knowing full well that the top 10 guys, the guys who are playing the 20th century rules, like Syria, are squashing what is really a generational opportunity. So both are true. Both are to be considered. But I think we, in the West, tend to think about the bad one, not about this hopeful one as much. I'll close with a very interesting thing that, when Benghazi happened-- our consulate was attacked, and Chris was killed, and three other people were killed, and Cairo embassy was attacked, I got a phone call from a "New York Times" journalist, who effectively said to me, OK, you're done, right? I mean, you are going to stop talking about this. There's no way this is ever going to happen. And I said to him-- this is a very smart, well-traveled guy, knows more about the Middle East than I'll know-- and I said, how many people were involved in those attacks? And he said, I don't know, maybe 2,000, 3,000 people. In a point of fact, it was probably about 200. And I said, look, I mean, these attacks were terrible. I knew the ambassador. These are terrible. But four months earlier, I was in Beirut for the MIT startup competition. And it was 5,000 or 6,000 companies from all over Middle East, 40% of them were women, that represented 14,000 or 15,000 entrepreneurs. And there ideas are unbelievable. And he just kind of froze and said, well this is-- there's something else that's going on. And so in many respects, as I thank you a lot for spending time on what is a counter narrative, I also know that you know that this is where the world is going. That again, we know, in three years, there's going to be a lot more technology in a lot more people's hands. And the ramifications on politics, on culture, on society, on debates about religion, about debates about women's roles in society, and about how people seize their economic future, I don't think it's ever going to go back. Thank you for listening. [APPLAUSE] JONAH BERGER: I would love if you have any questions or, more importantly, any thoughts from your own experiences, or-- AUDIENCE: So it's been demonstrated in the past few years that social technology in particular can be very disruptive to government operations. In Egypt, we saw that with Twitter. I was just wondering, as you've seen entrepreneurship develop in these regions, is there any sort of effort by the governments to stymie it, to get in the way of it, or to make it not as easy to do stuff? JONAH BERGER: So you're, in a lot of respects, hitting what is maybe the most important dichotomy that one sees here, and, I would suggest, across emerging markets, which is that, I think, at the end of the day, so many governments and regimes who rose in the days of consolidating wealth and power to a small minority people in order to keep control are trying to figure out what do you do is something which is so, by definition, bottom up. And to compound the point that you're making, they really think about it is a political tool first and foremost. So their idea is, if we can just contain enough of the free flow of political stuff, so we can stay in power, then all is going to be fine. And maybe a few good things will happen about and everything else. What so many of them miss, in my view, is that it's not just about the freedom of speech, but this is the economic force, platform, of the future. So that what you're doing is not only constraining voice, and trying to divvy out economic gain, you're actually constraining the entire way folks compete in other parts in the world. And so folks-- I mean, I've had amazing, interesting conversations with folks who are much smarter than I'll ever be in emerging markets. And they'll say, maybe, governments can pull that off, right? Look, when I was in business school, Tienanmen Square just happened a couple years before that. Everyone said, look. That's it. They're done. China will never be anything now. If you don't have political liberalism, you'll never have economic growth. I mean, that was the conventional wisdom then. And obviously, despite their political stuff, something happened there. So right, a lot of people said maybe you can have dual things. My own belief is that you can. This is not say a paradox at all. That you have an ability in doing this to constraint stuff. It's one thing, maybe, if you're a country driving 150 miles an hour to think, maybe, you can take it down to 130 at least for a period of time, in control, maybe. But the countries I'm dealing with, a lot of them are going 40 miles an hour. And if you take a generation out, then I don't know how you catch up. So it's an unbelievably profound choice compounded by the fact that this generation is more mobile than ever before. So at some point, they'll say enough. No mas. The only thing that I can tell you, despite everything I've said, Syria is a perfect example of this. I just know literally dozens of these entrepreneurs who got out. They are in Beirut now. Or they are in Dubai. And they can't wait to go home. And they just figure, the governments will mess with us, but we'll always find a work around. And so that's why I remain hopeful. But your question is the central question that constrains us in ways that are-- it's a missed opportunity is the thing that's so frustrating. AUDIENCE: Are there any leaders in the Middle East, in government, that you found are more open to this idea? It seems like Amman has been developing somewhat as a tech hub, and King Abdullah is somewhat more open. But at the same time, it seems like a facade. And I'm just wondering, traveling, do you see that there is, even if it's not established leaders, that there are people in power that are looking to this opportunity, and to actually embrace it? JONAH BERGER: I think the answer is fundamentally no. The King of Jordan is a very remarkable guy and has been backing the information technology, from an infrastructure basis, for many, many years. The talent that you see in Amman, and the incubators there will blow you away. And you can't take it away from his government in thinking about that. But at the same time, Jordan passed some pretty tough news rights and freedom of speech rights stuff on the internet that had a chilling effect on a lot of young people there, like I didn't think you were going to do this, and now you're doing it too. Dubai has all the infrastructure and all the wealth. E-commerce is going to be an enormous opportunity in the Middle East in the next couple of years. And Dubai is a fantastic hub for that, logistics as much as anything else. They've got their internet crackdown stuff as well. And so what I would say to you, at least in the case of the Emirates, at least in the case of the King of Jordan, I think they're doing a balancing act. They know that there's something here. This is not just lip service. I don't believe it's just lip service. But they are in a tough neighborhood, and they're trying to balance that in different ways. And history will tell whether they can pull off that balance in a very, very powerful way. But this is a golden opportunity for some leader to step up, and relate to this generation, and see what happens here. The new head in Cutter and all, you've got a whole generation of people in their 30s and 40s coming to power. They're going to be making choices. But I don't have a crystal ball on it. Can I ask you guys a question? If I can cold call on it, why are you here? I mean, I'm thrilled to see you, but why are you here? You've got nothing better to do? Get a break? Or startups in the Middle East? I mean, why are you here? AUDIENCE: It's interesting. JONAH BERGER: Why? AUDIENCE: Well, I might be a little [INAUDIBLE] but I'm on the localization team here, and I studied in Amman in college. So it's something I'm very interested in. JONAH BERGER: So you've met these people. You know. AUDIENCE: Yeah, I was actually wondering, because I studied there, I went to University of Jordan for a time in college. And most of the people I interacted with came from incredibly wealthy backgrounds who are in university. At most of these conferences are people college educated, in the university background? Or are you really seeing more of the common people getting engaged in want to pursue it? JONAH BERGER: You know, as across the board, and, I think, I can't prove this, too, somewhat chronological. Meaning it is not surprising that young people have been gotten a very good education and have had the resources to experiment with technology. And I think, as importantly, if parents who are willing to let them take risks so they know where things are going, is very powerful. Someone who read my book said, main, did all these guys study in the West? And in fact, I interviewed over 200 startups. And I could only write about 30 of them without losing the audience totally. And of that, probably only a third of them studied in the West, meaning that they really were doing things on the ground a very powerful ways. So what to me is so exciting at these gatherings is you do see the wealthy. You do see Western educated. And you see everybody from everywhere who is with their devices. And they are like, this is cool. We can make it happen. So I believe that you'll see some action from folks who have that. And then they start giving it back. I love this one great entrepreneur Samih Toukan. Did you meet him at all when you were in Jordan, or hear about him? So he was the founder of Maktoob, which was the first big exit over there, the Yahoo of the Middle East. And what did he do? Which has happened 100 times here? He could've taken his money and run. He could have done what ever he did. He formed something called Jabbar. A lot of the best entrepreneurs from that company went out to form other companies. Souk.com used to be part of it. And with Jabbar, he's funding startups all over the place. And the stars of his management team are now starting other stuff. And they, trust me, they come from everywhere. So that's the cycle that if, in fact, it happens at scale, I think changes everything. Why are you here? AUDIENCE: I have two [INAUDIBLE]. One was I read about the stuff at week end happen in Gaza, a really interesting article about it. It was the first time I considered startups as a path to peace and a path to creating a more progressive world. I've always seen startups as a way of allowing people-- like, the way that we do startups now, a way of allowing anybody to create a business. But not necessarily, I've always seen social entrepreneurship, but never something that has quite such a big political change as well. So I'm really interested to find out your viewpoints on that. And then, the other thing was, I've often found that, generally, the best ideas come from desperate times. I think now, like, in the West, I think everyone, akin to sort of like empires, everyone has just gotten used to being a certain way. And it's only when, life is at its worst that actually real innovation happens. JONAH BERGER: I couldn't agree with you more. AUDIENCE: I definitely think that, like, as you were saying this, I literally just wanted a list of all the great startups that you were talking about, I wanted to go through each of them and see all these things that we could bring in, whether it's bringing to Google, or starting, I always wanted to start my own company as well. So the idea of taking these great ideas and, I think, one of the things you pointed out was a lot of these companies beforehand had taken ideas from the West and had localized them to a point with [INAUDIBLE]. I think now we're starting to get to point where there's so much great startups that we're going to see a reversal of people taking the great ideas from these emerging markets and starting to move back over. JONAH BERGER: You've asked so many unbelievably exactly right questions about some of the stuff that's going on. And by the way, in the book, and I think we're handing them out to you guys on your way out, I have a list in my-- I have very long people criticize me, I have a very long list of thank yous. I actually listed every company that I spoke with, whether they are in the book or not. So it's actually a very easy guide for you to look at least some of the-- and remember, it's only a fraction of the folks that are out there. And I have friends who are pissed off because they're not in there at all. I mean, that's kind of the nature of things. And that's my fault, not theirs at all. So I think it's a very powerful thing. And I think the ideas that you do independently, or to think about your role in Google, is very, very profound here because it's, the impact, as I suggested before, is great. The second just quick thing that I would say is I actually spent-- it was some of the more interesting interviews that I did, I've interviewed my buddies in Silicon Valley. Because I effectively wanted to ask them, I'm like, you invented this stuff, for all intents and purposes. How are you thinking about the world for the next 10 years, as opposed to last 10 years? And what was amazing to me is that a lot of them are still thinking about it in a framework of the last 10 years, meaning, well, we'll invest in an emerging market if the market cap is so big. We'll lose our ass in China. But it's so big, we've got to be there, so we'll be there. Second, we definitely are going to outsource cheaply. And OK, fine. I mean, that's fine. But then I said, do you understand that you have a new generation of folks who are now innovating, right? And they're not just innovating for local markets. I mean, sometimes they are. Sometimes they are doing stuff which are very, very local. And they are going to be very nice little businesses, and they're making impact. Other stuff will be 350 million people. Other stuff will be emerging market to emerging market. And we're going to be using stuff made in Mina in the next three years and just think about it as a way of course. So how are you thinking about that? And often, the answer was, well, if they're that good, and that innovative, we'll convince them to come to Silicon Valley-- which is a very 10 years back kind of a thing. Look, Silicon Valley, it's easy to try to poke fun at it. But it's an amazing, I mean, it's, like, in world history, like Florence, I mean there have not been a lot of geographic locations that have just put together this network effect of unbelievable talent, right? So I don't want to-- with all the hubris that we also know about, I don't want to take away one iota of that. But the world is changing. A lot of people ask me, what is the Silicon Valley of the Middle East, and I saw, it's the wrong question. There's one Silicon Valley. Now there are going to be lots and lots of hubs of really, really interesting innovation. How are we going to get into it? How are we going to support it? And how are we going to co-author it? This is, to me, in some respects, the most important thing because if you're over there, no one liked me for our government, OK? But they loved Steve Jobs. They love Sergei and Larry. And they'd love to connect with them, but as co-authors. They don't want anybody patting them on the head. I mean, the most offensive line-- and this is usually coming from the government. Every so often, I've heard private equity investors use it, but not anymore. But they'll say the greatest American export is entrepreneurship. And the folks are like, are you out of your mind? We've been entrepreneurs for 10,000 years. I mean, so there is an engagement of co-authorship of, you know lots of stuff I'm never going to know. And it's not just about your markets. I mean, think about it . These are, as I said before, mobile first societies. Do you think maybe they've got a few things to teach us about mobile that we're not thinking about? So it is a real sense of co-authorship. It's really a sense that we have things that we can bring to bear that might of use. You've got things to bring to bear. And now we're two seconds away on a device. Let's see if we can do stuff. And people are beginning to get it. So I don't know if you guys have done a stuff with McClure and the 500 startup people. But he does what he does. And the [INAUDIBLE] do what they do. It's really interesting. But he also has this thing called geeks on a plane, where they just get people to get on a plane and go see other parts of the world. His next trip, in November, is going to be in the Middle East. That never would've been talked about two years ago. AUDIENCE: So you've spoken a lot about, like, these are the questions that are coming up. How do you envisage the world, the Silicon Valley v2, of the very fact of like a world that is made of, almost, most people will become self-made people working in either a startups that they created or are working on a small startup with a small group of people. How do you view the world being with everybody having the power at their laptop to start and do whatever they want to learn whatever they want? JONAH BERGER: So I'm old enough to appreciate revolutions and also appreciate entropy, right? I mean, we're still sitting here. And not to take a shot at YouTube, who does amazing stuff in the region by the-- we're still talking about 30 second ads in front of three minute videos. I mean, stuff doesn't, everything, change overnight. So Silicon Valley is going to be a force in any kind of sense. And the way they do business will be highly successful for many women and men in many, many different ways. The amount of innovation, because of the ecosystem that is the United States, isn't going away any time soon, no matter what people like to say. So there are things that exist now that are going to exist, and if you and I have a beer three years from now. But what is also going to happen is that we're going to be shocked by innovation that comes from different parts of the world. And we're going to be shocked when, all of the sudden, these products are serving 2 billion people markets, and it has nothing to do with us at all. And so, again, it's not unlike what describing what I said-- both will be true, but the opportunity lies, I would suggest, much more interestingly, mutually, in the second part of it. Why are you here? Why are you here? [LAUGHTER] AUDIENCE: That's a good question. My longtime interest and graduate study research all had to do with forced migrants and displaced people in East Africa. And actually, have had to do with, basically, the effect of being displaced on a creative music process. JONAH BERGER: Wow, meaning what exactly? More creativity because of it? AUDIENCE: So my dissertation was on, basically, Palestinian hip-hop music and comparing musicians in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as Israeli citizens, and Palestinians in a sense. So the 48s, as well as a band that were British citizens and Palestinians. And analyzing different bands, basically, the limitations on being able to collaborate due to physical limitations-- bands not actually being able to travel, being stopped at the border, and then the role of the internet being able to promote their own music and the idea of the end of music as a way to promote peace over violence as a way of expression. So through that, I also have an interest in how being displaced, or being a refugees, in particular, the setting of a refugee camp, and what can be done [INAUDIBLE]. There's a lot of interesting things happening right now in refugee camps in terms of learning trades, and education, how that happens, limitations on resources. And I'm interested in, for entrepreneurs who are displaced, and are in those situations, Syrian refugees, how it has an influence on their creative process. Does it stop it? How do they continue to, in particular, I don't think there's many out there. But I'd be interested in startups ideas in refugee camps themselves. How can you, in very limited time constrained, space constrained settings have a productive environment that also sustains people? JONAH BERGER: You guys have just asked the best questions and had the most amazing experiences. I'm blown away. Just a couple of observations, for what it's worth. And it ties, one part question that you asked, and I don't think I addressed it, because sometimes this is a particularly-- you know, I live on an airplane, but I'm based in Washington. So a lot of times, people ask me, is this part of the peace process? Or could it be part of the peace process? And I come at it a little bit differently, meaning that, when you're able to see a future, and attain a future, if you're able to sit with someone or be connected to someone, and you'll see that you share much more than you're opposed to. As to, as I said before, particularly in the case of entrepreneurs, but I'm sure it must be the case with artists, when you speak a language which is unique to yourself by the activity that you do, peace will come. You are at peace with yourself, and you're at peace with the people around you, and you can see a future that you can actualize, you tend to be a more peaceful person. And so I don't look at it is as a thing to be jammed through. And I can tell you that, particularly now, I know some great Palestinian entrepreneurs who could probably benefit by connections to [INAUDIBLE] because of technology, skill in Israel, is just a mind blow. But it just, all of the sudden, the very act of that, right now, today, almost politicizes it. And they're like, we're about building. No politics now, right? No religion. No politics. Let's build. But that doesn't mean that, one day, it couldn't open up in a very exponential way as people get to do it. So that's sort of the way that I think about it in terms of the framing of it. I call to your attention, if you write it down on your mobile device or whatever, this amazing woman named Nina Curley, C-U-R-L-E-Y, is the editor in chief of another amazing enterprise called Wanbda.com, which if you guys don't go to, you should go. Wanbda.com-- and the founder is a great Lebanese entrepreneur who gets ticked off when I say it, but it's the best way I could do it by analogy-- is sort of like Tech Crunch. I mean, it's like the definitive portal of content of what's happening in the ecosystem over there. But it's much more than that. It's a social community where people can share ideas and best practices, the resources that you can get there. They hold events, usually smaller unconferenced events, or they have this thing called mix and mentor where they bring together people who have been there with young people. And they can brainstorm and do that kind of stuff. Anyways, Nina is the editor of content. And she did this amazing piece where she interviewed Syrian expats who escaped with their lives, effectively, and I think they're in Dubai now, and how they think about their experience, and what they've learned, how they're keeping their creativity alive, and how they're counting the minutes to be able to go back. And it was in the "Washington Post" about two weeks ago. So if you Google it, it's very findable. And it's really moving. And it's really provocative. And it falls right into the category that you're thinking about. All I would tell is a couple things is that, I mean, the hunger is just a mind blow. So I don't know if this is still happening now, but I can tell you that, less than a year ago, there are amazing, amazing engineers in Damascus who literally snuck-- I was going to write about them, but I realized I might put them in jeopardy by writing about them, so I never did. But they literally would sneak over the border to have quarterly meetings with their Beirut partners. And then, in between, whenever they could find access to a proxy server, they did. And when they could find broadband, they did. And if not, if they found electricity, they would do. And they just don't stop. And this Oasis 500 that you mentioned, which is an incubator in Jordan, has these amazing sessions of training and so on. They are amazing. But guess what happens. They're based in Jordan for Jordan. And folks in Ramallah hear about it, and they are like, come to Ramallah. We've got to do this. Do you do it here? And can we send some people? All of a sudden, a bunch of Syrians show up. They say, can we participate also? Because that's the kind of hunger and the appetite that's there. And I don't think that gets stifled. I think it just almost gets magnified in a broader sense of mission, as well as a passion of what they do. In terms of the refugee camps, I don't know the answer to that with precision. But what I can tell you is that when people have technology, they do unbelievable things. So one of the most amazing group of entrepreneurs I met anywhere were these five young women-- I feel like I'm rambling, so forgive me. But it's cool stuff. Anyways, so there's this thing called INJAZ Al-Arab, which is based, a little bit, on junior league, I think. But anyhow, they do entrepreneurship classes all over the Middle East. That's their purpose in life, for Arab-based. And I think a million or two million kids have been through their programs in elementary school and high school. And they may have 30,000 a year, or something like that, directionally, who do these programs. So every year, they have big startup competition, the best of the best high school kids. And so the five young women in Yemen learned that one of the biggest problems in a tent community near them was that because that because of kerosene lanterns, there were fires. And they said, well, this is ridiculous. There should be solar panels. They should all have little devices that are chargeable. And they can have light that way. Why would anybody use kerosene lanterns? So their high school project, it took them 10 months, was to build sure charging stations with solar panels and to get distribution of these electrical lanterns to this community, which they did. All right, unbelievable in and of itself, but it gets better. So one of the judges, I was there, asked these amazing young kids, they just said, wow, but what where did you get the solar panels, right? Did some NGO give them to you? The UN give them to you? How'd you get them. I get what you put together. And you really did a great system integration here, but where did you get the solar panels? And they didn't skip a beat. They said, well, we built them. And they are like, what do you mean you built them? They said, oh, yeah, yeah, there are these great videos on YouTube-- this is where you guys come in. And if you search around-- you know, it took a while. But there are literally, if you search effectively solar panels, materials, at home, there are all these ways to do it. And it took them 10 months to do it, but they figured it out. And they built like little solar panels to put in umbrellas so that people could have fans in the heat, and that kinds of stuff. These are 16-year-old-- five 16-year-old girls in Yemen, OK? So that's not quite the refugee camp analogy, except that they found a way to bring something to bear in what is equivalent to those circumstances there. There's in Egypt, but I also an amazing version of this in Uganda, folks that are using texting capabilities to report things like sexual violence, which is unbelievably important. And then I remember the entrepreneur saying, I think I'm a journalist. I never meant to be a journalist. I thought this was a service. But I'm getting all this insight and stories that's helpful to the community about what's happening on a day to day basis. And so I haven't seen, specifically, examples like that coming out. But they certainly are in the kinds of circumstances that would talk to what you're talking about. I think I've taken a lot of time. AUDIENCE: What is the real world potential of a landscape changing piece of tech or app coming out of the Middle East. And should that happen, like a Twitter or a Facebook coming out of this development? And should that happen? How does that affect the sort of Western civilization of the modern landscape of technology. JONAH BERGER: The Western centralization, from a structural prospective, like the success breeds success ecosystem that I talked about in terms of Silicon Valley, I think, wherever great innovation comes from, still will have a sense of that structurally, physically, and realistically, right? But where I think the impact is so profound is in psyche, both in terms of folks here but, frankly, with folks on the ground. I cannot tell you how much success breeds success is important anywhere, but has a particular power in emerging growth markets. When Maktoob went public, it just changed the whole-- I mean this was $2 million exit, $175 million, whatever it was. And it just changed-- there were just a whole generation of kids who said, oh my god, we can do it here. And when these kids got Mubarak to fall, they all looked at each other and said, oh my god, we can do-- my parents were wrong. We could do this kind of a thing. So it has this kind of multiplier effect that's very, very powerful. So for example, if this young woman really does have the definitive goggle of swim training, I can't describe to you not only the multiplier impact there, but then folks over here say, well, we should be distributing that. Oh, of course, we need to be thinking about this in a different kind of a way. Put it another way. If we were sitting here in this room 20 years ago, 10, 20 probably, and I said to you that the biggest, or among the biggest player in gaming, and consumer electronics, and in mobile, structural devices, were Korea, Japan, Finland, we'd look at each other and say, what are you talking about? And things like that then take on a life of their own if they continue to scale and continue to have, I think power. But the biggest paradigm shift, which is so stunning to me, that people across generations and across geography still seem to have a problem really coming to terms with is this construct that it can happen anywhere because the tools are now available. And the thing that I think sometimes we don't focus on, and again, this is where my age comes in a little bit to it is, I mean, I remember when there was a lot of great technology, but a lot of it didn't work that well. I mean, it really works now, unbelievably, easily, and well, and accessible. And when that happens, then it changes everything that you're asking. Thanks for asking that. Thank you guys for spending time with me. It's really been a treat. If I can be helpful to you in anyway. If any of you, they've got my contact information. If you ever go to the region, you have to ping me because I know a lot of really fun, interesting people who would kill to do it. Take a look at what McClure is doing. If you can take time off and go over, I would encourage it deeply. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]