“Sand Hill Road is two-way,” Turkish entrepreneur Fatih İşbecer noted on a visit in 2010. “And it’s easy to get from one side to the other. That’s nice.” Working in Anatolia’s bustling business capital İstanbul, where traffic has no logic or mercy, it was an odd, yet revealing observation.
While entrepreneurship is indeed alive and on the rise in Turkey, as it is in emerging markets worldwide, it continues to face tremendous obstacles such as lack of capital, mentors and networks. Breaking them down is the reason that Fatih, CEO of the mobile tech company Pozitron is, along with 170 other emerging market entrepreneurs, in Silicon Valley this week. He is attending the Endeavor Entrepreneur Summit that starts tomorrow.
The summit is hosted by Endeavor, the non-non-profit that identifies and supports “high-impact entrepreneurs,” that is the most promising innovators running “macro” businesses that the potential to create “hundreds, even thousands of jobs, generate millions in revenue and draw in global investments.” Last year, Endeavor’s network of over 500 emerging market entrepreneurs throughout Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and now Asia (it operates in 15 countries, including regional offices in Dubai and Singapore), created more than 150,000 jobs and generated over $4.1 billion in revenue.
$4.1 billion in revenues shows that, unlike most non-profits supporting entrepreneurs, Endeavor does not think “micro” or aspire to Hallmark moments. With Wall Street rigor and Silicon Valley edge, it, under the guidance of its vivacious Co-Founder and CEO Linda Rottenberg and board chair Edgar Bronfman Jr., deploys a “mentor capitalist” model that breaks down the barriers preventing emerging market innovators from becoming the next Microsoft or Virgin. Its global network of seasoned business leaders, some of who pop on Forbes’s billionaires list, advise emerging market entrepreneurs on strengthening and scaling their operations to global excellence. The organization, as the summit’s agenda reflects, is about creating opportunity and social mobility in places where opportunity and mobility were only seen as an American dream.
The Endeavor Entrepreneur Summit is the 4th biannual gathering, the first to be held in San Francisco, of emerging market entrepreneurial innovators, business leaders and investors. And its the investors that couldn’t be happier.
Though entrepreneurship is the zeitgeist and there appears to more money flowing into start-ups, investors are cautious. “According to the National Venture Capital Association,” a New York Times article reported this week, “venture capitalists invested $5.9 billion in the first three months of the year, up 14 percent from the period a year earlier, but they invested in 51 fewer companies, indicating they were funneling more money into fewer start-ups.” With dismal U.S. job numbers, disappointing signs for an economic recovery and the threat of an American default on its debt, that is not good news. Caution stymies growth.
It also perpetuates pessimism. Since Wall Street’s meltdown in 2008 and the phenomenal rise of emerging market economies such as Brazil, China and India, talk about America’s economy inevitably becomes a discussion about America’s decline. “There is a sense that America has lost ground,” says Rottenberg. “The fact is America remains the most entrepreneurial economy on the planet.” Rottenberg hopes that Endeavor’s Summit will help restore that perspective, while also celebrating emerging market entrepreneurs.
Back in 1997 when Rottenberg launched Endeavor in Argentina and Chile where she had been working on venture financing and social entrepreneurship, no one celebrated emerging market entrepreneurs. “There wasn’t even a word for entrepreneur in Spanish or Portuguese,” Rottenberg is known to say. Entrepreneurship wasn’t inspired but pursued out of necessity. With no jobs or educational options, hobbling together your own business was unavoidable. No surprise then that Silicon Valley avoided emerging markets.
“Fifteen years ago, VCs used to say ‘this is Florence in the age of the Renaissance,’” says Rottenberg. Convinced that all the world’s entrepreneurship was contained in Silicon Valley, they felt little need to look elsewhere. Sand Hill Road was, metaphorically, a one-way street. Globalization has changed that. That is a positive in Rottenberg’s eye.
“Entrepreneurship isn’t a zero sum game,” she says. “It’s exciting for me to see that others (in Silicon Valley) see the same thing. There is a mutual interest from both the United States and emerging markets to learn from one another.” Argentine entrepreneur Wences Casares agrees.
“Starting a company from scratch anywhere is very hard,” says Casares, an Endeavor global board member and one of the organizations earliest selected entrepreneurs who made it big with Latin America’s first on-line brokerage firm Patagon. “But to do it in emerging markets where there is no access to capital, no culture or ecosystem to support entrepreneurship; where the rules of the game change often and without notice, it is much, much harder.” That is precisely the reason why Casares explains that Silicon Valley needs to engage with them. “When you meet these emerging market entrepreneurs and you see the passion and the fire in their eyes, you are reminded of the real reason entrepreneurs do what they do.”
Interestingly the reason isn’t money. While capital is indispensible to any entrepreneur’s foundation and success, value is what drives the type of entrepreneurs Endeavor selects in a highly competitive multi-layered process. “High impact entrepreneurs are those who create and add value to a society,” say Marc Dfouni and Nemr Nicholas Badine, founders of Eastline Marketing, Lebanon’s first digital marketing agency. “Their achievements aren’t solely monetary. High-impact entrepreneurs are defined by sustainability, building companies that last.”
According to Egyptian entrepreneurs Hind and Nadia Wassef they’re also defined by their resilience. That is something they have had to channel since the events in Tahrir square. “When you live in a country that has been under a totalitarian regime for 30 years, a lot of garbage needs to come up.” The sisters, who run Egypt’s popular bookstore operation Diwan, say much of this “garbage” had been directed at Egypt’s entrepreneurs who have been blamed for Egypt’s malaise. “The revolution was lovely and inspirational. I’m sure it looked lovely on Al-Jazeera, but you wouldn’t have liked being in its kitchen.”
That the Wassef sisters were “in the kitchen” with advice and insights gathered at previous Endeavor events made a difference. “I remember being at the selection panel in India in 2009 when the only thing anyone would talk about was the recession,” Hind Wassef says. She recalls being told ‘this is a crisis, cut to the chase, get down to the nuts and bolts, stick to your core.’ “That was useful to us during the mess of the revolution.”
The Wassef sisters are headed to San Francisco for similar insights as well as what Nadia says is “a much needed break.” She likens the Endeavor Summit to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. “It is a place where you can play around with ideas, experiment, and renew your drive.”
It is also a place they’re looking forward to connecting with the world’s greatest business and entrepreneurial minds. With keynotes from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and LinkedIn founder (and Endeavor board member) Reid Hoffman, along with insights from top names from Google, Dell, Kleiner Perkins, Ning, and IBM –including Watson himself, Endeavor’s summit is a gathering of entrepreneurship and venture capital’s best.
“I’m looking forward to hearing from these experts” says Fatih İşbecer. “But I’m also looking forward for them to hearing about what’s going on in Turkey.” He notes that it used to be that Turkish entrepreneurs, like those throughout emerging markets, could only learn from American talent. “Now they want to learn from us.” İşbecer nods vigorously when I say that it’s sounds as though entrepreneurship has become a “two-way street,” then pauses, “Actually, it’s bigger than a street, it’s a global freeway.” Fasten your seat belts.
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