The Ledger, every show

“I'm thinking about one person now who literally decided they were going to invest in 14 companies in Pakistan. They didn't really know Pakistan at all and never been there. They just assumed one of them would hit and that didn't help the ecosystem at all. I me…”

“When I was in Iran a month ago, all the young people wanted to show me on their smart devices, not only how they were all on our social networks, which allows them to see each other as well as to see other parts of the world, all of them had access to Coursera…”

“It amazes me how across the region and in Iran, maybe even more so, I find more women entrepreneurs than I find in Silicon Valley.”

“One of the biggest and obvious ones was they began to offer cash payments in when you finish your ride in a Korean car, because they knew that most people in the Middle East were not comfortable yet in the safety and protection of doing a digital transaction. …”

“I saw companies from Africa, from the Middle East and Southeast Asia that started, you know, day one going to London and started going to Different parts of the world. And I was skeptical of it at the time. And in hindsight, I I'm proven right. Right. Because …”

“All the stuff that we're hearing in American startups is happening in parallel at the exact same speed among the best entrepreneurs that I've been meeting in emerging markets.”

“I mean, and certainly half of the engineering graduates every year are women.”

“So last mile logistics is a tremendously difficult thing in most of the markets that we're talking about right now, as it has been in China as well.”

“When you look at the population in a lot of even the larger countries, like places like Egypt and Indonesia and all, a large swath of the population is still in a Cairo or in a Jakarta. The second or third cities there are large, for sure, but not in the same …”

“But if I were a betting man, I bet you they'll be pretty focused for a while because it's really the essence of what the customer needs.”

“Every venture capitalist I met has already had a multi-day offsite to stop and reflect about what its ramifications can mean in the medium term and what it may mean, not only for their portfolios, but their theses.”

“These ecosystems will thrive if the top-down institutions lean in and help them. And to the degree that they slow them down, the good news is that these are more mobile talent than ever before. They will go elsewhere. There will be brain drain.”

“Everyone I've met there of all ages have access to VPN. Every mobile phone I looked at had access to all the same things that we have access to.”

“This is the most mobile generation in history. And when I say mobile in this case, I don't mean phones or smart devices. I mean, they will move to where talent is.”

“You guys graduate something like six or 700,000 engineers across the spectrum of engineering every year.”

“I was quite surprised to see 31, ah, government accelerators with some very good technology in it and I was very surprised to talk to ministers in the information communication technology area who talk about a hell of a vision to build infrastructure there, to…”

“There were over 31 government-backed incubators and accelerators with some pretty interesting technology”

“IPhones are illegal, and there are over six million iPhones there.”

“There's a hundred percent smartphone penetration in Singapore, but if you are a Singapore startup alone, there's only so much you could do.”

“There've been a hundred unicorns in India. They're now kicking off a new generation.”

“The largest e-commerce player in a market of two hundred twenty million in Pakistan right now maybe has two, three hundred million GMV.”

“In retail in a many emerging markets to this day, 90%, 85% pick the market is mom and pop shops.”

“I had a wonderful entrepreneur who built what was effectively the Yahoo of the Middle East called Mach two, which got bought by Yahoo for almost two hundred million dollars.”

“The food service service there, the seamless of Turkey is a company called Yema Sepeki, which just got acquired for over six hundred and fifty million dollars, and there have been several multi-hundred million dollar exits there.”

“There are twenty million plus now subscribers to three G and four G out of a country of eighty million.”