promoting high impact entrepreneurs

Endeavor Jordan had its first local selection panel on Monday. This is the process whereby Endeavor Entrepreneur candidates are vetted by a local panel of top business leaders to determine if they should present at the Endeavor International Selection Panel (ISP), held four times per year. The next Endeavor ISP will be held here in Jordan at the Kempinski Hotel, Dead Sea. This ISP will also mark the official launch of the Endeavor Jordan office - go Jordan!

Our panel consisted of the top business leaders in Jordan. They include, from left to right: Ali Al-Husry, former Chairman and CEO of Capital Bank and Chairman of Endeavor Jordan; Laith AL-Qasem, CEO of Arab Business Consultants for Development; Fadi Ghandour, Founder and CEO of Aramex and Endeavor Jordan Board Member; Maher Kaddoura, MD Huron Consulting Group; and Safwan Masri Professor at Columbia Business School and Endeavor Jordan Board Member. In the front you'll find Endeavor Jordan Managing Director Carmen Saad and me of course! These guys are very busy. As Fadi Ghandour tried to hurry out of the meeting, I intercepted him and asked that he pose for a proper group picture. Thankfully, he's a very nice guy and happily obliged.



It was an exciting day of entrepreneurs presenting to the panel, great discussion and (sometimes) heated deliberation. The event spurred my thinking again about the state of entrepreneurship in Jordan and the level of sophistication among both entrepreneurs and capital providers. I must say the search and selection team put together quite an inspiring and varied group of entrepreneurs.

Sitting in the room with the panelists, hearing them joke with each other and interrupt the entrepreneurs to ask incisive questions, I felt like I was sitting around the board room with the partnership at my old venture fund:

"How do you quantify your target addressable market?"
"Your greatest risk lies in successfully executing on your franchising strategy."
"What is your pricing model and how will you work to build your recurring revenue base?"

The entrepreneurs were quite impressive as well. They brought energy, charisma, shiny power point presentations, and well thought out responses to the panelists' questions.

The entrepreneurs included a female PhD who founded a profitable social enterprise, the creators of a very innovative new green technology, a couple of Web 3.0 gurus, and a niche retail specialist who has grown a sizable business already. We're very excited to see who makes it through the ISP to become an Endeavor Entrepreneur. Stay tuned to this blog - I'll announce the new Jordan Endeavor Entrepreneurs in October!

The entire experience made me think: "Yes, Jordan is ready. The seeds have been sown to grow a strong knowledge-based economy built on entrepreneurship."

How does Endeavor help?

First, Endeavor provides access to a network of top business leaders. In addition to 3 of the panelists mentioned above, Endeavor has Samih Darwazeh, Founder of publicly traded Hikma Pharmaceuticals on its board, as well as Peter Kellner, co-Founder of Endeavor. The office has also assembled a group of VentureCorps members, other business leaders who serve as mentors to the entrepreneurs. Endeavor provides consulting/mentorship, makes introductions to potential partners, customers and funders, and can provide training on raising capital and pitching to investors.

Endeavor seeks the entrepreneurs with high potential and gives them a bit of a push, or a shoulder to stand on, in order to ensure their success. In this way, the organization helps build large companies that can employ many people and helps build a culture of entrepreneurship that encourages others to achieve. Endeavor entrepreneurs give back by coaching others and in some cases donating a portion of their revenue.

A key question in my mind is: How much of a role does Endeavor play in the entrepreneurs' success? Would these entrepreneurs be as successful without Endeavor's help? I'll come back to this in a later post. But the short answer is, I think Endeavor does have a unique and important role to play.

Finally, here's a quick tour through our office:

Modern set-up.

Beautiful views.

Outside garden. We have 3 undergraduate interns (in suits), me (also in a suit), Ismail and Ali (search and selection team, Ismail on the left), and Carmen (managing director, center).

entrepreneurship initiatives versus public policy

For a small country, Jordan is making a big push for entrepreneurship. On Wednesday last week I visited the El-Hassan Science City (http://www.elhassansciencecity.com/), home of the Princess Sumaya University of Technology, The Royal Scientific Society (an applied research institution), and the Higher Council for Science and Technology (policy and strategy). Co-located with Science City is the Queen Rania Center for Entrepreneurship (QRCE). Together, these institutions are working hard on very lean budgets to implement a vision of an integrated science park with students, incubated budding entrepreneurs and more mature businesses working alongside one another. And they are promoting a grander vision of a Jordan built on a strong knowledge based economy.

The QRCE has pioneered several initiatives, most notable of which is a national business plan competition sponsored by Google. They've also partnered with the Cisco Entrepreneurship Institute for business training and created a Made in Jordan competition whose aim is to turn innovative research into high growth companies. Additionally, business plan winners and runners-up, as well as some other companies, are supported at Science City's Incubator.

Courtesy of my friend Bob, who works as a consultant for Science City, I had the opportunity to tour the campus, meet with some companies and meet with the Deputy Director of the QRCE, Mohamad Khawaja. Here's a picture (and article) of Bob and Mohamad meeting with Her Majesty Queen Rania a few hours before I visited: http://www.jordantimes.com/?news=17456.

I think the effort is quite admirable, and I believe it will pay off. It already is. Mohamad, the QRCE's Deputy Director, is a young pragmatic yet passionate guy who can make things happen. The entrepreneurs at the incubator are young, hard-working and fired up about their prospects and the support and recognition they are receiving. I hear more talk of entrepreneurship than a few years ago. And while still rare, I see a venture fund popping up here, one there, focusing on high growth local entrepreneurs.

But there's still a long way to go for the government in terms of policy. Regulations often go counter to the goal of the business promoting initiatives. Take for example import tariffs. They're great, right? They generate revenue for the government while protecting or encouraging local business. But this is where Dani Rodrik's voice rings in my ear, "coordination failure." If the inputs that business require don't exist in country (coordination failure) and it's too costly to produce them in country, then they must be acquired from abroad. Now the import tariffs don't seem as appealing, since they might serve to depress business growth that can fuel the economy and generate many multiples more in tax revenue than the import tariffs currently generate. There are many other examples. For one, it is very costly and cumbersome to open a business in Jordan. Permit and license fees are very high as are working capital requirements.

Thus, we have exciting and ambitious government initiatives to foster entrepreneurship and build a knowledge-based economy coming at us from one direction, and mismatched government regulation that hinders entreprenuership coming at us from the other direction. Fortunately, in this monarchy government, strong potential exists for getting things done. If you are able to find and convince the right person things can start moving. Bob spends some of his time working on this. I'd like to as well....

why jordan of all places?

So why did I choose Jordan for my internship? Many of my international development (we call ourselves MPA-ID) buddies are off to more exotic places, or at least to larger places with arguably bigger development problems. Jenny, Oyebola, Jacob and Momar are in Liberia; Abhilash is in Kenya; Soham is in Sierra Leone with Tony Blair's commission, Paul is running TAMTAM (http://tamtam-africa.blogspot.com/); Helena, Olga, Martin and Dany are in India; Widhar and Jaun Pablo are in Vietnam; and the list goes on....


Jordan's annual per capita GDP is $5,300 (PPP-adjusted). Compare that to Liberia's $500. It's also small with a population of ~$6.2 million (July '08 estimates) up from about 4.4 million ten years ago, largely due to the influx of Iraqis into the Country over the past 8 years. So why care about Jordan when there are so many bigger development problems to tackle?

First, Jordan does have significant development problems. Jordan is a low middle-income country with very few natural resources but an abundance of high skilled human capital. However, the Country has failed to attract significant amounts of outside investment capital. Further, an interesting dynamic exists where there is a small upper class and a large, often well-educated, lower middle class that is unwilling to perform the unskilled labor tasks. As a result, the unskilled labor is mostly imported from Egypt and the far East. And there is a significant degree of unemployment and underemployment - often among people who are educated.

Next is my personal interest in the Levant region - the region comprising what was historically greater Syria and what is today Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Palestine and Israel. As a Palestinian, this is the region I am from (Jordan is also an estimated ~60% ethnically Palestinian). While I speak Arabic fluently, and have been to the region often, I have never lived or worked in the region for any significant period of time. For me, being closer to my heritage and learning the ins and outs of the business culture in my region, is very important.

Further, Jordan is already making a big push at the government level to develop a bottoms-up knowledge-based economy so there is some activity going on for one to take part in. And Endeavor, a U.S. non-profit supporting high-impact entrepreneurs in developing countries, just opened its newest office in Jordan late last year.

Finally, while the Middle East is of strategic importance to many Western countries, there is a general lack of understanding of what the Middle East (and the Arab World more specifically) really is. What do westerners typically think of when they think of the Arab World? The Gulf? Oil? Wealth? The U.S.'s war in Iraq? Mysterious, exotic people? Radical Islam? Terrorists? ...Well, what about all of the "regular" every-day Arabs? I think the world doesn't really care to know about them; but I also think these are the most important people in the region to care about. I truly believe that ensuring the economic stability and security of a region is the surest way to foster strong allies and squelch violence.

So westerners don't really know much about the Arabs of the Levant region. And the oil-rich Gulf states invest their capital in Western infrastructure and industry (Chrysler building, Ferrari, etc.) and in local (Gulf) infrastructure projects. They largely do not invest in Arab entrepreneurs, despite the fact that education and human capital is arguably one of the Levant's greatest resources; and that the financial capital required to unlock its potential is lacking.

Why doesn't Gulf money find Arab entrepreneurs to be interesting investments? Why aren't there more Arab entrepreneurs? What are the biggest challenges to entrepreneurship in the Levant region? What are the barriers to getting things done? And how can lessons learned be applied to other regions such as Lebanon and Egypt? These are some of the questions I hope to study while I'm here.