Jacob Korenblum
Frustration, Fearlessness, and Fortune
How Youth-Led Startups
Are Redefining Entrepreneurship
En 2005, armed with two years of college Arabic and a vague employment contract,
I tumbled out of a taxi and onto the main street of Ramallah, Palestine. The region
was anything but stable. Six months after my arrival, Hamas won its first elections
and came to rule the West Bank; apenas 18 months after that, the party was oust-
ed in a series of bloody clashes and retreated to Gaza. Mientras tanto, the Israeli mili-
tary occupation of both areas continued unchecked, as it had for close to 40 años.
Against this backdrop, my employer, a U.S.-based aid agency, was focused on
a unique set of priorities: holding focus groups with young Palestinians to hear
their views on youth economic opportunity and entrepreneurship, and to ask what
nosotros (as international interlopers) could do to help boost economic growth in the
country. While we moved from town to town, chatting with group after group of
earnest youth, two things happened. Primero, I got bored by the two-hour meetings.
Segundo, I noticed that everyone everywhere had a cell phone and that they were
using them constantly to send text messages to each other—hardly an earth-shat-
tering observation in 2013. Sin embargo, cerca de 10 years ago, only half the popula-
tion in my own home country, Canada, owned a cell phone, and at the time most
people didn’t see it as a vital device.
As the weeks passed, my frustration with the tried-and-true focus group
approach mounted. At first I was too timid to speak out (this was, more or less, el
first real job I’d ever held and I considered myself lucky to have it). Por último,
aunque, I ended up spending any spare moment I could sketching out text-message
sequences with some friends. As we started to build a team and a concept, we mus-
tered up the courage to leave our day jobs and focus on the idea full time. Y
while some criticized us for “having it too easy” or “having all the luck in the
world” by being able to work on our own clock without a boss or a 9-to-5 sched-
ule, we were simply thankful to have a window of uninterrupted time to try out
something new. Unbeknownst to us, we were about to come up with a mobile solu-
Based in Ramallah, Palestine, Jacob Korenblum is CEO and co-founder of Souktel,
the Middle East’s first mobile job information service. He is a past Reynolds
Foundation Social Enterprise Fellow at Harvard University, y un 2010 Silicon Valley
Tech Awards Laureate.
© 2013 Jacob Korenblum
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Jacob Korenblum
tion that would help thousands of people find work more easily: linking job seek-
ers with local employers via text message.
Fast-forward seven years, and Souktel—as our mobile job service came to be
known—has been fortunate to help youth in 21 countries, to be profiled in the
Wall Street Journal, and to raise venture funding from a group of investors that
includes household names like Google and Cisco. Through a process that’s low-
cost and easy to understand,
the service has allowed thou-
sands of
job-seekers with
basic cell phones to create
text-, audio-, or web-based
“mini-CVs”—with informa-
tion about their skills and
work experience. These pro-
files are then auto-matched
with jobs that are listed by
employers through a similar
proceso, and both sets of users
get SMS alerts with the other’s
contact details. Now that
we’ve reached scale, we fre-
quently are asked the same
question by aspiring startups
and high-level decisionmak-
ers: What’s the secret to build-
ing a successful youth enter-
prise?
Souktel—as our mobile job
service came to be known—has
been fortunate to help youth in
21 countries … Through a
process that’s low-cost and easy
to understand, the service has
allowed thousands of job-
seekers with basic cell phones
to create text-, audio-, or web-
based “mini-CVs”—with
information about their skills
and work experience.
Naturally there’s no simple
respuesta, but I usually respond
the same way each time I’m asked: from our experience, as a group of Palestinians,
Canadians, and Americans, we’ve achieved success by taking the very concepts that
often are used to define youth negatively—especially in the Arab world—and
inverting them to achieve positive aims. To be specific, we believe that the path to
successful youth entrepreneurship is defined by three key factors: frustration, miedo-
lessness, and fortune—and by “fortune,” I mean luck; the money, if it comes, is sel-
dom in the picture at the beginning.
Young entrepreneurs are frustrated. We’re never content with the status quo
and are always seeking to combat what we see as inefficiencies in the world around
a nosotros: Why should I call several taxi companies to hail a cab when a single app could
let me find a car that’s down the street? Why walk miles to charge my phone when
a solar device lets me do it at home? In each of these cases (and there are hundreds
if not thousands of them), “productive frustration” has led to the birth of produc-
tive youth-led enterprises. Where Souktel is concerned, it was our dissatisfaction
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Frustration, Fearlessness, and Fortune
with traditional ways of solving youth unemployment that led us to become bored,
frustrated, and eventually innovative.
Sin embargo, in much of the Arab and Muslim world, “youth” and “frustration” are
often uttered in the same breath but with much less positive associations. “Are
Frustrated, Idle Youth in Somalia a Threat to the World?” asks a September 2012
Reuters headline. “Riots in Stockholm Continue as Youth Vent Frustrations,” read
a headline in Germany’s Der Spiegel this past May. While policy experts and deci-
sionmakers unveil new initiatives aimed at helping youth realize their potential,
the media—a much more powerful amplifier—conflates young people and their
frustration with danger and the destruction of property. Of course this isn’t always
the case and not all media follow this line, but rare is the time I’ve read a headline
that proclaims, “Youth Channel Frustration to Build New Social Venture.” My
point here is that I believe we can do a great deal to help young people in Egypt or
Indonesia to harness their frustrations to positive goals instead of castigating youth
for being fed up with their surroundings.
Beyond being frustrated, successful young entrepreneurs are also fearless. Nosotros
don’t take “no” for an answer, and we don’t balk at risk. In my first few weeks in
Palestine, I slept on the floor of my bedroom, away from the window, as tracer fire
lit up the valley below our apartment building each night. As a Canadian, this was
a shocking new reality; for my young Palestinian colleagues, this was daily life—
and had been for decades. But life in a conflict zone also had taught our team
members from the region not to sweat the small stuff. If our prototype failed the
day before an important pitch, they weren’t phased by it. If our servers went down
for an hour, we all worked quickly to figure out where the problem lay, but with-
out getting scared. This may sound like an opportunistic corollary to connect the
dots between fearlessness under fire (literally) and fearlessness in the face of start-
up market pressures, but I firmly believe that our experience cutting our teeth in
Palestine during some of the region’s more difficult recent moments (el 2006
Lebanon war and the 2008 invasion of Gaza, among others) has helped us put our
startup challenges into perspective and enabled us to forge ahead more boldly with
our entrepreneurial plans.
During the 2011 London riots, a Guardian piece entitled “Who Are the
Rioters?” followed a group of young women and men as they torched vehicles and
vandalized shops. Characterized mainly by their brazenness and lack of trepida-
tion in the face of local law enforcement, these youth were every adult’s worst
nightmare: “She helped set a motorbike alight, walking away with her hands aloft,"
wrote correspondents Paul Lewis and James Harkin of one girl’s exploits, de este modo
painting a vivid picture of daring triumphalism in the midst of utter anarchy. En
our first-ever “elevator pitch,” at the Harvard Business School’s Business Plan
Competition, we had literally four minutes to extoll the virtues of our new, as-yet-
untested technology. We swallowed hard, and walked away with our hands aloft as
Bueno; not only had we unwittingly harnessed fearlessness and used it to our advan-
llevar, we’d scored a runner-up finish in the social venture category. There is a world
of difference between these examples, por supuesto: Harvard is by no means a London
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Jacob Korenblum
public housing estate. But I present this contrast, and commonality, deliberately:
Each year a handful of Palestinians, many from rural villages, journey to Harvard
and MIT on full scholarships. With the right support in place, this trickle could
turn into a flood, and young people in Cairo or Tunis could be channeling their
fearlessness, en masse, from the streets to the executive boardrooms of venture
capital firms in New York or Silicon Valley. Precedents are already being set in this
regard. Initiatives like the MasterCard Foundation’s half-billion-dollar Scholars
Program fund African youth leaders to study at Stanford, berkeley, and a wide
range of top schools across Africa and North America.
Beyond frustration and fearlessness, young entrepreneurs are ultimately
blessed with good fortune. Por supuesto, a large part of Souktel’s success is due to the
hard work and tremendous skill of our team. But to a certain extent, we were sim-
ply lucky. We took a gamble that mobile phones would become the “next big thing”
in youth financial inclusion when local employers, international donors, y el
general public still maintained that texting “LOL” was the main purpose of a
mobile handset. Even armed with reams of market research, we had no way of
knowing that our innovation would eventually take off and reach scale. As hard as
we’ve worked to achieve our venture’s growth, we’re also innately aware that factors
beyond our control helped us get where we are.
Souktel was once approached by an American venture capital fund that had
developed a unique algorithm: by drawing on “big data” from the entrepreneurship
sector and applying computer-generated screening criteria, the formula could
weed out less promising enterprises and hone in on winning ideas, thus creating a
foolproof funding portfolio. The fund was interested in our work, we were
intrigued, and we agreed to move ahead with them in the hope that we might
squeeze through the magic filter and be deemed a successful youth enterprise.
Soon after, aunque, we were told that we didn’t qualify as a potential investee, como
our funding history didn’t generate enough data points for the software to analyze.
Sin embargo, at roughly the same time, we wrapped up a lengthy—and, in contrast,
very traditional—due diligence process with a Middle East-focused fund that
counted eBay’s Jeff Skoll and Google.org as its backers, and we received $1 millón
in financing. Mientras tanto, closer scrutiny of the “algorithm fund’s” portfolio showed
eso, by its cofounder’s own admission in a 2012 artículo, “it is too early to report
successes or failures” among the 20-plus startups it had thus far funded through its
modelo.
My point here is that we can all look for best practices in youth entrepreneur-
ship—and this is not to say that correlative trends don’t exist—but, from our expe-
rience, many successful enterprises are successful not because they conform to cer-
tain criteria, but because to a large extent they’re lucky to sprout in the right place
at the right time. Would-be entrepreneurs and the funders who support them must
be aware of this reality; venture capital funds and foundations expend tremendous
resources trying to define the key traits of an entrepreneur, or the “secret sauce” of
entrepreneurship, but with limited results. al mismo tiempo, youth across the
developing world are often derided by their elders for having all the privileges of
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Frustration, Fearlessness, and Fortune
society and none of the responsibilities—or for sitting idle and abusing the good
fortune that has resulted from their parents’ hard work. “Wayward youth” has been
a North American catchphrase for decades. The challenge for all of us in the youth
entrepreneurship community—decisionmakers, funders, and plucky startups—is
to leverage this good fortune when it happens rather than criticising it. Nosotros entonces
need to move quickly to provide the kind of strategic support that lets innovative
youth enterprises move from startup to scale.
Frustration and
fearlessness, cuando
strengthened by
buena fortuna, poder
yield incredible
resultados.
Frustration and fearlessness, when strengthened by good fortune, can yield
incredible results: Otlob in Egypt and Digital Mania Studio in Tunisia are just two
examples of youth-led ventures that have achieved market success since the Arab
Primavera. And while conflict continues in Palestine
and nearby Syria—and these harsh realities must
never be overlooked—I firmly believe that we are
currently in a period of good fortune in the Arab
Mundo, at least where youth entrepreneurship is con-
cerned. Ten years ago, few would have imagined that
Nablus in the Northern West Bank, hemmed in by
Israeli military checkpoints for years, would host an
offshoot of the global Startup Weekend venture con-
prueba, sponsored by Microsoft and Amazon (entre
otros), where aspiring entrepreneurs would be
mentored by team members from Souktel and other
local tech ventures before pitching their ideas to a
panel of judges. Fewer still would have dreamed that that the Gaza Strip would be
home to Google-supported app developer meetups. The rapid growth of affordable
technologies—especially mobile tech—and the power of these technologies to con-
nect youth with financial services and entrepreneurship support means that more
young people than ever before are able to turn entrepreneurial dreams into reality.
As a global community, we must now become experts at recognizing frustration
and fearlessness as catalysts for positive change and stand ready to spring into
action when the right mix of frustration, fearlessness, and fortune presents itself.
Life as an entrepreneur is never easy; life as a young entrepreneur in the
Middle East, or any other emerging market, is dramatically more difficult. El
challenges that constrain youth enterprise—access to education, access to capital,
and dynamic institutions, among others—will likely persist, even as the technolo-
gies that help connect youth become cheaper and more widespread. At Souktel,
we’re constantly working to stay two steps ahead of the curve, to provide value to
the communities that use our services, and to stand tall as ambassadors and men-
tors for aspiring young businessmen and women across the Arab World. This year
we’re launching new job services in Iraq and Egypt while growing our team and
releasing new products—all at the same time. Every day is difficult, but no day is
ever boring; the realities of being young people living and working in our region
keep us energized and entrepreneurial.
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