Achieving Economic Growth Through Supporting Entrepreneurship
This article is written by Clinton James, a Contributor Author at Startup Turkey.
Mr. Fadi Bishara serves as the Founder of Blackbox VC. Mr. Bishara serves as the Founder of techVenture and serves as its Chief Executive Officer. He launched the Cofounder Network. Mr. Bishara had more than 15 years experience advising, mentoring and building teams for small venture backed technology startups. He has worked with 41 startups of which 14 have been acquired. Mr. Bishara has been a Member of Advisory Board of MIT/Stanford VentureLab since 2009. He serves as a Member of Advisory Board of Sydney Seed Fund. Bishara also served as a Member of Advisory Board of Colabs Startup Center Zrt.
Fadi Bishara, founder of a five-year Blackbox company has a purpose of matching human capital with venture capital globally. It is focused on accelerators and aims to support the growth of innovators and change-makers as he connects them worldwide with seed investors, venture capitalists, mentors, and market entrance partners. This aims to empower founders and focuses on elevating entrepreneurs by bringing people together. Fadi emphasizes that “we should no longer help entrepreneurs to start up the game better, but instead to help entrepreneurs play a better game” and can be actualized through role models who impact and encourage entrepreneurship so as to create value.
Among the programs by Blackbox is bringing people together so as to help them stretch their minds, focus on ambitions, learn craftsmanship of entrepreneurship, best practices, tricks and providing contacts to grow their business. This is proven by the success from close to 60 countries and over 4000 participants in the programs. 90% of these companies continue to grow and is realized from its $1/2 billion portfolio evaluation raised through about 250 companies. Clearly, it has all the right ingredients to enter and welcome the dawn of the entrepreneurial revolution.
The primary factor contributing to this is the internet which is of more value in this era than the basic electricity, as it is connected to a massive amount of knowledge that can be packaged to create services, products, and companies globally. Therefore, as we are moving from an industrial age to an information age, it is necessary for us to tap the ability of people to create value. This can be done through three trends; democratization of the entrepreneurship, innovation growth and the emergence of fast globally connected generation ability to see the world as one.
The main problem facing entrepreneurs is inequality as millions lack access to finances to commence as a result of policies, culture, and social barriers. As an idea to solve this, Blackbox has realized a global impact of increasing access to entrepreneurship by 10% to reach the untapped $22 trillion GDP. Turkey is a good example who have focused more on risk capital than risk acceptance to grow.
Every country is aware of these but have not done more about it. This is more reason why Blackbox encourages support of entrepreneurial growth to raise its economic value. To achieve this, we need to improve startup accelerators who support investors and further to entrepreneurs. People are the most important elements to startups and would need talent leadership development, mentorship, nurtured growth knowledge and access to active network.
As part of what Mr. Burak of Startup Istanbul does; bringing all the people together to achieve and increase all these elements of financial risk, capital and investors; are important to be heard. The ability to interact, live together, focus on network and build relationships will be of great value to this growth. Therefore, it's important that we elevate before we accelerate as the main purpose of Blackbox.