Of great stories and turning ideas into gold
The stories the young entrepreneurs shared on the opening day on Wednesday of the World Export Development Forum (WEDF) in Colombo were inspiring. Asked to relate one story each which stimulated and moved them to change the world, each of the panellists had a tale which would have been a handy addition to Scheherazade’s One Thousand and One Nights.
Take Lubna Shaban’s story of how her organisation which helps youth entrepreneurship – Child Youth Finance International (CYFI)– gave a hand to a teenager in Kenya to build his business. Tom Osborn was 17 when he founded Greenchar, a clean energy company. “He did this while helping his mum to cook, he realised the harmful effects of charcoal on his mother’s health and the environment,” recounts Shaban, director of entrepreneurship at CYFI. The cooking woes his mum faced inspired Tom to start his own company selling clean cook-stores which use smokeless charcoal briquettes recycled from agricultural waste.
Then what about the tear-jerker from our own Dulith Herath, founder of Sri Lanka’s largest e-commerce business Kapruka.com. This also involves a mother, giving it a character most people can relate to. “I come from humble beginnings. We were a very poor family and when I was born my mum didn’t even have enough money to pay for the transport to get me home from the hospital. She didn’t have money but what she gave me was a good education,” narrated Herath. Italian Brian Pallas, 29, a fellow-panelist at the opening day session titled ‘Young Entrepreneurs Enable Innovation’, has a more cut-and-dry story to tell. He is the founder and CEO of Opportunity Network which creates a global platform that connects corporates and companies allowing for collaboration. At last count, it hosts business opportunities valued at more than US$35 billion. He does it by signing agreements with banks, and today has a presence in more than 130 countries and in every fathomable business.
“When I went to Morocco a few years ago to push my business I had a meeting with the banks to convince them to come on board. The Minister of Commerce and Industry heard I was in town and he endorsed me right away. That was a great moment for me to get an official endorsement,” he related. Another Italian Gian Luca Petrelli’s story has to do with what inspired him to start BeMyEye, an innovative service for crowdsourcing store checks, data collection and mystery shopping in Europe. If major brands like Coca Cola and Nestle for instance need to find out if stores are stocking their products, how they are being promoted and where they stack up against the competition, BeMyEye allows people to sign up to its platform giving brands access to these people who will then go out and take pictures of these products. The people are rewarded with money. “I was working in my family olive oil business and we had signed a promotional deal in the US with a company.
But I didn’t how this agreement was being implemented and that is what inspired me to start BeMyEye,” revealed Petrelli. These spellbinding personal stories from each of the participants were perhaps the highlight on the first day at the WEDF which had earlier seen the bigwigs in the government dominate the opening session with their usual spiel about how Sri Lanka was “ready for business”. Each of the panellists continued to draw on their personal experiences as they told the audience how to create a business from an idea. “Ideas are cheap. The world is full of ideas but what makes a difference is how you execute that idea,” said Pallas. “The most important thing is you must have a general idea of what you want to do and then go about trying to achieve it.” The last word was left for moderator Tony Nash who likened young entrepreneurs to the alchemists of yore. “You guys are turning ideas into gold. You are the ultimate alchemists.”