During such a tragic time, the outpouring of love that Oklahoma and Moore have received has been overwhelming. We want to thank our StartUp Cup family around the globe for the kind words and support this week. It has been amazing to see how global citizens have come together in a time of need, lending helping hands to family, friends, neighbors, and strangers.

The StartUp Cup Team wants to let all of our friends know about some of the ways we can continue to help and support the people of Moore, Oklahoma. The American Red Cross (Oklahoma Chapter) is doing all it can to get food, water, money, clothes, and all other donations to the victims. Anyone who wants to help, please consider donating. Also, to those in Oklahoma, visit HelpMoore.com to learn more ways to lend support. We appreciate all of your thoughts and prayers.

It is an exciting time to support the growth of entrepreneurial ecosystems around the globe and we want to keep you informed on our impact. This week, we are featuring five StartUp Cups that are putting a dent in the entrepreneurial universe.

The Ghana StartUp Cup will kick-off this Saturday, May 25th with a workshop event that has over 600 attendees registered already! Stephen Gwasi-Kwaw, the Global Entrepreneurship Week Ghana Organizer, will be one of the featured speakers.

The Cairo StartUp Cup submission deadline is June 8th. Also, up to 50 teams will be selected to participate in the Extreme Build-A-Business Weekend on June 14th & 15th, lead by StartUp Cup founders Sean Griffin and Kristen Bergman. The Top 25 will be chosen from this group to move forward in the competition.

The Alexandria StartUp Cup submission deadline is June 7th. Similar to Cairo, teams will be selected for an Extreme Build-A-Business Weekend, facilitated by Sean Griffin and Kristen Bergman, along with local mentors. This will take place on June 21st & 22nd.

The Bader Lebanon StartUp Cup judges are in the process of selecting the Top 12 business models, from over 90 submissions! The entrepreneurs chosen to move forward will be announced June 1st.

The San Luis Potosi StartUp Cup is a member of the U.S. State Department Global Entrepreneurship Program Pilot Sister City Entrepreneurial Exchange Program with the City of Tulsa, Oklahoma and StartUp Cup. Submissions will open on Monday, May 27th, and a special announcement will be made at Startup Weekend SLP, by StartUp Cup founders Sean Griffin and Kristen Bergman, via Skype, on Sunday May 26th.

Betty Bedregal entered the 2012 Silicon Valley StartUp Cup Business Model Competition with a dream. Within 7 months, Betty’s tenacity and fortitude enabled her to create Betty’s Butterflies Day Care. Betty’s Butterflies is a bilingual, multicultural day care center that employs the Healthy Roots program and Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” program to focus on raising healthy children. These programs teach children to apply activity and balanced nutrition to their home and school lives for an overall improvement in lifestyle and confidence.

Betty Bedregal I
Betty’s Butterflies Day Care

Betty says that the greatest benefit she gained from StartUp Cup was the confidence she received, which has enabled her to feel more secure in reaching out to potential customers. She also learned FIVE invaluable lessons along the way:

1.)  Have Conviction | Know that your business is a good idea. It’s not all about money that matters at first.

2.)  Be Flexible | Don’t be afraid of change and embrace the unknown.

3.)  Be Alert  | Always keep your eyes and ears open for opportunities to change.

4.)  Be Open | Allow your idea to grow from a small idea to a big idea.

5.)  Have Vision – What was at first only an idea is now a sustainable business, with a location, customers and a waiting list.

By the end of the competition she had a business, which served 4 children. Today, her facility is at its full capacity, with an enrollment of 14. Based on this experience, in two to three years she is planning to expand her business into a commercial daycare with 60-100 children. It will be located in a place that will be convenient for working people to bring their children and for those looking for jobs. She is expecting to employ 15 people as she participates in the community to help build the economy.

The advice that Betty would give to future StartUp Cup participants, or aspiring entrepreneurs, is when you have a dream, chase it. Own your idea and care for it as you would care for a baby. Do what you like to do. Do what you need to do. Be happy.

2012 Cairo StartUp Cup Extreme Build-A-Business Weekend

While in Egypt, StartUp Cup will be conducting three experiential-based Master Mentor training programs in an effort to increase the quality and quantity of mentors in Cairo and Alexandria. We will also begin training implementation of a StartUp Academy in Egypt. StartUp Academy is an eight-week (or fifteen-week) experiential business building course led by a collection of local business-building mentors. These mentors are trained by our StartUp Cup Master Mentors and will share their expertise with tailored solutions that support local new business creation.

Sean Griffin, StartUp Cup CEO & Founder, will also be the lead facilitator for a series of Business Model and Mentor training sessions in Cairo and Alexandria. These highly experiential, mentor-driven programs are designed to visually facilitate entrepreneurs through the universal steps required to design, start and build a sustainable business. To wrap up his stay in Egypt, Sean will be a featured speaker at Startup Weekend Giza, May 16-18.

Sean’s excitement is contagious among the StartUp Cup Team; we are so excited to work alongside the Cairo and Alexandria StartUp Cups helping to grow their communities and building thriving entrepreneurial ecosystems.

StartUp Cup Mentor, Darren Fuqua mentoring aspiring Egyptian entrepreneurs through the business model design process using the Business Model Scorecard.

By stepping into the role of Mentor, you are taking on the responsibility of role model, motivator, advisor, coach, and door-opener, knowing that the only reward is in seeing the successes and failures of the entrepreneur you are mentoring. Mentors who live the six core entrepreneur mentoring principles outlined here increase their opportunity to positively impact aspiring entrepreneurs while supporting them to overcome the many challenges and obstacles faced when designing and building a new business.

Real World Experience
Mentors contribute to the growth of entrepreneurs by coaching them through experiences and skills that are not learned through academic practice. The real world experiences that a mentor has gone through hold the keys to advancing an entrepreneurs goals and objectives.

Deep Listening
Listening is one of the most powerful tools that is needed for us to learn, to imagine, and to create new solutions. We were born with one mouth and two ears, and should be using them accordingly. Listening means talking less, listening to what is being said above and below the surface, and listening for the unsaid.

Relationship Building
Relationships are one of the keys to unlocking business success. Successful mentoring requires meaningful and positive relationship building as one of the first steps. Building meaningful relationships takes special effort from both sides to be productive and rewarding.

Give it Away!
True selflessness and altruism are rare today. As a mentor your value comes from the wisdom and insights you give away.  The more you give away the more you receive. The more you give away the more you support people to reach their full potential.

Tough Love
Sometimes we all need a “whack upside the head” and entrepreneurs are no different. There are times when a mentoring situation necessitates the need to dispense a good dose of honest truth, or what we call “tough love.”

Strategic Questioning
Knowing the right question to ask at just the right time has the power to elevate an entrepreneur’s thinking to an entirely new level and increase their odds of success. Strategic questioning invites the entrepreneur to shift their thinking. It invokes creative thinking that encourages fresh ideas to meet the challenges at hand.

Learn more about one of the most rewarding journey’s there is … the role of Mentor. Download the StartUp Cup Mentor Playbook today.

Organizer: Alexandre Franco

Contact: riostartupcup@gmail.com

Website: rio.startupcup.com

The World StartUp Cup was announced during the 2013 Global Entrepreneurship Congress in Rio de Janeiro. Grand Prize winners from officially licensed StartUp Cups will be eligible to compete in the World StartUp Cup.

Entrepreneurial Champions who participated in the StartUp Cup Entrepreneurship 2.0 Fringe Event.

GEC is an annual festival of entrepreneurship hosted by Global Entrepreneurship Week and the Kauffman Foundation. GEC 2012 was held in Liverpool, England and will be taking place in Moscow, Russia in 2014. It is the only event that I know of where the entire global ecosystem assembles at one time in one place. With delegates from over 135 countries in attendance, GEC truly showcases the power of entrepreneurship to support creating world peace.

StartUp Cup was well represented at GEC with organizers from Armenia, Georgia, Silicon Valley, Palestine, Paraguay, Myanmar, Zambia and Lebanon in attendance. And we welcomed new StartUp Cup organizers from Rio, Philippines, Korea, Norway, Cameroon, Morocco, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines to our growing family of entrepreneurial community builders.

During the week there were over 70 events spread throughout Rio bringing together thought leaders in entrepreneurship including Brad Feld, co-founder of TechStars, Jeff Hoffman, co-founder of Priceline.com and Thom Rue, Vice President of Entrepreneurship with the Kauffman Foundation. New programs were introduced, including World StartUp Cup, The Ice House, Idea Challenge, and World Startup Report.

Many of the excellent entrepreneur programs we have come to know such as Startup Weekend, Cleantech Open, Creative Business Cup, Global Startup Battle, Endeavor (a GEC host) were also well represented. However, we could not help but notice that with so many programs focused on growing high growth technology companies, and with less than 2% of these startups receiving funding from angels, accelerators, or venture capitalists, the remaining 98% of non-tech and non-experienced entrepreneurs continue to be highly underserved.

As the StartUp Cup team has increased its travels around the world to train and mentor entrepreneurs, we have noticed that in a majority of cases entrepreneurial ecosystems are starting to look very similar and are focusing a majority of their programming on high-tech, high growth, fundable companies. According to the Small Business Administration only 0.1% to 0.2% of all startups in the U.S. secure venture capital funding. Not surprisingly, on a global level we are not experiencing a huge increase in new startups and, in many cases, there is a decline in startups and entrepreneurial activity.

As a Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur I can see how the mindset for encouraging fast, high growth technology companies has grown. Worldwide media are focused on high growth, high-tech, “sexy” companies, not the smaller “lifestyle” entrepreneurs who make up the backbone of our local communities. However, if we are truly going to move the needle and increase the overall number of startups, and as a result job growth, it is time for all of the drivers and champions who are active in growing their local entrepreneurial ecosystems to start thinking different about how we launch entrepreneurs and grow sustainable new businesses.

Participants in the Entrepreneurship 2.0 Fringe Event were graphically facilitated through a brainstorm on the challenges of building a strong entrepreneurial ecosystem and how to overcome these challenges.

The main concept of Entrepreneurship 2.0 is to start including EVERYONE into the entrepreneurial journey. This includes those with little or no education, little to no experience starting or building a business, and those who merely have a good business idea. This can be accomplished by arming aspiring entrepreneurs with the entrepreneurial mindset, skills, tools, and mechanics of how to design and build a sustainable business. Entrepreneurship is not just for University students, technology entrepreneurs, and the experienced entrepreneurs who receive the 0.1% of venture capital funding.

As Alexandre Franco of Brasil said during our GEC Entrepreneurship 2.0 | Taking Your Ecosystem to the Next Level Fringe Event, “I have been to many entrepreneurship events in Brasil and each time the focus is on technology startups. As a result I have felt left out, frustrated, and feel like nobody cares about my startup.” At StartUp Cup we are focused on changing this paradigm and increasing the number of people who gain access to the opportunity to learn how to design a viable business model, bootstrap a startup, and build a sustainable business no matter what type of business idea they have, tech or non-tech.

Alex Franco became so excited by the notion of StartUp Cup he applied to become organizer of the Rio StartUp Cup, our newest business model competition open to ANY type of business idea. GEC is inspiring champions of entrepreneurship to think differently about how entrepreneurial ecosystems and communities are grown. We look forward to continuing our message of total and complete entrepreneurial inclusion during GEC Moscow in 2014. I will be writing more about the Entrepreneurship 2.0 concept in future posts.

Co-Oranizers: Tinatin Gholadze and Hayk Asriyants

Contact: georgia.startupcup@iedc.ge

Website: georgia.startupcup.com

Organizer: Emmanuel Nyame

Contact: ghana.startupcup@gmail.com

Website: ghana.startupcup.com