RAISON D’ÊTRE:
Equal Opportunity to Participate in the Global Economy
Exports are essential to a country’s prosperity — they increase an economy’s productivity, vitality and overall standards of living. However, we currently live in a world where trade opportunities are only given to those who can already afford to travel the world, work with expensive agencies, and access dependable government sponsorships and programs, or those who are uniquely tech-savvy. In reality, the majority of business people and companies do not have such luxuries. Many companies do not have access to a chamber of commerce or government-led trade organization that can represent them overseas. Most haven’t even had the opportunity to learn if or how they could expand and grow their business abroad.
Where do you start? Who do you speak to? How do you find your customer? How do you communicate with them? What do you need to prepare? What are the costs? How many layers of red tape are there and exactly are they? This is just a small handful of some of the questions that come to mind when a company thinks about entering a new market for the first time.
The overwhelming combination of these obstacles, for many businesses, inhibit equal opportunity and access to participate actively in the global economy. That is good for only a handful of people — those who are already in the game. It is our goal to challenge that club, open it up, and empower business to compete. We aim to provide equal opportunity to every single farmer, artisan, buyer, seller, or company that needs to access another market overseas in order to grow. We will do this by creating affordable solutions that will enable users to: 1) be part of a community; 2) learn and discover new opportunities; 3) find the right customers and partners; 4) and spend time on what is important and essential to the growth of their businesses — actual sales.
Resilience of Economy & Business to Overcome Global Challenges
The global economy is founded on the international exchange of goods and services. As demonstrated with the challenges faced during the COVID-19 pandemic, companies and the countries that they support depend on the stability of that system. If imports and exports are stalled, then supply chains for necessities need to change on the spot in order to avoid economic crises and, in worse cases, the collapse of health care and food systems. In order for economies to become resilient, companies need to be able to adjust their supply chains and create new partnerships between suppliers and buyers in countries and regions they may have never even heard of all in a very short timeframe. This is only possible if trade networks, and the businesses that comprise them, are open to each other and empowered to interact.
However, in the current global economic system, we are seeing networks increasingly separate, bifurcate, and silo themselves — the building of exclusive networks based on region, trade bloc, industry, conglomerate, and so on. But, what happens when the next challenge hits? What happens when the ever increasing impacts of climate change threaten infrastructure like ports, canals, highways, and airports? What happens when changing rain and heat patterns devastate years of crop development and drive up prices to unsustainable levels in a certain region? Will buyers and suppliers be able to adjust and adapt? Will they even be able to discover each other if they remain filtered and siloed into separate, fractured networks? Obviously, no, they won’t. Without increasing the ability of businesses to create new trade networks, the global economy and those whom it supports will suffer significantly.
The only way to create resilience in the global economy is to work against the fracturing and siloing of trade networks. Currently, as each important actor (country, NPO, gov’t etc.) tries to develop a digital solution to cope with COVID-19 and the new geopolitical challenges of the future, they are building segregated networks — different solutions written in different language architectures, not integrated or compatible, with new logins, processes, prices and so on. Each country is trying to build their own digital markets and platforms, but by emphasizing geographic exclusivity within the digital space they are just building more walls. Companies are forced to choose which network to put their time and money into. They then grow into that network and develop their organization to profit within that space, slowly losing the organizational capacity to diversify and adapt. Technology should help integrate the global economy and reinforce resilience, not have the opposite effect.
WHAT WE MUST DO:
Provide services and products at more affordable prices in order to connect actors (suppliers, buyers, and helpers)
Build a technological solution (platform) that encourages B2B integration on a global scale
Foster a community of companies and organizations that ensures the qualitative growth of that network
Provide learning opportunities to emerging actors (entrepreneurs, SMEs, emerging markets, small governments, etc) so that they can maximize their potential to participate and benefit from our network
Collaborate with current networks to convert them to opening up and integrating with our system
OUR PLAN TO GET IT DONE:
Make sure that every single company that is in need of expansion registers with our platform. Our goal is to grow the largest business network in the world.
Provide our engineers that are building our software with the learning and experience to best understand our users.
Listen to the user for feature recommendations in order to create, develop and grow a more equitable global trade system together.
Learn, test, listen, analyze, improve, and repeat.
Expand participating industry segments, regions, and countries
Monetize the provision of real world trade data
THINGS THAT WE VALUE:
Simplicity
In order for a solution to have the maximum effect in integrated and providing resilience, it must be accessible and understandable to a wide range of users. It must account for diversity - linguistic, regional, organizational, cultural, and cognitive differences - in its design. The only way to do this is to aim for the most intuitive and simple network design and UI. If something is not intuitive, it should be reworked to be so or removed entirely. If it is not simple, it should be broken down and reconstructed into simpler parts, language, or logic.
It is the same within our organization. We do not want to make things overly complicated and pedantic. That only makes it harder for us. Simple language, simple and straightforward communication. Say it out it is.
Learn
Nothing can be improved unless we measure and learn. The experience of every participant in this network should be focused, in part, around the production of statistics, data, and measurements of each participant to maximize their ability to learn and grow. Information and processes should be analyzed, developed, designed, and executed in a way that encourages learning from- and the exploration of that data. This way, users are not funneled into a predetermined group or category that doesn’t work for them, but are, rather, empowered to move in any direction of their choice..
It is the same for people within our community. Everyone should be encouraged to learn and take the next step to be a situation where they are constantly learning. If someone feels that they are not learning, they should be pushed lovingly towards exploration.
Match
Just because we believe in integration and connectivity doesn’t mean that we believe that everyone should be friends and happy go-lucky. Not every dot in a network should be connected. You don’t need to take everyone’s business card. If you do, you won’t know which one you really need and wind up with a useless draw overflowing with cards or endless excel hell. That is not what we want. We want to leverage AI and data to create relevance and connectivity. We must strive to match users what they are looking for and not overcomplicate things by forcing them to meet everyone in the room and then figure it out on their own. We must have an advanced understanding of them and what they need.
Participate
In terms of our customers and users, we want to maximize their feeling of participation depending on what their goals and raison d’être are. If it is a TPO, they should be able to engage our network to help others. If it’s a company, they should be able to engage our network to buy or sell. If that final goal of participation is not within reach, we must put down what we’re doing, take it apart, and go back to the drawing board to make sure we are building the right processes and experiences to maximize that participation.
This also holds true for our own community. Anyone who is part of our company’s community should be encouraged to participate in a way that makes them feel like they are contributing to the integration and growth of the community. We should encourage that participation for the sake of having a diverse set of inputs for our own development, even if at times it may not seem like a priority to another participant.