Forbes Under 30 Forum
In March, a global cohort from the Forbes’ Under 30 community gathered at the World Government Summit 2022 at Expo 2020 Dubai. Participating in a number of panels throughout the two-day event, the entrepreneurs gave their insights into tackling some of the world’s most pressing issues.
Opening the Forbes Under 30 forum, Omar bin Sultan Al Olama, Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, Digital Economy and Remote Work Applications for the U.A.E., spoke about how the emirates have become a hub for technology and industry solutions. “Two decades ago, we were an ambitious country,” he said. “There were a lot of naysayers, but we can see that this was achieved. Today, the U.A.E. is by far the technology leader of the region.”
How To Prevent The Next Pandemic
Since the global pandemic first hit in March 2020, various businesses and startups alike have had to weather one of their toughest challenges and adjust to the worldwide economic disruption. “One of the big challenges that I’ve seen is how fragile supply chains really are and how important it is to own your supply chain, especially in a future where pandemics are probably going to continue happening for the foreseeable future,” said Arturo Elizondo, Founder and CEO of animal-free protein firm The EVERY Company, during the panel discussion “Preventing the Next Pandemic.”
Addressing the challenges, Chirag Kulkarni, Cofounder and CMO of Medly, explained that his same-day prescription delivery pharmacy partnered with local governments and insurance companies to be able to deliver prescriptions to patients at home. “We definitely couldn’t predict the
pandemic, but I think what we knew very early on is, especially in the U.S. healthcare system, the pharmacy is the one thing that connects all the major stakeholders in healthcare,” said Kulkarni. Four months after the start of the pandemic, the digital pharmacy raised $100 million in a Series B funding round to democratize access to the pharmacy across the nation.
“In our board meetings, we’re asking the question, what does globalization look like? And is the business continuity plan worth the risk? And it’s a serious question, which is a scary question, because globalization is better for the world, I believe,” said Ariel Katz, Cofounder and CEO of H1, which connects the global healthcare ecosystem through real-time data and clinical findings. “But I think a lot of companies in our ecosystem are starting to ask that question, which isn’t a good thing. I don’t think for the global markets.”
Eliot Brooks, Cofounder and COO of Thriva, which sells home-based blood testing kits for issues from thyroid function to iron levels, shared that there have been some positives in terms of accelerating trends, the biggest one for him in healthcare is the shift to remote, or remote consultations, which are far more efficient. “There’s lots of change happening. We’ve built up testing capacity across the world for COVID-19, and it’s about maintaining some of that. Some of it will have to go, it’s not going to be needed anymore, but some of it should be maintained because things can change really fast.”
Ethical AI: What Can It Do?
The discussion on “Harnessing AI Responsibly” featured young business leaders that have created companies with AI at their core. The conversation explored capabilities, ethics, and risks to look out for. Something to remember is that AI is often used to describe a much bigger ecosystem, of which it is one element. “A lot of companies use more big data than AI, and a lot claim to be using AI, but it’s really big data,” says Meti Basiri, Cofounder and CMO of ApplyBoard, an AI-enabled recruitment platform that helps international students apply to post-secondary institutions. “I think it’s still too early for most businesses,” Basiri adds.
While businesses are still learning, the current generation of AI actually has limited capabilities. “AI can’t do things that humans can’t do,” says Ankur Goyal, Founder and CEO of asset intelligence platform Impira. “So if something is very difficult for humans to do, it’s very difficult or impossible for an AI model or a machine learning model to do it.” But what about the near future? Will AI intelligence soon be able to outperform human intelligence? “Based on the technology that we have today, there’s no chance,” insists Goyal. Technology may be learning how to do things faster but isn’t yet learning how to do new things much beyond what has been developed over the last five years, according to the entrepreneur. However, there is potential to move forward.
“We’re currently putting all eggs in the same basket when it comes to technology,” says Joel Hellermark, founder of Sana Labs, an AI-powered personalized workforce education platform. From his perspective, research has so far been largely based on two models: reinforcement learning and neuro-networks. “We’re at a point where we’re really exploiting those models rather than exploring other models,” adds Hellermark. “Over the next couple of years, we will have to place our bets in other architectures if we want to surpass human intelligence.”
Breaking Borders And Making Transformative Connections
The panel “Breaking Borders, Making Transformative Connections” addressed the changing nature of how we move and meet and what that means for personal and professional development. Zoom has evidently emerged as one of the leading tools for keeping businesses up and running, and it seems hybrid environments are here to stay. “It’s completely changed
the landscape of fundraising as well for startups,” said Philipp Mintchin, Cofounder and CEO of Splyt. “A lot more things are possible over Zoom than we thought they would be.”
The pandemic has not only shifted the way we work, but it has also had an impact on workplace culture and employee engagement, especially when new recruits are fresh graduates from remote locations. “I did find it was a lot more inclusive when we started having online meetings for every single meeting,” said John Traver, Cofounder and Creative Technologist of cloudbased video collaboration platform Frame.io. “I felt just something as simple as the raise hand feature of Zoom allowed the people that might’ve been a little bit quieter in a meeting to actually present themselves and say, I have an opportunity to be heard.”
Xuan Jiang, Cofounder and CTO of virtual-events platform Run the World, believes that there was a gap in employee culture and tried to find creative ways to get people together. “What we found most productive or effective for bonding people is actually having this local hub where people can go and meet people in person. And then we also do all hands through online,” Jiang said, adding that her company’s most popular feature, the virtual cocktail party—in which attendees are matched for five-minute one-on-ones—spurred conversations and personal talk during the pandemic.
“I think a couple of benefits of the pandemic for startups and maybe even larger companies too is just having better onboarding documentation,” explained Jessica Scorpio, Cofounder and Board Member of peerto-peer carsharing community Getaround. “I know a lot of startup CEOs pride themselves on, and employees love access to, leadership and access to the CEOs.” Protecting Your Data: Pay Attention To Corporate Tech The “Market Confidence Through Transparency” panel discussed how transparency can bolster market confidence at a time when the digital economy is taking the central stage. The panelists shed some insight on how they leverage data and financial security to help both small enterprises and corporates remain compliant in the digital age.
Benjamin Brook, Co-founder and CEO of Transcend, says that consumers should be concerned about large cooperates more than hackers and governments because these are the core infrastructures of data collection. Personal data is mostly collected by corporate technologies through different channels, including smartphones and web browsing history. “At the bedrock of data and security concerns is corporate technologies and a lot of private security controls have to start there for us to get protection from government surveillance or security breaches from hackers,” says Brook. Transcend was co-founded by Brook and Michael Farrell while they were still in college at Harvard in 2017 to help companies achieve compliance with digital privacy laws such as the EU’s GDPR, which aims to strengthen how corporates handle users’ data.
However, Raunak Nirmal, Founder and CEO of Acquco, weighed in on the discussion, saying large corporates, governments, and hackers play an enormous role in privacy and security, but hackers stand out as the biggest threat. “Hackers do not have to play by any rules unlike the government that has a lot of oversight; there is a lens and focus on what every government is doing,” Nirmal said, adding that the same applies to corporates who are held accountable by governments, regulators or civic organizations.
Food-Tech Pioneers Reveal Fundraising Misconceptions And Why Automation Is Necessary
The panel “Feeding The Future, Sustaining The Earth and All Its Inhabitants” explored multiple dimensions and perspectives of sustainable food production. Implementing sustainability was identified as a non-negotiable for food-tech entrepreneurs. This encompasses many factors, including how food is produced, distributed, packaged, and consumed.
“People need to recognize that food and sustainability are so synonymous,” says Michael Farid, VP of Automation at Sweetgreen, a salad restaurant chain. “Sweetgreen has pledged to become carbon neutral by 2027, and that largely will be driven by changes in our supply chain, like using regenerative farming, and by building restaurants sustainably.”
Elsewhere in the sector, Joshua Nixon’s alternative meat company Prime Roots, is problem-solving the impact of animal agriculture. “Over half of the agriculturally-related greenhouse gas emissions come from animal agriculture,” says the cofounder. “In the life cycle analysis of our products, we found that we use less than one-tenth of water and less than one-tenth of the land to produce the same amount of food.” Also concerned for humanity’s agricultural footprint, Samuel Bertram, cofounder and CEO of vertical farming solution OnePointOne, advocates for building farms next to where the product is. “The vast majority of land occupied by humans is agriculture, which consumes 70% of freshwater,” he explains. “Our system uses about 99% less water, about a hundred times less land, increases plant average shelf life by three times and has no pesticides.”
For Henry Hu, the cofounder and CEO of robotic coffee startup Café X, technology has acted as an enabler for the business to be more sustainable. And while drawbacks of deploying such varying degrees of automation within different business models are often linked to claims of robots taking human jobs, these experts are quick to shift focus onto its evidence-based positive results. “It’s very common for a coffee shop to have a 100% staff turnover every year, which calls for more hiring and training baristas, and automation fixes this problem,” says Hu.
Rethinking Energy: Creating More Sustainable Structures
The discussion “Safe, Sustainable, Affordable Structures” explored the energy transition and how governments and entrepreneurs can create a more sustainable future. The global transition from a reliance on fossil fuels to greener solutions is a huge topic currently and one being explored by global leaders across several international forums—but are leaders and consumers having the right conversations? “The short answer is no,” says Derek Rice, Cofounder and Partner at Rice Energy & Rice Investment Group. “One of the biggest misunderstandings when it comes to the energy transition is how difficult this is going to be.”
At the moment, the world is focused on three main renewable energy solutions: wind, solar, and electric vehicles. However, according to the energy investor, these three things can only target less than half of the world’s emissions. “The world is focused on maybe 30% of the problem; there’s an extra 70% that nobody’s talking about,” says Rice. “The transition is going to take 30 to 40 years.”
On the other side of the sustainability equation are the users of energy, consumers and big business. Populations are continuing to grow, and as our demands for energy have increased, so has our demand for housing. The simple solution is to meet demand by building more housing, but not all cities have the space and vision of Dubai and its multiple high-rises. “It is very different to a city like Berlin,” says Thilo Konzok, Cofounder and Chairman at Home HT, and cofounder of Decapital, who is based in the capital of Germany. “We need more housing, but these are old cities, housing is complex problem. We need to be more radical. Cities like Dubai show people what is possible.”
From the energy perspective, while wind and solar are the cheapest forms of energy in the world, the speed to implement them is not going to be as fast as people hope. “The perception is that because we have the technology we can just press go—that’s not going to be the case. Everybody has to accept that it’s going to take time,” says Rice. “We are in a full blown energy crisis, but one of the biggest mistakes is taking oil away from citizens before there is something to replace it.”