Beyond Silicon Valley | Michael Goldberg | TEDxFulbrightSantaMonica

Hanoi is a bustling developing city of over 7 million people. In many ways, it's the complete opposite of my relatively quiet life in Cleveland, Ohio. In 2014, or 2012, as a Fulbright scholar, I moved with my family—my wife and three kids under the age of 10—to Hanoi, which was thrilling and exciting for us. Every street corner and sidewalk was filled with vendors selling products ranging from corn to mannequins to cell phones. Just crossing the street in Vietnam, with millions of motorbikes, few traffic lights, and even fewer traffic regulations, was an adventure. Every morning when we'd walk our kids to their school bus stop in our neighborhood, we passed by this woman selling fresh chicken, crouched on a stool. She butchered and feathered the birds right on the sidewalk. While my kids were a bit grossed out by the sight of the chicken blood on the sidewalk, we had deep admiration for this hardworking 23-year-old who was out there seven days a week. She was an entrepreneur. My oldest daughter, Anna, who was in third grade at the time, decided to make a video for her friends back in the US about the chicken lady. Here's a short clip from her video: 'Okay, this is Miss... she's 23 and she's our local chicken lady. Right now, she's working on a duck. The duck is already plucked and she's finishing off taking off feathers. One chicken here is 100,000 Vietnamese dong, or...' I love Anna's video, and it really inspired me for some later work that I'll tell you about.

As a professor, as a Fulbright scholar, I was attached to a local university. In my case, it was the National Economics University in Hanoi, where I taught entrepreneurship to about 50 undergraduate students. But I also looked for other ways to connect with the entrepreneurial leaders in Vietnam. To that end, I met a Vietnamese government official who asked me if I might consider teaching a course for them—a seminar on how Vietnam could become more like Silicon Valley. Vietnam's leaders were very interested in trying to move their economy beyond street vendors and factory garment workers, and they dreamed of the high-tech jobs and higher-paying jobs that exist in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley was their fantasy, and they wanted to know the quickest way to get there. Well, I thought it was highly unrealistic and unlikely that Vietnam would ever become like Silicon Valley, but I agreed to teach the seminar because I had some other ideas about a community that I could teach them about that I thought would be more relevant for them. You see, my own hometown of Cleveland is going through an experiment around supporting entrepreneurship. 100 years ago, Cleveland was at the center of the global economy, led by entrepreneurs like John D. Rockefeller. At that point, Cleveland was the fifth largest city in the United States. However, the impact of globalization decimated Cleveland's population and our economy. Cleveland's population fell from 5th to 47th largest in the US by 2012. Our young people were leaving the city in droves, looking for opportunities and support for their companies in places outside of Cleveland. In 2001, Entrepreneur magazine did a ranking of the 61 cities in the US in terms of supportive entrepreneurship, and it ranked Cleveland dead last. Cleveland had hit rock bottom. About 10 years ago, the leaders in Cleveland decided to try to do something about the support of entrepreneurship in our city. We didn't have access to the type of private capital that exists in Silicon Valley, so instead we had to look to other sources of support—namely government and donors working alongside the private sector. Things have gotten better for entrepreneurs in Cleveland over the past 10 years. We've put in place an array of initiatives and programs to help support early-stage companies. So back to the seminar in Hanoi, I decided to do it not on Silicon Valley but on what I called the Cleveland case study. I asked friends and colleagues back in Cleveland to either get up early or stay up late because of the 12-hour time difference and Skype into our seminar in Vietnam. The seminar went for a week, and the Vietnamese government officials appreciated this other perspective about a city that they had never heard of for anything besides maybe LeBron James in terms of Cleveland. They learned a lot from that seminar, and they considered it a success. So I came back after doing the seminar, and the other thing that was great is that I extended my Fulbright outside of the reach of the university to the community, which was important. So I came back to Cleveland, I met with my dean at the business school at Case Western Reserve University, and I told him about my seminar. He asked me if I might be interested in turning my seminar into a MOOC. So I told him okay, that sounds interesting, and I went out of his office and pulled out my smartphone and I Googled the term 'MOOC' because I had never heard of it before. So it turns out that MOOC stands for Massive Open Online Course, and the majority of MOOC students come from outside the United States. I spent my entire 25-year career working as an educator and in the private sector internationally, so I was really intrigued by the idea of taking my teaching on entrepreneurship to a global audience. So I went ahead and created a MOOC. I called it 'Beyond Silicon Valley: Growing Entrepreneurship in Transitioning Economies.' I had no idea how to make a video, but I knew that my daughter's video had really inspired me. It was fun, it was documentary style, and luckily I had an old friend who used to work for 60 Minutes who had recently moved back to Cleveland to raise her small kids. I basically asked her to come out of retirement and help me create my MOOC video. What we did is we interviewed a variety of people and we made it sort of fun and documentary short format, and we launched the course last April. So here's the thing that amazed me about this experience. When we launched our free 'Beyond Silicon Valley' MOOC last April, we now have had 58,000 students from 190 countries take the class. That's been great. We've had translations in 14 different languages, which makes it the top translated course on Coursera. What I want to do now is briefly tell you about three stories of students that took the class, and those are the kind of stories that have made me so proud to be the teacher of the course.

Macedonia is a former Yugoslav republic located just north of Greece. It has about 2 million people, and the US Embassy in Macedonia decided to organize a series of meetups and seminars around my MOOC last summer and then invited me to come out to the country to meet with my MOOC students. We spent a week there and had an amazing time visiting students from all over the country, speaking with them. We had one more seminar scheduled in a town called Bitola. Bitola is a two-hour drive from the capital of Skopje, and we drove through the mountains and the rain and finally arrived in Bitola to this very drab, post-industrial, Soviet-style building. We walk into the library, and I was met there by four students. So after a whole week of meeting tons and tons of people, this was the smallest group that I had the entire week, and I was initially disappointed. Then I started talking to the students, and my disappointment faded because they were amazing. Jovan, Natasha, and Elena work in the NGO community in Bitola where they support entrepreneurs, and Iskra works for a local dairy company. I came there to give them certificates for completing the course, but they gave me so much more. They told me about an idea that they had to make videos discussing what it's like to support entrepreneurship in Macedonia on the same topics of my MOOC lectures. With my support, they ended up getting a grant from the US Embassy in Skopje, and their videos have been shown to many meetups that they held. Just two weeks ago, I got an email from them to let me know that they were shown on Macedonian National Television, reaching thousands of people. I think they're staying up late in Macedonia to watch this.

The second story I want to tell you is about Medy. Medy is a 26-year-old entrepreneur who lives in Iran. Medy emailed me to let me know that he and a group of fellow students and researchers at Sharif University in Tehran were taking the MOOC, and he asked me if we could schedule a time to have a discussion to get into some more depth about how to support entrepreneurship in a community. Well, I was thrilled that folks from Iran were being reached by the course, but I was also a little worried. With US sanctions against Iran, there are certain online classes that are not permitted to be shown there, and I didn't know much about it. So I did some research, and it turns out that my class is allowed there. STEM classes are actually still prohibited there, although hopefully that is changing over time, but my class was allowed. So I was thrilled to engage with Medy and his colleagues in Iran. So there I was, a Jewish guy in Cleveland, Ohio, Skyping in to Tehran to have a discussion with Medy and his colleagues and friends about entrepreneurship. What Medy told me was that when he had watched the MOOC, he saw many similarities between Cleveland's experience in supporting entrepreneurship and Tehran's experience, and he was gratified to see that we were going through similar challenges. I was thrilled to be able to engage with them. Medy later organized the translation of the subtitles of the course into Farsi, making my course the first MOOC on Coursera with Farsi subtitles.

Finally, I want to tell you a story about Maria. I was lucky enough to go back to the Fulbright well and got a second Fulbright in 2015, and it took me to Namibia, which is a small country in southern Africa, where I collaborated with the Polytechnic of Namibia around my MOOC. Maria was one of my MOOC students. So if you think starting a business in Hanoi or Cleveland is hard, I want you to envision what it's like to start a business in northern Namibia. Maria is from a village called Eoka, and the majority of residents live in mud and dung huts, and few have access to running water. The economy in Eoka is based on subsistence farming, but in recent years there has been serious disease and drought in the region, making it very difficult for the local community to survive. Maria is a sustainable agriculturalist. She's full of passion and enthusiasm, and what she's focused on for her business is helping local cattle farmers find a market for their meat. Interestingly, there are high-end game lodges in northern Namibia only 100 miles away from Eoka, and it's full of foreign tourists who love meat. I've visited some of these, and we love meat. What Maria told me was that these game lodges are sourcing their meat a thousand miles away in South Africa, and she is working right now. During my time in Namibia, I worked with her to help find resources and support to help local cattle farmers in northern Namibia find a market for their meat in places like those game lodges. These are just three of the literally hundreds of stories that have happened since I started teaching this MOOC last year. What I love is that students like Jovan, Medy, and Maria took the lessons from the course and are applying them in their local community. Traditional measures of student success like grades or even course completion don't really apply so well in the MOOC world. It is the action that these students have taken with the information that they have got that matters. MOOCs are making an impact. They are transforming the speed and reach of global education. I literally stumbled upon MOOCs as a way to bring my ideas about global entrepreneurship to the world. I created a MOOC, and the MOOC has inspired local heroes all around the world. Thank you.