How to build one global entrepreneurial ecosystem. Please welcome Mr. Jonathan Ortmans, the president of the Global Entrepreneurship Network. Your Royal Highnesses, Excellencies, Governors, Ambassadors, ladies and gentlemen, people of Saudi Arabia, on behalf of the international community, thank you, thank you, thank you for your hospitality. Al Salam alaikum to our delegations from around the world. Thank you so much for making such an effort to join us here in Riyadh in this soon-to-be post-pandemic era. Traveling to foreign countries to participate in such gatherings is becoming new again to us, and we know that it takes considerable effort. We greatly appreciate the delegations from so many nations being present here. Your dedication to those who dream and figure out better ways of doing things is valued in every corner of the earth.
You know, this pandemic has brought many learnings we will hear about this week in terms of suffering and unprecedented growth and opportunity. We're here today because recovery from a global pandemic requires a response from the world's resilient citizens. Perhaps the world's most resilient citizens are entrepreneurs. As doers, makers, risk-takers, entrepreneurs are comfortable with uncertainty, well-equipped to rapidly rethink solutions amid changing dynamics and data, and uniquely positioned to innovate the world out of a pandemic. All parts of society, from how we educate our children to simply how we live together, was already not keeping pace with the opportunities and threats on Earth by new technologies. The pandemic accelerated change as more of our citizens adapted to virtual digital worlds and acquired new skills.
There are a few things that we need to do today and a few things that we need to do this week at the Global Entrepreneurship Congress. The first thing we need to do is we need a global response to a global opportunity. You know, the COVID-19 pandemic was indeed a global crisis tailor-made for a global response. Certainly in my lifetime, I can't think of a time when there was one enemy for every human being on the planet, yet it never got one. It accelerated massive changes in consumer behavior, and citizens across the world adapted quickly to a sudden and unexpected shutdown of normal life. But as pent-up demand from consumers is released, entrepreneurship is surging. Firms are starting and dying at unprecedented rates, and we're seeing an extraordinary number of nations rallying to reboot their economies, to rebuild their ecosystems, and to put policies in place that target a better, more sustainable, and equitable post-pandemic world. And as they do, they are rethinking approaches to building back stronger and regenerating economic growth, shedding the spotlight on entrepreneurs and the ecosystems that empower them. And as we embark upon this common mission of rebuilding our economies and creating new jobs, nations must work together. We did not work together in responding to the pandemic; we must work together as we look to regenerate our economies.
In the most recent startup ecosystem report put together by our great partner, the Global Startup Genome, the total value of exits and startup valuations in the top 25 startup ecosystems are above $10 billion, with the next 50 boasting a value between 1 billion and 10 billion. It's vital that as we look for this recovery from COVID-19, that we look at how we're going to be able to build on this kind of success, which has been remarkable over the course of the three years of the pandemic. So this week, we will spotlight common characteristics while exploring data-driven insights into policies and programs that can help these ecosystems reboot, rethink, and regenerate, providing a roadmap beyond entrepreneurial recovery to ecosystems that are fully organized for future performance.
Our second challenge this week: we need to build one global entrepreneurial ecosystem. As you've heard many times in this morning's presentations, a global entrepreneurial revolution has already taken hold and continues to grow, building a shared engine of innovation and economic growth in cities and countries everywhere. Investments into early-stage and growth-stage companies are reaching new highs, while the total creation of the global startup economy has reached $2.3 trillion over the last three years. The numbers are remarkable given the doom and gloom we expected at the beginning of the pandemic. The revolution is also not only happening in Silicon Valley, London, and Shanghai; it's happening in thousands of emerging ecosystems around the world. Places like Riyadh and Johannesburg are investing heavily, as we've seen, in their entrepreneurs to lead to the next generation recovery. So our second task this week is that we will strengthen and connect local and national ecosystems in building one global entrepreneurial ecosystem that empowers entrepreneurs to thrive no matter where they are in the world.
Our third job and observation is that entrepreneurs are trendsetters and game-changers. They're innovative, resilient, fast to leverage technology, and thrive in periods of uncertainty and disruption. Recessions have traditionally been excellent times to start new companies that either disrupt the status quo or simply capitalize on new rules and needs. At the GEC in 2022, we will connect entrepreneurs to investors, policymakers, and ecosystem builders who can empower them and ensure that they're able to achieve maximum impact at a critical juncture in human history where societies are choosing which ideas to leverage in pursuit of common goals.
The next key building block to what we're doing this week is understanding that inclusion is the key to strong, sustainable growth. As many people have heard me say, economies suffer when they leave people out. By removing barriers and enabling entrepreneurs to emerge from underrepresented populations such as women, immigrants, and ethnic minorities, countries can tap into a large resource of human capital. Here at GEC 2022, we will assess these barriers such as bias, declining infrastructure, government policy, and demographic shifts, and we will look at potential solutions for unleashing the full economic potential of a society, or in the words of my favorite scholar, Philip Auerswald, who is here at the Global Entrepreneurship Congress—and don't miss his session—'Inclusive Prosperity'.
The other major area that we need to observe and act upon is that government now has a new role to play to empower entrepreneurs. Obviously, government sets the rules and incentives that create the environment where companies start and scale. Increasingly, they're embracing entrepreneurship as a means of innovating their societies out of this pandemic and regenerating jobs and economic growth. Set against the background of billions of dollars of public investment in struggling post-COVID communities, smart use of resources will be paramount, especially in establishing a new generation of government engagement in enabling entrepreneurs. As our team from the United Nations that will be here at this Congress was talking to me about, it is unprecedented the massive shift in the last few weeks away from emergency aid into investing in ways of regenerating new economic growth through new value creation and increasing rates of new firm formation. Here at the GEC in 2022, we will convene senior government officials in a Startup Nations Ministerial to evaluate their policy structures against similar economies, and we will have a corresponding summit for government staff and advisers responsible for shaping these policies and programs. And to some of our entrepreneurs present, you might say, 'Well, why are we so focused on government?' It is now a symbiotic relationship of all of the actors in the ecosystem: the public sector, the private sector, but more importantly, both the institutions that are managing society and those organizations that are grassroots that are going through the creative process of figuring out better ways of doing things.
Another observation that we want to act on this week is that connectivity and cross-border collaboration is on the rise. The continuing fallout from the global pandemic has illustrated how interconnected our economies have become through global value and supply chains. But we all know that all boats rise on an incoming tide, and likely all boats, and in the digital age, that means national boundaries are as porous to economic growth as they are to innovation. This has resulted in an exponential increase in cross-border investing. We have the board of the Global Business Angels Network with us this week. There will be a summit of GBAN members from around the world, the people that are driving angel investor groups. And just to give you one example: it used to be that angel investors told me that less than 20% of their investments were coming from outside of their particular economy and that 80% were local. In fact, I used to talk to investors and say, 'Why don't you come with us to the Global Entrepreneurship Congress?' And this common answer I get is, 'I don't understand that market. I don't know it. I'd have to spend a lot of time in it to get to understand it, to figure out how to trust people, how to connect with people, who would I connect with?' Well, it's remarkable: in the last 24 months, in almost all of those angel investor networks, those numbers have switched, where we have 20% local investors and 80% investors kicking the tires of opportunities from overseas. And while that last mile of trust, as I call it, of doing the final due diligence clearly requires perhaps getting on an airplane, for the most part, investment opportunities are now, in this digital age, happening across digital virtual channels. This is a massive, mind-boggling change that will increase the ability for us to have not just significant cross-border investment and syndication, but significant changes in the balance of where funds flow. Here at the GEC, we want to offer a level playing field for all economies to identify new opportunities and leverage what is now a wholly new innovation ecosystem.
We also have with us this week at the Congress a large number of ecosystem builders. These are the leaders of their communities who are building the blocks necessary to enable an environment that fosters more entrepreneurship and innovation. We need to reset for this post-pandemic environment a new generation of ecosystems. And since this Congress first came to light 11 congresses ago, there's been increasing support for entrepreneurs in a global race to build the next Silicon Valley. The silver lining of this COVID-19 pandemic is that it temporarily reset economies of all sizes and allowed us the moment we needed to rethink about what ecosystems should be. In the day four of this Congress, there will be a deep dive into understanding the dynamic of what it takes to build an ecosystem in 2022 as opposed to what it took in 2018. We'll examine the common characteristics shared by vibrant, scalable, high-performing ecosystems to provide a roadmap for entrepreneurial recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic that has ravaged communities and economies everywhere. At GEC, our mission is to make it possible for anyone, anywhere, to start or scale a firm. And much of this work involves removing barriers, especially to those historically left behind within ecosystems faced by entrepreneurs.
The final and most important observation I would like to make this morning, and the action that we have upon us, is to recognize the extraordinary and exceptional change that has happened in this country in the context of entrepreneurship and innovation over just a few years. I first visited Saudi Arabia 10 years ago. My first visit was to Jeddah. I was supposed to meet with the Jeddah Chamber of Commerce for about an hour. I was bringing research from our foundation, some other knowledge and tools we thought would be interesting to talk about in the context of entrepreneurship. We ended up spending the entire day in that conference room, and that's when I knew that there was an urgency and a passion for understanding the dynamics of new value creation. I cannot say this strongly enough: it is so impressive for those of us that do not live in this great nation to see the extraordinary changes that have occurred over the last three or four years. The skill sets, the communities, the sophistication of both investors and startups, and the support and willingness of institutions, both private and public, to in an urgent race become a powerful, globally competitive entrepreneurial ecosystem is astounding. I have to say, one of the great privileges of being part of putting together this Congress has been the opportunity to spend a few minutes with His Excellency Dr. Majed. And one of the things I observed about him was a sense of urgency. And he once said to me, 'Take a look at how we're doing at different points here in Saudi Arabia on a historical timeline and look at the speed at which change is occurring in this country.' And I have to observe that I do detect that sense of urgency. And later this week, we will be announcing what we at GEC, on behalf of the entire international community, will be doing to help you—or to help you, but to be part of that journey in terms of what we hope to do here in terms of our presence in the Kingdom following this Congress. I have to say to any young people in Saudi Arabia, no matter what part of the country you come from, no matter what your background, this is a great, great time to try your hand at being an entrepreneur. This is a great time to be an investor. It's a great time to be someone who's part of the ecosystem. And so I think it's an extraordinary moment, and we're extremely proud that the Global Entrepreneurship Congress is here being hosted in your country. So thank you so much indeed.
I would like to, however, end my remarks with a comment about the leaders in our world. Leaders are the entrepreneurs; the rest of us are the feeders. And so I cannot think of a more fitting opening to this Congress than to hear from someone who is perhaps one of the most famous entrepreneurs on the planet. It's not just him; it's the companies and the communities that he's been part of nurturing. But I think he's the epitome of what it takes to experiment, to form teams, to figure out better ways of doing things, and to do it with a passion and a curiosity for making new things work. People often say to me, 'Aren't entrepreneurs people that go out and make wealth?' Well, yes, as an economist, I can tell you that's what we measure. But to me, most of the entrepreneurs I've met around the world, it's not about the money. It's actually about this curiosity of, 'What if I could build something better? What if I could improve someone's life? And what if I could make a positive contribution to the planet?' And I could not be more honored and proud to be welcoming to the stage for a brief conversation with us today, Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple.
Steve, I know we're very much looking forward to having this conversation with you. I want to begin actually with a comment about this large, grand stage. You know, for many of us, being up in front of a very large crowd like this can be intimidating. You know, despite your fame, we know you to be a shy engineer who has stuck to your core personal values, and that obviously is what's built Apple's extraordinary culture today. I read that you love to test innovations. I think you like to take road trips with your wife too. But tell us, to get us started here, a little something about yourself that might be useful to others who are also trying to stay grounded and humble among extraordinary prosperity and success.
Yeah, I'm very honored to be here, largely based on what you were saying about this part of the world, you know, and the direction, how valuable it can be to them. But you know, I go back to, okay, your personality, who you are, how you treat things in life, you know, how you talk to people, how you treat others. That really kind of solidifies between 18 years old and 23 years old, and from then on, you don't really change. You are defined. When I was very young, and you know, I started thinking about what sort of things do I want to be in life. I want to be good to people and well-liked. My father said that really is how high up you go in things. I was very established in, you know, mathematics and sciences in the school, winning the math awards and incredible science fair projects that I had no idea would have anything to do with my life. I thought because they weren't in school, there were no computers in our schools. But by the time I was getting out of high school, you know, I was starting to walk home. I was quiet and I was shy. I knew I'd be a great engineer, and I knew I'd be a teacher someday—that was my second goal—and I knew I'd be a comedian of sorts. But never ever could I address a crowd. That obviously has changed. But I'd be walking home from school and thinking, to be a good person, what things do you have to set up inside of yourself? And I was like programming my own religion or something in my head: this is how you'll be in life, these are the things that will matter to you, these are the ways you'll be good. And I came up with—I'm very, very happy with, you know, the things that I came up with. I never really wanted to, I don't know, start an industry or a company. I just wanted to be a great engineer in terms of the mathematics and the science that other engineers would look over my shoulder, see my designs, and say, 'Whoa, you know, that's incredible.' I want to be tops that way. And one of the proudest awards I ever got in my life was the IEEE Electrical Engineering Society of the United States gave me their fellowship, and that means other engineers respected what I did. And I didn't care about, you know, recognition for starting an industry, starting a company. I wanted other engineers to respect me. And that's just sort of—these are the sort of things I programmed in my head. But when you program something yourself, when you do something yourself, it's much more important to you than if it's taught to you by others. You know, you've come up with, 'This is how it should be.' We all have the abilities to define, you know, what's right and what's wrong and come up with our own principles. It's subjective; it could be different for different people. But I knew who I was inside, and I knew that person. And so all through my life, as things evolved and I had great successes, I still kept inside of me knowing who I was wasn't going to change. I was going to be true to it. A lot of people have, you know, huge monetary success in business, and it changes them. Now they want to make much more wealth and more power, have more power over things. But that was not my goal. My goal was just to create the greatest products of the time as an engineer. And I didn't want to let it change me. I didn't want to lose my values, which were a lot of ways to be good to others, to be sharing with others, and to be especially helpful to young people. I did achieve my goal of being a teacher. I taught 10 to 13-year-olds full-time, full-time, even seven days a week for eight years of my life. But I never let any press in. It's sort of secretive. Never let any press in, didn't want press near young children. And one of the biggest things that I learned doing that was something that certainly had affected me through my life, and it's not necessarily what you're taught by, you know, academically. It's not necessarily the content. What's more important is motivation. If you want to learn something, you will learn it. So it's the wanting. And I'm very sensitive as a teacher to not noticing in anybody if this is their direction in life, the things they want to study. I will do everything I can to help them go in that direction, same as my father did for me.
Well, Steve, obviously you're giving a lot of your time back to young people. What were you like as a kid?
What was I like as a kid? Okay, I was actually extremely athletic, very tops in all the sports that I was in. Good runner. I was in third grade, this is around eight years old. I went to school and we had some multiplication flashcard tests, and I had my hand up with the answers for everyone. I had actually prepared, and the teacher said it was the first time a boy beat the girls. And that started, made me feel proud of myself that I was good at something: mathematics. By the time that I got to high school, we would be assigned in a textbook to do at the end of this chapter, do all of the odd problems from 1 to 37. I loved math. I loved it inside of me. It was a passion. I wasn't going to just do the homework and get it right. I did every single question, even and odds, all the way up to question 50. I just loved it so much. And you get good without knowing it. It wasn't that my objective was to be good; it's just that I loved doing it. When I was about eight years old, my father took me to a big conference in San Francisco where companies presented new products that would go into electrical engineering and engineering projects. And at one of the booths, a gentleman held up a piece of cardboard with drawings on it that might look like squares for buildings and roads connecting them. He said, 'This is a chip we're going to make with six transistors on it.' It's a transistor. A transistor is the heart of today's digital community and every project you use. Transistor was invented around 1950, and one of the inventors flew out to Mountain View, California, and started a company to make transistors out of silicon. So what is a transistor? It's an electronic neuron. It's the heart of making decisions in every computing project to this day. Now, back then, you would have to go through a lot of steps to make a transistor out of certain metals and certain other elements. Today, you take the exact same steps and you can make 60 billion of these electronic neurons on a chip in an Apple iPhone. So that was it. That was the start of Silicon Valley. But I got into it because my father was working for Lockheed Martin space company, and the space race was going on, and also a lot of, you know, atomic fears with Russia and stuff like that, ancient days. And my father kind of had told me these chips were coming. I said, 'Wow, six transistors for the price of one? We're going to have better radios, right?' Transistor radio was the gadget of my life. My father said, 'No, these new technologies are always so expensive that you, you know, they only go to the military and they go to the government, and normal people don't really get them.' And darn it, I set inside of myself: I wanted the best technologies ever to be developed for normal people in their normal average lives. That started out. Now, back then, I was great at electronics because of my math. I got a ham radio license by age 10. You have to study a lot of math formulas for how electrons move through different materials, and I was good. I knew I'd be really good at electronics. And I built projects for science fairs. Science fairs were done in conjunction with the schools, but not ever in a class. No assigned projects; you make up your own. I got to make up my own, and I went for progression, better and better, winning awards at science fairs. By eighth grade, I won an award for the best electronics project all the way up to 12th grade for the whole San Francisco area. I got quite advanced. But that's electronics; that's the old-school analog electronics. You know, and I remember a lot of the old-school things, and I like those ways, things you did with pencil and paper. I'm wearing mechanical watches today. And I was good at electronics, but I stumbled—you could never learn anything about digital. There were no books in the bookstores. Even if you went to the scientific bookstore called Kepler's in Palo Alto, not a single book on how computers are made. And I stumbled across a journal in our hall closet, and I started going through it. These articles about computers dealing with numbers that were ones and zeros and making little decisions called logic, and combining logic steps to doing things like adding numbers. Oh my gosh, I played around with a pencil on paper, and I said, 'This is going to be the passion for my life.' I know that, you know, it's not anything having to do with school. Nobody else around me would know how to do this stuff. But I fell in love with it. And then I started working and building science fair projects with hundreds of transistors and parts all soldered together. I soldered everything myself. I was a builder. And eventually, by the end of high school, I had taught myself—there were no books on it—how do you design a computer? I had no access to a book, but I wanted to know so badly. I got a manual once of a computer. Somebody gave it to me at a company where my electronics teacher had let me go down to learn how to program a computer. And it was a manual describing the insides of a computer, not how it was designed, not the parts that built it. And I went back to my elementary school days when I learned about these ones and zeros and logic, and I sat down and started working on paper and drawing all the little parts. I had a book of chips that were being made and which chips, which number would build that architecture. It took me months to, you know, develop pretty much a design that would be a computer. And then I started designing computers. Every single, probably every single weekend, I'd close my door in my house, and on my white mic tabletop, I would pull out a new manual about a new computer, and I would start working out my designs for it. And I would design the same computers over and over and over. And my principle was: I can do it better than I did the last time. I can use fewer...
Parts and that became my thing to design it the simplest possible way. I developed a lot of tricks to get me through. Sometimes using one part for something that wasn't intended, sometimes using one part to do two things at once. And those tricks I could use forever in my life, but it was more important to know how to come up with a trick for a new project. And that was my life.
I came out of high school never thinking that computer designs were a job. I didn't even think it was an engineering job. This is a long time ago, but I knew that I got very good at it. So that was pretty much my childhood, and it got me up there where I was designing projects for other people. I loved designing so much that they heard in California, they heard this right engineer at Hewlett-Packard doesn't even have a college degree yet and he'll design things for you.
A guy came up from Hollywood and there were no movies in hotels and he wanted to build a hotel movie system and I got to design the digital part of it. I'm so proud of that. And I would design television time code circuits for people and I would always charge them five cents because I wanted to do this out of love and I didn't want to do it for money.
It was like when I was in college, I loved typing. You know, it wasn't like today where you have computers and everybody knows typing. I loved it. I would type a term paper for other people that handwrote it in cursive. I would type their papers from midnight until 6:00 in the morning, like six hours, and I would charge five cents. That's one of the proofs. And that's just sort of... I was strange. I could never ever speak to people though. I was very, very shy even up through the start of Apple.
So Steve, let's just quickly stick on the education thing for a minute. I mean, one of the things... there's a great book coming out this week about this massive gap between technology and our ability as people and as particularly educational institutions to be able to keep up with it. I know we also have Victor Wang here who I remember when he moved from the Valley to Kansas City said to me, 'I'm bringing my kids,' and he said, 'Oh my gosh, you know, the way they're teaching things in high school here in Kansas City is very different than the Valley.' I mean, I guess in the Valley the high schools are using design thinking and all sorts of new sort of ideas. But all of that spirit you had... was it just a natural innate sense that you wanted to tinker and experiment and figure out those things? Was it because your dad took you to that conference and it inspired you? Or was there something else that we can do? Because how do we narrow this gap between the sort of analog traditional way that we're teaching our kids in schools and into this environment whereby you were operating outside of the curriculum in doing all of this learning? You had your own innate curiosity and surely this is what we need to have with our kids today.
Different people have different personalities and some of them, the pure straight academic way is better. And we in schools we try to reach everyone. So you know, maybe someday we'll have a computer that's so smart as a teacher it can take you all the way in one year from second grade chemistry up to university chemistry. Maybe someday we'll have that and it'll be your best friend. It'll have personality, it won't just be a computer.
I thought that computers were going to change education a lot and the problem is it's just like an electronic form of a book. It's not like this is my best friend who knows everything in my life and what jokes I like. I believe a lot... I've always my whole life believed that laughter is the best medicine. And I've had a formula since I was very young that happiness is what life is about and happiness is your smiles minus your frowns, your good feelings minus bad feelings. And so always I wanted to follow a lot of humor and jokes and that applies to the classroom. The student who likes things and enjoys things and it's fun is going to want to learn more.
And then I also... how do you minimize frowns and bad feelings? And I just developed my own techniques. You know, you have to develop your own formulas. I can't tell other people what mine were and it would work for you. But for example, I won't argue because if you argue all you can do is have frowns from it. And also if you want to look back in the past and say what if we've done this differently at Apple, all you could do is be saying well I wish we'd done something better so you're unhappy. If my car gets scratched, you get it constructed. How do you fix it? Take it down to a body shop and get the car fixed. Don't go blaming and worrying about a lot of grief. Get rid of those frowns. A frown's a smile upside down, as they say.
Absolutely. Steve, let me switch on you for a minute. We have a lot of interest at GEN and indeed here in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia where I know under the leadership of MCIT and the leadership of this country, they have a Saudi Space Commission. A lot of interest in space. Let's switch to space for a minute. At GEN we don't do verticals but we often love space because it's something which obviously transcends the world. Obviously the cost of getting to space has fallen dramatically opening doors to thousands of new what we call spacepreneurs. In our GEN Space initiative we have more than 2,000. In fact our GEN Space teams are here in this conference and I know they would all be disappointed if I didn't take this opportunity to ask you about your interest in the field. So tell us about Privateer. I understand that you're in the space junk business. So you know, why is managing space junk important to people on Earth and what do... how much potential do you see here from the entrepreneurship perspective in opportunities coming out of this access to lower Earth orbit?
Well, almost this minute right now, the number of the efforts and launches and money that is coming from private instead of public sources to get in space, satellites and the like, is crossing over to where more of it is now private enterprise. And that's one of the reasons for our name, Privateer. My best friend, you know, best man at my wedding, Alex Fielding, started this company and it was largely based talking to other people in the academic spheres of trying to study and analyze all the space junk, the space refuse, satellites that are up there. We have nothing that tells us everything that's up there very well.
You think, okay, there's an effort here that's going to go up and maybe find a way to bring some space refuse down to Earth, but it's very difficult to spot the dangerous small particles less than 10 centimeters cubed. Very difficult to spot those and they're a thousand times the speed of a bullet so they are very dangerous. Our lives depend on things that come from satellites. Your navigation systems, a lot of our television, a lot of our internet, our phone calls from country to country go through satellites. And now we've got the internet coming with, you know, from Elon Musk. I mean, Elon Musk has become, you know, one of the outstanding experts in the world on space docking too.
So where is this private interest coming from? It's just that costs have come way down. When the costs come down, that's when new approaches get taken and created. We are largely focusing on space junk, but that means you got to trade between all the countries that have equipment up in space that can measure it and spot it and detect it. They got to share their information. We need worldwide standards so that some of it can be understood. It's hard to do. When I was young I was taught space can belong to no one, the moon can belong to no one. But the further we go, it really does... everybody does kind of try to own their parts of it.
So let me ask you a couple of things also about sort of wealth in this example because, you know, we're very lucky at GEN. We've had a longtime friend of mine, Richard Branson, has been a longtime advocate for the work that we do and he's been another person who's out looking at the space world. And you obviously mentioned Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. And sometimes when I talk about this and I get so excited and I say things like, you know, do you know that we're now able to actually organically grow new hearts in space? There's all sorts of things that we can't do in the atmosphere that we can do up there. And I get all excited about it and think about all the exponential opportunities and what if this and what if that. And people turn around and say, 'Ah, that's three rich guys playing around in space.' Is... you know, how do we... am I misunderstanding what's going on here? You said this moment of shifting from public to private sector... is this really just a rich man's opportunity?
Well, obviously for governments to have satellites in space that are observing things on Earth, it's got a different purpose. But for a lot of private enterprises, it very much is, you know, rich men's game that have the ability to pay for launches up there. Prices coming way down and we can put a lot of small satellites up, but you have to look at ROI, return on investment. Is what's coming back worth it? And one example you can look at of course is SpaceX and Starlink, really giving an alternative internet that you don't have to depend upon cables and lines in the ground. And you know, what's on Earth, you can actually get the internet when you're far away in the middle of a desert and there's really no cellular ability nearby.
And so there are some good things. For a long time we've had satellite phones so you could communicate distress signals if you were in ships way out in the ocean, you still had communication ability. And communication is always important. So there are some examples of return on investment. People now, younger people are starting to think... there are a lot of people actually thinking what if we could clean up some of this stuff that's floating around space that might knock a satellite out that's an important part of our lives, you know, things that we actually use, and knock it out by accident. And a lot of people are talking that way because the cost has come way down to launch very small satellites with lots of sensors.
And that's one of the things our Privateer is doing. But we're starting by saying we've got a map. You can't really take actions, say on the ocean, unless you have a bunch of buoys that are measurement systems. We've got to measure what's out there. We've got to share the information with others and it's going to take a lot more cooperation. But we want to get started forming really good, valuable maps that work. And it comes from a scientist who is, you know, professor in Austin, Moriba Jah, and he had created Astrograph that actually portrays the well thousands of the tens of thousands of objects that are out there that are known. Just because that's the starting point and we're following that guideline.
So any advice for this ecosystem about space? Would you still think it's premature? Is this a good time to be getting in? Is it a good thing to be encouraging young people to be experimenting around?
