Last month, fellow CMEA partner Faysal Sohail and I were among the few Venture Capital delegates invited to attend President Obama’s Summit on Entrepreneurship.  This gathering of talent and potential from the Muslim world, was an event set in motion by President Obama’s “New Beginning” Cairo Speech last June.

Faysal Sohail and Jim Hornthal at the Presidential Summit

The Middle East represents a huge market opportunity, and recent transactions, like Yahoo’s acquisition of Maktoob , create role models — one vital part of an entrepreneurial eco-system.  While nothing succeeds like success, it takes a lot more than a few financial hits to push back the decades (centuries?) of resistance to risk and the consequences of failure (2nd cousin to risk).

John Dickerson has been writing in Slate a series or articles about America’s Greatest Idea – Risk.  Cultural acceptance of failure is a huge challenge.  Even in the United States, tolerance has it’s own ‘micro-climatology’.  From region to region, city to city, or even block to block, the willingness to take on the seemingly impossible runs from scalding hot to ice cold.  After all, who is willing to take a bet with their careers?  It is one thing to be wrong and lose money (which, while we never like it to happen, is a fact of life in the venture business).  It is another to be willing to take that bet with an even more dear “currency”; an individual’s time and career.

Fellow venture investor John Doerr likes to characterize entrepreneurs as those “individuals who do MORE than anyone thinks possible with LESS than anyone thinks possible.”  It takes a similarly optimistic support system of angels, mentors, and venture investors to support and nurture these rising stars, and to also be there to pick them up when they fall down.  A failure can be worth two successes, especially for the individuals and teams that are able to learn from their mistakes.  This scar tissue has been vital to the success of most of our high tech heroes.  Our ability to transplant this model in other parts of the world is vital if we as a nation are to prosper and be secure.

The Presidential Summit was an important first step in this long journey.  I hope that we have the patience to see this all the way through.  Job creation is not just an important issue in the US.  The unemployment rates in the Middle East are staggering, and getting worse.  It is in our national interest to do what we can to nurture the job creation that comes with successful entrepreneurship.  Giving youth something worth living for is a far better prescription for our own security than enabling the seeds of insecurity and intolerance to take a greater hold, making them even harder to dislodge.  It is our responsibility to spread the seeds of creativity and innovation as far as the winds of change will carry them.