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Erik: What criteria have you used when considering international expansions?
Phil: When I'm looking at taking on a new city, it starts first with kind of the arts
and culture background. Even though Influencer looks at four areas, you know, we have the
arts, entrepreneurs, philanthropy and technology. Arts and culture is really a substantial underpinning
to everything because if you go one layer below that, what ties the four groups together
is really creativity, you know, we're really looking to become a global incubator for creatives,
whether you're a creative making a new software application or building mobile apps for digital
technology or you're, you know, building a new philanthropic enterprise or you're literally
an artist or a musician, all of these endeavors to me start with being creative. And so the
cities that we look to expand to have to have a strong creative class within them. So that's
pretty much one of the biggest criteria that I look for. Once that's been identified, then
it's a function of looking at the region, what's going on there, you start to just do
some research and get a feel for what's critical. Initially before I looked at Mumbai, I actually
thought about South Africa, and particularly either Cape Town or Johannesburg, I have relationships
there, and I've visited both places and I think there's interesting things going on
there but then as I started talking to more folks, Mumbai just seemed like the better
direction to go in now. So sometimes you have to curb your ambition for what makes sense.
And Mumbai and Sao Paolo made sense for right now. It's kind of like bigger *** for your
buck given the resources that you have, and so now, you know in 2000-- well, in the next
years, you'd kind of build out and say, "Okay, where am I gonna add new places?" So you're
constantly evaluating that process and figuring out what works, what doesn't work, and it's
not a perfect science, but it definitely starts from a standpoint of looking for a creative
city, strong creative class, arts and culture, and then building out from there.