The Germany Expat Business Show
A podcast that shares knowledge, stories and inspiration for anyone starting, running or growing a business as a non-German in Germany.
The Germany Expat Business Show
Giving Migrant Entrepreneurs a Boost in Germany's Tech Scene with Laila Zohaib
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Laila is a Startup Coach from Stuttgart, who wants to create a safe space for migrant founders in Germany through the community empowerment project ‘The Migrant Accelerator’. She loves to talk about lived allyship and inclusion for investors and corporates.
She is also the host of The Migrant Accelerator Podcast.
TMA sounds like a fun place to be, it’s full of founders from: Thailand, Uganda, Russia, Palestine, India, Ukraine, Pakistan and even a few Americans!
In our conversation we discussed:
- How her bachelor thesis formed the basis of The Migrant Accelerator.
- What The Migrant Accelerator is and how it helps
- The history of migrant entrepreneurship in Germany
- The availability of grants and non-VC sources of funding that aren’t widely known about
- The opportunities (and challenges) to founding a startup in Germany
- ‘Passport privilege’ and the the difference between the terms migrant, immigrant and expat
- Balancing motherhood (of a toddler!) and business leadership
You can find this episode and all episodes as well as show notes for each at https://thegermanylist.de/the-germany-expat-business-show-podcast/
Starting or running a business in Germany as a foreigner? Already running an online business in Germany as an expat? Wanting to grow your German-based business? Working as a freelancer in Germany? You'll love my guide with over 30 resources for expat business owners in Germany.
Hi, I'm Eleanor Meyerhofer, a native Californian designer and digital strategist. In October of 1999, a few years after graduating from design school, I flew from San Francisco to Munich with a fistful of Deutschmarks, a dial-up connection and an extremely vague plan. 20 plus years later, after a 10-year stint at a global agency freelancing and launching two online businesses, I'm still here. Now I'm talking to other XPAP business owners to share knowledge, stories and inspiration for other non-Germans running businesses in Germany. Welcome to the Germany XPAP Business Show. Today I am here with Lila Sohaib and I am going to ask Lila the question I asked everybody on this podcast. The answer is going to be a little bit different, but it is what is a two-minute story of how you got to Germany?
Speaker 2:Hi. Thank you so much, eleanor, for inviting me to your podcast. I'm really honored to be here. Hello to all the listeners as well to the audience. My father migrated to Germany from Pakistan in the 80s. Basically, he was looking for a better provision for his family and his sisters and needs to get them married, etc. So he's been working here at a factory and then he actually started freelancing himself. So this is what I'm doing.
Speaker 1:When I grew up here, Okay, so you did not migrate here yourself, but your parents did. But that leads to the next question why and how you started the Migrant Accelerator and tell us a little bit about what it is.
Speaker 2:Sure. So team A is the Migrant Accelerator. Team A is Empowerment Community Project, which is led by people like me who have a migration background or people who migrated here themselves, and what we're trying to achieve is just a community, basically of a peer network for founders. So if you're specifically like a tech founder, this is where we can help out each other the most. We have access to mentors and investors, etc. And targeting international students, international workforce who want to start up with their own idea, with their own project maybe are working on a prototype, and we offer like a dedicated 12-week accelerator program for them which is online, it's free of cost, we don't take any equities, like a social project, and also we have like a Slack community. We do monthly events as well for everyone who's, for example, not part of the accelerator. So I started it in Feb, actually, and we've grown to over 200 community members by now.
Speaker 1:What inspired you to start this Sure?
Speaker 2:So actually I have to go for to answer this question, I have to go back a little bit further. Actually, I've been working in like entrepreneurship at university like this university that I did my bachelor's in since 2018. I started with some thinking, innovation workshops. I organized conferences and pitch events and hackathons, so I got in touch with entrepreneurship on a more academic level, not on the hands on let's start my own business level but we're always like helping students, you know ideate and you know build a product and set up their own business eventually. And I noticed over the time that we have like very few foreign students who are actually willing to, you know, start up, or we have like very few programs aimed at them. And this is why I actually wrote my bachelor thesis 2018 on the motivations of young people with migration background in Germany about entrepreneurship, what their thoughts are, what their fears are, etc. So this is the first time that I actually dug into this topic and I specifically looked at my entrepreneurship and the history of it in Germany, and this has been following me. I haven't, you know, done anything past that since 2018. So this has just been lingering in my head and I've been noticing that there's very few opportunities or maybe like support systems or programs for migrant founders.
Speaker 2:We have specific communities here which are active, but they're like quite big and they don't have any targeted program for tech founders, for example, just like we do for our startups at university at any incubator accelerator. They have some kind of target right. What you can see over the last few years is that there's like a trend like in Germany we have a few big like. We have one big female accelerator, we have different programs like Germany is trying to push diversity and most of it means that it's gender. Unfortunately, the will of privilege is much larger and, yeah, heritage and background is also part of it, just like sexuality as well, for example.
Speaker 2:So there's a lot of groups which are not being looked at here in Germany and I myself identify myself like I fall into different categories just because of the way I look and the way I practice my religion, where I come from. But I do identify myself as a person with, like a migration background or with another background next to the German culture which I grew up in here, and this is why I actually wanted to leverage the network that I've been building over the last few years with investors, with mentors for startups specifically, which is like my personal network, but also my business network, which I used to use for students, you know, at our university, helping them out, getting them connected. And yeah, this is just something that I wanted to start on the basis of my own personal network and I'm thankful that it grew wonderfully and we have, like so many people now who are helping each other grow and successfully start up in Germany.
Speaker 1:Okay, let me go back to something you said about your when you were working on your thesis. You wanted to understand about the fears and thoughts of migrant founders. What were they? What conclusion did you come to?
Speaker 2:So my thesis is quite a few years back, but what I can say is that there were different feelings that migrant like young people had in accordance to thinking about financing their startup and even starting their own business, like the support of their family, for example, and I saw a difference as well between male and female here.
Speaker 2:So maybe I should also like think about publishing the results and really looking into what kind of things trigger them, not to start, but there was a big difference between males and females, and the males will actually feeling more empowered by their personal network and their own you know, family and friends network to start off something like this their own business rather than females. And the topic of funding their own venture has been a big problem as well. But you can also see these results actually in the latest migrant founders monitor, which is published by the startup Verband and Friedrich Naumann Stiftung, like the two big organizations who are actually asking micro founders themselves specifically what kind of issues they have, and they did deduct that there is like a big gap as well in VC funding and funding overall.
Speaker 1:Okay, so the people you're working with, like you say, or specifically like they want to go into tech. They tend to be students, they have obviously emigrations hintergrund and do they have to be German speakers?
Speaker 2:All right, my whole program is actually in English and online. Most of it is online, but all of it is in English. I just want to have a very low barrier entry barrier for those people who have less time and who just want to exercise economic opportunity and just try themselves out. It's not only students. We have a lot of professionals as well who are doing some side hustles and building something on the side, for example, with their friends and stuff. A lot of them are bootstrapped, like a lot of these responders either. They've given up their actual job, whatever they were working on, and they completely dedicated themselves to their startup and trying to push sales and everything. And a lot of people also are still working and doing startup on the side, while it's also kids and a family and everything. So very different stories, but all of them share like one thing, which is being very dedicated and being very hardworking, which inspires me every time that I speak to them.
Speaker 1:Okay, and I'm curious. I mean, I kind of know, but is English that common that it makes it a lower barrier to entry with somebody who's already here, who's studied here? Do enough people they speak English as a, I guess, third language in addition to German?
Speaker 2:I mean, I don't have the stats, but I feel like most of the community members they migrated themselves to Germany, so they're not people who did their bachelor's here or their master's here, who've been here for a longer time. So I do feel like a lot of people are either international students, who are people who have migration experience themselves. So this is also my main focus group because I feel like they need the most help because they don't have the network that you have. I mean, if you have a migration background like me, if you grew up here, at least you have some kind of friends and family support system. But people who come here by themselves just for a job opportunity or for, like you know, an MBA or a degree or whatever, they tend to be very lonely, even in big cities like Berlin, for example.
Speaker 1:And is there? Is there typically like in all the founders you serve? Are there maybe five countries they typically come from, or is it all over the world or what's kind of the demographics there?
Speaker 2:It's super diverse, like what I can tell you about the current cohort that we had. So we just wrapped up our first, you know, pilot cohort with TMA and I'm doing TMA actually as a side project, so I work 80% and then I'm doing this as a nonprofit on the side and we had an accelerator which was running from June till August and the 10 startups that were in, like I, pulled it up. So one person's father's Palestinian, mother is Russian, someone migrated from the US. Then we have someone from Philippines, uganda, thailand, afghanistan, cameroon, india, russia, again Egypt, ukraine.
Speaker 1:So it's basically Okay, it's really all over the place, even in America, in there. Yeah, so is a. Since you said network a couple of times and I know in any business person started up or otherwise, network is so important. Is that like one of the key things? Because so, if you can be, have a McDonnell's in the world but be like me and be your 20 years and I have a great network, so like I probably, you know, would use your accelerator also. I'm not doing it, but is it for people? Really that is like one of the key factors that makes somebody a good candidate is that they are kind of not wired into any particular community or seeing here that can help them with being a startup.
Speaker 2:I feel like those people benefit the most from the exposure to top experts and mentors and investors, because those people have the hardest time reaching these kind of people.
Speaker 1:Okay, so let's just add a curiosity. So let's say I'm like a good candidate for for TMA and I get accepted I'm assuming there's like an application process. So I'm like, what do I do at the level? Walk me through what going through the accelerator looks like. What do I start with them? What do I come out with at the end?
Speaker 2:Sure. So what I had in my mind for the pilot cohort, basically we are not, we don't have any industry, we're not industry specific, so we're industry agnostic. The only things that I defined for the first pilot cohort I mean it's an evolving program so for the first cohort we had people who applied, who had an MVP. So this is what we were expecting. Plus and a bonus was that if you have like a product which is already launched and live and you have like customers, for example, and you're gaining you know kind of traction, product market proof, like signs of that, and what we also looked at was, of course, the founders, the background and the niche itself, if the product makes sense. Exactly this is what we looked at.
Speaker 2:And for the accelerator, we had like one online workshop a week and then we had a demo day. We had one one mentoring sessions as well on the side. So, fortunately, we had like over 70 mentors which were from my personal network and personal network of my co founder. They actually signed up to support these entrepreneurs, these underrepresented founders, and obviously we couldn't squeeze all of them into the 12 week program schedule which we crafted specifically for that cohort. We also asked, for example, for the current challenges that they're facing startup related challenges, maybe also some personal challenges and then we also kind of prioritize the workshops and the schedule planning that for for the specific cohort.
Speaker 2:And yeah, we had weekly workshops, we had one on one feedback, check ins, pitch trainings, everything with experts that usually charge a lot, because I've seen them in other like I work at a university accelerator most of the mentors that we have we do pay them, so I'm aware of these people and people who are working in the ecosystem, so I've been super grateful that they're all dedicated the time to these founders. And then we had a wrap up with there was the team, a demo day also invited. Good job, okay, from two hearts as a keynote speaker Also sorry who's that?
Speaker 2:you got to help me out. Sure, to houses like a community that wants to bring together like diverse people in tech. Okay, so they have a slack as well. They have a few thousands, I think, in the slack. They're quite large community. They're focusing in Europe. So everyone who has like a two cultural backgrounds at least, or migration background, that can join that community. So this is quite large community which I was also a part in and invited the CEO for a keynote and actually invited some migrant investors as well, and Stephanie from there as well, from found a land maybe you know her. She was also part of the jury so we had like get together basically of the existing migrant support communities as well, which was wonderful Next to listening to all the pitches and the networking.
Speaker 1:Okay, and also for the folks listening at home. Mvp stands for minimum viable product. That's like when you just have like the most basic release of whatever product you're putting out into the world. So one of the things I'd imagine is difficult when you talk about funding is all of the funding the CD based, or do you guys look at alternate funding approaches?
Speaker 2:Yeah, of course I mean we talk about. We have an investors network inside of TMA. We have migrant founders office hours as well, which are led by VCs at the moment. But because of my own professional background and the professional background of my co-founder, who's also startup coach at a bigger university, who focuses on science startups, we do offer them consultancies to figure out if they can get access to public funding.
Speaker 2:And unfortunately, like in Germany, I feel like this there's like one thing that the people in the US do really well, as whatever they do like, they talk about it a lot and they're quite loud about it. So in Germany actually, we have a quite saturated funding schemes for startups actually, but a lot of the startups don't even know about them first of all, and they don't have any assistance to figure out if they're matched the criteria or not. So there's a lot of funding programs like exist startups type and grant, where if you're a university student, or at least you have completed your university in the last five years, you have a few co-founders, you haven't started your company yet you could, for example, get like an equity free cash up to 100K for one year just for developing what. Yeah, and this is what we also do with our student teams and what we're helping team A teams get as well. Free money. Basically, you just have to send in your business plan and whatever the write-ups that you need for your project.
Speaker 2:But there's a lot of schemes here and unfortunately, most of them are only communicated in German. So this is also something Sorry, I'm laughing. Go ahead, finish your thoughts. Yeah, unfortunately, like there's a lot of cool stuff that's going on here, but people don't know about it. So this is like the typical German way of doing stuff. I mean, they just update their website and they feel like the whole world knows about it, which is not the case, unfortunately, and especially most of the stuff is in German. So this is what I actually also envision to change that we have like a dedicated program for international startups, which we don't have so far here in Germany, like on a national level.
Speaker 1:I grew up in LA and when I was a kid and this is like many, many decades ago when I brought something home from school, it was like a five different languages. And the more I kind of go into this universe, I see that there is, you know, there's like make it in Germany. There are these things and sometimes it's in English. But I do have the feeling like I got condom sushi scaled when I quit my corporate job and I remember hearing about it. Somebody told me and I was like wait, you mean I can quit my job and they will give me money and it was a great program. But yeah, it wasn't like I just found out about it because somebody told me marketing far and wide is missing. But let me ask you a question. You said I was talking to somebody the other day and they were talking about getting a grant. What do you call that in German? What is a grant in Germany? My husband couldn't tell me like shankung sushi. He didn't know like the word for applying for a grant.
Speaker 2:It's mostly called Förderung.
Speaker 1:Ah, okay, thank you, and is there a lot of those kinds of opportunities?
Speaker 2:And they are. They're regulated, so you have to see where the founder team is based. A lot of them also expect I mean, they have different schemes right. So, for example, we have a scheme coming up which is called exist women. So this is like just an empowerment kind of for what do you call it in English? Like just for introducing women who might be wanting to start a company, who are even not yet working on an idea. So it's like an idea, but just to get them in the mood for founding a company. So this is like a three month stipend that you get from the government and us. For example, in the region of Stuttgart, we give away 10 stipends to young women and you will get like 2,500 euros per month and workshops and stuff. So just for you know, talking about, for example, if you have any fears about founding a company, anything that might empower you. Like they have a whole workshop schedule set up for these kind of people. So there's a lot of cool. Like Berlin, for example, they just announced like Gründerinnen bonus as well. So this is also for female founders, a bonus that you will get at things like 20K or 30K, I don't know.
Speaker 2:A lot of the stuff is happening on the regional level as well, but yet again, it's not being communicated enough, not going through enough channels. Me, for example, as a startup coach myself, I didn't know that we could, that we could invite international founders over here, for example, if they have, like you know, they got into an accelerator program which is funded, or they have like the startup grant or something you can actually get a visa for them, like for 18 months, and this is only written in like the you know, I don't know under paragraph whatever, like a small line. This is typical Germany, you know. I went to, I went to bits and pretzels this year and I talked to someone from leading the exist stipend. He's working at the economic ministry and he actually emailed me this paragraph and I was like what the hell you know? Like why don't we know this? Why don't we know the stuff? If we?
Speaker 2:want to cost you more.
Speaker 1:Do you have to dig through like government websites to find like where do you find, where are these things are? They are on all the the badminton burg website, bavarian website. These places.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I think BNBF, bnb, car, like the economic ministry, they do have some kind of thing called out Schreibung bekannt machen. So all Schreibung, basically just tenders that you can look up, which are, you know, not always start up related, sometimes innovation related, so you as an SME, as a small business, can also apply for these grants If you're working on digitization, ai, circle economy or something like this. So this is what you can follow as well. They have a database as well, which is called, I think, further Finder or further loads, or something I can send you learning afterwards. Unfortunately, everything's in German, so you might have to like Google translate. The all the websites exist also has like a an English website. But if you compare the richness of the information on the German website, which is obviously much more accurate and fuller, it's unfortunate that there's not enough attention being paid to, you know, cater to this target group and actually, migrant founders monitor found out that 22% of the founders in Germany have a migration background. This is every fifth person.
Speaker 1:Mm hmm, that's so interesting. There was, I think, when there are a bunch of layoffs in Silicon Valley. Somebody posted something like come to Germany. And then everybody piled on saying, like you didn't tell the Auslander before to this, because there's this disconnect between what the top of the German government is saying, like everybody, come here, innovation. And then when you show up at the immigration office, nobody's gonna speak English to you, nobody which you can make an argument is okay, but it's just, it's mismatched expectations in terms of what the messaging is and what the reality is. And that brings me to one of the questions I want to ask is what do you think are some of the positive, like the opportunities and positive things, as well as the challenges for non Germans trying to start businesses in?
Speaker 2:Germany. I think the on the opportunity side, if we want to start off positively, is definitely the. Germany is a market that is less competitive, for example, to the US, like if, obviously if you, if you want to get into a hot space like AI there's a lot of things going on here as well I do feel like Germany is a good test ground if you actually want to work on a product and you want to get it started, build your MVP, find your first clients, etc. And you get. Basically, you get if you, if you're smart as a or I mean work. People say work smart, not hard, right. So as a startup founder, I heard of people who are actually getting funded to getting through public programs for like years in a row just developing their MVP. So if you're actually smart and you know which accelerators, incubators, programs to apply for, you can get by monthly as well and just work on your own product. Obviously, it's not a recommendation for me. I feel like if you really want to start something, you have to find a pain point first and see if it works, instead of just, you know, chilling around and public institutes for a long time without any results. But it is, it is possible. So I feel like Germany has a very good, you know startup support ecosystem if you know your way, how to you know, if you know how to get around, and they're open for innovations, they're open for tech. They're getting a lot of funding from the EU as well, specifically if you want to work on green any green topic which is attractive, I feel like. So on that side we do have opportunities.
Speaker 2:But yeah, on the other side, germany it doesn't have the proper setup to accommodate, I think, international founders yet because, just like you mentioned, the communication is not there they had. They do have a vision, but doesn't translate into all the layers of the establishment. There's also issues with structural racism that all of us face. If you don't look like the normative, you know white guy from next door and there's also challenges in terms of funding as well. It's all like a whole bundle of issues that people face here. We also face racism on an individual level as well. So we have a lot of work to do, but I do feel like it's worth it, because obviously Germany has an aging society and aging population, so they do need to step up, step up their game and do something about it, and I do feel like they are realizing that, unfortunately, grassroots organizations just like mine do have to, you know, keep on nudging and keep on pushing and kind of maybe pave the way for them to actually realize how it could work or how it might work.
Speaker 1:Let me ask you about one of the things you mentioned to, especially around racism and discrimination. I am curious about this because obviously I'm a black woman but I'm American and I feel like, if I'm honest, I haven't really had to deal with a lot of discrimination in my many years in Germany and I feel like a part of that is because I'm American. I have a friend who is blonde and blue wide, but she's from Eastern Europe and she's told me stories about when she wanted apartment. They've said like you see all the names on these, these mailboxes are German and we want to keep it this way. Never happened to me. Part of that is also because I was working at a corporation when I was getting my apartment and stuff later on, not right at the beginning. Being American, we see everything through ethnicity black, white, whatever but what I've learned here is there's also national. I guess I'm kind of asking about passport privilege. Do you see that like there's some if you're coming from certain countries? Do you see there that that is an issue as well?
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely, I could second that. I do feel like that there's good type of migrants or experts or whatever you want to call them. Yeah, the bad type that no one wants to have. And yeah, unfortunately, like, for example, if you look at the history of Germany, people from Italy. They have received a positive framing around themselves or around their culture, for example, their food and everything. So they're considered, you know, like positive, like spoken about in a more positive way, rather than people, for example, from Turkey and the Turkish community has been here for a long time.
Speaker 2:You know that they came here in the 60s or something first, the people who actually built up this country. You know they still have their own businesses. They're here for generations now, but they're still the way that they are being talked about in the media. It's always in the context of something negative, I feel like, and Germany also has a lot of problems with this, which I've seen, and now we have other issues as well. So there's a, there's a whole mix, but I do feel like passport privilege is is the reality, sadly.
Speaker 1:And to that word. Do you have any thoughts about the terms like migrant, immigrant versus expat?
Speaker 2:Yeah, funny enough. I actually did a little bit of research on that because I had a presentation this in the beginning of this year so I actually did like a Google trends analysis and see what kind of words were associated with the word expert and with the word migrant. And funny, a funny thing is that if you look up immigrant migrant in Google trends, the next thing that you find is like you know coming up and next search results are like AFD, out of gender and crime, criminality and stuff. And if you Google trend expat, then you find you know how to open a bank account and 26, learn German, blah, blah. There's definitely a stereotype there and I've heard that as well from a lot of people who are technically an expat but they're not being treated as one just because of their, their heritage or the way they look.
Speaker 1:So yeah, so what do? What is? But that's because I'll meet other Americans and sometimes they will refer to themselves as immigrants. I think, yeah, well, we are immigrants. And then I saw it's like what is how you said, technically an expat. So what is that? What is the difference to you?
Speaker 2:So what I've read so far is that expats are people who don't plan on staying in the place for a longer time. This is what I researched so far for me, for for my personal experience. I feel like I don't know. I see myself as a migrant, and a lot of my friends as well, I mean I even though you were born here. Yeah, yeah, even though I was born here, yeah, Okay, okay, interesting, okay, but to finish, with that?
Speaker 2:sorry, exactly so. What I've read up so far is that expats basically come to a place and they don't plan on staying there for a long time they might go back to their their own home country, for example and that people who migrated there are actually having prospect of maybe staying long term in the country.
Speaker 1:That's true. I was talking to a client recently. She's German and she was back here. They lived in South Africa for a long time and now they are in Dubai, like her husband it's a has a big job. And I said something and she said oh no, we're expats, this is not a permanent placement. And I really continue the conversation and that kind of got my mind thinking ah, maybe it is just the temporariness of it. So, even though I sometimes refer to myself as an expat, I really am an immigrant, especially and I want to if they pass this down law, I'm getting my German passport, so I don't want to give up my American one, but I want to get a German passport, I want to be able to vote, do all kinds of things, but yeah, that's.
Speaker 1:I guess that is the way to think about it, just if you're going to be here forever or a very long time, or if you're just coming for like an assignment for three years or whatever. Well, wrapping up, I'd like to ask you kind of another question. I like to ask people if you had to do it all over again with TMA, is there anything you've learned, mistakes made or insights gained?
Speaker 2:I think if I would start TMA all over again I mean, we're just a quite young company, so it's not like five years ago or something that I started this but I feel like I would do it the same way that I did, because it did work out well. It was just maybe for myself. I should prioritize my well-being as well. This is a big problem because I'm a mom and I have, like you know, limited time and I'm doing this project on the side. So maybe me as a person, as someone who's leading a project, should just learn how to prioritize and how to delegate and how to effectively communicate in order to give up and let other people do their tasks as well and set up.
Speaker 2:I was thinking that why should I think about creating packages to give to someone if I can just do it by myself? And maybe this is also something that a lot of founders struggle. But I feel like the bigger your team grows, obviously you have to learn how to just define priorities and let the other people do. Other people do their job and, yeah, this is something. Delegation yeah, this is something that I'm still still learning.
Speaker 1:Do you have kids or a kid?
Speaker 2:I have a daughter. She's almost three years.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow, I have. Mine is going to be seven on a year's day. Yeah, it's a lot, and that age respect. I will be happy if I don't ever have to have a top.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's crazy. You're just trying to save their life and they don't want to.
Speaker 1:That's exactly how I describe it. You're possibly running after them making sure they don't die. It's that for two and a half years.
Speaker 2:Exactly. I really I don't know. When does it get better? I don't know.
Speaker 1:You know what I tell you it does get better. People say, oh, it just changes, it's just different, not better. But it is better with six. But when the tantrum stop, that was what was really hard for me Just total freakouts in the middle of DM or whatever that kind of stuff, because you can't have that. Yeah, and it does. Five and a half. That, I think, is better, and right now it's actually quite nice.
Speaker 2:So at least they understand what you would, you want.
Speaker 1:Yeah, in fact I will tell you. Lila mine kind of tricked us this morning and said she didn't feel well, so she's not at school.
Speaker 2:Oh wow, so that's starting now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then at one point she was doing cartwheels in the living room and my husband is doing home office today. We're like you know what, you should have come to school today. But since she's six, I'm like you're going to stay in your room now because I have this call and like that couldn't have done that when she was three. It would have had anyone email say I'm sorry, I can't do it today. So it does get better.
Speaker 2:Fingers crossed.
Speaker 1:Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time and can you just quickly let us know where people can find you and the Migrant Accelerator?
Speaker 2:Sure, you can check out our website at themigrantacceleratorcom and if you're also like someone with a migration experience, doesn't matter if you migrate to yourself or your parents did, but if you're interested in entrepreneurship, you can just join our Slack. So we have different workshops there, different parks there and, yeah, most welcome, you can join the community, apply there Also. The next batch if you want to apply to the Accelerator. The next batch will. The applications will open up in mid of March, so you can keep an eye out for that and you can also feel free to add me on LinkedIn.
Speaker 1:Okay, great. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast, Lila.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for the invite.
Speaker 3:Thanks for listening. You can find this episode and all other episodes of the Germany X-PAT business show at my website at wwwEllenRomeoHoffercom. That's wwwEllenRomeoHoffercom. See you next time.