In Startup Guide’s early days, the dream was to try to change the notion that 90 percent of all startups fail. Back then, after one of my first companies failed, I realized how hard it is to let go of something which you’d been working on day and night.

But I soon saw I wasn’t the only one. So many startups and ideas fail before they even get a chance to see the light. It made me wonder, how come? And what can we do to change this?

Startup Guide was a product of these frustrations. Now, the company’s mission remains the same: to guide, empower and inspire people to start their own business anywhere. In order to bring this to fruition, there were two challenges we needed to focus on:

With the first challenge, we had to understand why only 10 percent of startups succeed. We needed to focus on the very early stages of an entrepreneur’s life, during the time when they might not know whether or not they even want to be a founder.

We had to show them role models which prove that anyone can build a business. Then, we had to guide them and give them essential tools so that they could take a step toward starting their business. This laid the groundwork for the objective of our books.

Our second challenge was to scale. Though we knew our books were a scalable product, we wondered how we could get them further out into the world beyond the startup ecosystems we were already a part of.

We soon came to see we needed a partner that shared our mission of inspiring the next generation of founders. That’s where SAP Next-Gen comes into the picture.

I clearly remember the day I met Ann Rosenberg, senior vice president and global head of SAP Next-Gen, last year in Austin. Although our talk was short, I quickly understood the motivation and drive behind her team. They were on a mission to inspire the next generation to develop purpose-driven businesses and to connect them with SAP customers and partners. Most importantly, their ambitions spanned the globe.

SAP has office locations in more than 130 countries. Moreover, with SAP Next-Gen’s network of over 3,600 educational institutions in 117 countries, as well as 130+ SAP Next-Gen Lab locations and 100+ SAP Next-Gen Chapters, we knew we had found the right partner with whom to accelerate and scale the impact of our mission with.

In order to impact as many new entrepreneurs and startups as possible, in October last year we announced a global partnership with SAP Next-Gen with a clear goal in mind.

By 2020, together we aim to connect founders and promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth in 40 cities worldwide, such as Los Angeles, Singapore and Johannesburg.

We are proud to have such a visionary partner join us along our journey. At Startup Guide, we truly believe that in order to change the world, we need to partner up and work together – because together, we can go further.

Here’s to an impactful 2019!