State Department

Under Secretary of State Keith Krach keynotes at the first Abraham Accords workshop: Peace to Prosperity in Bahrain.
Keith Krach: If you look at my role, it’s to head economic diplomacy for the United States. And to me, what that mission is all about is maximizing growth for the sake of advancing prosperity and peace around the world. So there’s no other place I’d rather be than right here right now, this week. And my life’s work has not been in government. It’s really been building innovative companies, transforming noble causes. And, you know, key to that, is challenging the status quo, building high performance teams and I really believe that different temperaments, talents and convictions and diversity of thought is the catalyst for genius. And we certainly have that here. And if you look at the plan that Jared laid out that we’ve been talking about since last night, it really is about that. It is about challenging the status quo. It is about inspiring, mobilizing, unifying for that noble cause. It’s going to leave a profound and far reaching impact. And I think in this region, it’s set an inflection point. Technology changes a lot, certainly, but the young people change a lot. And that opportunity, I think, is tremendous. And Steve and Mohamed talked about that great opportunity. And it starts off with big, audacious goals in terms of economic prosperity, doubling the Palestinian GDP over the next 10 years. If you look at bringing the unemployment rate under 10 percent, reducing the poverty level, and I had an opportunity to build four companies in Silicon Valley. And, you know, before we would begin, we’d always talk about setting those big, audacious goals. And, you know, one of the things that I would always do before we were the last two companies were DocuSign and Ariba. We invented B2B e-commerce. Now one point seven trillion goes through that Ariba network. DocuSign, 450 million customers around the world. And maybe I just finally, I’ll just share a little quote. One of the things that I usually say before we begin this mission of building these companies, and this is from 1891, guy named Daniel Burnham. And I think it really sums up this plan and what we’re trying to accomplish: "Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans, aim high in hope and work. And remember that noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die. But long after we are gone, be a living thing, asserting itself with ever growing insistence. We remember our sons and daughters and grandchildren are going to do things that would stagger us."