by Lana Al-Kazimi

Yasmine El-Mehairy is a native of Cairo, Egypt. She studied Computer and Information Science at Ain Shams University in Egypt before later receiving her MSc in Interactive Multimedia at the University of Westminster, UK in 2004. She has worked in IT since then, holding positions such as Quality Assurance Specialist at International Business Machines (IBM) and Portal Project Manager at Al-Masry Al-Youm Newspaper. Her dual interest in entrepreneurship and social change ultimately led her to co-found SuperMama a year and a half ago with her partner, Zeinab Samir. SuperMama is a parenting website that features support, advice, videos, feedback and much more for parents and parents-to-be, a completely new idea in the Middle East. SuperMama is the epitome of creating a new market instead of entering an existing one, and Yasmine was kind enough to share her startup experience with us!

How did the idea of SuperMama come to life?

Right off the bat, let me state that I am not a mother myself. The thing is, my partner and I always knew that we wanted to do something that added value, not something for the sole purpose of money-generation. We were on the lookout for the right idea until coincidentally, my sister-in-law announced that she was pregnant. We soon realized how lucky she was because my entire family is made up of doctors, so anytime she needed advice she had easy access to verified opinions and was comfortable researching the web to get authentic information regarding her pregnancy. However, that is not the case with the majority of mothers and mothers-to-be in Egypt. It’s not easy to get practical parenting advice – in fact, the most popular source of information is someone’s mother or mother-in-law. These sources advise based on how they did it, or how their sister or aunt did it, and so forth. There’s no guarantee that the information the parents receive is authentic or credible. It’s all based on lessons from past experience, which I’m not belittling at all, but we are now faced with problems that our mothers and grandmothers didn’t have to deal with back then. That’s when we realized we wanted to offer something that would help mothers manage their lives accompanied by practical, tested and proven advice such that they can spend the time they need focusing on their families.

Who is your co-founder and how is SuperMama structured?

My co-founder is Zeinab Samir – we met in 2007 on our first day with a startup called OpenCraft. The startup didn’t survive the economic crisis and had to shut down in 2009, but we’ve been working together in different ventures and companies since then. We started with two other partners that have since left, and we recruited two more people, one of whom is now a minor shareholder but is no longer active in the company. We also have three investors at the moment that are involved in the decision-making process, as well as seven fulltime employees and eight or nine ‘working from home’ employees. We encourage the latter because one of our ideas is to provide a platform for mothers to work from home. Many different circumstances in Cairo and around the world inhibit 9-5 jobs, but there are so many mothers that want to do more with their time and share their experiences.

Raising funds in the MENA is very hard. How did you fund the startup and how long did it take to get the funding?

It’s ridiculously hard and a never-ending process. Combine the difficulty of getting investors with Egyptian laws and it becomes even harder to secure and establish something. We started in December 2011 and only a few weeks ago did we finish the incorporation process. How did we get the investors? We stalked them. You have to keep at it: Travel, pitch the idea, meet the investors, and keep pushing. One of our investors is Wamda, which is based in Lebanon. There’s also MBC Ventures, based in the United Arab Emirates. I had to go to both locations, pitch, and get these companies interested in the idea. That’s not even the hardest part; it’s the follow up process, as well as getting the different investors to work together. It took about three months to get them to agree to sign on, and the rest of the time was spent negotiating and drawing up the legal work.

How did you decide on the investors?

The thing with seeking investment is that at the beginning, you don’t know where to start. We were very naïve; we just knocked on every door regardless of suitability. Once you start pitching you realize each investor is interested in a different angle. You need to make sure that the investor’s interest works with your content – what you want your content to be. Then there’s also investors that may be great, but there’s no chemistry between you and them. It’s not just about getting funding; once we had about five or six people to consider, it became about adding value. For example, Wamda has a solid network established. They can connect us with whomever we need, whenever we need them. The lead person on board, Habib Haddad, also knows the technical side of the business, so when I have questions about how to do something he tells me exactly what to do based on his experience. Then there’s MBC and their media excellence– I mean, who else is as good at media as MBC in the region? If, for example, I wanted to enter the Saudi Arabian market, they already have someone who has done something in Saudi that can help us and has the leads to facilitate it. Be selective with who you choose to fund your initiative because they should be resources, not just investors.

Once you got the funding, where did you focus on spending it?

Marketing – we needed to reach out to people. Before we got funded, our marketing budget was about $150 a month on Facebook ads, which is nothing. So yes, people did return, I think our return rate was about 45%, but it’s not enough. We needed to spread the word, which meant we needed to market ourselves heavily, and it definitely worked. Pre-funding, in June, we had about 55,000 unique visitors to the website a month. Today, that number has gone up to 180,000 unique visitors a month.

How did you spread the word about the company, given that the percentage of online people is not as high as it in places like the US, for example?

Actually, you’d be surprised. Up until recently, our main market focus was Egypt. There are about 4.5 million women in our target age range here, with the specifications we are looking for (recently married, about to get married, and expecting)- that’s a very large amount of women. From the beginning, we made a conscious decision to focus only on people who were online. We knew it would be too difficult to reach people who were offline, and that brought us down to a specific group within that pool. We didn’t want to fool ourselves into thinking that we’d be able to reach every single woman in Egypt.

Your startup is steadily growing. How do you plan position your company in a way that enables you to generate revenue?

The revenue generation stems from advertising, like all other media companies. One of the most unique aspects of SuperMama is that it’s not a women-only website; it’s one of the very few parenting websites out there. The content is very high quality, all exclusive, and the content is specifically tailored to provide answers that parents are looking for. There are interviews with doctors, videos, research – it’s very selective.

Can you tell me a little about the business challenges of building a consumer application in the MENA?

The biggest challenge for us was deciding on the market segment. When we first started, we provided information in both Arabic and English, and we focused on all socio-economic classes, let’s say from A-plus to C-plus. Over time, we had to weigh the costs and benefits of keeping the English and A-plus segments, and ultimately decided to drop them. There’s actually another challenge, and I’m not sure how to categorize it, but there are things that nobody tells you. Nobody tells you what key performance indicators to measure, if something is good enough, or how to calculate your cost of acquisition, for example. You end up with all this data, and unless you stumble upon a helpful mentor or your investors are also advisors, there are points in time when nobody will tell you what criteria to be looking for. There are things, it can be argued, you learn through trial and error… But as a startup sometimes such an error can be catastrophic. There’s a lack of knowledge sharing, and it’s hard to know who to reach out to. We were very lucky because we had a mentor who was with us from day one, and only pulled away recently when he felt that we were standing on our two feet. However, even with that, sometimes Zeinab and I were faced with questions we had no idea how to answer, but we couldn’t get ourselves to ask our mentor because we felt it was too trivial! There’s no such thing as a crash course called Entrepreneurship 101, where you’re taught the A-Z of this process. Who tells you the basics? Then there’s even more trivial stuff, things that you cannot imagine will be challenges and I thought were Egypt-specific until I met entrepreneurs from other countries. For example, finding an office that has Internet access with functioning telephone lines and that also has electricity 24/7. As a startup founder, you don’t have an office boy to run around for you; these are things you need to get set up yourself, and fast. It begs the question, why isn’t there something that facilitates this?

Now that your website is live, what do you look back on as the key learning points?

Everything was a learning point… I’m still learning! That doesn’t stop, especially not at the stage we’re at now. The paradigm shift was when we actually started to meet our users; it was amazing! Let me tell you a little story, though I will keep the identity of the woman to myself. At the beginning of the year we began hosting competitions, such as a Mother’s Day competition in March (that’s when it falls in Egypt). There were three winners, and we delivered their prizes with our numbers on the packages in case of returns. One of the women called me to thank me, tell me about herself, and show me a picture of her kids. I was stunned because nobody says thank you. After that I discovered that she left posts on the website, also thanking us. I contacted her on the website and we chatted a bit, and that was the end of that. At some point, something happened that I’d like to call the ‘tour-guide effect’. That woman took it upon herself to help new users navigate the website and moderate the content. This woman came from a lower socio-economic class and education, and would sometimes hit her kids if they misbehaved. Along the way, we noticed that she stopped doing so, saying that SuperMama changed her, and she now actually forbids family members from hitting their kids in front of her! Moreover, in October, when we announced that it was Breast Cancer Awareness month, she changed her avatar to a pink ribbon in support of our campaign. This was one of the most amazing and gratifying things I have experienced; she grew as a person and the website grew because of her.

Was it harder to be a female entrepreneur in the MENA?

You know something, almost everybody asks me this question. In reality, it wasn’t true at all in my case. It wasn’t easier or harder, just equally as annoying. Of course, when we had to deal with office furniture and the like, we jokingly said that next time we should have a male co-founder to handle the dirty work! That’s about it though, we honestly didn’t suffer at all. In my field the ratio of men to women is almost equal, so maybe that’s why.

What advice do you have for aspiring entrepreneurs in the MENA?

Go ahead and do it; don’t wait. Before we launched, there was a point where we hesitated and thought it wasn’t good enough. Eventually, I decided we just needed to do it; we had already spent way too much time and attention to worry ourselves more. The other thing is, as an entrepreneur, you worry a lot about losing equity and your investors taking your rights. Along the way though, once the money is in the bank, you realize that equity isn’t the issue. That’s something you don’t feel that at the beginning, you only realize it afterwards. I hope that aspiring entrepreneurs do take this into account. It’s one of those things nobody tells you that I was complaining about earlier. Focus on the basics, it’s not about money, it’s about creating a successful project and adding value as an entrepreneur.

by Lana Al-Kazimi

Karim Kobeissi is currently the Senior Legal and Policy Advisor to the Minister of Telecommunications in Lebanon. Moreover, he is a managing partner at Kobeissi and Frangie, a law firm established in 2006 that specializes in various facets of law, such as finance, commercial, corporate, real estate, construction, insurance, telecommunications, and energy. Karim received his Bachelor’s of Science in Computer and Communications Engineering from the American University of Beirut before turning his focus to Law and gaining a degree in International Law from Saint Joseph University in Lebanon and his LL.M. from Harvard Law School in 2000. Over and above that, Karim used to play professional basketball for the Lebanese national team, is co-founder of the Civil Center for National Initiative in Lebanon, president of the Harvard Law School Association of Arabia, and teaches at both the graduate and undergraduate level at AUB, among other things.

A prime example of giving back to his country, Karim’s latest endeavor is the Beirut Digital District, which is the key focus of this interview. Karim was my Business Law professor while I was pursuing my Bachelor’s, and I am proud to say I am still learning from him!

What is your view on entrepreneurship in the MENA region?

This is an interesting question. There are definitely a lot of talented people here. Countries in the MENA are well equipped in terms of education to produce entrepreneurs. However, there needs to be more emphasis on certain freedoms, such as the freedom of speech and assembly. Entrepreneurship is a mindset, and to allow it to flourish you need to have the necessary institutions in place. There is not one initiative that can take off without having the freedom to do so, just look at the examples in the USA. The beauty of Lebanon is that the freedom to aspire and create is here, but it needs to trickle over to other countries in the region. At the same time, the market itself needs to be positioned correctly, and not all countries in the MENA have this at the moment. For entrepreneurship to flourish, the market needs to be open and receptive, as well as ready to experiment. Ultimately, there is definitely a lot of potential for the region, but we are still working towards it.

Can you elaborate on the challenges facing entrepreneurship here?

To start with, there’s an overwhelming lack of market understanding. For example, you see a lot of assets sitting in peoples’ bank accounts, but even though it’s idle money, investors are very hesitant to support disruptive changes. The investors themselves are not ready yet to invest in certain ideas or people, and the inherent issue is that we don’t have enough knowledge of intellectual property rights and we don’t have enough protection when it comes to IP. For example, if I am an investor and you tell me to invest in land or real estate development, I’ll jump at the opportunity. However, if you tell me to invest in the next Google, I’ll ask for collateral. Why? There are very few investments in that area. We need better regulations for investors to be able to do things in an easier way. There’s also an issue with exit strategies – they don’t really exist at the moment. Venture capitalists and angel investors need to know there’s an exit; no one is going to stay in an idea forever. Another issue is that we don’t have a strong capital market, and we barely have proper financial options. On top of that is the challenge of infrastructure; countries in the MENA are not all on the same level with regards to their established infrastructure. In Lebanon the Ministry of Telecommunications, under Nicolas Sehnaoui, has been working very hard to enhance it. It’s going to take time though, it’s not yet fully established. Finally, there is the problem of fragmented markets in the MENA; people working in Jordan are just in Jordan and they cannot easily do business with someone in Egypt. Compare this to the US or Europe, where the exact opposite is true. In the end, there definitely quite a few challenges, but there’s also opportunity.

How did the idea of your initiative, Beirut Digital District, surface?

The whole thing started with a meeting between a French entrepreneur and the Minister [of Telecommunications]. He was telling the Minister how he has a company in Dubai with over 200 employees. Apparently 80% of those employees are Lebanese, and the man said, ‘I wish I could have my business in Lebanon – I’d have both a better quality of life and significant cost reductions’. The Minister told me about the conversation, and we got to thinking about how to make it happen; this is how the idea came up. As a university professor, I cannot tell you how many of my ex-students I see leave the country. It’s not a healthy state of affairs and the economic model here is very simple: We produce talent, export it, they send money home, get old and come back, educate their children, export their children…and the cycle continues.

So how does BDD work and how does it add value?

BDD is a project whereby the government is encouraging and facilitating the creation of digital zones, with private companies investing in buildings, equipment, and services. The way it’s being set up is like a campus, where all the players have easy access to each other and can meet, brainstorm, plan, and execute in the same area. There are many different layers to the project – part of it will be an incubator, just like Berytech. You’ll see the big companies as anchor tenants creating the critical mass to attract startups and provide entrepreneurs with ideas, advice, funds, etc. Another layer of BDD is the educational component; we want to have labs available [through university collaboration] so that entrepreneurs can develop products and machines in-house, and receive the necessary guidance to do so. A third layer is the financial aspect; attracting the private investors and the venture capitalists so that the entrepreneurs can get the necessary funding to take off. We also want to provide the correct infrastructure, such as 4G mobile technology and 24/7 satellite technology. We’re also focusing a great deal on incentives. For example, we are working with IDAL, the investment authority in Lebanon, to provide different players in BDD with some incentives and tax breaks in order to get a final product (the space and the needed services) at lower costs. It’s a cycle, and hopefully it will be a beneficial one for all parties involved. Of course, we’re also going to promote the BDD and other zones that we’re planning via exhibitions, road shows, and so forth. It’s just the beginning, but these are the issues we are tackling so that we can attract the right talent and put Lebanon on the map in terms of innovation and entrepreneurship.

What responsibilities do you think entrepreneurs have in making this initiative work?

The way we’re planning and hoping to implement it is such that the entrepreneur only needs to worry about his or her business. In a sense, we’re trying to provide the most innovation-friendly environment for the entrepreneurs to stay in the region and feel that they have a shot. Actually, not only that they have a shot, but also that the government is supporting their ideas. The present economic model that I discussed previously needs to change, and it’s our duty to make it happen. The responsibility of the entrepreneurs should be to spur change and creativity right here, so long as we facilitate it.

You decided to create this hub yet you yourself left the region for a while. What happened to make you do this now?

I am finally in a position where I can give back and I have the means to do so. One of the most interesting things I saw was when Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard professor and founding board member of Creative Commons, came to speak in Beirut in 2010. There were over 300 people who attended, and it fascinated me. It was at that point that I realized that we have the talent, but more importantly, that the talent could remain in Lebanon and in the region in general if the right opportunity presented itself. The creativity and freedoms we have make for a strong foundation. The thing is, however, the freedoms need to be in place all over the Middle East as well, because how can creativity flourish if we don’t nurture it? Another reason as to why now is, frankly, I received a lot of encouragement for my idea. Prime Minister Mikati was so supportive of the initiative that he would actually check in weekly and gives his directions. Minister Sehnaoui was involved in every step as well. It can easily be said, at this point in time, that our government is acting as an enabler of such initiatives, and that’s a key factor for success. We need to see more of this in the region.

I’m going to switch tracks a bit. As a lawyer, what are some issues you see entrepreneurs facing on the legal side?

The biggest issue here is that so many people have no knowledge about what a company is, how to start it, and how to establish it. There’s a reason Business Law is part of the BA curriculum! Of course, entrepreneurs should be seeking and receiving advice when they get to that point, but that lack of understanding is there. A legal issue in Lebanon, specifically, is that there is no differentiation in the form of a company. The legal requirements at present are the same for a startup as they are for a bank. Another issue is the capital requirements – in the traditional view of business models, heavy capital investment is needed before a company can be established. But what if the entrepreneur doesn’t have the capital, only the idea? The capital requirement is a huge roadblock, and it needs to be looked into.

Which corporate structures are investor-friendly?

[Laughs] Am I in a classroom? Let me be brief here, there are two structures that are friendly. For entrepreneurs, the limited liability company (LLC) is definitely more favorable, but corporations are better suited for investors, because they include shares, options, and so on. The ideal structure would be to begin as an LLC and transform it into a corporation when investors begin to show interest. There, class dismissed!

Where are the best locations to incorporate, in your opinion? We see a lot of entrepreneurs favoring The British Virgin Islands…

There is a very big misunderstanding when it comes to this. For example, when a Lebanese company chooses the BVI, they still need to incorporate in the place where they operate. Otherwise, they’ll be taxed as a foreign company that is a resident in Lebanon, and the tax amounts are huge. It really depends on whether you’re selling a product or service, but in general the BVI is not always the right choice because of the tax resident consideration, in Lebanon or elsewhere, and being subject to higher costs.

Is there anything specific you want to tell aspiring entrepreneurs in the MENA region?

There are so many opportunities in the Middle East that need to be taken advantage of. I believe it’s time turn our ambitions inwards and remain in the region, and allow the MENA to grow along with all the entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs-to-be out there. In terms of Lebanon and the BDD, I just want to say that Beirut is a good destination and the BDD has a lot of potential. There are so many people who believe in this project; the government believes in it, the private investors believe in it, and many other players also believe in it. All we need now is for the entrepreneurs to believe in it, and allow it to be a success story. We need more projects and initiatives in the MENA, so hopefully this is just the beginning.

by Lana Al-Kazimi

Bilal Zuberi is a principal at General Catalyst Partners, a Venture Capital and Private Equity firm with offices in Boston, New York City, and San Francisco. He moved to the United States from Pakistan and brought with him a wealth of clean-tech focused knowledge. He holds a PhD in Physical Chemistry from MIT and had a short stint in management consulting before starting a company in 2004 that commercializes advanced materials [advanced ceramic technology] for automotives and other applications. GEO2 Technologies commercializes the automotives’ emissions control technology in partnership with Corning, Inc. That then led to a spinoff biomedical device company called BIO2 Technologies. Once launched, he joined General Catalyst Partners [about four and a half years ago] as an investor. Bilal’s side interests include ENTER, a program he co-founded to help college-level entrepreneurship, active membership in the TIE Entrepreneurship Taskforce, and engaging in intellectual conversations, to name a few.

Needless to say, I was fascinated by Bilal’s accomplishments. Even better? He’s approachable! If you have any questions that I didn’t cover below, please do reach out to him, that’s how interested he is in helping people!

Why did you become a Venture Capitalist?

I don’t think you choose to become a VC. I think you go through this experience – and most VCs go through this, where you gather a bunch of information, either reporting about startups or doing your own, and you start thinking, ‘How can I help other people?’ There’s a bunch of ways of doing that; you can become an advisor or a board member, you can become an incubator and start a bunch of companies…but if you also have the fiscal diligence and understanding of how companies get financially structured to be successful, then VC is the route to go. You get invited in to start helping VCs and you ride up the ranks to become your own investor.

It looks like you’re big on helping out starting entrepreneurs. Can you tell us a bit about why?

Well, listen; if you look at societies that are thriving and growing, both economically and in my opinion socially and politically as well, you see entrepreneurship playing a very important role. It is a mechanism; you start with nothing…then you have this dream and think, ‘If I have an interesting idea, if I execute against it and obviously if I’ve been given the ability, in terms of rules and regulations, to do it, then there’s no reason why my idea is any less important than the next big company’. That bottom-up movement of wanting to do this your way – the way you would want others to be doing it, solving real problems and understanding what peoples’ needs are and building something to solve that problem, I think that’s fundamental. That’s what excites me and a lot of others. To be honest, all VCs will tell you they’re entrepreneurs at heart. They go to bed thinking about problems; what they heard and what they saw that triggered some sort of imagination inside their minds. For that same reason, I am drawn a million times more towards startups and small businesses rather than larger companies where you have an important role to play and are moving the wheels forward. I don’t think that role has the transformative effect towards society that a startup can have.

Many of our readers are young entrepreneurs, what do you look for when you get a pitch from one?

A couple of things…first and foremost, let’s be honest: not every idea is a good idea. I’m not as focused in on the idea itself. I look for the person: the tenacity in them to be able to execute on an idea, the hustle in them to fight against odds, and their resourcefulness. Let me talk about that last point a bit. Resourcefulness is not being born into a rich family or knowing a bunch of rich guys or investors. It’s the ability to do a lot with little – figuring out how to find shortcuts, how to get things in peoples’ hands early, quickly; getting feedback, reiterating, and doing things again and again and every single time incrementally improving it. That’s what is really important. In all honesty, four, five years ago when I was new to the venture capitalist world, it was a little bit of a mystery to try and figure out what distinguishes Mark Zuckerberg from any other undergraduate who might be building up a little software on the side. But once you start seeing people and following their success, you realize that they are driven by a mission; they take any and every resource available to them and guide it towards solving the particular problem that has become their life’s mission. They have this common sense to always know that the only way they can improve is by hiring and surrounding themselves with people that are even better than they are. It’s really just like a movement; if you want to start a political movement, you want to bring the smartest and most important people around you. That’s what I see the best young entrepreneurs doing. That’s what I would encourage people to think about. Too many people get caught up in the idea – that’s less important.

To surround yourself with the best, you need to network. How do you suggest entrepreneurs go about doing that?

This is not so much of a chicken and egg problem. Firstly, I believe people are genuinely nice and want to help others. Even if you talk to the most successful entrepreneur, they’ve been in your shoes at some point. They’ve had an idea and not known where to take it, so they sort of empathize with that. Once you’ve gone through that process, you realize how difficult it is and you like to support others. The second thing is, everyone who has gone through that (and is now in a position where they can fortunately help others) is thirsty to find and meet intelligent people. That’s what drives us and that’s what we look forward to. When we meet people who seem very interesting and smart, I can think of a hundred ways in which they can be useful to me. Not only because they’re pitching an idea about a startup that I might want to invest in, but they might be interesting for one of my portfolio companies, and they might even be somebody I want to hire in my own work. The biggest hurdle in networking is the strength that it takes to walk up to somebody and say ‘Hi, my name is so and so, I would love to talk to you for a few minutes about what I’m doing’. I have that done to me all the time, and I see that as my job, to listen to what they have to say. Of course, there’s manners and politeness; you don’t start with a ten-minute story about your ancestors. But, the most important thing is to understand, if you have something important to say that captures the other person’s imagination, they’ll be willing to talk to you.

Your biography on General Catalyst says one of your biggest passions is ‘disruptive innovation’…can you elaborate on that a bit?

There are a lot of problems in the world that can be solved with incremental improvements, right? It could be the next big database system or the next big social network. In my opinion those are all relatively incremental. Sure, those are problems that need to be solved, so go ahead and solve them. But I look for things that disrupt the way things are done. Either they disrupt the way we behave and the way we interact with people around us, or they disrupt the way people think technology can solve a problem. So, an example I would give is the introduction of agriculture and robotics. It would change productivity of an agricultural field many times over. This is not incrementally improving your irrigation processes to reduce water by a little bit. Another example is what solar energy has done over the last few years. Who would have thought that a world that grew up with an industrial revolution, where we had big crank engines and big motors, would have solid state devices passively sitting on your roof generating megawatts of power? But it happened. I also look for healthcare innovations, where you know that there’s a real problem. Somebody has to do the science and find the solution. You cannot solve the problem of cancer by incrementally improving the same medications. You have to go out of your way to find a new way of doing things. Those things excite me; they tend to be riskier because there are a lot of unproven details, but if they’re successful they can radically change our approach to problems and our ability to solve certain problems.

What are some common mistakes entrepreneurs make?

Well, over ten years of doing and funding startups I’ve seen many different types of mistakes. The most important mistake that I’ve seen entrepreneurs make is not having a very strong team around them. Entrepreneurs that start off being too cautious of losing control, too worried about who they’re bringing on, or too worried about their own role in the company if they bring on somebody more knowledgeable than them – those companies inevitably find failure one way or the other. There’s a common saying among venture capitalists: B players will always hire C players, but A players will always hire A plus players. So I really look out for them, when I meet the founder, I ask them who their partner is and where they found them. Then I spend a lot of time meeting that partner to make sure that the founder got somebody even better than them, versus their neighbor, best friend, or cousin because it’s the easy way to go. A second common issue I see, which may be more relevant to the kinds of businesses I focus on (more capital-intensive), is not understanding how you create enterprise value.

What do you mean by not creating ‘enterprise value’?

There’s a kind of business you can create which goes towards profitability, becomes cash flow positive, generates a little bit of money every year, but then stops growing; every local store that has been profitable and has been operating for twenty years falls into that category. It’s very hard for most of those businesses to scale. Most of the time I meet entrepreneurs in that category, making a million or two in revenue, profitable, but don’t know how to take it from there, to thirty or forty million in revenue. It’s probably because they never stopped to think about what creates enterprise value. What is the sustainable problem that they’re solving that can be strategically important to somebody else? Are they doing something to protect their customers from ever having to find a solution elsewhere? I see that quite a bit, but I don’t just blame the entrepreneurs for it, I blame some of their board members and advisors. A lot of entrepreneurs, myself included at one point, are doing it for the first time. You’re tackling so many day-in and day-out challenges that you need to have guidance and advisors who help you see that although you may be solving the immediate problems, you need to think ahead. The reason for that is that there’s things coming down the road that, although not apparent to you now, you better be prepared for now. Value added, that’s the line of thinking for VCs. We don’t roll up our sleeves and become involved in the day-to-day management of the business, but we start thinking about how to make the business most valuable in the long run in terms of strategy, the team, financing, and the partnerships in the marketplace.

At what point in the process do you think entrepreneurs are ready to approach VCs?

[Laughs] There’s this common misunderstanding that somehow you have to have a certain level of business maturity and a certain kind of formalized business plan before you reach out to VCs. I’m not quite sure where it germinated, but I have a feeling it might have to do with some of the business schools that started teaching entrepreneurship as a formal discipline. I actually reach out and talk to students who don’t even have an idea yet but are always talking about interesting new things. I want them to talk to me about their ideas and have a real dialogue. Maybe by the fifth idea they bring up I’ll say, ‘This is a very interesting idea, why don’t you guys do it?’…And then we jump in. We’ve made investments where the investment memorandum, so to speak, has been written almost after the investment has already been made. Those formalities are important and are done for a reason, but that’s not what drives good and bad investments. If you have an interesting idea, resourceful entrepreneurs would reach out to anybody and everybody that can help them. And as far as networking goes, I think VCs do networking for a living. I mean, that’s all I do. I talk to people, travel the world, and spend a lot of my time on the phone simply to have a very active and useful Outlook address book that I can ping into and find people that I need. So if you reach out to me, and if I’m able to help you, I will. I think a resourceful entrepreneur knows that they should tap into that sooner rather than later.

What’s your viewpoint on business plans?

Business plans should be done – forget about the format. There should be a formalized thinking done about the business because it gives you structure. It makes you think about things that you may not otherwise think about, such as the future, strategy, growth, funding needs, competitors, profits, margins, etc., those are very important details. But if you get stuck within a business plan, you’re doomed. Nowadays, everyone’s talking about ‘pivoting’. It has to be done all the time; a business is constantly pivoting, even if they’re not major pivots. They’re continuously adjusting their strategy and their product to make sure that they’re meeting the real need of the market place. You can only do that by going out and executing. Don’t get too caught up in the theoretical nonsense.

If entrepreneurs do receive angel investment, what should they be careful of?

Well, obviously investment is an interesting and important milestone in the life of a company. But it’s never really an execution milestone; it doesn’t really, in any which way, guarantee your success even for the next milestone to be hit. It just means that they like what you have so far. The thing is, all money is green, at least in the US…but the people who provide that money make all the difference. When you’re looking at where to get the investment from, make sure you’re finding people who are really willing to help you and have the ability to do so. Probably, the easiest dollars you can raise are in the form of a loan from your father or your uncle, but those are probably the least useful dollars that you will raise as well. Be careful to find people who are genuinely interested in your business and are genuinely interested in building your company. Also, if I had to go out and raise money, the first people I would reach out to are the people who’ve been entrepreneurs themselves. They’re the ones who understand the passion that drives a startup and the speed with which things need to move…the chaotic nature of how an entrepreneurial venture moves forward. Keep those guys in the loop, because you don’t want to get stuck with a bunch of bankers and lawyers who are just funding you but don’t really understand what a startup does.

What about the investor’s role and expectations?

A lot of people don’t utilize their investors effectively. Investors, especially at an Angel stage, aren’t or shouldn’t be focused on your revenues and profits. If your revenue is a million or a million and a half, that’s not going to change my world. What’s most important is if they’re high value-dollars. Are these the right kind of sales and the right kind of customers? Are we learning all that we can from the early customers? Good entrepreneurs would turn to their investors and ask, ‘Are we doing things the right way?’ At least in the US, lots of the angel investors have been entrepreneurs themselves and have been execution-type guys within over 15 companies, not just one. So use these guys effectively; use their networks and knowledge. The time will come later when you start thinking about your fiduciary responsibility towards them. Angel investors, by their name, are sort-of like guardian angels. They reach out and support you because they really like your idea, passion, and team. I’m an angel investor myself, and when I invest I almost write it off right away. My point in making an angel investment is not only the financial returns that I will get, but to make sure that the really smart people with the good ideas get a shot at it.

What do you recommend entrepreneurs should focus on now, given that there is such high competition?

There’s always competition and there’s always the next amazing idea right around the corner. I don’t think there’s ever going to be a shortage of ideas for entrepreneurs. What I would warn against is to do an academic exercise of laying out an idea based on another successful one. For example ‘Oh, Groupon is very successful, so I will start the Groupon for Blah, or Zinga for this, or Pintrest for that’. I see a lot of entrepreneurs, especially outside of the US, going down that path. That’s not the right way to approach a problem. They should say, ‘How did Uber identify the problem that they started solving?’ Use that process to figure out if there is a problem that you really connect with. If you look at these big companies, when they started they sounded like crazy ideas. They didn’t sound like something that would become the next billion-dollar hit. The reality is if you have passion you just do it. I was having a discussion with my team at work last week, and we were thinking: ‘How do you know when you meet all kinds of students from MIT or Harvard, all very smart with good GPAs and all that, how do you know who’s the real standout in the entrepreneurial world?’ the first thing that came to our mind was that the guys who have a higher likelihood of success are the ones who don’t spend too much time theorizing about startups and spaces and really dive in and start building instead. They start launching products; some things take off and some don’t. It’s no different from a professor’s lab where they’re attacking cancer. They don’t just have one path that they all take, or sit there and theorize before they start. They will have four post-doctorate and six graduate students working on eight different ways of attacking that problem, because they know that any one of those ideas could help lead to a solution. Great entrepreneurs do the same thing. They try multiple things, all the time, in areas of interest to them. Some things take off, and they get known as the ‘Uber’ for this or the ‘Groupon’ for that.

What general advice do you have for entrepreneurs, from your own experience?

As an entrepreneur myself, I am absolutely amazed at the energy that drives entrepreneurs. The reality is you’re on your own; you understand that there’s a problem that you need to solve, and if you succeed it could be worth a lot, but more importantly you’d feel very proud that you were able to solve it. I think that’s awesome. The advice I have is that there are lessons that people have learned over time that are now available, either in books or in other peoples’ minds. Go out, reach out, and learn from these people. Don’t think that this information is tightly sealed and VCs in the US are not interested in sharing it elsewhere. This is our bread and butter; it’s what we do for a living and we are eager to share it with intelligent people. Reach out to people and customers…have a field-level understanding of how success gets made. Secondly, solve big problems. This is a short life that we live, so don’t do something incremental, even if it may appear to have a higher likelihood of success. Do something big; something that sounds like a bigger challenge. Those bigger challenges will result in bigger opportunities and bigger profits down the road. You’re not going to find large companies changing the world. If you look around at the companies that we are most proud of and use all the time, from Microsoft and Apple to Facebook and Google…these are the companies that we really care about. We don’t sit and discuss what amazing things Phillips and GE are doing; we think of them as more of a government, just doing what they have to do. All these important companies were really young people who wanted to solve a particular problem. So find an idea that you care about, launch it, play with it, ask people for advice (it can only make you better), and if you’re successful you’re successful. If you’re not, it will only help you find the next success more easily.

What’s your favorite book?

My favorite book is Career Warfare. It was given to me when I came out of college and it’s written by the former CEO of John Hancock Financial Services, David D’Alessandro. It talks about how the life of a person inside a company, and often also inside a single startup, is usually no more than five or six years. When you stop learning and growing, you basically don’t just become stagnant, you start decelerating… That’s when it’s a good time to move on. I took that to heart, and if you look at my career, every five years or so I’ve done something different, or at least changed the trajectory a bit to make sure I’m continuing the learning process. I think a startup goes through the same thing; it either becomes really successful in five years at which time a lot of management comes around and you become like the ‘Wiseman’ guiding it, or you give up, move on, and start the next idea.

A lot of our readers are from the Middle East, do you have any particular advice for them?

Solve global problems. Even if you start off doing something that’s locally important and very interesting, always have the bigger picture in mind. Always understand that it’s a very global world; language and communication are no longer barriers. If you have an interesting idea, there’s no reason why it won’t be a global business. I’ll give you two examples that make all the sense in the world. One, already a big success, is Skype. This came from Estonia, and nobody had thought of Estonia as the entrepreneurial capital of Europe, let alone the rest of the world. But they built a product that they very quickly felt the whole world should be using, and the more people use it the more valuable it gets. Even today with Facetime and everything, last night when I was stuck in the airport, I was Skyping my kids before bed – changed the world, right? The second example is Uber, which started out as software that one could have said is for taxi and limo drivers to connect with the home base. It could have easily been a very simple software development company. But they created a service and as soon as they started seeing a bunch of people in San Francisco start to use it, they grew it. They now have offices in London, Paris, Boston, San Francisco, and NYC.  They weren’t scared of going international and solving the bigger problem. Of course it’s not easy, but this is when you go and find help and make sure that you have the right advisors around you. This is one problem that I often run into; a lot of young entrepreneurs that I meet in the ME, including Turkey, often feel a bit too scared of tackling global issues, and that should not be the case.

Follow Bilal on Twitter @bznotes

Check out his personal website: http://www.bilalzuberi.com

by Lana Al-Kazimi

“How I did it” is part of an ongoing series of real entrepreneurial stories. If you would like to contribute to this series, contact us at exec@yallastartup.org with your proposal.

Ian Connor, an Australian native living in Boston, MA, studied Physics and Math at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. He then went on to pursue his law degree, which he obtained in 1997 and shortly thereafter started his first job in the legal world. That didn’t last long, however, as six months later as he discovered he enjoyed the database implementation portion of a legal advice he was working on a lot more than the actual legal work. The switch in his career path was swift, and a few jobs later, he decided to move to Boston to focus his energy on software development at companies like Iris Associates and later IBM. Eventually, he became addicted to the ‘Web’ and took a leave of absence from IBM to do his ‘own thing’. It was after that point that the idea of Pubget surfaced.

Pubget, the startup that Ian co-founded in 2007, stemmed primarily from co-founder Ramy Arnaout’s need for quick and easy access to scientific research. That need, along with a lot of hard work, led to the launch of a budding startup. In 2008, the Pubget search engine became active in institutions such as Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Massachusetts General Hospital. By 2011, Pubget was activated in over 200 institutions, and in January 2012, it was acquired by Copyright Clearance Center.

Needless to say, it was a long and exciting journey with a lot of learning experiences. I was curious about how his career shift, as well as his technology background, played a role in the startup’s success. On a very interesting phone interview while walking his dog, here’s what Ian had to say:

Let’s start at the very beginning; you studied law in college, but switched to software. I think I speak for all the fresh graduates out there when I ask, was it a tough decision? How did you know that what you wanted to pursue was not what you studied?

I finished my law degree. I’m not very good at quitting things; I want to finish them, which I think is healthy. But my family was very into IT. My mother was selling IT, my stepfather was a systems engineer and then became an IT consultant. Even my younger brother is a software tester for mobile phones. The whole family has IT genes in them. I, for whatever reason, thought I was going to be a lawyer. I think what happened was, in Australia different courses have different grade requirements. So you sit there with a really good grade, I graduated in the top 2 percent, and you think – all right, this is great. What do I do with this? So I look at the list and I see lawyer. I thought, wow, I can be a lawyer! And you convince yourself at age 17 that being a lawyer will be really good. But I really enjoyed science, math, the only humanity I ever did was Japanese, so really I probably shouldn’t have done law. I treated all law subjects like they were an algorithm class. When I got into the actual practice of law, it was all very one off. In software, you do something once, millions of people can use it – it’s satisfying. As a lawyer you write an advice once, for one client and it’s a one shot deal. You bill per hour and that’s literally all you get, that one hour…to me that’s not very rewarding. Also, I wanted to travel. It wasn’t a really hard decision; it just didn’t suit me.

Haha, okay. So how did the idea of Pubget surface?

I was looking for something that had a little bit more meaning. I was after something that, even if it didn’t make money, it would make me feel good and like I contributed. So I left a message for a doctor in the Boston area, who was struggling with this need to access research papers in a frequent and efficient manner. He’d written a Python script that kind of did it. I looked at the script and told him we should turn this into a website. We could make it available for everyone, we could make it easy – that was the start of Pubget. We wanted to see if we could attract people with this simple idea of getting research papers quickly, and we did.

Nice. So how were you able to grow the team from that point?

We started working in the MIT Student Center. When we got five thousand users, we realized that with relatively little effort, we were able to attract what is in the doctor and research world a significant number of users. So we thought, well we’ve got some business here, so rather than having a doctor and a computer guy thinking that they know how to run a business, let’s talk to somebody who will listen and get a Business guy in. That’s how we met the third co-founder, Ryan Jones, who had worked for FAST, a company that was acquired by Microsoft. It started as a $100,000 company and was acquired by Microsoft for $1 billion. So we thought, Aha! His job at FAST was to turn search into money. We ran searches, we needed money, so we thought: this guy is great! We tried to convince him to leave Microsoft to join us, and one of the things we realized was that we needed funding. Ryan raised the money, he got the first round from professional investors from the West Coast…that’s how we launched Pubget. We moved out from the MIT Student Center and got an office and started employing people full time and kept growing the customers from there.

How did you tackle the whole funding aspect?

Ryan put it together. In the West Coast they know if you have a good team you can change and adapt the market. Like us, we started with an important need and a problem, we got into much smaller problems, and we turned those niches into products. The ability to shake things up, the fact that we weren’t a big gamble, it meant we didn’t really need that much funding. The inertia of the industry is going in a particular direction – if you want to decide that cars are no longer the way, well you’ve got a lot of people who like cars, people who sell tires, that sort of thing. You’re going to have a lot of fighting along the way. There’s a survival period where people won’t take you seriously until you convince them that your way is better. That needs a lot more funding than going into an existing market and making some improvements.

The inertia of the market?

We walked completely blindly and naively into a 200 year old industry and we were shaking things up. So, there was huge inertia in the industry. Academic publishing has been around for a very long time, and it’s going to be around for a very long time, and there are people trying to change it around in various ways…but that’s going to take years. You’ve got professors that have tenure and all these factors and everyone’s doing their own thing and all these sub-specialties. It’s very complicated; to reach 10 million people and tell them we could be more efficient if we changed publishing in these ways…well some people will listen, some people will say they’re too busy and they have to focus on their job. To get their attention, to change it, it’s a lot of work. You could take that approach, the other approach is to identify smaller areas, areas that don’t have to be trivial, but ones that the majority of the industry agrees can be done more efficiently. In our case it was logistics and holding. There were other players in the market, but we came up with a better way to do logistics and holdings, and everyone kind of agreed it was better. There was no dispute, the inertia wasn’t working against us, it’s less controversial, easier to sell, and it still gets everybody moving in the right direction without a big fire sale where you throw everyone in chaos. That’s how we worked in an industry with inertia.

Apart from the actual market inertia, was one of your biggest challenges?

To get the scale that you need, it does help to have backers. You can go down the VC route and pay a big round of financing to make the next leap, or you can get acquired by a bigger company that has similar visions and goals. Bigger companies have an existing sales force and they have the scale that you need to get the business relationships in place. That’s really where the key is; it comes down to that. It’s almost like the technology is the easy part, it’s putting things together really, and doing it in an effective way. There’s a little bit of trickiness to it, but the hard bit is on the business side. Making cold calls, going out visiting customers, convincing them that the solutions that they currently have can be done in a better way. The things that a business developer does everyday, to me that’s the magic that makes a startup work. Obviously you have to have good IT and good technology, but you have to have the business in line and have the need in the market. That’s more important than just the pure technology.

You successfully launched Pubget at institutions like Harvard, MIT, and MGH, to name a few…how were you able to achieve this?

We worked at the libraries with existing subscription. We left the library intact, left the publishing industry intact, and we just ended up focusing on making it better for the user and dong it in a way that nobody could argue it was bad.

Did you have to change your business model at any point?

We pivoted the business slightly away from the original idea, which was purely research-focused. We found that pharmaceutical companies and libraries were the ones who were able to make the purchases. So we started focusing on tools that that market needed. Now there’s a lot of back end tools, logistics tools, a lot of it is not actually research, it’s a lot of behind the covers stuff. We do a lot of APIs for people so they don’t have to go through that. A lot of it is big data. We deal with ten to forty thousand new articles a day, 30 million records that we index. Keeping all that information in RAM is a lot of work. It’s one of the values that we brought, and we were able to let other people build sites based on our back end. You know, white label, that kind of thing. It was a key learning point, which is don’t force the user to come to you, go wherever the users are. If your goal is to help as many people as possible, get your product as widely accepted as possible and don’t be restricted by your own ego to build a destination site. What you really want to do is say: you know what, fine, people come to my site, that’s great. But if they’ve got an idea and they want to build their own site and they’re happy to use your technology to build it, then let them. It’s much better to do that than to try to force people into one direction.

So what is your biggest contribution to Pubget?

I was the CTO and I managed and wrote a lot of the tech, and I was growing the team as well. I was trying to hire people smarter than me every step of the way without being afraid of it. There are people that say ‘I won’t hire people smarter than me in case they make my position irrelevant’. If you’re a good manager, you want that; you want people smarter than you, you want to be irrelevant. Let’s say you go to them and tell them: Here’s a problem that needs to be solved and I think it needs these ten steps to solve it. If they come back and do it in three steps because they ignored you and they’re smarter than you, then you win. Your ego doesn’t win because they proved you wrong, but the company wins. As a founder, that’s your primary concern. I’ve been proved wrong several times during the startup. If I took it personally every time…forget it, you need to focus on whether or not it was the right thing to do.

You sold the company at the beginning of this year to CCC. How did you base your decision to stay on?

They left us completely autonomous. You know, a life in a big company is only as good as your manger. If you worked at IBM, you can talk to two employees, one will think they’re a bunch of idiots, and the other will think it’s a really respectable work environment and life is great. The difference is going to be the manager. I definitely did my due diligence when we got bought by CCC, to see who my manager would be. As a result, I have a very happy life. It didn’t really come down to the details. It’s not really the company; it’s the manager you get within the company that’s important if you’re going to stay on. If the company just wants the tech, that’s fine. Maybe they put you as a consultant for the company, which is another way of saying thanks for building it this far but we’ve got it from here. If you’re going to be on full time, it means they see you as part of the company and they want you there.

Do you think there is a particular time when a startup should be sold?

[Laughs] One of our advisors said every time he had an opportunity for an early exist and didn’t take it he regretted it. It depends on your risk capacity: if it’s a good bid, it’s going to make you financially happy, you like the manager, you like the team, and you can still work there and feel like you’re making a difference…then that’s an easy yes. There’s a spectrum. I would advise people to go and talk to people who’ve done it before who they know and trust to share the details with them. They might be able to guide them about where they are on the spectrum, because sometimes you can’t see it yourself.

Do you think there are certain characteristics entrepreneurs should embody to be successful?

The ability to know where you’re going and not be stuck on your original idea is key. Keep it simple and don’t get hung up, and definitely don’t try to solve every problem at once. Try to boil it down to one or two things that you’re going to do.

Do you have any advice for aspiring entrepreneurs out there?

The most important thing is, don’t over-engineer. You don’t know the space until you get into it, so you don’t want to make code that will do everything for everyone. Once you make it too configurable, you’ve lost direction. What you really want to do is focus on the minimum feature set that you need to shift. From the tech side you need to work for the people in the business and say ‘do you really need that? What can we do instead of that that will still prove or disprove that your business is still valid?’ The simplest technology will be the easiest to adapt. If you can do something in four lines of code instead of forty and it tests the business hypothesis that there is a need is in the market then you should do the four lines, even if it doesn’t completely satisfy the need. What will happen is the business will test the market and come back with changes, guaranteed. Even if you’re in the right direction, what you think is the right direction is not going to be the right direction. So you really want to keep the code as simple as possible so when the business comes back and tells you how the market responded you can adapt. Small iterations in a fast market are much better than trying to keep it right, because there is no right way.

Also, don’t be afraid to talk to people. I know people who are like, ‘If I tell him he’ll take my idea’. The idea is nothing; it’s not the idea that matters, it’s the implementation. Doing the work, the cold calls, that’s the hard bit. Coming up with the initial idea…I mean, there are so many people with ideas. If you don’t go spread your ideas to know if it’s good or bad, you’re going to get no feedback. You might be sitting on a really good idea or you might be sitting on an idea that needs to be changed in some ways…or you might have a bad idea and you’re just wasting your time.

If you could do anything differently, would you?

I’ve debated with some our investors about that. If you ask: ‘Had I known what I knew at the time, would I have still done it that way now? I think my answer is yes, obviously now I know more, I would do it differently. But I think as long as you can honestly say to yourself you will learn from your mistakes and you’re not trying to repeat mistakes, then that’s all you should hope for. The worst thing you can do is not do anything because you’re worried about mistakes. I don’t have anything specific apart from: don’t be afraid to do it.

This is a cross post from Sami Shalabi’s blog

Taking on entrepreneurship is one of the most life changing events any person can embark on; it not only impacts the individual, but impacts the community and even the world. An entrepreneur is someone who just does not accept the status quo, but has a vision for the future and makes the impossible happen to arrive at this vision.

Entrepreneurship is not easy anywhere in the world. Each region has its unique challenges, and in the same ways has its unique opportunities. The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is in transition. All market indicators whether it is around consumer usage patterns, infrastructure availability, business demand or overall business and political disruptions indicate the MENA is ripe with opportunity. Things are moving quickly and it is clear that it is a major and growing world market.

What does this growth mean for MENA entrepreneurs? We are about to enter the age of MENA entrepreneurship. MENA Entrepreneurs are going to be the life blood of all MENA economies. If you have what it takes, now is the time to act and take that idea you have always wanted to do and just make it happen. Only good will follow!

In my journey as an entrepreneur, I too started with a desire and an idea. This idea took me to unexpected places and taught me plenty of lifelong lessons that I will share with you in a list of 10 confessions:

1. Be your #1 customer

I have always found that the greatest products service the needs of those that create them. Solving a real personal pain point makes you passionate about the space, and solution. Being your #1 customer makes you use your own product everyday and forces you to keep improving it before the rest of the world asks you to. Your problems are potentially business opportunities.

2. Beauty though real things, not business plans

I always tell entrepreneurs when starting out not to focus too much on the business plan. That is a poor use of time. Spend your time building a prototype and make it look beautiful. Many early stage detailed business plans I have seen are not worth the paper they are written on. A beautiful user experience that solves a real problem get most users and investors excited. It also proves that the team behind the idea can actually deliver, which is usually the biggest wild card with early stage entrepreneurs. So ask yourself, would you invest in a business plan or a real working service that looks great?

3. People like to do business with people they like

One of the best pieces of advice I got when I was starting out was to not be so serious or take myself seriously. When working with customers, investors, and partners, it shouldn’t all be about business or technology. Human nature gets people to gravitate towards people they like. I have seen it time and time again, and all over the world, people like to do business with people they like, plain and simple. Do not forget that. There is no harm exposing your cool personality during these important business meetings and presentations.

4. Fail fast

Failure in the MENA is a huge taboo, sometimes the kiss of the death. If you read the research, second time failed entrepreneurs double their chances for success. At a more tactical level, I have found that it is far more important to get to a working prototype as fast as possible, so you can identify what is not working and fix it. In most of the products I have worked on, the first prototypes validated that the initial ideas needed evolution to work for the market. This is especially the case with new products, new markets, or new ideas. Ideas need time to bake, and it is best to bake them by allowing the bad ideas to fail as quickly as possible so the good ones fourish. So, don’t be afraid to have failed ideas under your belt, just make sure you do it quickly. In fact, the more bad ideas you have under your belt, the closer you are to having a good solution.

5. Build a lean mean machine

One common mistake I have seen in many startups is scaling and hiring a lot of people quickly. I think that it is a bad idea when you do not know that you have a product market fit. The less money you spend at the beginning, the longer your runway to figure out if you have a business. Start to scale only once you see traction, otherwise it is a poor use of money. Find the cheapest path, time and money, to test the solution.

6. Put everyone, including yourself on a vesting schedule

One of the most challenging problems with most startups is figuring out who owns what. I have a simple rule, all employees and founders must be on a vesting schedule from the start. Vesting is when people get their equity in increments over an allocated period of time. For example, if you own 40% and are on a 4 year vesting schedule, you get 10% every year for 4 years. If you leave early, then you get what is vested. There are many schools of thought, but I generally like to pick a vesting schedule of 4 to 5 years. This is such a critical concept because it protects everyone. If anyone wants to part ways early on, then it does not destroy the business. Further, it also tests if everyone has the resolve to stick with the business. A business is a multi-year affair and those that stick with it should be rewarded more than those who do not. This topic has a lot of other subtleties that I will not go into, but the principal should be set forth from the start.

7. Great teams rule

When starting a business it is important to find people to work with you that complement you. It also allows you to scale as a person and creates an environment of healthy dialog. The most important advice I got in the start of my career was when I figured out how to get others to help me. I have a better chance of moving faster and having broader impact. Further, innovation is a process and not an event. Working with others helps put that process into hyper drive. When picking people, make sure they are rock stars at what they do. The first group of people you work with will define your corporate culture and be role models for everyone else. Never compromise on people because one bad apple will bring the whole team down.

8. Plan in small measurable increments

I am a strong believer that attacking problems should be done in small increments. It makes things manageable and achievable. I generally like to set my goals once per quarter and then every week set a weekly plan to support my quarterly goals. Especially in technology, planning beyond a couple of quarters is the equivalent of looking in a crystal ball. This does not mean that there shouldn’t be a strategy; a strategy is a direction, not an execution plan. Execution should be focused on measurable deliverables. If you do not measure what you do, then how do you know when you are done or if you have succeeded.

9. Always get out of your comfort zone

I have a personal rule, if I am in my comfort zone I am doing something wrong. When you are in your comfort zone, then you are not learning. Getting out of your comfort zone, means you are learning new skills to close a gap. I ask myself always, am I doing something new? If the answer is no, then I need to change things so I am uncomfortable again.

10. When starting out, sell to anything that moves

A common thing I hear from many entrepreneurs, especially in the MENA, is their fear to share their ideas with others. The logic just shocks me. First, if an idea can be easily copied by just a conversation then it is an indefensible idea. Second, actually executing on an idea is really hard work. The likelihood of someone doing this is very low. On the plus side, when you share your ideas with others, then questions they will ask you will help it grow and flourish. The more people who talk about what you are doing the more you are likely to get visibility in the community and industry.

In closing, entrepreneurship is the most exciting thing I have ever done. It has helped me grow as a person because of the things I had to do and all the great people I met in the process. I am sure you will too. The hardest part is always taking that first step, so what are you waiting for?

About Sami Shalabi

Sami Shalabi is a Boston based software inventor, entrepreneur, and angel investor. He is currently Head of Engineer for Digital Publishing Platforms at Google. At Google he also co-founded Google Friend Connect. Sami joined Google after they acquired Zingku, Inc, a venture backed software company he co-founded in 2006. Sami has over 30 patent/patent pending ideas and MIT recognized Sami with the 2009 MIT Young Professional Award.

Sami also co-founded a non-profit called YallaStartup, an organization with the mission of fostering innovation and early stage entrepreneurship in the MENA region.

Prior to Zingku, Sami had architecture and leadership responsibilities for a number of products at Lotus, Iris Associates, and IBM. Sami serves on the Board of the MIT Arab Alumni/ae Association as well as several startups and non-profits. Sami received his SB and MEng from MIT.

(this is a cross post from Ariel Diaz’s blog The Ambitious Life)

–

The Product-Distribution Framework

Given that the product vs distribution debate is not just an either or, I wanted to create a framework to help me think and evaluate the tradeoffs of each, and take into account the strength of each. So I created a simple 2×2 matrix comparing weak and strong product vs weak and strong distribution, using a fun theme of plants to characterize the various types of companies (trust me, it’s much safer for work than the initial images).

The Oak Trees – Great distribution and product feed on each other to build great companies

At the top right are the truly great companies, that have created solid products and achieve successful distribution to reach enough people. These great companies are household names, including Facebook, Apple, and Google. There are various paths to get there, but most of these companies have a fanatical devotion to creating a solid product, coupled with a very smart, disciplined, and powerful distribution. Throughout the growth, these two strengths continually feed on each other creating a positive feedback loop.

Example: Apple in 2010 – Apple is firing on all cylinders, led by Steve Jobs’ literally maniacal focus on creating a perfect product. But it’s easy to forget how strong the Apple marketing engine is, creating hundreds of millions of dollars of free publicity with every product launch. They have also created one of the world’s strongest brands, and use their huge profit margins to build a wildly successful retail distribution channel.

Example: Google – Google is the undisputed search leader with about 70% of the market (and holding strong). Early on they built a fundamentally superior search product, perfected it through continual execution and improvement, and leveraged the strength of the product to grow distribution. Now the two build on each other, with their market share in search enabling them to continue to improve their product through more data and more servers, and that continually improving product keeps people coming back to use their search engine.

The Weeds – Potentially profitable by eventually doomed

At the top left are companies that have created great distribution despite a weak product. Contrary to conventional wisdom, these companies can be very profitable despite the weak product because of various channels to reach customers and user habits.

Example: MySpace – MySpace leveraged huge email lists to spam users and build a large social network. They grew quickly and sold for $580 million, but continual lack of execution on the product led to their downfall and imminent irrelevance.

Example: Microsoft – A monopoly is about as strong a distribution strategy you can have, but even that is not enough to sustain a company that continues to make inferior products. Despite being wildly profitable, their stock has gone nowhere in 10 years, and their lack of product execution has put them in weak positions in the next computing wave (mobile and tablet).

Example: American auto makers – The analogy even applies outside consumer technology, as evident by the downfall of the American automotive industry, which for too long relied on patriotism, customer loyalty, and a saturated dealer network to distribute an inferior product. Eventually it caught up with them, and now even though they are building better products, decades of perception still linger with consumers and they face an uphill battle.

The Desert Flowers – Potentially great but need some breaks

At the bottom right are companies that have created a truly interesting and innovative product, but have struggled to get it out to the people that care about it. Many companies founded by techies have a strong risk to go down this path, continuing to focus on building the perfect product and not spending enough time getting it out there. And make no mistake, Facebook was not one of these companies in the early days, aggressively crawling online groups to get initial profile pictures and emailing whomever they could.

Example: original Mac-only iPod – Given the rapid success of the iPod franchise, it’s easy to forget that it originally launched exclusively for the Mac as a way to drive Mac sales, and took almost 2 years to sell 1 millions units (vs. 74 days for the original iPad, 28 days for the iPad, and about 1 day for the iPhone 4). It was only when they began offering a PC version and leveraging their iTunes distribution platform that sales began really accelerating.

The Tumbleweeds – Also Rans – Lots of challenges, but could work in certain offline niches

In the lower left quadrant are the companies that don’t have a particular strength in either product or distribution, and are thus left facing many challenges. In certain commodity local businesses with limited competition, this may not be an issue (for example the only dry-cleaner in a neighborhood), but for online businesses this can be a killer.

Examples: Most clones that lack distribution – Clones often try and replicate a successful product but lack many of the soft traits and methodologies that made those products successful in the first place, and thus often create weak imitations. If those are coupled with distribution advantages, they can be profitable, but often they are mired in the bottom left quadrant to hang on and pray.

What this means on a practical level

Coming back to Antonio’s question from that dinner, if I had a choice of having either great distribution or great product, I would choose great distribution, turn that into profitability, and leverage that to build a great product. Practically speaking, however, those choices are rarely presented. Therefore, when starting a new company, the important point is to clearly understand the tradeoffs as well as the strengths of the early team and company. Then use that to built a great company, whether it means leveraging distribution to get to a great product, or building a great product and figuring out the distribution.

And the truly great companies are constantly focused on both, like an oak seed going deep into the ground for a solid foundation (the product), and reaching for the skies to get sun and spread the branches (the distribution).

I’d love to hear other thoughts about this framework as well as other good examples. I’m also planning a follow up post about how to move between areas in the quadrant, and specific industry dynamics.

Entrepreneurs,

Looking to fund your idea, or to find out more about venture capital in the MENA region?

Our friends at MENA Private Equity Association put together a guide for new Arab entrepreneurs titled The VEECEEPRENEUR. It details the basic concepts of venture capital as well as the perspectives of major VC firms in the region.

The link to the full PDF:

Why do we still have to carry all our loyalty cards in our wallet when they simply can be replaced with a application on our smart device. And since we take our phone with us everywhere we go, we have all our card in the palm of our hand, and turn our fat wallet into a skinny e-wallet.

Looking for a free ticket to ArabNet’s conference in Lebanon?

Tweet a tip on Entrepreneurship from your own experience or tweet what you think an entrepreneur is and attach #YallaStartup #Tip next to your tweet.

YallaStartup will be giving out one free ticket to the best tip – best defined by quality of tip and number of retweets.

Let’s get those tweets going. This starts NOW and ends on March 20th.

There is nothing like it. You have an idea, and you have the stage for a minute, or two, or five. You’re on a mission to sell yourself, your vision, and your team. There is no room for error, and no room for mediocrity.

You need to be the number one advocate of your product. You need to love it, and you need to show how much you believe in it. You need to be passionate about it. Passion is contagious, and the only way you are going to win the crowd over.

With passion, you need to deliver a clear vision. You need to show that you are captaining a plane with a clear destination, and that it would be a mistake not to come along for the ride. That means really understanding your product and getting the basics right:

• Why are you creating the product or service, who is it serving and how big is the market?
• Why your solution? what’s so magical about it that competition can’t replicate?
• How will you make the idea a reality?
• Why your team can take it forward and succeed?

Get those figured out and take the 2 minutes you will have, mix in Passion, Confidence, Clarity and Keep it Simple.

Demo’ers shorten up the above, make it quick and focus on your demo. Show us your product and go through a few scenarios that really showcase your top features. Check out Demo 2011 pitches for some examples. Be very clear and very precise – that means Practice! Practice! Practice!

And now, we will leave you with this -

“If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days [of preparation]; if half an hour, two days [of preparation]; if an hour, I am ready now.” – Woodrow Wilson

Jump start your ideas and apply to ArabNet’s Ideathon and Startup Demo. The Ideathon gives selected entrepreneurs 2 minutes in the spotlight to pitch their ideas to investors, incubators and others. The top 3 pitches will win cash prizes as a seed grant to help them build a prototype of their product. The Startup Demo allows selected startups that already have customers/users and a revenue stream to showcase their products in 5-minute pitches to a panel of judges. Additionally, startups will be provided with exhibition space for the duration of the conference.

The deadline to apply is on FEBRUARY 27th [Extended to March 6th]. You can find more information on the event and application process here.

Goaaaaaaaaal! Lebanon 1 – Brazil 0.

Mimix just won the final face off against Mindle from Brazil and became the ultimate champion of Global Startup Battle. Congratulations to Mimix and to all YallaStartup’ers you showed to the whole world that we have the Power of Yalla!

Below from the Global Startup Battle page:

All of us at Startup Weekend extend a huge round of applause to the entire MIMIX team for a job well done! Congratulations to Pierre Daher, Jessica Abou Haydar, Pascale Baaklini, Akram Barakat, and founder Mahmoud Darawaheh. As the Ultimate Champion, the MIMIX team wins a website by Clover and a customized video by SwitchMarketing! These prizes, in addition to those the team received as Week 1 winners, will help catapult MIMIX to the next level of entrepreneurial success.

MIMIX is a web and mobile app which builds on speech recognition and 3D modeling technologies to translate speech into sign language in real-time. The team and their startup have huge potential and we are certain that the winners of Global Startup Battle will have many more successes in their future.

StartupWeekend just announced:

YallaStartup Weekend’s very own Capsu.ly wins Global Startup Battle: Wild Card! In an impressive show of solidarity, Capsu.ly received three times as many votes as the second-ranked team. Lebanon now boasts the winners of both GSB: Week 1 with Mimix an dGSB: Wildcard with Capsu.ly –an impressive show of entrepreneurial innovation and grass-roots networking from one of Startup Weekend’s newer countries.

Capsu.ly is the “world’s first infinite and free community-based storage system” that takes personal files, dices them into pieces, duplicates and encrypts those pieces, and distributes them across a worldwide network of users. Files are safe and inaccessible by those hosting them yet account holders can retrieve their personal files at any time. Sound cool? Want to learn more? Check them out at capsu.ly!

Capsu.ly‘s win comes only a couple of weeks after Mimix’s! So Silicon Valley, can you hear us now? Now before you do anything else, it’s time to do the final voting between Week 1 and Week 2 winners, let’s show again our amazing support for Mimix. Yalla Vote NOW!

MBC Ventures is coming to Lebanon and Syria in the next few weeks to meet with young emerging entrepreneurs. They are hoping to identify a few to support with cash and expertise.

Read the MBC invitation below:

“MBC Ventures is a fund set up and run by MBC Group looking for young entrepreneurs who have ideas, products, and businesses in the media space that addresses the local MENA market. The sort of projects that MBC is interested to invest in will include among other things, initiatives on the web, new and innovative content for digital platforms, gaming, mobile apps, animation, etc… MBC will provide both cash and other support functions to help the selected projects become operational and profitable media businesses.

MBC is interested to explore Start ups that have a product and track record of performance with a business plan and investment proposal. If you only have a brief project with no clear business plan, we will also be happy to speak to you and see how MBC can support your ideas.

MBC needs a clear 3 year vision and an investment proposal where available.

Beirut
Monday the 13th of December – Between 11:00am to 1:00pm and 3:00pm to 5:00pm at MBC offices in:
Gefinor Center, Bloc B, 4th Floor, Clemenceau Street, Hamra

Damascus:
Wednesday the 15th of December – Between 11:00am to 1:00pm and 3:00pm to 5:00pm at MBC offices in:
Al Jamarek Square, Tabaa Building, 7th floor

For more information please email dania.ismail@mbc.net”

The Weekend of 12/11/10 was one to remember! More than 250 participants came from all around the Arab world came to Lebanon for a highly intense 3 days of coding, networking, fun and most importantly of action!

Friday afternoon the first “Geeks on Bus” arrived at Berytech from Syria. Crowds were pouring in from all over. We had people from Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Jordan, Palestine, USA, Canada, just to name a few of the countries represented. Energy was mounting to get started, but we were waiting for our Jordanian “Geeks on a Bus” to arrive. The driver got lost, but they eventually got there. Gotta love Beirut traffic. When our Jordanian friends arrived, we were ready to get started.

The goal of the first day was to get people organized into teams. The stage was open for anyone to pitch their idea in 60 seconds. After an intense compressed session, over 60 ideas were presented. Now the task was to identify the best ideas that will get traction for teams to form around. So we did it Bazaar style where each participant had two votes to cast for an idea using plain old post-it notes. It was fun to see everyone selling their ideas to others, which is really something that also happens in real life during the early stages of a startup. People gravitated towards 35 ideas and now the wheels were set in motion to take that idea and build a prototype to pitch in 2 days.

Teams formed! It was amazing to see how multinational the teams were. Many of the teams had a healthy mix of gender, skill set, backgrounds, and passion! Immediately, all teams became a force and started to take that basic idea turning into something real. The energy was contagious. You saw people immediately busting out their laptops and started to design logos, UIs, user models, UI flows and some even started coding. Not only were new ideas being generated, but internet bandwidth, caffeine and snacks were being heavily consumed. The work continued till the wee hours of the morning. Some folks did not sleep, while others just crashed on a bean bag or sleeping bag. You could smell the adrenaline in the air! Really it was adrenaline!

The next day started off early with lots of caffeine and two wonderful talks by Walid Wannous and Ayman Chalhoub. Walid talked about the importance of UI and Ayman discussed the mobile revolution we are in the midst of. Work continued, but the pace got faster. So fast, that one of the internet routers got fried. It literally overheated. That was how hot the ideas were. We pulled some ninja moves and were able to get a new router installed within a few hours. One of the teams, KomicHub, during the down time wrote an application that would send a tweet and SMS notifications when we lost internet connectivity at the venue. How cool was that!?

Later in the day we had a great talk about agile development by Joi Ito. It was over skype and with our internet woes, Habib was transcribing live what Joi was talking about. You gotta role with the punches. After Joi, Ziad gave an inspirational talk about his journey building a mobile internet business in Egypt. As soon as the talks were done, people grabbed some chow and rushed back to keep hacking. Press, investors, and experts walked around to see what people were working on and gave them feedback. Everyone after their rounds came by and expressed their awe with what they saw.

In the evening, some teams took a break and listened to more talks by Chris Messina, who described the importance of simplicity and how to mobilize a community around your idea. Ayah Bdeir gave a very exciting talk about the intersection of engineering and art. This was followed by a showing of “Pirates of Silicon Valley”, one of the best geek movies out there.

Day 3, was when all the teams went into hyperdrive. The clock was ticking and everyone was scrambling to get their demos and pitches ready. For most, it was the first time they would pitch to an audience this large. Habib, Elie, Sami and Adam setup office hours to help everyone prepare. You could see in their eyes the shock of how much the teams achieved.

It was getting close to pitch time. Crowds were pouring in. TV stations, investors, students, professions, and more arrived. People from all walks of life came waiting to see what the teams have been cranking on for the past 3 days . There were over thirty 4 minute pitches to go through. So the best way to start is to just dive in. Habib described the ground rules, and got everyone pumped. Then the marathon started. One after another the teams presented their companies. It was a wow moment for all. Yes a wow moment. A panel of judges were evaluating each idea and keeping score. What was amazing was in the middle of the pitch sessions, an angel investor from Dubai, Samer Alameddine, came up and handed the organizers a wad of cash to give to the winning teams. How amazing is that? The pitching was over and now tensions were mounting because the results were getting tallied. The results were so close that we had to call the judges back to help identify the winners. It was an exciting time for all.

And the winners of YallaStartup Weekend 2010 according to the jury were:

First place… Mimix, a service that translates voice into sign language
Second place… Capsu.ly, infinite free community based storage solution
Third place… Hintout.com, a social platform that revolves around activities & going out.

The rest of the awesome startups created during the weekend are located here.

Congrats again to everyone. Everyone who participated is a winner! As the organizers, we wanted to remind everyone involved that this event is not a competition but about living the life cycle of a startup in just one weekend! It’s about getting interest for your idea, matching you with co-founders and team members, and showing each and every one of you what you are capable of. You all got a full dose of what it means to build something from scratch. What the teams were able to build in one weekend was really inspiring! A big part of entrepreneurship is about taking that first step, and remember, it all starts with the “Power of Yalla”; The power of doing things vs strategizing and thinking things forever before taking action.

To add more icing to the cake, Startup Weekend winners compete against their peers across the globe. Each city has their winning team send in a pitch to participate in a Global Startup Battle. Guess who won? Our very own Mimix. Go Mimix!

Right after we distributed the prizes and certificates we all went out and celebrated the weekend over some good food, bowling, pool and other fun games.

This event was a purely volunteer run event and we want to thank everyone who made this a reality. Some of the participants even gave us a hand on the first day to handle registration. We want to thank Ramy El Khoury from Umbrella for the great design work, we also want to thank Adam Stelle from StartupWeekend, who flew all the way in from Seattle and was of tremendous help; and Amir Kabbara and Rock Sfeir for all their hard work helping pull together the materials for the weekend! We also want to thank Berytech, Nicolas Rouhana, Tania Mazraani, Krystel Khalil and all the team for being amazing partners and hosts. Finally, we wanted to thank our sponsors for making this event a reality. As a not-for-profit, we depend on your generous support to make a difference. Thank you!

You can also view more pics here, some videos here and here.

The YallaStartup Team
Amir, Elie, Habib, Sami

Remember how Hitler first reacted when he heard about YallaStartup Weekend ? Well wait until you see what he said when he heard about the 30+ mind blowing startups that were formed at the weekend!

Hitler Sucks, MENA Startups Rock! YallaStartup Weekend from YallaStartup on Vimeo.

YallaStartup Weekend is one Weekend to remember, it was our first but certainly not our last! The amount of energy passion and talent was unbelievable, more than 200 people showed on up on Friday to pitch ideas and form teams. Teams got formed with people from various skills backgrounds but most importantly various nationalities. The weekend ended on Sunday evening with more than 30 startups created in just 2 days! Yes, it was an intense high energy but fun and productive Weekend!

We will write other posts summarizing the event and list all the amazing startups but first we want to share that WE WON GLOBAL STARTUP BATTLE!

Yes, that’s right, Mimix.me, a MENA startup made of people from Lebanon and Jordan that never met each others before the weekend, won part 1 of Global Startup Battle against 12 winners from other cities like Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Lisbon, New York and Sofia. Mimix is a startup that translates written and spoken words into sign language. Imagine the potential of such a technology on TV, airports, and even online videos like YouTube.

Congrats once again to Mimix but also to everyone who made it to YallaStartup Weekend, the startups created in that weekend were really amazing and we can’t wait to help and see them go to the next level! Watch that space! In the meantime take a look at some pics from the Weekend!

Enjoy!

قالولي ليش إنت مكركب
قلتلهم رايح عـ yallastatup

شلة مبرمجين
Geeks ومصممين
بدهم لحمة بعجين
… وعطول أكل مرتب

وقلتلهم رايح عـ yallastatup

من أردن سوريا ولبنان
رايحين انملي المكان
لا تقلولي انك نعسان
… فريقك لازم يكسب

وقلتلهم رايح عـ yallastatup

رايحين انطبق أفكار
نشتغل ليل مع نهار
راح تحكي عنا الأخبار
… ولنفوز نحنا بنتعب

وقلتلهم رايح عـ yallastatup

Microsoft أو Java
حتكون حمم الLava
ومع عصير الجوا ڦا
… حبيب را يتعزب

وقلتلهم رايح عـ yallastatup

فريقي عم يتجمع
وراح يحتل المجمع
واللي مش سامع يسمع
… وعالكل راح نتغلب

وقلتلهم رايح عـ yallastatup‬

by Eric Koester

I’ve often heard the phrase “You get out of something what you put into it.”  And in most cases, that is true — if you put in some time, some energy and some effort you’ll get an equal amount back out of it.  With Startup Weekend, that phrase also applies — it’s just that you’ll get 5 times more out versus what you put into it.

I’ve had the opportunity to attend a half dozen StartupWeekends.  Some weekends have been a fun chance to meet people; some weekends have been a chance to build something cool; some weekends have been the opportunity to challenge myself to learn something new; and some weekends have left me with more to think about than at the start of the weekend.  But in each case, I consistently got much more out of the weekend than I put into it.

I may have hit the jackpot on my second Startup Weekend to be honest. That was a Startup Weekend held at Microsoft where my team was the only one that built something on the Apple iPhone… and then we had to rock the boat and win the whole darn thing.  Next thing I knew we’d created a firestorm and our story spread like wildfire through the tech ecosystem — from Engadget to Mashable and everywhere in between on the twittersphere.  It was great… and we hadn’t even launched our app on the AppStore yet.  Three weeks later, we finally launched Learn That Name and the press continued… Wall Street Journal, Xconomy, TechFlash, ABA Journal and more.  We had a hit on our hands and all of it started at Startup Weekend.  Fast forward a couple months later and a meeting over coffee (spurred by Startup Weekend again) turned into a demo of our app, a partnership discussion and ultimately an acquisition of Learn That Name by Gist.  And the rest was history.  We’d gone full circle, from an idea pitched and built at Startup Weekend to a real live cash acquisition.  And that’s how Startup Weekend sometimes happens — an opportunity that pays it back in social capital a hundred times over.

But the really great part of the story isn’t that Learn That Name was acquired or we got covered in TechCrunch or our team won at Startup Weekend.  In fact, all of those things were pure bonus points for us. Nope, the best part was the fact that I got the chance to work with a dozen team members to build something… and build something that I still have on my iPhone.  That’s the best part.  You take an idea or a problem or something you think that would be fun and just build it.  There’s no judgement; no risk; no downside.  That’s Startup Weekend… the chance to be an entrepreneur, a developer, a project manager, and a startupper for a weekend or maybe more.

So how can you get the most out of Startup Weekend?  Well, first off, don’t expect to build a company in a weekend. That’s not what the weekend is about.  Here’s a few things I’d encourage you to consider to make the most out of your weekend:

• Be flexible. Startup Weekend attendees that come in with a set plan or goal for the weekend are often disappointed.  Not because you can’t meet those goals or build that product you wanted.  No, you are disappointed because you don’t build something as great as you could have.  My vision for the products or ideas I’ve had were blown out of the water by the collective thinking of the team.  So offer your idea and maybe it will be picked… but don’t forget to be flexible enough to listen to those around you and get the most out of the collective brainpower in the room.
• Build a product; not a company. Teams that focus on what happens after the weekend lose track of what happens during the weekend.  If you spend all your time dividing the pie that hasn’t even baked yet, you’ll miss out on all the fun that is had in making the pie.  So think about how you can build something to show off on Sunday night.  If you’ve got something worth turning into a company, the post-weekend challenges will really help solve themselves.
• What can you build in 54 hours? In each case, after the weekend it is hard to keep a team motivated.  If you’ve got a big idea, try and build a piece of that idea… or a feature… or a prototype.  Startup Weekend is about building something in the weekend so even if you don’t get your grand plan completed, get something completed.
• Build or join a team of people you want to meet. The best parts of Startup Weekends for me have been the relationships post-weekend.  It’s funny, but after the weekend, you share a bond that others don’t have.  It’s like we have a secret handshake, know the inside rituals, and laugh at the jokes that only the SW alums know.  So get a team of people that you want to meet and don’t worry about building the perfect team or excluding an extra designer or marketer.  Big teams are fun and teams with people you don’t know expand your social circle.
• Take risks. Are you a great back-end developer?  Try some UI or front end work.  Don’t know anything about coding?  Try to learn something or at least take a crack at some HTML work.  This is your chance to do something you don’t do at your job Monday through Friday.  It’s easy enough to take a risk at an open environment like this… so take it and you’ll be amazed at how much fun it can be.
• Have fun. At the end of the weekend, you should look back and smile or better yet laugh at a few of the funny things that happened that weekend.  If you are coding until your fingers bleed, if you are using the dry erase board until your forearms are black, or if you are so worried about the demo that you keep your headphones on all weekend, you’ve missed out.  These weekends are about the people and the process — not about winning.  So remember that when you are deciding whether to get a beer that night or stay up all night and code that extra set of features… be with your team and work hard, but at the end of the day have fun.

I’ve been to multiple Startup Weekends.  Most don’t end like Learn That Name, so don’t expect that yours will either.  But every weekend has been a series of memories, stories and new friends.  Hope your Startup Weekend is a big success — and it can be if you meet new people, take a few risks, and build something together.  That is Startup Weekend…
Now go make your Startup Weekend!

About the author

Eric A. Koester is VP of Operations and General Counsel at Appature Inc., a technology company providingrelationship marketing software, and a former attorney at Cooley LLP (previously with Heller Ehrman LLP’sVenture Law Group) with a practice focused on emerging technology companies, venture capital firms and investment banks, with particular emphases on venture capital and bank financings, corporate partnerships, commercial agreements, intellectual property licensing, public offerings, and mergers and acquisitions. Eric is a graduate of the business school at Marquette University and a graduate of The George Washington University School of Law. Eric is also a certified public accountant.  He’s also proud to be an entrepreneur as well, starting a consulting business MEGO Consulting, Learn That Name (which was acquired by Gist) and App&Seek.

by Ryan Murray

Every startup is looking to get their business idea to market as fast as possible.  Startup weekends are a great way to push that goal to limit.  But with the objective of getting an application actually working in those 54 weekend hours, developers in particular have a hard task in front of them.  However, the minimal infrastructure needed for the weekend is nothing compared to what is need to manage and maintain a working app over the long haul.  And the goal of all the startup weekend teams will be to have their app running long after the weekend is over!

Cloud platforms offer a particularly enticing solution to startups in this regard.  Provisioning time and configuration are reduced dramatically. And many cloud services are free for small apps that don’t consume a lot of resources.  Here’s a quick review of some cloud providers that can help bootstrap your YallaStartupWeekend apps fast.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) gives developers a range of cloud solutions.  The AWS EC2 service gives developers virtualized dedicated servers running Linux or Windows.  Paired with the RDS mysql service, this gives developers a familiar environment for developing apps with the language and application sever of their choice.  Amazon also offers a suite of highly scalable application building components accessed via REST APIs, including simpleDB for schema-less data storage and the SQS queue service.  Building apps with simpleDB and SQS however requires a significant rethinking of traditional application design, requiring an initial investment in learning a different development paradigm.

Google App Engine (GAE) provides a higher level abstraction for developers willing to work in Python or Java.  In the GAE environment, developers don’t need to worry about low level details of server or database provisioning and management, instead focusing on higher-level application logic only.  There is of course a learning curve on the core GAE datastore in particular, where the concept of transactional, strong and eventual consistency needs to be clearly understood when designing the app.

Microsoft’s cloud offering, Windows Azure, resembles the Amazon approach to cloud infrastructure, offering virtual servers running the Windows OS, a hosted schema-less database service accessible using ADO .NET or LINQ, hosted SQL Server instances and an application bus called appfabric.  For developers already well-versed in Microsoft technologies, the Microsoft cloud offering is a compelling choice.

At a similar layer of abstraction as GAE, Heroku is an excellent deployment option for Ruby apps.  Unlike GAE, with Heroku the database technology is a pure RDBMS (Postgress) so the learning curve is fairly low for experienced Ruby users.

At the other end of the app cloud spectrum is the Lebanese startup apstrata.  apstrata is a lightweight REST API which exposes a scalable document-based datastore with integrated user management and data security based on ACLs (access control lists).  Apstrata’s datastore stores files along together with document data, making it easier to build media-centric applications.  In addition, integrated full-text search for document and file data, email API and server-side scripting (Javascript) make apstrata an interesting platform for UI-focused developers to get apps running more quickly than on other cloud platforms.

About the author
Ryan is a software technology professional and systems architect with over 12 years experience, having worked as both consultant and internally within various IT environments in the US and Europe. Prior to element^n, Ryan worked as the Director of Engineering for The Net Planet, s.p.a., an innovative search technology startup in Milan, Italy where he was responsible for the productization of the nascent search technology, managing development teams in Italy, Eastern Europe and India, as well as building the technological capacity of the company’s professional services organization. Ryan has also served as a software architect for large, distributed systems, as a technical architect and as a technical consultant to a number of European and international firms, such as Siemens (Germany, Italy), Humanis (France), Spazio ZeroUno (Italy) and Omnitel-Vodafone (Italy). Ryan holds a degree in Genetic Engineering from Duke University.

As we promised a few weeks ago we are going to be chartering free “Geeks on a Bus” rides from Amman and Damascus to YallaStartup Weekend in Lebanon. Many thanks to our friends at Meydan for generously sponsoring the bus from Jordan!

A – “Geeks on Bus” from Damascus/Amman to Beirut

From Amman

From Damascus

Date of departure: Friday Nov 12 @ 5:00am Place of gathering: Abdali Bus Station, Amman Contact info: Kamel AlAsmar, Nakhweh, IdeationBox: 0775812413 Fouad Jeryes, AmmanTT, D1G: 0795055074 email: jobus@yallastartup.org Important notes: Make sure you have a valid Jordanian passport valid for at least 6 more months. For non Jordanian citizen make sure you have a valid visa. Make sure you have 8JD on you for the taxes on the borders. Due to logistical issues and not to cause any delays on the whole bus, people without the above will not be accepted on board. Please make sure you have this figured out before hand. Also make sure you are at the gathering point on time otherwise you will miss the bus ride.

Date of departure: Friday Nov 12 @ 9:00am Place of gathering: Hackerspace Damascus: الروضة، امتداد الطلياني، جادة الزهراوي بعد وكالة سوني جانب ساربينوز بيتزا Contact info: Bassel Safadi, AikiLab email: sybus@yallastartup.org 0988476040 Important notes: Make sure you have a valid Syrian passport valid for at least 6 more months. For non Syrian citizen make sure you have a valid visa. Due to logistical issues and not to cause any delays on the whole bus, people without the above will not be accepted on board. Please make sure you have this figured out before hand. Also make sure you are at the gathering point on time otherwise you will miss the bus ride.

B – “Geeks on Bus” from Beirut to Damascus/Amman

Buses will leave on Monday morning from Berytech (the venue in Lebanon) back to Damascus/Amman.

Exact time of departure from Berytech will be communicated during the event, but it’s expected to be around 6am to Jordan and 9am to Syria

Are you ready to compete against startups from San Francisco, Boston, Sao Palo… Startup Weekend just announced the first “Global Startup Battle,” to challenge and inspire entrepreneurs from around the world during Global Entrepreneurship Week.

Global Startup Battle will tie teams from over twenty StartupWeekend events taking place during Global Entrepreneurship Week (November 12-21) in cities around the world from San Francisco to Sao Paulo, from Boston to Beirut and beyond. The winning team from each event will have 24 hours to create a 90-second video pitch that highlights their freshly-launched product or service. Viewers from around the world will then be invited to view the video pitches and vote for their favorite concept. The winners will take home an assortment of cash and prizes from partners and one-on-one time with a celebrity venture capitalist or angel investor.

So are you pumped? We are confident you will be creating awesome products and can’t wait to show the world what we are capable of! Yalla let’s do this! Sign up today if you haven’t done so already.

Startup Weekend Global Entrepreneurship Week Events:

We love communities! The YallaStartup Q&A has been a great tool to get real world questions answered by our extensive network of experts and readers. Your leadership to help each other has helped realize a collaboration between YallaStartup and Venture Magazine. Starting this month, great questions and answers you crowd source will be featured in Venture Magazine. This is only the beginning of a work we have planned with our friends at Venture.

YallaStartup Q&A in Venture Magazine

Creative Commons is finally coming to Lebanon and we are super excited about it.  Joi Ito and Larry Lessig one of the two most prominent names in the history of the internet will be speaking live at AUB on the 25th! Make sure you don’t miss this one in a life time oppotunity to mingle with the Internet Wizards! On the same night there will be a very fun Creative Commons Salon party in Karaj Beirut.

AUB Talk

Location: Maamari Auditorium, Olayan School of Business

Monday, October 25,  5:00 – 7:00 pm

Register here http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=163363530359136

Creative Commons Salon

Location: Karaj Beirut

Monday, October 25, 9:00pm

Register here http://www.eventbrite.com/event/970666289

About Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of ©. They provide free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof.

We are only a few weeks away from StartupWeekend and are super excited for the potential. So far more than 150 attendees are going to show up to create more than 40 projects and startups! It’s going to be an awesome and fun weekend and we can’t wait to see the community getting together for an all action event!

There is one thing issue that is still bugging us though … The majority of the attendees currently registered are men! Women Startup enthusiasts, designers, developers, entrepreneurs where are you? We need you and your creative minds at our YallaStartup Weekend event!

Yes, we think the next Bill Gates, Sergey Brin or Steve Jobs might be at the weekend but what about the next Carol Bartz (Yahoo), the next Meg Whitman (eBay), Marissa Mayer (Google), Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook) or Catherina Fake (Flickr).

To help spur your interest, we want to offer 15 free passes to Women for YallaStartup Weekend. Just drop us a quick comment below or send us an email and you are in! Yes, it’s that easy!

Thanks to our friends at Seeqnce for initiating the lead on this last week!

Check our StartupWeeekend FAQ, and our blog posts on tips to shine at the weekend and reasons to attend!

Startup Weekend is coming up fast, so we’ve prepared some helpful tips to help you make the most of it. The weekend will pass by quickly, but as long as you keep a few things in mind, you’ll be in control of your time. Read on for some helpful tips.

1. Come prepared

Make sure you read the F.A.Q page  before the event.

2. Pick Your Idea

If you already have an idea, develop it into something you can actually share with your friends. You want to make sure that your idea is feasible to be implemented in a weekend. Here are a few ideas that have been implemented at previous Startup Weekends:

Metayoo: Finding new connections nearby. A user can open up their LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter profiles to people 300 meters and make new connections.
Flought: Letting people broadcast thoughts anonymously. People use their phones to type in 70 character messages that only people within a 70-foot area can see.
CoRider: A social network of people who want to share rides.
Fanattix: Loyalty program for college sports fans. Fans get points for checking in to college sports venues (bars, arenas, Universities, etc.).
Speed Watch: is an iPhone and iPad app that clearly tells you the speed limit of the road you are currently on, and notifies you when the speed limit changes.
Schedify: A scheduling Web app that takes the hassle out of creating and managing restaurant and other retail employee scheduling.
TaskAve: Easily manage, post and share new tasks

If you don’t have a particular idea, be sure to start reading up on startups in general.

3. Define Your Value Prop and the Business

What is the problem or what value are you adding to the market, what is the solution, how does it work, what is the secret sauce, and who is this for? How many people out there may want your product (market size)?

Think through why someone would take their time to try out your product. It needs to make sense and its value needs to be communicated. You want to make sure you impress Judges and Attendees.

4. Practice The Pitch

Start pitching the idea to the people around you before coming into the event. This will help you shape the idea and your pitch. The more practice you get the more prepared you’ll be with pitching your idea. You can find a few tips on pitches here.

5. Build The Perfect Team

You may already have a team in place, but if you don’t you may want to consider bringing on people with specific skills or people that you know can add value. Make sure the team you come in with is the one you want. Otherwise, there will be time to set up a team on the first day of the event.

6. Map Your Project Plan

Create a plan and stick to it – always push forward and be mindful of the time. Create a realistic plan that can be completed throughout the weekend. You can come into the weekend having prepared a few things in advance (project plan, sketches), but always keep in mind that you have only 54 hours to execute your project. It needs to be in a state where you can successfully showcase it.

8. Put on a show

Your project is complete. Now it’s time to put on a convincing and interesting demo. Don’t be afraid to wow the crowd and get creative. You need to tell everyone exactly why your project is the best, and do it in style.

7. Give it All you’ve got

Startup Weekend is a lot of fun, but also a lot of work. Give it all you’ve got, never give up and always push forward.

9. Make Sure You Meet Everyone

YallaStartup Weekend already has more than a 100 confirmed attendees. Make sure you network with everyone. You never know when you might cross path in the future.

10. Enjoy Your Time and Explore Beirut!

By Amad Almsaodi

Surprisingly, the 2nd day of the MENA ICT Forum was as exciting as the 1st day, if not more engaging and informative. The day started with a Social Media discussion, and Alexander McNabb from Spot On PR declared Print and traditional media agencies dead. This statement kicked off a heated discussion between the panelists and some of the audience who tried to defend TV advertising and traditional media. Alexander delivered a storm of proofs that back his statement, and his KO punch was highlighting the increasing number of newspapers going bankrupt globally and regionally. The verdict is traditional media is going south if they do not embrace the new media.

The second panel discussed outsourcing in MENA, and the conclusion was that there are more than 70 cities in the world that are trying to emerge as the new destination for outsourcing, and Multinationals are evaluating them all. Therefore, MENA’s aspiring cities need to step up their game and invest heavily in their people, because the name of the game is quality talent. Following that, Future trends were covered by a set of distinguished speakers including Richard Avery from IBM, Ari Kesisoglu from Google, Imad Malhas from IrisGuard, and Mohammed Saleh from Microsoft. Innovation, interconnectivity, and systems intelligence were some of the key topics discussed.

The Mobile Development discussion was also interesting, and it was very clear that the Mobile sector has way more challenges than the Web. While the Arabic Web is struggling with quality content, the Mobile arena is struggling with lack of sustainable revenue models, payment challenges, telecoms monopolies, etc.. One of the main questions raised was why don’t we have enough rich Arabic Mobile applications? Especially because the cost and effort for developing a mobile app is usually less than a web app? After going over several possible reasons, it was apparent that we do not lack the technical know-how, but rather the financial incentives for entrepreneurs. As long as the Telecom operators insist on taking 50% of the revenues and the Entrepreneur/Developer ends up with 20-30% after the aggregators take their cuts, no serious efforts will be invested in the Mobile space.

The best discussion was Addressing the Arabic Content Crisis. Mohamed Saeed Harib shared his continuous struggle when starting Freej the popular Emarati animation series, and Wael Ghonim shared very positive stats, for example, he noted that the Arabic Content on Google increased by 50% in the past 12 months! Kareem Darwish from Microsoft noted that the best quality Arabic content is actually in Forums, and that the problem is not in the content quality, but rather on the tool that hosts it. Hosam Elsokkri from Yahoo concluded that the Arabic content is going through a quality crisis and not a quantity crisis.

eGovernment was the last panel, and the Bahraini eGov initiative shined as the #1 eGovernment in the Middle East, and the #13 in the world! Syria had a very local approach to their eGovernment strategy with their eMokhtar initiative

Finally, the MENA ICT Forum ended with a celebration of the first wave of graduates from Oasis 500. The entrepreneurial spirit was high, the bar has been set high, we all enjoyed the event and the discussion, and we are looking forward to meeting everybody in November at Yallastartup Weekend.

عماد المسعودي، رائد أعمال يمني مهتم بالإنترنت والتجارة الإلكترونية، حاصل على ماجستير في إدارة التكنولوجيا والإبتكار، ولديه مدونة لترويج ثقافة ريادة الأعمال فيالوطن العربي.

By Amad Almsaodi

Today was the first day of the MENA ICT Forum that was held in Amman, Jordan. The MENA ICT Forum is an Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and Information and Communications Technology Enabled Services (ICTES) industry event for the MENA region, that is held in Jordan on a bi-annual basis.

Todays panel discussions included a set of diverse topics ranging from the importance of Cloud computing to promoting Entrepreneurship in the region. Each panel included a mix of global and regional experts. Panel discussions were followed by interesting questions by the audience and sometimes the audience were asked to vote. One of the voting questions was: What’s the Arab worlds greatest limitation in ICT? The audience agreed that the greatest limitation is the mind set; however, some of the panelists disagreed by pointing to the lack of management expertise as the true limitation.

The most interesting panel discussion was the MENA Entrepreneurship ecosystem which focused on the challenges that entrepreneurs face in the region. The consensus was that the ecosystem is not ready yet to foster Entrepreneurship in the region, and that Entrepreneurs face more challenges than their peers in other regions. The education system, government support, lack of mentoring and of course lack of seed capital are some of these challenges. Initiatives such as Meydan and Oasis 500 were mentioned as promising vehicles for providing financial and expertise support for Entrepreneurs.

One of the trends during today’s discussion was that we need to stop copying Silicon Valley and that we need to develop local solutions for our challenges. Many initiatives, government programs, investors, and entrepreneurs keep following the best practices that are popular in the West, but our region’s differences require a different set of local solutions.

Here are some special quotes from the event:
- Aiman Mazahreh: Jordan’s ICT sector represents 14% of the country’s GDP
- Habib Haddad: Youth Entrepreneurship is really important and once we start supporting those; we will no longer have a problem!
- Ahmed Nassef: The region needs true innovation, and the local startups need to gain their users trust
- Mohamed Barig: We should discuss failures publicly to help young entrepreneurs learn
- Randa Ayoubi: We need to be willing to accept continous change in our education system
- Maher Kaddoura: Entrepreneurs are people who don’t give a $hit
- Habib Haddad: There is an “ad mafia” in the region and startups cant tap into ad networks easily.

The 2nd of the MENA ICT Forum will include topics such as: Social Media, Outsourcing, Mobile, Arabic Content, and eGovernment. Like today, we will be tweeting live from the event, so if you cannot attend follow us @yallastartup

عماد المسعودي، رائد أعمال يمني مهتم بالإنترنت والتجارة الإلكترونية، حاصل على ماجستير في إدارة التكنولوجيا والإبتكار، ولديه مدونة لترويج ثقافة ريادة الأعمال فيالوطن العربي.

1. Network, meet potential co-founders and investors

2. Build awesome companies

3. Unlimited Learning Potential

4. Awesome PR

5. Win great prizes and most importantly HAVE FUN

Want to get a free ticket to YallaStartup Weekend?

Easy, all you have to do is:

1. Leave a comment below and tell us why you would like to attend (in less then 2 sentences)
2. Tweet this article
3. Share this article on Facebook.

We will give out 5 free tickets for the best 5 comments.

More than 100 people have registered from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Qatar, Egypt and more so what are you waiting for, come on join them and create awesome products! YallaStartup Weekeend!

This is the part of an ongoing series of guest articles about entrepreneurship. If you would like to contribute to this series, contact us at exec@yallastartup.org with your proposal.

هذا المقال تابع لسلسلة من المقالات المستمرة عن الريادة. إذا كنت ترغب في المساهمة الرجاء إرسال رسالة إلكترونية إلى exec@yallastartup.org

by Mussie Shore

Mojo
Pronunciation: \ˈmō-(ˌ)jō\
Etymology: probably of African origin; akin to Fulani
moco'o medicine man
Definition: a magic spell, hex, or charm; 
broadly :magical power

Teams with mojo launch things continuously, always, we never stop launching things. This guide, offers ten principles , which when practiced by everyone, on balance, preserves and extends a team’s mojo.

#1 Know what you are launching next, and when it is launching

Every day you should know what you are personally contributing to externally launching next, as well as its launch target date. “External” means it is visible to either people outside your team. It has to be something people can actually use to get something done. At any time you should be able to say “I am launching x on date y” regardless of whether you have dependencies you can’t control.

#2 Know what you will personally demo to the team within two weeks

Every day you should know what you will demo within the next two weeks that contributes to the next launch. It doesn’t matter how weird the demo seems – it must be something you did, and is demonstrable to even a PM (even if they don’t understand it). A demo may be – lovely and interactive, typing something in to a black box and something comes back, opening up a critical design doc, showing how monitoring is catching a new fail state, etc..

#3 Actually demo each sub-two-week milestone

Every other week, or less, seek out a Product Manager (PM), Tech Lead (TL), and colleagues to demo your < 2 week milestone. By demoing – you satisfy yourself you took a positive step where you are going, and provide others a pulse of our progress.

It is understood that no one bats a 1000. If you are about to miss a demo window, you can pick up the pace, talk to a TL about modularizing the planned demo into smaller modules, one of which you’ll demo within the two week window. And learn for the next time. Most importantly – when you demo, even if it seems dweebish, you contribute to the overall team’s sense of collective mojo – “We are building stuff!”

#4 Never define a two week milestone that has an external dependency

It’s fine to have critical external dependencies. It is not fine to define a two week milestone that hinges on one, and then show up empty handed for your demo milestone because that darn Joe Dorfhauser didn’t cough up. Your milestone should be redefined, re-sequenced, or re-framed to include time for scaffolding that you can code now and then happily throw away.

#5 Own your dependencies

When you are building something that has a dependency, you own it. Whoever is the “them” who is building the thing you are depending upon, is now “we”,- so our mojo principles now apply. Ask your new “team mate” what their next two week demo is so that you can keep the pulse of the dependency you now own. Never accept radio silence. Can’t squeeze out a milestone commitment? Demo’s not happening? Go talk to someone immediately.

#6 Help your colleagues out of their doldrums by not going there with them

People naturally fall into the doldrums. You can tell. They don’t seem to have their dev environment running much, show up less, have no patches in the system, seek distractions, get whiney, horse around way more than average, don’t seek folks out to demo their latest creation, and so forth. Doldrums are communicable, they can infect an entire team. Help your colleague by not going there with them. You can’t help someone out of a hole by climbing in with them.

#7 Write no email longer than two paragraphs

Emails longer than two paragraphs long are basically useless because they do not launch. You are likely avoiding a quick conversation/IM for some reason, or have lost your path to your next demo and are thus seeking distraction. High mojo teams don’t write much, they ship much.

#8 Have four weeks of your work planned and twelve weeks of “team” vision

It is nearly impossible to keep your mojo without sensing the next round of work that is waiting for your talented hands. It’s like running without someone chasing you – tough to sustain a head of steam. So you should have a reasonable sense of what the two weeks after this two weeks holds for you. And you should have a broad three month roadmap in your head outlining work that the team as a whole is tackling. If this has not been communicated – go kick a manager in the ass. This (both the ass kick AND the resulting roadmap) provides mojo in broader context.

#9 Don’t worry if – someone else is building it, it doesn’t ship , it doesn’t grow fast

Teams with mojo don’t worry about duplication of effort, risk of not shipping, or fear of “it” not being a hit. Look at this way – if you work at a startup in a hot market, there is a high chance that at least six other well funded competitors are making something similar, and there is a very high chance that one of the competitor’s will out perform you and take the lion’s share of the market.

Yep, managers try to divide and conquer, but occasionally they trip over each other, and sometimes it is critical to intentionally build throw-away-stuff, simply to see forward. So, if something you’ve been coding doesn’t ship, or is swapped out by another team’s subsystem, don’t worry – it is a small price to pay for an innovative culture. Keep building!

#10 Surprise someone

Individuals on high mojo teams surprise each other. They build things in addition to what was requested, or better than what was requested, and show them off. They don’t ask for innovative work assignments – they do innovative work. When colleagues are surprising each other, the whole team gains mojo.

Finally

Team principles are aspirational. If you breath, you will sometimes space these principals out, and occasionally feel blocked. If you feel blocked in any way, not sure what your next demo is, in the doldrums, loosing your bearing in any way… just go talk to a colleague, a TL, a PM or a manager until you feel unblocked. Just don’t loose your mojo for too long – the team is counting on you!

Mussie Shore is an inventor, designer, team leader, and technology officer in the software industry. He has a passion for building market-focused products and services that deliver value and simplicity in every element of the user’s experience. He enjoys working with high performance teams that successfully navigate the confluence of market opportunity and engineering feasibility. Currently he is at Google. He joined Google after they acquired his venture backed company, Zingku, Inc. Prior to Zinku, Mussie was VP of Product at Kubi Software; CTO at McKinsey & Co; and Chief Designer at Lotus.

Are you Inspired? Think you are up for it? Come on get your tickets today to StartupWeekend Lebanon and join us for a fun exciting weekend! http://www.yallastartup.org/startupweekend/ – Register before September 30 and get $25 off.

Many great companies started as a weekend project and we want you to be next! If you are passionate about building great things and are up for a fun intense weekend then YallaStartup Weekend is for you.

StartupWeekend is a famous event that has taken place in 54 cities in the US and around the world and we are bringing it to Beirut on November 12, 13 and 14 at Berytech. The weekend is a hands-on event that encourages out of the box creative thinking and startup creation. The idea is very simple, you join us on the first day of the weekend with a group of highly motivated developers, product, marketing, graphic and business guys and girls together, you team up, decide on an idea, code and deliver a prototype on Sunday. During the weekend, VCs and experts will be spending walking around the venue and giving some short talks in the hope of scouting the next big thing! Winning teams will receive prizes and recognition on YallaStartup and our press partners.

A number of teams from StartupWeekend in the US actually went on to become successful startups and raise funding. The event is open to everyone and if you are in Jordan or Syria we are organizing sponsored bus rides in an exciting and fun “Geeks on a Bus” setup. We are also exploring with the help of our generous sponsors to help assist with your stay, but do feel free to bring your sleeping bags, Berytech is generously allowing participants to crash at the venue.

So what are you waiting for? Learn more and register at http://www.yallastartup.org/startupweekend/. If you register before 9/30, tickets are $25 off so go get them today!

Between now and the event we have a whole series of exiting activities planned. So stay turned!

Oh, and check how the worlds reaction to YallaStartup Weekend:

AllWorld Network and Professor Michael Porter of the Harvard Business School are on a quest to spot Arabia’s fastest growing companies. YallaStartup is a proud partner of this initiative and we want to encourage all our members not to miss this unique opportunity.

AllWorld has already announced the Saudi Fast 100 and the Lebanon Fast 25 winners, next on the list is Jordan! We encourage everyone to apply today to the Jordan|25, and read more about Arabia 500. Private companies from any industry, that are growing quickly, are invited to apply.  Jordan 25|100 winners automatically qualify for the Arabia 500, becoming part of a global network of AllWorld entrepreneurs.

“Being a Saudi Fast 100 winner inspired our team. Our staff sees that their hard work has paid off, our customers are more confident that they are putting their needs in the right hands and our shareholders are proud to be #1.”

- 2009 Saudi Fast Growth 100 #1 company – Secutronic’s co-founders, Mr. Jawad Anwar Ali and Mr. Ihab El Samannoudi

101010: That’s not binary for “Hello” that’s the date the YallaStartup team will be in Jordan taking part in the MENA ICT Forum!

We are excited that YallaStartup is viewed as a regional thought leader at the event. YallaStartup co-founder, Habib Haddad, will be speaking at the event on two panels, the MENA Ecosystem and Addressing the Arabic Content Crisis. He will be discussing the realities as they appear on the ground and our unique approach to addressing them.

If you happen to be at MENA ICT Forum, please pass by, give us a shout out and cheer us along. If you are not around, feel free to send us your ideas and thoughts by commenting below, tweeting, watweting, emailing, texting, buzzing, facebooking, foursquaring or even ESPing!

We’ll be likely organizing a YallaStartup mafia hangout and will be welcoming all you God Fathers .  Please stay tuned and see you soon!

YallaStartup is proud to partner with Knowledge@Wharton to bring you great content on Entrepreneurship. Please email us your requests for topics to cover at exec@yallastartup.org.

Why do more than half of all start-ups fail? Because they bungle their marketing, according to Leonard Lodish, a professor of marketing at Wharton, and co-author of two books, Entrepreneurial Marketing andMarketing That Works. “The dogs won’t eat the dog food is the way venture capitalists describe it,” Lodish says. The key lies in how a marketing plan is crafted. In this installment of the podcast series for the Wharton-CERT Business Plan Competition, Lodish explains that marketing plans must take into account three critical strategic and tactical factors: positioning, targeting and pricing.

The following are edited extracts of the conversation.

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: Professor Lodish, you have said that marketing is the reason why most ventures fail. Could you explain why?

Leonard Lodish: The biggest problem is that when push comes to shove, whoever needs to buy the product or service that the venture is selling either won’t buy it or won’t buy it at a price that justifies all the costs involved in making and selling the product. The dogs won’t eat the dog food is the way venture capitalists describe it. And depending on whose numbers you look at, 50% to 60% of ventures will fail because of reasons related to marketing, and the reason I just mentioned is probably the biggest one.

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: So a new venture or start-up needs a marketing plan. What should the main elements of a plan be?

Lodish: Three decisions are crucial to the success of any entrepreneurial venture…. Two of them are strategy decisions and one is the tactics that implement it. If you do them well, the venture is much more likely to be successful. If you do them poorly, no matter if you do everything else right, you are still probably not going to do well. If you … do a reasonable job with those three, even if you are not so good on some of the tactical things which we will discuss, you will do okay. The three things are positioning, targeting and pricing.

The first two are basically asking: What am I selling and to whom, and how am I structuring the perception of my offering? I’m using the word “offering” instead of “product” or “service” because it is a bundle of attributes that people perceive. And then: How is my perception going to be different than that of competitors in a way that is attractive enough to a target group of people, who we have to define and who want to buy it for enough [money] to make the whole thing work? It’s important to understand that you need to make these decisions in an environment where you are concerned about not only the present, but also the future. Your major concern has to be [achieving] sustainable, competitive advantage, which is crucial for an entrepreneur because with little resources, little time and few people, you can’t compete on commodities. It’s just not going to work. You can’t compete on price. You have to have a differentiated offering.

You need to develop or leverage distinctive competencies and make sure your positioning [guides] how you are perceived. Leverage those distinctive competencies in a way that the purchaser will see value versus your competition, buy your product for a price that makes sense, and give you some insulation from your competition over the foreseeable future.

It’s not as simple as that because invariably your competition does something that you don’t anticipate and you have to readjust continually. But [it requires] thinking in basic terms about what am I selling and to whom. Why am I different? How can I get sustainable competitive advantage? What are my distinctive competencies? And you need to come up with distinctive competencies that have value to an end user. Putting them in a package is what makes successful ventures.

Once you get that making sense and you have a [proven] group of people who would buy your product, the rest of the marketing plan decisions — the distribution, advertising, promotion, PR, logos and all this other stuff — is much easier to determine. Sometimes it is pretty obvious…. But a lot of entrepreneurs don’t think about it that way when they start their companies.

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: As you correctly noted, when entrepreneurs start companies, they are strapped for resources, and marketing budgets are especially small. Are there any creative ideas that they can use to become effective marketers with little money?

Lodish: The most effective marketing vehicle by far — for new and existing companies — is word of mouth from existing customers. You need to treat your first customers as if they were gold and make sure they are delighted with every aspect of what they are buying from you, then encourage them to tell their friends. If you can do that, you can be successful without spending anything. An example is a company called Milo.com, started by a Wharton undergraduate student, which allows you to check if a product is in stock at your neighborhood retailer. It has a million users and has not, as far as I can tell, spent any money on marketing. But it has optimized Google’s search engine.

Another example of a company that has done this very well is Diapers.com. Again, it was started by a Wharton student, and 35% of its new users comes as word of mouth from existing users. It has been the fastest-growing Internet retailer for four years running.

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: What are some of the most common errors that entrepreneurs make in marketing, and how can these be overcome?

Lodish: The most common, as opposed to the most important? The most important error is developing and coming to market with the product and not being able to sell it. You end up failing. I described that a little bit earlier.

There are all kinds of other errors involving people thinking they have to advertise to get their brand out there. In a lot of cases, you can do that much cheaper because the biggest asset, again, is word of mouth. If you have people telling their friends about you — and there have been studies about this — it is 10, 15, 20 times more valuable than having somebody see an ad. [So the error occurs with] people wasting a lot of money and being more concerned about tactics than strategy.

For one of the data points in our entrepreneurial marketing book, Marketing That Works, we surveyed two groups of people about their marketing activities. One was a group of run-of-the-mill Pennsylvanian entrepreneurs; the other was Inc 500 CEOs [of the fastest-growing companies in the U.S.] When you asked the run-of-the-mill entrepreneurs what the most important marketing decisions are that they need to make, they talk about tactics. When we asked the Inc 500 CEOs the same question, they talked about positioning and targeting. That explains a lot.

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: What is the relationship between marketing and sales? And what do entrepreneurs need to understand about this relationship to succeed?

Lodish: Marketing is the process of structuring exchanges so that they are valuable. Sales people implement those exchanges. In successful companies, the marketing people and the sales people work very closely together. In fact, in the second of the two books we’ve done –Marketing That Works — we added a chapter on marketing-enabled sales because for your sales people to be successful, there are a lot of things marketing can do to support them, including explaining to the customer how the product works and developing proposals that the sales people can use. Marketing amplifies sales, and sales amplifies marketing. But marketing has to happen first. If you have the right product and service and the right target, sales is an implementation vehicle.

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: Most entrepreneurs I have met have been intuitive marketers. When they launch a start-up, what aspects of marketing are innate? And what do they need to learn about marketing?

Lodish: They need to understand the important strategic concepts and how to make some of these tactical decisions. There have been a lot of people in a lot of marketing departments — especially here at Wharton — who have spent a lot of time working on those decisions. But the biggest thing they can do is go into the marketplace and generate evidence about whether people want to buy their offering at a price that makes sense. You can do that by very simple in-market or concept testing. You can do stuff on the web. But you need to, in a structured way, get people’s reactions and get their intent to purchase. That is very low in cost but extremely valuable.

A good example of that is a company called CarsDirect.com, which is the largest automobile dealer in the U.S. It is part of Internet Brands. It started in 1999 when somebody asked, “Could we sell automobiles over the Internet and deliver them to people with a bow on them?” They glued together a site over a weekend, bought some search words in what was the prelude to Yahoo’s overture search called Goto.com and sold cars at something like $50 over invoice. They sold four cars over the weekend, but they proved they could sell $30,000 or $40,000 cars over the Internet. That cost them $15,000, including what they lost on each car because they weren’t buying in bulk. From that, they got $200 million in venture capital and are now the largest auto dealer.

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: Could you give one or two points of practical advice for entrepreneurs who want to be better at marketing?

Lodish: Don’t be afraid to do something different to be noticed. Once you’ve done your positioning and targeting, the first thing you want to do is leverage your happy customers. Give them as much inducement as you can to tell their friends — coupons to give their friends or a reduction off on their order when they sign up friends. That’s what Diapers.com does.

If you are not going to do that, the next thing to do is leverage public relations and publicity. The best example of that still is what Josh Kopelman did when he launched Half.com [a website selling used CDs, DVDs, books and video games]. He went to Halfway, Oregon, [in 1999] and convinced the town council in return for [financial donations] to change the name of the town from Halfway to Half.com. That got him on Katie Couric’s “Today” show for five minutes talking about his website. When it was launched, even though he thought he had industrial-strength servers, the demand was so high that the servers went down. A year later, [Half.com] was bought by eBay [in a stock deal valued at about $350 million]. It was a good purchase for eBay because Kopelman had created so much value. But he had to fight with his VC firms that financed him to not spend money on TV advertising, which everybody else was doing, and to do these creative things.

The other thing he did that summer was what he called “guerrilla marketing” — he gave some Wharton students rubber gloves with holes in them that said, “Don’t piss away half your money. Go to Half.com to save half,” and put them in every men’s room in New York City…. That got him a lot of notoriety, but that was the one of his marketing activities that Meg Whitman stopped when eBay bought Half.com.

About Knowledge@Wharton

Knowledge@Wharton is the online journal of the Wharton school of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. The global network provide cutting-edge knowledge and timely business analysis to more than 1.5 million registered users in 200 countries. For more information and to subscribe to the newsletter, please visit: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/arabic

This is the part of an ongoing series of guest articles about entrepreneurship. If you would like to contribute to this series, contact us at exec@yallastartup.org with your proposal.

هذا المقال تابع لسلسلة من المقالات المستمرة عن الريادة. إذا كنت ترغب في المساهمة الرجاء إرسال رسالة إلكترونية إلى

Advice by serial Entrepreneur Brian Balfour

Know Why You Are Raising

Its great to have grand dreams of being the next GroupOn, Zynga, or , but keep those dreams in check while raising your first capital. First time entrepreneurs are commonly unrealistic about three things. One, the fact that your idea is a good fit for Angel/VC money in the first place. Two, the amount of funding you need and the valuation you are asking for. And three, the milestones you can achieve with that funding. Overshooting these three things raise a huge red flag with investors as it shows you aren’t able to properly think through the business.

Its The Process As Much As The Pitch

Successfully raising funding comes down to how you execute the process as much as the quality of your pitch and idea. Create urgency and build momentum by properly preparing diligence and executing as many initial pitches in the shortest frame of time you can. Once you do your first pitch, your chances that you get a term sheet become less likely each day that passes. Don’t lie about commitments or shop term sheets, but there is a proper way to get investors to compete. Competition among investors is where you will find leverage.

Do Your Diligence

Many first time entrepreneurs get so enamored once they get a funding offer, they breeze by their diligence on the investor. Entrepreneurs should do as much due diligence on the investor, as the investor does on the company. Talk to founders (not hired CEO’s or other execs) of recent successful and not successful portfolio companies. Additionally, do whatever it takes to get back door references for a true perspective. Money from a really bad investor is worse then no money at all.

Bonus: Never wait for the money to get started (on anything). While difficult, you must keep the company moving forward while you fund raise if you want to close capital.

Brian Balfour is a Co-Founder and Vice President of Business Development & Marketing at Viximo, a venture backed social gaming platform. Throughout his startups, Brian has raised both angel funding and millions in venture capital. You can follow Brian on Twitter @bbalfour or at his blog SocialDegree.

(This is cross posted from Sami Shalabi’s blog)

During my trips to the middle east I try to capture new thoughts about things I observe. My previous post on the topic covered my early observations. This summer I had the privilege of hanging out with some Jordanian entrepreneurs and listen to their heroic journeys. Here are my observations:

The opportunity is significant, but opaque.

On the ground it is clear the opportunity is significant. You can see how peoples lives can be impacted by technology. The things we use everyday in the West, such as online shopping, online banking, LBS, e-commerce, etc are still not mainstream, but it is clear the region is at an inflection point. Internet access to spreading like wildfire. There is a desperate need to local solutions.

However, the opportunity is still very opaque for people not on the ground. As part of some due diligence I was doing, I had a very difficult time finding any concrete data about market size, the flow of money, the major players, etc. Such information is easily found for other markets. Information appears to be shared anecdotally, and once pieced together does not always add up. Candidly, people like me, who have short stays, walk away not feeling comfortable investing.

Recommendation: We need to capture, document and publish real market data to showcase the opportunity. It is a critical piece of bootstrapping the investor/acquisition ecosystem.

The flow of money is a serious challenge

This appeared to be a universal problem for everyone I talked to. Getting money into their bank accounts is difficult.

Investors: Getting money from investors is a challenge. There are not many early stage investors. If they do exist they offer ridiculously low valuations only viable to the desperate.

Business-To-Consumer: Lots of startups complained about something we take for granted, the lack of a payment gateway. Most complained that they can not find a bank willing to offer them an online payment system. Therefore, collecting any money from consumers that scales and automatically goes into their bank accounts is just MIA. Options like paypal, etc just do not work. They need to get creative, but this issue really hampers the local startups from succeeding.

Business-To-Businsess:: Another complaint I heard is that money collection is real challenge. You can do a lot of business on credit, but payments become an issue. I was told that bartering is a common means to pay for things when money and credit are tight.

Exits: Exits are hard anywhere. In the US, large corporations understand that acquisitions are an important tool to infusing talent, create new businesses, and get access to new technology. The acquirers in the region are lacking, unless they are from the outside. As someone who has been through an exist it is a tough journey and does not happen easily. Therefore in the region the odds for exists are very limited. This is a tricky problem since you run into a chicken and egg. You need big corporations to acquire little guys. However, there aren’t that many big guys around. So we need to help the little guys become giants.

Recommendation: Embrace the realities since these problems will take a while to get solved. Governments should take the flow of money issue head on since it will require legislation to address this huge gap.

Exposure outside the MENA

I asked everyone I met how they want from the Diaspora to help? This was in part to ask how someone like me can help and how organizations I am involved with such as YallaStartup, and MIT Arab Alum Association can help. The most common thread I got is more exposure to the US. When I go back I will look for ways to bridge this gap, but my advice to these startups is that exposure is a full on contact sport. Get out there, make it a priority.

Recommendation: You should try to goto the conferences, make it a point and mingle. Whenever you visit someplace new, reach out to people you know and do not know. This is standard procedure for us in the US. People like to do business with people they know and like. Just do it!

MENA Entrepreneurs are warriors!

The entrepreneurs I met are real warriors. They are leading the pack with their risk taking. I salute them all for what they have achieved given the difficulties they talked to me about.

Finally, the Arab diaspora really wants to help. if you have ideas for how we can help, please do contact me at [sami at yallastartup.org]

Link to original post

This is the part of an ongoing series of guest articles about entrepreneurship. If you would like to contribute to this series, contact us at exec@yallastartup.org with your proposal.

هذا المقال تابع لسلسلة من المقالات المستمرة عن الريادة. إذا كنت ترغب في المساهمة الرجاء إرسال رسالة إلكترونية إلى exec@yallastartup.org

Now that I’m between startups, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what I want to work on next.  I like thinking in frameworks, which makes it easier to evaluate new opportunities and create my own theses around where technology and business is heading.  My previous analysis on the Product vs Distribution Framework focused on the core traits a company needs to ultimately succeed. This post looks instead at the macro trends of the Internet itself.

Each phase of the Internet’s growth was enabled by key platforms, and had key successes that were able to level those platforms and other trends to create huge businesses.  Each phase also built on the previous phases, and would not have been possible without the foundation created before it. And because of this improving foundation and growing user base, each phase enables bigger opportunities that can be reached faster than before.

The diagram below shows the four key phases of the Internet, as the platforms and successes in each, as well as the worldwide desktop and mobile Internet user base. Note that the timeline for each is a general approximation of that trait as the defining leading edge of the web, and there exists considerable overlap in the general use cases and impact of each.

2 – The Searchable Web

The second phase of the Internet saw an explosion of content, which was built on the key enablers of the first age (desktops, browsers, web standards). Once the volume of content exploded beyond the early manageable levels, lists and portals were no longer sufficient to access this content. This led to search becoming the only feasible way to harness the incredibly expanding volume of content.

Google emerged in this era as the key platform because of it’s simple, powerful, and fast search capabilities. This dominance led to a web that was organized through the principles of PageRank, and created the SEO and SEM industries. It also opened up a new world of long tail e-commerce, where small companies could have a much bigger footprint than ever before, and cheaply reach customers across the world.

3 – The Social Web

The third phase of the web was based on saturation of online penetration among the general population. A true social web can only existing once online penetration begins to saturate the population, reaching 70% adoption or more. Interestingly, most developed countries started reaching this penetration level around 2003-2005, coinciding with the birth and growth of social networks. This is in stark contrast to the Searchable Web, which is valuable to users even with low adoption rates as long as there is enough content to search.

In this phase, Facebook has emerged as the defacto social platform. This platform has facilitated the creation and growth of two of the fastest companies ever to reach a $1B revenue run rate: Zynga and Groupon.  Both of them used the Facebook platform to grow faster and more cheaply than ever before due to the incredible low friction that social networks have to get new users. Zynga reached 100 million users faster than Facebook itself, mainly because most of the users were ALREADY on FAcebook, making them much easier to acquire.

4 – The Mobile Web

The fourth phase if the one we are just entering, which is being enabled by ubiquitous mobile computers (e.g. smartphones). Inherent to this phase is not just the mobile computer itself, but the fact that they are increasingly always with us, and are location aware (know where we are).  The combination of ever-present mobile computing, plus a rich location layer, seamlessly integrated with the social graph and the searchable web creates enormous opportunities.

The key platforms in this space have are clearly iPhone and Android, but there is still room for winners on the customer side.  Foursquare appears to be one of the early companies to succeed while specifically leveraging mobile + location, but there will certainly be more.

What does this mean?

What’s interesting about these trends as I pointed out earlier is that each phase gets progressively bigger than the one before, and leads to faster growth for companies that are well positioned.  You can bet that new companies will emerge will get to $1B in revenue faster than Groupon and Zynga.

About the Author

Ariel Diaz is an entrepreneur currently running a startup and a consulting company. He serves as President of the Dartmouth Entrepreneur Network of Boston, and on the Executive Committee for the Thayer School Annual Fund.

In his previous life he worked as a Management Consultant for a boutique strategy consulting firm in Boston. He holds an A.B., and B.E. from Dartmouth College, and a Master of Engineering Management fromThayer School of Engineering and Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

This is cross posted from Habib Haddad’s blog

When the Chinese internet giant QQ released Fanfou a few years ago many criticized it as an obvious clone to twitter. The same again happened with the launch of Watwet the Jordanian startup. After all, at first glance the sites do look a lot like twitter. Maktoob, the company behind the Arab internet success story was always described as the Yahoo of the Middle East because of the very similar services it provided. It didn’t come much of a surprise when Yahoo actually acquired the company in 2009.

But is localizing an existing product or business idea imitation or art, and does that limit innovation or actually requires it?

There are mainly two types of innovations, incremental and transformational. Incremental innovations are improvements built on existing products that add benefit to the user. Suggested search in Google and Yahoo is an example, higher resolution on the new iPhone is another. Transformational innovation on the other hand is much more disruptive, it creates dramatical change in industries. Creation of the web, invention of the wheel and in my opinion the iPhone itself are all transformational innovations.

Smart localization would fall under incremental innovation and a number of web companies in the Middle East have been doing a good job at that. Baythas taken Monster.com model to the Middle East but was innovative in its business and sales approach that allowed it to flourish in a fragmented market. Maktoob was able to capture users by localizing Yahoo services by capitalizing on forum’s  (Bulletin Board System) popularity in the Middle East and using its true understanding of the cultural intricacies. A good example of that is BentElHalal the matrimonial forum/service.

Twitter clones are good examples of how localization could be incremental innovations. In Japan, Digital Garage has partnered with Twitter to localize it but has taken a very innovative approach. In fact one might argue that Twitter Japan has been even more innovative that the original company with the earlier release of a mobile version and ad platform.  Watwet has replicated Twitter in the Middle East but focused on the SMS by signing deals with operators to wave the charges. SMS GupShup in India has done an amazing job at that by quickly capturing 30 Million users and adding an SMS advertising platform.

The real problem however, is when it becomes a blunt copy paste . The copy paste approach is not only unethical, but does not offer a sustainable advantage and more seriously discourages innovation in the company or even country at large.

An example of a blunt copy paste is Biglion the russian clone of Groupon. The company went even to the point of ripping off the site’s design and navigation. In an emerging market like the Middle East, there still remains a lot of white space to fill. While a blunt copy paste is very tempting it that it’s important to not forget that it’s not only a bad business approach but also a recipe for suffocating innovation at large.

In my opinion, for localization to really work it does require some amount of innovation and art, and that’s where players like Maktoob and Bayt have been very successful at. But what we lack in the Middle East are transformational innovations and while signs of those still exist I am confident that as the “cost of failure” gets lowered, culturally and financially, that we’ll witness much more transformational innovations.

By Habib Haddad; habib AT YallaStartup DOT org, @habibh

(This is cross posted from Habib Haddad’s blog)

The Middle East and North Africa region is home to 350 Million Arabic native speakers, 65% of which are under the age of 30. While internet penetration is still low at 20% it’s growing at the fastest rate in the world, mobile penetration however is at 80% with about 220M users. The education and health are booming due to the fast population growth. This growth coupled with the wealth of some countries especially in the Gulf is creating significant opportunities that are yet to be explored.

However a large portion of the massive GCC sovereign wealth funds was historically invested in markets like USA, Europe and Asia, but the recent downturn has put pressure to finally look and foster opportunities in the MENA region itself. Governments all over the Arab world are also keen on accelerating entrepreneurship and have been shifting the mindset of their funds towards more early stage deals, hoping to create that ecosystem. The challenge here is that it’s not just a shift of mindset but also a shift in required skills; Investing in startups and SMEs in the MENA emerging market is far from similar to investing in a developed ecosystem where the returns and exits are more or less established.

Incubators are also proliferating in the region aiming to foster early stage entrepreneurship. While I am a big fan of mentorship and truly believe it can add tangible value I am not sure traditional incubators are the answer. Those risk of becoming real-estate projects and can loose the energetic culture that they were set to create in the first place. Great entrepreneurs would want to tap into the contacts that the incubators provide but would graduate when the right time comes. The program/mentorship incubators that were pioneered by the likes of YCombinator and TechStars could work well but it’s important to not forget that the MENA is no Silicon Valley so we should be careful when adapting those concepts in the region. Meydan is one example of a TechStars model that launched in Jordan a few months ago.

One big gap remains in the seed investing with virtually no Angel network. It will require a generation of successful entrepreneurs to exit, make their fortune and turn to angel investing – while adding value – but in the meantime our bet still remains on incubators and on convincing wealthy individuals that investing in people is much more impactful then investing in buildings.

It will require a bit of testing and adaptation until MENA startups, VCs and Angels figure out the best model(s) but it’s important in my opinion to not to try and emulate the Silicon Valley but rather to focus on finding our own competitive edge. Taiwan for example was able to first position itself as a hub of semiconductor manufacturing and it actually did so by leveraging it’s competitive advantage: The Taiwanese Diaspora in working in tech companies in the Silicon Valley. Rwanda is another example of how Government was able to make a transformational change. In just a few years after the 1990 genocide Rwanda ranked 67 in the world bank “ease of doing business” index ahead of many Arab countries. Rwanda also focused on it’s competitive edge and in this case it was Coffee. Now that Rwandan Coffee is selling at a premium price on US shelves, it has created an entrepreneurial revolution back home. Businesses including technology oriented ones are emerging to serve this industry.

Going back to the MENA region I believe the conclusion is that we need to focus on our competitive advantages. Lebanon for example has been a historical creative hub and the birth place of many renown artists. This has pushed Cisco’s CSR arm to invest in fostering a Lebanese creative cluster, an admirable move that could have a long lasting effect.

On the other hand, international companies are also getting interested in the region and have started entering it, mind you each with different strategy. Google for example has set up sales and marketing offices in Egypt and the UAE and have assembled an engineering team in Zurich, Yahoo has acquired Maktoob the largest Arabic portal and Facebook signed a deal with ConnectAds a MENA ad agency to sell ads on its behalf – I will address the benefits of each to the local entrepreneurs in a later post - So while the painting of the entrepreneurship ecosystem hasn’t yet been completed, the MENA market offers a very fertile market, and it’s huge!

Link to original post.

By Habib Haddad; habib AT YallaStartup DOT org, @habibh

TechWadi, the leading networking association for Arab and Arab American technology professionals is coming to Beirut and will be hosting an event at AUB Olayan School of Business on Wednesday June 23.

Join us for an energizing discussion on accelerating entrepreneurship and venture capital in Lebanon and across the MENA region. The Forum will bring together distinguished investors, executives, entrepreneurs and policymakers, united in their vision to create a vibrant world-class entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Use the promo code TWYALLA and get your discounted tickets today and don’t miss this great opportunity.

YallaStartup has partnered with TechWadi on various programs, some of which will be announced at the forum. Also joining will be a distinguished delegation led by the US State Department including prominent investors and entrepreneurs seeking to expand cross-border ties with the MENA region.

More info on the forum here.

Brought to you by Kharabeesh.

]]> http://www.yallastartup.org/blog/2010/05/20/%d9%85%d8%ba%d8%a7%d9%85%d8%b1%d8%a7%d8%aa-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%a7%d9%86%d8%b7%d8%b1%d8%a8%d8%b1%d9%88%d9%86%d9%88%d8%b1-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%b5%d8%ba%d9%8a%d8%b1/feed/ 2 http://www.yallastartup.org/blog/2010/05/08/%d8%b1%d9%8a%d8%a7%d8%af%d8%a9-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%a3%d8%b9%d9%85%d8%a7%d9%84-%d9%82%d8%b5%d8%a9-%d8%a3%d9%85%d8%b3-%d9%88%d8%ad%d9%84%d9%85-%d8%a7%d9%84%d9%8a%d9%88%d9%85/ http://www.yallastartup.org/blog/2010/05/08/%d8%b1%d9%8a%d8%a7%d8%af%d8%a9-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%a3%d8%b9%d9%85%d8%a7%d9%84-%d9%82%d8%b5%d8%a9-%d8%a3%d9%85%d8%b3-%d9%88%d8%ad%d9%84%d9%85-%d8%a7%d9%84%d9%8a%d9%88%d9%85/#comments Sat, 08 May 2010 10:07:13 +0000 Guest Author http://www.yallastartup.org/blog/?p=462

This is the part of an ongoing series of guest articles about entrepreneurship. If you would like to contribute to this series, contact us at exec@yallastartup.org with your proposal.

هذا المقال تابع لسلسلة من المقالات المستمرة عن الريادة. إذا كنت ترغب في المساهمة الرجاء إرسال رسالة إلكترونية إلى exec@yallastartup.org

بقلم عماد المسعودي

صفحات كتاب محركو الاقتصاد اليمني الذي يتناول قصص نجاح أهم 100 رجل أعمال يمني، ذكرتني ببحث قمت به قبل عدة أشهر يتعلق بتحديد شخصيات ريادية شابة في الوطن العربي، فالتشابه بين قصة رجال الأعمال اليمنيين لا تختلف كثيراً عن قصة بقية رجال الأعمال الناجحين في بقية الدول العربية. هناك نسق واضح جداً، إليكم كيف تبدأ القصة:

التاجر فلان بدأ تجارته بدكان بسيط ومتواضع يبيع منتج معين في “دكان فلان”، وبعد 20 سنة من الجهد والمثابرة، تم فتح فرع جديد للدكان، وبعد 10 سنوات أخرى تسارع النمو وأصبحت “شركة فلان” تمتلك فروع في كل المدن.  من ثم دخلت الشركة في قطاع جديد وبدأت تقدم تبيع منتجات أخرى، وفي هذه المرة تم النمو بشكل أسرع بكثير، ومن ثم تم فتح شركة أخرى، ودخلت الشركة في عدة مجالات، وأخيراً تم تغيير إسمها إلى “مجموعة فلان”.  الآن أصبح الشيخ أو الحاج فلان رئيس مجلس إدارة المجموعة وتولى أبناء فلان إدارة شركات المجموعة وتطويرها.

قصة التاجر فلان مليئة بالعبر، فهي تجسد المثابرة والكفاح والنجاح، ولكن يجب علينا أن ندرك بأن سوق اليوم المليئ بالمنافسة المحلية والدولية يستدعي  إعادة النظر. إليكم بعض النقاط المهمة:

1 - عندما افتتح التاجر فلان دكانه كان هدفه هو تأمين مصدر رزق لعائلته، لهذا لم يفكر في النمو مباشرة، وإنما بعد وقت طويل جداً اكتشف بأن أمامه ثروة تجاهلها لمدة طويلة، وعندها فقط قرر توسيع شركته. وهنا يجب أن لا نلوم التاجر فلان، بل على العكس، يجب أن نحترم شجاعته، فبالتأكيد كان هناك أكثر من تاجر لديه دكان مشابه، لكنه الوحيد الذي قرر المخاطرة والتوسع.

2 - بعد نجاح شركة فلان، اكتشف التاجر فلان بأن المنافسة المحلية ضعيفة جداً، فقرر الدخول في مجالات أخرى، ولا بأس في هذا القرار إلا أنه عادة ما يفقد مجموعة فلان للاستراتيجية المنظمة، فتجد المجموعة تبيع السيارات، ولديها بنك، ومزرعة دواجن، ومستشفى، ومصنع بسكوت. طبعاً تنويع المنتجات فيه توزيع إيجابي للمخاطر، لكنه يسبب تشتيت في نمو الشركة ويقلل من كفاءة وفعالية الفريق الإداري.

3 - معظم هذه المؤسسات التجارية عبارة عن شركات عائلية، فالحاج فلان يحاول أن يورث حرفته وصنعته وتجارته لأولاده. والحقيقة، أن هناك قصص نجح الأبناء في تطوير الشركة وتوسيعها، ولكن في الغالب تتدهور مجموعة فلان بعد رحيله بعد عمر طويل. فأحياناً يولي الحاج فلان ولده إدارة الشركة بالرغم من عدم رغبة الولد، وأحياناً صغر عمر الولد وقلة خبرته تفرز قرارات متسرعة، ولا ننسى الخلافات العائلية في مجال الورث وتقسيم الأملاك وأثرها السلبي على مسيرة الحاج المرحوم “فلان”.

كلي احترام وتقدير للحاج فلان ولما قدمته شركته للمجمتع والاقتصاد المحلي، ولكن أملي أن يستفيد رواد أعمال اليوم من أخطاء رواد أعمال الأمس، وفي نفس الوقت أن يستمدوا منهم الإلهام والتحفيز. إليكم الدروس المستفادة من وجهة نظري:

1 - إبدأ مشروعك بطموح عالي، وكن على ثقة بأنك تستطيع اكتساح الأسواق العالمية وإنتاج شيء جديد ومميز. ريادة الأعمال نوعان، ريادة الأعمال الصغيرة (دكان، سائق تاكسي، إلخ..)، وريادة الأعمال القابلة للنمو (شركة نقل بحري، موقع إلكتروني عالمي، إلخ..).  لدينا الكثير من النوع الأول، نحن بحاجة ماسة للنوع الثاني.

2 - عندما يبدأ مشروعك بالنجاح، واصل تطويره وتوسع في مجالات مرتبطة بمنتجك أو خدمتك الرئيسية. لا تجعل الحواجز الجغرافية تحصر طموحك، إن نجحت في مصر، فتوسع للوطن العربي، وإن نجحت في الوطن العربي، توجه إلى السوق العالمي. استمر في التركيز على خدمتك الرئيسية ولا تشتت تفكيرك.

3 - كون فريق عمل قوي بعيداً عن المجاملات، اختر ناس أمناء أكفاء تستطيع الاعتماد عليهم. لا بأس في أن تعطي ولدك منصباً مرموقاًيوماً ما، ولكن إن لم يكن مؤهلاً لا تجعله صانع قرار. إن كنت تحبه أعطه جزء كبير من ملكية الشركة، لكن لا توله زمام الأمور إلا إن كان أهلاً لها. هذا الكلام ينطبق على أقاربك وأصدقاءك أيضاً. هذه هي الوساطة التي دمرت مجتمعنا لكنها بشكل مختلف، اجعل الكفاءة عامل لتحديد القادة في شركتك.

أقتصادنا اليوم قائم على النجاح الذي حققه جيل الأمس، وجيل اليوم مربوط بحبال اليأس والتذمر واختلاق الأعذار. ابحث، تعلم، وانطلق.. كُن تاجراً !

عماد المسعودي

عماد المسعودي، مؤسس مشروع عقار ماب، حاصل على ماجستير في إدارة التكنولوجيا والإبتكار، ولديه مدونة لترويج ثقافة ريادة الأعمال في الوطن العربي.

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This is part of an ongoing series of expert articles about entrepreneurship. It answers the questions you have asked on YallaStartup answers. If you would like to contribute to this series, contact us at exec@yallastartup.org with your proposal.

Q1. In Arabic below:

ما الفرق بين “رأس المال” (المبلغ المسجل ضمن الوثائق القانونية لتأسيس الشركة) و”قيمة الشركة”، قبل مرحلة تمويلية معينة (لنقل مثلا التقدير الأولي Pre-money valuation)؟

حسب فهمي الشخصي ثمة فرق. لكني اليوم في اجتماع مع محام، علمت منه أن قيمة الشركات ذات المسؤولية المحدودة في المغرب، هي نفسها قيمة المبلغ الذي سجلت به كرأس مال. وهي قيمة لا تتغير بحجم المداخيل. فلو تم تأسيس شركة ذات مسؤولية محدودة وحدد لها مبلغ ألف دولار، فسيكون ذلك المبلغ هو قيمتها. ولو جاء مستثمر وأراد الدخول في تمويل الشركة، فإن تقييمه الوحيد الممكن سيكون هو ألف دولار. على الأقل هذا ما يعرفه المحامي الآن، وقد طلبت منه البحث أكثر في موضوع الاستثمارات.

أو ربما الأمر يختلف من دولة إلى أخرى، وهذا يقودني إلى السؤال الموالي

نظام الاستثمار المخاطر (Venture Capital) ظهر بداية في أمريكا، وتطور كثيرا هناك. في حين لم ينتقل هذا النموذج الاستثماري إلى كل الدول، ولا بنفس الشكل. ما هي الدول العربية التي تتوفر ترسانتها القانونية على أنظمة التمويل المخاطر القريبة من النظام الأمريكي؟ وهل تعرف تفاصيل معينة عن نظام (قانون) استثمار رؤوس الأموال المخاطرة في الشركات الناشئة في المغرب؟

Thank you for your question.

Founders/entrepreneurs in any jurisdiction must differentiate clearly between two terms that will be crucial in setting up their business and potential entertaining third party funding – namely capital and valuation.

The process for forming companies is somewhat similar in all jurisdictions, seeing as the underlying premise of registering commercial interests in the name of commercial vehicles as opposed to persons is the same. The idea that an operation, a contract, a license, a patent, etc. are owned by the Company and not the founder are what allows a founder to readily divest/exit (sell shares) and therefore benefit financially.

Capital of the Company

The Company must legally be owned by a person(s). This partial ownership is what capital or equity is addressing. One must always remember that the capital/equity holders are the beneficial owners. Capital has nothing to do with valuation.

For example, your lawyer may recommend that you incorporate the Company with a paid up capital of $1,000 divided into 1,000 shares. The Company is therefore collectively owned by the holder(s) of the 1,000 shares. This initial capitalization again does not relate to the valuation but instead refers back to how much funding was initially injected into the Company to get operations started. Jurisdictions have different minimum requirements for initial capitalization outlined in statute.

Remember, larger capitalization does not mean that the Company is better off. Larger capitalization may actually hinder returns and operation seeing as legal requirements such as assigning statutory reserves may apply.

Valuation

The valuation of the Company will depend on a multiple of its assets and/or its profits (ie. earnings). To take an example, if the Company is making $100,000 a year and is valued using a 5 times earnings multiple (ie. $100,000 x 5), it is seen to be valued at $500,000. If the same Company had 1,000 shares, each share would logically be valued at $500 even if Commercial Registry says that each share has a Par Value of $1.

The most important factor in addressing valuations are the multiples. The buyer and the seller must come to an agreement on the multiple. This would be done by considering how the Company is assessed in comparison to other companies in the same field. One would do well to consider similar listed companies and see the market’s assessment of multiples before making any valuation-based decision.

Venture Capital

Venture Capital in the region is readily available although it is obviously not as well structured, organized or marketed as it is in the West. For all intents and purposes, private holding companies owned by investors and traders in these jurisdictions satisfy this segment. The only difference in practice is that the holding period for such Venture Capital Investors is longer, seeing as access to markets is not as simple (reference to comparison between time required to list companies in the West versus time required in the region).

That said, some jurisdictions facilitate access to markets and exchanges more readily than others. Dubai and Qatar are the primary examples usually used.

In the future, the region will continue to adopt more structured methods of assessing investment opportunities and securing investors risks thereby allowing for specialized Venture Capital Funds to be incorporated. Governments, including Morocco, are already funding and facilitating such vehicles. One would be well advised to contact the relevant Ministry to address these opportunities.

Q2. What’s the best legal set up for a company to operate in the Middle East, knowing that the company would seek investors, issue equity (preferred and common or their equivalent), option pool … Does a BVI setup (British Virgin Island) make the most the sense ?

Where to set up

The selection of the best legal set up depends wholly on the jurisdiction and the business you’re in. I’ll expand with a few pointers which may be helpful.

The standard recommendation is to have the Company incorporated in the jurisdiction in which it will be operating. For example, if you’re setting up a trading company with operations in Dubai, you might as well incorporate the main office in Dubai, as opposed to forming it elsewhere and then incorporate a branch in Dubai.

That said, if you are planning on investing in or developing intangibles such as intellectual properties, one should incorporate in a country where the legal framework guarantees both your ownership and your asset’s security and integrity.

Which type of company

There is a vast number of company types that may potentially be used. Entrepreneurs are always recommended to discuss their requirements with their legal counsels to establish a structure that meets their needs.

The simplest organizations to form are general partnerships and limited liability companies. If you’re just getting started, I would recommend either of these. The benefits are simple, a general partnership usually have nominal capital requirements, if any, whereas in a limited liability company, you would not be liable if the Company has financial problems.

When you wish to increase the organization’s complexity in terms of equity structure, you can always convert the company into a structure – joint stock company for example – that will allow you to issue common and preferred securities.

Q3. Perfect timing, I really need an answer for this this question:
We are trying to setup our startup as a corporation, but at this point we consist of a Founder and a very tiny team, with the business being financed (bootstrapped) by the Founder who owns a majority stake in the business.

One of the things that confused us is who should constitute our board of directors? The Founder will be one of them, but we have no investors at this point, and we cannot afford experts as directors because its just too soon for us.

Can the board of directors be a one man show in our early days, because we have no time for formalities and meetings as we are busy structuring our business and developing our product.

Please let me know what do you think..

The laws of the country in which you’re incorporated dictate the requirements in appointing the Board of Directors of the type of organization you have opted to form.

Assuming the laws in your country allow for the Board to have only one member, I see nothing wrong with the founder being the Sole Director. This is not unusual for start-ups.

If you need a recommendation on an additional board member, I would also recommend that you go back to your bankers especially if they’ve extended large facilities. Their input may be very helpful.

Q4. I am starting out and some friends and family want to give me money. However, I do not want to anything too complicated. My “investors” want something on paper and I am totally lost. I hear about convertible debt. What do you recommend I do?

In responding to your situation, you will have to address your family and friends’ expectations. We always recommend that you keep it as simple as possible.

Options 1: If they expect to be partial owners of your business and accept the fact that they may see a profit if things go well but may also lose their money if they don’t, I would incorporate a limited liability company and give them shares in it corresponding to the cash investment you receive.

Option 2: If instead they expect to get their money back regardless how you do in business, just simply sign a Loan Deed or Promissory Note that effectively means that you commit to pay them back. They will not be party to any additional profits if the Company does well.

Q5. How does stock vesting work for founders and employees?

The Company is collectively owned by stockholders. At incorporation, the founders are the only stockholders.

Usually with start-ups, founders may opt to grant employees shares in the Company to align commercial interests. This can be done simply by selling shares to them or promising to sell them shares in the future (Stock Options). The way this works is that the founders will decide on what a reasonable valuation of the Company is and then will set up ‘if-then contracts”. For examples, if Employee A stays with the Company for 10 years and if his department is profitable for each of those years, then Employee A will be allowed to buy 10,000 shares at $1 each. Assuming the shares are then worth more than $1, Employee A may be in a position to make a significant profit.

If done well, Stock Option Programs incentivize employees to look after the interests of the Company in the long-term. Be careful though, Stock Option Programs are very rarely done well or structured in a mutually beneficial manner.

Q6. What are common pitfalls that you have seen people do legally and do you have suggestions for how they can be avoided?

The most common pitfall I find with first-time entrepreneurs is their general reservation when it comes to appointing legal counsels whether it’s for incorporating companies or reviewing contracts. The most important element in any company is to get the structure right in the first place and to ensure that your contracts, patents, etc. are legally binding and enforceable. The whole value of the Company depends on these pillars.

I would always recommend even if one opts to ‘Do-It-Yourself’, entrepreneurs should at least get a lawyer to provide a written opinion to confirm that you’re on the right track. Opinions cost nominal amounts and usually save you from having to fix the structure or situation later. Remember it always costs exponentially more later.

Q7. If you are an angel investor, which corporate structures are investor friendly? In the US, we typically do convertible debt or preferred stock in a c-corp. Are those viable options in the MENA?

Convertible debt and preferred stock are both available and executable in MENA. The selection usually depends on how active the angel investor wishes to be and how good the founder is at negotiating.

Again, the underlying theme is always to attempt to keep equity in a growing and successful business for as long as you can. Make sure you don’t give stock away too cheaply whether its common stock, convertible debt, or preferred stock.

If you’re going to give stock away, see if you can adopt a buy-back provision. This usually comes in handy if the Company does excessively well.

Q8. What set ups allow you to issue option pools ? What about vesting schedule ? I think in Lebanon you can’t really have a traditional “vesting schedule” …

Theoretically speaking, any corporate set up provides you with the right to issue option and assign vesting schedules. The main difference with the West though is that the assignment of such rights may not be done by the Company’s Management or its Board of Directors, it must be resolved and ratified by the Company’s shareholders. This is why many corporation in the region shy away from such programs.

That said, if the vast majority of shareholders approve of the scheme, there is no legal limitation – assuming the program is well structured to ensure enforceability.

About Aymen Almoayed

Aymen Almoayed is a Bahrain-based legal consultant and corporate strategist operating through a number of vehicles including Althukair & Almoayed – Litigators and Counsels where he is a founding partner. His work in the field of law throughout the Gulf Cooperative Council of Arab States (“GCC”) has primarily been in the facilitation of developing corporate opportunity. He has been retained in the past eight years to lead cross-boarder acquisitions, negotiate mergers, analyse and deduce the best sources of liquidity, issue corporate bonds, restructure organizations, liquidate operations and list corporate vehicles.

From another prospective, Aymen has been appointed as both trustee and independent director in a number of regional operations. The exposure, plus his experience as the founder of over 5 successful companies, has allowed him to better appreciate the intricacies of international business and more importantly regional opportunities. Such expertise is continually placed to good use while analysing commercial opportunities at the Board level or as objective legal counsel.

Aymen is a graduate of both the University of Kent and the University of Cambridge. He was a granted Bachelors Degree in Law and the Masters in Business Administration respectively.

Photo credit: luisbg

“Ask the Expert” is part of an ongoing series of Q&A sessions with industry experts where you, our readers, are given the opportunity to have your questions answered.

You been asking and we’ve been listening and now you’ve got it. It is with great pleasure that we have MENA legal expert, Aymen Almoayed, on deck to answer your legal questions. He is on the ground and has seen it all. Now it is up to you to ask him the hard questions.

The way this will work is you ask questions and we’ll pick the top 3-5 topics for Aymen to answer in a future blog post. Question collection will start today and will be open for one week.

Here is how you can ask your questions:

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About Aymen Almoayed
Aymen Almoayed is a Bahrain-based legal consultant and corporate strategist operating through a number of vehicles including Althukair & Almoayed – Litigators and Counsels where he is a founding partner.  His work in the field of law throughout the Gulf Cooperative Council of Arab States (“GCC”) has primarily been in the facilitation of developing corporate opportunity.  He has been retained in the past eight years to lead cross-boarder acquisitions, negotiate mergers, analyse and deduce the best sources of liquidity, issue corporate bonds, restructure organizations, liquidate operations and list corporate vehicles.

From another prospective, Aymen has been appointed as both trustee and independent director in a number of regional operations.  The exposure, plus his experience as the founder of over 5 successful companies, has allowed him to better appreciate the intricacies of international business and more importantly regional opportunities.  Such expertise is continually placed to good use while analysing commercial opportunities at the Board level or as  objective legal counsel.

Aymen is a graduate of both the University of Kent and the University of Cambridge.  He was a granted Bachelors Degree in Law and the Masters in Business Administration respectively.

This is the part of an ongoing series of guest articles about entrepreneurship. If you would like to contribute to this series, contact us at exec@yallastartup.org with your proposal.

هذا المقال تابع لسلسلة من المقالات المستمرة عن الريادة. إذا كنت ترغب في المساهمة الرجاء إرسال رسالة إلكترونية إلى exec@yallastartup.org

Few weeks ago, I was running like a crazy from an interview to another in order to finish the first part of my field work for my PHD research about Syrian musalsalat.

An (Arab) friend of mine just looked at me as if I was totally weird and told me: “why are you doing all these crazy efforts?! You read Arabic, just translate those (pointing at few articles and couple of books dealing with drama) into English and khalas, it’s done!”.

While trying to explain him that a PHD research –generally speaking- is something quite serious in terms of getting a critical mass of sources, comparing them, quoting, elaborating, etc I just realised there was an “abyss” between us.

Few days later, I went to interview a smart guy who’s trying to collect different historical sources concerning drama and doing an “encyclopedia” type of project. When asking questions, I saw him being quite reluctant in answering.. he suddenly said: “sorry but you should pay for this”. “Pay?!” . I have to admit it was the first time in more than 10 years of research that I was hearing such an answer. “There is a value in what I do. And, if you are going to take it without giving anything back, at least you should pay”. My efforts in explaining that there is something called “quotation” in academia, something that acknowledges the original creator of a thought, were vain.

He simply concluded that, while the Western world has got “quotation”, the Arab world has only  “copy and paste”.

That “abyss” of few days before finally had a name: “copy and paste” culture, thaqafat al nskh wal lsq.  It seems that Arabs are so used to copy and paste others’ works that original creation is quickly dying in this part of the world. Creativity just disappears when there is no value attributed to cultural creation, no intention to acknowledge, no wishes to build upon somebody else’s work in order to create your own work.

The copy and paste culture is not a revenge against Western imperialism – the West which exploited and deprived the Arab world -, as somebody is nostalgically putting it.

The copy and paste culture is actually something the Arab world itself is paying a price for, by preventing original Arab thoughts to be exposed and debated, original Arab ideas to be investigated, original Arab research works to be published, etc. Cause if nobody attributes a value to a scientific article, a to a piece of information, to interviews and investigations that go into a PHD thesis, how do we expect to have an original Arab thought to be formed?

We always hear debates about the “XXI century Arab thought” etc, but where does its essence lay if not in original creation? And where this original creation can be expressed and exposed the most, if not on the Internet?

It’s precisely there, with all the digital easy access tools that new technology has provided us with, that a new Arab thought has to displayed, debated, re-elaborated, re-innovated.

When we celebrate the boom of the Internet in the Arab world, the increasing usage of social networks, etc, lots of this stuff is actually still about consumption and not creation.

• We need to write, not only to read.
• We need to film, not only to watch.
• We need to produce, not only to consume.
• We need to innovate, not only to preserve.

But, in order to create, we need to give a value to our creation. Then we need to respect this value. We need to trust. I personally see the challenge of Creative Commons organisation in the Arab world to be in this very challenge of creation, of giving a value, of facilitating trust.

Creative Commons was born in a Western world were copyright protection had become a chain, an obstacle to innovation. In the Arab world, copyright is almost unknown or disrespected, and original creation is disrespected, too, to the extent that it is totally neglected. In this context Creative Commons should be understood as a way of giving value to this neglected creation, of building trust and respect around it.

Would be this possible, the Arab world’s past and its history (like the history of its TV drama, just as an example) will finally have a value for Arabs too … the future won’t be made up of only Westerners investigating and writing this story, while Arabs just reading it.

Donatella Della Ratta

Donatella has got a background of ten years’ experience in Arab media research. In 2000 she wrote her first book on Arab satellite channels, “Media Oriente”, followed in 2005 by a monography on Al Jazeera. She was advisor of Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona for the art exhibition “Occidente desde Oriente” in 2005 and she created “West by the Arab media“, a two day festival of screenings and debates on how Arab TV channels picture the “West”, launched in 2008 in Rome and to be held in 2009 in Brussels. She has lectured on Arab media in many events held, among the others, in MIP TV Cannes Market, Brussels’ EU Parliament, Linz Ars Electronica, Aula 06. She loves Arabic language and goes crazy for musalsalat, especially those dubbed in Syrian dialect. She leaves somewhere between Rome and the Arab world.