August 2011
1 post
Starting a new adventure; Joining Wamda
I am happy to announce that I will be joining Wamda as its new CEO.
When Fadi Ghandour emailed me last April to see if I’d be interested to join him and Abraaj to change the early stage entrepreneurship ecosystem it was a no brainer that I would say yes.
As many of you know I have been a huge believer in the entrepreneurship scene in the Middle East and passionate about making an...
June 2010
3 posts
3 tags
Localization: imitation or art ?
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...
4 tags
Governments on "lowering the cost of failure"
I participated yesterday in the Economist Roundtable in Beirut. The theme was around “how Lebanon can reach its full potential” and mostly focused on the role of government. There were some impressive talks by various Ministers including Charbel Nahas, Gebran Bassil and Mohammad Safadi. My panel discussed how to foster and keep Lebanese talent in the country, obviously I vouched for...
5 tags
The Arab entrepreneurship opportunity
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...