The future of home goods and technology with Homzmart
Today’s episode is with Mahmoud Ibrahim, the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Homzmart, the Middle East’s leading furniture & home goods marketplace platform, Mahmoud has over 13 years’ extensive experience in Tech startups.
With a background in building digital companies in emerging regions; Mahmoud started with Rocket Internet’s Jumia serving as VP Operations. Mahmoud then co-founded Daraz, the leading ecommerce platform in southeast Asia, where his role was Group Chief Operating Officer, before the company was acquired by Alibaba.
Mahmoud founded Homzmart spotting a need in the market & providing a solution for it, by making the discovery, and purchasing of furniture easier as the platform helps customers choose from thousands of SKUs and brands.
We talk about the following and so much more:
✅ Why Mahmoud wanted to work on solving this problem
✅ Why customer service is such an important part of their brand
✅ What their competitive advantage is
✅ How their business managed during the pandemic
✅ How he deals with challenges
Stay tuned for upcoming episodes with startup founders in the Middle East and North Africa!
Please tag us and tell us what you learned. We’d greatly appreciate a review if you are enjoying these conversations.
لسماع البودكاست ا-ب تغذية على انغامي:
https://hakawati.fm/alef-ba-taghziya
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Powering Gaza with solar-panels with Majd Mashharawi
Today’s episode is with Majd Mashharawi, a resident of war-torn Gaza, who observed the acute need for access to construction material in order to rebuild damaged buildings and infrastructure.
She strove to meet this need by founding GreenCake in 2015, a company that creates environmentally friendly bricks from ash and rubble. GreenCake was a runner-up in the annual MIT Pan Arab competition.
In the summer of 2017 she developed SunBox, an affordable solar system that produces energy to alleviate the effects of the energy crisis in Gaza, where access to electricity has been severely restricted, sometimes to less than three hours a day. With SunBox, she has been able to provide electricity to hundreds of people.
In 2018 she was selected as one of the most creative people in business by Fast Company and SunBox won the MIT Pan Arab competition, competing against 6000 entries. Her TED Talk, How I’m making bricks out of ashes and rubble in Gaza, has received nearly 1.3 Million views so far. Last September Ms. Mashharawi and Sunbox company was awarded the Muhammed Ali Humanitarian Award in Louisville Kentucky by the Muhammad Ali Center.
You can find her on FB, Instagram, Linkedin.
We talk about the following and so much more:
✅ Why she decided to focus on electricity in Gaza as an industry
✅ Why and how she created Sunbox
✅ Some of the challenges she faced in building the product and the company
✅ How being a new mom has transformed the way she sees the world
Stay tuned for upcoming episodes with startup founders in the Middle East and North Africa!
Please tag us and tell us what you learned. We’d greatly appreciate a review if you are enjoying these conversations.
لسماع البودكاست ا-ب تغذية على انغامي:
https://hakawati.fm/alef-ba-taghziya
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Empowering global small business with crypto-powered payments
Today’s episode is with Amr Shady, who has two decades’ experience in building and scaling startups globally. He co-founded Tribal, a Silicon Valley-based crypto-powered payments and financing platform that helps emerging-market SMBs grow and compete in a global economy.
The company started as a spin-off from his NYU research on using AI to predict startup success. Tribal raised $163 million in total funding from SoftBank Latin America Fund, QED Investors, BECO Capital, Stellar Development Foundation, Digital Currency Group, and Coinbase Ventures.
Amr started his first company at 22, bootstrapping it to a multimillion dollar business. TA Telecom is a payments company that processes 15 billion transactions yearly. Named “local hero” by the Financial Times, the company also ranked on Deloitte’s fastest growing tech companies in EMEA.
Amr’s mentors and especially his mom, were an instrumental force in allowing him to stay the course on the road towards building Tribal.
We talk about the following and so much more:
✅ Why Amr started Tribal Credit and why it’s so important to small businesses
✅ How his product changed from version 1 to the latest version
✅ Which people and mentors in his life helped him develop his company
✅ Some of the books that he recommends for anyone starting a business
Stay tuned for upcoming episodes with startup founders in the Middle East and North Africa!
Please tag us and tell us what you learned. We’d greatly appreciate a review if you are enjoying these conversations.
لسماع البودكاست ا-ب تغذية على انغامي:
https://hakawati.fm/alef-ba-taghziya
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Personal finance investing in the Middle East with Sarwa founder Nadine Mezher
Today’s episode on Startup Confessionals is with Nadine Mezher, the founder of Sarwa.
Sarwa is the first and fastest-growing digital investment platform and personal finance app for young professionals in the Middle East, with more than 50,000 registered users. The company helps its clients build their wealth by leveraging data-driven strategy and technology to bring down costs.
Since launching in February 2018, Sarwa has revolutionized how young professionals grow their wealth by bringing smart, simple, affordable digital investing to the region.
Through its mobile app, Sarwa aims to deliver more innovative personal finance products, such as Sarwa Invest, Sarwa Crypto and Sarwa Trade.
The firm was founded in 2017 by a team of financial, technology, and management experts, and is backed by top regional and international stakeholders. Sarwa received a total of $25 Million in funding to date.
We talk about the following and so much more:
✅ Why she decided to build Sarwa, and what the alternative investing options are
✅ Sarwa Invest, Sarwa Crypto and Sarwa Trade, and how many users have more than one product
✅ How she’s handled adversity and how her relationships really helped her though her journey
✅ Her 25 million funding round, and how her priority to Sarwas mission has not changed
Stay tuned for upcoming episodes with startup founders in the Middle East and North Africa!
Please tag us and tell us what you learned. We’d greatly appreciate a review if you are enjoying these conversations.
لسماع البودكاست ا-ب تغذية على انغامي:
https://hakawati.fm/alef-ba-taghziya
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How to build a world-class wellness and health company with Vivoo founder Miray Tayfun
Today’s episode is with Miray Tayfun the co-founder and the CEO of Vivoo, an application based on urine data that delivers personal advice to the individual for a healthier lifestyle.
Miray graduated from Stanford postgraduate programs specializing in Go-to-Market Strategies as well as Diet and Gene Expression. Miray has previously founded companies in medical diagnostics, smart homes and smart co-living spaces.
Vivoo is the first at-home wellness tracker that uses urine to provide personalized insights and recommendations unique to the user's body while helping them track their hydration, pH, ketones, kidney & liver functions and so much more!
It takes just 2 minutes to take a test and get your results instantly in your home, through your mobile app.
We talk about the following and so much more:
✅ Vivoo’s value proposition and why she started the company
✅ Her investment journey with Tim Draper and other well-known investors in Silicon Valley
✅ Vivoo’s competitive advantage
✅ How the company changed from the version 1 to where it is today
✅ Her favorite book recommendations
Stay tuned for upcoming episodes with startup founders in the Middle East and North Africa!
Please tag us and tell us what you learned. We’d greatly appreciate a review if you are enjoying these conversations.
لسماع البودكاست ا-ب تغذية على انغامي:
https://hakawati.fm/alef-ba-taghziya
A show that explores the world of founders; their disappointments, their wins, their personal lives, and how they deal with adversity.
Host Yasmeen Turayhi interviews startup founders and entrepreneurs in emerging markets in 1:1 conversations where the audience will learn about some of the biggest lessons these founders learned on their journey from the personal to the professional and share how they keep themselves motivated.
The Middle East was built on the foundation of commerce and sales and the spirit of entrepreneurship pulsates through the veins of the region. These founders have a unique lens about what it takes to build and grow a company in the Middle East and North Africa. Oftentimes, these founders have found ways to deliver on the promise of their product within an early or non-existent ecosystem. In some cases, they had to build both the product and the ecosystem.
Yasmeen Turayhi is a product marketing expert in Silicon Valley and Board member of TechWadi, the leading non-profit organization building bridges between Silicon Valley and the Middle East and North Africa region.
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