Women at the Startup Helm“Sorry to disappoint anyone,” Alex Tohme said to me in an elegant, deep, last-century British accent, “My e-commerce startup is not focusing on ‘sexy kinky lingerie’ because that doesn’t address the issue that women really want. They want advice, they want answers to their bra problems, and they want to feel like someone is focusing on their feelings and not their wallets. Every woman should be celebrated no matter the shape and size.”
I met Alex first at Omar Christidis’ ArabNet in Beirut in 2012, which she helped organize, and later in a café by her offices in Dubai. As a digital marketing executive at Western ad agencies like Ogilvy One in the Middle East, she has built a following as an at times shockingly blunt blogger on the startup ecosystem in the region. Lebanese born, Saudi raised, she was sent off to Britain for high school, and then in 1998 she passed the Regular Commissions Board for entry into Sandhurst, the United Kingdom’s high school version of West Point. After studying psychology at the University of Manchester, she returned to the region in 2006, intrigued by the early days of the rise of the digital economy. One does not forget her.
She is launching amourah.com as the first underwear shopping blog and e-commerce platform in the Middle East. Her first blog post described bluntly how difficult it could be to find personal clothing that fit well, and not feel uncomfortable shopping in a public place. “I think it’s the first time anyone actually showed their boobs in a bra in this region!” she laughs. “But I’m still alive and haven’t been arrested. Women reached out with the same experiences and questions I had. If you take the risk it gives others confidence to follow.”
Tohme has experienced significant pushback in what she acknowledges remains a heavily male-dominated retail industry. “I’ve even had some men tell me that women empowerment won’t work,” she pauses incredulously. “We are talking about a shopping experience for and about women. Women are more likely to admit where their skills are and where their weaknesses are and seek out people who can fill that gap.” She believes that while the ecosystem is deeply challenged, something new is happening with women stepping up to lead. “Everyone says the Middle East isn’t ready for X, Y, or Z but nobody knows until you try. Most of the time the market is ready, it’s just that there isn’t anyone around with the balls enough to do something about it.”
Her anatomical analogy stayed with me later that day on my ArabNet panel when I received the greatest reaction I ever received on any stage. Event founder Christidis, who is an exceptional, thoughtful, and provocative moderator, pushed us to speculate on why the Middle East seemed to be lagging behind other emerging markets in startups. “Do we not think big enough?” he asked with exasperation, and then channeling Alex, “Do we merely lack balls?” I looked over him and winked, “Well, the first thing you can do is promise never to ask about balls again. In my experience, some of the greatest innovation is coming from women.” The room—all of the women and not a few, perhaps sheepish men—erupted in applause.
Like many of my fellow westerners, I once harbored the one-dimensional view of the Middle East that we often see on the news—a series of male-dominated societies where, in places like Saudi Arabia, women cannot even legally drive. After all, I often play a thought experiment with my friends in Silicon Valley, asking them to name five women general partners in venture capital firms or how many women engineers they have on their teams. Given how often such questions are met with silence here, I assumed female representation in the Middle East must be near nonexistent.
There is no question that men are more common on the tech scene in the Middle East. At the same time, one still sees a striking number of women at every gathering and meetup. Hala Fadel, who runs the Middle East MIT Business Plan Competition, sees the number of women applicants increasing each year, from an already surprisingly high base. In 2012, more than 4,500 teams of three people or more competed. “That means over 13,000 potential entrepreneurs,” she told me. “Teams that included women were near 48 percent! How many Silicon Valley competitions can say that?”
The answer is none. The rising role of women in the Middle East mirrors the rising role and impact of women across emerging growth markets. I wanted to understand the background of this rise more clearly, and to explore the opportunities some women entrepreneurial leaders are creating.
* * *
One must be cautious about painting a region as rich and diverse as the Arab world with a broad brush. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the Gulf States tend to be significantly more restrictive than Egypt or the Levant, and they pay a significant price for it economically. According to a recent Booz study of women’s role in Gulf region, women actually represent the better-educated talent pool than the greater population but a drastically higher percentage of the unemployed. “Women in Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia constitute 67 percent, 63 percent, and 57 percent respectively of university graduates,” the study found. In countries like Kuwait, however, nearly 80 percent of the unemployed are women.1
Whether in the Gulf, Egypt, or Levant, however, one can find examples of both the old and new narratives just about everywhere. “Don’t get me wrong,” one twenty-something B2B CEO from Beirut told me, “too many men here, especially older investors, judge us in an old lens and it can be a problem.” Another entrepreneur from Alexandria, who has developed a regional portal to connect mothers and their children, added, “Believe me, being a woman entrepreneur is very hard—being a wife, a mother, a daughter puts real pressure on us, we can feel real guilt under the weight of expectations. But at the same time being an entrepreneur is not mutually exclusive.” And yet another social network founder from Cairo challenged why I was making any distinction. “We are not women entrepreneurs,” she chastised me. “We are entrepreneurs who are women. We face all the same issues as any entrepreneur. If anything, as women, we probably work harder, are better collaborators, better at just getting things done than a lot of men.”
Whatever one’s perception of the Middle East, significant change has been well underway for years. And the crucial role of women in economic development is a global phenomenon. As every study of women’s impact on society demonstrates—most recently the World Bank 2012 Gender and Equality and Development Report—that while gaps remain, women have an ever-increasing role in job creation, business creation, and consumer economic activity across every industry. It is no surprise that with access to technology, they are hungrier than anyone to create.2
Alyse Nelson, CEO of Vital Voices, Hillary Clinton’s nongovernmental organization that trains and invests in emerging women leaders around the world, told me that she sees the change in the Middle East as part of a global shift. “We see women closing the gap with men in areas of economic development and girls’ education,” she told me, “but the greatest unfinished business in the twenty-first century is that women still lag significantly in leadership, power, and decision making.” She has found worldwide that women hold less than 20 percent of the seats in parliament and fewer of the C-level positions or board seats in larger corporations. “The exciting thing, however,” she notes, “is that the power dynamic has shifted dramatically in recent years with access to social networks and mobile devices. Agency—real influence in making change—is no longer just wielded from the corner office, but also from a Twitter account. Technology is changing everything—breaking down cultural barriers that once held women back and creating innovative opportunities to make positive change.”
In her book, also titled Vital Voices, Nelson tells the story of online activist Manal al-Sharif, who took on the Saudi “tradition” of not allowing women to drive. She not only began to drive, but she videotaped herself doing so and put it on YouTube, where it instantly went viral. As far back as 2008, Egyptian Esraa Abdel Fattah set up one of the first Facebook groups in the Middle East to promote a day of civil disobedience to protest low wages at a textile factory. It soon had 77,000 followers. The essence, Nelson told me, is, “One day women thought we have no voice—they see this and say, now we have a voice.” The multiplier effect is profound. Vital Voices and Yahoo! partnered to host a “Change Your World Conference” in Egypt. Women by the hundreds who had never met before, except online, came together not only to share strategies and ideas, but also to push each other to make their voices heard.3
Ruth Messinger sees the multiplier effect of women active in their economies. Since 1998, she has served as chair of the American Jewish World Service, which has funded nearly 400 grassroots organizations working to promote health, education, economic development, disaster relief, and social and political change throughout the developing world.
“We in the west sometimes don’t fully appreciate how women are the lynchpins of the family,” she told me in her Manhattan office, which buzzes with her eager young team. “Women play an extraordinary role that keep the families together and functioning. When I think even in my home, I have to constantly remind my husband to call his family, it reminds me that throughout society things just get dropped when women don’t step up.”
She continues, “In emerging worlds, there are many ways women are codified as second-class citizens—how they dress, what education they are expected to receive. They see themselves as caregivers first and foremost—up (to parents); sideways (spouses and siblings), and down (children.) At the same time, most people underestimate their role as providers at the professional level. When you stop to think that there is something like one to two billion subsistence farmers in the world, and 60 to 80 percent of them are women, it should make us all rethink what their economic role already means.” In addition so many women have viewed their roles—and thus their work—as not something one can get paid for. “Men all over the world presume they will be paid for their labor, but most women just do things even outside their homes—start a small health center, offer tutoring—and it doesn’t occur to them they should even be paid for it. That is starting to change.”
When women do become significant breadwinners in emerging markets, the first thing they do with their own income is invest it. “We know from all the work we do in microfinance, when women have disposable income they invest in the places that have the highest multiplier effect of getting their families out of poverty: in education and welfare of their kids. Men are more often likely to drink it up.” Furthermore, women seem invariably driven to think ahead, weighing the ramifications of each step. “Again, look at microfinance. Ninety percent of the women tell us that the minute they receive a loan, $14 or whatever, it is the only shot to remove them from the wage slave thing. They will never not pay back what they owe, because if they blow this money they know they’ll be handed a broom and paid 10 cents.”
Technology is opening new problem solving throughout such communities. According to the International Finance Corporation (IFC), both mobile and computer usage in women-run businesses are about the same as men, approaching 90 percent, and over two-thirds regularly access the internet.4 Access and outcomes are found in pretty surprising quarters. In fact, the young women in Yemen from the previous chapter are a few of thousands. Messinger explained to me, “Give a woman a cell phone and the capacity to recharge and watch them build a kiosk so people will pay them to make a call. Allow women access to an anonymous cell phone number where they can report abuse, have their stories anonymously vetted, justice can be offered. I know one entrepreneur in India who built this service, and they see themselves not only as protecting human rights, but offering a form of journalism to a community that has no newspapers. He’s gathering reporting, checking it out, reporting it on mobile phones and making sure authorities follow-up. Others in Africa are offering similar services to combat corruption.” Stories like these are unsurprising to Ghada Howaidy in Cairo, who runs institutional development at the American University of Cairo’s School of Business. She explained to me that a large, informal, less tech entrepreneurial movement has been happening among young women in Egypt for over a decade. Many women may have come from other professions, but for other reasons—passion for an idea, lifestyle, raising kids—decide to start businesses from home. “Such businesses may start more traditionally—food catering, home accessories, or jewelry,” she notes. “But it is no surprise that easy access to technology is not only driving those businesses but allowing women to create regional, maybe even global, online-only businesses.”
The breadth of women-founded tech startups in the Arab world is stunning and inspirational, but also instructive as a window into the opportunities emerging in the region. They cross every corner of the Improvisers, the Problem Solvers, and the Global Players, but I examined four other common groupings: offering services in Arabic; helping other families achieve work/life balance; leveraging experiences from the Arab Spring to create collaborative crowd sharing platforms; and developing scalable women-focused retail and e-commerce platforms.
So Many Arabic Speakers, So Little Still Available OnlineAs a mentor and advisor to two remarkable ecosystem builders in the Middle East—the region-wide startup portal/angel investor Wamda and the Jordanian incubator Oasis500—I see, but take no economic stake in some pretty astonishing entrepreneurs. Through these efforts, I discovered three wonderful stories that look to solve the ecosystem challenge with which other Improvisers wrestle: the surprising lack of content in Arabic across the internet.
May Habib sat down with me at a classic bistro in downtown Beirut. The intensity and deliberateness of our conversation fit perfectly with how she built her company. A Lebanese-born, Harvard-educated wealth fund manager in Abu Dhabi, she started getting restless about two years ago. She had reached an age when many of her friends were starting businesses, looking to solve problems. She wanted to make a difference in her region’s development.
During a holiday in Europe, Habib began to fill a notebook with lists of problems and potential solutions in the region: everything from female disempowerment to religious radicalism to lack of college counseling in high schools. But it was something she read in the 2005 UN Arab Human Development Report that really hit her. Although over 80 percent of the Middle East’s 350 million people spoke solely Arabic, shockingly few global information resources—especially online—could be found in Arabic. Even five years later, less than 1 percent of all content online is in Arabic.5
“By the end of the holiday,” she recalled, “I had a model of how I could use a crowdsourced expert network to address this.” Within two months she had written a detailed business plan, left banking, and returned to Beirut to seek funding. Qordoba, her first startup, was born in 2011.
Her team—now 14 full-time and three part-time engineers and over 500 freelance writers, editors, and translators—has built one of the largest Arabic-content creation platforms in the Middle East. Qordoba launched in the B2B space, largely because that’s where the money is. “The region’s multinationals, e-commerce startups, consulting companies, law firms all complain about the same thing: how hard it is to find Arabic language services that are high-quality, fast and convenient,” she notes. By building a web-based platform that screens, tests, and employs freelance writers, editors, and translators, and distributes projects based on expertise and skill, Qordoba solves all three of these requirements. “Our customers were previously served by expensive global translation services companies and less-than-reliable local mom-and-pop shops,” she adds. “We made the whole process easy and efficient.”
Beating revenue forecast each month in a market place where star engineers cost a fifth of what they do in the United States, Qordoba is attracting significant investor attention, but wants to hold off their first Series A for the spring of 2013. By then, they also hope to enter the consumer space by offering Arabic translation of English language books.
Habib’s roots help explain her dedication and determination. She was born in a small agricultural center in Akkar, in the northwest corner of Lebanon, and her family immigrated to Windsor, Ontario, when she was six. Her parents founded a machining tool company where she and her seven siblings were expected to help out while remaining focused on their education.
Entrepreneurship may have been in May’s DNA, but her first job upon graduating college was at the investment bank Lehman Brothers and she eventually moved to Abu Dhabi to work in private equity. “I had a great two years there, in part because I was doing tech deals all over the world,” she told me. “I kept seeing the problem of Arabic content everywhere, everyone talking about it, and no one was doing anything about it. Now no one has an excuse—we have built an awesome, affordable solution.”
Habib worries about the same things as any entrepreneur—long hours, hiring the right people, finding customers and keeping them happy, spending every dime. “Being a woman, if anything, has been an advantage,” she believes. “I work with an A-team, and they took pay cuts to join us. I think I was able to recruit them because of traits I see more frequently in female entrepreneurs. I have made my success their success, and I didn’t take no for an answer. For cultural reasons (and this is true in both East and West), that’s easier to do if you are a woman recruiting a man versus a man recruiting another man or woman.” She is proud that online distributed platforms like Qordoba open up job opportunities for writers and translators throughout the Arab world.
The next day when I flew to Amman, I almost physically ran into Jordanian Samar Shawareb at Oasis500 headquarters—she had recently been selected to join the organization. Like May Habib she also knew early that she wanted to be an entrepreneur and found another large opportunity underserved in Arabic. Having graduated from the American University of Beirut with a business degree and then receiving her MBA at the University of Jordan, she landed a job at the British Embassy in Amman. She learned she had a passion for throwing events, and she was good at it, too. “I thought there was a need in the market for a professional event management company in Jordan,” she recalls. “I decided to start my first business, Events UnLimited, in 2001 to organize exhibitions and conferences throughout Jordan.”
Over the next decade, as the wedding category became one of her business’s largest and most lucrative, she knew she could offer greater resources to brides-to-be throughout the region. Some of the most time-consuming, stressful, and confusing parts of wedding planning—identifying and selecting the right wedding suppliers; seeking guidance and inspiration on issues related to wedding planning, fashion, beauty and other tips; evaluating various offers and finding out what the bride and groom truly need and can afford—could ideally be served by an online content and social platform. To her surprise, few resources, especially bilingual ones, were available online in the Middle East.
In 2011, Samar launched Arabia Weddings, the first comprehensive bilingual wedding planning website to serve the Arab world. Originally launched in English, now also in Arabic, Arabia Weddings offers a unique combination of rich content (original, aggregated news and online directories of wedding suppliers in ten Arab countries); innovative planning tools (couples’ wedding websites) and special deals. Her timing could not have been better. As one of the go-to executives in the industry—Events UnLimited ran the only bridal exhibition in Jordan, “The Wedding Show,” for seven straight years—Samar’s market knowledge gave her unique insight into the potential online. In addition, because Jordan’s internet penetration and communications technology sector is one of the best in the region, Amman was the perfect place to build a region-wide footprint. Her team of seven is preparing to expand to the lucrative markets of the Emirates and Saudi Arabia next.
Samar concurs with Habib about the challenges and pressures of a startup. “Quitting a great job to set up my first business was one of the hardest decisions I had to make, mostly because of the loss of a monthly secure income. The risk was mitigated by the fact that I worked in parallel for a few years setting up the company and maintaining my day job. My new online company ties nicely to my offline businesses—seeing a dream becoming a reality is rewarding,” she pauses and smiles, “Albeit it’s always mixed with a sense of fear.”
Jordanian media exec Fida Taher similarly plans to use technology to introduce the world to the best in Middle Eastern cooking. Zaytouneh, founded in late 2011, aims to become the world’s largest library for short and illustrative cooking tutorials through multiple platforms, including websites and smartphone applications. Producing videos under three minutes showing step-by-step regional food preparation, she plans eventually to dub for every language in the world.
A television production major, Fida has long had a passion for regional cooking. Her mother was an entrepreneur establishing a leading catering company in Jordan. “Most video recipe content on the web is user generated and not very good quality—hard to follow,” Fida explained.
“We film in full HD, and our videos are of excellent quality. Since only the hands are showing, dubbing our videos in any language is a minor operation and cost. Even in the best recipe websites, mostly English-based, it is hard to find ‘good’ oriental recipes in text, and near impossible to find good ones in video.”
Starting as a woman entrepreneur brought with it clear three challenges, she recalled: “First, some men get intimidated by a strong woman. Second, others—and I will try to sound as proper as possible—think a business relationship with a woman should be a personal one. Finally, some men underestimate women in general, and believe that women are not capable of delivering good results.”
“Of course, being underestimated in not always a bad thing,” she continued. “I am proud to be a feminist and believe that we need to fight for equal rights on all levels, social, economic, and political.”
Aside from garnering top recognition in regional startup competitions, Zaytouneh has nearly 35,000 followers globally on Facebook and is well underway to creating 120 video recipes per month. Having raised her angel round also from Oasis500, she is exceeding revenue targets and in line for her next round of funding in 2013.
Life BalanceFear is not unfamiliar to any of the women I interviewed. Ask any woman in the Middle East startup community their greatest challenges and the first things you hear are painfully common to any entrepreneur in any country. Can I do this? Will anyone care? How do I choose among a seeming hundred priorities? When do I raise money? How should I hire? Can I move fast enough?
But press a little further and more woman-specific themes emerge, if with some regional sensitivities. As one online video founder told me, “Being a woman entrepreneur in general means that you have to overcome many cultural stereotypes, especially as wives, mothers or daughters. It is easy, in our cultural conditioning, to feel guilt for not being there for our kids as we have so much work to be done.” Another agrees, “It is a very delicate balance. If you drop the ball, you are judged twice as harshly by society.”
It is no surprise that great startups are offering platforms to help navigate this balance, and offer powerful resources for the Arab world and very possibly beyond. Neither Yasmine el Mehairy nor her partner, Zeinab Samir, is a mother. But these Cairo-based entrepreneurs were stunned when Yasmine’s sister-in-law became pregnant, and there was no online resource for new mothers in Arabic. “I come from a family of doctors so we were comfortable enough with English-language medical information,” she told me. “But we wondered what other Arab women do.” Having failed together in an earlier IT services venture, the two friends were looking for a new idea. The opportunity to create the first parenting portal was wide open, and they gathered a team of ten to launch, in 2011, a site that is quickly becoming the go-to parenting resource: Supermama.com.
After a year of researching the space, Yasmine and Zeinab concluded that the three greatest challenges for young mothers are finding information, finding the time to balance work/life issues, and creating financial plans for their families. Supermama became one part comprehensive resource, one part blog compiled by mothers who have “been there,” covering basic questions around pregnancy and parenting, running a home, convenient recipes, and balancing their time between kids, husband, domestic duties, hobbies, and work. “Modern moms are online all the time,” Yasmine notes, “but there is so little in Arabic, and so much information in any language is outdated or simply invalid.”
Yasmine was a computer science major at one of the top universities in Cairo. “I started with the belief that technology is the way to make things happen. So for one year, we all worked from home, running the entire business on email and online tools and this allowed us to build a network of mommy bloggers and experts. They love working with us, since they are not required to be sitting in an office space all day.”
They quickly gained attention in the growing regional startup community, being a finalist in the MIT Enterprise Business Competition last year (one of nearly 4,000 competitors). But it was the Europe-based Startup Boot Camp that changed their lives. “We were connected with experienced mentors, and could ask them anything,” Yasmine recalled. “We learned not only how to think about mistakes, but also to understand we weren’t just ‘good’ in an Egyptian context, but one of the best teams among the region and global participants.”
As Supermama came out of beta last spring, with thousands of mothers already sharing experiences, investors agreed. They are finalizing their first $350,000 capital-raising round this week, which includes one of the leading local venture funds, MBC Ventures. “We think that there is global potential here—there are hundreds of millions of Arabic-speaking women around the world,” Yasmine notes looking forward. “But we want to remain focused—diversify services around parenting—and grow from there.”
Rama Kayyali Jardaneh and her partner Lamia Tabbaa Bibi were stunned by the absence of what they thought had to be high-demand early education resources online for Middle East audiences. Rama is Jordanian, Lamia Jordanian/Saudi, but both studied at university and received master’s degrees in the United Kingdom and the United States. “We never thought of ourselves as entrepreneurs, per say,” Lamia told me. “We were both working as freelancers in video documentary and news content production after university, but when we had our kids we felt there was an utter lack of responsible, high-quality Arabic educational products for them. We simply wanted to fill that gap.” Little Thinking Minds, the region’s first Arabic audiovisual educational company for children under seven, was born.
They started plotting, appropriately, virtually—Lamia was living in London and Rama in Amman, each with toddler sons—complaining that all they found for their kids were badly dubbed versions of Western programs such as Barney or Disney or religious content. At the same time, Disney’s Baby Einstein was a huge hit all over the world, and their sons loved it. When Lamia came to visit Rama in Amman, they started asking each other, what if someone created the Arabic versions?
They soon began working on their first plotlines, which remain as popular today as when they were first screened in 2005. Back then, they hosted small cinema screenings for three year olds, who were invariably thrilled. Six hundred kids showed up to the first screening, and they had to expand it to six. “It dawned on me then,” Lamia told me, “that what we are doing is quite revolutionary. By offering this eventually on digital platform, and by being first, we would become market leaders.”
They started part time, with Rama overseeing production and DVD distribution while Lamia, still based in London, wrote scripts, consulted with child education specialists and pursued distribution deals. While offering videos on DVD and even VHS, digital access changed everything. “Parents simply want content delivered to their children that is culturally sensitive and reflects their values as Arabs, and they are willing to pay for it. By going digital, this will result not only in larger visibility for us in Jordan and the region, but we will also reach Arab expats around the globe more easily than we can now offline,” according to Rama.
Today they offer their tools and content across an entire spectrum of media—DVDs and CDs online and in brick-and-mortar stores, including every Virgin Megastore in the region. Apps, music, video, and online games are available on the App Store, iTunes, and as YouTube rentals. They are in negotiations with regional airports and airlines to host their experiences for traveling families. Looking forward, Rama told me: “We plan to develop a portal on everything related to Arabic education to children under seven, as well as teaching kits for schools that will connect with our digital/electronic platform to enhance Arabic language learning for parents and young kids.”
Alexandria-based Sara Galal just had her first child when she already saw a missing opportunity, even if a couple of years early. A hotel and tourism exec coming out of college, Sara’s heavy travel schedule didn’t allow her the time or ability to connect with her new baby. Switching to human resources at a local IT company changed everything for her. She learned about both the power of technology as a tool of connection and how important a company’s culture was to the success of its mission. What, she wondered, could she create that would satisfy her passion for building things and allow her to be the best parent possible?
Alexandria has become one of the hubs of innovation in the Middle East, and two years ago Sara decided to attend the popular Startup Weekend Competition there—which attracted over 1,000 participants. “Over 90 percent of those competing were from technical backgrounds with very sophisticated ideas,” she told me. “This pushed me to think, how can we utilize technology to support and strengthen the relationships between parents and kids? But it was also intimidating—my Facebook status then was ‘Should I go, should I stay, should I come back another day?’” Her answer, however, was equally clear: “My deep inside feeling was that I have to prove that a working woman can also be a good mom and a good wife.”
Sweety Heaven, beta available to anyone who signs up, is a web and mobile experience that helps parents and children set behavior expectations—keep your rooms clean, do your homework, be respectful—in a lovely, simple, game-like environment that also tracks their success. Based on a time frame and goals they set themselves, a parent and child create a reward system—this currently includes a toy or gift delivered right to their door, but will expand into additional privileges or even a gift to a local charity or cause. “The idea is quite simple, and it is what parents do every day already—but this platform really brings parents and children together to form closer and happier relationships, even if a parent might be traveling from time to time.”
Galal was surprised that early investor feedback was enthusiastic, but also encouraged her to take the idea to Silicon Valley or elsewhere in the West. “With all the change in Egypt, I feel obliged to bring positive energy to my country, myself, my daughter,” she explained. “I feel positive toward Egypt’s future and as well as significant market opportunity in the Middle East.” She adds however, “I think parents and children anywhere in the world might want to use our platform.”
Her husband, Mohammad Badrah, is an IT engineer and, like Sara, quit his job to join her as tech lead and project manager. They have built out a local team of seven product specialists and engineers. “Having a supportive husband is like the kiss of life,” Sara told me. “When you are so down, helpless and hopeless—and all entrepreneurs feel this at some point—a great spouse can lift you up in a magical way. We complete each other.”
Sara speaks for many women in the region and around the world when she says: “Believe me, being a woman entrepreneur is very hard. It is an unusually a challenging thing for a woman to balance between taking care of home, husband, a child and even work outside—so many entrepreneurs cannot simply quit their ‘day jobs’ for financial reasons. But if you want to ask why we do this, it is because we have no choice. I won’t be able to make my family happy if I am not happy, and in my startup I have found a great happiness. In using platforms like ours, women can feel connected, maybe have more time for them and possibly create and build their own ideas.”
Connecting with Others to Build Better IdeasThese are the earliest days of crowdsourced storytelling, according to Perihan Abou Zeid, whose new multimedia startup, Qabila TV, took top awards at this year’s MIT Business Competition in the Middle East. Like Yasmine Elayat of the collaborative social video capability 18 Days, she graduated from the American University of Cairo and became fascinated by both the power of social media and the performance analytics available to scale quality, useful content creation. But her roots as an entrepreneur started early. “My first entrepreneurial project was in grade 8, when I designed accessories and sold them to my classmates—I made a fortune for a kid at my age at the time.” She is particularly interested in the power of marrying analytics and social media for effective advertising content.
Qabila, which employs over 30 engineers and curators, is a video content company that leverages crowdsourced media to provide any organization with cost-effective content. And they help clients engage audiences across any social network or online platform. “We guarantee that the message of our client reaches the target audience effectively,” Perihan notes, sounding every inch the Google account strategist she once was. “By studying the audience behavior and adopting a crowdsourcing model that actively interacts and engages the audience to better understand them. We believe we are revolutionizing the media production industry in Egypt.”
The Revolution had a profound effect on the founding of Qabila. “The Arab Spring affected me greatly; in fact Qabila was inspired by the revolution in Egypt and the very first video we shot was in Tahrir square. The Arab Spring showed us the huge gap in the media industry and the opportunity presented itself at the time.” At the time, the company thought no one, least of all themselves, understood the basics of civics and government. So they launched educational videos. According to the local media watcher, Egypt Today, “Using humor, simple language and even simpler animations, their videos reached out to the youth who recently found interest in politics but were bombarded with terms they didn’t understand.” This was the model and voice that they have subsequently brought to marketers across all industries.
Sabrine Assem was working toward her master’s degree in innovation and technology at the German University of Cairo a year ago when she saw her colleagues posting questions and problems on Innocentive. The U.S-.based crowd-sharing platform has allowed over 200,000 experts in hard sciences to post R&D questions and projects to each other, and she was hooked. “Think of all the problems in Egypt that could be solved through technology, through connecting with expertise around the world,” Assem told me. She decided to launch an Arabic version in her
company, Fekkra—Arabic for “idea”—this past spring.
Sabrine was born in Alexandria, Egypt, her father an IT services consultant and entrepreneur in the late 1960s when few in Egypt knew what that was. “He always wanted to be his own employer,” Sabrine recalled, “so he always encouraged me to start my own projects.” Inspired by both her sister’s active use of social tools in her youth empowerment initiatives, and her classmates at university, Assem was an early convert to the power of crowd-sharing. But even so, a startup wasn’t easy. “Generally, it is very hard living alone in Cairo—hard financially, hard because some people don’t think women should live alone, let alone start a business. But I learned that the only thing that mattered was my mission.”
She too attended one of the many “Startup Weekends” and remembers one meeting at a Starbucks where her companions and the event organizers were riveted by her idea. “I partnered with another woman I met there and returned to Cairo to put together a team of students to build a platform and find if we could match in a beta some need to experts on the ground to solve it.” She has convinced the university and one government energy department to post projects, and has already received a proposal from academics in Egypt.
Of course, the power of social media in Middle East startups is hardly limited to Egypt. Jordanian-based Abjjad is the first Arabic/English, Goodreads-like social network where book lovers log in, connect, and share recommendations and book lists with other readers, authors, and bloggers. Founder Eman Hylooz is a software engineer, MBA, and marketing research expert, and her team has built one of the largest databases of Arabic book titles. She believes this will stir audiences across the entire Arab world to read and buy more books.
“Apparently I am a bookworm,” she told me. “I wanted since forever to start a project related to books.” While covering Jordan and Saudi Arabia for KPMG, she heard that the new Amman-based startup incubator Oasis500 offered a six-day training class on how to start a business. “It was a turning point in my life,” she believes. “I gained the knowledge of converting my idea into a real business plan. I pitched Oasis and won a seed investment to establish my ideas. That was May of 2012, had my beta up by June 18, and as of this week have more than 15,000 registered members and near 2,500 written book reviews by the audience.” Built solely with freelancers, Eman will look to raise her first large investment round. Later this year she hopes to open an office, bring on full-time employees, expand beyond Jordan, and monetize through book sales and advertising.
“I have to tell you,” she smiled, “I am proud to be a woman entrepreneur, as usually entrepreneurship is oriented more toward men in general. Currently, however, the ratio is changing as more women are tending to go through this journey. And maybe I am getting more opportunities from other women entrepreneurs as they love supporting other women more.”
A New Day of RetailAlex Tohme isn’t the only woman leading the charge in e-commerce in retail in the region. I knew Jordanian Linda al Hallaq was a great entrepreneur, based on her focus and energy alone when I met her at a Wamda gathering specifically on e-commerce in Jordan, but clearly it was also in her blood. Raised in Saudi Arabia until the first Gulf War, she returned to Amman to study hospital management. At the tender age of seven, she would pick parsley from her grandmother’s garden, wash it, remove the stems, wrap bunches in napkins, and sell them to her neighbors. In college, she organized student parties and threw children’s events, and later, in 2004—knowing nothing about cars—she launched Jordan’s first auto enthusiast magazine because she sensed a market need.
But it was in 1998, with fifty dollars and her sister Hana, Linda founded Hand Crafts—creating and producing painted handicrafts for friends and relatives. Their business succeeded, and they began to meet other women doing similar work. They eventually built a network of a thousand women artists working from home. They organized over 60 public shows and bazaars for local artisans, with over 200,000 people attending over time. And they knew that through technology, they could build an online store that would take the idea across the Middle East.
First Bazaar was launched in March 2012 to match designers and artists working from home to the enormous customer appetite for one-of-a-kind and beautiful handcrafted products. “We are providing hundreds of thousands—mostly women—with a portal to display and promote their products without the hassle of logistics, money transfers, high costs of store rentals,” Linda told me. “Without us, they really would not have an opportunity to connect with each other.” Thirteen years in the craft sales business is a significant barrier to entry. Linda notes, “We have the contacts, the know-how of how to reach and promote handmade crafts, and how to create awareness. We help buyers and sellers get exactly what they are looking for.”
With two full-time employees, two part-timers and a team of trainees, Linda and Hana see no limits. They were proud when Queen Rania of Jordan visited one of their bazaars last year, admiring the quality of the products, and it inspired them to expand globally. “We absolutely will next year,” Linda plans, “Though we already have had international sales, because the internet by definition is global.” They currently have over 200 designers offering more than 3,000 unique products online, and 50,000 unique visitors last month.
And Linda and Hana are proud to pay it forward. “In 2010,” Linda told me, “we created Hands Advocacy—a nonprofit organization that provides a platform for women entrepreneurs working from home and women interested in owning their businesses.” Hands offers free confidential advice, connection to mentors, and guidance on influencing the policy environment for business formation and growth. “Our vision is to empower working women nationwide to achieve economic security.”
Rasha Khouri is a global mix—she was born in London to Lebanese Palestinian parents, raised in New York City, and studied at Brown and INSEAD. Her commitment to the region never wavered. “When I was at INSEAD,” she recently recalled, “I realized I wanted to combine my interest in retail and my love for the Middle East. Through my research, I realized that no one was offering luxury goods online specifically catering to the region. I knew this was an enormous opportunity to create something new and exciting.”
DIA-Style was launched two years ago as the definitive online destination for on-trend luxury shopping in the Middle East. Commuting between London and Beirut, Rasha appreciates the size, velocity, and global nature of her opportunity. “Even in 2010, there was an explosion of users online in the Middle East as well as an increased consumer confidence to online shopping,” she notes. “We became the only site that offers the most comprehensive selection of on-season and on-trend women’s ready-to-wear and accessories in both English and Arabic.” Surprisingly, leading luxury brands already in e-commerce—such as Ralph Lauren and Burberry—do not have sites in Arabic, concentrating their e-commerce efforts on European languages, Chinese, and Japanese. She believes that they are missing a $7 billion market opportunity in the Middle East. More than an e-commerce site, DIA-Style helps “fashionistas” learn their best options by offering popular virtual styling tools for users to create their own fashion “mood board,” and a “Lifestylizer Quiz” they can share with their friends and receive feedback.
Rasha is proud that she is building a broad-based Middle East ecommerce enterprise. “At one level, we are giving an online fashion voice to a region that is finding its voice politically and socially,” she believes. “But moreover, the business itself is linked to all parts of the Middle East—our translators are in Lebanon, our developers are in Palestine, we are working with a marketing agency in Saudi Arabia and a PR agency in Dubai. It is very exciting to work with this region during this time of change.”
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A piece of every one of these remarkable women’s stories is embodied in Randa Ayoubi. Her multiplatform on- and offline content production house is one of the most respected in the world. But Amman-founded Rubicon Group Holding is in its eighteenth year. With over 500 employees spread across Amman, Dubai, Manila, and California, her privately held company is rumored to be valued at over $200 million. She has partnerships with global media players like MGM, Sony, and Turner Broadcasting. They have created content and computer-generated imagery for television, online, and in areas as diverse as entertainment, education, and training, and soon the billion-dollar Red Sea Astrarium theme park planned to be opened in 2014. Everything this new generation has experienced and expressed she lived, though she smiles, “in 1994 there were no entrepreneurs except for Fadi Ghandour in Jordan, no VCs or even much culture to start your own business. The idea of digital was foreign to most people.”
She looked out her office window and grew quiet and asked me to look at all the cars parked in the parking lot and driving on the bustling Amman streets. “I know you are thinking “big deal,” but you have to understand that most of the kids you are talking to today never thought having a car and all this was possible. The men and women you meet, possibility is the determining factor, not politics. They see success, they see those cars or others creating their own ideas, and its empowerment to know they can do the same. What they see now is that they can drive their own futures.”
She believes she had it easier than many women despite all the challenges of being alone not only as a woman but as an entrepreneur. She lived in a more cosmopolitan center where women did go from university to the workforce, and her family was very supportive especially as she began to raise a young family. But she is aware that the Middle East is at a turning point. “It has nothing to do with the law,” she tells me, “nothing to do with religion. It is about broad-based cultural perceptions about what women can do here. Nothing will change that but education and experience.”
Was I hearing “success will breed success” yet again? “Of course,” Randa said, “If every year there are 10, 15, 20 examples on any of our concerns, society will change. But I think the entrepreneurs need to also set their own expectations about themselves. In the market they should not worry about limits, they will persevere. But I’m often asked how I handle work life balance, and I always say you can’t, it is a myth.” She pauses noting that women are making real choices now in the region about whether to work, stay at home, or do some of both. “But when we learn and accept that we can’t be super human beings, but are open with our expectations—today or this week I travel, tomorrow or the next week I am at kids’ school activities, there is a balance.”
Salwa Katkhuda, the investment manager at Oasis500, agrees and is encouraged by what she sees daily across the spectrum of local, regional, and global potential for women-led startups in the Middle East. Having been an international financial analyst, a Jordanian investor, and founding franchisee for a global children’s fitness center, she brings a broad perspective.
“Women have had real challenges—male bias, life style balance, limited role models, and even limited access to basics like a proper transit system,” she told me. “But the internet has transformed our opportunities. It has allowed for more flexible work options (freelance, remote, and home-based work). It requires low capital needs and allows women to more easily be their own bosses. All kinds of resources are literally at their fingertips for free or low cost.”
Randa, however, wrapped my inquiry succinctly: “this isn’t about men. Bad behavior is bad behavior and we should call out bad behavior. But we should acknowledge that we are different, we have different emotions, experiences, even paces.” She agrees with something almost every founder said to me in some form: “These differences and how we balance them are why we are such good and impactful entrepreneurs.”
