Interview with Amir Hegazi – Author of Startup Arabia

1- HR Revolution Middle East: Amir we are grateful to interview you at HR Revolution. Can you share with the readers the idea behind your book? How did the inspiration to writing come in the first place?

Amir Hegazi: Thank you for the opportunity, my pleasure! As far as the initial inspiration for Startup Arabia goes, it was really the genesis of two events: the first took place back in December 2012, when I attended The Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES) in Dubai and heard Fadi Ghandour speak passionately about the “youth bulge” and the 100 million projected unemployed youth in the region by 2020, and instinctively recognized the dire ramifications of such mass unemployment, not just on individuals’ quality of life and the economic climate in general, but practically on all aspects of society, on the entire well-being of nations and the region as a whole.

The second event that triggered my interest in writing this book, which happened four years later, was the Amazon acquisition of Souq.com in March 2017. Prior, I was a top executive at Souq reporting to Ronaldo Mouchawar, one of the top visionaries in the region and a true entrepreneur in every sense of the word. Ronaldo instilled in the team a culture of making an impact, or “making history” as we liked to say internally. For me as I know for many of us at Souq.com, Souq.com represented something special that went well beyond providing a great value to our customers, it was out to break a mental barrier of some sort that can be best described as “it can happen here.”

That’s when I realized the urgent need to create a product that help educate and inspire the next generation of entrepreneurs in the region, utilizing existing local success stories that are relatable, insightful, and uplifting. Hence, I set out to capture the stories and advice of 22 of the top tech entrepreneurs across the Arab world under one title, Startup Arabia.

2- HR Revolution Middle East: You have interviewed many entrepreneurs in order to form this excellent book. I am sure there are countless startups out there that are quite exquisite, so what was your criteria for selection?

Amir Hegazi: I had an extensive criterion for selection– first, they had to be founders or co-founders, as I felt I wanted to capture the experience of someone who built something from the ground up versus someone who comes in at a later stage as say a seasoned executive, not to take away from the accomplishment of the latter. Still, there’s something magical about creating something from nothing or is now commonly referred to as going from “zero to one” to quote Peter Thiel excellent book with same title.

Second, they must have had established a great business, have had an exciting and interesting success story, and are articulate and generous enough to share.

Third, I deliberately chose entrepreneurs who are passionate about being active participants and contributors to the startup ecosystem. And saw their role to extend beyond achieving financial success, but also to make positive social impact.

Finally, I tried as much as possible to present a wide array of “types” of entrepreneurs from different gender, age, background, nationalities, location, industries, stage of development, etc. I even looked for diversity in terms of subtle and intangible things like personality type, style, etc. I aimed to provide a multi-lens approach than a one-dimensional one-size fits all one. I felt that different readers will relate to and learn more from some than others, so I went about covering a wide spectrum of entrepreneurs and startups.

3- HR Revolution Middle East: Since you have personally interviewed each of those leaders, what’s the one lesson you observed?

Amir Hegazi: There are countless lessons, but if I had to boil down to one essential must-have trait, it would be that they are driven by much greater force than financial gain. I can’t say exactly that financial success is not part of their motivation, because clearly it is, it has to be. After all, as an entrepreneur, you’re building a commercial venture that needs and aims, by definition, to be profitable, sustain itself, and reward its founders, staff, investors, and other stakeholders handsomely for their commitment and effort. No one wants to or aspire to work in a cash/resource draining organization of any kind, even if it’s non-profit per se. Nevertheless, they are clearly all deeply committed to a personal cause they’re passionate about, typically solving a massive problem or a major economic inefficiency in the market. Typically, I found, they deeply relate to customer pain and genuinely would like to help. At their core, they’re all trying to bring about positive change for the world and for themselves. In that sense, they’re after something bigger than themselves with the potential for massive and lasting impact.

4- HR Revolution Middle East: This book is clearly a complicated project, so from a project management perspective, what’s your advice to someone who is considering taking a complex project, in terms of pre-planning and avoiding or overcoming such challenges as “project creep”, etc.?

Amir Hegazi: Writing a book or taking on any complex, seemingly overwhelming project whether its building an app, learning a new subject, or creating a business plan comes down to a simple “divide and conquer” approach. You have to be able to break your so called “complex project” into bite size, manageable tasks that you can focus on completing one at a time. You begin by doing task A and only worry about task A, task B doesn’t exist for now. Then you move on task B and forget about tasks A and C, and so on. Then when you’re done with these tasks say A to Z, then you step back and organize these “puzzle” pieces into a coherent whole.

Having said that, the key underlaying pre-requisite to getting you setup for success and focused on the right tasks is to pre-think and pre-plan your project. Without a very strong, focused intention why you’re doing what you intend to do and what you’re seeking to accomplish in terms of outcome, your ship is likely to stray off target and that’s when you have “project creep”. As a captain of your ship, you have to always steer ship back on target by always keeping that target in front of your eyes. You take your eye off target for too long, then ship gets off course. The same is true for any project you undertake, as was the case with writing Startup Arabia.

I set out to educate and inspire MENA entrepreneurs, so that entails providing insightful stories that touch on all the key topics of starting and scaling a new company and the inherit challenges entrepreneurs face in the region. It also needed to be motivational and even entertaining, unlike say a text book. It also had to resonate with the readers via local success stories from local, likable, and articulate entrepreneurs. Once I was clear on the vision of the final product, which is something you visualize and plan, then the rest seem to fall in place and it’s just a matter of again dividing and conquering.

If you’re at the outset of a new project, I recommend you start with a broad intention of what you’re trying to do, try to capture in one sentence, that’s your “direction” so to speak. Then zoom in more into more focused “path”, so then decide on “highway” you need to take and finally which “lane” you choose. But it all starts with that broad intention and statement of purpose that sets you on the right track.

Of course, easier said than done, but it can be done!

5- HR Revolution Middle East: I am curious, what was the first job you ever had, and what did you learn most from it?

Amir Hegazi: Funny you ask, you can say my father was my first employer. I was just 5 years old and my father owned an apparel boutique store and I was put in charge of folding and stacking t-shirts and jeans, and placing on shelves. I resented having to work after school, but I also realized that the faster I can complete my tasks, the sooner I get to watch cartoons. So, I came quite proficient at it working diligently against the clock, so what used to take 2-3 hours to complete, I was able to finish in an hour or less. It was a good lesson—though of course I didn’t know at the time that it was a lesson—in the value of focus and speed on output and productivity.

I should also mention that during the same period, I went on a semi-strike when my father had turned down my request to buy me some new toys. So, following my father’s business best practices, I decided to set shop within a shop. I gathered all my unwanted toys and laid on a table to showcase and started selling, I remember placing a sign I borrowed from the store that said “Sale”. So, I was off and running selling toys, like a real small-time entrepreneur, both literally (I must have stood barely at 100 cm. tall) and figuratively. And when I gathered enough money, I went and got some new toys, mainly matchbox cars which I was obsessed with as a child. I guess lesson learned here, in retrospect of course, is if you’re stuck in a job and you can’t get what you want, venture to do something on the side or eventually full-time on your own that gets you what you want. In other words, you want something, go find a way to get it. Don’t wait forever for things or people to give you what you want, go earn them… make things happen. That was invaluable lesson to say the least.

6- HR Revolution Middle East: From your experience and observation, what can organizations learn from startups?

Amir Hegazi: There’s a lots organizations can learn from startups, least of which being frugal, testing quickly and inexpensively, being responsive to customer/market needs. Great, promising ideas from front line folks in organizations, who are often at the pulse of customers’ pain points and market demands, often get killed early on without even getting a hearing due the high bar that’s required of them internally within large organizations.

Not every new idea needs to be green-lighted by top management, formalized into a project, assigned resources, or get funded within an organization to get tested on small scale to validate; there needs to be agile practices within an organization where there is a small budget within organizations and freedom to test new ideas quickly and affordably and tweak as needed, before surfacing promising ones to management. Often what happens is you have staff member A who’s low on the command chain, who gets assigned a task amongst dozens or even hundreds of colleagues within same the department, before stepping back and identifying a major flaw in the system or a major breakthrough, or at least a glimpse of something promising. Given their low-rank in the organization, their suggestions are either dismissed or worse, they’re accused of being “unfocused” working on tasks outside their job scope.

Organizations need to build a forum where new ideas that fit within the company mission and objectives, and capitalize on the company strengths are encouraged, nurtured, and given the support they need to grow. The alternative is organizations stay stuck in their own ways, not learning or being responsive to customer needs or market demands fast enough, and eventually lose grounds, and eventually get disrupted by innovative startups. Case in point, established taxi organizations Vs. ridesharing services such as Careem and Uber. There are countess other examples, practically in every industry.

7- HR Revolution Middle East: How important is the role of tech education and digital transformation in today’s organizations and do you see a positive movement in that direction?

Amir Hegazi: I think there is definitely a positive movement on the tech education front in the region, most notably the ever-growing tech talent pool in the region, which has been a major bottleneck for quite some time and continues to be though to a significantly lesser degree. The shortage of qualified engineers, developers, and designers has historically seriously hindered the tech ecosystem, whereas, we are seeing some progress on that front. Granted it is still not where it needs to be to be regionally self-sufficient and no longer a limiting factor to startup and corporate growth, there are few promising digital transformation initiatives on the education front happening.

One initiative that comes to mind is Misk Academy, which was launched in summer in 2018 in Saudi Arabia in partnership with General Assembly, a world-renowned innovative education provider. The program focuses on offering “skills for twenty-first century” education in critical and timely tech-related areas, such as UX design, data science, software and app development, user experience, etc. It’s a clear example of how governments, or corporations for that matter, can be pro-active in educating their community about timely digital and technology skills and stay ahead of the curve.

8- HR Revolution Middle East: What is your future plans for Startup Arabia?

Amir Hegazi: I’m working with my publisher, Nahdet Misr, who have been extremely supportive on expanding the awareness and distribution of the book into new markets and platforms, including universities, high schools, NGO’s, events, incubators, and other channels where it can give book exposure it needs to its target readers, being entrepreneurs or anyone who is working in startup most particularly.

We’re expecting the Arabic version to be released in Jan, 2019, so that’s quite exciting. We are also looking into converting book into audiobook for both English and Arabic version, so there is a lot of work ahead to capitalize on the amazing stories in the book and spread the word to mass audience and get in the hands of those who need it most and help them in create their own success stories. Please stay tuned.