We recently sat down with Amir Hegazi, author of the renowned book Startup Arabia. Hegazi is a life-long entrepreneur, with over 15 years of startup, tech, E-commerce, and digital media experience. Hegazi is one of the early pioneers of digital media in the region, having launched the largest online TV network in the Arab world.
What is the importance of work in your life? Why do you work?
As critical as work is from a financial, make ends meet, and quality of life/well-being perspective, its value goes well beyond. Doing meaningful work that someone is passionate about and believes in is perhaps one of the most rewarding endeavors one can undertake. It’s “food for the soul” if you will – it teaches you much about life, people, and yourself – I can’t think of a better and more rewarding education and personal growth vehicle than searching for, finding, and following your dreams with focused, hard work over many years.
Work has given me the opportunity to experience and learn new things I never imagined, travel the world, cultivate valuable relationships, as well as develop myself and learn from my mistakes. Not to mention the priceless satisfaction of seeing success or impact right before your eyes.
What does the word “entrepreneur” mean to you?
Entrepreneurship at its core is about creating something valuable out of nothing, which may or may not involve building a startup, though a startup by definition forces you to develop an entrepreneurial mindset/attitude.
Entrepreneurship is very much about being resourceful, since its rare that you have all the components of a successful business from the get-go, e.g., the right idea, co-founder, team, opportunity, funds, know-how, timing, etc.; so then it really becomes more about how to leverage whatever you have as best as you can and work around or make do without whatever you lack, till you’re able to gather all the right building blocks you need to scale.
How do you create a balance between scale and quality as an entrepreneur? Do you perceive one of them as more important than the other?
That’s a great question and while the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive, it comes down to distilling the key essence of your product or service and identify the real drivers of value to your customers, and protect those core elements or what is commonly referred to in business lingo as the “secret sauce” through rigorous quality control process and various checks and balances mechanisms to ensure your customer experience is at minimum consistent as company grows, if not actually getting better.
Exceptional companies like Amazon, Apple, Google, Airbnb, etc. go even further, where they have built-in customer feedback loops and use data analysis and all kinds of ongoing product/service- customer fit to further tweak their offering. And a prerequisite to all of this, of course, is assembling a team that is customer-centric and always striving to learn and do better. This is critical, without such a continuous learning and development mindset and culture, no amount of customer feedback or data will ultimately produce optimal tangible improvements in quality. Afterall, it’s your people that have to analyze the data and make the critical decisions, often against preconceived notions or in the face of unexpected results, and often involving new risks and requiring strategic shifts in thinking, or even a partial or complete overhaul of an entire strategy as in the case of pivoting.
Why did you decide to do Startup Arabia now?
I felt the timing was right, a large portion of the region’s youth are now just coming of age when they have to make tough career decisions and weigh out their options, many with limited options in so far as employment opportunities. Thus, there seems to be a greater need and demand for entrepreneurial education and inspiration.
I felt there are no better storytellers and in effect mentors than the very local entrepreneurs who went about achieving great success and “survived to tell all about”, folks like Samih Toukan of Maktoob & Souq.com, Mudassir Sheikha of Careem, Omar Gabr of Instabug, Mona Ataya of Mumzworld, etc. I thought they would be more relatable to the local youth, much more so than their counterparts in the west, e.g., Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates, etc., not to mention their advice and perspective would be much more relevant and timelier to starting and growing a business in the Arab world.
I felt a project as such was overdue and it needs to be done—so, I embarked on as a social mission more than anything to try to help give back something that can be valuable to many aspiring entrepreneurs looking for some kind of guidance at the beginning of their startup journeys, so they may go achieve success comparable or even surpass those ones in the book, or even go on to build world-class, globally-recognized brands, perhaps some of whom are reading this as we speak, or perhaps that someone is you.
The stories in the book are described as ‘untold’, why is that? And what do you think makes the interviews within it special?
There hasn’t been any comprehensive book or publication of any kind to date that I’m aware of that captures the full stories and perspectives of so many different kinds of tech entrepreneurs in one place. Sure, bits and pieces, have been covered here and there. And while Chris Schroder’s exceptional book Startup Rising has put the region on the map so to speak by highlighting the changing tides and entrepreneurial wave taking hold in the region, nowhere has there any book published by Arab entrepreneurs for Arab entrepreneurs.
Startup Arabia captures the exciting stories of twenty-two top tech entrepreneurs across the region and across different industries and from different backgrounds. It gives the reader a front seat view of their exciting journeys from idea to thriving success. It presents their lessons and insights from marketing advice to funding tips to inspirational quotes to personal perspectives, etc., so others can learn from. If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur or a seasoned one for that matter in the Arab world, I believe this is a must-have book, it’s a small investment in gaining insights and motivation you can use on your entrepreneurial journey.
For more information, visit Startup Arabia Book. The book is also available in book stores in Egypt and soon in both English and Arabic throughout the region via Nahdet Misr Publishing House.
