I got into a conversation with an intellectual person from my circle recently, and after discussing my answer to “What Inspires You?” she asked me the following question.

One more question if I may

How do you inspire yourself? It’s like we wait for inspiration to come through books or people or something like a muse but how do you find it now? How do you know what book to read or who to talk to? Knowing that you are stuck and you need to be inspired like you’ve been before that will lead the way, how do you inspire yourself?

First of all, I love the question, and I salute her for her curious mind that took her to the extent of thinking about it and asking it. Most knowledge -I believe- comes from great questions.

I have never thought about how to trigger or regenerate inspiration. It has always been a thing that happens if I’m lucky. But I do believe that everything can be analyzed to an extent, and you can manage to form an idea on how it works. My answer for now though will certainly be raw and incomplete. Here, I discuss 2 factors that I believe help me personally get inspired.Read More

A friend has recently asked me: “What inspires you?”. I kept putting the question off. Frankly, I don’t have an answer. Here, I come to my keyboard, trying to find one.

I asked Google: what is inspiration? “The process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially to do something creative” it said. What a beautiful definition. Keyword here is stimulation. What is stimulation, I asked. “The action of arousing interest, enthusiasm, or excitement in something”, Google answered. What a beautiful definition! So in essence, inspiration is the process that gets you to become mentally aroused and excited to take action.

When she asked me, I felt that I have mixed up the definition of inspiration and motivation, so what is motivation? Read More

Hi there,
Let me start by saying that I have never built an ecosystem before. But I have built a startup. And I believe that building an ecosystem is not much different than building a startup. In fact, the two have so many similarities that I will use startup analogy to explain how I think an ecosystem should be built.

I would define an ecosystem as an environment in which a startup can thrive by being able to operate with minimal friction. Such environment is originated by a source, often being an establishment aiming to create economic value out of it [the company]. In most recent cases, that source is a government trying to attract investments and increase jobs. That source can do so by solving a problem of inconvenience for a startup [the customer] to set-up, operate, and scale.

That establishment would set value hypotheses on the issues its customers are facing, along with potential solutions to them [leap of faith assumptions] and would try to test each solution through small experiments [minimal viable product].

A startup sometimes builds a community that maybe had never existed before and nurtures it until it can sustain itself, then it steps back and empowers the community, and watches it grow. As much as we’d love to believe that an ecosystem is formed organically, reality enforces that an establishment [i.e. government] has to take initiative and put building blocks for it.

A startup has to keep itself in check every day by getting feedback and data from its customers on how it’s doing. The startup must ensure that such feedback and data is true and accurate, not just customers saying what they want to hear. In fact, the startup must search for the criticism and points of improvement rather than compliments on what it has done right. In the same context, a government must do the same to its customers [i.e. startups] to ensure that it’s on the right track in proving the value hypotheses.

A startup doesn’t care for PR, page views, events attended, or other vanity metrics, but rather for actionable metrics that measure true results like purchases, subscriptions, or metrics that lead up to those. The same way, government must clarify its metrics while building an ecosystem. Is it Startups attracted? Investment funds established? Startup jobs created? In simple words, the results should be output, not activities leading to the output.

A startup can build the perfect product in a year, or launch a limited simple version in a month to test its leap of faith assumptions. If the startup invests too much money and resources in its initial product release, it might all go to waste as the team realizes that the customer doesn’t find value in the product, or that the problem isn’t as important as they thought. Exactly like that, governments should stop trying to solve the “big problems” with the perfect solutions, and start being shameless about launching minimal versions of programs, policies, and initiatives to test them and improve them with time. Build, Measure, Learn cycle must be enforced.

I can go on, but you get the point. These are the main problems I see with the process of building the ecosystem(s) I’m involved in. I’m not inventing anything new here. All the terminology used is based off of The Lean Startup methodology by Eric Ries. I think anyone who’s involved in building an ecosystem should read that book.

The process of bootstrapping is painful, yet beautiful. It teaches you so much about business that no other experience possibly could. The uncertainty of knowing whether or not you will survive another month and the anxiety caused by it is a tough master of discipline. I know this firsthand having run my first startup from a $1,000 loan I got from family to +$100,000 in revenue as a 19 year old.

Now that we have closed a funding round for Malaeb, some think that things have been very easy. “But you have a good runway!” or “Lucky you don’t have to think about money.”

The truth of those statements is debatable, but regardless of that, have things always been this way? The short answer is no.

We have survived way longer than we thought we ever will. There were moments where I personally had literally $0 in my bank account for days, and couldn’t do shit about it. There are moments where our company’s bank account also had $0 with payroll of 6 people coming in. This is the ugly truth that not many are willing to talk about. I’m writing this for the entrepreneur out there who thinks they’re in a bad position. Guess what? It’s part of the journey; it’s not all rainbows and butterflies.

Here, I want to give the outside world a glimpse at what was happening in the 6 or so months where we were fundraising with the clock ticking.Read More

Once upon a time, a friend invited me to a yoga class. Two months later, our company received a wire transfer from an investor. Those 2 events are completely correlated.

As a tech startup CEO, a great chunk of my job is networking. Whether during events, in the elevator, while in a queue at Starbucks, or even in a yoga class. The doors this opens are countless and priceless.

As I try to maintain a somewhat human-like work-life balance, I decided to go to a yoga class a friend has invited me to. It was an interesting experience as I stretched and moved parts of my body I never felt before. As I left, I spoke to the instructor and told her I’d like to come again. She included me on the class confirmation email where I would reply to confirm my attendance.

One of the emails that were copied on the confirmation email was name[at]rocketmail.com and that caught my attention. First of all, it was a 4 letter name, and then it was bloody RocketMail email!

RocketMail was one of first major email companies established in 1997 and acquired by Yahoo! in 1998. After the acquisition, nobody was able register their email with RocketMail anymore. [Yahoo! opened that option in 2008 closed it again soon after]

Anyway, I had a feeling this guy was a techie. As I was leaving my 3rd class, I had a quick chat with him. Let’s call him Mike.Read More

Lesson learnt. Thankfully, the easy way.

As I was leaving Bahrain Tech Week’s awesome event, I glimpsed a small group of the organizers on the side so I went to say hi. I thanked each one of them for what he/she was doing: “Thank you for the coverage!” “Thank you for MCing” “Thank you for the support!” until I reached the last person whom I didn’t know [and wasn’t an organizer], so I said jokingly “Thank you for existing!”. He chuckled and took it with good sports.

Two days later, I get a WhatsApp message from a number I don’t know saying “Hey”. I ignored it, until about half an hour later, I get 2 more messages saying “I have an issue to discuss with you” “Do you remember me?”

Well, shit. At this moment, I had 2 thoughts in my head:

• I hope he wasn’t offended by thanking him to exist
• Well, shit.

I thanked him for getting in touch and said I’m very curious to know what he found!Read More

The term Startup has invaded our dictionaries heavily in the past 5 years. It’s been overused and abused. Here, I explain why most businesses are not a startup.

If you are a newly established design agency, you are not a startup.
If you have a small law firm, you’re not a startup.
Running a salon on the side? Nope. Not a startup.
Selling t-shirts online? Yep. Still not a startup.
Unique concept bakery? You guessed it. Not a startup.
Providing consultancy services? Not even close. Not a startup.
New restaurant around the corner? Don’t think so. Not a startup.
Got a hobby app with thousands of downloads? Sorry. Not a startup.

In most cases, you are not a startup. You might have been referred to as a Startup, but that doesn’t make you one.

Here’s what makes you a Startup:Read More

“The world is this continually unfolding set of possibilities and opportunities, and the tricky thing about life is, on the one hand having the courage to enter into things that are unfamiliar, but also having the wisdom to stop exploring when you’ve found something worth sticking around for. That is true of a place, of a person, of a vocation. Balancing those two things -the courage of exploring and the commitment to staying- and getting the ratio right is very hard.”

Meet my new $2 words! Conscientiousness and Industriousness are very similar concepts.

Also, meet my new favorite modern psychologist! Jordan Peterson. He’s a YouTube star from the videos of his lectures and the vlogs he shares (which he records at midnight when he has thoughts keeping him awake instead of writing them down on a piece of paper).

Here are my favorite videos for Dr. Peterson. I’ve been sharing them very religiously with those I care about.

Wasting Time and Opportunities

Peterson here speaks about the “capacity” at which we work, also known as performance, which is something I’ve always thought of. He says that from his experience, most people run at about 51% of their capacity.Read More

Recently, I stumbled upon a couple of very thought provocative questions on separate occasions which had me pause for a while and think. Today, I created a list on Google Keep of those questions aiming to update them and go through them every week or more frequently.

Here, I will share those with my insight on each, and I’ll update the post whenever I find another one that catches me off-guard.

What are your 10 year goals? How can you achieve them in 6 months?

Woah. Well, fuck. First of all, most people -myself included- probably don’t even have 10 year goals outlined. But forget that. Put your 1 year, 3 years, or 5 years goals. Why can’t you achieve them in less? I’m a huge supporter of challenging myself to achieve what’s unimaginable. I think that’s how the best things are created. A lot of great characters advise to constantly challenge yourself and prove that you can do WAY more than you think you can. This could be simply proved by doing 30 push-ups when you think you can only do 10.Read More