Startup Rising: The Entrepreneurial Revolution Remaking the Middle East - Hardcover

Schroeder, Christopher M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0230342221 ISBN 13: 9780230342224

Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

Despite the world's elation at the Arab Spring, shockingly little has changed politically in the Middle East; even frontliners Egypt and Tunisia continue to suffer repression, fixed elections, and bombings, while Syria descends into civil war. But in the midst of it all, a quieter revolution has begun to emerge, one that might ultimately do more to change the face of the region: entrepreneurship.As a seasoned angel investor in emerging markets, Christopher M. Schroeder was curious but skeptical about the future of investing in the Arab world. Travelling to Dubai, Cairo, Amman, Beirut, Istanbul, andeven Damascus, he saw thousands of talented, successful, and intrepid entrepreneurs, all willing to face cultural, legal, and societal impediments inherent to their worlds. Equally important, he saw major private equity firms, venture capitalists, and tech companies like Google, Intel, Cisco, Yahoo, LinkedIn, and PayPal making significant bets, despite the uncertainty in the region. Here, he marries his own observations with the predictions of these tech giants to offer a surprising and timely look at thesecond stealth revolution in the Middle East - one that promises to reinvent it as a center of innovation and progress.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Christopher M. Schroeder is a U.S.-based entrepreneur and venture investor. In 2010, he wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post about start-ups in Dubai and the Middle East, and was subsequently invited by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's office on entrepreneurship to judge a start-up competition in Cairo one week before Tahrir Square. He is on the boards of advisors of the American University of Cairo School of Business and regional start-up resources Wamda and Oasis500. He lives in Washington, DC.

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Startup Rising

The Entrepreneurial Revolution Remaking the Middle East

By Christopher M. Schroeder

Palgrave Macmillan

Copyright © 2013 Christopher M. Schroeder,
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-230-34222-4

Contents

Foreword by Marc Andreessen, ix, 
Chapter 1: Celebration of Entrepreneurship, 1, 
Chapter 2: Work-Around: "Entrepreneurship Isn't New to the Middle East", 21, 
Chapter 3: The New Breed, 41, 
Chapter 4: Leap Frog, 71, 
Chapter 5: The Ecosystem Builders, 93, 
Chapter 6: Startup/Turn-Around: The Education of a New Generation, 121, 
Chapter 7: The New Middle East: Women at the Startup Helm, 147, 
Chapter 8: Religion and the Ecosystem, 171, 
Chapter 9: Not a Matter of Whether, but When, 189, 
Notes, 207, 
Acknowledgments, 211, 
Annotated Bibliography, 223, 
Index, 229, 
Eight pages of photographs appear between pages 120 and 121, 

CHAPTER 1

Celebration of Entrepreneurship

I sat, jet-lagged, in a small conference room, watching the desert sun sink toward the western horizon. It was my first trip to the Middle East in over a decade, and I had forgotten how hot it could get there even in November. Last time I had been a tourist — all antiquity, pyramids, and museums in Cairo. Now I was a seasoned internet investor, board member, and entrepreneur, attending one of the first region-wide gatherings of tech startups in Dubai. The looming skyscrapers and business towers before me had been barely an architect's dream during my last visit. Now, only the heat was familiar. By the end of this conference, virtually all my preconceptions of the Middle East would be thoroughly altered.

As if on cue, a flowing figure in black glided before me like a phantom. She sat beside me, shoulders proudly back, dressed in the traditional head-to-toe abaya that revealed only her face and hands. She said she was a university student in Saudi Arabia, and while there had designed a luxurious leather carrying case for mobile devices like smartphones and iPads — complete with a battery pocket to keep them charged. She asked whether I thought this was a good business idea.

I have happily listened to hundreds of ideas, investment pitches, and calls for mentorship throughout my career. It's inspiring to meet people trying to start something from scratch, with the odds so strongly against them, and it's gratifying to flatter myself that my nearly two decades of business experience might materially help these budding entrepreneurs. But on this day in 2010, my first mentorship experience in the Middle East was unnervingly different.

Fumbling for a coherent answer, I asked a few questions about her background and the genesis of her idea and offered some generic encouragement about following her dreams. She nodded politely, but with a palpable sense of boredom. "Thank you for that," she said. "It is very helpful. But I should have been more precise. I have a pre-order for a thousand units, and this leaves me with a dilemma. There are four low-cost manufacturers in China who are enthusiastic about doing business with me, but I am nervous about having my suppliers so far away. Should I risk manufacturing my idea with people I don't know very well, or should I raise the roughly $45,000 I'd need for machinery and then hire a young woman I know locally to handle production?"

I was stunned. Before me was a young, Saudi Arabia — based, tech-savvy woman entrepreneur looking to expand her operations globally. This was not the Middle East that I had been taught to expect. It was not the Middle East that my Western peers, even the most sophisticated businesspeople, knew. In fact, her story shocked even many of my skeptical friends in the region when I later described her.

One of the other young entrepreneurs in the room, the founder of a computer animation startup based in Syria, sensed my amazement. Eerily resembling a younger Leonardo DiCaprio with a ponytail, he winked at me. "There's a lot going over here, right sir?" Right.

I was in Dubai because I have been a successful entrepreneur and sometimes successful investor in many startup companies. I've played the roles of leader, board member, mentor, and amateur psychologist. I know the high of watching customers flock to a new product, and the gut-wrenching terror of realizing that even a small mistake on my part could cost my employees their livelihoods. When I talk with young entrepreneurs so passionate about technology and the internet that they can't imagine doing anything else, I am conversing with a sister or a brother. I know what they're in for, and I applaud them for it. It's a life of bold choices; one that, as the legendary founder of Netscape and venture investor Marc Andreessen reminded me at the beginning of one of my ventures, yields only two emotions: total euphoria and abject fear.

I was there primarily, however, because of an unusual journey.

In the United States, I am frequently asked why I care about the Middle East. My answer is usually a baffled, "Why don't you?" It's hard to name two regions of the world whose mutual needs, tensions, misunderstandings, and mistakes have had more impact in shaping their fortunes than these two. When I was growing up, when we thought about the Middle East at all, we generally lumped its unique cultures and histories into some simplistic context framed around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the Iranian Revolution. In college, I had a brilliant roommate who had recently escaped civil war — torn Lebanon with his family. When our late-night bull sessions turned to the Middle East, he tried patiently to teach our dorm-mates about the nuances of the region and how we were viewed there. One night, one of our classmates turned to him, as if the West had had no responsibilities for the region's challenges and said, "There is no hope. We should build a wall around the region and let you just figure your own shit out." There was embarrassed silence, but none of the rest of us had anything more sophisticated to offer our exasperated friend.

In the following decades, America's economic and strategic connectedness to the Middle East continued to increase. The accompanying tension and confrontation reached their apex in the terrible and brutal shock that was September 11. By that time I was a well-travelled executive. I understood that engagement and problem-solving anywhere required sensitivity to the countless big and small distinctions on the ground — that the most creative solutions were rarely one-size-fits-all. I had just joined the Young Presidents Organization (YPO), which has nearly 16,000 CEO members from around the world. The group's mission is less about business networking than building connectedness and understanding among senior executives. In 2003, a fellow U.S. member introduced me to other members from the Arab world. We collectively decided to form a sub-group of U.S. and Arab CEOs to help each other learn and understand our various cultural perspectives.

"The purpose of our group," as one Arab member more colloquially but accurately described later, "was to convince one another after September 11 that we're not all assholes." About two dozen of us met as often as three times a year — once in New York or Washington, once in Europe, once in the region. We got to know each other personally, and debated with outside experts. Most importantly, we learned about the unique problem-solving under way in both regions, well below the radar of the broader political narrative of economic aid...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0230342221
• ISBN 13: 9780230342224
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 258
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland