 They're still here. Yes. They're still here It's an enormous honor for me to sit here with Fadi Ghandur He is just the best entrepreneur you can find for a long time. He was the only one in the Middle East He has built billion-dollar companies. He is runs a VC firm right now He has built hospitals for those in need. He's just an amazing personality and I don't think Startup people can get any better advice than all the stuff you've learned Fadi during your years. Thank you. Welcome. Thank you Thank you. That's an honor. Thank you Thank you. So we go straight to the point. Yes, you meet a lot of startup CEOs Yes, what's the most common advice you end up giving them? So I mean being an investor and an angel investor and a builder of companies I've realized over the years that it is never about you alone. So you need to always I need to always see the team It's about the team who works with you. Who's your co-founder? How do you build teams? How do you attract talent? How do you get people to stay around with you and work with you and believe that there is a future for them? Where their ambition can happen where they can actually create and generate their own wealth. So the core story is always about You know, everybody is gonna come and say I'm building a product I'm doing this. I'm doing that good stuff. Yeah, but what is going to differentiate you for me? And what advice I'm gonna give you is how do you build that? Organization that is going to last and you do that with people at the end of the day They're the ones that are gonna differentiate your capabilities down The sustainability road of that startup, right? So when you if it is about the team when you meet the CEO How do you know whether the CEO can build a team? You know, you're gonna be poking you're gonna be asking questions You're gonna be saying you know, so who's how is it that you're gonna? Share your ideas. Who advises you? How do you go out and recruit these guys? What do you give them? How do you entice them to stick around? Do you think about these things? I mean if they're not thinking about these things that you can tell very quickly I mean for those of us with businesses it is very easy to catch the guy that Is a salesman rather than with all the respect I love salespeople or the guy that actually means what he is saying Right, so does a leader have to be extremely tough or do they have to be extremely soft or no soft? Look, you need to have a balancing at at all times so tough You need to be tough when you need to be tough Yeah, and you need to be soft in the sense of absorbing and advising and acting as Addressing that challenge from a learning perspective Rather than really being a soft and not taking any Issue or challenge or a problem in the organization Without Making it a lesson. I mean that that you know, we we learn by continuously Making mistakes, so it's not about softness. It's about what do we do with that? Yeah So then if you look at an entrepreneur does it matter what education they have is there some education? That's especially good or a special technical then your technical you have to have that You have to know your stuff, but I'm not gonna ask you if you have an MBA or Or what did you study? Neutral on it, okay, it doesn't matter who cares if you have an MBA or not It's about Your knowledge and your passion and your your ability to actually articulate what you want to do when you became an entrepreneur, how did that happen and What did your parents and family think about it when you you know, I'm you know, one of the lucky ones I had fantastic encouragement and then my father for a long time was a mentor So and and if you'd ever asked me he was the core at you know At that you have to remember I started the business straight out of college So I was 23 years old and I was very naive You needed a father figure so I had the father to be my father figure and he He was invaluable for me And like everyone else and we've talked you and I I mean I I consider myself an accidental entrepreneur I wasn't thinking that Actually a career could be in building a business I never knew for a while whether my business that I started was gonna survive in the first place So yeah So accidental but you had but you had somebody supporting you. Yeah, I had a co-founder I had I had a partner who's no longer with us now But he was he was a bit older than me and he was definitely a mentor he and the idea came originally from him to be fair So I'm I'm the execution. I executed. I built the business. He was based in New York I was based in Amman Jordan and we thought That we wanted to build the federal express of the Middle East The there was a gap in the market Post offices were lousy. They still are there was one big multinational and we thought we were crazy enough to build a Company that's gonna compete with the HL imagine. I mean even now if you say it they think you're crazy Imagine back in 1983 What people would have said about that but that takes naivete that takes somebody that says why not you know It can be done and And you just go out and do it So let's talk about the Middle East you are from Jordan and you now live in Dubai So I yeah, I built the business out of Jordan. I grew up in Jordan, right and I've moved only 10 years ago to Dubai For for the venture fund and for for building the business. So is it possible to make a comparison about starting a company in the Middle East? versus doing it in California or I tell people who are Whoever wants to listen That building a business out of Silicon Valley is is easy because you're you're in what you are in Silicon Valley, so it's You you have an idea you have massive amounts of capital the infrastructure is practically built It's an open market. You have a 300 350 million dollar market the biggest economy in the world and it's all open You don't worry about geography. You don't worry about what do I do to sell a product in? From California to New York. How do I access markets? How do I access clients? It's been done before you have mentors that have done it right next door to you within What five ten twenty mile radius in the Middle East with 22 countries? We're 350 million people In the Middle East but 22 countries each country has a different regulation different a way of doing business different way of accessing markets It is so much more difficult and I you know, these are real these are real heroes and real entrepreneurs because they go out and they are crashing and and and demolishing barriers day in and day out and not waiting for anyone to actually Open these doors for them because it is so difficult. So yes, it's different Different here in Europe also because you also have a relative even though you have many countries, but you have a relatively sometimes common regime of of a regulatory environment that And it takes much longer to scale businesses and it's because you have to struggle with all these multinational boundaries that you have You you have to face so when I built aramics, which is a logistics business and by definition You have to be in many countries when we were able to conquer the geography of 15 of 22 countries We effectively made that market suddenly melt and looked like a 350 million People market and the two trillion dollar economy and that's that's how how we became a dominant player Because we made the geography Irrelevant at the end of the day right and now Aramax has revenues of nearly two billion dollars It's one point one point three one point four billion dollars. It's uh, we took it public on NASDAQ We were the first company to have gone ever public from our region On NASDAQ in 1997 and then I bought it back Like every entrepreneur five years later and then I listed it again So I took it. I'm one of the few entrepreneurs that took the same company twice We did it on the Dubai stock exchange and we actually Made the seven times our money within three years by taking it from NASDAQ back to Dubai and And I remained a shareholder all the way through by the way So buying it back and and re-listing it again Talking about exits because everybody thinks of exits. It took me 35 years to exit my business So it's you can't build a business you can't stick around on it Yeah, and you can enjoy doing whatever you're enjoying and you can create wealth while sticking in the business There's nothing wrong with thinking long-term and building an 18,000 people Company and and enjoy running it and creating entrepreneurship inside the organization. I'll give you a high five for that indeed so a Company that wants to Establish business in the Middle East or sell to the Middle East. I know we shouldn't generalize, but what's the general advice? Talk to me No, I mean the general advice is it depends on the market You're going to and then again, you know generalizing means mean when you say Middle East you're generalizing so People that want to come to the Middle East normally come to the Gulf Cooperation Council so Saudi Arabia United Arab Emirates Kuwait Oman Bahrain these are relatively a common market There is There are stream they they look the same their currencies are the same practically They are they're the they're about 60 70% of the economy of the whole Middle East So instead of thinking fragmentation of 22 countries you you think of five six countries you base yourself out of Dubai and And you launch Dubai is the hub of business and commerce out of the region So people come and set up there. There is a regulatory regime that allows you to own a hundred percent of your business It's tax-free and it allows you to cross border not only into the Gulf countries There are a lot of people that are based out of Dubai that do business in Africa do business in South Asia It's within a radius of I'd say five five hours flight You're tapping into three four billion people market out of Dubai So and that's how the the city positions itself as How is the attitude among buyers if you come there as a northern European startup? With different background different culture values. Are they protective or The internet technology has melted that that cultural differentiation. So everyone has a smartphone in the region Everybody trans acts. Everybody's on Facebook. Everybody is on Twitter. Everybody consumes massive amounts of YouTube E-commerce is is happening and happening rapidly So if I'm gonna analyze the Middle East with our and removing that it is in the Middle East because everybody is scared Middle East bombs Political upheaval forget that don't believe CNN when you watch it about our region. Yeah, we have a different region It's young 60% of the population is under the age of 25 and they're all connected and they're all Intune with what's happening with the rest of the world So focus on that focus on the promise focus on the future focus on when on people that that that look like you that want to do Things so buying habits are not necessarily different. They might want people people might want to do stuff in their own language in Arabic But it's the same story. It's this Amazon Google Facebook. They all have massive Operations out of Dubai by the way, so talking about the same language and the same the audience here wants to hear you Talk about leadership and values, right? So so leadership values culture the culture of the organization. How do you how do you think about values in organization? What do you look for? So look you need to and we've talked you and I several times before about about you know the issue of values is Startups even at the very early stage You need to think about what sort of an organization are you building? What sort of culture inside the organization? How do you talk to each other? What is the communication between people is how are you creating a flat? Organization where there is a democratic process relatively democratic process of sharing knowledge and sharing capabilities Do how do you actually talk to your clients? Are you a customer centric and what does that mean? Do you talk about it? Do you address these issues? How do you how do you want the world to view you and specifically now look at Silicon Valley from being and with all Respect we can we can go controversial a little bit And from being the darling of the world to being a sort of a in a strange place now Are we disrupting democracy? What is social media to wing to us who is manipulating social media fake news? And this is all part of an internal process For very powerful companies that wanted to tell us that they had a fantastic corporate culture But then discover that they have challenges inside that need to be addressed So every startup needs to realize that this is a complex world Everybody's watching and and you need to be very clear on how you manage you want to manage your organization Not to talk about harassment and sexual harassment. And this is all It's part of the process of power you're the founder you're a CEO you feel you can do stuff People watch you and then use kill you because if you disrupt that process of respect inside the organization Whether for women males or females etc. Then that reflects on the whole organization and some organizations collapse Collapse because the CEO failed in translating his his real vision of what an organization he's building and his personal actions Well, you have to walk the walk and talk the talk and be Be there all the time you it is a very very tough job to be a CEO of a company It is there's no glamour in it You are being watched and you'd better you'd better be careful. So when you were CEO Did you bring up culture and values as a separate topic? Did you say let's discuss, you know, my job as a CEO was a preacher Yes, I preached I was in the business of flying all over the world because we were in multinationals You know, we were in 65 70 countries. Yeah, so by definition multinational multicultural so India UK US China these are different types of people and the culture unites the culture of the organization unites I was the culture custodian. So I was the preacher and I felt that Culture actually was a differentiator for us from our competition because if I'm if you ask me today What the heck did you do building a business competing with DHL? What's the different? What's the difference? I can tell you all sorts of things. We were less expensive stuff But what really trumped us was a corporate culture was completely flat. I Wasn't the guru of gurus up there where everybody comes back to me. Hey boss What do you think of this? What do you think of that? If people told me hey boss? What do you think? What do you think of that and they're based in China? They are out of a job Because I have no idea what happens in China. Okay, you're on the market You're on the front line go fix your problem. You're empowered. It's decentralized. It is your story not mine I'm funny. Yeah, we have only a conductor. We are running out of time, but we have an important question to you Yes, teach us something from your culture some saying or wisdom or something that we can take away from Jordan From the Arab world. It's it's called So I you you you give me a hint before so I Prepared myself for it and and so that it fits into the the startup world It's it says it says I'll say it in Arabic. Yeah, it sounds like finished by the way, so cool Masha'a liqa'hu al-uqool Al-mashura So seeking advice is the fertilization of the mind Seeking advice is so you have to seek. Yes So I have to ask for advice and it's how you fertilize your mind. So it's about mentorship. It's about Companionship it is about doing things together because because I my mind is better when I ask you questions And and your mind is better when I ask you questions in return Wonderful. Thank you