 How many of you have heard of a gentleman named Mohamed Bozizi? Just a couple. How many of you have heard of the Arab Spring? There's a gentleman named Mohamed Bozizi who is a fruit vendor in Tunisia. And every day, he would bring his fruit and he would bring it to market. And this is how he would feed his family. However, because of the ecosystem that he lived in, he was harassed. He could not register his business. He had trouble with the most basic things in rule of law and property rights that we take for granted. And he became so desperate over and over again that he got in a fight with a police officer who spit on him, took away not only his fruit, but his right to be on that street corner. He walked to the governor's office that day and he cried out, how do you expect me to make a living? And he lit himself on fire. I don't think any of us in this room can imagine the desperation that goes into an action like that. But that was the start of the Arab Spring. And the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto interviewed all of the survivors and the family members of the people who followed Bozizi's unfortunate example and lit themselves on fire and self-humiliation in protest. And he found a common threat. And it's encapsulated in what something that Bozizi's brother Salem said. De Soto said, what would Muhammad say if he were alive today? And Salem said, Muhammad would say that even the poor should have the right to buy and sell. And I think that narrative of just basic entrepreneurship, having an ecosystem in which you can take the talents that you have and apply them to the service of others, whether it's something as simple as putting fruit on another family's table or building an app that can change the world. Those ecosystems are what allow people to build prosperity for themselves and their families. And so our next two speakers are here to talk about those ecosystems. They come from the North Africa and Middle Eastern regions. They're talking about how they're building the ecosystems here in this country and all over the world. Habib Haddad is a former vice chair of the World Economic Forum. And we have him here. We're lucky enough to have him here. I'm sorry, the Council on Entrepreneurship specifically. We're lucky enough to have him here at the MIT Media Lab. He's running the E14 fund, which is taking all of the fascinating inventions and ideas that are here at MIT and helping them take flight with investment. We also have Ziad Sultan, who leads product management for Newsstand, which is Google Play's news platform, which reaches over a billion people, including me. So please welcome these two wonderful people to talk about this important subject. Hi, Ziad. Thank you, Mark, for this very powerful intro. We're going to talk about communities. And I think I'm feeling very lucky to have my very good friend here, Habib, who has some very interesting experiences when it comes to the power of ecosystems and communities across continents. So we're hoping to cover a few topics that have to do with his unusual path to venture capital, which comes from social impact and activism. Very interesting and unusual. So we'll touch a bit on that. And I was hoping to also ask you about your experience in the Middle East with building a dynamic platform and community of entrepreneurship. And then we'll ask you about your next steps right here in the MIT Media Lab. So to start with, you're pretty famous now in the Middle East as the founder of Yamli. And pretty much everything you've done before being a VC has had a social impact aspect to it that has been very important. Could you tell us a little bit about your journey from activist and entrepreneur to venture capital investor? Yeah, sure. To put some context, I graduated from undergrad from Lebanon in Beirut. And then I moved to USC right before 9-11 and to work on what was my dream of working in Hollywood on graphics. And little did I know that actually it was very hard to find a job for an Arab in Hollywood right around that time. And at that time, my ex-girlfriend was actually at MIT. My wife is here. She's not my ex-girlfriend from that time. So I still had her password, an easy man password. And I remember I went on her account and I found this crazy sea sail team that are working on image-based modeling that time at that time. So I took a flight, flew to Boston, joined as a founding member, and built this company that was called Mock 3, which was an amazing technology set up up until today. But we did everything wrong in the book. In fact, not long ago, I was walking down the hallway at the MIT Media Lab and I came across used Bonson, who teaches a venture here at MIT. And he said, I know this company, I actually use it as what not to do in my courses. So I did that. And at some point, we came in. The VCs had taken over. They fired us. The product was amazing, but we kind of obsessed so much about the technology. Kind of like the rookie on the mistake of building a technology company. And then after that, I did what every immigrant entrepreneur wants to do, joined a big company. Went to join ATI, worked on the graphic card industry right around the time when GPU was taking off, worked there for two years, right until I got my green card. And as soon as I got my green card, I jumped on board and started my company, Yemli, which is an Arabic linguistics company. In fact, when you said about social activism, the company in itself started around the time when there was a war between Lebanon and Israel and the time where I wanted to find information online, but I couldn't because I didn't have an Arabic keyboard. So the idea of being able to type phonetically using English characters came about and therefore was the base of Yemli around which was a search engine, et cetera, et cetera. Fast forward in 2011, completely by coincidence, not by design, I find myself in the middle of that spring. Most of the people, the leaders of that movement were techies, were entrepreneurs. People that I had been interacting with, with my Yemli hat. And I remember even a few months earlier to January 25, which was the kickoff of that spring in Egypt, at least, some of my friends were emailing me and saying, I want to do this Facebook group. We want to work on those interesting cunning techniques to push people to protest, but we don't know anything about that, but we're going to push people to go on the seat of Alexandria where black t-shirts look at the sea and turn your back. And you're all using Facebook. And if you remember, actually, interesting, at that time, at some point, Facebook had groups where you had to actually ask to join them. It was not an open, free-flow kind of designed group. And then it was very interesting because before that, before that spring, a number of attempts were tried to build movements and build communities around online tools, but they always failed because the tools were clunky, they were not open enough, not distributed enough. And I think a number of different factors, not only social media, social media was a big part of it, allowed this group to come very quickly together. And then one thing that kind of opened my eyes was on January 28th, I remember well, the internet in Egypt was shut down. And this was a big problem because all the news that everyone was getting about what's happening on the streets was coming from social media. And so people on the streets would take pictures and then the police would not actually take a brutal action because those pictures were being tweeted. And then the internet was shut down, everyone was worried about that. At that time, Google and Twitter were talking to us as on my startup hat, and as you can see, switching activism and entrepreneurship all the time. And they said, well, listen, we're thinking about launching a product that would allow people to bypass this shutdown. And the way to do that is to give people a no phone number that you call on and then you leave your voicemail and this voicemail would go on Twitter, was called speak to tweet. And as soon as this went on, we called our friends who were journalists, they pushed the numbers out, people started calling, but they were all in Arabic. So it wouldn't reach a big mass. So I went on Twitter and said, hey, I need volunteers to help me transcribe and translate those messages. And in literally less than a few hours, I had a thousand translators join and we had like a Google sheet, a very simple Google spreadsheet. They would listen to the voicemails on Twitter, put them, transcribe them, translate them and move across the line. And which was quite interesting because we could uncover a few interesting insights. We would figure out that there were the hooligans that were launched on the streets. And all of this got me so excited and I met so many great people and so many great creative ideas, innovative ideas. But obviously I got very disappointed with the outcome after the Arab Spring, what happened post Arab Spring. And this is when I decided that I wanna jump and what kind of led me to the venture capital world, which was a very interesting kind of weird path. But this is when I thought, well, there's so much energy and so much creativity in this part of the world proven by when they were pushed to the edges by the regimes by the Arab Spring, but not necessarily used for productive means. So I felt it was much easier to build movements against something than for something. It's much easier to say I wanna go and fight this than I wanna go and build a long-term sustainable plan to build great jobs and opportunities and entrepreneurship. And so I took on this as my next step and moved on at least at that time. So very unusual path and filled with social mission. And I remember from the very beginning, the mission of Yemli, if you can maybe remind us just for context, the company that Habib founded which is very famous in the Arab speaking world, is Yemli which is a transliteration engine. It's actually very difficult with an English keyboard to actually interact with Arabic content and that also leads to very little Arabic content created, very little Arabic content consumed online. So from the very beginning, it's a technology play, but to use Magat thing, it was not a pizza delivery app, it was literally a way to get Arabic content represented online for all sorts of very powerful missions. So can you remind us maybe, what was the proportion of Arabic content to Arabic population? Do you remember that? That was one of your key. Yeah, there was approximately five to 10% Arabic speakers online, but there was about 0.5% content at that time. And so the goal was how can you push content and how can you build knowledge in a, with 350 million speakers who don't have native language, content with the native language where they can learn and push their knowledge. Yeah, and I wanted to take that small detour to give context and also because that still feels like a very powerful mission that you can easily imagine how communication and easy communication, fluid communication was at the basis of the company you founded, but then this is one of the main reasons you got pulled into the center of a lot of very important movements during the Arab Spring. I remember my software development team at the time I was working on my own company, they were based in Alexandria around that same time. And so literally my software development team lost internet connectivity overnight. We couldn't reach them, we didn't know what they were up to if they were okay. And it was a very chaotic time. And you had a very powerful team. I mean, the team that you were working with in Alexandria was one of the best engineers. Very good talent in Egypt. Exactly, so they were fantastic in terms of talent and what they were able to work on and deliver. But they also were able to take on some very unusual challenges like lack of electricity, lack of security with grace and strength. And it was a great example, very inspiring. And so that leads me to maybe the next chapter that I would love for us to discuss, which is you're coming from this perspective of there is definitely a need for technology to help the region in terms of both the technology itself but also the ecosystem and the community around it so that you can go from being against something to trying to create, right? And so I remember you taking a plane and leaving for the Middle East and trying to work on what became a very powerful platform and fund, can you tell us a little bit how that process worked out? Yeah, sure, so the excitement of seeing the Arab Spring kind of opened my eyes on how much talent there was. And then I moved to the Middle East. I mean, the reason was to build eventually an adventure fund but starting with a community. And if you look today at most of the venture funds in the US, Sequoia and Bison Horowitz, they all have a fund first and eventually they have a platform to support that. What was interesting in my experience is that in emerging markets, I had to create the platform first and the platform was to develop the ecosystem and as you develop the ecosystem and you start investing in it. So we started by creating what today became one of the biggest media arms of tech and entrepreneurship and the Middle East kind of like the tech launch of the Middle East called WAMDA. Then we built mentorship programs, we built accelerators and was really kind of in a very ad hoc kind of filled the gaps endeavor. Well, let's build this. Oh, there's mentorship gap here. Oh, there's actually other gaps here. Oh, we should go to work in Morocco or work in Kuwait or Saudi, whatever it is. And over time we had a fund as well as initially a small fund. And in emerging markets at that time, most of the VCs came from investment banking background and usually failed investment bankers because the funds are usually smaller. So the term she's at the discussion that the negotiation with entrepreneurs was really disgusting. So we had a really easy kind of gap to fill but then the problem was on how to scale that. So we built a few things and even eventually in the Middle East which is made of 23 countries is a big market but fragmented because you have borders and you have to figure out how to work across borders. We figured out as well that one of the interesting ways to scale startups as they grow was working with large corporates and large family offices who have been established in the region for a long time, have businesses and are willing to want to innovate and they do that through startups. So fast forward, today we have a $75 million fund. We invest all across the Middle East. We came across a number of those war stories, entrepreneurs by the way and we kind of have been able to build the platform and then eventually build the fund. And kind of that told me how important and how underestimated is the power of communities. And I think we take it granted in the VC industry and the entrepreneurship industry in the US, but it's something that actually really is at the key first layer of ecosystems. So let me ask you a question. I believe that one of the most important parts of the community is some key success stories, right? Because it's more than just an example for everybody else. It actually graduates alumni who have seen the movie play out from nothing to a big company. It creates angel investors. It creates advisors, right? But how do you create these anchor companies and do you see that happening around the Middle East and how is the community coming together around them? It's a very interesting question, especially when you start when you don't have too many successes. There were like a couple of successes, but not enough to make a big story around them. So that's why initially we started with a media company. And the media company, we were over celebrating the stories, sometimes even pushing it a bit more than it is just to recreate a message. And we would take those stories of, for example, there's one of the entrepreneurs that I really like, Mohanad Ghashim, who was actually based in Aleppo. And when the war started in Aleppo, he fled to Jordan and eventually built on what became one of the largest e-commerce platforms in the region. So that's a story you celebrate, you share, you talk about it, that kind of inspires others. Another company is two guys, Eli Khouri and Jad, who were based a bit north of Beirut. And when the war in 2006 happened, they didn't have access to internet anymore. They had a dial-up connection. They built a company called Wupra, which is one of our big analytics company today. And they had to create their own compression algorithm because they were using dial-up. And this compression algorithm became the basis of the technology that actually moved in the valley and the venture back there. So those small stories, those are what you want to celebrate. And you kind of start activating small lights here and there in the community. And these kind of have a small radius of inspiration, not very large, but small rates of inspiration. And then you have to obviously put money where your mouth is and start investing more and more. And then until you create those success stories that are the unicorns, only now that the Middle East started because the system became commercially viable, you're starting to see unicorns all over the place. You have acquisitions. Asian companies are buying left and right. And it's becoming one of those emerging markets that's there to grab. I see. And so on the point of the media company as an avid reader of the posts that you guys were creating, I know there is a thirst for success stories. And so it actually is something very important. Even if it is not the next billion dollar company, just the daily accomplishments of an ecosystem being documented, being shared, being celebrated, I think it's something that everybody there recognizes and actually wants as part of belonging to this ecosystem. So I think that was extremely helpful to everybody. Even me from here reading it over there, I thought it was really helpful. I think also the fear of failure and all of the stuff that we hear about that they're much more eccentric in emerging markets because you want to create a job for yourself. You also, it's not something that's very common being an entrepreneur and leaving what potentially could be a good job. And so just talking about it and make it more credible and making it more, putting it as heroes of the region is something that was very important. And this is why in retrospect, if I look at communities, I kind of could, building successful communities around building three main key elements. Communities of interest, communities of action and of purpose. When you combine the three, then you have a very powerful movement. So interest is around, in this case, around entrepreneurship, is around just building tools, technology, and it manifests itself. We did it through the media platform, but it could be done around anything else. If we have an interest in VC, we come to the conference, we read stuff about it. So we link, but with a very weak link. The second thing is action. So bring people together to build really cool projects. So we used to do those workshops with MIT Media Lab, where each year, the faculty and some students would go and for a couple of weeks long, we bring startups and faculty members and they build really cool innovations on smart cities or how to work with, how to get all cities more risk resilient. And so this is kind of the action part, where you bring people together. Arab Spring was an example of the action part. And the third most important thing is purpose. You kind of keep reminding the community that it has a bigger purpose than just being a group of people linked together. In this case, was creating jobs, was dignity, was pushing the future of the region together. And that's very important when you build long-term communities. Unlocking potential and talent, I think, is one of the big ones. You have people who are extremely talented, very dynamic, and just having that avenue and not depending on just local opportunities, but creating your own, I think is like one of the big drivers. Absolutely, and also, when you think about it as, and Brad Feld says something, has a word that's very nice, hierarchies of a network, networks of hierarchies. So distributed models of rather than top-down. And in the Middle East as well, you see countries that are in the Gulf, like in the UAE or Saudi or Kuwait, where they have a lot of cash, they try to build always import and build. We want to build John Hopkins University, we want to build the Silicon Valley, and it's always about like, let's pay, and let's build this big economical zone, where we're going to bring all the difficult people and they're going to figure it out. That never works. And so it's almost always bottom up with some helping hand on making sure that your regulations and all the red tape is off. So in terms of bootstrapping such a community, there's one area we don't always agree on. And it's the role of adapting existing technologies locally, which you call copy-paste innovation. Or actually transformational stuff coming up locally with things that are worldwide like impact. And of course, the second one, the worldwide coming up with the next transformational technology is more glorious. But is there room when you're dealing with a community that is not yet completely mature and has a lot of opportunities to create these kind of dynamics, to actually adapt locally successful models from elsewhere and create some success stories that trains engineers, designers, that gets the capital flowing, that gets success stories going? And does that help as a good way to bootstrap such a community? So what is your point? What's your one sentence? You don't believe in copy-paste or so that we can get people to vote on which ones they agree with? So my take, and I remember calling you on, when you were catching the plane on the way to the Middle East, you know, was don't neglect the copy-paste because it will stimulate innovation and success stories. And I'm not saying you did neglect it, but I think the mind share is always more present on the other stuff. Like we're going to create something completely new. But I think the first one is a great way to also like put money, ideas, talent to work on success stories. So I think it's powerful. Yeah. I think actually we do agree. We didn't agree five years ago. So I think, I mean, the thing is, you see a lot of copy-paste innovate. So the Amazon of the Middle East, the Uber of the Middle East, but usually it doesn't stop at just having the right business models, the business economics and just building a company that does e-commerce, whatever. It's usually happens where they have to build many things around it. So Sugdov Cometches, the first Unicorn, a few years ago, we came to Unicorn in the Middle East, basically had to build their own e-commerce platform, but then they had to build their own payment as well because the credit card penetration was low and people would use something called cash on delivery. And cash on delivery, where you say I wanna pay with cash, but once it gets delivered to your door, the impulse buying is lost. So you said, I don't want anymore. And if you're shipping across border, then after you're stuck in customs, the whole issue. So to fix that, they create those scratch cards that are available in many different emerging markets, that became a different company on its own. They also had to create their own logistics company because last mile delivery was also a pain in some countries. So there's always a copy paste, but there's always an innovate next to it. And I think that the difficulty of building business in emerging markets also builds walls. And so other international competitors have much tougher way of actually entering those markets. All right, so we agree more than before. But speaking of when you were on the plane on the way to the Middle East, what was your first investment? While you were heading there, it was in my company, so big disclaimer. But it brings me to the next question, which is what is the role of your existing network as an investor and how does that relate to your next step as somebody coming back to lead the E14 fund at MIT? So, I mean, I'm a proud investor in Ziad's company, friends and investors. And I was telling Ziad before we got on stage about how important I think as an early stage investor, you have to build a relationship with the entrepreneurs. And it's really about the personal connections that one has to build. Because most of the time, and a lot of VCs would come and say, we bring value and we can open doors, and we're gonna create this whole amazing thing for you, but really it's all about the entrepreneur. And the role of the VCs is very much a guiding, a sounding board and a guiding person more than anything else. And also a therapy provider, a therapist, and I'm not, I have been a therapist. I would lie on the couch. Ziad has been mine in many different cases, but it's very important to build that relationship. And I'm actually quite lucky now that I'm moving and I'm building the E14 fund, which is a fund that initially was incubated in the media lab and now is spinning out to focus on all of MIT, where I could build those relationships early on with students that are still thinking about spinning off companies. I think it's very important, not just because we need to be aligned, it's not about having to be friends before to invest, because I really need to know who you are, I need to know who I am, I need to know how to interact, how you like to work, how you think. Because at the end of the day, as an early stage VC, it's really about pushing you to do the best what you can and giving you my network. And you have to figure this out. In fact, when I first moved and I'm trying to figure out MIT, I'm new to MIT, I'd realized that there's so many programs all over the place, really amazing programs, but there's so many of them, it's lost. There's like a map and I don't know who's what and where I can get money, et cetera. And I was trying to figure it out, but I was talking to students, I realized you don't have to, because the good students, they have figured it all out. They get all the free money, all the free network, all the free support. They just know how to work the network out. So it's really about putting it out, making sure it's accessible. And as someone who has gone through the motion as an CEO, as an investor, it's about just giving you advice here and there, but also being sure that you are there at all times in terms of the support they need. Okay, and I have one question, but I don't know if we have time for opening up for the Q&A after this question, or was this the... Groundhog. Okay, so my last question was when you're talking about the people who know how to navigate the system, which is great. How do you feel about, as an investor, so as a VC, I was always torn that the people you are most likely to invest in are the ones who need you the least, right? It's a moving train, people don't even need you, and you're trying to be like, no, please take my money. On the other side, you have people you think you can really help, and if they just get things started the right way, it could be a very powerful story. And how do you kind of navigate the two? I see it as more of a very long-term game. I don't think you can find a company that's moving very fast and just... The company will not move fast. It's not like an abrupt binary thing where sometimes moving slow and then it's gonna move fast very quickly. It's moving faster than a long time ago. So you have to catch it early on. And to catch it early on, you have to position yourself and really be a very friendly and very thoughtful investor that can work and open up your doors and all of that. Actually, Joe Yito, who's the director of the Media Lab, has something that he has, his book called Whiplash, which has 10 principles. And two of his principles apply to a question. One is power of pull. And it's the idea that you actually position yourself and you work within that you actually pull on the network rather than push on the network. And if you are in a position where companies will actually come to you, then it becomes much more easier than you actually pushing on that. And number two is the compass of a map. So rather than thinking about this as the strategy, you want to go after and really planning for it. It's about just being able to have a compass and to navigate that system. It really comes down to a mindset approach. And so at the Media Lab, for example, even the companies that spin off and we don't invest in, like, we always make sure that we create a community, that we link them back and eventually they'll come around. The next startups, when they want to launch it, they'll come around. All right, Habib, it's been a pleasure to see you improve the community in terms of activism. It's been a pleasure to see you push the community in the Middle East. As your investor. As my investor. And looking forward to your efforts in the MIT community and the Boston area. Thank you.