 Live from Bahrain, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Summit Bahrain. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here in Bahrain for the special exclusive coverage of AWS Summit in the region, and the big announcement of the AWS region being deployed here, and that's scheduled for Q1 roughly in 2019, as Theresa Carlson told us today on theCUBE. This is exciting opportunities for the Middle East and the region and the ground in the world. A big spot where Amazon needed a region, and of course we got all that coverage. Our next guest here is Lana Alatar, founder of Good Juju, and amazing logo on their card. Empowering good, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. Thank you for having me. Great to meet you yesterday, and when we were chatting, take a minute to explain what Good Juju is, and we'll get to the meaning of the logo if you can see it. I'm not sure you can see it, but. Go ahead, what's that? What's Good Juju? Good Juju means good magic. We're a digital agency with a conscience, and how we do that is a lot of our clients are people that have any kind of social good to them, so we're talking autism schools, or even normal schools, for example. They might charge money, but they're still in the industry of education, so it's fantastic. So we help the little guys. We give them the technology that they need. We empower them with technology, and that's what Good Juju's about. On the other side of the spectrum, we also hire mostly women to do the development, so we hire and train. We hire refugees as well, and most recently we've signed a contract with a company, and they provide us differently-abled people, but they're fantastic designers and developers, so we've expanded into that as well. So we pay our staff to be heroes. They are heroes day in and day out, and that's why I told you to wait. I can see you're impressed. Oh my God, I'm impressed. Well no, I mean, there's a little bit of capitalism in there, too, that makes me go, wow, that's a brilliant idea. Arbitrage of the labor market, but they're also helping people, and you're giving, tapping into passion. You're taking a passion project, turning it into a business, help people bring it all together, magic. Exactly. Do we help people? That's good magic. Exactly. That's where the name Good Juju comes from. Great mission. I love your mission. Talk about some of the things you're working on. Okay, so most recently we're working on a diversity on board project, and initially it will be to, so we handle the tech part of this. So a lot of people, they come to us, and they try to partner with us, or even get us to complete their projects. And this particular project, it's, if you go to any part of the world, usually in the Middle East, it'll be Middle Eastern men on the boards, and if you go to the States, it'll be like middle-aged white men on the board. So there's no diversity, and that can be a problem for certain companies, because you want the 360 view. It's a problem period. I think pretty much people have figured out that diversity gives you more than not having it. You see things from different angles, because if you have the same kind of age group and the same kind of gender and the same everything, then you will not foresee the different challenges or opportunities that come by. So this is a matchmaking portal that we're working on, and it's soon to be launched. We're already testing internally in beta, and then we're going to expand it to like a private beta group. So that's one of the things that I'm working on. I recently, within the company, did one for the Women Power Summit. It was the largest summit in Bahrain for women. We had 500 women attendees and about 50 speakers. Some of them were international as well. All women, men were welcome, but majority of them were women. And just to really up the game in the gender equality, so we did the technology for that as well, so we did an online ticketing system, credit card debit card payments, a reservation, so it was a lot of fun. And who's coding all these apps? Oh, us internally in the team. We have about nine in Bahrain, and most of them are women, except for one, the digital marketer. Mm-hmm. People getting down and dirty in coding away. Yes, although it does take a lot of training, so in Bahrain there's been a shift, right? So I also run a local development community, so the Google Developer Group in Manama, the Manama chapter, and we have like 651 members, right? So it's picking up, and people are learning. TensorFlow is like candy for developers. We did do a few TensorFlow. People love TensorFlow. Oh yeah, definitely AI machine learning, deep learning. It's on right now. It totally is. All right, so talk about how do you find all these people, do they come to you? You've got an open policy, you're hiring refugees. Is there like, it means there's like a network? Are you tapping your own network? So what we usually try to do is find people that are on the ground, and then they tell us like, oh, we have like this kind of facility set up, so can you find us a job? And I will never say no to people wanting jobs, and to be very honest, in my line of work, especially when you're catering to charities and NGOs, you have an abundance of clients. It's overflowing, because they don't have the capital that they need in order to accomplish their projects. You do big firms, you're like conglomerates now. You know, you want to tap in these big agencies. Yeah. You got to write a big check. Exactly. And you might not get the service you need anyway. Exactly. And if you're an NGO, you don't get the love that the big commercial clients would get? Exactly. So we cater to those kind of clients. And also we have, so our slogan is empowering goods. So we empower those that empower other people. We would never sell our clients something that they don't need. For example, we focus primarily on like, sometimes they want a website and an app and the whole nine yards, and then they just need one pager to accept payments or donations online, and that's all they really need, and some good branding. And so we make sure they focus that capital that they already have, and really capitalize on that capital that they have and give them the maximum bang for their buck, basically. That's awesome. Now, who do you work with? Do you have any partners? Are you doing it solo? What are your? It's just me and leading the staff of nine. And then we tap into a global market of 10. So we have associates that we bring on. I believe in the gig market. I don't think that having full-time staff long-term is something that is sustainable. Even, so I recently came back from China from the annual new meeting of champions and the common theme over there, whether it was the future of work, the future of education, or even the future. Okay, wait, there was work, there was education, and there was one more. Did you hear something? Yeah, e-commerce, there we go. Digital, like online sales. And we noticed like, there was a very big trend towards everything being digitalized. And with the exception of having community clubhouses to have that human factor over there. So people love to still have that engagement, that bonding that I belong to that company or I belong to that mission of vision. But everything is going online. So I really believe that the gig market's going to, it's already started taking off, so it's going to be a thing. And then being a part of community really brings the shared experiences together. And when you have that kind of co-creation or interaction, it makes people feel part of something bigger. Exactly. And that's bonding. Exactly, so even if you look at e-commerce stores, a lot of them have their like flagship stores, but they're not there for sales. Because most of their sales gets done online. They're there for giving that experience. So when you walk in a store, you have that experience. That's super. What's the biggest thing that you've learned doing this? Is there any things that surprised you? Things that jumped out at you? Things you didn't expect? Things that were successful? You go, wow, that was amazing. Things you tripped over? I tripped over a lot. It's constant tripping. So that's how you learn. Yeah, so when I first started, I mean people think like, okay, so you're going to help charities and you're going to help people and you're going to make money. How does that work? I learned very earlier on that people value what they pay for, so don't give things for free. You charge people, but charge them reasonably. So you say, okay, I'll charge you this much for this kind of service. And this bit, you can do it by yourself, right? We'll give you the guidelines. We've done it over and over. And we'll tell you what your branding is and then you go out, find the pictures or write up the copywriting or whatever. So there was a lot of, for example, oh, you can't hire refugees and why can't I hire refugees? There's a lot of trial and error. Obviously you'd have people that would sell their... You got to give it a shot. You got to try. Yeah, of course. And the experience has been unbelievable. I mean, some of them start off with WordPress development and then end up with full stack JavaScript, right? And you give people a chance. It's just like that example of Professor Mohammed Unison, Grimanc Bank, where he said, oh, you can't loan to beggars. And he's like, why not? And the default rate is so much more lower than the conventional banks and they don't have any credit ratings, right? So I learned to not, I try not to follow the status quo. My mission is purely to empower people, whether I'm employing them or I'm doing a project for them. So there's always that angle and it's very different when you know what your values are and you go in, so. And then you got to have an alignment. Well, Lana, thanks for coming on theCUBE and sharing. Great to hear your story. I think Bahrain is going to be a great tech scene. Obviously I'm very encouraged by the entrepreneurs I met. You can kind of spot an entrepreneur mile away. They chirp a lot, they want to move go faster. Where's the cash? Where's the collaboration? So they don't, I'm not in the mean way, I don't mean that. And then the other thing that surprised me was Teresa's women's breakfast yesterday that was blown me away. How dynamic the group was. I thought that was phenomenal. Just great to see the startup community here in Bahrain doing just so much energy and support. We have a very tight ecosystem. I'm sure some of the other people probably have already mentioned this. Everybody talks to everybody. So you're always one step away from whatever it is that you need. So either you ask a person, they know exactly what you need. Or they refer you to that person and they give you like name and number right then and there. So we're all intertwined. I think you've seen as old how the ecosystem is just amazing. That's important and it's super important as communities with open source, you can see this when Amazon comes here. It's going to be a goodness of open source. And you can have now scale. You can have pull new opportunities going to be coming in. It should be a fun ride. I'm looking forward to covering you guys. I've been telling everyone that it is amazing time to be a woman tech entrepreneur in this region. Amazing. Congratulations. Thank you. Our doors always open in Silicon Valley if you need anything. Okay, that's more cube cover. Stay with us all day wall to wall. Stay with us. We've got a couple more interviews. We'll be right back after this short break.