 From Bahrain, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Bahrain. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Welcome back everyone, it's theCUBE coverage for Amazon Web Service Summit in Bahrain in Middle East. I'm John Furrier, Cloud Compute Star, startup panel. Got two great guests, Sahab Abdullah, who's with Flat Six Labs. Incubator, investor, same Dolbett with Sync. Sorry, I got that wrong with a little glare on my screen there. Thanks for coming on, appreciate it. Guys, startup scene here is robust. Last year from this year, more energy, more deployed capital, you guys are deploying capital, you're building a company. Give us the update, start. Yeah, what would say over the past year, just our Bahrain location alone, we've already hit 23 startups that we've invested in and we're looking to increase that number by about six to eight startups every six months. As you've seen over the past year in the MENA region and in the GCC, there's rapid growth in the startup scene and we're slowly starting to see each vertical fill up with relevant startups and get a bit more saturated. I think for a while we were one of the regions that were a lot less saturated when it came to our local startup ecosystems than the rest of the world. The good thing is now that we've got a lot of the financial infrastructure into the place, Flat Six Labs is one of them and I think that's where we really were lacking support before. And so we're starting to feel C players come into every stage of startup growth to be able to help the startups raise their seed funds, series A, series B. And your role here is outreach, building out Bahrain. Yeah. We're going to the Economic Development Board trying to figure out that, put together that entrepreneurial strategy and not figure it out, we know what it is. You get money, you build a company. Yeah, exactly. Just get into parties together. Yeah, so what we're trying to do is there's two main things. One is that we're trying to finally be the first kind of financial investor that can help people going from a full-time job into full-time entrepreneurship roles and to give them access to three of the biggest barriers that they usually will face, which is a business development network, mentorship and capital. And another thing that we're doing is we, so personally what I take care of is that I go to a lot of the international events around the globe with startup ecosystems and try and find very early-stage founders and educate them on the market, the region, see where people would fit, where the gaps are in the market and kind of raise awareness of all the advantages that we have here in Bahrain. What makes you guys different? What's the differentiation? As a country or as Flat Six Labs? Both. So I'd say as a country, Bahrain's in a very unique position where we have a cultural mindset that is very easy for a lot of foreigners and expatriates to adapt to. I think we've even been ranked number one in the world as a place for expatriates to live several times. And another thing is that we have a very high-skilled workforce. Overhead costs are a lot lower. So for example, when it comes to the cost of rent, when it comes to hiring a team, you also have subsidies that come into place like Tamkeen, which Sam has also benefited from, where if you go and you hire fresh graduate Bahrainis, you'll get a large margin of that subsidized by the government. So you're looking at a mix where you have a high quality of life, but at the same time, it's the best starting point for a lot of startups because you can extend your runway. You have a much lower cash burn. And at the same time, you've got one of the biggest market places right next door, which is Saudi Arabia. It's a 30-minute drive across the bridge. So we've kind of got the best of all worlds over here. And because we're a small country, we have a government that's incredibly reactive. So the regulatory authorities are very close with the startup ecosystem. For example, we're always involved in the economic development board round table meetings. And the ministry is all working closely together to try and make this as friendly an atmosphere as possible for the startups. And they're authentic. This is interesting to see government authentically aligning the interests of entrepreneurs. I'd say one thing we really have going on is it's really a nationwide initiative from the founders to the private entities and investors like us and to the governmental agencies where we all are really dedicated towards making this a startup hub. San, talk about your company. What do you guys do and what's your situation? Right, so my company's name's Sink and we're a software as a service company that helps businesses manage the really hard aspects of managing their employees. Like things like time sheets, scheduling, job safety is a big one for us and job costing. And our target market is actually US small businesses. And we were early stage company and we met Salar and Flatsix Labs and they convinced us to come set up here in Bahrain and we've never looked back. The access to talent here is just amazing. The costs are very low and we're able to do a lot with a very small amount of money. And so far we've got to a total of 4,500 US businesses using the platform and we've done that all here from Bahrain. So a very low cost, leverageable model and that's because of the subsidies of just talent. It's a mix, it's a little bit cheaper to hire people. You've got more access to talent. But I mean, it's a number of things. It's both of those things. Yeah, the university programs are interesting. They're got a degree in cloud computing. They announced that we heard that news today. I mean, that's compelling. I mean, hell, if you want to make the market just teach it. Yeah, exactly. This is good. I think the good thing is that everyone's come to an understanding that all parties have to get actively involved to make it the right atmosphere. So the universities are also working very closely with us hand in hand. And I've seen personally a gigantic improvement over the past year where their senior projects of universities are turning out where they've got legitimate startup pitch decks and some of them are even ready to go straight into acceleration, which was not the case a few years ago. So everybody's really on board. That's one of the things we met last year in the economic development board, that round table, a lot of, I won't say complaints, but concerns. And they're very listening. They have the whiteboards out there, flip charts. How are they doing, checking the boxes? Are they checking the items off, moving these blockers and what's remaining in your mind in terms of things to make it frictionless? Yeah, I'd say like there's, so far we've done a great start and in the space of a year we've accomplished a lot but of course they're still shifting the whole mentality to understand the startup scene and also to get people to be less as a cultural mentality risk averse and start letting people feel that failure is an okay thing. It's okay to go straight out of university and give it a shot and try and start your own startup and also educating people of all the tools that are available to them. So although we do a lot of outreach and road shows, still there's a lot of people that need to be educated on how acceleration works, how the VC side of it works and I'd say another thing we need to see come in is bridge funds. So we've got people that are ready to come in at series A, at pre-seed, at seed but then there's usually these gaps where we need to kind of help fill as well to keep people on target towards series A. You like a bullpen capital kind of model like Paul Martino's company, SaaS companies that are in between A or B or B and C that just need that little bridge. Yeah, exactly. Just that extra runway so that they can hit the targets but the later stage investors want to see. Guys, give a plug for your reference. What are you working on now? What are you, what's your to-do item? What's the plan? Give a pitch for the company. Look, so we're not the first company to attack time in attendance and we won't be the last but where we think that we can win is job costing and job tracking which is something that the customers that we talk to are really screaming out to. So we've been building a really complex but simple to use system for managing jobs for the last three to six months and we're about to deploy that to our users in a few weeks. We're very excited about that and that's really our secret source. We're just, you know, a lot of guys doing the time in attendance, we're doing it very well but we want to be the best at jobs and we also want to stay laser focused to our particular users which is actually employers with one to 20 employees in the States and that actually makes up 89% of all employers in the States and it's very hard historically to find these guys but with everyone having a smartphone in their pocket it's actually becoming easier and easier for us and we find that- And those companies need the most help too because they're the ones that could grow to 50 employees next. Yeah, exactly, yeah. So what's a URL or website app that can download? What's the, how does someone contact you guys? Yeah, so they'll go to sync.business and they can use the web version there but we also have two mobile apps so we can be found in the app store and in the Play Store. Awesome, congratulations. And updates for you guys, what's next for you here in Bahrain in general? Well in Bahrain, in the MENA region we're continuing to expand. There are several locations that we're gonna launch again as accelerator programs and locally over here we're always accepting applications from international startups. We're actually having our demo date tomorrow so you should drop by if you're in the country. I'm gonna be here. Yes, so that'd be great if you come down. And as that happens, we're accepting applications to the next cycle and they can just log on to flaskslabs.bahrain.com all the information's over there and if they wanna get in touch with me they can just put my name into LinkedIn. So I have a password. You feed them up into a system and then when they're ready to accelerate, they go. Good to go. Good to graduate. Good job guys. Thanks for the update. Startup scene is robust here in Bahrain. The CUBE coverage for our second year covering Amazon Web Services Summit. I'm John Furrier. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break.