176: Beyond the Silk Roads: Middle Eastern Venture Investing - With Noor Sweid, Founder and Managing Partner of Global Ventures
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The Arab Empress Zenobia was a third century queen of the Palmyran Empire in Syria, known for her bold defiance against Roman rule and her ambitious military campaigns. She conquered Egypt and much of Asia Minor and declared independence from Rome, and her reign was marked by intellectual and cultural flourishing as she welcomed scholars and philosophers to her court. She was a symbol of leadership.

Well, today we welcome an inspiring 21st century female Syrian figure, one of the Middle East's most powerful angel investors and venture capitalists, enlisted in Forbes 100 Most Powerful Businesswomen 2024. Noor Swaid, Tasha Rafunar, Bimari Fatiga, Washkaran, Izir Atakan.

Simon, shukran that you're having me here. It's a pleasure to be here. And absolutely humbled and honored to be even in the same frame of reference as Zenobia. She's been such an inspiration to history, to women around the world. So really, really humbled. And thank you for having me on this amazing Money Maze podcast. It's

a fantastic platform that you've built. Thank you very much indeed. Well, for those who are thinking, how on earth did Simon manage to unveil that piece of historic evidence? How did you? Well, Simon Seabag Montefiore was a guest back in December 2022. He wrote this magnificent book, The World, A Family History, and he devotes some of the early chapters to some of the great Arab figures. I'll put it on my reading list. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for coming to our offices today. Absolutely. Where is home today? Home has been Dubai for 30 years.

And I think as time has shown, home is where the heart is. That is where my heart is in terms of my work, the entrepreneurs we back, my family.

So I'm from Syria, British, grown in London, and then in Saudi and Dubai and Boston. But really, it's Dubai. Well, we are going to talk about a number of those. But I noted, of course, you had an untraditional upbringing geographically. Can you assemble that mosaic for us? Absolutely. I was born in Boston to Syrian parents who had immigrated there in the 70s. And then when I was three, we moved to London. So I was raised here.

At 11, we moved to Saudi Arabia. My father's work took us there. He was an entrepreneur. And when I was 15, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid had this vision of the first seven-star hotel in the world. And my father decided to move to Dubai to build a business there. And so I moved there and he started an interior contracting company called Depa. A few years later, I went away back to Boston for college. I worked for a few years. I did my MBA. I

And then I was hired by a consulting firm that discovered I spoke Arabic and promptly sent me back to Dubai. And I noted in this sort of peripatetic existence is you would return as a child to the Middle Eastern in your book, which we'll talk about in a second. Is I just wondered, how did you think of yourself as you were sort of parachuted back into the region? As I think as a child, you're always struggling with a sense of belonging and you're developing your sense of identity.

And so being Syrian in London, where Syria was a very different place in the 80s, and we'd go back every summer and you assimilate.

and then you come back to the UK and you assimilate. So you're in a permanent state of assimilating. But I think as a child, you wonder, where am I from? Is it here? Is it there? I think as you grow up, if you're fortunate, you realize it's both. And I think that that's just part of that story of belonging in more than one place and that that's possible. You don't have to choose. It can be both.

Right. And you just mentioned you did strategy consulting. And I just wondered, because we had a lot of people from finance who started there, what did the strategy consulting experience arm you with?

A wonderful skill set. So I think that the frameworks you learn in consulting really help you throughout life. They help you frame markets or frame companies, look for frames for founders as now I'm a VC and we invest in founders. So what does matter? So thinking of things in a two by two matrix sometimes simplifies life, sometimes oversimplifies things. But for a large part of it is like, yes, if you can put this in a two by two matrix and how do you do that?

And what does that mean? So really the skills to understand how to map markets, how to do research, how to seek results from research, not just do the research and turn those into a strategy that's thoughtful and then a tactical plan. So I think all of that comes from the consulting skill set.

Got it. So before we talk about your current business, I referenced your book, Coming of Age, which Time Magazine referred to as a masterful exploration of resilience, innovation and transformation in the MENA region. For those who aren't familiar, Middle East, North Africa.

But before we talk about it, let's just get a sense of the geography and the investing potential. Because as I went through some of the data points, 310 million people speak Arabic as a first language. It's the fourth language of the internet. It's such a young region. You have 450 million people, half of whom are under 30. Just give us a sense for those who are not familiar, and that would include me, of just how you define this investing terrain. Yeah.

We define it broadly. We think of MENA generally. We invest across MENA. So we include sub-Saharan Africa. We can talk about why, but the bottom line is that the founders there are solving the same problems as the founders in MENA. The problems just happen to be more acute and the regulator happens to be more aware and friendly towards solving those problems in some areas. But if we just talk about MENA, which is what the book talks about, which is where we do invest most of our capital and where I invest most of my time, when we think about that, it is 450 million people.

So about the US, if you will, in terms of population, half are under the age of 30.

And there's no funny math there in terms of if I remove a country, add a country. No, it's pretty much 50 to 60 percent or under 32, regardless of where you slice it or dice it. And what that means is you have the highest digital penetration in the world in what is one of the youngest populations in the world. Only sub-Saharan Africa is about the same or younger. And a really eager, hungry drive.

a lot of optimism, a lot of youth, a lot of energy, and people coming into the workforce, looking for opportunity, and in the absence of finding it, going ahead and creating it. And really this rise of entrepreneurship driven by the rise of the youth. So when we think about investing, it's really across that part of the world. If we were to divvy it up

When we think about investing in Saudi Arabia, there is a general company that are based in Saudi, building for the Saudi market and scaling in Saudi, which is a very high growth market, especially on the consumer side, and has its own merits, whether it's on an average basket size, amount of population, and so on.

When you think about Egypt, those founders cater to Egypt. Egypt is 100 million people, again, half from the age of 30. Again, missing infrastructure like banking, so fintech picks up. Missing infrastructure like healthcare, so health tech picks up. And those founders build on a wonderful cost base, build great tech because you have some of the best engineering schools, and then build for the region. So they're able to build in Egypt and really expand regionally.

When we think about the UAE, the UAE provides an opportunity to attract the world's best talent, build regionally, scale globally. And we have about a dozen companies that have more revenues in the US or Europe than in the region, all based in the UAE. So really thinking about global tech, best practice, and the best application for industry. So although we do think about it as MENA, 450 million people, really young, each market has a little bit of its own nuances.

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You go into the investing and operational world. You'd spent time working for the Dubai Future Foundation and then with Leap Ventures, your father's business. Just tell me a little bit about those operational and practical skills you were acquiring, which are going to be very valuable when we dive into global ventures.

I think of each part of my journey as an opportunity to learn a new skill set. Consulting was consulting. It was wonderful. We've chatted about that. When I think about working in the family business, I was in the interior contracting company my father founded for eight years from 2005 until 2013.

And when I first joined, we were about 1,000 people, $60 million in revenue in the Gulf. By 2008, we were $600 million revenue, 9,500 people, 22 markets, and the biggest in the world in the interior space across every metric. Singapore had become our biggest market. India was a large market for us.

And interior contracting is 30% of development value for high-end hospitality and infrastructure. So whether it's the Four Seasons, whether it's Mumbai Airport, in Singapore, the Marina Bay Sands, those are all important projects where the interiors matter. So not the design, but the execution of the design. So when I first joined, it was interesting because you're properly in operations and properly responsible for delivering a project.

no matter where you sit in the organization. And the first thing that we worked on was the implementation of governance, a board with independence, and governance really trickling all the way down to processes, policies, procedures. How do you bid? How do you procure?

Once we IPO'd, so I led the IPO in April 2008, fortunate to have Morgan Stanley and UBS as the book runners. We learned so many things in that year alone because 2008 was a very special year. So two months after listing, we had a dual listing on the NASDAQ to buy on the LSC as a GDR. And two months afterwards, the world pretty much imploded. We lost 60% of your market cap in a six-month period. We were just very lucky to have $420 million in cash.

because we had done 80% of our IPOs at primary listing. And what that meant was we were able to go ahead and work across the world in mergers and acquisitions and just acquiring many companies. And learned that if you approach things with a family business mindset, but access to capital markets, you can structure wonderful opportunities. Learned the value of market timing and the impossibility of market timing, both at once. So really learned that when windows of opportunity present themselves,

One should take them. And that's served me very well later on in life. Working in the family business also has its own dynamics. So the real opportunity to lead by example, you can't expect people to behave one way if you behave another. So that really trickles through the business and was very important. And then the value of scaling globally.

So by the time we IPO'd in April '08, just from a few short years earlier, where all of our revenues was from the Gulf and Egypt, by 2008, 85% of our revenue was outside the region. And that was important because you mitigated client risk.

And so as you think, even now, when we think about how we build our venture firms and our LPs, we love LPs that scale with us. We also want to make sure that we have many of them that can scale with us. So really thinking through governance was the first part. And then the ability of a well-governed company to scale due to governance. How do you bid? How do you procure? How do you do that systematically and repeatedly, no matter where you are?

are key fundamentals, parts of scaling any company in terms of identifying your key processes and policies and adapting them to make sure that they can be scaled throughout your business, enabling your business to scale on strong foundations and fundamentals. So that was really the takeaway. And that applies a lot now when we work with founders, because working with founders to say, okay, but how do you do this? If you can master something,

turn it into a process and teach it, freeing up yourself to create value somewhere else, and at the same time ensuring that everyone in your organization does it your way, then you can achieve scale. As long as you're continuing to do it in a haphazard way, you can't then multiply and scale. So 2018, after that experience, you start your company Global Ventures. Some might say it was an obvious next step, but there's nothing obvious about building a business.

What was the driving impulse? So this wasn't my first business. So in 2006, I started the first yoga studio in Dubai out of passion for health and wellness. And I hadn't been able to find a yoga studio in Dubai. So brought two teachers over from Boston and built up what was to become one of the largest wellness chains in the region, ultimately exiting to a private equity firm.

That journey, you know, we ended up with 6,000 students a month, five locations, 72 teachers and a few short years. And every time I would walk into these studios, my stress level would go up because of managing all of this rather than down.

because the intention was to go and just practice yoga. And so that's what ultimately led me to sell. But in the meantime, realized how hard it was to be an entrepreneur compared to managing a billion dollar company and doing them simultaneously.

So that was a huge wake-up call for me to say, actually, that early journey can be harder than that later journey. So that's how I got into angel investing and into venture capital initially. And part of that learning really drove me then to work within the Dubai Future Foundation, serve as chief investment officer there.

thinking through Dubai's growth as an innovation hub. And that was, goodness, almost 10 years ago. And it was this, how does Dubai move from a tourism hub to an innovation hub? The DFDF, which is a Dubai Future District Fund, now wonderfully one of our MyLPs. And the learnings there were much more, how does government become a key proponent of change and innovation and attract

the right talent to build an innovation center, which we can see now many years later is really bearing fruit. Give us the sort of the high level summary of your business today in terms of mission, assets, organizational setup.

So I started the firm seven years ago. We managed three funds. We managed $400 million. We've made 68 investments across the region. We only invest in Middle East Africa. And we've had six exits, which has, again, proved the exit ability of the region. We've had a couple of M&A. We've had some secondaries. But effectively, our first fund, which is 2018 Vintage, sits at a 0.7 DPI and 2%.

2.5 MOEC. So that puts it in top decile global performance across metrics on Carter's rankings, which are the most thorough as far as we can find in terms of global markets. Our second fund, which is the 2020 Vintage, just had its first exit a few months ago, where we were able to secure 28 times our proceed, eight times our A out of a FinTech in Nigeria.

Again, driving that funds DPI to top decile, TPPI similarly. So as we look to invest, scale and exit companies and really prove the region is investable, this is what we've been doing. And it's important because when I first started the firm seven years ago, MENA as a whole had $400 million of venture funding that year.

So all of me now, all 450 million people had $400 million, which is back then like one series C round, if you will. Last year, it was 2.4 billion, which is a six X increase over seven years. It's fantastic. And Dubai is the fastest growing venture city in the world based on all the research, independent research. But...

$2.4 billion is still a drop in the bucket when last year's venture globally was a $290 billion asset allocation. So we're still less than 1% of the world's asset allocation. So when you think about that, it really puts it all in a different frame to think about the opportunity, how nascent the ecosystem is, and yet how fast-growing it is.

So let's just drill into that investment process. You have this combination of the industry verticals from healthcare, medicine, et cetera, to the geographic dispersions. And I wondered how, when you look at your matrix, being an ex-consultant, how you think about divvying it up?

Geographically, we're agnostic across the region. So wherever the best opportunities come in from, we can invest. So right now we are very focused on the GCC, on the UAE and on Saudi. We see wonderful opportunities there and so much to do. On an industry perspective, as you mentioned, we have a very clear view. Our funds are all sector agnostic. And right now we're deploying out of our third fund, which is right now the largest venture fund in the region.

And as we deploy out of this fund, as with the other funds, although we're sector agnostic, the question is always which industry five years from now is massively different to five years ago.

So if I want to take it back to consulting frameworks, how do you garner that? And for me, it's a top-down and a bottom-up approach. The top-down approach is to take a look at the macro trends, where the wins are, what's happening globally, and what other markets are doing, whether it's Latin America, India, Southeast Asia, where rarely the first move a market, although that is changing.

And then the bottom-up approach is to take a look at what are founders doing on a grassroots level, on a seed level, which we don't invest at seed, but we see most things at seed and we definitely hear about them, even if we don't see them. And where those two come together, where you have massive tailwinds and the ability to say, macro, this is changing. And we have the privilege in our part of the world where our leadership and our governments are very sharing with their 10-year plans.

So they come out and they say, here's our vision 2030. Here's D33, Dubai's 2033 vision. And for these visions, there are sectors that we've aligned with. And as a government, we would like to see private sector in this industry grow at this rate. And how can we be helpful to achieve that end goal? So we're able to say on a macro level globally, this is what we're seeing. Other markets is what we're seeing. And then within our region, this is what's important.

And on the seed stage, this is what's coming up. Where the two come together, you can say there's definite momentum and inflection points here. So in 2018, with that thinking, we published a large research paper that was 85 pages on fintech. It was the first fintech paper on the region. We put it on our website just to share, share with our LPs and share with other people that were curious to learn. It became a lighthouse for founders. So that enabled us to see all the fintech founders. And our first fund became 40% fintech.

We had full conviction back then, it wasn't rocket science, that by 2023, fintech looks nothing like 2013. You could not have imagined it back then. 2020, in January, we published 120 pages on health tech. And again, you can't time the market. But a month later, after we made our first health tech investment in the region, you had a pandemic.

And so suddenly we looked very smart, but just lucky on timing and had done the homework. And it was that same fintech theory where seven years ago, the region was 85% unbanked. We are now 52% unbanked. Nobody built banks. And in January 2020, our argument was we have one doctor per thousand people in MENA. Europe has about four doctors per thousand people.

So we'll never have enough doctors. You have the same discrepancy in hospital beds and clinics. We'll never have enough. So if you can overcome, we will never have enough. Then the question becomes, how do you solve for access to care?

And how can technology help? And how can you leapfrog? So how can you use the world's best technology to solve these fundamental problems for hundreds of millions of people, given you have no industry incumbents? This is actually a great place for founders to play. So we did this in January 2020, and Fund2 became 40% health tech.

With, again, the conviction that by 2025 today, health tech looks nothing like 2015. You could not have imagined it, which is relatively true, especially in our part of the world with remote diagnostics, with telemedicine, overtaking primary care in some parts of the region and so on. And AI and what the LLMs in Arabic have done in terms of providing access to primary care, even though it's not a doctor, it's an AI, you still have access to care. So rethinking what that future looks like.

Today, as we sit, and we do publish research on many subjects. So every quarter we publish a new research report. It's all in-house. It's all on our website. But today, as we say, which industries five years from now are just massively different, you could not have even imagined that in 2020. We take a look and we say there's two that are fundamentally game changing. And there's supply chain tech. So everything from manufacturing to logistics in our part of the world in five years will be drastically different. And food.

we still import 85% of our food. So as we are a growing population with a young demographic and we're importing 85% of our food, we can genuinely say we don't think that will be the case in five years. So what are the game changers? What are the companies that are now at Series A that are able to play in that food security space that will be accelerated massively?

So this is how we think about industries. We invest across everything. We just did a health tech. We've done a fintech recently. But that's where we get very excited, where we see that these are the industries that are accelerating. So just pausing on that agritech, which I think people will understand the dynamics that you just alluded to. Can you give us an example of a dominant player in your portfolio that is exploiting that opportunity?

Absolutely. So when we think about agrotech, we don't want to be investing in CapEx heavy companies. It's not our job. So we have a company in the portfolio that's managed to reduce energy consumption for indoor farming by up to 85%. It's called Iris.

And they came out of KAUST, which is King Abdullah University for Science Technology. And they had identified ways to treat water so that you don't need to desalinate it because the treatment of water is largest energy consumer of indoor farming and a new material science by which to coat indoor farms. So you can still absorb 80% of the light, but only 20% of the heat. And again, reducing the cooling energy bills.

So those two combined have had that effect. There are now retrofitting farms in our indoor solutions across 15 different states, six different European countries. But their solution came out of the region because, again, the region has this massively acute need for indoor farming to be a solution since we're not going to do traditional agriculture anymore.

So when we think about it, this is an incremental nice to have for many other parts of the world. For our part of the world, it's game changing. So as an American and British founder, I have built this company. And that takes indoor farming from loss making to very profitable, which means you can have more of these indoor farm solutions and solve that agri-tech problem and that food security problem much more quickly.

So before we continue this conversation, we're going to take a short break to have a note from our sponsors.

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So you've written in your book that you're founder first, not company first, and yet you've argued strongly that the sectoral imperative is there. So I'm just wanting you to marry those two things. There's three things. I didn't read the book well enough, did I? So I think the sector, we have to have wild conviction on the market. So the sector, the market, this is very, very, very important to solve.

And then we have to be convinced on the company because we're not investing a seed. We invest a series A. So companies usually have a couple million dollars in revenue. 80% of what we do is B2B, which is highly capital efficient, given how small our capital markets are for this industry. It's important. And it usually means that we can diligence not just the tech, but also the clients, former clients, if there are any. And usually the team is already there because they've built the client base, the revenues, the product, the tech, etc.

So when we're coming in, and I'll tell you that a quarter of our portfolio is EBITDA positive, which is unheard of usually, but we're investing in very small companies with huge growth and great tech. So you have to like the company.

So you have to have wild conviction on the market, strong conviction on the company, and then you have to be absolutely convinced that this founder is the one that's going to solve the problem that they've identified. And the reason that I think that COVID was a great testament to is it founder first or company first was that was a period of time where if you had invested company first and lower conviction on the founder and that company's business model didn't survive, the founder wouldn't have known how to pivot. Right.

And the companies where we had invested founder first with strong conviction on the company, but wild conviction on the founder.

the founder was able to pivot if the company struggled within that business model, which many of them did during that pandemic. And so that was a great proof of it needs to be founder first because the right founder can pivot any company to a business model that makes sense. And what are your red lines about having board representation and being on the journey with them? Because these will be strong-minded people and you have your own convictions and it's your capital. Well, it's LPs, but there's capital. How do you manage that?

I think of venture as where influence matters more than votes. Because venture investing is always minority investing.

And you can club around what you need if you have the right influence, especially with the founder. And if you don't have the right influence, your votes don't matter. So it's really this very careful balance between how do you build such a strong relationship with a founder? Is the founder coachable? Are they someone that you want to work with for 10 years, perhaps? So we think about it in a way that we maintain really strong founder relationships. We

We do that as a platform, as Global Ventures, by we've developed a seven-layer framework where we come in. We call it the partner framework. P stands for process and governance. It's the first thing we do with a founder. A stands for awareness and PR. We work with PR firms to make sure all of our founders have the support they need to build the brand they need to generate the revenues they want.

So really thinking through that framework, R stands for recruiting. I won't walk you through it all. But ultimately, by developing this framework, it enables us to work with founders and our touch points are every two to four weeks. So by the time you've gotten to a board meeting...

there should really be no surprises. You know what's going on. You're ahead of it in helping them. And you're really seen as a strong partner to them rather than just a reporting framework into a board. And I think that's where many people in venture might have different opinions. And our opinion is very much you want to be that extended founders team, that extended mind that they have. And you want to be their thought partner, not just their reporting capital partner.

And you said we a few times. Tell me about how we has become we from I. So we're five partners. I started the firm in 2018. Very shortly thereafter, Medea Nacientini joined me. So she's been with the firm for, goodness, seven years, literally since day two, working with me on the first ED report. And she's also a former consultant from Booz and a former operator at OSN. And she's a wonderful person, had a social impact accelerator for 11 years.

And really a privilege to be working with her. A year later, Saeed Murad joined as an operating partner. So he had helped companies scale from A to B and had a lot of private equity before. And both amazing people and have had the privilege to work with him for many years.

Saeed runs now the portfolio management side of things. So as an investor, but also oversees and ensures that across the 68 companies, we know what's going on. We've identified risks in advance and we can support these founders to mitigate those risks.

Simon joined five years ago from the UK, former VC and before then a chartered accountant, and brings a different level of investment, you know, diligence to the process. And then Dia is the fifth partner. So joined from more of a marketing events and a little bit of finance background and bringing it all together. So that's five partners. And we have 20 people in the firm.

And the biggest constraint I would imagine is your time and the calls upon that time. And there'll be a lot of people knocking down the door of your firm to say why there's the great new thing. You have to be, I imagine, brutally disciplined about that. Just talk me through that filtering process. So we do have the privilege of looking at 600 opportunities a quarter, which isn't little.

AI has been very helpful in filtering some of that noise out. And then we also try to engage and build the community. So you can't really operate a VC if there's no ecosystem.

So we do try to do a lot of ecosystem building, and that includes hosting an open office event every six weeks where literally one evening we just open our doors to VCs, LPs, founders, friends of founders. So people that come in through that, through a relationship, are always welcome to meet with us for five or ten minutes. We do like to see founders earlier in their journey just so we can monitor how they evolve and if they deliver on what they commit so that by the time they're at Series A, we're able to make a judgment about

on their execution. And then ultimately, the team runs, the investment team runs their process. So I sit on the investment committee and I like to see things at the investment committee. I'm always happy to meet founders earlier. I'm always happy to work with founders to think through things to brainstorm. But I very much encourage the team to do their due diligence independently.

And VC, as we know, is fraught with the failures that are part of that portfolio. What have you learned that you have then baked into your investment process from the mistakes? Oh, where to start? There are so many. The most important one or two. I think never to get excited.

So I think everything's exciting and the job is not to get excited. So I think always approach everything with, you know, very, very cautious optimism. Never believe the numbers, you know, create your own judgment and,

And then on the flip side of that is companies that we thought were write-offs at one point in Fund 1 and Fund 2 are now rock stars. So never to give up on someone. So never to get wildly excited on someone's promises and never to give up on someone that looks like they're struggling and might not make it to the end of the month because two years later, they might be knocking it out of the park. Megan, that's so difficult, particularly if you are sort of a go-getter sort of person, which you are, is not to get excited. I think might be the most difficult of the lot.

But also, it's coming back to that point about boards. You've run businesses and been operationally involved and got your hands dirty with this. And presumably, there are times when your investment is looking more fragile and it requires intervention. And when do you decide that you need to step forward?

We step forward every day. And I mean that it's really this very active, proactive approach. I step forward either when the partners ask me to, or when the founders ask me to, or if I see kind of a very slow train crash, and then we'll step forward and we'll try to intervene. But as I said earlier, venture is a game of influence, not power.

And you'll never have enough votes. You'll never have enough power. It's really about making sure that you're guiding the journey more than instructing the journey.

So we had a couple of questions from the network. Habib Akhtar, who is Morgan Stanley's former head of the Middle East, said, how challenging is it to invest in local venture capital versus the EU or the US? I don't think it's more challenging. I think that our founders are using the world's best tech to solve massive problems. And I think to the extent that you're close enough to that massive problem that you can identify and understand it.

but you're also close enough to the world's best tech that you can see how it functions and see how it can apply to that problem, then it actually becomes a very obvious conclusion. I think where the challenge lies is, I'll give an example. No one was sitting in California thinking, how do I do last mile delivery when there are no street addresses? But you take a look at the world and over 6 billion people don't have street addresses.

So solutions like that are going to come from people that are actually in those markets. And when you take a look at all of the wonderful companies that have been built in the region that had to solve for last mile delivery, that had to solve for how do you scale e-commerce, if the best address someone can give you is it's the second right after the McDonald's and then the first left after the mosque, it doesn't work.

So ultimately, solutions were built ground up using the world's best tech to solve this very massive problem. And you get that repeatedly. How do you do in Egypt, for example, or other markets? How do you do digital payments when most shops don't have the card machine because the card machine costs $300 or $400? And that's a lot of money in emerging markets, especially if you're not dollar-packed.

So if you start to think about that, and then you start thinking about the solutions that Paymal built, they built the first mobile software that can receive payments, right, out of the visa incubator in Egypt. So you take a look, and no one was sitting in Europe or in the U.S. thinking about that. That was being thought about in the rest of the world where this is a real problem. So to the extent that you're saying, how can I –

use that technology, enhance it, apply it in a new way. To me, that's a much easier value proposition to get behind as an investor than let me go down this rabbit hole of deep tech that's very binary.

And Dalia Dana, who very kindly introduced us, and that's why you're here today, said that how difficult is it to steer away from the problems and politics of the regions when you meet investors from, for example, the US or Europe? Again, the challenges and problems that our founders are addressing are...

very irrelevant to politics. So it's fintech, it's health tech, it's manufacturing, it's food security. So regardless of where the politics play, you're talking about basic infrastructure that's been missing for a long time and a younger generation that's found ways to use technology to build that infrastructure. And so that's really decoupled from what's happening in politics.

So I noted that venture investor Chris Schroeder comments that the level and speed of change and innovation in Saudi has seemed beyond anyone's imagination a decade ago. But let's just take Saudi, for example, and you've highlighted the enormous speed of change. Fast forward 10 years. I mean, where are the big changes that are going to not be expected by folks sitting in other parts of the world?

I think when we take a look at Saudi specifically, the growth of the consumer market, but also the inclusion of women in society at large. So one of our investments is like Shopify for Saudi. And again, it would doubt positive double digit month on month growth, becoming a wonderful company, you know, with path to liquidity in the next 12 to 18 months, really.

And 60% of their business are Saudi women setting up micro shops or small shops that were formerly not included in the workforce or society. So as you've included women in society as workforce, not just consumers, you've had a massive shift.

And I think that will continue to drive and continue to grow over the next 10 years. Well, it was interesting because, of course, you know, Japan's economic history is emblematic of the disadvantage it handed itself by not employing Japanese women for so long, which has changed. You, of course, have been, I wouldn't say you've been a sole beaker, but it's been commented that you're the only Arab woman in the Middle East running a VC fund. I'm sure that's not right. Is it actually right?

There's a few other women that are partners at VC firms, but I would say, yes, I'm the only Arab woman that runs a VC firm. And how hard is that? No harder than it would be being the only French woman running one in France. So I think that VC is notorious. That's 2% of venture funding globally goes to women. So for every dollar I raise, a gentleman would raise $50,000.

So when you think about that context on a global basis, the regions are different. And given when we've asked questions of successful females on the show, it's like portfolio management generally lends itself to females being very good at it and be able to sort of stay the course. What does the industry need to do? That's a big question. And it covers lots of geographies to attract more successful women.

Attract and retain. And retain. Yes, that's a very good one. I think the industry needs to take a look at venture with a more holistic lens. Venture historically has been this very deep tech power law play. If you take a look at a lot of the VCs that have survived for decades and are multi-generational,

The one advice I get from many of them is take winnings on the way up, which is not the way that VC is played today in a risk-taking mindset, which is just like bet everything on your winners and ride them all the way.

But it is the way that if you talk to the old school VCs that they've done it. So one of the things we did in 2021, the market felt very hubris. And we had the opportunity to exit some of our positions. And our perspective, I mean, I do believe in the power law.

right, for deep tech and for early seed. But when we're investing at our stage and you have the benefit of having a company, having revenues, having a team, our portfolio construction is a bit different. So I think about it as a blend between PE and VC. So every 10 companies we invest in, our hope is that only two go to zero. So our loss ratio should be two out of 10. And then two out of 10 should make it to 10 times money.

And the remainder need to make it to six times. And once they hit six times, if there's an opportunity to exit, it needs to come to the investment committee. And either we underwrite another 3x over five years or we sell. That way you can generate venture IRRs but have PE risk.

And the way that we mitigate and we generate that consistent 6x is the partner framework that we discussed on value creation. So by the time we've entered, we've de-risked technology because there's revenues. We've de-risked client risk. We've taught a client. We've de-risked team. The only real risk that you have is that execution risk, which we support with. So in 2021, we had four positions that had reached that 6x in a very short period of time.

And the marks we couldn't justify. And in my worldview, if you're not selling, you're buying. So we had one unicorn that is no longer a unicorn, but we exited at that stage. So we generated 14X. Another one we generated 7X in 15 months.

Another one hit $300 million valuation. We had come in at 15 two years earlier. So as these things came forward in 2021, we had the discipline to say, great, let's exit. And that got fund one to a 0.7 DPI within two years, you know, just because of that discipline and that thoughtfulness that the partners and I really worked with to generate these returns.

The feedback I got at the time was, this isn't how venture is supposed to be. You're supposed to take more risk and you're supposed to double down on these winners. One of which no longer exists. The one that was at 300 million. So you take a look at it, but I couldn't underwrite those valuations.

So that's why we got out. And 2021, as you know, was the peak. So it was pure luck and timing and market timing, which, as I've learned in life, it's something you can't time. But when the opportunity presents itself, the importance is to have that discipline to execute and not that FOMO of what am I missing out on? So it's much more important to not lose money than to really capitalize on that upside.

So I think the gender question lends itself to how much risk are you willing to take? And is there a gender conversation to be had on how much risk you like to take and how much more disciplined risk women take? And research has shown that women are more disciplined in their approach to risk taking. And I think that plays out in venture if you can approach it without this power law approach, which is one company needs to return the fund. It

It cannot be the case. You can structure a fund where one company doesn't have to return the fund and you can still have venture returns. The portfolio should still generate five to six times, which is a strong venture portfolio. So, Nora, some more general questions about

How would you consider yourself to have done an outstanding job five years hence? I always think of my job as to hire myself out of my job. So to master something, learn, master, processize, teach, allow others to do it.

Five years from now, my hope is that some of the other partners in the firm are running more of the firm. The ecosystem's 10 times bigger because other VCs have evolved and grown and come into the market. We've had 10 unicorns or exits out of the portfolio that have been able to trickle into the market and deploy further. And that I'm finding new creative ways to add value.

Secondly, you've written this terrific book. What was the inspiration? Over the last few years, there's been a lot of interest in the region. Many people coming, whether it's to fundraise or to explore, it's almost as if it's been discovered. And as I talk to more and more people, they want to understand a little bit of the history, the culture, who they should speak with, what some of the success stories are, what it was like 20 years ago. So last year in March, I went online to search for a book to send to a friend before they came over and I couldn't find one.

I found 10 on India. I think I found 15 on China, but I couldn't find one on the region. So I said, you know, let me take the time. I'm fortunate enough to have the time to know these founders, to know the ecosystem, and to really lend a little bit of a voice to the story of the region and its coming of age. Up to now, who has inspired you the most? My children.

So my children challenged me. Up until about a year and a half ago, I was quite media shy in the context of anything that was not thought leadership or intellectual. And then I was asked and had the privilege of being invited to be a shark on Shark Tank Dubai season one.

to which I promptly declined. And my children very promptly stated their dissatisfaction with my response. And so challenged me to go outside my comfort zone as I teach them and to have a growth mindset and that they learn so much from media. And so over the last year and a half, they've been inspiring me as to how to share more knowledge on social media and how to

teach on Shark Tank and on Instagram and on all these platforms where the youth actually are. So their perspective was, mom, if you really want to teach people about entrepreneurship and building businesses, you got to meet them where they are. And they're definitely not sitting in fancy classrooms at fancy universities. They're on Instagram.

and other platforms. So really inspired by how much they listened to me and how much then that all got thrown right back at me in terms of my limitations. Fair point. And my final question for all of us who don't know the geographic opportunities is that where would be the most beautiful place in MENA that we should go and visit? I think Oman is a very, very beautiful country.

and is understated, has a lot of nature, wonderful diving, great hikes, and is very grounding.

and I would highly recommend a visit there. It's on my list, particularly since there's some lovely golf courses as well, which can be sandwiched in the height. It's been terrific having you today. And as I make a few conclusions, as we do, you've clearly laid out that there is a seismic shift going on in the region, which is a huge region with the highest digital penetration and the ability and need to catch up and also the possibility of leapfrogging stuff because it isn't burdened by some of the institutional processes. But

But you make some important other points, which is that still today, the amount of capital going into the region, particularly venture capital, is microscopic. That your own philosophy does focus on, and it's not risk aversion, but it is definitely about gauging that risk taking. And you make a good point, which is women have been proven to be better in

in this area and that doesn't you know surprise me and that as a firm you are sector agnostic but are seeing these significant opportunities and it's quite an exciting runway indeed been great having you here today and having this conversation thank you for having me it's been a pleasure

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