Conversations with Loulou Loulou Khazen

I had the incredible opportunity to sit down with Ronaldo Mouchawar, the trailblazing Co-founder and CEO of Souq.com, which was acquired by Amazon in 2017 for $580 million in cash + $200m in Amazon shares. Ronaldo, a true pioneer of e-commerce in the MENA region, founded Souq in 2005 as a spin-off from Maktoob, another regional success story that was sold to Yahoo for ~$170 million in 2009.

In our conversation, Ronaldo shares captivating industry insights, recounts his personal journey, and reveals his passion for music. Now heading Amazon's operations in MENA and Turkey, Ronaldo remains fervently optimistic about the future of e-commerce in the region. Don't miss this fascinating and inspiring episode!

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I sat down with Jonathan Doerr, the Co-founding Partner at Antler MENAP to learn about his experience in building, scaling and exciting companies. Jonathan brings a ton of learning from his time with Rocket Internet, where he was the Co-founder and Managing Director at Jumia Nigeria, Africa’s leading e-commerce site which IPOed on the NYSE in 2019 and the Co-CEO at Daraz, the South Asian e-commerce player which was acquired by Alibaba in 2018.
We discuss challenges of building e-commerce companies in emerging markets and the differences between an IPO and an acquisition. Today, Jonathan is leveraging his experience to enable the next generation of founders via Antler where he plays matchmaker and investor to 100s of founders that join Antler’s programs in Dubai, Riyadh and more to come.

Support for the show comes from Capital.com, a global investment platform.

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Dana Baki is the co-founder and COO at MUNCH:ON, a UAE born startup that was solving the corporate lunch problem. MUNCH:ON which started as LUNCH:ON was utilizing kitchen’s off-peak to deliver affordable meals to corporate executives. The business was experiencing high growth until Covid which posed an existential threat. MUNCH:ON was then born to cater for meals throughout the day. Careem acquired MUNCH:ON in 2022 and Dana took time off to recalibrate and figure out what she wanted to do and landed in the space exploration industry. This is a fantastic conversation about entrepreneurship, work ethic, motherhood and so much more. 

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Ben Harburg is the Managing Partner at MSA Capital, a Chinese VC with $2.5bn of assets under management and MSA Novo, a newly established emerging markets fund with focus on the GCC. Ben brings a decade of expertise investing in Chinese tech companies to the Middle East & North Africa (MENA) region and is scouting for the next MENA based unicorns. MSA capital is already an investor in regional success stories like Tabby, Homzmart, Rabbit, Baly and KASO to name a few.

A refreshing conversation on Chinese tech and what we can learn from China’s startup ecosystem and why Ben believes that startups in MENA would likely be looking more East than West when it comes to innovation and business models to mimic and perhaps even exit opportunities.

Ben is an entrepreneur and the co-owner of Cadiz football club, he shares tips on entrepreneurship and on having the foresight to spot opportunities before they become common knowledge and why he constantly seeks arbitrage opportunities. 

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Huda Al-Lawati is a veteran private equity professional across emerging markets having had executive roles at companies like Gateway Partners, Savola and Abraaj. Huda has recently launched Aliph Capital, a private equity fund that focuses on the mid market segment. 

I sat down with Huda to get an insider’s view on the private equity industry in the MENA region, what are the opportunites, where to fundraise, how to source deals, how to create value to companies they acquire by building the right teams and much more. Also if you’re interested to work in private equity, Huda shares her tips on what she looks for and what it takes to succeed in this competitive industry.

If you’re looking to gain an understanding of how the industry works then this is a great place to start!

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When Hassan Sawaf started working on machine learning in the 90s in Germany, no one thought advancements in AI would bring us to where we are today. Not even Hassan himself! In fact, people thought the AI field was too 'theoretical'.
In this conversation, Hassan talks to us about AI’s evolution and his vision for aiXplain, a company he is building out of California that aims to make AI accessible to builders and innovators and provide them with tools to prototype their ideas with low or no-code. Hassan has been in the driving seat of the AI evolution and has led AI efforts in some of the world’s leading companies; eBay, Amazon AWS and Meta, he is a serial entrepreneur, sits on several boards, has a Ph.D. in machine learning algorithms for speech translation applications and has 60+ patents and publications in the field.

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