Djamel: [00:00:00] If you go to France, if you go to the McDonald’s around the corner, you’re not gonna be able to see the supervisor. The guy’s gonna tell you, “Oh, I’m busy. Do you have an appointment? What do you want from me?” Right here? You can walk into a minister’s office and you’re telling him, “Look, I’m looking to bring my startup in Saudi. What shall I do?” And the guy can sit with you.
They reward the fighters, the ones that are pushing and fighting. They throw you in the middle of the ocean and you have to know if you can swim or not.
The Thursday I came, I came at 2:00 AM in the morning in Dammam, which was not even Riyadh. One guy came to pick me up and he drove me to the office and there was a bed in the office. So it gives you a good tone.
My goal was to deliver a company at scale. Above like $50 million ARR and profitable, at least break even. That’s what I did.
You don’t put me any potential client in the CRM until you have either a parking spot there or an employee card. You have to drink coffee with them. You have to go to the smoke break with them. You have to understand their pain point.
The idea is to lead it from Saudi and we have the same ambition that tomorrow Gowata is gonna be a [00:01:00] prerequisite globally for any AI adoption.
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Introduction
Jamie: Delighted to say that my guest today is Djamel Mahan, a Rocket Internet alumnus who landed in the Kingdom over a decade ago, back when relocating to Saudi for tech was far less than fashionable.
Now, over the course of the last 10 years, he’s been building businesses across the region, perhaps most notably as the Chief Operating Officer at Foodics, where he helped scale the restaurant management platform to over 30,000 restaurants across 25 countries. And they’re on the precipice now of an IPO.
Earlier this year, however, he stepped away to start something new: Governata, a Saudi-based data governance platform that’s just raised a $4 million seed round.
Now, data governance is not exactly the sexiest pitch in the world, and Djamel will be the first to admit this himself. But his thesis in essence is this: everyone is talking about AI adoption, but very few organizations have their data house in order to actually make it work.
Gowata is positioning itself as that foundational layer. During the course of the conversation, we get into the Rocket Internet origin story, what he learned scaling Foodics, and why the gap between having a data policy and actually implementing one is [00:02:00] where the real opportunity lies.
Incredibly grateful to you, Djamel, for taking the time. Really, really enjoyed the conversation.
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________________


Interview
Jamie: Djamel, absolutely fantastic to have you here. Many congrats on the seed round for Gowata, which was announced last week.
Djamel: Thank you. Thank you, Jamie. Happy to be here.
Jamie: I try to avoid, on occasion, digging too much into the background of guests, but on this occasion, I think to fully appreciate how you actually came to this problem in the first place, I think we probably do need to go back in time. My understanding is Djamel, you’re French by birth. So how do you come to Saudi then? We were talking off camera before this, over a decade ago, before it was fashionable, I think it’s fair to say. You were on the ground in Riyadh. So I believe you were a Rocket Internet alumnus. How does this journey start?
Djamel: That’s a great question. Look, exactly more than 10 years ago, I was in France, very traditional background. I did a business school in [00:04:00] France and I was working at Amazon and I was very comfortable and never expected to come here.
But then, I don’t know, suddenly I think I hit my year target like around July or August. So I was like, okay, what’s next for me? And you know Europe very well: even performing, I’d say the reward is less, because again, the market is security. There’s so many talent. So what do you get even crushing your target for 15 years consecutively? You’re still like somehow stuck somewhere.
So I got this offer from Rocket Internet in Saudi. Initially for me it was like a joke, but as I’m also a Muslim, I said, you know what, maybe it’s a good idea just to go for a year, do the Umrah, see what’s going on there and come back.
Because again, I crushed my target. Maybe I’m thinking about switching jobs anyway, so I’m still young, so let’s make it happen. So what was supposed to be six months is now 10 years, because when I came here, yes, it was difficult, it was another world, but I saw immediately the potential of a country.
And how I evaluate that is just: where is the glass ceiling? Where is the ceiling, right? If you are good and you are kicking [00:05:00] ass basically, and if you are performing, where can you go? And I immediately saw that here, there is no limit. So that’s what immediately attracted me. There were a lot of other things that were like mixed feelings obviously, but at least this was there, which was not in Europe.
So that’s why I guess I’m still here until today.
Jamie: What was the experience like with Rocket Internet? I’ve heard from others it’s baptism of fire.
Djamel: It is something, so it’s not for everybody for sure. I basically like the whole concept: they throw you in the middle of the ocean and you have to know if you can swim or not.
And it’s good for you because it’s a discovery for yourself as well. So again, back to me coming to Saudi, the first day I came, I came at 2:00 AM in the morning in Dammam, which was not even Riyadh. And one guy came to pick me up and he drove me to the office. And there was a bed in the office, right?
So my first night was in the office, and it gives you a good tone. Next day, like 8:00 AM started the work. It was Easy Taxi at the time, which is now Jeeny, the ride-hailing company, right? And again, maybe next day 9:00 [00:06:00] AM I was on the streets stopping taxis. I was not speaking any word of Arabic.
The guys didn’t understand me. So it was just like, okay, full is register. And yeah, that’s been like the same tone for the four and a half years I stayed with Rocket. Every day it’s about doubling the numbers versus the previous day, one way or another. After six months, I had a team of 50 people.
I never managed a single person in my life before. But again, like this is where the true character comes out. And if you can swim, as they said, maybe only two to three percent of the people can do it. But for me, again, it was a great school. I’ve been always grateful to the Rocket management here in the Middle East, to my former CEO as well.
So it was tough. It was a lot of sleepless nights. I lost my hair. I gained a few kilos. But honestly, from a business perspective, it’s probably the best school you can have in the world because you can do anything after that, basically. You’re not afraid of any challenge. Any target seems to you like ridiculous or achievable at least.
Again, it was difficult. A lot of work seven days a week. A lot of challenges. Again, when you do [00:07:00] 500 rides the first day and they tell you have to do 1,000 the next day, one way or another, a lot of innovation and imagination comes your way. So you don’t sleep not only because of work, but because of stress as well, and not having a clue of what you’re gonna do the next day.
But again, at the end of the day, you come back from it much, much stronger and most importantly, not afraid of any challenge after that.
And as I said, everything after that sounds like holidays or sounds like reasonable, right? So that’s the idea.
Jamie: Do you think you’ve internalized something from the culture there? Is that something that you’ve brought with you? Something I’ve maybe read in interviews that you’ve provided before is you seem to embrace the messiness of things and you thrive in that more chaotic environment.
Djamel: Somehow, yes. But you know that chaos is not a goal, right? It’s just a way to do things. What I learned in Rocket, really, is this culture of accountability. That you have to deliver whatever. If you have to be messy, make it messy. If you have to make it like borderline, make it borderline.
But if you can make it organized, it’s much better. Of course, nobody’s gonna [00:08:00] value messiness over organization and structure and strategy, right? But it’s just about all these things have to be a way to achieve the goal, right? When I see in some organizations later on, and even startups, that people are doing organizational stuff just for the sake of being organized and not for the sake of being more performing, that’s a problem, right?
And that’s what I learned in Rocket: that we don’t care about these things. We care about the objective. Okay? So if you have to be messy, make it messy. If you have to be organized, make it organized. But the most important thing I take from that, and I often replicate after that, is the culture of extreme fairness, right?
And this is, for me, a very important culture where you absolutely value top performers. For me, maybe in my four years in Rocket, I’ve been promoted five times or something like this, been given responsibility of three, four ventures at the same time. I had at some point maybe 600, 700 people under me very fast because I think I delivered and I achieved results.
And on the contrary, again, [00:09:00] if you’re a bit maybe lazy, if your lifestyle or work style is nine to five and you’re comfortable with that, which has nothing wrong by the way, but they show you that from the day you walk into the office or the street or the warehouse or wherever they sent you, they show you that it’s not the place for you, you know?
And I think that culture for me, it really sticks with me and I try to replicate everywhere I go because this is the way you attract, you nurture, and you promote all top performers and people that want to deliver and work. And that’s the way where you avoid maybe also disappointments, et cetera, right?
So that extreme fairness culture is extremely important. Again, in both sides. That happened to me, promoting people three times per year. You know, I think it’s in no HR manual on the planet, but for me, I don’t care. I’ll do it 10 times if it needs to be done. And if the person is amazing, I’m gonna fight, I’m gonna take from my salary to give it to him.
And that’s what I learned again in Rocket: that at the end of the day, that culture [00:10:00] is also the most performing one. And it reflects in the whole company, as I said, like by yourself. You’re gonna work out if you’re not here to deliver, and you’re gonna attract the best people because they know that this is where they’re gonna be rewarded better than anywhere else.
Jamie: Okay. So you have this internal culture of accountability and rapid promotion. So it’s very much meritocracy. I’m curious about this period generally, because I know you’re trying to think of it as the first ride-hailing wars. I feel like I’m invoking Asimov and the robot wars to a certain extent.
First, obviously you have Careem and Uber present at this moment in time as well, obviously, I would think with enormous resources compared to Jeeny. So how did you navigate this?
Djamel: Yeah, it’s a great point. Look, first, by the way, when we came, there was no Uber or Careem, you know. We came first. And the value proposition was literally, and there was no meter in the app, the negotiation was still physical, et cetera.
And this was only public taxis. There was no private cars at the time because it was forbidden. [00:11:00] The only value proposition was literally just order your cab not from the street because it’s too hot, but you can stay in the office while you order. When the cab comes, then that is the same offline experience.
So it was really a basic experience and we started from there. And so you can imagine, I would say, the struggle even with the customers, et cetera. And I remember once we had the GPS issue with the app, so it was showing to the driver at different locations. It was showing that, “Jamie, you are like 100 meters, 200 meters away from where you are actually,” right?
So as we said before, you can shut down the app for two weeks until they fix it, or you can manage, right? So I remember we had the call center calling the driver, calling the passenger every single time to say, “Hey, by the way, Jamie is not there, he’s in front of the pharmacy.” And at the time it was 4,000, 5,000 rides per day, right?
So it was not small. So when Uber and Careem came, actually it was a good thing, because first they also brought the private cars with them. The model we know today was forbidden. I think they got their office shut down like four or five or 10 times, but eventually them pushing and us pushing,
we managed to make it [00:12:00] a proper regulation and we made it approved. And also, again, our fight was not between really each other, but was from switching offline habits to online habits. And the market is, I would say, big enough for the three of us to grow. So them pushing the marketing as well, and for us, acquiring their users was also helpful.
It’s easier to convert a guy from Careem to Jeeny saying it’s cheaper, for example, than converting him from offline where he has his own driver to online where he has to fire the driver, change all his way of life, all his commuting, right? So somehow it was a blessing. But yes, you are fighting against people that have $200, $300, $2 billion of funding, right?
They can fund drivers, they can fund customers and acquire customers much faster than you. But eventually, I think when I left, we were more or less head to head with Careem, and they had all this funding. And for us, probably we spent $2 million and then became profitable.
The whole idea was, again, to be cheaper for drivers. So we’re taking less commission and cheaper for people and to be [00:13:00] extremely efficient in terms of operations. Right? At the end of the day, I think it was me and the CEO in terms of proper management and all the rest were driver operations, right? So we were super lean as well. And in marketing we had also a very efficient setup where we have a good cost of acquisition.
But again, like on paper it works. Then it’s about hammering and executing every single day to grow the customer base, to grow the driver base, make sure the operations are straightforward. Again, like for example, we had support on the ground in Saudi. Maybe Careem didn’t have that fully in the beginning. We had people talking to the driver, like from Pakistan for example, talking to the people from Saudi, from Jordan as well, with the proper Saudi accent localized. We’re fixing the issues.
Like Uber, for example, you cannot talk to anyone. Obviously here you can talk to an actual person that speaks your language. That makes a big difference in Saudi till today. But at the time it was even [00:14:00] a bigger difference.
Like in Europe, for example, first you don’t want to talk to a customer service agent. That’s number one. Don’t want to talk to anyone. And number two, obviously you’re not gonna pay for it. You don’t care that they have customer service or not. At the end of the day, you want your product in the right time with no issues, and you don’t want to talk to anyone.
Here, they reward this thing. Like they’re gonna use you because they can call and shout at you if they have any problem, and they reward that, meaning they’re gonna ride with you.
So we understood that localization aspect, which I think made us successful really even in fighting the giants at the time. But I don’t like to use these words. It was really mostly about all of us pushing to convert the market. Maybe today the fight is more intense because everyone is online at the end of the day and you have to fight your online competitors.
But at the time it was really about switching the habits and we all benefited from each other for sure.
Jamie: Yeah. There’s a literacy component, isn’t there, in terms of educating the market? Something that I did hear about as well is that you were very agile with regard to pricing.
Can you tell me a small bit about that? Maybe you weren’t restricted by the same levers of bureaucracy that maybe an Uber or Careem was as far as [00:15:00] adjusting.
Djamel: Of course, of course. I guess I told you like we’re a super lean organization. At the end of the day, I was changing the pricing. It takes me a couple clicks to change the pricing. I guess changing Uber’s pricing, it’s a six-month strategy and negotiation exercise, right?
Our goal was really to be cheaper on every single ride. So what we were doing at some point, we’re looking at Uber pricing and I was applying a 10% discount. And again, when they were changing their pricing, for them the six-month exercise, it was taking us maybe half an hour to change and be agile, and we were still cheaper.
Right? So that flexibility, it’s extremely important. It’s critical because again, for them, they take six months for what we do in half an hour, and people are gonna see it. We can continue our value proposition saying you would never find an Uber driver that is cheaper than us at the end of the day.
And it was very important as a justification. And it’s not only about the agility of changing, right? Even if Uber changes their pricing, they’re gonna take another six months to have the awareness to promote it, to make sure people understand it and see it, and the reflection on the customer behavior, right?
So for [00:16:00] us, that agility was really our strength and our competitive advantage for sure.
Jamie: Okay. So after Jeeny, then we go to Kitopia, and then where, give me the timeline as far as next steps. I get somewhat confused. I know there’s Kitopia, there’s what, there’s Foodics then as well.
Djamel: No, there was, I would say again, Rocket Internet at the time was probably the biggest startup incubator in the world. So they launched a lot of ventures also in the Middle East, right? Replicating the model they had in Europe and South America and in Africa, everywhere else in the world.
So after Jeeny, because we were quite successful, we managed to grow the company, made it profitable, fighting head to head with Careem, for example, very close to Uber as well. I was called to work with other ventures as well. Either pivot or grow these companies that were maybe less successful sometimes or had the wrong business model.
So I helped, again, what did come at the time, it was an e-commerce. They raised a lot of money and I think they could not maybe compete with the players at the time. And Souq was acquired by Amazon, so it was [00:17:00] very difficult for them to compete. So we came in and we pivoted the company to grocery delivery.
And at the time it was the first one as well, in terms of grocery delivery. So we pivoted the company. We were working hand in hand with the Foodics team, and eventually, they acquired the company. I remember again, Carrefour at the time or so from Foodics launched their online store, and they could do maybe 10% of the order volume we could do, operation-wise, because we had that experience also with ride-hailing, with managing operations. Like they didn’t have.
So we were performing super well. And that’s why I think they decided to also acquire the company, to acquire the operations as well.
And we helped also several other ventures. So for me it was a good experience. At the end of the day, I was thinking, why not open a VC? I’ve seen more or less all business and startup models. No founder can bullshit me today, and I’m gonna know exactly how to scale every single business.
But I loved operations too much. So eventually I went to Kitopia. So the challenge was incredible because they just raised, I think at the time, their [00:18:00] Series A or Series B, and they were expanding to KSA. And I love the business model, which is to bring food brands from all over the world in a single location and ride this wave of food delivery and digitalization.
And it was amazing. The challenge was great. We launched the country. I was employee number one in Saudi. I stayed only nine months, unfortunately. After that COVID hit. And I had some personal issues where my wife had a tough pregnancy. I had to come back to France.
But for the nine months it was a wild ride. I mean, we launched a company. It was one of the first MISA companies integrated in the country here in Saudi that got the license to operate as a foreign company, as a startup. So even the country was not ready. Like banking, I remember taking like $300,000, $400,000 in cash from the bank, carrying it on me, to pay the employees because the bank had no clue at the time how to handle those companies.
Same with government processes, same with getting a [00:19:00] license to open the kitchen, you know? So it was really a wild ride. I mean, we started with myself and we went up to, I think, 300, 350 employees, to provide accommodation for the guys. There’s a huge shortage in the market because we had to open, I think, 50 kitchens the first year, something like this.
And, you know, employees, it takes up to six months for manpower companies to bring you waiters, et cetera. So, happened to me driving to Dammam 400 kilometers to get one guy that was in the falafel shop in Dammam that just shut down, to bring him back to Riyadh just to work and teach him how to do fries and cook other stuff.
So it was really insane. I remember there was the Friday prayer on Friday from 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM. And the rest of the time it was all working. I think 4:00 AM, 5:00 AM in the morning, just to set up the company. And I think we did really amazingly well.
I mean, we opened a huge central kitchen, six kitchens. We onboarded I think four brands, something like this. Again, 400 employees in nine months. I remember I had food brands, guys that came to me, like the Healthy Guys, that is the biggest in Saudi. They came to me and said, “Yeah, how did you open, like how did you get so many [00:20:00] municipality licenses even to open so many places?
I mean, we have 500 branches. We still don’t understand how you guys are doing this.” So again, it was amazing learning, wild ride. Again, the last hair I had, that went there. I didn’t know we could do worse than Rocket Internet. But again, I think we did amazingly well.
And I think it allowed the company also to raise that big Series C of $500 million from SoftBank to continue the expansion into Saudi. Even despite COVID coming, we set up the foundations for the company to grow. And now they’re thriving in the market and I’m very happy to see how successful they are in the whole region.
Jamie: And Djamel, can I ask you, you mentioned the accelerated licensing there. How did you actually approach that? How did you get that done?
Djamel: Again, at the time it was all about pushing. I think the founder, Hamad Balouchi, was pushing with the help of MISA as well, to have that case study. Also, Kitopia was a Dubai company coming into Saudi, got a good amount of funding from VCs in the region.
So it was important for the country, for the Kingdom at the time that was actually [00:21:00] having the intention of Vision 2030 to attract those kind of companies, to make it also a proof of concept. But again, at the time, today maybe there are some processes and you can find online like the documentation you need and what are the steps to follow.
At the time, honestly, it was like a jungle almost. You just have to go there, sit there in MISA, try to help them figure out as well what to do, right? And that’s the beauty of Saudi, honestly, that’s what I love about the Kingdom. If you go to France, as I say often to my friends, if you go to the McDonald’s around the corner, you’re not gonna be able to see the supervisor. And the guy’s gonna tell you, “Oh, I’m busy. Do you have an appointment? What do you want from me?”
Right here? You can walk into a minister’s office and tell him, “Look, I’m looking to bring my startup in Saudi. What shall I do?” And the guy can sit with you and give you advice, and he can talk to you, and you can change your whole government process by just sitting there with them and working all together.
So it’s an amazing thing at the end of the day. As I told you in the beginning, Jamie, it rewards [00:22:00] the fighters, you know, the ones that are pushing and fighting. Of course, if you stay home and you expect to have an online application and get a license, it’s never gonna happen. It’s never gonna happen. But if you go there and you push and you work all together and you show that you’re bringing value as well to the country, to the people,
they’re gonna make an exception for you. Sometimes maybe you’re gonna hear from a government entity tell you, “Look, go without a license. Just start. And we’ll do the whole licenses framework while you are working. So we study how you work and we’re gonna do the licensing based on that.”
So that flexibility is really amazing and it’s really what makes the country great as well, despite sometimes, as you said, you see some messiness. Yep. But the intention, the objective, and the vision is there. So once you have this setup, you’re going to reach there one way or another.
And this is what you see even in governmental entities. So that’s the mindset you need to come with. And that’s why I always say, even to startups in the UAE, guys don’t think that expanding into Saudi because there’s a border in common, it’s that easy. You have to think like you’re expanding to Singapore or Japan.
You’re never gonna tell me that, “Yeah, I’m gonna travel once a month for one day to Japan and I’m gonna launch my company there.” It’s not the case. So the UAE is the same thing. And guys have to come on the ground and you have [00:23:00] to push as well. And you have to see who you have to talk to because remotely, you’re not gonna see anything, right? And that’s also a good learning for people that are building and want to deal with the government here and with the administration as well.
Jamie: Yeah. There is this perception that it’s just entirely culturally homogenous and there’s no difference.
Let me tell you, I was only in Riyadh very briefly for a week, and I can tell you this, there’s a difference. Believe me. And that’s no bad thing, but to your point, I think there’s this idea: they share a border, so therefore there can’t be too much of a difference. They don’t appreciate even the size of Saudi in and of itself.
It’s a continent in many respects. Even expecting the same thing in Riyadh and Jeddah, they’re quite different.
Djamel: For sure. I’m, at the end of the day, even I’m surprised by this because look, even in the UAE, right? At the end of the day, you don’t do business in Dubai like you do in Sharjah or in Al Ain or in Abu Dhabi even.
And I see sometimes, honestly, startups, they have different teams for Abu Dhabi and Dubai, but they want to do Saudi the same. They say, “Oh yeah, it’s easy, it’s the same country, right?” I’m like, guys, but even for Abu Dhabi, you understand it’s a different go-to-market and it’s a different country, right?
Because it’s different Emirates, right? And you think that [00:24:00] Riyadh is gonna be just an extension of your Dubai business? It’s not possible. It’s just not humanly possible. And this is just not how it works, right? And I think a lot of people understood that today, but it took some time. I remember a lot of UAE companies just expanding to Riyadh as a, again, “I’m gonna do two days every two weeks in Riyadh.”
And it’s gonna be just fine because it’s the same people, having the same ad content, for example, et cetera, et cetera. It used to be a very common mistake. I think today everybody understood, but it took some time, right?
Jamie: Yeah. It’s certainly no longer a box-tick exercise.
Something that has emerged as a thread with regard to Jeeny and I think Kitopia, there is this idea of establishing things before maybe the requisite regulatory framework or licensing is necessarily in place.
Can I ask, and we’ll maybe lead into Gowata, and we can maybe go back to Foodics in a while. When did I suppose the data governance problem first become visible? Was this something that you saw throughout your career in a Saudi context?
Was it running [00:25:00] operations at Foodics, or was it your co-founders, Jihad and Khaled, did they bring the insight?
Djamel: To be honest, it was a bit of everything. At the end of the day, it’s a very different topic, but you see a lot of common similarities. So what I saw, I think the first time I met Jihad is a good example, because he was selling Informatica, which at the end of the day is our biggest competitor globally that got acquired by Salesforce, to an entity called NEOM. Here it’s the PIF venture dealing with healthcare.
And these guys wanted to buy that software so badly and he was actually selling it, but trying to explain to them that they’re not ready to buy it. And for me, it’s very weird to see someone selling something and convincing the client not to buy.
For me it’s like error 404, at the end of the day. And I tried to understand this and I was like, “What the hell? Why do you guys want to buy this so badly?” And I understood again that there was this regulation about data management and data governance.
And I realized something: again, everybody was buying that software, although they cannot use it because it’s too complex, it’s really old school, it does not even [00:26:00] make you compliant with the regulation. But they were using it to have it on record. And the same thing with the data policies.
Data sharing policies, data privacy policies that they wanted to establish. All this, the regulatory framework. But at the end of the day, it’s like a virtual world, right? So they have this somewhere, all these policies and regulation, compliance, and what happens on the ground?
It’s something completely different, right? So it’s like a virtual thing. So the government is allowing all these guys to operate, and they’re not fining them initially, and they know about this. It’s not like they don’t know. They know that this is just policies that you have on paper and you’re giving it to us and pretending you are using this.
And in reality you are not. They know. But again, as I told you, Jamie, they look at the objective, right? So for them, it’s a first step. At least they brought consultants to draft those policies. They understand what it means and they’re gonna implement tomorrow. But they are not, like, they are very smart.
They’re not maybe a bit stubborn like we see in Europe or in our countries to say, “Oh no, [00:27:00] you are not compliant. Okay, we’re gonna fine you. We’re gonna hurt you, we’re gonna hammer you and we’re gonna prevent you from working.”
No. They understand that the intention is good, okay? The intention is to comply. They don’t really know how. So they are buying a software they’re never gonna use. But again, the intention is good, so we’re not gonna prevent them from operating. We can actually help them until they get there. And then maybe we start actually fining and actually slapping them.
So that’s why we created Gowata: to actually, of course, keep the regulatory thing in place, but allowing the entities to actually use it and make it a reality and actually apply it within their teams and within their organization.
And I think, again, the government is very supportive also with us because of this, because they understood. Okay. Before we were having a regulation, they were applying it halfway. We were closing our eyes because they had nothing in the market. Now they have something that they can take, these regulations and these policies that they have, and make it a reality.
So we’re gonna encourage it. And once it’s there, and that’s what [00:28:00] I’ve seen before with all the other ventures, once it’s there and they’re confident that everyone knows the way, has the way to comply, then they’re gonna be merciless, which is fine at the end of the day. But in the whole process, they’re gonna be pragmatic.
And that’s what I love again about the country, about the government, about the regulation here. It’s always like this. The same thing happened to us in Foodics. We were one of the first what we call payment aggregators in the country, which means we were taking the money off the restaurants and settling them ourselves.
So we’re not a bank, we’re not an acquirer, but we are getting the money in our bank account and we are settling merchants. This didn’t exist initially and they created, I helped create the license for that. But first they created the sandbox, then they allowed us certain thresholds. Then we were operating somewhere that is a gray area that they didn’t cover because we’re doing something they don’t even know if it’s legal or not, if you need a license for that.
But they’re not gonna come and fine you. [00:29:00] They’re gonna come and talk to you and say, “Explain to us what you are doing exactly.” And for us, we’re gonna create the regulation around it and we’re gonna tell you whether you need a license or you need just a non-objection letter or you don’t need anything.
And we’re gonna create a framework around the business, not we’re gonna create the framework to destroy the business.
Jamie: Yeah. Not the European Union outlook where it’s “penalize and fine first.”
Djamel: Exactly. Exactly. That’s what I love here. Exactly. In Europe, they’re gonna stop you first, and then they’re gonna start thinking.
Here, they know you have a good intention, which is to digitalize the country, to secure data, to digitalize the government, et cetera. So they know about your intention that you’re not doing anything wrong. You’re doing something to help the country and help the Kingdom, help businesses to digitalize.
So they know you have a good intention, so they’re not gonna stop you. But they’re gonna say, “Guys, now that we understand what you are doing, we’re gonna build a regulatory framework around it. First, that’s gonna be still allowing you to operate because we see you’re not doing something wrong.
Secondly, that’s gonna secure that because of course it’s not a jungle, you cannot do whatever you want. But again, that is logical and [00:30:00] makes everybody’s benefit. The government security and the business going. So everyone is supportive.
I’m sure the regulations you have, like in some, for example in the Central Bank, most of it has been like written, redacted, by businesses, right? Not by technocratic people that are sitting in an office. I don’t even know what business you are dealing with, right?
No. Most probably these are people from companies who suggested rules to regulate their own business. And SAMA approved it or not. And this is amazing. This co-creation process is why you also respect the government and the authorities when they tell you something.
It’s not just to depress you and to prevent you from working. You know that most probably they saw an actual risk. It’s not just them wanting to shut you off. It’s them seeing a proper risk. And you even respect that as a business. And you’re fine with the regulation because they also have a good intention from their side to regulate and still to promote business.
Jamie: Yeah. They don’t know the pain of an ivory tower in Brussels ruling on high.
But look, let’s knock into that. Okay. This is all well and good. So Jihad comes with this insight, as it pertains [00:31:00] to advising NEOM, the company that he’s selling Informatica to, and he’s reluctant on one level.
That’s quite a leap then to Gowata. Let’s fill in some of that blank space there, because you’re with Foodics, it’s a company you’ve helped scale to 30,000 restaurants, approaching profitability, heading towards IPO. What on earth makes you walk away from that?
Djamel: Yeah, it’s a good question. Look, for me, at the end of the day, I’m extremely proud of what we did in Foodics. It’s like my baby until today and until today I’m helping any way I can, you know? It’s just that I think I finished my mission.
I think I came to the company, it was like maybe four or 5 million ARR, scaled it like 10x, opened a few countries. We started the payment vertical. We hired maybe more than 2,000 people in total, added like five or six products, acquired a few companies, raised $200 million. So now again, what more? At the end of the day, we’ve done it all.
I guess for me, I think again, it was time also. The company enters a new phase with the IPO, et cetera. My goal was to deliver, I think, a company at scale. [00:32:00] Above $50 million ARR and profitable or at least break even, and that’s what I did.
After that, again, it’s a new phase where you prepare for an IPO, targets are also different and more achievable maybe, and this is not also where I thrive. At Foodics, again, for me, I consider the company as my baby, but still I’m not a founder as well technically speaking. The company was five years old already, so I think it was time for me also to start my own.
I’m very proud of what I did for the company. Part of my job was to make the company scalable also with or without me, right? So part of my job was to put a very solid team in place and that’s the case. I think they’re better than me as well. So I’m happy about that. And the company is not suffering from me leaving because it’s part of my job to make sure it’s not the case. And I think I’ve done this well as well.
The new leadership is exceptional as well. And it’s gonna take the company, it’s the right leadership to take the company to the next phases like the IPO and post-IPO story. And me, again, I’m more of a builder at the end of the day. And I think it was time to [00:33:00] build my own before I get too old, you know?
And too fat maybe. So that’s exactly what happened.
Jamie: Yeah. So before you’d left, had you identified the opportunity that you wanted to tackle? Was it more, “I wanna do my own thing and I’m not sure yet what it is”? Or is it, “Okay, I’ve identified this opportunity and the data governance side of things, this makes sense. The timing is right. Let’s get after this.”
Djamel: So it’s maybe a mix of both. Look, for me, what I was certain about is that I love the model we had, which is B2B SaaS model, because it’s for companies, it’s recurring revenue, and it’s bringing value to the clients a lot. So I love that model.
My only frustration in this business model at Foodics is that at the end of the day, what merchants pay us is around $1,000 to $1,500 every year. And with this amount, you cannot really take care of the customer as much as you want, right? Because with $1,000, basically, if you make one visit per year, you are eating 50% of that revenue, right?
It’s a good challenge because you have to automate support at scale. You still have to have a good [00:34:00] service level despite not being able to invest that much with the clients. But for me, I always had in my mind to have the same B2B SaaS model, but with a much higher contract value. Not because of financials.
Yes, of course it’s better to need only 100 customers to be a unicorn than 50,000. Definitely. It’s also better as a founder. But that will give me the liberty to really take care about the customers and bring a premier service to the customer, understand the pain point and fix it even beyond my own product.
So for me, that was always in my mind. And the data opportunity, it really came to me again like this by seeing the opportunity in the market, but seeing it at scale, because everybody has the data issue one way or another with their dashboards, with their data warehouse, with their systems, system integration. Sometimes they have three middlewares, et cetera.
So my thinking was, I always wanted to do something in this space, but nothing was really scalable. So when I [00:35:00] met this data governance opportunity with Jihad and with what he was selling, I was like, “That’s amazing,” because that’s the only thing that is common across all companies, from the smallest startup to the biggest government entity in the data space.
And that’s amazing ’cause it reminds me of the POS story at Foodics. Because Foodics was successful because as POS, you are the source of truth of all data and of all systems. So if you have a mobile app, you have to connect it to your POS. If you change the mobile app, you can change the mobile app, but you’re not gonna change the POS. You have to reconnect it again.
And here, data governance, data management, it was the same feeling. It’s like we are the prerequisite of any data work. If I want to change my data warehouse, it’s okay. I’m not gonna change my data governance because this is where I define my terms. I define my threshold of quality for data. This is where I scan my data, et cetera.
And down the road, the same thing. If I want to change my visualization app, people switch and I’m sure it happened to you, Jamie, and to everyone. People are in Power BI and they say, “No, Power BI sucks. Let’s go to Tableau.” And Tableau sucks. “Let’s go to Qlik.”
And then it sucks. “Let’s go back to Power BI.” [00:36:00] It happens to everyone. It’s just people don’t understand that the issue is not the application. It’s the backbone that is behind, which is data and how you manage your data. Because people probably now understand data warehouse, like they are buying Snowflake and Databricks and this kind of thing.
So they understood they have to put all their data in one place. But they did not understand that you cannot connect things to that because that place is like a box. You don’t know really what’s inside. So you need, I always use this metaphor, but it’s like you have a warehouse and you throw all items inside.
Now you want to buy a white t-shirt like yours, Jamie. How do you find it? You need someone that comes, does the shelving, does the labeling, does the fire security, puts a guard on the door, puts proper lighting, ventilation, humidity. And that’s exactly what we do.
And that problem is common to everyone. And for me, when it hit me, it was really beautiful.
It is actually, even from a startup model, it was what I was looking for. Because again, it is obviously higher contract value. We’re solving a core problem. There are so many [00:37:00] things you can do once you have Gowata as a prerequisite. You can do AI, the GenAI opportunity came here as well, which is that again, we are prerequisite for any GenAI thing.
So there’s so many things you can do. From there, it immediately hit me that it was the starting point of everything and that this is the opportunity I have to grab. And that’s what we’re doing successfully, and we’re gonna do much more in the next few years. Of course.
Jamie: Did your two co-founders take much convincing? Were they skeptical or were they all in straight away?
Djamel: Honestly, Jihad maybe. I hope he would not hear this. So I’m gonna hide the recording from him, Jamie.
But you know, again, Jihad is really a data guru. He’s been establishing data offices for public and private entities for the last 20 years, and he knows the problem and he sees that.
Again, I told you he reached a point where even what he’s selling, he’s not convinced himself. So he saw the need. It’s just that when you’ve been a consultant with Deloitte, with the biggest consultancy entities for 20, 30 years, the idea of leaving and building something yourself because you identify your problem…
It’s like I’m asking you to give your kidney. [00:38:00] For consultants. For me, it’s logical, right? It took me two minutes in my brain. For them, maybe because they have 30 years of experience with the biggest consultancy companies in the world, resigning and building your own product is very difficult.
So it took me a lot of convincing to convince him. I actually had to build an MVP to show him that, “Look Jihad, it’s possible. And the problem you are facing, we can actually solve it and we don’t need anybody else to solve it for us.” And then he jumped in.
And actually, one of my biggest prides, our biggest milestone and achievement is to make this data guru, that’s working with, that everybody wants in the market, resign and start this with me, till today.
I think it’s my biggest achievement and maybe in 10 years it will still be one of my biggest achievements.
Jamie: So talk me a small bit about that MVP then. How do you go about crafting that? Because your background isn’t in the data governance space.
Djamel: Look, at the end of the day, the industries, it’s not really relevant, right? For me, I’m a scalability guy. At the end of the day, I learn how to scale ventures. The industry knowledge, it’s always fixable. It’s [00:39:00] always, at the end of the day, about problem solving and execution.
So for me, I don’t know anything about data governance, but a lot of people know things. So I sit with Jihad, I sit with people in the industry. I understand what is the pain point, what is the problem, and we build something around it. And what I know is, again, how to execute, how to get a good product guy, how to get good developers, how to make them work efficiently at scale and make them work fast to build something.
Was it perfect? No, obviously, because again, I myself have a lot of data knowledge missing. But still, the MVP was good enough to show the opportunity. And that’s was my goal.
Remember Jamie, I told you everything is objective-based. My goal was just to convince Jihad that it’s possible to build something that fixes this problem.
And that’s why I managed to build trust and I managed to build something good enough because I was always objective-driven. And for me, I do sometimes entrepreneurship keynotes, and I always say something, I say “time to start,” like the “try fast, fail fast.”
You have to launch whatever idea you have. Don’t do business plans for six months or one year or [00:40:00] build complex product, just launch. That’s literally what I said. But that’s exactly the contrary of what I did for once in my life. Because we’re dealing with a deep tech product that had to be mature enough to work with ministries, to work with government from day one.
Then we had to improve a lot of things. We had to iterate the development, we had to invest in a lot of skilled technology resources. But again, the first MVP did the job to convince the right people to get on board. And I understood through my experience that most probably the most important thing initially is to have the right people with you.
And then from that we can build much better, much faster, and a different product.
Jamie: And to that end, from a hiring perspective, I think you’ve spoken previously about hiring for mentality over credentials. Trying to find hungry people. At the seed stage especially, those early hires are existential.
So who were the first people that you brought on outside of the co-founders and how did you pinpoint them? How did you find them?
Djamel: Yeah, obviously, I mean that definitely, I’m not gonna say something new, but the [00:41:00] first people I brought are people I know from my previous experiences. As you said, at that stage it’s critical.
The first people you onboard, 100%. It’s very difficult to hire, honestly, from CVs today because you can say anything you want in a CV. And for me, as you said, mentality is much more important even than where you worked before. I don’t, I’m just thinking now, people in Gowata, I don’t even know their age, honestly.
My co-founder, I don’t know how old they are, at the end of the day, ’cause I don’t care about the age, I don’t care much about the background. What I care about is really the mentality, what they can deliver. As I said, like even industry, they can learn. Although sometimes in some positions you need specialized people in the industry.
But for me, of course immediately I go to the people I know and I go with people with the track record. So if I have to look for people outside, I don’t look at the CV, I look at the track record. And that’s very different.
So I’ll give you an example. Now we’re looking for salespeople. Obviously in the public sector. For example, I could hire any guy from Oracle or Microsoft or Informatica even, [00:42:00] that has in their CV, “Signed Ministry of Tourism or Ministry of Agriculture.”
The thing is, I don’t know if they signed Ministry of Tourism themselves. Maybe it came from the top, from somewhere else and they just executed the deal.
So now to hire, you don’t need a recruiter. You actually need like a private investigator, to know exactly who brought those deals and who actually went and closed those deals. And often what happens is it’s not the guy that said that he brought the deal. It’s someone, maybe it’s a project manager, a small account manager. Sometimes it’s even an assistant that brought the deal.
And for that to hire these people, it’s, as I said, it’s more like a private investigator you need than a talent acquisition or headhunter.
So it’s very tricky, very difficult. That’s why for me, I always go first to the people I know and I’ve worked with whatever the background, and then I look at really track record. And then if I have to hire from outside, yeah. I always choose mentality over skills, honestly, and IQ as well. Because again, I think a smart person with the right mentality can do anything.
At the end of the day, we’re not doing neurosurgery, something ultra technical. Except in some [00:43:00] positions where we have specific AI use cases, et cetera. You need proper people. But 95% of the positions we have, again, if you are smart, high IQ with amazing mentality and you’re hungry to progress and make it happen,
you’re gonna figure it out. The three months investment we take with you to teach you is worth years of achievements. After that, you sign multiple government entities.
Jamie: And you’ve signed some large private sector organizations as well. I’m keen to press you on the reputation. Sometimes these are notoriously slow to actually convert.
So first off, what are we talking from a sales cycle perspective? I’m keen to get the real story on the ground as it were. And then I suppose, where did those opportunities come from? Was that tapping into Khaled’s network to a certain extent? Jihad’s? Just paint the picture for me.
Djamel: Yeah, very good question, Jamie. Look, there has to be a challenge, right? [00:44:00] Because not everything is great. We have a great product, we have a great team. There’s great revenue, great margins, and it’s a very sexy space at the moment, and something everybody needs. The time is ripe. Everybody literally, in terms of B2B.
So there has to be a challenge, right? It cannot be, there’s no free lunch as we say, Jamie. So that’s also the challenge: how can we scale sales with this B2G, or sales with enterprise clients? And that’s, again, our challenge. And that’s what I’m here to fix.
Actually, that’s my main added value here. So first the idea was to standardize what we are selling. And for me, I saw that selling with these big entities, they often need a lot of customization and dedicated support. For me, it was very important that Gowata stays on the software level.
Yes, we are a SaaS company selling a software. If you need any additional services, you can use your current partners, advisors, consultants, or we can bring you our own.
And I’m saying this, maybe it sounds logical to you, right? But it’s not easy. Like you have clients that tell you, “Oh no, Djamel, just stay with me for six weeks. Give me two consultants and we’ll pay you $400,000, $500,000.”
And it’s tough to say no. [00:45:00] It’s really tough to say, “No, we’re not gonna do that. Bring your own consultants or we’re gonna bring you one of our partners,” right? Because refusing one is very difficult, but it’s what keeps you scalable.
Tomorrow, if we want to have 500, 1,000, 5,000 clients, this is the only way. If I start staffing two, three people at each client, we are dead already today in terms of scalability. That’s very important, the first thing.
And understanding that helps you reduce the sales cycle as well. Because again, if they already have people helping them as consultants or their internal teams, it’s easier to work with them than me coming in and doing the whole work.
So we’re gonna empower these people with the software, teach them our software, but they’re gonna do the job themselves. Maybe even from a contract perspective, it’s gonna be easier for them just to increase the contract amount or number of resources they have with this existing partner.
So it’s going much faster. The second point is us owning the software is very important. Our competitors mostly have distributors in the market, and with a distributor it’s complicated. First from a price perspective, [00:46:00] because they have to make their margin as well, so if the license of the competition is like 1 million riyal, the contract value is gonna be 3 or 4 million riyal, you know.
For us, we’re first cheaper even in terms of licensing. So probably it’s gonna cost you half a million riyal, and you don’t have to pay that much also to the distributor. The second thing, and it’s very important here to own your technology, is the flexibility.
You know, these government entities, enterprise customers, each of them have their customized rules when it comes to procurement and sales cycle. Some will tell you, “We love your software. If you could install today, it would be fantastic, but we can pay you only next year because we don’t have the budget for this year. So next year’s budget we’ll arrange for you.”
We have no problem doing that because at the end of the day, we’re convinced, once we’re inside, they see the value and they end up paying. And it’s our software.
And we don’t have CapEx. Back to the first point, I don’t have consultants staffed there, so I can afford giving them six months for free for them to discover the software and have the time to arrange from next year’s budget.
Same with the whole [00:47:00] tendering and contracting processes that they have. We try to understand, for example, what is their direct purchase budget and we can arrange for, for example, the first year to be as a direct purchase. So the second year will go through the full procurement and tendering exercise, but at least for the first year, we go quick.
Back to the flexibility element, and that’s very important. And the last thing is on the process itself. So the process, we have all the documentation in place. It’s very standard. Technical proposals, RFPs sometimes, we’re replying to RFPs. We’re expert in this because we try to standardize again, what we do as much as possible. We’re ready with the documentation, we’re ready with the whole proposal writing. We’re on the ground to do meetings, et cetera.
That’s why I tell the team now, the sales team now, I tell them, “You don’t put me any potential client in the CRM until you have either a parking spot there or an employee card, or you show me any kind of proof that you belong there.
Otherwise, you don’t put them in the CRM because you’re not gonna sell by doing one meeting every month or every quarter [00:48:00] demonstrating with the PowerPoint, demonstrating your solution. You have to be there. You have to drink coffee with them, you have to go to the smoke break with them. You have to understand their pain point. And they’re gonna reward you eventually, because even if you help them, even if the topic is not even related to us, they’re gonna be rewarding and they’re gonna want to help you and promote your software as well.”
So all that combined helped us really reduce the sales cycle. So some of the biggest ministries and authorities here, we did the end-to-end process in less than three months, which normally maybe takes three years for other people. Because again, we have that understanding, that flexibility and that standardization.
The standardization is very important, because if you start going out of that, you’re going to be in an infinite loop of extra requirements, et cetera. Positioning as a software company, selling a unified product, is the core of everything as well.
Jamie: I love that ultra-high benchmark from a qualification perspective.
In a previous life, I [00:49:00] led BDR teams. This resonates as far as sometimes qualified lead definitions vary as to exactly how “qualified” a lead may necessarily be.
How do you hire for that kind of salesperson? How do you identify someone who’s a good fit to, I suppose, what you’re describing there is really a white glove service? Someone who’s a people person who goes above and beyond.
Djamel: Maybe I’ll reply to your question in a different way. But the worst thing would be to hire a guy that is senior, experienced, has this background in data management with bigger companies in the market, that you’re gonna pay like $70,000, $80,000, $100,000, because that’s the prices in the market.
And eventually the guy comes and you realize that he was just piggybacking on the brand or on the clients that were already existing and he didn’t actually really bring any business by himself. And this is a huge mistake because it’s a costly mistake because it’s gonna cost you a lot, gonna take a lot of time for you to realize that as well.
And it’s gonna be, again, very painful to also [00:50:00] remove the person and the collaboration with the person.
So that’s really the mistakes we are trying to avoid. I’d rather hire five local guys, juniors, all of them with the right mentality. They’re gonna ask their dad, their cousin if they know something. That are hungry to thrive and to grow, than one guy that is super senior and experienced that eventually is gonna talk a lot and bring few results.
Maybe the five do not become like Jordan Belfort, but at least maybe one or two will succeed. And we’ll be much prouder of this, even as a company, even as an individual, than the other case basically.
Jamie: And how important is it for the platform to be Arabic-first?
That’s something that definitely struck me when I was reading the press release. And what does that actually mean from a technical perspective? How difficult was it to build that out?
Djamel: Okay. The Arabic bit is not that difficult as a language. So technically speaking, it was quite easy.
So when we say Arabic-first, it’s not really about language only, it’s more about localization capabilities. Yeah. So you have to also go back to what I told you before. The practice in data management before was to have this software, [00:51:00] maybe the Chief Data Officer is there and having the software on his shelf, and then the whole entity, which again, if you’re talking about a ministry, maybe you’re talking about 20,000 people.
No one ever heard about the software or any data policy, right? Why? Because if you’re using like Informatica, for example, first you have to be Informatica-certified to use it. If you don’t have three years of experience with Informatica, you’re not gonna be able to use it properly. And secondly, again, if you don’t have it in Arabic, for example.
How do you expect the business teams to use this software? Because data governance is not the software being used by IT and data teams only. It has to be shared across all the organization.
For example, you, Jamie, if you’re the head of sales, the data team is gonna give you a threshold, for example, of quality for your data and say, “Jamie, you have the CRM, you have X, Y, Z systems. We don’t want less than 95% completeness on your data. So if you have empty fields, it’s not gonna be good. You’re gonna receive alerts and you’re gonna have to go fix it by yourself.”
So you, [00:52:00] as a business user, you’re gonna have to use that software. It’s not a software to put on a shelf with the data guy. It’s a software to be shared across all the organization.
So if you are not Arabic-first, people are not gonna be able to use it. If you are not extremely good in UX and very simple, people are not gonna be able to use it. And if you’re not localized, meaning compliant to the local data practices, it’s also completely useless.
Because again, people are not gonna use it as well. Maybe your data guy applies GDPR rules and he has this somewhere and he’s happy about it, but the rest of the entity is clueless.
So for us, this is the gap really that we are solving. So it’s not just having an Arabic version of the software. It’s really making it usable by everybody to do the work it was intended to do. And that it’s not doing today with other solutions.
This is the difference that we have versus others: that they actually use our software and people are actually actively using it on a daily basis versus software that stays on the shelf or just with the Chief Data Officer to [00:53:00] have a nice data policy repository where he can put all these rules that are never gonna get applied in reality.
Jamie: Is Saudi very much the focus moving forward then from a market perspective? Looking at the makeup of the cap table from the seed round, it seems very Saudi-focused. Is that the play moving forward? Is there scope regionally further down the line or globally? What’s the ambition?
Djamel: No, of course. Like for us, we start with Saudi again because the need is there. Yeah. The regulation is there, and as I just explained, it’s a huge market that’s super underserved. So as a Saudi company, at the end of the day, we want to serve the Kingdom first, and it’s aligned with the vision of the country, et cetera.
But yeah, the value proposition, honestly, it’s global. We didn’t take a global competitor and localize it. Our software is much better, much more modern, usable, and even the features, the modules that we have, a lot of AI incorporated. So we do the things much better than any competitor globally.
We could go, I think, today to the US [00:54:00] and get significant market share when it comes to this industry. It’s just, we don’t want to, because at the moment Saudi needs us. There’s a lot of work to be done there. But of course, once we have a proper, I would say, market share awareness in the market, we are serving like, the ball is rolling at scale, so we have multiple people distributing our software also here. And we make sure that it’s available for everyone and everyone can use it.
Of course, the play then is regional and global. Because again, our goal, the goal of the country is aligned with our goal: first to digitalize what we have and then to lead the AI revolution, right?
The GenAI revolution. The idea is to lead it from Saudi and we have the same ambition that tomorrow Gowata is gonna be a prerequisite globally for any AI adoption in terms of data management, in terms of having your data in the right place to do AI, to do analytics, or to do anything else globally. Because the value is there already. It’s just the focus is now Saudi.
Because we want to go fast. We want to go big. We are laser-focused to be able to execute and deliver faster. [00:55:00] But for sure you’re gonna hear about us globally very soon after we are in a good place in the Kingdom.
Jamie: And maybe last thing. What’s your biggest lesson now that you’re sitting in the founder’s seat, which you haven’t had before?
Is there anything that you’ve learned over the course of the last number of months that surprised you?
Djamel: If you have another two hours, we can talk about it for sure. Just, it’s definitely not the same. It’s definitely not the same.
For me, at Foodics for example, maybe I had at some point of time maybe 80% of the payroll under myself. So you think that, again, at the end of the day, you are like managing the company. But again, being in the founder seat is a whole different level as well. It is not just the same thing. Plus, it’s a whole different thing.
When you have a fiduciary duty to the company, you have to do the whole fundraising by yourself, make sure people are working well together as an organization. The culture you have to print from the first day, et cetera. It’s a whole different ball game, right?
So that’s why I learned, it’s not, maybe when I came I was like, “Okay, I did it like 10 times [00:56:00] before. I can do it one more time.” My main learning is it’s not one more time, it is a completely different time. And I’m happy about it.
Actually, I was worried that I’d get a bit like, not bored, but I’d just repeat what I do one more time, even though it’s for myself this time. But it’s not the case. So I’m happy because I’m getting challenged on the daily basis. But again, for all people out there that have a job, even if they are like almost a founder, being a founder is another galaxy.
Like you were talking about the UAE and Saudi expansion earlier, that’s the same thing from jumping from being an employee at the end of the day to a founder, even if you were not a regular employee. And even if you had a very hands-on experience before, that’s absolutely a different dimension and a different level when you become a founder and you have to be ready for it.
Jamie: You seem to be managing pretty well so far, my friend. So I look forward to doing this again when the Series A is announced, and I’m sure that won’t be too long at all. Djamel, thank you so much for your time, dude. Really, really appreciate this. It was a fantastic conversation.
Djamel: Thanks Jamie. [00:57:00] Thanks, appreciate it.