[00:00:00] How much runway did you actually have left? Zero, pretty much. Having come out of raising a Series B in 2019, spent most of the money not showing the growth, that essentially put us in a death spiral. Startups really suck at is pricing. Customers keep telling us this is really good for them, and they like it, and they can't believe it's free. We need to start charging for it, and that was the most transformational journey. So as soon as we did that, we were able to go into Saudi. We've raised a lot of money, you know, $55 million plus. We need to realize a liquidity event. It's our fiduciary duty. Do you feel that pressure to engineer an outcome at this point? I took the money knowing I need to do this. As a founder, you need to provide. I'm already behind, to be honest. Where I'd love to start, and it's, it's a thread that I picked up in a couple of interviews that I read with is you seem resistant to pigeonholing from a categorization perspective what Bayzat is. How would you define it today then? Because it's obviously it's been quite a long journey as well. Like, Bayzat is prehistoric nearly in

[00:01:00] terms of relative to the rest of the ecosystem. 2013? 2013, 2014. That's a long time. What are you guys today? How do you, how do you describe it? I mean, look, the product vision is clear. So Bayzat helps primarily SMEs supercharge people, processes, and payments. So that's core HR, talent management, payroll, employee benefits, and we're expanding constantly, right? So now it's, like, more, AI workflow builders, app builders, fintech products. So the I refuse to pigeonhole us in terms of industry categorization. We're not an insurance broker. I mean, overall we are a SaaS provider. But the product vision's super clear to us, to our customers. But initially it wasn't, I suppose you probably wouldn't have categorized yourself as a SaaS provider in the early days. It was probably more insurance-oriented, would I be correct in saying? That's, that's very fair to say. So, initially the concept for Bayzat was a B2C fintech product. Right? So, we want to connect all your accounts, give you recommendations, et cetera. The first iteration of that was a price comparison website. Just because I had

[00:02:00] lived here most of my life I had I was realistic about what we could expect from banks, insurance companies, and things like that., And then quickly realized that to actually complete the roadmap, the fintech roadmap, would probably be, like, a 20-year journey.? Because there's no infrastructure here to support that., Until today, I would say it's still early days for banking-as-a-service providers- 100% and fintech players. It's still very hard to launch a fintech product here., And we started looking for something else to do. I mean, this, again, this wasn't really officially Bayzat back in 2013. And it was honestly luck that we fell into this SMB space, right? Because since the first iteration was a price comparison website, we introduced health insurance as the first insurance product, and the reason we did that is because we just realized that's probably one of the easiest things to do versus integrate with banks and things like that. And then shortly thereafter, Dubai introduced the mandatory health insurance law. Helpful timing to So that's luck. That's luck, right? But interestingly, the demand we were getting on our website was not from consumers really it was from

[00:03:00] SMEs. And we said, "You know, this can't be the only thing we just, you know, be a website where these SMEs come and find some sort of insurance plan. What more value can we provide to them?" And then we started digging deeper and then realized that And we're dealing primarily with HR managers, right?. So we realized, they do everything manually right now, To be completely honest, when we started, I was like, " we'll do employee record management module for them, and then we'll do a time off module." "But we don't need to do payroll." People asked me, "Will you do payroll?" I said, "No." Like, there's so many payroll providers out there. But nobody was using any payroll provider because it wasn't localized enough. And then five years in and we have a full HR platform, a payroll product. So it's just really around listening to our customers and just having some guardrails around strategy, right? So we're employee benefits, HR payroll, let's just figure out what makes sense for this market and build it., It's like Conrad Parker has this, like, definition of the compound startup., You have multi verticals and many different products, and you fold it in all underneath one umbrella. But at the same time

[00:04:00] then, that's contingent on every product that you offer being as strong as each other in many respects. Like, is there any product or any vertical that you wouldn't go into? Or do you have an example maybe even of a time where you've launched something and then it didn't quite work out? I mean, definitely believe in the compound startup. I think especially with, you know, the bubble days of venture a lot of things were presented as standalone company, standalone business models, when they were just more features. I think HubSpot does this very well., And you just have to be patient and realistic, right? So you're not gonna get there in a year, two years, even five years, right? So it's a journey of continuously improving across these verticals and then adding new ones, when they make sense., We've tried some stuff, definitely. During COVID, we launched,,, a chat interface sort of like Slack, things like that. And then we killed it, right? Primarily not because of Slack, but because, I mean, Slack suffered from this, is Microsoft, right? Came in and then most of our customers are on Microsoft who said, " Teams is there., We don't really want to invest in this

[00:05:00] further.", So that was one example. Second example is when,, ChatGPT first came out,, when the first video model came out as well, we tried to build like a lesson planner things like that., It was too early, right? Just the video models weren't there. So we're constantly trying to push the limits and see what we can do. Where are you on build versus buy? Deal is the example that comes to mind for me, and that Alex really seems to be pushing. They want to build their own internal deals. I think they replaced maybe Jira with their own internal version, and that brought down a big reduction in terms of the tickets. Where are you as far as that's concerned? Internally, in terms of like AI and things like that? I mean, the opportunity in AI is obviously amazing. Aside from our product, just internally, right? And what we're able to do. And we made a lot of progress, so, you know, happy to speak on where I've seen success and where it's more challenging. Having said that, I mean, we're on Salesforce, right? Probably one of our top three Things we have to pay as a company. Not a huge fan of it, but we're using a lot of AI on top of it now and building tools outside of

[00:06:00] Salesforce, but we're not thinking of replacing it. Right. So the opportunity cost is too high. So you're not vibe coding your own CRM? Is that a what? And if it's a system of record, then you know, we're talking about security maintenance, all that stuff. So we're pretty realistic around, like, the effort we would have to put in there., It would probably have to be 2x more expensive. I mean, it's very expensive already, don't get me wrong, for us to really- 100% you know, start getting serious about that. Plus, we've been around for 10 years, all the data we have there. Accounting software, again, not We've automated a lot of finance but we're sticking with the accounting software. I pay more than I should right now given how much I use and, you know, mostly it's AI agents using it., But it's not worth the opportunity cost. Marketing tech is in for a very tough time, right?. So that stuff we've automated. I think that's primarily also because,, from like a data security perspective right, it's not like accounting or CRM. As sensitive,, But more importantly is because these are team-based systems. Two, three people only use them, right? So it's very easy for them to build something, build something lightweight to replace it. A

[00:07:00] lot of that's moved into n8n, Claude Code, things we've built as well, and,, I would say for the most part, we want to buy non-critical-, software, and then things that are easy to replace or we're facing too many limitations with, so I don't know, like landing page builders then let's move away from that. Where do you fall on the token maxing debate that's present at the moment? Do you have- caps as far as usage is concerned, or how do We do not have caps., I would say probably engineers right now. I mean, look, the pricing has changed drastically in the past couple of months, so we're starting to look into it. But, you know, the top engineers right now, if they're working on an AI feature on top of just also using AI to code probably we're getting close to like $3,000 to $4,000 a month. Median is probably $1,500 for that engineering. On,, other departments, it's honestly negligible. I saw a podcast with Ahmed, your CTO, who was describing the forward deployed vibe coding that you're doing with certain clients. Can you talk a

[00:08:00] bit to that? 'Cause I thought that was really interesting. This is from the perspective of our customer and us building a product for our customers. I'm gonna talk about internal right now., And when AI came out, we were super excited, launched,, the first product is still live. I think it's on GPT-3., So it's not very good right now. I was reading about this. It was so early. It was like the knowledge hub kind of thing. It was a knowledge hub thing, right? So RAG and all that stuff, you know, concept of MCP didn't exist then or even the concept of agent., So that product's still live. Obviously, we'll look at improving it. It's very outdated in AI terms., But really if you think about software, when you're building software, if you want to build for a single company, very cheap, very easy with you know, even if it's Emirates Airline, honestly, you know, small team can do it because essentially just one set of requirements. That's it. And software, we wanna reach economies of scale and build it for a very wide range of requirements. I would say 80% of those requirements to 90% are the same across every company. Right? But then the last 10% is very different, and

[00:09:00] that's where it gets really expensive, right? 'Cause you don't wanna build customized solutions. You want a product, a platform, right? Everyone sitting on the same instance. And you accu accumulate a lot of technical debt. The issue is most of the value you provide to your customer, if you think about it, is in the first, like, 20% of what you develop, right? So somebody went from having no payroll solution to Bayzat's basic payroll solution, that's probably 50% of the value. Potentially, V2, V3 is, like, at 80%. So the things they need for that last 10%, especially larger companies, is diminishing value for the company. Right? So, and they have a diminishing propensity to pay as well at the same time, right? They've already paid you so much, and that's really where AI came in, right? So we can't, you know, take these very niche requirements and build on top of payroll, for example., Somebody has a small office in a country and we don't support it for tax. Very valid example. Our payroll module's millions of lines of code, right? Last year, we managed $2.5 million of payroll on the platform. So to do that, it's gonna be, like, three, four months, right? And it's a

[00:10:00] mission-critical software. So we said, you know, this is where AI can come in, actually. So, like, let's just decrease the cost to build that last 10%. And what that really ended up looking like, aside from, you know, workflows and things like that, is a suite of products called Bayzat Studio. Where you have service desk, service now workflows, but then you have an app builder that's chat-based, that sits within Bayzat, speaks into all the internal APIs. So for example, this customer,, they basically just you know, we opened it up for them, just like, you know, Replit or Lovable, started chatting built them a tax engine for that country that can go back into the payroll system, right? Speaks to it, and pulls all the data as well from it. So, that's really where I saw most of the value for AI early on is decrease the cost, deliver that 10%, which in software, especially when you're talking to larger customers, is really where you win deals, right? And where you retain customers. Was that customer-led, that desire for,, that enhanced AI functionality, or was that something more that you felt that you needed to be doing, and you're showing the customer the potential of this? Where do you fall on that? No, I think the customer

[00:11:00] primarily still cares about sort of the job to be done. How it's done is not as important to them. Irrelevant, so in this case, I mean, look, so many benefits, but if I talk about the starting first principles point was, "Hey, if I want to do this for this customer, it's way too expensive." It's. And I can use, you know, AI and maybe build that for that single customer but then how am I gonna fit into the platform, all these things. So then became this product of apps that speak to the entire platform, and the main goal was, now you want that I can deliver it to you in, like, an hour. Tested, deployed, et cetera versus three months. And now I can do that for every single customer no matter what they want, and now they or their implementation partner can do it themselves as well. And does that change the pricing arithmetic then as well, or how do you approach that? Pricing's a whole other ballgame. I treat as a separate step. I try not to anymore, you know, build this sort of product. I mean, it's out of beta, it's quite mature but pricing, it'll take, like, a year after It'releasing to become mature as well. Right? So, sort of early on we just have, you know, two, three sort of

[00:12:00] models. And then whichever, you know, expansion team member, sales team member is selling that, they have the liberty to test it out, right? And even sit down with the customer and say, "Which of these would actually allow you to win internally?" Right? "Which of these make the most sense to you?" and then we sort of institutionalize the pricing later. So I don't have an answer, basically. Long way to say I don't have an answer yet. No. That makes total sense., I did want to ask you as well, this may be going backwards slightly, because you actually acquired an insurance brokerage as well, I think back in 2017. Why did you do that? Why not partner? Why fully integrated yourself? So honestly, it was part of that fintech,, consumer fintech product we wanted to build early on, the learnings from there, right? So what The reason we launched insurance early on is we said, you know, with banks, we're going and talking to them and saying, you know, "This is the company we are. This is what we do," and they're like, " does this fall under the marketing department or the business unit?" and then they all had different KPIs, right? So marketing was CPL, business unit was cost of acquisition and these guys didn't even speak to each other. They were in a different language. Different language, like,

[00:13:00] Insurance is obviously, you know, you know, probably about a thousand-year-old industry now. I have no idea, but it's probably close to that, I would assume, and it's been the same forever. So we said, "You know what? We could just partner with a broker early on, and we never even have to speak to an insurance company." They have the products. They have the authority to sell them, to collect all that stuff. And much easier to work with a broker than a massive insurance company. And then the vision is, was definitely let's partner, prove it and then acquire someone, and we ended up acquiring the one we partnered with coincidentally. But that was a way for us to fit into the financial services industry right, as sort of a digital player. Cool. Now they understood, we're an insurance broker, so we're just gonna give you business. You just pay us like you pay other brokers. You don't need to worry about all the tech stuff we're doing. To that point, is insurance still the primary wedge through which customers come, or is it more that they're looking at the full suite? Is that the more unique selling point now? It's always primarily been on

[00:14:00] HR payroll, so, you know, all marketing spend is to drive around you need a system of record. You need the pain point around payroll, et cetera. Because insurance CAC is very high. And just arithmetic. Somebody would only care about insurance one month out of 12 months of the year. So again, that contributes to a hard CAC as well. And does that meaningfully, that ability to sort of cross-sell Like, when you have a customer come on board, are they always coming on board for the full suite, or is it just, you know, they can go for separate components? Like, how aggressive is the cross-sell or, and how does that meaningfully change the unit economics as well? I mean, I'm not a B2C consumer. I'd assume any sale, it comes down to the customer having a very specific pain point they experience. So it's never, you know I mean, in some cases, I need a whole platform. But again, if you're selling to that person, you're not, you don't have the time to go into a sales meeting and be like, "Let me show you the whole platform." It's why did you reach out to me? What was the compelling event? Addressing the actual pain point as opposed So it's always coming around one module, and then, you know, you from there expand them and show them the value of having everything in one place. And I think

[00:15:00] initially, I remember reading or listening, it could have been Ahmed again, the, your CTO who mentioned that I think when he joined in 2018, majority of revenue was probably coming from insurance, whereas now it's probably closer to 50% coming from the HR or more the SaaS solution side of things. What's that progression been like over time? So when COVID started at that time, 2020, Bayzat's business model was give the platform for free, get companies and then just cross-sell them, insure tech products. So, you know, primarily group health but then some other lines that they needed as well. And during COVID, we grew customer base by maybe 40, 50%, if I remember correctly that year, but revenue was low single digits, right? Because a lot of companies downgraded. It was very traumatizing event, and that essentially put us in a death spiral having come out of raising a Series B in 2019, spent most of the money not showing the growth. So we had to get creative. And one thing, you know, I say this all the time, probably you've heard me say on many podcasts,

[00:16:00] startups really suck at is pricing. So I would say we got more confident maybe, or we just took a risk. We said, "You know what? Customers keep telling us this is really good for them and they like it, and they can't believe it's free." Flip on switch. We need to start charging for it. And that was the most transformational journey because, that also allowed us to launch in new markets more easily, right? If you're using this freemium model and you wanna launch a new market and your revenue stream's a regulated industry, insurance, then you're gonna spend a lot of money before you generate the cash from the marketing and sales spend. So as soon as we did that, we were able to go into Saudi within a year and a half, two years. And most of our customers stuck with us, which was I was gonna really the important lesson there. I was gonna ask that. Did you receive much pushback, or, was there understanding? No, I mean, we obviously thought it was a big risk. So we spoke to some mentors, some people who were very experienced in SMB SaaS in the US as well, and their view was, you don't really need to be scared because you work with, you know, 100-person company right? On average. And that means the ultimate decision maker

[00:17:00] is one, two degrees of separation from seeing the value you provide and even from using your platform versus an enterprise, you know, they may never even know you exist as a vendor. So if you actually are providing value to them and you're charging something reasonable, they're not gonna churn. They'll quickly realize the opportunity cost of churning, and that proved to be true. Briefly touched on geographic expansion there with regard to Saudi. How has your ambition for expansion changed over time? When you initially started Bayzat, obviously it was a pretty nascent period even in the UAE with regard to insurance, and things have changed drastically over time. You mentioned the mandating and I think it was only last year that all seven Emirates now are mandated from an insurance perspective. Saudi's obviously meaningfully changing to that end as well. Have you been guided,, by regulatory changes with regard to expansion definitely historically we looked at markets that had the same dynamics. So, you know, if I was doing Bayzat in Europe, I probably wouldn't do a health insurance vertical. It doesn't make sense. But in UAE it's mandatory. In the US, you know, it makes sense as a vertical. Actually probably

[00:18:00] very few markets where it makes sense. And we're really good at it, high gross profit margin high retention rates. We understand the industry very well, and it's a cash cow. So definitely, you know, we looked at Saudi Arabia. Within Africa, you know, South Africa's a very big insurance market very big SME ecosystem, things like that. So at the same time I'm always, I would say for the most part, always very honest with myself. So if I say Bayzat, you know, our edge and why we win deals and why we can achieve big scale is because we're the most localized solution, that's a double-edged sword as well. Right? So we never had the ambition to go into 50 markets. I would say probably what's changed is maybe I'm a bit more ambitious now because we've done the first market. So, you know, now I'm, " maybe I can do two in two years.". But not something like, you know, going to 50 markets, in the next two, three years. Even the EOR players, right, they partner with local firms for payroll. Right? So everyone understands in the space it's about localization, so it's a bit different than, you know, a lot of other tech verticals I would say. What's different about Saudi in comparison to the UAE

[00:19:00] then? Obviously there's external perceptions like, "Oh, they're the same thing. They're from obviously NAS." How has it been different going to market there versus the experience in the UAE? So, you know, I used to live in Saudi when I was younger. I worked for a Saudi company, so, you know, understood. I would say Saudi, very digitally advanced for people appreciate good technology, and that's really driven by the government. You know, if you look at the government, e-government services are incredible there. We even have APIs we can integrate with as an HR payroll provider, right, to do exit/re-entry permits Right and even to their payroll system. So that's really driven sort of the culture there. So if you have good technology and it's differentiated they definitely can see that. Probably differences, you know, I won't get into like customer segmentation. You can find obviously more companies in Saudi within your niche, and you can find more other types of companies as well. But I would say for B2B and especially HR tech, when I used to work in Saudi maybe, I'm getting old now, 15 years ago-

[00:20:00] Worked for a company and sort of, you know, the holding company had thousands of employees. They didn't have an HR department, so it was just the accountant was sort of the HR because there wasn't too much to worry about from an HR perspective. So I would say the HR profession's still maturing in Saudi, and there's not enough HR people because it has to be Saudi nationals, and there's high turnover. And, you know, you do see some impact in terms of buying behavior, and what that primary impact is that business owners are much more influential in buying decisions in Saudi Arabia versus UAE. I would say that's probably the main difference Interesting if you're doing B2B sales. A lot of other minor differences, but that's the one that, you know, will stop you from scaling faster if you're in B2B sales if you don't understand it. How entrenched is a product like Bayzat? Like, how sticky is it? How difficult is it for a customer to migrate off the platform? And does the advent of AI change that? Like again, I think it was, it was Alex from Deel that was talking about, you know, at the moment it's quite difficult as it relates to, you know, a product like this, but, you know, if AI agents can accelerate that

[00:21:00] process, then maybe that lowers the barrier I mean, I'll answer in two ways. Just in terms of the whole buy versus build discussion, most companies don't wanna build. And they don't have the people to build. The resources. Within any company I mean, how many people are actually builders?. What happens is if you're in a software company, more people are builders because you have an engineering department You have the skills for it and things like that, right? So you've hired problem solvers. So that's the fundamental issue. It's not about, you know, someone could have developed their own HR software at this point, if you're a large company for $20,000. But you have to sit there, give the requirements. That's the part that's missing, right? And AI doesn't necessarily solve that. In general, a system like ours, so we're not an ERP. So we're not the cheapest player. You know, but we're not an ERP either, so I'd say, you know, we're SMB mid-market. Probably 20% maximum the price of an ERP, maximum. Just to give you an idea of like the So for somebody to replace Bayzat, for the most part it's system-wide, it's company-wide

[00:22:00] system. Every employee is on there. So if you onboard to Bayzat You need to do system, change management process. Right? This is, you know, the cutoff for leave. This is the new way of doing things, which is very different from a team-wide SaaS software, like an accounting software or the marketing platforms we spoke about. So for you to make that switch, something has to be 10x better and/or 10x cheaper. Where the, I would say cheap in the grand scheme of things of what a company would be spending on software you know, their ERP, their CRM, hosting, all that stuff. So that one's hard to beat us on, and the 10x better, I mean, we just need to do our job and make that can't happen and be the ones who are 10x better. So overall, it would be a while before it makes sense for companies to switch out a lot of these systems. Again, maybe if you're a huge multinational enterprise company, your bill is higher, but even then, what's a company paying for their ERP versus all the other stuff, right? Like I mean, if AI's gonna really save you money, it's not by replacing your software, it's by replacing your payroll. That's the truth. How important is profitability?

[00:23:00] I'm thinking something, a platform like Bayzat. You ideally probably don't want to onboard your entire team or company onto a platform that's burning cash at like a crazy rate. So does, sustainability, does that matter, do you think, with regard to external perception of, if I'm going to put my team on Bayzat, I want to know that Bayzat is going to be around in 10 years? And obviously the extent to which you have been around leans into that. So early on when we started, we were focused on companies that are 20 employees, 30, 40, and then up till 2020, 2021, our customer segment was 20 to 250 employees. So I would say up to 100 doesn't matter that much. And then over time, as we were in the market, people knew us, we're in the press, our customer list, you know, became more exciting to companies. It is, it does matter for larger customers. They wanna know you, but I mean, thankfully now we're considered in that side of things versus the startup, right? We're the incumbent as far as, the space is

[00:24:00] concerned. Where do you fall on the M&A side of things then? Because certain players will, instead of launching a specific vertical, they'll go out and acquire someone who's already been doing it for four to five years instead of dedicating the time internally to figuring it out and developing a product. What would your attitude to that be? So M&A, I mean, twofold. One is obviously in us getting acquired in the future. You know, we've raised a lot of money you know, $55 million plus., We need to realize a liquidity event. It's our fiduciary duty., And there definitely I would say we have two things going for us. So one's definitely strategics. Everyone understands the name of the game's localization., You know, if I talk about Workday, for example, they've built payroll natively in four or five countries only. And two of them were very recent, in the last year. So there will be acquisitions from that perspective., Global insurance brokers because we're one of the biggest in SME health insurance. They're very acquisitive. They operate in this region. They've made acquisitions. So I look at these types of things, track record, right? Have these acquisitions happened in the space? Are there enough

[00:25:00] players that could, you know, acquire some of our scale?, And then financial because we're software employee benefits, very well understood., So I definitely see opportunities for us. Now, in terms of Bayzat growing, I'd say in our funding life cycle, we're probably closer to that stage than venture, right? So we're very much followers of the rule of 40 for the last two, three years. You know, company's EBITDA positive, net-income positive so far this year. So we're always trying to be around the 40, and balance between revenue growth and profitability. So we are getting more interest from growth equity firms, and definitely they're interested in more buyout plays, right? And those are One could be product add-ons. The issue for us is there's not too many players to buy in our space, right? So you can go talk to the four or five, or merge with them, that's it. If they're not interested, it's over., But there's definitely opportunities in some more traditional industries, right? HR outsourcing, payroll outsourcing, insurance brokerages, things like that could, you know, be accretive to the business. So definitely we do get approached for that. We do think about it. The other interesting thing I started thinking about more

[00:26:00] recently is, you know, we want to realize this liquidity event but there's only a very short time and sweet spot right, that you could do because otherwise you become too big. You have to be very realistic around, if I'm saying the US, Europe, India, I'm gonna go to my IC and say we're gonna acquire a company in UAE. If you're talking to them in terms of, you know, high nine figures, they're like, "No, that's something we do in the US market not here." Right? So that's something also that's becoming top of mind as you start becoming more mature and having these discussions with, you know, potential, acquirers, liquidity providers, et cetera. Do you feel that pressure to engineer an outcome at this point? The pressure is more on just the business side, right? 'Cause if that's going well, then the other one will, I mean, I don't wanna say take care of itself, but have much better odds. But no pressure from my shareholders, right?. It's purely internal pressure in terms of it's part of the deal, right? Like, I took the money knowing I need to do this. I mean, I come from private equity background as well-

[00:27:00] so, I respect that, and, as a founder you need to provide I'm already behind, to be honest, Hm. Nail the game I need to get to it, right? Obviously some stuff outside my control have happened, et cetera. Some stuff in my control, but regardless, it's something that, you know, we're actively putting the business in a position to be able to do. Talk to me about the fundraising journey then again, because you started when there was probably a handful of VC firms, if even, regionally. Obviously things have changed over that period and you have some big names on the cap table as well, like Zubairco, Mubadala, et cetera. Give me the picture of what fundraising was like back when you started and how things have changed over time, 'cause I'd imagine it's quite a meaningfully different picture. So when I started, I guess, you know, 2013, wasn't really thinking about fundraising. You know, I had my full-time job. My co-founders had full-time jobs, so we're just figuring out things. We hired a couple people. Two of them are still here actually, so they're serving the company longer than I have been. No way. Wow. And

[00:28:00] then we started raising some angel money, and through that I met, Amir Farha who's, was one of the founders of BECO and now he's with CO2. And the way I met him was the guy who was developing Bayzat. Com said, "Oh, I know a guy with this domain with, like, a different letter, so why don't you meet him?" So went and met him. He was just starting BECO back then. And then they ended up coming for the last half of the round, as BECO. That was the first institutional money, and then they were very supportive. You know, supported us all the way through series A. Back then, I would say it was what? BECO, MEVP, Wamda, maybe I'm missing one, two. And very small funds doing early stage. And once it got to series A, this is back in maybe 2016, 2015- I didn't really have too many options in the region for series B, so that one was very difficult. I think I read somewhere, was it as after series A or series B, you sent, like, 100 cold emails and I

[00:29:00] basically said, you know, I have to spend at least 70% of my time on this, handed off my responsibilities to other execs, colleagues, et cetera. Traveled to, you know, Shanghai, Hong Kong, London, South Africa, US, you know, East Coast, West Coast, trying to find international investor. And thankfully we found Point72, a hedge fund out of New York. They led the series B, but that took, you know, that series B took a while. And then Mubadala came in. So we were off to the races and then COVID happened a year and a half later. Everything growth stage was way more challenging than early stage, for especially in this region. Series C, we were successful in the end, but that was like Slog. Slog. Twice we had, including a lead, you know, signed DD, all that stuff. They just didn't end up having the money to carry through the transaction. So, those were a couple tough years, but then, you know, we got out of it, and now I'm off I was, for the most part, I'm off the gravy train, not really looking at venture-

[00:30:00] funding. I'm probably not even a venture funding candidate if I'm being realistic. No. How it's changed, I have no idea. I'm not necessarily in the loop but there's way more investors, for Way more. Like, I don't know, the people I know from my early days who are still mostly around are probably, like, 20% of the investor pool now, so there's a lot of names I haven't heard of, a lot of activity. I don't know if it's easier or harder, 'cause there's probably a lot more startups as well. That'Right? So I'm not Did people understand the region when you were pitching international vest investors back in 2015, 2016? Was that a heavy lift? I mean, I would like, since then, if somebody hasn't really invested in the region, I won't engage with them too seriously. I don't wanna be I tell them, "I don't wanna be your first IC pitch." And, you know, the fact that I spoke to 100-plus investors, this investor was different, right? I mean, it's a hedge fund, so it's not a venture capital, and they create their own thesis and they go find companies that do that. So I had seen that they were making investments similar to Bayzat, software attached to fintech in, you know,

[00:31:00] Australia and Mexico and other countries. So I reached out to them, said, "Here's our metrics." "Seems like you guys like this story. We're doing something similar in the Middle East." so hedge funds are typically willing to take way more risk, right? Even if I think about Bayt. Com, I guess Tiger, if I remember correctly, was a hedge fund, one of their first investors, probably the first international investor in the region. So that'Actually, it's Rabih this podcast sitting in that chair like two years ago. But in general now, if, you know, I do get approached by investors, especially on the PE side, and that's changed actually, right? So three, four years ago, "Have you done any deals here?" "No, we're just exploring." I'd say a small handful at this point you know, as we're three years in, four years, have actually now done their first deal or have at least taken a couple deals to IC already. So then I would engage with that type of investor. I think that'll be a meaningful difference-maker for liquidity events regionally. We still don't really have that PE. Like, it just hasn't really been much of a thing. Like, we're No we're still reliant obviously on public market, events as well. PE is probably behind VC at this point since

[00:32:00] Abraaj ended in the region. This is true. I don't know if there's even, like, probably less liquidity, less, capital in PE than VC. Certainly didn't help, matters, I remember reading that you're a big fan of John Wooden can you outline maybe a small bit about why that is, and maybe explain who John Wooden is for those who aren't familiar as well? I mean, John Wooden is arguably the most, one of the most successful sporting coaches, definitely one of the most successful basketball coaches. I think he went undefeated for a couple years. I mean, and, you know, kind of like, Sir Alex Ferguson was there for, you know, decade plus It's a great equivalence. And then kept winning. And really what resonates is just how simple his teachings are. Right? It's nothing miraculous, right? It's like, be good, do good, but most importantly, details matter, and you practice everything, right? So, part of his principles and, you know, he coached Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, you know, and superstars and, you know, part of the principles was we're gonna practice how to put on our socks properly and how to tie our shoes, because if you don't, you're gonna get blisters. That's gonna impact your

[00:33:00] playing time. You would imagine this is the most motivational, inspirational, strategic guy in the world. Even, you know, when they would play opponents, he would primarily spend time on what they're gonna and practice that versus what the opponent's gonna do. And then once you dig into it was actually very simple stuff that, I mean, must've been grueling, obviously, to care about every single detail and make it's disciplined and practiced. But it was all these small things that just added up to consistent success, right? Consistent success is not about, you know, "Hey, let me motivate you. I mean, dude, it's " No, it's system, process Compounding over time culture, the people you have in there, making you know, they're all fitting within what you wanna see in the team. And then after, you know, obviously he didn't achieve immediate success. It took, like, four or five years in, and then he's just on this run, right, of amazing achievements. Do you enjoy Bayzat now being a bigger customer? Or sorry, a bigger company. Or did you like I'm just keen to get your preference on. I mean, I enjoy In general, I mean, I never worked for a big

[00:34:00] company. I never had, the urge to work for a big company. It's always been very small companies. You know, I only worked for two companies before Bayzat. So, I do like the feel of a small, company, but you can have that with a big company. I mean, I would say at some point, we got to a stage, I think we even reached 300 people. But now it still feels like a small company versus back then. Why does it feel like a small company? I would say one is, you know, we reduced all the bloat. We kept teams smaller. We made it not to have to invite everybody to something, right?. It's not hurting. It's, like, just time efficiency and do we need there. So I just made things feel smaller, right? Less people on a project, smaller teams, and that kind of gave me all, most of the benefits of having that small team again. Talk to me about the bloat reduction that you mentioned there, because that's obviously something that we're encountering frequently now with the likes of massive companies, even Meta, Atlassian, for example. And there's a debate as to whether it's for, in the name of AI efficiency or whether or not it's just sort

[00:35:00] of overzealous hiring during like, the disrupt days during COVID. Do you think a lot of companies are going to be reducing their headcount? Look, nothing's linear. I don't think there's any company that hires perfectly. Dynamics change, roles change. Some things don't work out the way you thought they were gonna work out. So it doesn't matter if you're a startup or, you know, the biggest company in the world, it's, you know, you go through these cycles It's nuts of like firing. Hiring, firing, hiring. Obviously, it'd be nice to reduce them, things like that, but that's just the reality. Like business is dynamic. Things are changing all the time, and not everything works out the way you thought it would. So, if you're in business, that's just the reality. Like there's no sense in thinking you're gonna be different, right? Because the world's changing, that's the, like it's always gonna be different reality for you, so you can't be just stuck in your ways. On, I mean, I'm not a, I'm not following public markets as closely as I used to, but on all the firing, I mean, I think it's pretty clear you could actually just go see the hiring figures and the OPEX of these companies since COVID, and

[00:36:00] it was nuts, right? Like, you know, if you're Meta and you're hiring 30,000, 40,000 people, I'm you're not gonna need all of them. And then, I mean, let's not remember they changed the name to Meta. Right? Which didn't work out, so that's probably gives an idea of how many people were involved with that you know, had to, had to be laid off. But, overall, I would say if you talk about, moving forward Definitely the tech industry won't be hiring as they once did. Definitely some roles will be consolidated. I don't, I don't have, like, a general view, for example, on between front-end product designer, product manager, what role stays, what doesn't. I think it comes down to the actual person. Because within any company of those three, one or two people can replace one of them. Right? It's gonna be different within each company. I'm concerned about entry-level the most, to be honest. Really? I don't know how young people are gonna you know, keep getting hired, 'cause those are definitely the easiest things to automate with AI. And then in department-wise, look, AI is very good for engineering because

[00:37:00] it's very deterministic, right? Finance, Everything is pass, fail. So from that perspective, finance is similar. Right? You use AI, you can build an eval because everything is very clear. This is what it needs to look like if it's successful, and this is a failure. So there you're gonna see a lot of disruption for and then sales probably will come last. And I think most of the efforts, when it's not deterministic, I find most of the efforts are generating more opportunities, doing more things, versus replacing what I do right now. It's gonna be hard for an AI agent to convert, a large enterprise deal. If you're advising someone then, a person who's going to study something in university, what would you be guiding them towards, do you think? At this point, the basics probably. Math, English Physics seems like the safest It does bet to me. I think humanity's English way of, like, thinking nearly now that probably seems, the safest to me, especially on the math, English ones. Like, you need to get better at the basic It's true cores that, are gonna become very easy for people to be lazy with. Have, members of the team actually internally, have they been

[00:38:00] willing adopters of this AI tooling? Has there been any resistance or fear out of, like, you've maybe seen in certain companies, you've heard of stories whereby, you know, the staff are,, basically training the AI and the processes, and then the agents actually is going to replace them. So early on, you know, especially our CTO, you know, did a lot of amazing things to, you know, allow people to experiment hack, et cetera. And we went through phases. So when it first came out, you know, definitely we started talking about it in the company. We launched that first product. Most people gave it a shot, and then they fell off for, like, the next year and a half because they were like, "No, this sucked. It wasn't a good experience." but then there was a few. And then for those few, for example, we, you know, got no-code, low-code tools. We hosted n8n on our server so they can start using it securely, you know, really help them, give training sessions, stuff like that. Then we create small teams to start experimenting. Now everybody's convinced, right? That's probably So last year there was this probably when, you know, Claude

[00:39:00] code came out and started getting good. I think it was it last year? I can't say. It's going, it's going so fast. Year and a half ago. It made a big difference. No, But anyways, at some point last year, I guess probably more with, like, Sonnet 4.5 and stuff like that. Then you saw a batch of, you know, probably in engineering, which was, like, you know, maybe 30 to 50 people at any given point, maybe 5% were, like, all in. And then Sonnet 4.5, you start seeing, you know, probably another 20% added. Such a step change then and now it's everybody. Maybe as a question to wrap up then, are you still enjoying this as much as you used to? Definitely. I mean, I still enjoy it. Definitely there's more stuff maybe that I'm not as excited to do, but now with AI it's, it is exciting because, you know, I force myself to just use AI build something permanent to handle these things moving forward. Very easy to be excited honestly right now, I mean, with what's happening in AI. I find myself lucky that I'm in software in the tech space, so I can take advantage of this opportunity and be at the forefront of it. So it's, it's very

[00:40:00] exciting for having said that, I mean, I would say I'm somebody who is easy to be excited. I mean, I'm, I'm not I can zero in on, you know, a very specific problem and just get really excited about solving that problem. Is there any other problems that you would be excited about potentially solving, outside current domain? The list is long, and, I would be excited to solve any of them. Just, I don't wanna, spill the beans Oh, go on. Give us a slight my next, you know, trillion-dollar idea. Give us a clue. Give us a clue. But no, look, the reality, the ideas are a dime a dozen. And one thing early on, when I was starting Bayzat, and it was a bad idea, it was the price comparison website idea or consumer fintech back then. And I was telling my dad, you know, "Gonna start this, et cetera, and what do you think of it?" And he said, "Nobody will ever be as excited about your idea as you are." That probably is a way of telling me it's a really bad idea, but it's true as well, right? So there's no sense in asking. It's, it's good to ask other angles, you know, what do you think of this market and what are, you know, the

[00:41:00] challenges you might see for me, et cetera, but do you like my idea? Everyone's gonna find their own idea exciting. So, it's really around, one is do you find the right people who are also passionate about the idea, right? That's one thing you wanna probably check early on, because you need a team behind you, right? And that's So I'll just go down the list and filter them out in different ways. And I'll get there when I get there. I mean, right now obviously I have a lot of work to do at Bayzat. One question that I meant to ask earlier that I didn't,, but I did want to ask about a particular setback that you might have encountered, like one of your biggest setbacks, how you handled that. I mean,, definitely COVID, I think we spoke about was a setback. And there, you know, pricing ended up being the solution. So strategy actually ended up being the solution. When, funding fell through and we had run out of runway, basically that was probably where a lot of people were folded. Right? We didn't. And it was just

[00:42:00] more of a first principles approach. Why do we need money? We need money to pay the team. Why do you need money to pay the team? Because we have to do these things. What are the things we need to do? How do we find ways to pay the team? That's priority one, and then move things around, and then come up with ESOP programs and, you know. Get creative. Get creative. But then also the other piece is when you're in that type of situation where you have a big problem that you need to overcome, the human tendency is to get really stressed out and be like, "I need to solve this right now." "It needs to be solved immediately." Some problems, like a liquidity problem, balance sheet issues, will take three years potentially to pass through your system and solve. So once you can get out of that mindset and be like, "This sucks. This is a problem I'm not gonna solve in one day, I'm not gonna solve in one month." You just gotta start chipping away. And obviously you have a plan of when you'll get out of it, then you're able to honestly overcome any problem. But it's actually that tendency that you

[00:43:00] stress yourself out, like, "I need to solve this right now." Be methodical as opposed Why? You don't need to solve it right now kind of snap your fingers. It's not, it's not even possible to solve it right now. So get that out of your head and just solve it in the right way. And time is not in your control, right? How much runway did you actually have left? Zero pretty much. Like Why? I mean, we were generating cash flow, right? So obviously that gave me the ability To buffer to figure out move things around each month. But we were burning money, a lot of money, and we had no cash, but, I mean, thankfully, we had sales you know, obviously we started selling the platform. That helps good luck to you know, at that point, that it provided some cash flow each month. Was that insanely stressful, though? Insanely stressful for I mean, still maybe a bit traumatizing, but, the human being adjusts to everything, right? I mean like I said, like two, three years to clear something like that through your system, right? From the company, and clean the balance sheet, and all that stuff, and get back on track, and growth and profitability. You adjust, right? You're in a pressure situation. It becomes normal eventually. Right. We'll end maybe on an uplifting

[00:44:00] note. Who is the one person maybe in the regional ecosystem in particular who you would say that you look up to the most? You can do multiple if you have to., I mean, definitely look early on the people who, you know, started the first to take the bait, you know, et cetera, Via, Dani, Munam, might be missing people. Look, typically I look up to people in like very specific domains. So if I need something, you know, from like who's the best salesperson the best strategy person, et cetera. But those are definitely, you know, people that set the groundwork. And sort of my batch, obviously, you know, you have, Magnus, Mudassar from Careem of, you know, still going till today which is amazing to see. There's a lot of people, right? On the investor side, definitely, you know, people like Grateful for people who started BECO for people who started MEVP, all the early VCs, the ones in Saudi, that wasn't easy to start VC in Saudi. You know, Rahah Ventures a bunch of these guys. So,

[00:45:00] or people, honestly, people I'm most grateful for and look up to are my customers, honestly. Great answer. Great answer. Honestly, I mean, like I still to this day, you know, can't believe this company is like buying something that, you know, I'm involved with from day one. It's still crazy to me. No, that is pretty nuts, in fairness. Talal thank you very much for coming on. Really appreciate it, man. Awesome. Thank you. Any enemies which could be an issue, but