Olayan School of Business, American University of Beirut
Thursday, July 29th
Over looking the Mediterranean on waterfront property, AUB is one of the finest Universities in the Middle East. Yesterday I had the pleasure of meeting with one of their B School’s senior individuals and a huge proponent of social entrepreneurship, Tony Feghali.
We discussed the potential for partnership between AUB and VilCap, and I am extremely optimistic about future collaboration. Tony has been working hard to make entrepreneurship, and more specifically social entrepreneurship, a staple of the University.
Tony shares my viewpoint, which is that Lebanon has massive potential, often over shadowed by politics- whether they be in the past or more current. There are huge opportunities in agribusiness, clean water distribution, and other projects relating to infrastructure
Tony and AUB will be hosting an enterpreneurship workshop in November, and we hope to devote an entire day to VilCap related topics.
Thursday, July 29th
Endeavor is a fantastic non-profit organization, that provides all the expertise, network, and support of a Venture Capitalist, just not the capital. This is important, because in many parts of the world, a little capital goes a long ways, but the scalability is extremely labor intensive. This is very similiar to VilCap’s philosophy. Endeavor accepts just 4% of applicants, and has an extremely high success rate with those entrepreneurs.
Cameron Miller, fellow FM Scout and intern at Endeavor this summer, as well as Tania of Berytech connected me with Tarek Sadi, Managing Director of Endeavor Lebanon. Tarek and I had a very interesting conversation about two their enterprise which will be looking for working capital to scale in the coming months. One is social media advertising firm, targetting the Arab world. Web based advertising products in the Arab world are a $19 million market, and are suspected to grow to $400 million in the next 2-3 years. Endeavors company is uniquely positioned to tap into this market, as they focus almost exclusively on the Arabic speaking world. The other enterprise is an enterprise that exports fine Lebanese artisan products, doing about $3-$5 million a year in Revenue. The enterprise employes about 40-50 people directly and 150 people indirectly. Lebanon was once the center of glass production in the world, meanwhile there is currently only one glass blower in the country. This enterprise is interesting in that many of these artisan enterprises that are part of their supply chain, might not exist had it they not come into play as a buyer.
Additionally, Tarek and I talked about the democratization of the internet, and what has happened this Spring in the Arab world. We discussed how one could make an argument that twitter and Facebook where the two strongest proponents of social good in the region, this past year, therefore contributing to an ever refined understanding of what social impact means. Context is everything, and the political climate is perhaps one of the more important contributors in this part of the world.
Tarek, his team, and organization, are extremely passionate about entrepreneurship in the region. It will be inspiring to see what Endeavor Lebanon continues to accomplish, after only 6 months since its inception in the country.