Entrepreneur from Q8

April StartupQ8 Event with CFA Institute

CFA Society Kuwait in collaboration with StartupQ8, Union of Investment Companies, Ajar,  and Sirdab Lab is holding a conference about Fintech (Tech startups in the Finance industry) on Monday the 24th of April as part of CFAI’s global “Putting Investors First” initiative.

Our main speaker, Saalim Chowdry, who is an Entrepreneur in Residence at 500 Startups, the world’s most active fintech…

Weekly one-on-one Advice Sessions with Abdulaziz

Abdulaziz AlLoughani (ex-partner at talabat.comand current Vice Chairman at Kuwait National Fund) is doing a weekly one-on-one advice sessions with entrepreneurs to give feedback on their startups and projects. That’s a free advice from one of the best minds in tech and business we have in Kuwait. I really appreciate what he is doing and I hope you all benefit from it. The meetings will be every…

StartupQ8 Event – 25th of Jan

Hello everyone,

We are kicking off this year with a very special guest, Ihsan Jawad. Ihsan is a managing partner at MEVP and founder of Zawya.com (Bloomberg of the MENA region that was acquired by Reuters).

You shouldn’t miss this event if you want to learn how to build a successful startup and how to raise money in the region. Ihsan is also an investor in FishFishMe, Inc., so you’ll get some…

Why you should attend ArabNet – Kuwait?

So Arabnet is coming to Kuwait! That’s a great news! ArabNet is a yearly conference event done in a Middle Eastern city to celebrate startups, founders, technology and share knowledge. The most famous ArabNet event is probably Arabnet Dubai and Arabnet Beirut. I need to be honest, I never been to any Arabnet event before. But, I know the team behind it, their motivations and how they are adding…

Startup Investment Guide for Kuwaiti Investors

Two weeks ago I was in talks with a person (that I greatly appreciate) to help them out with their new fund. They wanted to invest in startups and my job was as an advisor in the fund. While I really liked the initial idea and the people behind it, we disagreed on the strategy of the fund and how everything should work.

I had my own investment thesis that I developed myself. I’m no investment…

1st StartupQ8 Event in 2016 – This Tuesday 19th of Jan!!

Hi guys,

We are kicking off 2016 with a StartupQ8 event this Tuesday the 19th of Jan at 7PM in Global Tower. I know this might be a short notice, but we promise this event will be worth it. Two interesting talks in the event:

1- 7pm – 7:45pm Startup Weapons:

Abdullah Alshalabi(the co-founder of StartupQ8 and Fishfishme.com is back!) will be talking about Startup tools. The tools that will help…

We just finished 500Startups accelerator program. Demo day was great, but so stressful! I probably need 10 posts to write about the program, but I’ll focus on one thing today. Something that many people neglect to mention when talking about accelerators. It’s probably the most important element when selecting your program. The people running the accelerator program.

Everyone knows Dave McClure,…

Smart City Hackathon – Dubai

Been a while since I wrote a post and I was supposed to write about more about my experience in 500Startups, but Mijbel suggested we do an event about that since I’ll be in Kuwait 2nd week of June (more about that later).

One of the most people I respect in Dubai and a person that helped us a lot during our 2 years journey in Dubai (Rekha Setpal) recommended that I post about a great event…

Cool Batch 13 – Part 1

I love writing about startups and their stories! In this post I’m writing about startups with us at 500Startups batch 13. Below is a number of startups that I interviewed, and there will be more startups that I’ll cover in future posts. We are 28 startups in batch 13, so hopefully in 4 posts I’ll be able to cover all startups here. I also asked some of them about how did they get to join…

500Startups here we come!

I’d like to announce that fishfishme.com joined 500Startups batch 13 in Mountain View, CA. The program kicked off last Monday 20th of April. If you don’t know what’s 500Startups, then you can watch the video here:

500Startups invests $100K in startups selected in addition to a 4 months program. During the program they help startups…

New Blog on Town

There is a new blog in the block called beopen.me. Its a mix of news (Tech and non-tech) and thought sharing platform in Arabic and English started by a good friend Ali Al Nusif. Below is a better description about what the blog is about by Ali:

Open is an open blogging and aggregation bi-lingual thought platform. It aims to bring interesting thoughts from individual contributors to create…

“How is business going?”

Almost every day I pump into someone (a friend, a fellow entrepreneur, someone I don’t even know) and they ask me “how is business going?”. It’s a very tricky question to ask for a startup founder. Things at a startup are 90% of the time going bad. I used to hide from my parents to avoid answering this question!

So how to answer this question?

99% of the answers I get if I personally asked this…

Most events are a waste of time!

As you might know, I’m now living in Dubai and there are tons of events for startups every week and almost in a daily basis. To be honest most of the events are a waste of time. Focus in building your business better than you go to events. The worst events (aka conferences) are the ones that you need to travel to go to them. Such a big waste of time and money! Especially the ones that convince…

UX Designer Responsibilities (Part 1) – Intro to User Experience

This is a post by our new contributor Mahmoud Ilyan. Mahmoud is a UX designer I met when he was working with CarpoolArabia.com in Dubai. He has a good eye for UX/UI and most importantly he understands people and the latest technology that makes the user experience better. At the end of the post you’ll find more personal info about him. Welcome Mahmoud! 

  In recent years the demand for UX…

Many startup founders ask me this question “Should we move to Dubai?” I get it from startups not only in Kuwait, but all over the Middle East, especially since Dubai is now considered the business and innovation hub in the Middle East. Well the answer is not straight forward. For some startups it makes sense to move right away, for others later and for some maybe never.

To be able to answer this…

Failing is becoming too cool these days. I agree that it’s ok to fail, but it shouldn’t be a reason to give up easily. Listen to Marc Andreessen talk about this (watch starting from minute 18 to 21):

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYYsXzt1VDc

He doesn’t want to invest in someone that gives up easily, someone that tried then tried then tried until things started to work. The journey will…

Am I going to smile again in my life? Founders and Depression

That’s the feeling I got the first time I felt depressed while building my startup. I remember this moment very well. It was two years ago and business was tough, no bookings coming and starting to get doubts about everything. I was driving my car in Kuwait, heading to Starbucks just to do something other than work. I was thinking, am I going to smile again in my life! I was so depressed. Then…