We talk to Basel Anabtawi, podcaster and co-founder of Rising Giants Network, a UAE born podcast network producing hit shows like Al Rasoul, Al Tikriti and Beirut Blast. Basel takes us through his journey of trial and error, why it's important to ask for what you want and to drop your ego. We also discuss the ups and downs of startup life, educating brands on the value of podcasts, monetization and creating hit shows. For more information visit: www.conversationswithloulou.com or reach out to me...
Jun 24, 2022•47 min•Ep. 38
We talk to Sara Chemmaa, the Founder and CEO of Citron.ae about stumbling into entrepreneurship after realizing that she needed to find a solution to her toddler's unusual mealtime needs. Little did she know that her toddler would become the source of inspiration for Citron, a company that produces over 200 products and sells in over 20 countries. We discuss entrepreneurship, manufacturing, fundraising for a non-tech startup and more. For more information visit: www.conversationswithloulou.com o...
Jun 09, 2022•45 min•Ep. 37
Kamal Dimachkie and Eddie Maalouf are veteran marketing and communications experts from the MENA region. They have recently launched Tough Love Advisors, a new age consultancy practice. We discuss the challenges of new beginnings, the pillars of brand building, the role of marketing and the impact of social media, influencers, technology and more on how we succeed or fail at brand building.
May 26, 2022•51 min•Ep. 36
We talk to Feras Jalbout about making the jump from professional investor to entrepreneur and building Baraka, an investment platform for the MENA region. Baraka not only enables the young generation to invest, its goal is to educate everyone about the markets locally and globally using simple and easy to understand language. We wrap up with Feras' experience and learnings from having joined YCombinator, one of the top global accelerators and his views on the volatility and the changing expectat...
May 12, 2022•42 min•Ep. 35
We talk to Lebanese entrepreneur Ralph R.Debbas about pioneering the automotive industry in the Middle East. A 15 year journey that saw him create some of the world's most exquisite high performance luxury cars. Today, Dubai born W Motors is building and shipping hypercars like the Lykan - the star of the Fast & Furious 7 movie - the Fenyr and more recently Ghiath, a series of police patrol and military cars. Ralph is also venturing into electric vehicles, the metaverse and more! This is the...
Apr 28, 2022•46 min•Ep. 34
We talk to Dr. Louise Lambert, a Registered Psychologist, Researcher and Professor about Positive Psychology. We cover strategies to use to improve our overall wellbeing as well as the endless pursuit of happiness and meaning in life and at the workplace. We wrap up with some insights from Dr. Lambert's research (a podcast scoop!) on the impact of school systems on our children's wellbeing, a must listen if you're a parent! For more information visit: www.conversationswithloulou.com or reach out...
Apr 14, 2022•49 min•Ep. 33
We talk to Rashid Al Ghurair, the Founder & CEO of Cafu, the first on-demand fuel delivery company in the Middle East that is expanding to become the one-stop-shop for all vehicle needs. Rashid recalls how growing up in one of the UAE's most successful business families has taught him that "business has no borders" and that he needed to branch out of the family business and leave his own legacy. We discuss bootstrapping Cafu, the future of fuel and mobility, sustainability as well as standin...
Mar 31, 2022•51 min•Ep. 32
We talk to Omran Sharaf, Project Director of the Emirates Mars Mission about his experience in leading one of the most significant projects the UAE has undertaken. Omran and his team were in charge of developing, building and launching the "Hope Probe", an unmanned spacecraft sent to study the Martian atmosphere. Omran recalls the events of the night of November 20th 2013, as he juggled between the launch of DubaiSat 2, an earth observation satellite, and a call from the UAE government that woul...
Mar 17, 2022•52 min•Ep. 31
We talk to Jonathan Labin about his move from a high powered career at Viacom and Facebook to taking a 1 year sabbatical and then shifting gears to startups. In 2020, Jonathan joined Unifonic, a Saudi born startup co-founded by brothers Ahmed and Hassan Hamdan. In his role, Jonathan was responsible of taking the company to the next level, and in 2021, Unifonic raised a whopping US$125 Million to scale. We discuss startups versus scale-ups, cultural, technical and organizational debt and we wrap ...
Dec 29, 2021•45 min•Ep. 30
Talal Tabbaa is the Co-Founder & Chairman of CoinMENA, a crypto business that was founded by Talal and his Co-Founders Dina Sam'an and Yazan Barghuthi - and regulated by the Central Bank of Bahrain - that aims to provide crypto based financial services such as borrowing, lending, investing and more. He joins us to discuss the business of crypto exchanges and why we need them particularly in the Middle East and North Africa region. A thought provoking and energy filled conversation about ICOs...
Dec 20, 2021•53 min•Ep. 29
Shant Oknayan is the Head of Global Business Solutions at ByteDance (TikTok) across Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa. He joins us to discuss his role in building the regional footprint of one of the fastest growing startups globally. In this episode we zoom in on challenges of leading in a pandemic and we focus on culture. We discuss the evolution of our digital lives and we close with a deeply personal story from Shant and we learn about its impact on his leadership style. You can find Sh...
Nov 15, 2021•49 min•Ep. 28
Mohamad Ballout, a serial entrepreneur and the Co-Founder and CEO of Kitopi , a cloud kitchen startup, has recently joined the exclusive and extremely coveted "unicorn club", with Kitopi's valuation topping US$ 1 Billion. He joins Loulou to discuss building a global business out of the UAE, the challenges he faces as he scales Kitopi beyond the UAE, the complexity of running a "food platform" and shares his views on fundraising and managing the Board of Directors effectively. You can watch this ...
Oct 28, 2021•39 min•Ep. 27
Nadine Mezher, Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer at Sarwa, and her 2 partners Mark Chahwan and Jad Sayegh want to bring smart investing, trading and saving to the Middle East. In 2017 they launched Sarwa.co, a venture backed fintech startup with US$25M in funding to date. Sarwa is democratizing investing for the young professionals and as a result has witnessed tremendous growth. We talk to Nadine about investing, her own entrepreneurial journey and advice for budding entrepreneurs about ha...
Oct 12, 2021•43 min•Ep. 26
Our guest is Dr. Saliha Afridi, Clinical Psychologist and Founder of The LightHouse Arabia, a premier mental health and wellness center in the UAE. We check in on mental health in our "new normal" and we discuss unlocking our potential as individuals and business leaders, listening to our spirit, taking back our power, unleashing creativity and healing both our body and mind. If you're looking for inspiration, this episode is for you! Find out more about The LightHouse Arabia by visiting their w...
Sep 16, 2021•41 min•Ep. 25
Emaan Abbas is an American Egyptian entrepreneur who has recently moved to the UAE to follow her dream of working with her idol Huda Kattan, the famous Co-Founder of the Billion Dollar Huda Beauty brand. Working under the stewardship of the Kattan sisters, Emaan quickly learned everything about product development and gave herself the permission to dream about creating her own, one day. We talk to Emaan about grasping opportunities as they arise, pitching her dream business to her boss and mento...
Aug 24, 2021•48 min•Ep. 24
We talk to Cedric Betis, an athlete and wellness expert who works with Ministers from the Dubai government and CEOs from the private sector to help them achieve their health and wellness vision for themselves, their companies and their city. We discuss how COVID has changed the dynamics in terms of wellness on a corporate level and why it is no longer a "nice to have" a wellness program and why the role of "Chief Wellness Officer" would become ubiquitous. Cedric offers tips to companies, individ...
Jul 26, 2021•40 min•Ep. 23
We talk to Noor Sweid, the General Partner at Global Ventures about building a top tier Venture Capital firm in the Middle East & North Africa region. We cover her recent startup exits with e-commerce startup Mumzworld that has undergone an M&A transaction and Kitopi, a cloud kitchen startup that has recently raised $415M via Softbank’s Vision Fund. We discuss fund return expectations in MENA and we wrap up by touching on Noor’s own journey as an entrepreneur and investor.
Jul 12, 2021•38 min•Ep. 22
Ramez Shehadi is the Managing Director of Facebook for the MENA region. In 2020, Ramez was ranked among the top 20 of the 'Top 50 Regional Executives Heading International Companies' by Forbes. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of Aramex, the Board of Trustees of BeMA (Beirut Museum of Art), the Board of Directors of MMA (Mobile Marketing Association) and is a Fellow of the Aspen Institute's Middle East Leadership Initiative and the Aspen Global Leadership Network to name a few. What...
Jun 28, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 21
As the topic "cryptocurrency" reaches its highest level on google trends globally, we decide to dig into this world in order to understand what it all means to us as individuals and potential investors. We've all seen the news and watched Elon Musk drive cryptocurrencies and particularly Bitcoin to its highest peak and then sent it back crashing. But is it all Elon? What else is at play? Are cryptocurrencies and their underlying technology the blockchain here to stay? Will they indeed fundamenta...
May 30, 2021•42 min•Ep. 20
This inaugural episode for season 2 delves into the world of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and gives you a high-level overview of their use cases. We talk to Kristel Bechara, the award-winning Lebanese artist residing in Dubai about her experience being the first artist from the MENA region to mint and sell NFTs. Why do you need to know about NFTs? Because the underlying technology of NFTs could become ubiquitous sooner than you think and ultimately everything that we own could be made into and tra...
May 10, 2021•39 min•Ep. 19
Brahms Chouity known by his Instagram handle @DaddyFoody is the winner of the Best Comfort Food Blogger at the World Bloggers Award for 2019. In this episode we discuss Brahm's passion for conceptualising and identifying business opportunities with the goal to exit in a few years and how he managed to launch close to 30 startups in 2 decades. Whilst he was hard at work churning one business after the other and just before he turns 40, life throws Brahms a curveball that would change his perspect...
Nov 24, 2020•40 min•Ep. 18
Tara Rogers-Ellis, co-founded Mojo along with Louise Mezzina. Over the course of a decade, the duo have built Mojo into a successful PR and Communications agency, with top clients like Johnson & Johnson, the European Union, RAKBank, Montblanc and more. Tara grew up in South Africa during apartheid and an opportunity to move to the UAE meant that she could have a fresh start, it was at that point when she discovered her natural inclination towards PR and her love for building teams. During th...
Nov 10, 2020•33 min•Ep. 17
I’m excited to have Mishaal Al Gergawi on the show this week, one of the UAE’s top thinkers and intellectuals. Mishaal’s journey is quite fascinating as he started his career in finance yet quickly became renowned for his writing, a passion that fueled the launch of The Delma Institute, a think tank that he ran between 2012 and 2018. His work was centered around providing analysis and insights on West Asia and North Africa to governments and corporates. At that point, his curiosity to learn abou...
Oct 27, 2020•34 min•Ep. 16
Ali Matar, LinkedIn's Head of EMEA Emerging Markets, Middle East & Africa talks about the disruption that COVID has had on the MENA region and how people are coping with the new work dynamics, job losses and the need to re-think their careers, particularly women. We build on Ali’s experience as the first employee tasked to build the LinkedIn presence in MENA and how a misconception he had ended up being one of his biggest career learning opportunity. A great discussion if you’re currently ma...
Oct 13, 2020•35 min•Ep. 15
I’m joined by my friend Khaled Kteily, the Founder and CEO of [Legacy](http://givelegacy.com), - a startup he founded at the Harvard Innovation Lab - that provides from-home fertility services for men with the aim to change the outdated view that fertility is a women's issue. The UAE is part of Legacy’s first phase of international expansion and Khaled is hoping to kick off at the earliest given the region’s struggle with infertility in general. Khaled and I talk about the similarities in our jo...
Sep 29, 2020•47 min•Ep. 14
Nadine Hachach-Haram is Lebanese reconstructive plastic surgeon based in London and the founder of Proximie, an augmented reality platform allowing surgeons to remotely guide local clinicians through complex procedures in real-time. She joins me on the show this week to talk about growing up in post-war Beirut in the early 90s, her first exposure to the world of surgery to her mission with Proximie to provide top-class healthcare across the world. We also discuss the importance of multitasking a...
Sep 15, 2020•39 min•Ep. 13
In an increasingly digital world, you have to appreciate people who work with their hands—artists, tailors, buildings, designers, cooks. I’m joined on this episode by Sky Kurtz, co-founder & CEO of Pure Harvest, a new breed of tech startups that has raised $50 million to build high-tech greenhouses. We talk about how he got started with entrepreneurship after graduating from Stanford, moving to the UAE and eventually setting up Pure Harvest with a “demo” farm based on which he raised his fir...
Sep 01, 2020•49 min•Ep. 12
Jalil Allabadi started working on Altibbi.com, a health-tech startup out of Jordan in 2011. It was the first attempt to digitize an Arabic-Arabic medical dictionary published by his father, a prominent Jordanian surgeon. What started off as 15,000 terms is now 100,000 medical terms across 2 million pages. In 2016 he saw an opportunity to change his business model and decided that the real opportunity is in telehealth - the ability for patients and doctors to connect online and on demand - a feat...
Aug 18, 2020•45 min•Ep. 11
Dina El-Mofty is the founder of Injaz, a pioneering NGO in Egypt and on a mission to empower one million Egyptian youths by 2020 by teaching them entrepreneurship, financial and work readiness skills. Injaz's work with schools and universities led Dina to launch "My Company" in 2011, an accelerator offering grants and mentorship to entrepreneurs at a time of crisis (during and post revolution). We talk about her journey of persistence building Injaz, the importance of patience in building relati...
Aug 04, 2020•44 min•Ep. 10
Binod Shankar is many things--from a former entrepreneur & now a mentor to a podcaster & speaker to a cyclist & mountaineer, and a dear friend. He was also my CFA Level I coach. After leaving the corporate life, he went on to co-found the Genesis Training Institude in 2009 which eventually got acquired by Kaplan Inc. in 2017. Today he mentors young finance enthusiasts via his podcast, The Real Finance Mentor, and is a writer, speaker and regular guest on CNBC Arabia. Binod opens up a...
Jul 21, 2020•46 min•Ep. 9
