Los Ángeles native Sharif El-Badawi shares his journey in Dubai
Youth in a city where inspiration surrounds you can spark good ideas.
That’s one thing people in Dubai learned when serial entrepreneur Sharif El-Badawi took time to discuss his early life experiences in his native Los Ángeles, California, a special place which is also my home city.
El-Badawi, a San Francisco-based executive on Google’s Global Partnerships for VCs and Startups team, coordinated a roadshow across four MENA (Middle East-North Africa) cities with his team at TechWadi; a nonprofit powered by Google For Entrepreneurs that has the mission of connecting the startup communities in Google’s native California and the MENA region). The roadshow’s content is on Twitter at #SV2MENA.
The end of the ten-day TechWadi (“Wadi” means Valley in Arabic) tour was in Dubai at AstroLabs on October 28; this story looks back on El-Badawi’s thoughts on life as an entrepreneur in college in LA (at UCLA), the way startups in California are improving our living conditions (healthcare startup Collective Health) and the growing MENA startup ecosytem (rising stars like on-demand car service app Careem) that he shared at AstroLabs at a Startup Grind Dubai event.
The latter was made possible by two HULT Dubai alumni: organized by Vendedy Founder (and Startup Grind Dubai Director) Christine Souffrant and hosted by Tena Pick, CEO of The Sustainability Platform and Director of Advisory at VentureFin.
In a perfect example of Onlyness — a term coined by Nilofer Merchant — El-Badawi shared his unique experience: a journey that began in his native LA, California and recently has led to getting involved in the startup community in his ancestral Egypt.
Here is, in pictures, words and YouTube videos, his one-of-a-kind experience in two places. (Special thanks to Partimo founder Gabriella Bou Said for recording the videos below.)
BONUS: On February 9, El-Badawi launched MENAscapes (MENAscapes.com) and held TechWadi’s first live webinar to discuss this open-source map of the MENA startup community which you can watch below.
TECHWADI UPDATE: The Tech Wadi Middle East Roadshow continues today at 5pm in Dubai when two experts flying in from California, Yasmeen Turaythi and Eric Elias, speak at AstroLabs. The next stop on the Roadshow will be in Amman, Jordan on March 12. Details are below and at https://techwadi.org/event/mena-speaker-series-dubai.
Elias Kamal Jabbe is a markeing professional, writer and translator from Los Ángeles. His Californian Creativity presentations he shared in Paris, Tunis and Dubai are below. Website: Elias213.com
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